The semiconductor manufacturing business is absolutely immense. To give the numbers some perspective, in 2024, chip makers generated revenues that were about three quarters of the size of the US defense budget and about two-thirds the size of the social services budget allocated by Congress. …
The AI boom has been very, very good to Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co, which is positioned to do well if Nvidia continues with its hegemony over AI training and inference or if the rebel alliance forms behind AMD or if the hyperscalers and cloud builders dedicate a substantial portion of their capital budgets to etching and packaging homegrown compute engines. …
Making a graphics card for gamers is one thing, but manufacturing a rackscale supercomputer with over 600,000 components that burns 120 kilowatts of power, that has over 5,000 copper cables for an all-to-all interconnect mesh for 72 dual-chip compute engines, and that weighs over 3,000 pounds is another thing entirely. …
The HPC centers of the world like fast networks and compute, but they are also always working under budget constraints unlike their AI peers out there in the enterprise, where money seems to be unlimited to what sometimes looks like an irrationally exuberant extent. …
Compute engine makers can do all they want to bring the performance of their devices on par or even reasonably close to that of Nvidia’s various GPU accelerators, but until they have something akin to the NVLink and NVSwitch memory fabric that Nvidia uses to leverage the performance of many GPUs at bandwidths that dwarf PCI-Express switches and latencies that dwarf Ethernet interconnects, they can never catch up. …
Spending on AI systems in 2024 just utterly blew by the expectations of the major market researchers and those who dabble in metrics like we do. …
All presidents of these United States have the bully pulpit from which to lecture the American people and, for the past century, the rest of the world about how the global economy and culture should work. …
It is no secret that chip maker Intel is having a tough time these days on a number of fronts, but it is important to remember that nearly two out of every three processors sold into the datacenter are Intel Inside. …
If you want a CPU that has the floating point performance of a GPU, all you have to do is wait six or so years and the CPU roadmaps can catch up. …
People are impatient for Intel to get fixed, and have been for many years. …
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