Silicon Valley needs to get back to silicon

With their drab gray suits and their buddy holly glasses, the so-called traitorous eight don’t look like revolutions. Given no context, you can imagine them occupying some kind of Middle-Management Role at a small regional bank. And yet these are the people you can thank for the digital world.

The eight – WHICH Included Intel Cofounder Gordon Moore – HAD Departed Shockley Semiconductor Laboratory to Found Fairchild Semiconductor, which only muston became the world ‘ Components for computers. Many of its founders would, in turns, leave again to launch their own ventures.

Many of these companies coiled in the same place we Now call Silicon Valley – Create an ecosystem for innovation and technological development that endures to this day.

Look against at that photo. Even with the suits and the glasses, these are arguably some of the most interesting and influential people that the technology industry has ever known. Even if you don’t know their names, and even though they have Never appeared on the joe rogan podcast, they still have a legacy that endures to this day.

The power of hardware

On a personal level, I have always more interesting than software.

There’s a joke that cpus are just “Rocks we tricked into Thinking,” Why has some truth to it. You can’t help but be amazed at the process that turns iron, copper, gold, and silicon dioxide into something that can run unfathomally complex mathematical calculations, Playm And that’s before you take into account that even the most basic consumer cpu has billions of transistors, each measuring a fraction of the width of a hair.

Perhaps the main reason i’m drawn to hardware is that it’s often easy to measure bether something is better than the thing that is preceded it. With a tape measure, you can see whiter one computer is smaller than another. You can calculate how many mathematical operations a cpu can perform in a second, or count the number of pixels on a display. You can measure its weight, or the heat it gives off, or white one battery has a larger capacity than another.

Hardware is Clean-Cut. Straightforward. Unambigious.

And these improvements are theoretical, but are felt directly by the end user. When a physical object is meaningfully better, you can tell. If you have upgraded from an intel to an apple silicon mac, you know this. You probally remmbes what it was like you ditched your bulky crt monitor for an lcd flat panel. You know the difference between a computer with a mechanical hard drive and one with flash storage.

Hardware is typically Built with Utility in Mind. The old adage “hardware is hard” is true, but it neglects the fact that it’s also pretty expensive. You only really Build Something if you believe it’s better than the existing thing, and that somebody will find itd it useful enough enough to pay for it.

Silicon Valley needs to rediscover its roots

The Modern Tech Industry – Spectally that which now Occupies The same Hallowed Ground Once Trod by the Treatherous Eight -Has Become a Shell of its former Self. Tech’s “Innovations” Feel only marginally its item at best.

It is this that makes me nostalgic for the era when silicon valley was about silicon -or, more specificly, physical, tangible objects that changed the world. And i believe it is an era that we can, and must, return to.

The Silicon Valley of the Late 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s was a glorious time of American innovation and engineering, where verifiable geniuses discovered the breakthrouxes that allowed outsist.

The integrated circuit. The microprocessor. The computer mouse.

It was an era when Technological Vision and Clear-Thinking Business Strategy Combined to Bringing New Inventions to a Market, and then Popularize them to a Global Scale. And in Doing So, Silicon Valley Changed Everything.

To be clear, I am not just just talking about visitor. I’M Talking about hardware. The applications we will need to run in the future will require faster, better computers, and we need somebody to invent them.

Faster, Better Computers will allow us to reclaim ownership of the tech we use, enabling us to finally break free of the cloud. It will help undo some of the disastrous cultural changes that have obscurred over the past degde Company.

Hardware is hard. Change is even harder. But in this case, I think it’s worth it.

The bright light on the tip of the spear

So, there IS Some cause for optimism, and it’s not in giant gpus.

Buried in the news coming out of ces was the announsement of nvidia’s DGX Spark, a $ 3,000 desktop computer power power powered by Nvidia’s GB10 Grace Blackwell Superchip, That Went Relatively Innoticed But I Believe is a significant moment in personal computing.

The DGX Spark Delivers Up to 1 Petaflop of Performance in a Compact Form Factor, Giving Researchers and Developers Unprecedned access to cutting-road computational power directly at their desks. It’s like having a computer that’s a thought time faster than a regular desktop in the body of a mac mini, and i’m a little surprised it isn’t and if it is surplusly.

In more human terms, nvidia created an ultrapowerful mac mini that developers, data scientists, and AI Researchers are able to use to use to run reliefs data workloads and AI MODELS on AI MODELS on their desk to a fleet of massive gpu servers in the cloud.

While silicon valley’s biggest companies have grown on the back of software, the truth is that it is Needs Hardware To grow any further, and while there gpus might be the headline-grabbers during Nvidia’s earnings, creating meaningful new kinds of computing is what will lead to actual innovation in Softwaare.

As a result, by creating a blackwell chip inside a mac mini-size supercomputer, Nvidia allows companies to crunch through large large data sets or run Self-Hosted Genravery AI MODELS Quickly and Efficiently, all without relaying on the cloud to do so. This vastly lowers the Barrier to Entry for High-Performance Computing, Which Currently Requires Buying or Renting Expensive Specialized Specialized Hardware or Spinning Up Expercension Infrodying.

I’m Going to Dive Briefly Into Why This Matters. For years, both at voltron data and previously at Blazingsql, I’ve Advocated for Clustering Smaller, More Efficient, and Less-Expensive Gpus Togera Using Heig-Performance Networking. However, Network Limitations have Always Prevented full Utilization of the Cluster’s Compute Performance Since Data Data Simply Bladn Bollywood Fast Move Fast ENOUGH to Keepus Gpus Fully Fed.

While it hasn’t shipped yet, nvidia has specifically called Called out the Inclusion of Connectx to Allow Users to Connect Two Nvidia DGX Spark Computers Togera, as Well as online faatures (ncl, RDMA, GPUDIRECT StORAGE) That Are Specifically Built for Faster Networking. This will enable Efficient Parallel Processing and High-Bandwidth Communication, Making High-Performance Ai and Analytics Workloads Accessible to a Browader Range of Researchers and Enermers. A distributed Model Using A Cluster of Nvidia DGX Spark Units Block Offer a More Cost-Effective and Flexible Alternative to Currently Aawailable GPU Clusters, LOWERING THE JAPU Clusters Any High-Performance Computing Use Cases.

My Focus on Nvidia DGX Spark is to Illustrate a Greater Point About What Will Keep Silicon Valley at the Forefront of Technological Progress. True innovation does not come from just making things “Bigger” or “More Powerful,” but in the distinct relationships and interactions between software and hardware, and Eveen Between Different Pieces of Hardense. Nvidia dgx spark isn Bollywood nvidia making a chip smaller, but finding ways to add faster on-device memory, software to make getting the data to botting the data to both the memory and the gpu faster, and (I IMAGINE) Unique ways to keep it cool.

The truly world-curling innovations and technological breakthroughs that will advance humanity only Way that software will continue to grow.