Dwarkesh Podcast
Reiner Pope – Chip design from the bottom up
Deeply researched interviews <br/><br/><a href="https://www.dwarkesh.com?utm_medium=podcast">www.dwarkesh.com</a>
Show Notes
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New blackboard lecture with Reiner Pope: how do chips actually work - starting with basic logic gates, and working up to why GPUs, TPUs, FPGAs, and the human brain each look the way they do.
Reiner is CEO of MatX, a new chip startup (full disclosure - I’m an angel investor). He was previously at Google, where he worked on software efficiency, compilers, and TPU architecture.
Watch this one on YouTube so you can see the chalkboard. Read the transcript.
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Timestamps
– Building a multiply-accumulate from logic gates
– Muxes and the cost of data movement
– How systolic arrays work
– Clock cycles and pipeline registers
– FPGAs vs ASICs
– Cache vs scratchpad
– Why CPU cores are much bigger than GPU cores
– Brains vs chips
– A GPU is just a bunch of tiny TPUs
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