// TOM'S HARDWARE US — HARDWARE & GADGET
This week on Tom's Hardware Premium: October 3, 2026
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Over at Tom's Hardware Premium, we've been publishing a slew of stories centered around our themed AI Chip Design Week, where you can learn more about how artificial intelligence is reshaping the chipmaking world. Each article in our series of stories is free to access for a limited time, and we're extending the free period over the weekend until Monday, October 5, so you don't miss out.
Headlining this week is our interview with OpenAI hardware VP Richard Ho, talking all things Jalapeño, the Broadcom co-developed inference ASIC that the company debuted earlier this year at Hot Chips 2026. The interview dives into how the company used AI within its design processes, beating Nvidia on efficiency, and demystifying common misconceptions like only being optimized to run OpenAI models. This lengthy read is a full, unredacted transcript of our session with Ho, so don't miss out.
But how close is AI to designing the very silicon that it runs on? We explore the concepts, products, and everything else shaping the industry in our pair of exhaustive primers on the subject, covering the companies seeking to make the chips themselves.
We've also broken down all of the tools currently in use, with comments directly from Synopsys, and a breakdown of all claims from vendors currently using AI within their chip design workflows. Additionally, during the week, Synopsys debuted its 'Autopilot' platform for its AgentEngineer, specifically designed to aid directly in chip design workflows.
But all of these new tools open up an uncomfortable reality. With AI's growing role in the chip design world, at what point are patented IPs in danger? This question is explored in our detailed report, where we ask experts like Domenec Forte, professor of electrical and computer engineering at the University of Florida, and Simon Moore, professor of computer engineering at the University of Cambridge, to learn more about a looming issue that could broadly impact the AI chip design market.
With our AI chip design week in full swing, we've also been publishing our regular remit of detailed news analysis stories, exclusively for subscribers, which kicked off with a curious discovery: Intel has reportedly been granted a patent that embeds MicroLEDs in chip packaging, which could enable optical interconnects through TGVs, opening the potential for glowing RGB CPUs.
Next up, blockchain-assisted cyberattacks are on the rise and have primarily originated from adversarial actors linked to Russia, North Korea, and China. The groups reportedly leverage open-weight LLMs to develop sophisticated cyberattacks against unsuspecting users.
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This is a topic highlighted this week too by Anthropic, which published a report on how Zhipu AI's GLM-5.3 can be used to generate harmful content, with claims that the Chinese frontier open-weight model also has advanced hacking abilities, nearing similar levels to Claude's own Mythos AI model, showcasing different methods of getting around the model's guardrails, or disabling them entirely.