NVIDIA's H100 chips are used by nearly every AI company in the world to train large language models hooked into services like ChatGPT. It's been great for business. Now, the company is ready to make those chips look terrible, announcing a next-generation platform called Blackwell. Named for David Harold Blackwell, a mathematician who specialized in game theory and statistics, NVIDIA claims Blackwell is the world's most powerful chip, reaching speeds of 20 petaflops compared to just 4 petaflops the H100 provided. Yeah, throw it in the trash.

On Tuesday, at its annual Snapdragon Summit in Hawaii, Qualcomm announced a major addition to its line of mobile chips with the Snapdragon X Elite, which the company is calling its most powerful processor to date. The Arm-based Snapdragon X Elite is the successor to last year's Snapdragon 8cx Gen 3 line of laptop chips, which recently got a name change to reflect the huge leap in performance for this upcoming generation. Powered by 12 Oryon cores, Qualcomm claims the X Elite provides up to two times faster CPU performance compared to Intel's 13th-gen Core i7-1360P and i7-1355U processors while also drawing up to 68 percent less power. The chip is based on a 4nm design fabricated by TSMC with standard clock speeds of 3.8GHz with a dual-core boost of up to 4.3GHz. Qualcomm also includes 42MB of total cache with an LPDDR5x memory bandwidth of 136 GB/s.

Apple's transition to its own processors is nearly complete. The company's recent spring event saw the debut of the Mac Studio and its M1 Ultra processor -- its most powerful piece of silicon yet. But it also revealed what the future of Apple's computers could look like. For the first time, all of Apple's chips are on the table. The first crucial takeaway is that Apple is now a force to be reckoned with when it comes to chips (if it wasn't already).

Everything in our home is getting smarter. As more devices gain intelligent controls and applications, their interconnected nature will come into play, with many ways to interface with one another: smart speakers controlling lights and locks, security cameras sending video feeds to TVs, and smartphones signaling when you're coming home to open the doors and turn on the air conditioning. As the smart home continues to change, there are some trends emerging that are worth noting. By understanding the direction the market is moving, you'll have a better idea of what equipment is really keeping pace and which is going to become a relic sooner than later. There's a shift toward smarter fitness devices in the home with gear like Peloton and NordicTrack offering equipment you can use to get in shape and stay in shape.

Google announced its next generation of its custom Tensor Processing Units (TPUs) machine learning chips at Google I/O today. These chips, which are designed specifically to speed up machine learning tasks, are supposed to be more capable than CPUs or even GPUs at these tasks and are an upgrade from the first generation of chips the company released at last year's I/O. And speed up they have. Google claims the each second-generation TPU can deliver up to 180 teraflops of performance. We will have to wait and see what the average benchmarks look like, but they are a step forward for more than speed.