Semi Doped
The business and technology of semiconductors. Alpha for engineers and investors alike.
Semi Doped
Latest Episodes
Masterclass on Google's TPU v8 Networking
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 (
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Meta VP Matt Steiner on Ads Infra, GPUs, MTIA, and LLM-Written Kernels
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 (re...
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Credo + Dust Photonics, XPO, Nuvacore
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/GavinS...
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Is Intel Finally Back with a $300B market cap? OpenClaw can Dream?
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....
Reiner Pope (MatX): Designing AI Chips From First Principles for LLMs
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 Goo...
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