Chip Companies
topic on 5 shows · 8 statements across 6 episodes
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8 statements about Chip Companies, every show
Sacerdote: Stalled Frontier AI Models Will Spark Race to the Bottom
“In AI, if Anthropix sort of hits a wall and stops improving, or open AI, then the open source models will catch up. And then it might be a race to the bottom, and it might be, you know, it won't be good for the stocks, probably. It could be good for the chip c…”
Evans: Infrastructure providers historically fail to capture value compared to OS
“Chip companies didn't capture the value. ISPs didn't capture the value. Mobile network operators didn't capture the value. Windows and iOS did, but they were doing something else.”
Cahn: Chip makers finance AI buildouts to book revenue circularly
“The chip companies are now stepping up and saying, okay, we'll absorb some of the risk. We'll put in the capital to finance this build out where the demand on the other side is not so clear because of course the chip companies also get to book this as revenue.”
Building a first chip takes two years and $50 million, says Feldman
“We're gonna spend two, two and a half, sometimes three years and 50 or sixty million dollars building our first part. And then we will learn if people like it or hate it. It has a huge gaping chasm between when you start and when you begin learning from custom…”
Hardware bugs cost $20 million to fix, requiring huge QA ratios
“Often in chip companies for each developer, you have three or four QA people, DV people, and that's because a bug can cost you 20 or thirty million dollars. It's not like, yeah, I'll fix that in, in four dot one dot one. You're gonna have to re-spin the chip i…”
Goldberg: Most chip companies had 20% to 30% gross margins in early 2000s
“When I started covering the industry in the early 2000, gross margins for chip, most chip companies were in the 30 percents, the 20 percents.”
Goldberg: Only about 100 non-semiconductor companies can design custom chips
“There's only about a hundred companies in the world that really can design their own chips other than chip companies, right? It's mostly the big internet companies and the big industrial companies.”
Andreessen: Moore's law has flipped from performance gains to price cuts
“Moore's law has now flipped. The dynamic now, instead of increased performance, has reduced cost. You now have this dynamic where every year, year and a half, the chip companies come out with a chip that's just as fast, but half the price.”