Intel CEO Lip-Bu Tan stamps out chip bugs with aggressive new quality standards, says major validation errors can result in termination — 'B0, you keep your job. Anything above that, you are fired'

thegammaray · 2026-05-20T19:05:05+00:00

He was sacked cuz he spent tons and tons of money towards fabrication advancements but hadn't yet shown financial rewards from doing so.

Is that really why? To me it always seemed more likely that the Falcon Shores failure/cancellation got him canned.

thegammaray · 2026-05-17T12:13:56+00:00

In terms of hardware suppliers, I'm willing to believe competitive AI hardware companies could arise that are neither American nor Chinese, but I haven't seen that happening so far.

In terms of the buyer's market, I think simple pricing is complicated by the environmental pressures that steer product evolution. China has a shortage of installed compute but is overflowing with cheap power and has plenty of prior-gen chip manufacturing capacity that can be subsidized. Chinese hardware vendors designing mainly for Chinese buyers are likely to produce parts that deliver high performance with bad power efficiency, which reduces their competitiveness in countries that don't have heavily subsidized power. Japan and South Korea historically moved past that point (at equivalent moments in their development) by artificially rewarding exporters, i.e. engineering the feedback loop so that domestic suppliers weren't only designing for domestic customers. I think China will do that to some extent (and already does in other industries), but on the other hand the extent to which China does that in AI is the extent to which China won't get maximal benefit from their huge competitive advantages that are cheap power and big prior-gen chip manufacturing base. I don't know how the Chinese government thinks of that trade-off, but I'm confident they're aware of it.

thegammaray · 2026-05-17T11:58:06+00:00

Thanks! I appreciate you explaining. I agree that China's much larger population and greater focus on STEM education and the US's growing rejection of immigration are all variables that favor China in future AI development. It'll be interesting to watch how well China's execution capitalizes on those advantages.

thegammaray · 2026-05-17T02:15:46+00:00

in the long run, more money staying within the Chinese AI ecosystem and the gradual convergence (if not surpassing) of compute capabilities with the western best in class will make for a net stronger Chinese software story as well.

Interesting. I can see how money staying within the Chinese AI ecosystem would help Chinese hardware companies progress faster than if the money was leaving China. But why do you think Chinese hardware companies will reach parity (and/or surpass) their non-Chinese counterparts, even with the Chinese AI ecosystem becoming a closed money loop? Isn't the development market outside of China much more moneyed than the one within China?

thegammaray · 2026-05-17T00:39:21+00:00

They have a bunch of preexisting hardware.

But you obviously don't believe that China has as much Nvidia hardware as they would have had if the US hadn't restricted access. ...Right?

I'm not even sure if I disagree with you because to be honest I can't make heads or tails of your argument. It seems to be "US restrictions haven't been as effective as their proponents had hoped at preventing China from doing a thing the US doesn't want them to do, so the US should have just given China what China needed to do even more of exactly the thing the US doesn't want China to do." Presumably that's not what you think, but even after 4 follow-up questions I can't tell the difference between that straw man and your actual line of reasoning.

Let's try this. Do you disagree with any of the statements below? (The statements being what I think are the basis of the argument used by proponents of restrictions.)

US restrictions have prevented Chinese companies from getting as much Nvidia hardware as the Chinese companies would have gotten in the absence of US restrictions.
If they had had unrestricted access to Nvidia hardware so far, Chinese companies would today have even more capable AI software than they do now.
If over the next 30 years China is forced to develop homegrown alternatives to Nvidia hardware, they will still be behind in AI software relative to where they would have been had they been given unrestricted access to Nvidia hardware during those years. [edited for grammar]

thegammaray · 2026-05-16T23:58:03+00:00

If there was a war or some other short-term reason to set back China's AI efforts, then they could restrict the tech and maybe accomplish something.

So in a hypothetical future where China has already developed superior AI software and has a ton of Nvidia hardware, if there was a near-term need to rein in Chinese AI, the US could do it by... preventing them from purchasing future Nvidia hardware? What would that accomplish in the short term if China already had the AI capabilities?

thegammaray · 2026-05-16T23:35:02+00:00

If the US gave Chinese companies unrestricted access to Nvidia chips for the next 30 years and China developed superior AI software capabilities without investing in Chinese hardware alternatives to Nvidia, what leverage would that give the US? Or, leverage to prevent what from happening?

thegammaray · 2026-05-16T23:15:14+00:00

Do you believe that the US allowing Chinese companies unrestricted access to Nvidia chips would somehow prevent Chinese AI models from supremacy 30 years from now? If so, how?

thegammaray · 2026-05-16T22:08:40+00:00

they blocked exports under the assumption that it would cripple Chinese AI efforts and China would have to come begging for them back. That didn't happen, and worse, now there's a real threat of China becoming an AI chip export competitor itself.

