Computex Mania 2026: Optics and Power

Marvell, everybody, the next $1 trillion company. And I was like, "Haha, funny joke." And then I learned the next day, or I don't know, the same day. Whenever the market's open, Marvell is up 70%. And I was like, "Oh, my God, there was my arbitrage event." And I was there taking Jensen, like the jacket video, the whole time. My video cost me thousands of dollars. I should have bought, wow, I saw 100 billion centons come by, right by my face. And I just let it go by. I did absolutely nothing. [MUSIC PLAYING] All right, hello, everyone. Welcome to another semi-dote podcast. I'm Austin Lines of Chip Stratton, with me as Vic Shaker from VIX Newsletters. So we're back from Taiwan. And I'm getting over my jet lag. This is my first time to Asia. And as hard as I tried to not have jet lag, it's still just my internal clock is just totally screwed up. So I'm back. I'm awake. I've got some coffee in me. And listeners, you may not know this. But Vic and I, we've got-- we're six months into a podcast. But we're actually in two different countries. And we actually met in person for the very first time. So Vic, you took a picture. It was pretty cool. Yeah, it was awesome. It was totally cool to meet you. And when you meet each other, the first thing that came to my mind is like, holy crap, Austin is tall, man. Austin. What? You don't-- like in video, I can't really tell. And when I met you in person, I'm like, who is this guy? Why is he all the way up there? That's hilarious. It's just small Indian dude. So I'm like, yeah, this is my regular height. I'm kind of average, I would say, for Indian height. But yeah, Austin's tall. So that's cool. I'm going to make a picture. So yeah, obviously you can see the height difference there. We're on the same floor level. That was cool. It's nice to meet you in person. Finally, after all this talking online, it's amazing what you can do with the internet these days. You can start a whole podcast. We got this thing. We talk so much semis. But in person, it was awesome. We met so many people that were also in the online world. And you meet them all in real life. Computax is such a big show. It's amazing how big it was and how many people there were. All of them looking at this AI hardware stuff. I'm like, wait, all of you really interested in AI hardware? I'm amazed. Yeah, totally, totally. Yeah, I agree with you. It's really cool to meet, obviously you in person and hang out more. And then just the other substackers, YouTubers, people in the industry that we know of. It's very humanizing. You just get in face to face. And you're just like, yeah, this is another person. Also has the same crazy interests that I do going really deep on the businesses and the technology. And yeah, I agree with you. On the one hand, there was a ton of people there. And on the one hand, I was like, well, we are in Asia. And a lot of people work in this industry. But in the other hand, it does outside of the whole AI and Semi's has blown up in the last two years. It is still a little crazy. Yeah, I've always been into this stuff. And it's pretty like kind of deeper tech than maybe just pure software. And it's crazy to see like, oh, there are hundreds of thousands of people that also feel the same way. Of course, as they're walking through, I thought, I wonder how many of them have seen the podcast. And if not, there's a huge subscriber base right here like in the compute text of pre-registration line where apparently I actually didn't pre-register. So I, there was like literally 1,000 people in this line where if you pre-registered, you got to pick up your badge. And somehow I screwed it up and didn't actually pre-register. So I got to like go to a different place where there's only 10 other people. And I was like, OK, I guess I'm never going to pre-register because I got like the fast pass. But I looked at that long line. And I just thought like, we got to get all of them to check out Semi-Doped. [LAUGHTER] Like Austin is over there counting time. OK, I'll do my time right here. Computex is my time. My substack time. My podcast time. But yeah, you're right. That's right. I'm like, I was truly amazed. And yeah, it's so funny, though, because in the previous evening, I think you had some events you had to attend. And by the time you showed up and we met, it was like already at past 4 p.m. And like, we went to the registration counter and they were like, no, it's done for the day. And the next morning, I walk into the venue and I see the lines on the registration. It goes like the entire length of the conference hall or something, like half a mile. I'm like, oh my god. Like Austin should have done this yesterday. He just needed to show up like 10 minutes earlier. And now I don't know how he's going to get his badge. But I'm glad you like out there counting time, you know? Yes, totally. Yeah, I thought the same thing. I was like, crap, I screwed this up. But then it turned out OK. You know another thing that stood out to me was like, there are so many people who came up to us and said, hey, I watch your podcast. I like it. And I love what you guys do. And super thankful for meeting