Building chips

Joined April 2015
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CPUs suck. We're building a new general-purpose chip that scales to thousands of cores while being more energy-efficient. We're hiring hardware design engineers, consider joining us tendrils.co/jobs What we do differently ...

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People underestimate the opportunity for generational whealth you have as a founding engineer. We for example offer up to 2% equity and expect to be valued at a few hundred million USD in about a year, let alone in 4. I encourage you to actually do the math
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Oh and in addition to that we pay ARM principal engineer base salary
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Nils Cremer retweeted
FR8 is a 12,000 m² palace, filled with geniuses researching or building startups, it charges 0% equity and even pays for your food, living, and flights. One of their founders drank actual poison on stage to demo their tech. Welcome to FR8. Nothing about FR8 makes sense because it’s so over the top in their ambition, but they might eventually become the biggest thing for young founders globally. And it’s happening right here in Europe. They are neither a hackerhouse, nor a startup accelerator, nor a classic research lab. Instead they think of themselves as a university-like institution for the post AGI world that pushes you towards building companies, ambition, obsession, and bias-to-action. Think YCombinator, Stanford and Bell Labs all wrapped into one thing for the most ambitious 20-somethings in the world to work, run by 20-somethings. They just came out of stealth. Until recently people didn’t even know where their latest cohort is based. Because additionally on top FR8 is absurdly secretive. Their target group knows them and that’s about all they care for. We visited last week to join them behind-the-scenes as they prepare for their first demo day in their new building - a 5 floor university building in the middle of Helsinki. We knew them for quite some time so we were allowed to film them as the first team worldwide. But even we couldn’t film multiple floors and rooms of their building. This video gives you an insight into the ambitious craziness that FR8 is – but trust me there’s more to come in the near future. The biggest new thing in startups – isn’t in SF – it’s in the north of Europe and attracts young geniuses worldwide. Welcome to FR8!
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As porting software gets cheaper, hardware becomes more fungible
Replying to @jarredsumner
there will be a blog post about this. on what this means for bun, benchmarks, memory usage, maintainability going forward, and also the literal process of doing this (it wasn’t just ā€œclaude, rewrite bun in rust. make no mistakesā€) this is a 960,000 LOC rewrite, the code truly works, passing the test suite on Linux and soon other platforms. e2e I started working on this 6 days ago. this would’ve been a massive amount of work by hand.
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I'm all for understanding intelligence
I looked into something related recently. Models seem to learn meaning via collective coordinates between tokens. This is quite similar to how we describe phonon modes (lattice vibrations) in physics. (1/9)
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FR8 is the single one place to be if you want to create the impossible. What the team has managed to put together in the past year is just unreal and what will happen in the next decade is unthinkable
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We took over a former technical university. This is Hogwarts in real life. For people who want to work on something too early, too weird, too ambitious.
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Nils Cremer retweeted
nils is probably the smartest friend i know :) would not miss the chance to work with him to build the future of chips
CPUs suck. We're building a new general-purpose chip that scales to thousands of cores while being more energy-efficient. We're hiring hardware design engineers, consider joining us tendrils.co/jobs What we do differently ...
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Nils Cremer retweeted
I had the luck to briefly talk with Nils at the SPH last year. During our conversation I remember thinking ā€œwowā€ this guy is actually going to change the world! This is a one in a generation company.
CPUs suck. We're building a new general-purpose chip that scales to thousands of cores while being more energy-efficient. We're hiring hardware design engineers, consider joining us tendrils.co/jobs What we do differently ...
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Nils Cremer retweeted
The team at Tendrils reminds me daily that elegance still exists, and standards are something we want to stand for Truly a once in a lifetime opportunity to work with some of the most humble and capable teams I've ever interacted with.
CPUs suck. We're building a new general-purpose chip that scales to thousands of cores while being more energy-efficient. We're hiring hardware design engineers, consider joining us tendrils.co/jobs What we do differently ...
