With so many August events, we chose to focus this BWR episode exclusively on Hot Chips 2026. Joe and Bob discuss key disclosures, including Intel’s Diamond Rapids Xeon, AMD’s Helios MI450 platform, NVIDIA’s LPX/LPU architecture, Cerebras’s CS-4 wafer-scale engine, and OpenAI’s Jalapeño ASIC. As always, you can find timestamps on YouTube if you want to skip to items of interest.

The latest episode of The Byrne-Wheeler Report covers a slew of deals from funding to outright acquisitions. In my coverage space, Upscale AI has raised another $200 million at a unicorn valuation. Marvell is acquiring CXL-switch startup Xconn Technologies. Joe and I discuss two announcements in the RISC-V arena. In case you're wondering about Episode 7, it was a special episode with guest Mike Demler discussing Nvidia's Christmas Eve $20 billion bombshell Groq deal.

At GTC DC last month, Jensen Huang showed off components of the Vera Rubin NVL144 platform. First, here's the latest roadmap, which now includes BlueField-4 and BlueField-5. For more on that, see BWR Episode 4 .  Source: Nvidia Below is the Vera Rubin compute tray, which includes four Rubin GPUs. By GPU, we mean package not die. Note that the Blackwell NVL72 and Rubin NVL144 both have 72 GPU packages, but the NVL144 moniker denotes Nvidia's new math counting die. The company didn't rename the Blackwell configuration, even though that GPU also has two die. Each compute tray has two Vera CPUs, which are 88-core Arm processors. Two GPUs connect with one CPU using NVLink-C2C, a coherent variant of NVLink. Although the roadmap above shows CX9 as 1600G, each ConnectX-9 is actually 800Gbps, requiring eight chips to deliver the aggregate 800GB/s quoted for the tray. That means each GPU has a pair of 800G Ethernet/InfiniBand NICs for scale-out networking. Finally, a single BlueField...

 The Byrne-Wheeler Report Episode 4 discusses the RISC-V Summit NA, BlueField-4, SambaNova, and AWS Rainier. You can skip to 12:12 if you're uninterested in RISC-V.