HN commenters cite it as a thoughtful talk from a legendary chip architect, both for the s-curves view of progress and for concrete technical details on semiconductor scaling.
Jim Keller, CTO of Tenstorrent, gives a keynote at Stanford's System X conference on change, understanding and the future of computing. He touches on Moore's Law, how far transistors are from physical limits, and ideas like DNA origami.
“If you are fan of the stack of s-curves, you will probably like this talk by Jim Keller.” (HN, 2023)
K8 seems pretty small after he made the fucking Zen architecture (and Tesla AI). Lex has good interviews with Jim[1], he's not just very smart, he is wise. He started Tenstorrent some time ago with Ljubisa Bajic so I'm assuming this fab is related. Here is youtube channel for Tenstorrent[2], and last time I checked it was getting under 100 views per video... Ian also interviewed him[3] some time ago. Long story short if I had money that would be relevant in this context I would invest really hard into Tenstorrent. Investing time to listen to the guy seems to be not worse. 1a. [link] 1b. [link] 2. [this video] 3. [link]
Tenstorrent channel listed as source to hear Keller.
"Is this really the way forward?" No. The way forward for scale-free systems which implement a hierarchy of competence is to have "the factory smaller than the product" [1]. Instead of the Chrome Canary team and the various Working Groups dictating from above what passes as valid, let the rules be sent at the same time with the interpretation of the rules [2]. In the same manner DNA encodes proteins with no mention of the underlying morphology, but once the RNA starts building the morphology arises. [1] Jim Keller talking about DNA Origami at 19:18, [this video] [2] Not even such a new idea, "Building a Better Web Browser - James Mickens - Harvard CS Colloquium 2015", on rendering at 04:20, [link]
Keller on DNA origami, cited for factory smaller than the product idea.
We are ridiculously far from physical limits in our current artificial computers (both theoretical [1], and practical [2]). For more technical details see Jim Keller: [3] [4] [5]. [1] [link] [2] The ~12 watts computer inside each living human adult skull (and perhaps each eukaryote cell [6]) is still the state-of-the-art, for quite some time. [3] 2021, Jim Keller: The Secret to Moore's Law , [link] [4] 2019, Jim Keller: Moore’s Law is Not Dead , [link] [5] 2023, Change w/ Jim Keller , [this video] [6] Our computers aren't yet able of polycomputation, where the computation topology, data, and functions depend on the observer, instead of computation in a passive implementation, once done forever set in s̶t̶o̶n̶e̶ silicon, 2023, Michael Levin, Agency, Attractors, & Observer-Dependent Computation in Biology & Beyond , [link]
Keller talk cited for technical detail on how far computing is from limits.
Transistor measurements in nanometers has been more or less meaningless since the introduction of FinFETs over a decade ago, and IIRC it was TSMC that started the let's play funny business with nanometers affair. Today they are marketing terms and the different fabs try to align them somewhat, but have inherent conflicts of interest when it comes to overselling their tech. For example a TSMC N5 transistor is roughly 100x100x100nm in size as per [this video] .
Cited for the actual physical size of a TSMC N5 transistor.
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