zach's tech blog

I’ve been a public critic of Etched for a while.

Most AI chip companies are focusing on speeding up generative AI workloads by changing the memory hierarchy.

Axios just dropped a bizarre scoop.

When Nvidia announced the Vera CPU as part of their Vera Rubin system, they described it as “purpose built for Agentic AI”.

Crossbar, Inc is a company that was founded to commercialize resistive random access memory (RRAM), an emerging nonvolatile memory technology that’s one of the candidates to replace eFlash in modern process nodes.

I’ve been an outspoken critic of Etched, the chip company that claims to be making AI chips that beat Nvidia by aggressively focusing on accelerating transformers and reducing programmability.

A few weeks ago, OpenAI announced a massive new partnership with Cerebras, the wafer-scale AI chip company.

If there’s one thing we love here at Zach’s Tech Blog, it’s weird security vulnerabilities in processors.

On December 24th, the semiconductor industry got an early Christmas present with the announcement that Nvidia was acquiring Groq.

Merry Christmas, Happy New Year, Happy Hanukkah, and enjoy all of your other holidays as well!

Last month, Irredudible, the company founded to use field programmable gate array chips (FPGAs) to accelerate zero-knowledge proofs (ZKPs) shut down.

This week, Cadence Design Systems, one of the big 3 electronic design automation (EDA) companies that dominate the market for the software that engineers use to design microchips, acquired a small startup called ChipStack.

Disclosure before I jump into the article: I used to lead the silicon team at Normal Computing, a thermodynamic computing company that is considered a competitor to Extropic.

This blog post is based off a talk that I’ve given a couple times: first at Homebrew, then at Betaworks, and finally at Foresite Labs’ Reinventing the Semiconductor Future Symposium this past week.

My most popular post of all time was about why Y Combinator is wrong about LLMs for chip design.

In the past couple of years, large swaths of the security community have been getting excited about trusted execution environments (TEEs) and secure enclaves (SEVs).

This week, news broke that Elon Musk is shutting down the Dojo supercomputer it was using to train its full self-driving models.

GPUs and AI chips continue to be a huge area of investment, from edge chips like the Jetson to datacenter behemoths like the B200.

News broke last week that Tenstorrent, the AI startup run by the legendary CPU architect Jim Keller, was acquiring the analog design startup Blue Cheetah.

If you talk to any chip designer, they’ll complain about Cadence’s chip design software.