these people in person. It's insane. Like, we don't know who's on the other side of this video, right? But there are people apparently. And it's nice to meet them. Totally. Yes, yes. I thought the same way. When people subscribe to our substack and read it, we can see the email of who signed up. So you get a general sense of who your audience is. But with the podcast, we just kind of throw it out into the ether. And so it's cool. Yes, when people came up and they're like, oh, hey, Austin, what's up? Yeah, I had someone at breakfast one day. They was like, oh, are you Austin? I was like, yeah, what's up? And then he was like, oh, I think I do write a substack. And I was like, yes. And then I was like, I have a podcast too, you know? But just cool to run. It's like, it's like niche maxing or something. Like in a very, very, very narrow niche, people like know who we are. And that's very cool. But on my flight home, my flight got-- I was supposed to fly through Tokyo, but that got canceled because there was a typhoon. So I hope all of our Tokyo listeners are OK, Japan listeners. And so I took a different flight, Taipei to SFO. And when I got there, someone sat down next to me. I was like, oh, it looks just like Ben Thompson. And so then later, I was like, I think that has been Thompson. So I said to-- he writes "strategory" for those of you who don't know. And so then later, I was like, hey, Ben, I'm Austin. And I introduced myself to him. But same, I thought about him. I was like, oh, he's like hyper famous in a certain slice of the world. And then everyone else in the airport has no idea who he is. Yeah, for those who don't know, I think we should mention this. Ben Thompson is the OG newsletter guy. He started a newsletter when there was no substack or anything like that. Substack is built on Ben Thompson's idea of creating an email newsletter. And he has tens of thousands of readers, and he writes every day. And he has a podcast. So we all know him in the tech world or whatever. But it's so cool you ran into him in an airport. And he'll be like, oh, my god. Nobody ever recognized me here. But it's certainly Austin who walked up to me. So it's like a hyper niche thing. It's like the moment we step out of Computex, nobody knows who we are. Like the moment, you know? Yes, totally, totally. In my neighborhood, everyone just is like, oh, that's the dude that runs all the time. But other than that, people have no idea. And then you go to something like it to Taiwan, to another country. And then Austin, people recognize me. And it's like, oh, this is weird. Yeah. So maybe this is a consequence of being in a highly populated country. Because in my neighborhood, somebody recognized me. I'm like, whoa, that's insane. That is good to buy milk. And then in the airport, somebody said, hey, are you the guy you write to a newsletter? And so that was like, yeah, that's me. That's amazing. And so in Computex, to be met so many people, it was great. But part of the Computex appeal is actually the exhibition, which is fantastic. It has multiple buildings and multiple floors of everything from AI racks to chairs. I saw chairs, like computer chairs that you could sit on and work on. And all the gaming in all that in between. So I suppose that it's natural to have gaming chairs as well. It covers so much. And at one point, I walked into the ground floor. And there was like a ton of people. And I was like, yeah, everybody's looking at AI racks. But it's not so. Because there was actually Jensen, who was at the other end of that, looking at all the racks and stuff. And I was with like a couple of people. I think you had gone back already. And I was like, we were like, that's it, dude. We're not going into this hall right now. Because the way it is, there's security walking on either side. And they're making way for him. And he's walking by. I guess somebody told me people are keeping track of whichever boot he stops in and buying stock. Because I don't know. He's placed, he went to having these mini pops. And maybe people were counting. He stood at Delta Boot for 20 seconds. It must be something there. Yeah, just like momentary arbitrage. You get a signal before everyone else. While someone else is posting the picture to X, you quick invest. And then someone everyone sees it. Oh, Jensen stopped there on X and then they buy the stock. That's crazy. So talking about momentary events, right? Let's talk about the networking keynote I attended, which is like Marvel. And I was in the front row because they let the media in. I guess I'm media now. Yeah. So I was sitting there. I was pretty surprised because I didn't have any idea. Jensen is going to come trotting on stage. So he comes in and he's like, hey, everybody what's up? And all everybody were like, happy. Jensen, you know, we get to see the Jensen. So I was pretty happy because I missed the GTC, actually. I didn't. I like, I've never seen Jensen in person. OK. So I was like, pretty stoked by it. I'm like, I saw it in the jacket. Oh, that was your first time seeing the leather jacket in the flesh. Yeah, cool. Yeah. Nice. I only write about all the stuff leather jacket creates on