FEELING HOT HOT HOT! 🎙️ NEW EPISODE: OpenAI's Jalapeño! Vik and Austin react to @OpenAI's Jalapeño inference chip, announced at Hot Chips by @rh00 @cdleary. - "Dark silicon is cheaper than idle accelerators": one balanced chip beats a GPU + LPU pair? - Nine months from RTL to tapeout, a Blackwell-class chip designed with AI for EDA - NUMA-style local HBM slices per accelerator fix the "operands arrive late" problem - Broadcom ESUN scale-up: 128 chips per rack at 600 GB/s, 2,048 chips across 16 racks at 200G (still scale up!) - The "regret factor": opportunity cost of missing a future model beats the cost of generality Plus the extra spicy questions: should OpenAI sell it, how much of the RTL was AI-written, and where is Anthropic's chip? Chapters: 0:00 Hot Chips Reaction 2:32 Designing for User Experience 11:16 A Generalized Inference Chip 14:18 The Foundry-IDM Analogy 18:42 The 'Regret Factor' 21:02 The 9-Month Design Cycle 23:45 Challenging the Two-Chip Solution 35:08 Solving HBM Underutilization 36:46 The NUMA Architecture Solution 39:28 System-Level ESUN Networking 42:06 Dark Silicon vs. Idle Accelerators 49:08 A Wake-Up Call for the Industry 52:59 Where's Anthropic's Chip? Get more of Austin and Vik daily, free! Sign up: Connect with Vik and Austin: Vik's Paid Substack: Austin's Paid Substack: @austinsemis @vikramskr