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Nils Cremer retweeted
nils, hugo and t6 are ones of the smartest and most humble people that i know in fact, whenever i go outside and speak of technical excellence at @shipfr8, i bring them up i’ve only met 2 teams in my life that are on this level of excellence this is one of them please read the blog on interaction nets, please read the papers behind it albeit the tagline sounds they are doing GPUs but it’s something different, the nuance lies in ā€œgeneral-purposeā€
CPUs suck. We're building a new general-purpose chip that scales to thousands of cores while being more energy-efficient. We're hiring hardware design engineers, consider joining us tendrils.co/jobs What we do differently ...
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Nils Cremer retweeted
These guys are one of the most cracked teams I’ve ever met working on one of the most interesting problems. Would 1000% recommend checking out there stuff.
CPUs suck. We're building a new general-purpose chip that scales to thousands of cores while being more energy-efficient. We're hiring hardware design engineers, consider joining us tendrils.co/jobs What we do differently ...
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Nils Cremer retweeted
Replying to @nilscmr
@nilscmr and the Tendrils team will outcompete AMD on every level. If you’re bored of your big tech 9-5 you should seriously consider joining them and make your life’s work
CPUs suck. We're building a new general-purpose chip that scales to thousands of cores while being more energy-efficient. We're hiring hardware design engineers, consider joining us tendrils.co/jobs What we do differently ...
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Nils Cremer retweeted
Generational company in the making.
CPUs suck. We're building a new general-purpose chip that scales to thousands of cores while being more energy-efficient. We're hiring hardware design engineers, consider joining us tendrils.co/jobs What we do differently ...
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CPUs suck. We're building a new general-purpose chip that scales to thousands of cores while being more energy-efficient. We're hiring hardware design engineers, consider joining us tendrils.co/jobs What we do differently ...

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... is that we use the parallelism, locality, and linearity of interaction nets to solve some of the hardest challenges in chip design. Local SRAM memories, no reorder buffers, and no cache coherency. All while maintaining generality. Read more atĀ tendrils.co/background

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Nils Cremer retweeted
We are at a unique moment in time for AI & compute: New accelerators / chips, HPC hardware, and new algorithms have each made strides, but we are not yet orchestrating them as a heterogeneous stack. That is what @CallosumAI is built to do, and today we are sharing our vision 🧵
Today we launched @CallosumAI. We are building the infrastructure where heterogeneous chips & intelligence co-evolve to solve the world's hardest problems. Today we present our first results. Across four large problem spaces, we break SOTA and deliver orders-of-magnitude improvements in capabilities, cost and speed: 12Ɨ cheaper deep context. New web SOTA with open-source, 3x cheaper and faster. 2.4Ɨ cache speedups. 1,767Ɨ faster tool calling. This is the worst our infrastructure will ever be. We do it by co-evolving heterogeneous chips and multi-agent intelligence - workflows aware of their hardware, models aware of their task graph, kernels aware of their output constraints. An Intelligent System. callosum.com/blog/welcome-he…
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Nils Cremer retweeted
Today we launched @CallosumAI. We are building the infrastructure where heterogeneous chips & intelligence co-evolve to solve the world's hardest problems. Today we present our first results. Across four large problem spaces, we break SOTA and deliver orders-of-magnitude improvements in capabilities, cost and speed: 12Ɨ cheaper deep context. New web SOTA with open-source, 3x cheaper and faster. 2.4Ɨ cache speedups. 1,767Ɨ faster tool calling. This is the worst our infrastructure will ever be. We do it by co-evolving heterogeneous chips and multi-agent intelligence - workflows aware of their hardware, models aware of their task graph, kernels aware of their output constraints. An Intelligent System. callosum.com/blog/welcome-he…
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I originally left formal verification as the tools really sucked. Hope that this new interest will bring experienced engineers to a field usually only reserved for theoretical computer scientists in academia
I think it must be a very interesting time to be in programming languages and formal methods because LLMs change the whole constraints landscape of software completely. Hints of this can already be seen, e.g. in the rising momentum behind porting C to Rust or the growing interest in upgrading legacy code bases in COBOL or etc. In particular, LLMs are *especially* good at translation compared to de-novo generation because 1) the original code base acts as a kind of highly detailed prompt, and 2) as a reference to write concrete tests with respect to. That said, even Rust is nowhere near optimal for LLMs as a target language. What kind of language is optimal? What concessions (if any) are still carved out for humans? Incredibly interesting new questions and opportunities. It feels likely that we'll end up re-writing large fractions of all software ever written many times over.