the-- You know, my sub-stack and all that, but I never see him in the flesh. Well, there you go. And how was it? I don't know, it's cool, I guess. I mean, I don't think that one time Jensen's sighting is the feeling he's ever going to come back. It's like, oh, that's Jensen, by the way. And then he comes in and says like, "Marvel, everybody, the next $1 trillion company." And I was like, "Haha, funny joke." You know, why? Because just then, Matt Murphy, the CEO of Marvel, had said, "Oh, yeah, like, we've already had "$3 trillion memory companies recently in the AI boom." And all that. And I was like, "Yeah, yeah, that's pretty cool." And I didn't expect Jensen to come by and say, "Oh, yeah, next trillion dollar company." I thought he was just saying that to make Matt feel better. I'm like, "Oh, I don't worry, you'll be a Bill Trillion Dollar Company "to someday." And then I learned the next day, or I don't know, the same day, whenever the market's open, it's like, "Marvel is up 70%. "And I was like, "Oh, my God, "there was my arbitrage event." And I was there taking Jensen as a jacket video the whole time. My video cost me thousands of dollars, I should have bought. - That's fine. - That's hilarious. No, yeah, they were truly up like 30%. Maybe they got, I don't know, something crazy, like 50 billion in market cap or something, just from Jensen's comment. Of course, or you could say it was because of what they presented and the merits were good and the story was good, whatever. Regardless, I thought to myself, "Oh, man, Jensen goes around "and gives two billion to this company, "and he's going to give two billion." Hey, this point, he doesn't have to give two billion, he just has to give compliments. And maybe that's even more valuable to the company than a two billion dollar investment. - Yeah, I know, that's more valuable. You can keep your mind. Just say, Jensen, Jensen says, your company is good and then you're better off than his two billion. So Jensen's happy, he gets to keep his two billion and the others are like seeing everything pop. Anyway, it's strange times we live in. I thought it was funny because I've never been in the middle of an event, you know, a hundred billion, I think it was a hundred billion actually. It's close to a hundred billion, that the comment was, and I was like, wow, I saw a hundred billion sentence come by right by my face and I just let it go by. Like, I did absolutely nothing. Yeah, but the whole talk about Marvel CEO basically was like, oh yeah, Optics is here. And you know, the wall, the copper wall, has now moved out to the point that you can only do like on-package stuff and everything within rack is now going to be Optics, you know. So he showed this cool slide about that. And so I think the whole keynote was basically about Marvel's prowess in optical interconnect, especially when they acquired infe. Many years back, I think great acquisition. I think they have like a very strong optical portfolio now. They showed off their Terrelynx switch, which is a 102.4 terabits per second switch, which is, I would say like, what the Tomahawk 6 by Broadcom is similar, it's a similar 102.4 terabits per second switch. So that was their big announcement there. But yeah, they showed a big tray of CPO and, you know, and he's pointing to it and saying like, look at that. That's how big it was. Yeah, the switches are big. Yeah, those are big, right? I mean, if you have to do a pluggable implementation, those are really big. But then he showed the CPO's, like, which was like much smaller, right? It's like it's size of your whole hand extended kind of size. So it's amazing that kind of compression in size CPO can bring about. And yeah, so the whole show was essentially a very heavy, you know, heavy optics, like people loved CPO. Everybody was, every demonstration is CPO and this, and CPO that and the talk was all CPO. That's what a sense I got at least. So yeah, it was cool, actually, the whole keynote was nice. I've never been to too many such high profile talks, like right up front. Well, this is very new to me. But I had fun. Yeah, yeah, good. Yeah, I thought the Marvel keynote was good. I think Matt Murphy is a good public speaker. I think of the key of this, like stories I've seen them tell over the last, like, say two years. I've always felt that they didn't, Marvel has not done a good job of articulating who they are. Are they an ASIC company that also has interconnects? Are they an internet connect company that also makes custom ASICs? I think to in this story, they really try to position themselves as an interconnect company. And if I recall, they showed how like their revenue was, you know, the majority of it was from interconnects. And then some of it was from AIA6. So I thought at least they narrowed in on like, hey, we're talking interconnects. We think of us as a connectivity company. And then, you know, they talked a lot about the copper wall and their portfolio. I did feel like they missed an opportunity to talk about how those two businesses can cross sell each other. So like, hey, think about it. If you're Marvel and you're making an XPU for someone, it's not just about the