Piecemakers - GoKawiil

Tom's Hardware Premium recaps Steam Frame launch, DRAM crisis and AI safety clash

Tom's Hardware Premium's weekly roundup covered Valve's release of the Steam Frame VR headset with an interview of its engineers, an investigation into worsening DRAM and NAND shortages now hitting SLC and NOR Flash, and PieceMakers' Taiwan stock debut pitching hybrid-bonded chips as an alternative to HBM for AI inference. The issue also detailed a public dispute among AI leaders after a former OpenAI and Anthropic employee warned advanced AI could threaten humanity by 2030, prompting rebuttals from Sam Altman, Dario Amodei, Mark Zuckerberg and Jensen Huang.

tomshardware.com · 2026-09-19

Nanya-backed PieceMakers debuts on Taiwan exchange, targets AI inference memory niche

PieceMakers, a DRAM designer majority-owned by Nanya Technology, began trading on Taiwan's Emerging Stock Board at a NT$740 reference price and closed its first session up 23.6% at NT$915, valuing the company near $1.4 billion. Rather than competing in HBM, the firm is pursuing custom memory designs that bond DRAM directly to processors via hybrid bonding, positioning the technology between SRAM-only chips like Nvidia's Groq LPU and traditional HBM for AI inference workloads.

tomshardware.com · 2026-09-16