Intel and Qualcomm are reportedly bidding up to $10 billion for
Tenstorrent, whose roughly $1,000 Blackhole chips run the
BlockFloat8


Sign Up [1] |Advertise [2]|View Online [3]

TLDR

TLDR HARDWARE 2026-10-19

¨

HEADLINES AND LAUNCHES

INTEL AND QUALCOMM REPORTEDLY BID UP TO $10B FOR TENSTORRENT ON AN
UNVERIFIED COST CLAIM (3 MINUTE READ) [4]

Intel and Qualcomm are reportedly bidding up to $10 billion for
Tenstorrent, whose roughly $1,000 Blackhole chips run the BlockFloat8
number format natively, where GPUs with native support list near
$40,000. Smallest.ai says its text-to-speech model, with over 80%
running in 8-bit, costs about a quarter as much to run as on Nvidia's
L40S. The figures are vendor-published and unverified, and no deal has
closed.

CXMT SWINGS TO A NEARLY $20B NINE-MONTH PROFIT AS AI DEMAND DRIVES UP
DRAM PRICES (2 MINUTE READ) [5]

CXMT expects nine-month net profit of 131 to 132.5 billion yuan
($19.6 to $19.8 billion), versus a 5.3 billion yuan loss a year
earlier, on revenue of 265 to 270 billion yuan, up from 32.1 billion.
It credits AI-driven DRAM shortages, expanded capacity, and more
output per wafer. Its claim of fifth-generation DRAM in mass
production hasn't been independently verified, and memory booms
typically fund new capacity that eventually pulls prices back down.

¨

ENGINEERING AND APPLICATIONS

TESLA ROADSTER PAIRS UNDERBODY SUCTION FANS WITH COLD-GAS THRUSTERS
FOR GRIP BEYOND WHAT TIRES ALLOW (3 MINUTE READ) [6]

The Roadster's floor uses fans and perimeter seals to pull air out
from under the car, creating up to 2 g of suction, enough to hold it
upside down while stationary, and at speed, front and rear passages
open for more flow. Cold-gas thrusters add a second system: ten
nozzles fed by compressed air, with all-electric actuators for fast micro-adjustments, which Tesla says push with four to five times the
force tires can deliver.

NASA'S ROMAN TELESCOPE BEATS ITS IMAGE-QUALITY SPEC BY NEARLY 30%
AFTER A HAIR-WIDTH MIRROR NUDGE (3 MINUTE READ) [7]

After moving Roman's secondary mirror by about one-sixteenth the
width of a human hair, engineers measured 63 nanometers RMS of optical
error in the Wide Field Instrument, nearly 30% better than the
90-nanometer requirement. The camera has 18 detectors, and the same
adjustment fixed slight defocus in the Coronagraph Instrument, which
still needs testing of its ability to block unwanted light. Roman
launched August 30, and both instruments now match or beat
predictions.

¨

RESEARCH AND PROTOTYPES

REACH 8 MILLION TECH PROFESSIONALS READING TLDR (SPONSOR) [8]

Ads get ignored on social media but not in TLDR! Reach hardware
engineers and makers where they actually pay attention. Learn more
about sponsorship opportunities [8].

SPIN WAVES COUPLED TO A SUPERCONDUCTING CIRCUIT CREATE A ONE-WAY
STREET FOR MICROWAVE SIGNALS (3 MINUTE READ) [9]

Argonne and UIUC researchers coupled spin waves in a thin yttrium
iron garnet film to a superconducting resonator built directly on top,
creating a hybrid mode that propagates one way and could keep return
noise from leaking back into qubits. The key materials fix was
swapping the usual rare-earth-containing substrate, which absorbs
microwaves at low temperatures, for one without rare-earth metals.
It's still a proof of concept.

