Semi Doped

ตอน

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  Datacenter Interconnects: Copper vs. Optics, Nvidia's 78-Layer PCB, Co-Packaged Optics (CPO) 24.07.2026 49นาที

  Vik Sekar and Austin Lyons tackle the biggest bottleneck in inference: moving data. They break down the three tiers of datacenter networking — scale up, scale out, scale across — and the core engineering trade-off at each layer: copper vs. optics. Topics include Nvidia's extreme measures to keep scale-up fabric electrical (a 78-layer mid-plane PCB), why Co-Packaged Optics is the "holy grail" everyone wants and no one can ship, and the serviceability problem standing in its way. Key Takeaways:...
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  PicoJool's Al Yuen: The Case for GaAs VCSELs in Scale-Up Interconnects 16.07.2026 49นาที

  Al Yuen, CEO of PicoJool, talks with Austin about using VCSELs for scale-up optical interconnects in AI data centers. Al explains why gallium arsenide (GaAs) supply is unconstrained while indium phosphide (InP) is limited, and how PicoJool can leverage existing supply chains to ship in the millions per month. They cover the roadmap from 1.6T to 12.8T, the trade-offs among 8×200G, 16×100G, and 32×50G, and the push to train the next generation of photonics engineers. The spec that changed is er...
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  WEKA's Val Bercovici: KV Cache, DeepSeek V4, HBF, SLC vs QLC NAND, CXL, NVLink, Tokenomics 10.07.2026 1ชม. 4นาที

  Vik welcomes Val Bercovici from Weka to discuss the rapidly evolving landscape of AI memory and storage. Val explains how Weka's architecture leverages high-bandwidth networks to make storage faster than motherboard DRAM. They dive into KV cache optimizations, the future of NAND flash tiers, and the role of CXL in AI inference. The episode concludes with a look at predictive memory offloading and the AI flywheel. Chapters: 0:00 Welcome Val Bercovici, Weka 1:59 Memory situation and model rout...
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  Micron's Record Profits, Apple's CXMT Plea: AI is Eating All the Memory 03.07.2026 50นาที

  Austin and Vik break down the current memory crisis, where AI demand is driving unprecedented profits for memory makers like Micron, while simultaneously causing inflation and price hikes for consumer electronics. They discuss how even premium brands like Apple are struggling to secure supply, leading them to controversial suppliers. The hosts also explore the long-term implications of AI's insatiable memory appetite and its impact on both data center and consumer markets. Chapters: 0:00 Mem...
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  Qualcomm's HBC Memory, Alphawave, Modular, and more 29.06.2026 59นาที

  Qualcomm flew Austin to New York for its investor day, where the communications company laid out a plan to make data center, automotive, and IoT two-thirds of its business by FY29. Austin was in the room and asked Cristiano Amon a question on the record. Vik watched the whole thing on YouTube. Together they break down what actually changed. The technical centerpiece is High Bandwidth Compute (HBC): stacking LPDDR on top of logic to expose the whole face of the chip for interconnects, claiming...
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  Advanced Packaging, TSMC CoWoS, Intel EMIB 19.06.2026 1ชม. 9นาที

  New episode: Advanced packaging for AI chips, from wire bonds to TSMC CoWOS and Intel EMIB. Packaging is no longer an afterthought. It is the chip, and Intel's EMIB challenges TSMC's CoWOS. Three CoWOS flavors: silicon, organic RDL, local bridgesEMIB embeds tiny bridges into the substrate, no interposerEMIB-T and EMIB-M add through-silicon vias and power capacitorsGoogle is booking 3M TPUs on EMIB via MediaTek by 2028Package sizes keep climbing: 5.5x reticle today, 40x aheadThis episode is br...
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  Computex Mania 2026: Optics and Power 12.06.2026 48นาที

