2026-05-22
1 小时 20 分钟I'm back with Rainer Pope, who is the CEO of Maddox, which is a new AI chip company.
Last time we were talking about what happens inside a data center.
Now I understand what happens inside an AI chip.
How does a chip actually work?
Full disclosure, by the way, I am an initial investor in Maddox, so hopefully you have designed a good chip.
Also, if you're listening to this on an audio platform,
it's much preferable to watch this Blackboard lecture on a platform where you can see what's happening.
So switch over to YouTube or Spotify.
So I'll start with sort of the very smallest fundamental unit of chip design,
then we'll sort of build up into what an overall, like actual production chip, what are the components of that.
At the very bottom level of a chip, the primitives that we work with are logic gates,
which are very simple things like and or not.
And then these are connected together by wires that have to be laid out physically as metal traces on a chip.
The main function that AI chips want to compute is multiplication of matrices.
And really inside that is the fundamental primitive is multiply, accumulate of just like of pairs of numbers.
So we're going to sort of demonstrate what that calculation looks like by hand.
And then sort of infer what a circuit would look like for that.
It'll turn out to be sort of easiest if I do multiplication accumulator,
something like a 4-bit number with another 4-bit number.
And then we're going to, the actual clearest primitive is actually multiply accumulate.