VARIABLE FREQUENCY DRIVES COULD FREE UP GRID POWER BY CUTTING MOTOR
ENERGY USE 40 TO 60 PERCENT (5 MINUTE READ) [10]

Variable frequency drives adjust motor speed to match demand, cutting
a motor's energy use by about 40 to 60 percent. Toyota saved over
$700,000 a year after putting them on 200-plus HVAC motors at its
Kentucky plant, in a $1.25 million pilot. Cheaper sensors,
machine-learning control, and power chips borrowed from EVs and solar
inverters have cut costs. ABB claims drives on every motor could cover
up to five years of data center load growth.

¨

MISCELLANEOUS

KORNIA-SLAM: VISUAL-INERTIAL ODOMETRY AND SLAM IN RUST (3 MINUTE
READ) [11]

Kornia-SLAM is an open-source visual-inertial odometry and spatial
mapping library implemented entirely in Rust. It supports monocular,
stereo, and RGB-D cameras coupled with inertial measurement units,
utilizing factor graph optimization to maintain real-time performance
and strict memory safety. This framework gives embedded software teams
a reliable, crash-resilient foundation for real-time spatial
estimation on compute-limited physical devices.

GEMINI 4 ARGON: MULTIMODAL FOUNDATION MODELS FOR EMBODIED
INTELLIGENCE (4 MINUTE READ) [12]

Google DeepMind has released Gemini 4 Argon, a multimodal foundation
model engineered specifically for embodied physical systems. Featuring
native spatio-temporal reasoning and low-latency action generation, it
links high-level semantic understanding directly to robot execution
through native bridges for ROS 2 and physics simulators like MuJoCo.
The architecture allows creators of intelligent physical machines to
translate natural language goals into dexterous, real-world
manipulation and navigation.

¨

QUICK LINKS

TERMINAL RVIZ: TERMINAL-BASED 3D VISUALIZER FOR ROS 2 (2 MINUTE READ)
[13]

Terminal RViz renders 3D ROS 2 sensor data, point clouds, and robot
states directly inside a terminal window using Braille Unicode
characters and a software-based renderer.

HUMXN PAYS FOR HOME REPAIRS IN THREE CITIES TO RECORD WEARABLE-SENSOR
DATA FOR ROBOT TRAINING (3 MINUTE READ) [14]

HUMXN, a Minneapolis AI data company, will pay for qualifying
plumbing, electrical, HVAC, air-duct, and carpet-cleaning jobs in
Minneapolis, Chicago, and Miami in exchange for letting technicians
work in homes wearing capture gear that records their jobs.

AMD SHOWS HOW TO HAND-TUNE AN FP16 GEMM KERNEL ON RDNA 3 AND RDNA 4
TO MATCH HIPBLASLT (25 MINUTE READ) [15]

AMD walks through eight steps to build an FP16 GEMM kernel on RDNA 3
and RDNA 4, taking the RX 9070 XT from 150 ms to 8.71 ms on an
8192-cubed multiply, versus 8.05 ms for hipBLASLt.

APPLE AND META TUNE AN 816B-PARAMETER OPEN MODEL TO RUN ON TWO M5
ULTRA MAC STUDIOS (3 MINUTE READ) [16]

Meta's 816-billion-parameter Muse Spark Open model, a
mixture-of-experts design with 42 billion active per token, is tuned
to run locally on clustered M5 Ultra Mac Studios using Apple's MLX
framework.

ASPIRE: AGENTIC SKILL DISCOVERY AND POLICY SYNTHESIS (3 MINUTE READ)
[17]

ASPIRE is an autonomous framework from NVIDIA Research that enables
robots to discover, practice, and catalog manipulation skills in
simulation without human supervision.

Want to advertise in TLDR? ¨

If your company is interested in reaching an audience of hardware professionals and decision makers, you may want to ADVERTISE WITH US
[18].

Want to work at TLDR? ¨

APPLY HERE [19], CREATE YOUR OWN ROLE [20] or send a friend's resume
to jobs@tldr.tech and get $1k if we hire them! TLDR is one of INC.'S
BEST BOOTSTRAPPED BUSINESSES [21] of 2025.

