It's a great era to be a hardware nerd.

TSMC got so far out in front of everyone that their competitors had to get creative and solve other issues.

Why is this on 7mn? Because I dont think you could do this on 3nm. It is my understand that everything down at that scale is double shot/imaged to get the right sized components, and with that a higher defect rate.

Look at what intel is doing, and holding out for single shot processes. Their pushing of double sided chips (power on one side and data on the other) would be impossible with the 3nm double shot (I cant see flipping the die as being a good way to get reliability in alignment for 4 imagings..)

I suspect that were getting to the end of size (shrink) scaling and were going to get into process and design scaling. Going to be interesting to see what happens to cost and capacity if we're at that point. Process flexibility would be the new king!

Not necessarily. It's not like an image sensor where you throw it out if theres a single dead pixel. To increase yield of CPUs, they design them to have parallel redundancy and deactivate cores or memory chunks and sell it as a lower tier model. These AI chips are way more parallel than a CPU. They had decades of statistics of wafer flaw distributions before they began the design process, so they would design in just enough redundancy to get the desired yield for the process. I wouldn't be surprised if each processor has hundreds of things disabled (ALUs,memory units, whatever theyre using), and thousands to spare.

Traditionally, that has been the issue with wafer scale processors. Cerebras is supposedly selling these things to production customers for obscene pricing, probably offsetting the low yields. Who knows if it’s profitable though or still burning cash.

So it sounded like the wafer was being used as an interconnect kind of thing that might be much easier to fab.

The actual processors sound like they’re being made on other wafers in a standard way and then cut out and attached to the interconnect wafer.

So it’s not like the entire part was built only on one wafer and a single mistake would cause the whole thing to have to be thrown out.

At least that’s how I understood the article + educated guessing.

The point of Tesla is apparently to promise a firehose of impossible deliverables in order to pressurize a separate hose connected to Elon's wallet.

We don’t know if this wafer is a good investment or not. It really depends on what its performance and cost are compared to the performance and cost of other solutions.

My guess is if they did this, they thought it would be a huge improvement over buying off the self hardware. The reason I say this is it’s expensive to design a wafer computer, and get it manufactured.

18000 amps? What kind of a motherboard and power delivery is that

A comparable product from Cerebras is rumored to cost around $2-3M.