  Austin and Vik discuss their recent experience at Computex, where they met for the first time in person after six months of podcasting together. They share insights about the massive show, the people they connected with, and the exciting developments in AI hardware and interconnect technology. Connect with Vik and Austin via a daily free newsletter: https://www.semidoped.com Vik's Paid Substack: https://www.viksnewsletter.com Austin's Paid Substack: https://www.chipstrat.com Chapters 0...
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  Huawei's Tau Scaling Law: Is the "EUV Killer" Real? 29.05.2026 38นาที

  Huawei dropped a paper claiming 1.4nm-class performance without EUV, and the internet immediately declared ASML dead and US export controls useless. Austin and Vik recorded one day after Memorial Day to unpack what Huawei actually announced at ISCAS 2026 — and why the "EUV killer" headline gets the story backwards. They walk through the tau scaling law (tau is delay, and the idea is to attack it at the system level instead of the transistor), logic folding via hybrid bonding, the Kirin 2026 ...
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  Lithography Masterclass 22.05.2026 1ชม. 3นาที

  Spend one hour here and you've caught up on the entire arc of semiconductor lithography. Austin and Vik run a masterclass on the technology that decides who gets to make leading-edge chips, and why so few companies can afford to. The thread is economics. An EUV machine runs about $400 million, a new fab needs roughly 15 of them, and the total bill clears $20-30 billion before a single wafer ships. Austin and Vik trace the whole story: Rock's Law and the cost of a fab, what it actually takes t...
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  Cerebras IPO 15.05.2026 50นาที

  Cerebras IPO is the only thing to talk about this week. 🔥 IPO prices at $185/share. Pops nearly 70% right after. The first wafer-scale chip company to make it public — after a 40-year curse killed every prior attempt. A water-cooler-style convo on what Cerebras actually builds, why a 23 kW wafer is a power and cooling nightmare, why 44 GB of SRAM is both the magic and the wall for LLM inference, and the cursed Trilogy Systems saga that Gene Amdahl tried — and failed — to pull off in 1983. Why...
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  Gimlet's Cross-Vendor Inference Cloud 12.05.2026 48นาที

  Gimlet Labs runs an inference cloud built on heterogeneous silicon. Their software traces a PyTorch workload, segments it into its component parts, and schedules each piece onto the best-suited hardware — connecting chips from different vendors on a single high-speed fabric. In this interview, Gimlet co-founder Natalie Serrino and former Intel executive Beltir walk through the architecture (graph trace, optimal split points, lowering each segment to TensorRT on NVIDIA and equivalents elsewhe...
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  Power as the Next Physics Wall for AI 08.05.2026 41นาที

  What's common to optics and power that ruins everything in the era of AI? Resistance. The same physics that drove interconnects to optics is now driving low-voltage power delivery up to 800V. Austin Lyons (Chipstrat) and Vik Sekar (Vik's Newsletter) unpack it using the Kyber rack as an example. At 600kW and 48V, you're pushing 12,500 amps through a single rack. Power loss scales with I². The math doesn't work. The fix is 800V — and the parts come straight from the EV traction inverter ecosyst...
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  CapEx is just Memory Tax Now, Deepseek V4 NAND impact 03.05.2026 45นาที

  The hyperscaler memory tax quarter. More CapEx? Pssh. We knew flops needed scaling. But $25B at Microsoft alone just to pay higher component prices? A memory tax. That's the news. NAND? Sold out. HBM? Sold out. What we cover: SanDisk revenue +97% sequential.78% gross margin. Guidance above 80% next quarter.Samsung HBM4 first to ship. Demand outstripping supply.DeepSeek v4 goes SSD-centric. KV cache offloads to flash.Microsoft: $25B of 2026 CapEx is just memory pricing.Jassy: memory shor...
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  Masterclass on Google's TPU v8 Networking 24.04.2026 46นาที