If you have any comments or feedback, just respond to this email!

Thanks for reading,
Andrew Tan [22], Adi Nikumbh [23], Kshitij Sudan [24], & Kat Scott
[25]

Manage your subscriptions [26] to our other newsletters on tech,
startups, and programming. Or if TLDR Hardware isn't for you, please unsubscribe [27].



Links:
------
[1] https://tldr.tech/hardware?utm_source=tldrhardware
[2] https://advertise.tldr.tech/?utm_source=tldrhardware&utm_medium=newsletter&utm_campaign=advertisetopnav
[3] https://a.tldrnewsletter.com/web-version?ep=1&lc=48ce571c-d4e0-11f0-8279-1f6dc2dca83a&p=b7588d5c-cba6-11f1-b706-7f8fc4f7a507&pt=campaign&t=1792416280&s=2db2eb95dab527dc170e3b65db4fddfe0a8443247598b62ed6c30dc935ee3c80
[4] https://theinference.org/article/intel-and-qualcomm-are-reported-in-talks-for-tenstorrent-worth-up-to-10-billion?utm_source=tldrhardware
[5] https://links.tldrnewsletter.com/nxWvMx
[6] https://www.caranddriver.com/news/a74165059/tesla-roadster-thrusters-fan-system-explained/?utm_source=tldrhardware
[7] https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2026/10/261016070630.htm?utm_source=tldrhardware
[8] https://advertise.tldr.tech/?utm_source=tldrhardware&utm_medium=newsletter&utm_campaign=secondary10192026&sp=WQM5nqm4zEKXexk3CncRXZtS
[9] https://www.nanowerk.com/nanotechnology-news3/newsid=70437.php?utm_source=tldrhardware
[10] https://spectrum.ieee.org/variable-frequency-drives?utm_source=tldrhardware
[11] https://www.kornia.org/slam/?utm_source=tldrhardware
[12] https://developers.googleblog.com/gemini-4-argon-for-robotics/?utm_source=tldrhardware
[13] https://github.com/nathanshankar/terminal_rviz?utm_source=tldrhardware [14] https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/artificial-intelligence/ai-lab-offers-free-plumbing-and-hvac-repairs-across-three-cities-to-train-ai-robots-wearable-sensors-record-video-of-repair-work-for-robotics-training-free-services-also-include-electrical-work-air-duct-cleaning-and-carpet-cleaning?utm_source=tldrhardware
[15] https://rocm.blogs.amd.com/software-tools-optimization/rdna-fp16-gemm/README.html?utm_source=tldrhardware
[16] https://www.cnbc.com/2026/10/15/apple-meta-partner-ai.html?utm_source=tldrhardware
[17] https://research.nvidia.com/labs/gear/aspire/?utm_source=tldrhardware
[18] https://advertise.tldr.tech/?utm_source=tldrhardware&utm_medium=newsletter&utm_campaign=advertisecta
[19] https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/tldr.tech
[20] https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/tldr.tech/c227b917-a6a4-40ce-8950-d3e165357871 [21] https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:7401699691039830016/ [22] https://twitter.com/andrewztan
[23] https://www.linkedin.com/in/adinikumbh
[24] https://www.linkedin.com/in/kshitij-sudan/
[25] https://www.linkedin.com/in/katherineascott/
[26] https://tldr.tech/hardware/manage?email=tldrnewsletter%40synchro.net
[27] https://a.tldrnewsletter.com/unsubscribe?ep=1&l=516aef72-d5bc-11ee-9229-6b70acf0ae94&lc=48ce571c-d4e0-11f0-8279-1f6dc2dca83a&p=b7588d5c-cba6-11f1-b706-7f8fc4f7a507&pt=campaign&pv=5&spa=1792414916&t=1792416280&s=181c55bfc6fc7302290510b6fe1d46d22ddf4e7ac662156d11227056cae8a36c
---
þ Synchronet þ Vertrauen þ Home of Synchronet þ [vert/cvs/bbs].synchro.net