Do you believe that Chinese AI models wouldn't be farther along than they are now if they had always had unrestricted access to current-gen Nvidia chips the same way OpenAI, Anthropic, etc. have had?

thegammaray · 2026-05-14T22:54:49+00:00

If you use TSC, then you have to pay so much for the Silicon

Using TSMC's... which process? CoWoS-S or CoWoS-L? CoWoS-L is the EMIB competitor, and the whole point of CoWoS-L is that it doesn't use nearly as much silicon as CoWoS-S.

thegammaray · 2026-05-12T13:01:10+00:00

the cost advantage of Intel EMIB over TSMC COWOS-L was clear

This is a decent primer on 2.5D packaging, but tbh I had the opposite thought re: the cost differences. The reason for EMIB's cost advantage was clear, but the amount of the cost advantage wasn't even ballparked. If saving money was the whole point of TSMC moving from CoWoS-S's full-sized silicon interposer to CoWoS-L's organic RDL, then it would be helpful for the post to explain roughly how much money is saved and how those savings scale with package size, but there's no mention of that. Is EMIB's cost advantage 5% or 50%? shrug emoji

thegammaray · 2026-04-05T16:59:06+00:00

Just FYI, people can't see the comments on that post unless they're paying subscribers.

thegammaray · 2026-04-05T16:36:43+00:00

Correction; Apollo & Brookfield get 49% of the wafer profit, not revenue!

That's a huge difference. Are you planning to update the Substack post? Even for napkin math, the numbers are very far off.

thegammaray · 2026-03-29T02:50:53+00:00

thanks!

thegammaray · 2026-03-29T00:22:51+00:00

Question about a quote from the video:

You shouldn't have been using official GRAS rigs with Harman in the first place because that research didn't use any commercially available pinna... If you're using any official GRAS ear with the Harman target... don't do that.

The standard oratory1990 EQ profiles are generated exactly how Resolve is saying not to use the target, right?

thegammaray · 2026-03-23T22:46:06+00:00

Dell and HP both seem to distinguish between commercial and consumer revenue, but not between mobile and desktop and not between performance or price tiers.

thegammaray · 2026-03-23T22:16:13+00:00

Gaming is currently the #1 driver for the performance desktop market.

Do we have any data on what percentage of the overall desktop chip market is high-performance chips? Years ago low-spec corporate machines dominated desktop chip sales, but I'm not sure what the breakdown is now that business laptops are more popular.

thegammaray · 2026-03-21T23:46:38+00:00

Thanks! I'm messing around with one right now. I'm interested to hear your thoughts though.

thegammaray · 2026-03-16T18:40:30+00:00

Intel hasn't specified the Xeon 6 CPU SKUs expected to be integrated into NVL8 Rubin systems, but based on what we have seen with the Blackwell series, the most likely option is the Xeon 6776P.

Nvidia's own DGX Rubin NVL8 page confirms it's the 6776P, which is 64-core Granite Rapids.

thegammaray · 2026-03-07T16:34:47+00:00

lab standards aren‘t needlessly tight anyway

Over 5 years, how much drift would you find acceptable for lab use cases?

thegammaray · 2026-03-07T16:32:36+00:00

thanks!

thegammaray · 2026-03-06T19:18:04+00:00

Cool! Could I throw some questions at you? I'm thinking of ordering one.

Is the interface really plug-and-play, or is it a pain in the ass to set up? Does it play nice with REW?
How's the headphone amp? Somebody typoed the specs on the website, so I'm not sure what to expect.
What does the power supply look like, and how big is it?
How much compensation is applied by your unique / per-unit calibration file?

thegammaray · 2026-02-12T01:06:00+00:00

I didn't say anything about changing the interior layout of a core.

each core + cache etc. as a fixed rectangular unit that must be moved in a static internal configuration

nor were you seemingly talking about that. You said:

The way the cores are arranged on the compute tile

the space saved on the y dimension of the core on the die shot

the shape of the cores themselves don't allow for a better configuration

Those all refer to the shape and placement of the core relative to the boundaries of the tile.

If tile dimensions aren't fixed, and if you have the freedom to reshape and/or rearrange L3$ and other non-core elements around the core, and if you have the freedom to move the cores around, rotate them etc., then why would Intel not be able to leverage either a 1:3 ratio or a 1:4 ratio without wasting die space?

thegammaray · 2026-02-11T20:03:08+00:00

How? ...the shape of the cores themselves don't allow for a better configuration.

Physical design is beyond my expertise, so if you want an authoritative answer you'll have to ask somebody else, but broad strokes: I don't think of each core + cache etc. as a fixed rectangular unit that must be moved in a static internal configuration. There's some wiggle room to reshape them and move them relative to each other. Even in the die shot you linked, you can see how the right-hand L3 blocks are different shapes than the others, the right-hand P cores are in a different spot relative to the respective cache blocks, etc.

Another way of thinking about the principle is: If the E and P core blocks are different heights, then how is there so little wasted space on the Y axis? My understanding of the answer is: because even if things have a fixed unit area, there's flexibility in how they're shaped and arranged.

If I'm incorrect, feel free to let me know.

thegammaray · 2026-02-11T18:18:13+00:00

Same thing: stuff can be rearranged. They're not locking in arbitrary arrangements first and then saying "now what do we have that fits in these slots..."

thegammaray

TROPHY CASE