XPU. It's also about the XPU attach. And a lot of that is around interconnects. And so the whole point that I'm trying to make is they can say, like, we can work with hyper-scale customers to make their XPU attach their data centers. It's really bespoke data centers. And that can help us sell into the interconnect there. And, you know, vice versa, as we sell interconnects for people, maybe that's opportunities to get our interconnects into their systems and then maybe eventually sell some AIA6. Maybe that's not a story they want to tell because maybe these companies that they make the data centers for don't always buy their, like, switches, for example. Maybe they're still buying Broadcom switches. So maybe that's not the true story. But I would love clarity. Are these two distinct businesses or can they actually benefit each other in cross sell? And they never seem to talk about that. So if anyone from Marvel is listening, I won't add love and answer. And two, if you have a good answer, then you should tell that part of your story. Yeah, absolutely. I was listening to the Bank of America conference today where Matt Murphy also spoke about like the interconnectivity, their connectivity products. And then in the middle, he was also like, "Yeah, yeah, yeah, we also do some A6 stuff too." So, you know, it's, so I see what you mean by the disconnect there. But I guess their essential business is data movement. However you want to frame it. I guess you could A6 move data inside the chip. Sure. It could be one framing. We are a data movement company. Within the chip, as in the A6 business, or between chips, as in the interconnect business, you know, or between data centers, in the DSP business. They have a very strong DSP business actually. And I guess it is a bit counter positioning against Broadcom. Who of course has an amazing data movement business, but it's spent a lot of the earnings called talking about the A6 XPU business. I think that's also just what analysts want to ask a lot about. So it is, we are in an interesting world, I think both for Broadcom and for Marvell to, as they have these two different businesses to figure out, what is the cohesive narrative, basically? Yeah, that's true. So, you know, that leads to the question of if all of the interconnects, today, you know, optical is used in scale out. We know that. And there is still a lot of benefits to using copper or optics. It's not like one or the other yet. But, you know, as speeds go up, I think copper will run into its limitations. And so optics is nice. They have their entire portfolio around it. But I think what is more interesting to talk about is the scale up scenario. Because when Matt Murphy drew that line and included the rack in the optics thing, it's very interesting that now internally, we may be seeing the birth of optics for scale up. And recently, there's been a lot of debate online about whether CPU is really here. When is it going to be here? Well, can we support optical engines and packaging them at scale? Because I don't think that we have done them at scale, like Spectrum X and the Quantum X, and, you know, Tomahawks from Broadcom have CPU. But they're just like one application and just coming into production this year. So nobody really knows if you can produce CPU at scale, if there's capacity to do so. And also, if there is like the question of yield, okay? The reason I'm saying yield is, you're packaging the TSMC scoop process, you're putting the optical engine on top of the electrical engine. And so that, I don't know how that can be done at scale. So I have no idea. They said something like, oh, we have 99% yield in engineering samples. But that doesn't mean you can scale up to, you know, millions of these things. So those are all like unknowns at the moment. And also, there's the question of testing, you know, optical engines. Because especially when you have two-sided diets, a problem now, because you have to align the top of the wafer and the bottom of the wafer to test them simultaneously. Because you need the electrical side and the optical side to be aligned. And then you can test each one. And that alignment from what I have read and spoken to people about takes time. So that is a big unsolved problem. Or a problem. problem that is currently being solved in terms of testers and things like that. How do you test CPU fast enough to make it a reality? And so, CPU is definitely coming because we have to go to optical down the line. There's no way around it. But yeah, there are a lot of challenges. So maybe a lot of the discussion online has been like, why don't we go to near-packaged optics for now and we'll just not have to deal with the advanced packaging part of it at least. But then we can just do the silicon engines, optical engines in silicon photonics and maybe put it into a socket. So that's the kind of discussion that's out there right now. And it's interesting to see how it'll evolve. I don't think I have all the answers at the moment. It's interesting. Yeah, yeah. I totally agree with you. And ultimately, near-package optics takes a step in the right direction, gets that electrical, there's, yeah, the copper trace