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Another thing people might not be aware of is that in chip design, most time is actually already spent on verification. Imagine the productivity gains if you only had to check the properties are correct and could leave the totally verifiable task of proving them to a model.
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One really exciting consequence is that as software gets cheaper to port hardware gets fungible and you'll always want to run your code on the chip with the best perf/$
Shifting structures in a software world dominated by AI. Some first-order reflections (TL;DR at the end): Reducing software supply chains, the return of software monoliths – When rewriting code and understanding large foreign codebases becomes cheap, the incentive to rely on deep dependency trees collapses. Writing from scratch ¹ or extracting the relevant parts from another library is far easier when you can simply ask a code agent to handle it, rather than spending countless nights diving into an unfamiliar codebase. The reasons to reduce dependencies are compelling: a smaller attack surface for supply chain threats, smaller packaged software, improved performance, and faster boot times. By leveraging the tireless stamina of LLMs, the dream of coding an entire app from bare-metal considerations all the way up is becoming realistic. End of the Lindy effect – The Lindy effect holds that things which have been around for a long time are there for good reason and will likely continue to persist. It's related to Chesterton's fence: before removing something, you should first understand why it exists, which means removal always carries a cost. But in a world where software can be developed from first principles and understood by a tireless agent, this logic weakens. Older codebases can be explored at will; long-standing software can be replaced with far less friction. A codebase can be fully rewritten in a new language. ² Legacy software can be carefully studied and updated in situations where humans would have given up long ago. The catch: unknown unknowns remain unknown. The true extent of AI's impact will hinge on whether complete coverage of testing, edge cases, and formal verification is achievable. In an AI-dominated world, formal verification isn't optional—it's essential. The case for strongly typed languages – Historically, programming language adoption has been driven largely by human psychology and social dynamics. A language's success depended on a mix of factors: individual considerations like being easy to learn and simple to write correctly; community effects like how active and welcoming a community was, which in turn shaped how fast its ecosystem would grow; and fundamental properties like provable correctness, formal verification, and striking the right balance between dynamic and static checks—between the freedom to write anything and the discipline of guarding against edge cases and attacks. As the human factor diminishes, these dynamics will shift. Less dependence on human psychology will favor strongly typed, formally verifiable and/or high performance languages.³ These are often harder for humans to learn, but they're far better suited to LLMs, which thrive on formal verification and reinforcement learning environments. Expect this to reshape which languages dominate. Economic restructuring of open source – For decades, open-source communities have been built around humans finding connection through writing, learning, and using code together. In a world where most code is written—and perhaps more importantly, read—by machines, these incentives will start to break down.⁓ Communities of AIs building libraries and codebases together will likely emerge as a replacement, but such communities will lack the fundamentally human motivations that have driven open source until now. If the future of open-source development becomes largely devoid of humans, alignment of AI models won't just matter—it will be decisive. The future of new languages – Will AI agents face the same tradeoffs we do when developing or adopting new programming languages? Expressiveness vs. simplicity, safety vs. control, performance vs. abstraction, compile time vs. runtime, explicitness vs. conciseness. It's unclear that they will. In the long term, the reasons to create a new programming language will likely diverge significantly from the human-driven motivations of the past. There may well be an optimal programming language for LLMs—and there's no reason to assume it will resemble the ones humans have converged on. TL; DR: - Monoliths return – cheap rewriting kills dependency trees; smaller attack surface, better performance, bare-metal becomes realistic - Lindy effect weakens – legacy code loses its moat, but unknown unknowns persist; formal verification becomes essential - Strongly typed languages rise – human psychology mattered for adoption; now formal verification and RL environments favor types over ergonomics - Open source restructures – human connection drove the community; AI-written/read code breaks those incentives; alignment becomes decisive - New languages diverge – AI may not share our tradeoffs; optimal LLM programming languages may look nothing like what humans converged on ¹ x.com/mntruell/status/201282… ² x.com/anthropicai/status/201… ³ wesmckinney.com/blog/agent-e… ⁓ github.com/tailwindlabs/tail…
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