Dylan and Jon on the Dwarkesh Podcast

Set two hours aside and listen to a great conversation. Plus some more recommendations for reading and viewing.

What do you get when you put together two of the world’s best commentators on semiconductors and one of the best podcast hosts out there?

The answer is the recent appearance of

Dylan Patel

of SemiAnalysis and

Jon Y

of Asianometry on the Dwarkesh podcast.

Dylan Patel & Jon (Asianometry) – How the Semiconductor Industry Actually Works

I really can’t recommend this strongly enough.

It’s one of the most intense - in a good way - and informative conversations I can remember in a long time!

I know that this newsletter shares many readers with Dylan and Jon - due to their early support, for which I’m immensely grateful - but I suspect that even if you are already a fan of their work you’ll get some new insights from this conversation.

It’s hard to pick examples from such a wide-ranging discussion but here are a couple of quotes that give something of the flavor. First from Dylan on the structure of the semiconductor industry and trying to understand it:

You have this stratification, every single layer and abstraction layers through the entire stack. It's an unholy concoction. No one knows what's going on because there's an abstraction layer between every single layer. On this layer, the people below you and above you know what's going on. Beyond that, you can try to understand, but not really...

and then from Jon on TSMC’s research:

It’s experiments. They have a recipe and that's what they do. Every TSMC recipe is the culmination of long years of research. It's highly secret. The idea is that you're going to look at one particular part of it and say, “Run an experiment. Is it better? Is it not? Is it better or not?” It’s a thing like that.

And there is so much more. Plus it’s a lot of fun! It’s hard not to be engaged by Dylan and Jon’s knowledge and enthusiasm.

The link above has a full video of the discussion and links to your favorite podcast service. If you prefer to watch on YouTube then here is a direct link.

---

Asianometry

I had the enormous pleasure of meeting

Jon Y

in person earlier this year. Jon’s YouTube channel on such a roll over the last few months years so here are a couple of personal recent favorites.

First, on the US memory industry:

And then the story of the Cray Supercomputer:

All of Jon’s prolific back catalog is worth exploring - it’s tremendous!

---

Chips and Cheese

As if all this wasn’t a big enough treat, I’m delighted that the Chips and Cheese blog has joined Substack. Here is a recent post on Intel’s Lunar Lake iGPU but again their entire back catalog is worth exploring.

Lunar Lake’s iGPU: Debut of Intel’s Xe2 Architecture

---

Digits to Dollars

And last but not least, I’ve now added Digits to Dollars (

D2D Newsletter

) to my recommendations.

D2D has been in tremendous form recently. Their last edition is packed full of interesting updates on everything from AI startups to high-end audio equipment.

Again, strongly recommended.

The Bubble Must Eat