Reiner Pope – Chip design from the bottom up

New blackboard lecture with Reiner Pope: how do chips actually work - starting with basic logic gates, and working up to why GPUs, TPUs, FPGAs, and the human brain each look the way they do.

Reiner is CEO of MatX, a new chip startup (full disclosure - I’m an angel investor). He was previously at Google, where he worked on software efficiency, compilers, and TPU architecture.

Watch this one on YouTube so you can see the chalkboard. Read the transcript.

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Timestamps

00:00:00 – Building a multiply-accumulate from logic gates

00:16:31 – Muxes and the cost of data movement

00:26:10 – How systolic arrays work

00:39:11 – Clock cycles and pipeline registers

00:51:51 – FPGAs vs ASICs

01:03:25 – Cache vs scratchpad

01:07:27 – Why CPU cores are much bigger than GPU cores

01:12:00 – Brains vs chips

01:15:33 – A GPU is just a bunch of tiny TPUs

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