Rob Wachen
speaker
529 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Jun 2026
last heard 30 Jun
Rob Wachen’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jun 2026 with 1.
Appearances
I think there's a certain level of naivety required to think that you could build a chip better than every other AI chip ever built and build a company to do it way faster than ever has been done.
And we have the naivety.
There's many times where we would say, like, why isn't this possible?
And really push on it.
And it turns out that everybody's answers are extremely siloed to a set of constraints that aren't true anymore.
And the reality is the entire semiconductors and data center industry is built on buffer.
And what I mean by that is every part of the stack, from the EDA tools, to the power modules, to the circuit boards, to the chip design and standard cells, everything is built to be general purpose for everything, not just in the data center, but IoT, on the edge, and so forth.
And when you have a specific use case you're really trying to design for, you can change the constraints a lot.
And I'll give you just a very simple example that we're not the only one who does, which is one of the things you care a lot about is the clock speed of your chip.
It's proportional to the throughput of your system.
When you are doing sign-off for different timing, what clock speed you're actually going to be able to run on when you tape out your chip, there's this concept called corners, which is, you know, what temperatures are you going to be able to run at this clock speed?
The default configurations for a lot of these EDA tools assume that you're going to be running your chips in freezing temperatures.
Now, I don't know about you, but I've never seen an AI data center with ice in it.
So, you know, we can feel pretty confident that our ships don't need to run at full speed at 0 degrees Celsius.
In fact, like, they're never really going to be running below 80 degrees Celsius anyway.
And just by knowing that that's a constraint that doesn't matter, we can make a ton of changes throughout the entire system.
That's like a very simple one, but there's many more that you get.
20% here, 50% there, 2x here.
And these compound to a system that can be radically better for inference.
Candidly, people think about this market a bit lazily.
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