One thing we highlighted before for hyperscalers is how power efficiency (PUE is the ratio of total power consumed to the amount of power consumed by IT equipment) has flatlined.
“So I tried just to put together this chart to show how different the GPU package is between 2015 & 2024. So of course, the B100 chip, the GPU introduced a few months ago, and this is not enough because Jensen has already introduced the next generation of GPU last week” (h/t The Transcript).
These 16 companies dominate Google search results. Odds are you haven’t heard of any of them.
“Across 10,000 terms where affiliates are ranking, which cover products in every niche you can think of (home, beauty, tech, automotive, cooking, travel, sports, education and many more), these 16 companies ranked on the first page of 8,574 (or 85%) of them.“
Interesting analysis on staying competitive in semiconductor manufacturing.
“The dotted black lines toward the bottom show the estimated cost of building a leading edge fab (the lower line) and a line showing double that number (the upper line). Our thesis is that companies whose annual revenue fall between those two lines are at risk of falling off the Moore’s Law treadmill.“
TSMC came close once. Samsung looks close now (though this doesn’t include the rest of the group subsidising the fab). It also shows that Intel’s plans to offer fab services need to succeed.
“Over the past 30 years, battery costs have fallen by a dramatic 99 percent; meanwhile, the density [a key measure of quality] of top-tier cells has risen fivefold.”
Interesting corollary from Ben Evan’s “the most interesting thing is a new Google feature called ‘circle to search’. You can use your finger to draw a circle around anything on your Android phone screen, in any app, and Google will do a text or image search. So, you can circle a hat in a Tiktok and Google will tell you where to buy it. It occurred to me a while ago that screenshots are the native file format of smartphones, but they lose context. But what if the OS knows what’s on the screen, in every app? Screen-scraping is the new API…”
A very good history of Y Combinator and how Paul Graham, through his essays and otherwise, had a huge part to play in building the cult of the founder.
This history is trapped inside a not-so-convincing argument of YC’s demise.
