Blog

MLPerf Inference 6.0: Software Gains & Broadening Competition Shake Things Up

Steve McDowell April 2, 2026

MLCommons released MLPerf Inference v6.0 results, marking what the consortium describes as the most significant update to the benchmark suite to date.

The round introduced five new workloads, including a multimodal vision-language model, a text-to-video generation benchmark, and a new interactive scenario for the DeepSeek-R1 reasoning model.

RSAC 2026: Agentic AI Security Takes Center Stage at Industry’s Marquee Event

Steve McDowell April 1, 2026

If RSAC 2025 was the year the industry debated AI’s role in security, RSAC 2026 was the year the debate ended. Agentic AI, with its autonomous systems that perceive, decide, and act without human intervention, dominated every keynote, expo-floor conversation, and press release at this year’s conference.

From Zero Trust to Zero Assumption: The RSAC 2026 Vibe Shift

Michael McDowell April 1, 2026

Zero Trust, as it’s been marketed for the last decade, has officially entered its “participation trophy” era.

NVIDIA Just Rewired the AI Factory — And Networking Is Now the Star of the Show (GTC 2026)

Michael McDowell March 20, 2026

Together, these components make a rack behave like a single system instead of a collection of servers held together by hope and bailing wire.

Call Notes: Quarterly Semiconductor Update (March 2026)

Steve McDowell March 5, 2026

Every quarter I participate in a call for buy-side investment analysts focused on the broader datacenter/hyperscaler semiconductor ecosystem. Here, I’m sharing the raw notes I used to drive that call.

Memory & Flash Crisis: March 2026 Update

Steve McDowell February 28, 2026

The global memory market entered 2026 in a state of structural supply constraint. AI infrastructure demand has reallocated semiconductor manufacturing capacity toward HBM for GPU accelerators, creating scarcity in conventional DRAM and NAND flash products.