This week on Tom's Hardware Premium: August 22, 2026 — foundries, supercomputers, China, and how to not overpay on a motherboard

This week, Tom's Hardware Premium published a swath of new features, new roadmaps, and deep industry insights. And if you haven't subscribed to Tom's Hardware Premium yet, you'll have the opportunity to access our Hot Chips 2026 content for free for a limited time with a free Tom's Hardware account, no payment required.

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First off, PC components expert Joe Shields lays down the law when it comes to shopping for a new motherboard. Unless you've been living under a rock, you know component pricing has skyrocketed over the past 12 months. If your current motherboard has recently kicked the bucket, or if you're looking to change platforms, you don't want to overpay on a component that, in all likelihood, you'll never use to its full extent. With memory pricing the way it is, overspending on other components that are less crucial for juicing performance is a one-way ticket to spending too much on stuff you just don't need.

Within the article, Joe details exactly what you might want to pay for — and the things you don't need to focus on, like fancy 20+ phase MOSFET VRMs, or that slick RGB shroud, which pretty much just sits there looking pretty while other components do the real work. So if you're in the market for a new motherboard, or if you want to learn more about them in general, Joe's article is a fantastic, detailed read on exactly what you should be looking for, more important the reasons you shouldn't be splashing over $500 in the current market.

• How to choose a new motherboard without overpaying — scoping out the features you need, and what you might never use as component costs soar

With all of the hubbub around AI and massive gigawatt-scale data centers, focus has shifted from the not-so-humble supercomputer. In June, China's Lineshine officially became the world's fastest ... but does that really matter anymore, in an era where AI systems built for training and inference exist? That's the question columnist Chris Stokel-Walker poses for us in his latest Special Report, where he interviewed Julian Kinkel, professor of high-performance computing at the University of Göttingen and deputy head of high-performance computing at GWDG, and Jack Dongarra, one of the TOP 500 founders and emeritus professor at the University of Tennessee.

The outlook for traditional supercomputers, which are benchmarked using the High Performance Linpack benchmark (HPL), remains mixed, as compute workloads continue to diversify amid shifting trends and demands, splintering the supercomputer race.

• The supercomputer race no longer means what it used to, as rankings lose relevance in the AI era

This week's hardware roadmap examines the status of Samsung's global foundries, from the long-delayed Taylor, Texas, facility, all the way to the flagship Pyeongtaek facility and associated R&D complexes. We examine the status of each of the locations, in addition to what processes and products each focuses on. But all that glitters is not gold: We also review the foundry's yield woes and the pressure to deliver on its lucrative deal with Tesla to manufacture the company's AI6 chips.

The company remains a distant second to TSMC — at least in terms of foundry revenue — but the AI era is accelerating Samsung's products and roadmaps as the South Korean chaebol continues its efforts in the semiconductor fabrication market.

• Samsung's fab roadmaps examined — Taylor, Pyeongtaek, and the yield woes behind a $16.5 billion Tesla deal

In the news

The regular slate of analysis pieces on Tom's Hardware Premium this week has been dominated by headlines covering China, trade, and Chinese-made chips. While the blockade on Nvidia H200 chips has officially lifted, we explore how it might be too little, too late for Nvidia, whose market share in the region has plummeted as a result of relentless export controls.

In the company's place instead are homegrown suppliers, according to new reports. Both Western and Chinese companies are in a heated battle to develop the most powerful, most intelligent AI models. To that end, China's domestic heroes are poised to corner the market, according to new market intelligence.

To that end, SMIC, China's premier chipmaker, has posted a record $3 billion quarter and expects to hike wafer prices to contend with insatiable regional demand. Keep in mind, these successes come not from GPUs but other parts like logic ICs, BCD power management devices, and optical transceiver components.

• H200 AI GPUs finally reach China under case-by-case import licenses, but it's already too late for Nvidia
• China's homegrown AI accelerators to supply 90% of the country's domestic market, analysts suggest
• SMIC posts record $3B quarter and hikes wafer prices — US sanctions hand Chinese foundry a captive AI market

Speaking of optical components, which are one of the hottest commodities in the chipmaking industry, the market is set to explode, estimated to reach an eye-watering $144.4 billion by 2030. Driving those figures, according to China Insights Consultancy, is a hunger for co-packaged optics, photonics chips, transceiver modules, and new techniques, as copper traces and cables begin to reach their natural bandwidth limits.

• AI data center optical interconnect market to hit $144 billion by 2030, an over ten-fold increase from 2024 figures, according to new projections

This week, LG reportedly entered the chip packaging business, shipping a Laser Direct Imaging (LDI) tool, a maskless machine especially designed for patterning interconnects. This marks LG's first foray into the advanced packaging arena. The LDI machine trades resolution for pure throughput, which is incredibly welcome. While the LDI machine has reportedly been shipped to an OSAT, it remains new to the arena, and it'll likely take the South Korean company years to firmly establish itself as a reliable toolmaker.

• LG enters chip packaging arena with Laser Direct Imaging machine, as TSMC's CoWoS remains constrained

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