Moore's Law is ending, forcing chip design to collapse into a single stack. Architect designed a chip in two weeks using AI instead of human designers, skipping the traditional abstraction layers that separated software from silicon. This "designless" approach may be the only way forward when CMOS hits its limits.
Chapters
I think I know how this game ends. It ends with recursive self-improvement at the chip layer. Obviously, this is a bid to try to make that even faster. And it probably ends with collapse of the abstraction barriers between software models, operating systems, chip design, underlying physics of chips. It's all going to collapse as Moore's Law ends. And so in a scenario where Moore's Law is ending, where, you know, Dave and I always talk about photonics and other successors to CMOS, absent a successor to CMOS, the only way ultimately to continue to get performance improvements is by crushing down the abstraction stack of modern computer architecture. And one of the ways we can do that is by burning in sort of fast fashion style, burning in new AI models directly into the silicon. So this is what Architect was able to do. They were able over only 2 weeks, they call it designless. NVIDIA is fabless for decades now, prided itself on not owning any fabs. Architect prides itself on not having very many designers. So it's the next big thing after, after being fabless. I think this is where at least the post-Moore's Law era ends with— this is sort of the death throes of Moore's Law, where AI is designing and breaking down those barriers to design successor chips for itself.
