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Kevin Immanuel Gubbi
@kevingubbi
PhD UCDavis ECE Chips - Cybersecurity - AI ex-samsung_research ex-amd SF Bay Area
1.1K Following    558 Followers
Had a great coffee chat with @jukan05 a few days ago... lovely time spent and had thoughtful discussions on state of Semi. We looked at the same semiconductor trends from two very different angles: his from market research and supply chains, mine from chip architecture and design. His point about cheaper memory potentially unlocking local AI is particularly interesting, especially when the AI data center boom is also competing for that same memory manufacturing capacity. I wrote up a few of my thoughts on the hardware side, emerging architectures, and where I think things could go:
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Thoughts on memory: Anyone who thinks compute will stay in shortage while memory slides into oversupply must be smoking something. Compute and memory are destined to tighten together or deflate together. One cannot die while the other survives. By the same logic, the pods shorting memory and going long HDD are out of their minds. How do you think HDD isn't joined at the hip with memory? You really think HDD stays safe if this cycle rolls over? In the end, all of this comes down to nobody having conviction about what happens after 2027. Historically, we have watched P peak one to two quarters before supply ramps, then Q expands and the entire profit pool collapses. But everyone forgets that this cycle runs on nonstandard products, unlike PCs, smartphones, and general purpose servers, and that it was triggered by factors different from past cycles. This is because of the boomers who still see memory as an industry where you make a killing in the upcycle and lose your shirt in the downcycle. These self proclaimed veterans view memory through the lens of their past experience, and since they drive the market and set the stock prices, memory trades at such a low valuation. What I keep saying is that a sharp collapse like in the past is impossible. A gradual decline is possible. But even if Samsung and SK Hynix margins were cut in half from current levels, they would still trade at a P/E in the teens. That is still roughly half of HDD valuations. Personally, I think that as memory prices fall, other sources of demand will absorb the supply at each step down. In particular, I expect personal AI demand, led by local AI, to emerge. Looked at another way, for local AI to take off, the hyperscaler driven spike in memory prices has to be brought under control. At current memory prices, local AI can never diversify. Just as mainframes gave way to PCs and the cloud gave way to smartphones, each time carrying the cycle from P into a Q expansion phase, I think this AI cycle will also move from frontier labs to local open source AI. Based on these historical precedents, I believe local AI will take over the memory cycle from the frontier labs and carry memory demand. I am not saying memory prices will hold for more than a decade. Memory P will fall at some point. But what is different from the past is that new consumer devices and new consumer demand, such as open source driven local AI, will support the floor for memory. So the market right now keeps discounting these stocks out of fear of a memory peak nobody can time. This discount is being driven by boomer investors who dismiss the idea that AI supports the downside and keep pushing the view that earnings will collapse and the trough will revert to past levels too. My point is that this is completely wrong.
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A retired NASA engineer who had worked on the Space Shuttle program for 25 years was hired by SpaceX at age 62. He described the first week as the most disorienting experience of his professional life. At NASA, a design change required 3 meetings, 2 committees, a review board, and 6 to 18 months of documentation. At SpaceX, his new supervisor said "if it works, build it. If it doesn't, change it by Friday." He sat at his desk after the first day and called his wife. He told her he felt like a man who had been swimming with ankle weights for 25 years and someone just cut them off. He could move. He could decide. He could build something in the morning and test it in the afternoon. The constraint that he had accepted as the nature of aerospace engineering turned out to be the nature of bureaucracy. Within 6 months he had contributed to more design iterations than he had completed in his last 5 years at NASA. Not because he was working harder. Because the time between having an idea and testing the idea collapsed from months to hours. The same brain. The same knowledge. A different operating system. He described a specific moment where he proposed a modification to a Raptor engine component. At NASA, the proposal would have entered a queue. At SpaceX, the modification was machined by the end of the day and tested by the following morning. He watched his idea become a physical object in 18 hours. At NASA, 18 hours would not have been enough to schedule the first meeting to discuss whether to schedule a meeting. He told an interviewer: "I didn't get smarter when I went to SpaceX. I got faster. The intelligence was always there. The system was in the way." The difference between SpaceX and NASA is not talent. NASA has extraordinary talent. The difference is the time between a thought and a test. SpaceX compresses it. NASA elongates it. The same engineer produces 10x more at SpaceX than at NASA because the bottleneck was never the engineer. It was the meetings about the meetings about the work.
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After a lot of discussions at SemiCon/tech week, it is evident that there's a long long road ahead to bring 'Superintelligence to everyone everywhere'. Chips, models, energy, physical AI, edge ai!? To anyone who's building in these areas and beyond... There's never been a better time to build... Keep going folks! (Goiing back to some key insights into how Agentic workloads use hardware I posted a while back.)
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If AI agents spends more time waiting than generating answers, what should we actually be accelerating? And what does that mean for the next generation of AI chips? A look at where the time, memory and money go when agents get to work.
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Is it a chip? Is it a wafer? It’s Cerebras Wafer Scale Engine. @cerebras #semiconwest#
HUGE UPDATE !!! Muse has now completed full place and route in OpenROAD and generated a final GDS for our RISC-V based crypto accelerator SoC. The crypto accelerator includes SHA-256/512, Keccak, Ed25519 + secp256k1 field arithmetic and closed on nangate45 with the following specs: - 61,590 cells - 100 MHz with +4.5 ns slack, - 20 mW, zero DRC/electrical violations. The GDS is public and is under releases in the repo. The host core has also passed the full RISC-V scalar compliance sweep too which consists of ACT suites + 1.5M Berkeley TestFloat vectors. This was all done with ~100M output tokens or roughly ~$2,000 of work !!! Next step for me... add vector instructions, rip out the third party core we used as a baseline, and then port to run the @thru_xyz block chain natively on the chip with the exact memory map to make it the fastest block chain on earth. If anyone has any MPW shuttles coming soon that aren't quite booked please reach out! We are looking to start taping out ASAP and my hope is to pass DRC on a new node by end of month.
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Got qwen running on a aws f-2 instance tonight that muse wrote entirely itself after 3 long hours of cutting timing slack (for some reason LLMs still insert resets everywhere). Looking forward to posting in coming days but sadly a lot of work left for the bubble boi, I'm an artist at heart.
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Current frontier LLMs do something I call "spinbusy". Where they make the least amount of incremental progress towards a goal, over and over again, instead of doing the obvious thing and just completing the goal Spinbusy LLMs. Just wasting tokens, running tests, wasting time
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I think @PGelsinger's point actually hints at something much bigger. A lot of today's chip design workflows, tools, and abstractions were built around the limitations of humans and traditional algorithms. AI could fundamentally change those assumptions. And when the assumptions change, entire industries become ripe for disruption!! From EDA and verification to manufacturing and packaging, this might be one of the most exciting times in decades to build disruptive deep tech. We shouldn't just be asking how AI makes the existing flow faster. We should be asking how much of that flow needs to exist in its current form at all.
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I think @PGelsinger's point actually hints at something much bigger. A lot of today's chip design workflows, tools, and abstractions were built around the limitations of humans and traditional algorithms. AI could fundamentally change those assumptions. And when the assumptions change, entire industries become ripe for disruption!! From EDA and verification to manufacturing and packaging, this might be one of the most exciting times in decades to build disruptive deep tech. We shouldn't just be asking how AI makes the existing flow faster. We should be asking how much of that flow needs to exist in its current form at all.
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If AI agents spends more time waiting than generating answers, what should we actually be accelerating? And what does that mean for the next generation of AI chips? A look at where the time, memory and money go when agents get to work.
Show more