By Hamza in Quantum Weekly — Mar 30, 2026

Quantum #105

Issue #105 of the weekly HPC newsletter by HMx Labs. ARM makes a CPU, LLM-D goes open source, HPSFCon gives us hours of useful content, we give you a way to save money on cloud VM and vibe coding amusement.

As the dust settles on the hype created by GTC we saw that NemoClaw wasn’t meaningfully more secure than its ancestor OpenClaw and that the shine of growth forever in GPU clusters is starting to fade (in the financial markets at least). A week after HPSFCon though and we have hours of footage with actually useful information. Awesome.

Last week ARM told us that it will start creating its own CPU. Wait. Haven’t they already been doing that? No, they’ve just been designing chips for other people. So, you don’t run on an ARM CPU but an AWS Graviton or a Google Axion or possibly an Ampere. Now you’ll get to run on a chip that identifies not only its architecture as ARM but also its manufacturer in the lscpu output. It’s an interesting development and potentially puts ARM into competition with its own customers, a strategy that isn’t working out for Intel so well right now. I guess they’ve got Meta backing them at least though.

What I’m looking forward to though is to (hopefully) finally be able to test ARM against AMD EPYC and see how well the power efficiency claims hold up, not only when sat idle babysitting a GPU but also when running full tilt on some HPC workload. We already have the numbers on AMD, anyone want to give us access to some ARM kit?

At a time where people are questioning what happens to open source code in the face of the AI assault, IBM has just donated LLM-D to the Cloud Native Compute Foundation (CNCF) 🎉. Now if only they would open source their good HPC schedulers too and we could build a decent inference stack on open source IBM software.

Does anyone know what happened to insidehpc.com? All I get is a 404 error from WP Engine. It’s been like that for a couple of weeks now.

Aside from making Lego jokes last week we’ve also been busy giving you a way to look up and compare the details, performance and cost of various cloud VMs. Whilst continuing to vibe code (I mean agentically engineer) a new HPC workload manager and scheduler for giggles. Or more accurately, fail to vibe code one. More details on that down below as are all the links for the news above.