SK Hynix is in exploratory talks with Intel over a deal that would
have it manufacture memory chips in the US for the first time, with
one scenario ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌  ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ 


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TLDR

TLDR HARDWARE 2026-09-18

📱

HEADLINES AND LAUNCHES

SK HYNIX IS IN TALKS WITH INTEL TO MAKE ITS FIRST US MEMORY CHIPS (4
MINUTE READ) [4]

SK Hynix is in exploratory talks with Intel over a deal that would
have it manufacture memory chips in the US for the first time, with
one scenario having it lease part of Intel's long-delayed Ohio campus
and another forming a joint venture with Intel and major cloud
providers to lock in steady memory supply. Intel's Ohio site,
announced back in 2022 at up to $100 billion, has slipped to a
2030-2031 start, so landing SK Hynix as a tenant would give Intel's
foundry business exactly the marquee customer it's been chasing, while
giving SK Hynix a way to actually produce chips domestically rather
than just package them, as it's already doing at its $4 billion
Indiana facility under construction.

FIGURE'S HELIX 2.5 WALKS INTO 30 UNSEEN HOMES AND GETS TO WORK WITH
ZERO FINE-TUNING (5 MINUTE READ) [5]

Figure pretrained Helix 2.5 entirely on Index, its crowdsourced human
video dataset, then fine-tuned three whole-body behaviors - tidying
rooms, folding towels, making beds - before deploying a single fixed
checkpoint into 30 Bay Area homes it had never seen, with no data
collection or adaptation on-site and objects it had never encountered.
The key isolation test: training two otherwise identical policies on
the same task-specific data, one from random initialization and one
from Index-pretrained weights, showed Index pretraining alone lifted
zero-shot success from 9% to 56%, over 6x higher, with success
requiring full task completion and no partial credit.

🔨

ENGINEERING AND APPLICATIONS

ONSEMI REPLACES TINY WIRES INSIDE POWER CHIPS TO CUT ENERGY LOSSES (4
MINUTE READ) [6]

Onsemi's new Embedded Power Platform (EPP) builds power components
directly into the silicon itself, wiring them together with precisely
etched layers instead of the usual wire bonds, which cuts electrical
losses and lets the parts switch faster. The idea is to design the
electrical, thermal, and mechanical sides of a power system together
from day one instead of separately, since treating them as separate
problems has been forcing expensive redesigns late in development as
devices demand more power in less space.

NVIDIA GRAPHICS CHIPS CONTAIN UP TO 40 TINY PROCESSORS FOR
HOUSEKEEPING (5 MINUTE READ) [7]

The shader cores that do actual graphics work aren't where the RISC-V
lives - it's in a collective of small management processors handling
clocking, memory, security, and other housekeeping, with Nvidia VP
Frans Sijstermans confirming each GPU packs 10 to 40 of them depending
on the model. Users can't program these cores directly, and they're cryptographically locked down so tightly the GPU firmware won't even
boot if they've been tampered with.

🧠

RESEARCH AND PROTOTYPES

HUGE AI MODELS CAN RUN ON A CONSUMER GRAPHICS CARD BY USING SSD
STORAGE (4 MINUTE READ) [8]

Mixture-of-Experts models keep growing capacity by adding more
experts, but even after quantization, the full expert pool still
dwarfs consumer RAM and VRAM, so local inference has to lean on SSD
storage instead - a much harder problem than just having enough disk
space. SSD-LLaMA builds an SSD I/O pipeline tuned specifically for
fetching experts, layered with a three-tier SSD-RAM-VRAM hierarchy
that dynamically decides which experts to hold where, and CPU-GPU
hybrid execution balanced against the SSD's limited bandwidth, all
while running every selected expert in full rather than pruning or
substituting cheaper approximations.

INVISIBLE CHANGES TO A ROBOT'S TRAINING WORLD CAN MAKE IT FAIL IN
REAL LIFE (3 MINUTE READ) [9]

Every 3D asset in a robot simulator carries two geometries - a visual
mesh for rendering and a coarser collision mesh for physics - a
legitimate gap since matching them exactly is too expensive. This
paper shows that gap is exploitable: an attacker can alter only the
collision mesh, so a policy trained on the poisoned asset looks and
behaves normally in simulation, then fails or creates real safety
risks once deployed. It slips past existing checks entirely, since
asset review covers malware, copyright, and format, but nothing
verifies visual-collision consistency, and the researchers found the
defenses they tested weren't enough to catch it.

