Silicon
topic on 14 shows · 21 statements across 18 episodes
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21 statements about Silicon, every show
Feldman: Extreme AI demand means no silicon compute goes unused
“Look, I think there is so much demand right now that, that, There is no silicon that will go unused.”
Paruri: Perovskite Solar Uses One-Tenth the Energy of Silicon per Watt
“We use one-tenth the amount of energy required to make on a watt per watt basis compared to silicon.”
Paruri: Tandem PV delivers 30% efficiency boost over silicon, 50% over CdTe
“When you think about our technology compared to silicon, it's like a 30% improvement. When you think about it in compared to cad tell, it's a 50% improvement.”
Kalinowski: Losing silicon or RAM forces catastrophic hardware redesigns
“If your silicon goes out, if you can't buy your silicon, you can't buy your chip. Now you have to redesign your board and you have to find something else that might work. This is a catastrophic redesign. If you can't get the RAM you wanted in the form factor y…”
Welling: Perovskite-Silicon Solar Panels Can Theoretically Reach 50% Light Capture
“They can now make solar panels with new perovskite layers on top of the silicon layers that can capture, you know, Theoretically up to 50% of the light, where now we're at, I don't know, maybe 22 or something, right?”
White: DE Shaw Research Hardcoded Molecular Dynamics into Custom Silicon
“They built their own silicon. They built their own clusters. They had them taped out all themselves. They burned into the silicon the algorithms to run MD.”
The laws of physics allow solar panels to become 10 times cheaper
“The limit of physics on how cheap a solar panel can be is, like, at least 10 times cheaper than it currently is.”
Prince: Every chip shortage in silicon history turns into a glut
“There's never been a chip shortage in any time in the history of silicon that doesn't turn into a glut.”
Chamath: Transformer attention mechanisms require hand-tuning for specific hardware silicon
“All of the attention mechanisms that are built into transformers, that really differentiate how good the models are need to literally be hand-tuned for every single target of silicon that you have.”
Kilpatrick: Google's Full-Stack Control Extends From Silicon to Model Delivery
“Google controls. From a product perspective, like all the way to how the models are delivered to how the models are trained down to the silicon. So like you can make decisions assuming a bunch of those things are going to be true, which is like a lot of folks …”
Boland: Edge AI Inference Will Require High Silicon Capacity
“I mean, yeah, but with that is coming a lot more sort of chain of thought reasoning, a lot more test time compute, so the token generation is still going up, actually. So I still think there's going to be a large amount of silicon required to be able to do sor…”
Early transistors in 1951 relied on germanium instead of silicon
“To give you a sense, silicon is years away. Transistors are probably just getting going. We're not in the integrated circuit yet, and it's all being done in germanium, not silicon.”
Lisa Su: Chip complexity has moved to advanced multi-chip packaging
“It's even more complicated because it's not just about silicon. It's about packaging and, you know, really how do we put these you know, these chips together for you know, very complex, multi-node you know, multi-chip, you know, type things.”
Frith: Chinese battery makers lack international IP for next-gen chemistries
“The technologies that are about to be adopted and, you know, going back to Silicon as an example here, right, imminently going to be adopted in electric vehicles. A lot of Chinese companies don't have the freedom to kind of operate and sell that material outsi…”
Silicon atoms hold 24 times more lithium than carbon atoms in batteries
“The thermodynamic limit of graphite, which is made entirely out of carbon atoms, is you need six carbon atoms to store a single atom of lithium. Whereas with silicon, you can take a single atom of silicon and store four lithium atoms. So that means instead of …”
Berdichevsky: Silicon should replace graphite across all batteries in 20 years
“So I think there'll, there'll be a place for graphite, but I would say in 20 years, silicon should be able to replace it in every nook and cranny.”
Gurley: AI inference market will prioritize power and cost over raw performance
“The inference market over time is gonna be much more susceptible to you know, things that are lower power, lower cost, all the things that, that aren't just performance from a silicon perspective.”
Feldman: Chip market will use separate silicon for training and inference
“Now, whether you will have different silicon for training and for inference, I think you will.”
Jaffe: Graphite will continue to dominate EV anodes over the next decade
“On the anode side, it's going to be for this next decade, it's, we're still going to be living in a graphite dominated world with more and more silicon coming into the
The anode, but it's still going to be mostly graphite”
Berdichevsky: Silicon anodes hold 24x more lithium per atom than carbon
“So there, the lit, ah, four atoms of lithium actually bond with a single atom of silicon. So you remember with carbon, it's six to one. Here it's one to four. So it's 24 X atomically better.”
Berdichevsky: Silicon is 10x better by weight and 3x by volume
“Now silicon's heavier. So it's only about 10 times better on a weight basis. And then the other thing that happens is the silicon expands about three X as you charge it with lithium. And so on a volume base, it's about three times better, right?”