  Google's Cloud Next 2026 keynote? Fire. 🔥 The TPU is now two chips instead of one — 8t for training, 8i for inference — but more interestingly, it's two scale-up networking topologies too. Austin Lyons (Chipstrat) and Vik Sekar (Vik's Newsletter) walk through what actually changed, one day after the announcement. OCS? Yes. AECs? Yep. Copper? Yep. Optics? Yep. We cover Virgo (Google's 47 petabit/second scale-out fabric, built entirely on OCS), Boardfly (the new scale-up topology for MoE infere...
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  Meta VP Matt Steiner on Ads Infra, GPUs, MTIA, and LLM-Written Kernels 20.04.2026 39นาที

  Matt Steiner, VP of Monetization Infrastructure, Ranking & AI Foundations at Meta, walks through how Meta's ad system actually works, and why the infrastructure behind it differs from what you'd build for LLMs. We cover Andromeda (retrieval on a custom NVIDIA Grace Hopper SKU Meta co-designed), Lattice (consolidating N ranking models into one), GEM (Meta's Generative Ads Recommendation foundation model), and the adaptive ranking model, a roughly one-trillion-parameter recommender served ...
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  Credo + Dust Photonics, XPO, Nuvacore 17.04.2026 38นาที

  Austin and Vik discuss Credo's acquisition of Dust Photonics, XPO as the new standard for scale-out (maybe instead of CPO?) and some thoughts about Nuvacore entering the CPU scene for agentic AI. Gavin Baker's tweet: https://x.com/GavinSBaker/status/2044410644301046031?s=20 Vik's Substack: https://www.viksnewsletter.com Austin's Substack: https://www.chipstrat.com Chapters 00:00 Introduction to the Semiconductor Landscape 02:49 The Rise of Nuvacore and CPU Innovations 05:27 The Demand for...
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  Is Intel Finally Back with a $300B market cap? OpenClaw can Dream? 10.04.2026 34นาที

  In this episode, Austin and Vik discuss if Intel is finally back with CPU partnerships with Google, and heterogeneous inference with SambaNova, while market cap soars above $300B. Vik tries to get his OpenClaw instance to dream every night. Chapters 00:00 Anthropic's New Direction: Chip Development 02:30 Navigating Subscription Changes and Token Costs 05:25 Exploring Alternative AI Models 08:10 The Economics of AI: Rent vs. Buy 10:56 Intel's Resurgence and Market Dynamics 15:23 Intel's Stra...
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  Reiner Pope (MatX): Designing AI Chips From First Principles for LLMs 09.04.2026 38นาที

  Reiner Pope is the co-founder and CEO of MatX, the startup building chips designed from first principles for LLMs. Before MatX, Reiner was on the Google Brain team training LLMs, and his co-founder Mike Gunter was on the TPU team. They left Google one week before ChatGPT was released. A counterintuitive throughput insight from the conversation: “Low latency means small batch sizes. That is just Little’s law. Memory occupancy in HBM is proportional to batch size. So you can actually fit longer...
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  $300M for 70K Viewers | Intel x Elon, OpenAI x TBPN, Citrini's Strait of Hormuz Stunt 07.04.2026 36นาที

  Intel Foundry just partnered with Elon Musk’s Terafab. What is Terafab anyway, why vertically integrated fabs make sense but the economics don’t (yet!), and what Intel is doing here (hint: no idea). Then: OpenAI acquires TBPN for an estimated $100-300M. Not sure why, but the more interesting thing is the value of niche audiences when five companies control a trillion dollars in AI capex. And finally, Citrini Research sent an analyst to the Strait of Hormuz with a Pelican case full of spy gear...
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  NVIDIA's Marvell Strategy, Is Memory Different This Time?, Intel's Ireland Fab 03.04.2026 42นาที

  In this episode, Austin and Vik analyze NVIDIA's $2 billion investment in Marvell NVLink Fusion, exploring its implications for AI infrastructure, interconnect protocols, and the broader chip ecosystem. They also discuss the current memory market surge, DRAM pricing, and Intel's strategic fab buyback, providing deep insights into industry trends and future directions. On Substack Vik: https://www.viksnewsletter.com/ Austin: https://www.chipstrat.com/ Chapters 00:00 NVIDIA's $2 Billion Inve...