🎁

MISCELLANEOUS

INTEL VETERANS RAISE $100 MILLION TO HELP DIFFERENT AI CHIPS WORK
TOGETHER (4 MINUTE READ) [10]

Delos Data, founded by Intel veterans, raised $100 million led by
Matrix Partners and Playground to build networking chips and software
that move data faster between processors inside increasingly
heterogeneous AI data centers. Early AI data centers were mostly
Nvidia GPUs wired together with Nvidia's own proprietary networking,
but as the focus has shifted from training toward running persistent, failure-tolerant agentic inference workloads, data centers now mix
GPUs, XPUs, accelerators, CPUs, memory, and storage from Nvidia, AMD,
Cerebras, and others, none of which were designed to talk to each
other efficiently at that scale.

LEAKED TEST SUGGESTS APPLE'S M6 IS 27% FASTER THAN M5 ON MULTICORE
TASKS (3 MINUTE READ) [11]

An unverified Geekbench 7 result for Apple's new 2nm M6 chip,
debuting in the new Mac mini, shows a single-core score of 4,071 and a multi-core score of 22,783, up roughly 12% and 27% respectively over
the M5's average scores. That single-core number tops every other Mac
or PC in the Geekbench database, including the M5 Max (3,731) and
Qualcomm's Snapdragon X2 Elite Extreme (3,396), backing up Apple's
claim that the M6 has the world's fastest single-threaded CPU
performance, while the multi-core gain lines up with Apple's
advertised 1.2x multi-threaded improvement.

⚡

QUICK LINKS

ARM SEES A BETTER CHANCE OF REACHING $2 BILLION IN SALES OF ITS OWN
AI CHIP (2 MINUTE READ) [12]

Arm CEO Rene Haas discussed the company's AI revenue targets with Jim
Cramer on CNBC's Mad Money, framing Arm's architecture as increasingly
central to AI infrastructure even as competition from RISC-V and
custom silicon intensifies.

OPEN-SOURCE PLANS LET YOU BUILD YOUR OWN ROBOT ARM (2 MINUTE READ)
[13]

OpenArm is an open-source, fully 3D-printable robotic arm project
from Enactic, designed as a low-cost, hackable platform for robotics
research and development.

MISUMI AND FICTIV LAUNCH A $50 MILLION FUND BACKING THE NEXT
GENERATION OF HARDWARE, ROBOTICS AND PHYSICAL AI COMPANIES (3 MINUTE
READ) [14]

Misumi, a maker of high-end linear actuators, and Fictiv, a manufacture-on-demand service, are launching a $50M venture fund that
aims to bring their hardware manufacturing expertise to new hardware
and deep tech startups.

JENSEN HUANG SAYS NVIDIA WILL DOUBLE AI CHIP SALES NEXT YEAR (2
MINUTE READ) [15]

Speaking at a summit with King Charles III in Scotland, Jensen Huang
said Nvidia expects to sell twice as many chips next year, extending a
forecast that already projects 70% revenue growth for fiscal 2028.

TESLA'S AI5 CHIP ENTERS TRIAL PRODUCTION AT SAMSUNG'S TEXAS FAB (3
MINUTE READ) [16]

Samsung has started trial production of Tesla's AI5 chip on its 2nm
node at the new Taylor, Texas foundry, fast-tracking prototype runs
ahead of schedule to handle a wave of custom silicon orders, backed by
Tesla's $16.5 billion manufacturing contract at the site.

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Kshitij Sudan [21] & Adi Nikumbh [22]

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[4] https://links.tldrnewsletter.com/9mlABf
[5] https://www.figure.ai/news/helix-2-5-zero-shot-30-home-generalization?utm_source=tldrhardware
[6] https://www.servethehome.com/onsemi-embedded-power-platform-announced?utm_source=tldrhardware
[7] https://www.xda-developers.com/your-nvidia-gpu-dozens-risc-v-cores-one-took-over-graphics-driver?utm_source=tldrhardware
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[9] https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.18122?utm_source=tldrhardware
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[11] https://www.macrumors.com/2026/09/15/apple-m6-chip-benchmark?utm_source=tldrhardware
[12] https://www.cnbc.com/2026/09/16/jim-cramer-arm-ceo-ai-revenue-goal.html?utm_source=tldrhardware
[13] https://github.com/enactic/OpenArm?utm_source=tldrhardware
[14] https://www.fictiv.com/articles/misumi-americas-launches-misumi-ventures?utm_campaign=&utm_content=&utm_source=tldrhardware
[15] https://www.cnbc.com/2026/09/17/nvidia-huang-ai-chip-guidance.html?utm_source=tldrhardware
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