much shorter, but doesn't jump all the way to CPU. Feels like a decent intermediate step, especially when you think about manufacturing. And of course, then there's XPO as we've already talked about, which I think will continue to extend pluggables. What else, did you see much on NPO or XPO or was it all CPU that you saw at the show? So I want to talk about both of them. Actually, let me go over to XPO first, and because the CPU one is also nice. So is the first time I've seen an XPO module in person? Okay. And there's this whole video I took of me talking over it. And we'll play it right after this. But it is essentially a honking big connector, like it's as big as my hand. You know what, let's just look at the video and then it'll work out. All right, check out this is the XPO module, which is the next generation of connector. Do you see how big this thing actually is? Like, this is a honking big XPO module. Ridiculous. Oh my god. Look at this. This thing is liquid cooled. And it's the equivalent of 8 OSFP plugs. It's insane. How big this is. Wow. I'll show you all the cables after this for size comparison. All the other connector types, I guess. So you can see how big it is. So, this is for comparison. So the whole thing with XPO is that it is effectively 8 plug-able modules, OSFP modules in one. So it's a massive, massive connector that's liquid cooled. It's quite amazing. You see the number of cables that came out of it. So this is nice. I like looking at it, but I genuinely think that it has a shot at being an alternative to CPO if the ecosystem wants to stay plug-able. I don't think it's ruled out yet. So I'm glad I saw that part of the future of optical interconnects. But then the other thing I saw was the IR labs scale up CPO demonstration with the Wewin racks on the show floor. It was cool. In the picture of the rack, you can see all of these external laser modules that are sitting in the front, like the face plate. And then all of the optical fiber that's coming in from the co-package module inside the rack. So it is really nice to see something that it's not in production or anything, but it's like a concept wise as a demo wise, it's really nice to see the fully scaled up optical CPO rack. And be like, wow, this is what maybe data centers will be filled within about maybe three to five years or some time frame. And so what was really cool about this was they had a video on the side that for people who didn't know what they're looking at, they explained the whole blowout image of the whole video. So yeah, check this video out. So this is cool because watch this video and I'll show you what comes up after this. This is the IR labs scale up optics. And the other side of the rack is the actual hardware. So you can see all the external laser modules plugging into this thing and those going to the rack. Yep. So that's a fully optical scale up rack. So what I did was after that was once you see the insides of this rack and what is inside it and how all the optical engines are sitting next to the silicon and stuff, they have their actual rack. So I took like a whole video of all the little details in the rack and how you can actually put, give you handles, you can pull them out. So that's, you know, I'll just, we should just play the video too because there's a reason I took all of this stuff so we can put it in the podcast. All right, look at this is CPU rack level scale up. So each of these blue things are like external laser modules and I believe this entire handle exists so that you can pull out the rack and change it out like it does in that video. But you can see internal to it is the optical cable going to the CPU switch and all of these yellow cables are actually optical fiber. It would be the switch I believe that would be the optical switch that hooks up all these expews in an auto all configuration. Other than that, there was a micro LED demonstration by media tech which was interesting but nothing new. I don't know what I was trying to find out from them like what is there reach and you know how fast they can run it and all that but I didn't manage to get too much info out of that. It definitely looks like it's still nascent at least in the media tech demonstration. So I need to go to the next optics conference either in Spain that's coming up ECOC or maybe OCP will have some stuff about micro LED interconnects. So I definitely like to see more of that stuff. Interesting. I didn't know media tech had a micro LED offering. Yeah, they've been working on it actually. So they run, you know micro LED's can only run one to four Gbps per lane. So the whole idea is that you have multiple lanes and transmit wide but slow. But this rate, like we counted it, it had only like 100 LEDs or something that range. So in reality, what you see every sign a demonstrate is more like 400 LEDs. So each running at maybe one to two Gbps and then you got like 400 and 800 Gbps out of the whole thing. So that's kind of what I was hoping to see. But it wasn't really a demo. The videos with the LED lights were just like coming on and off. So I guess you're turning that lights on and off and there's a microscope on there. This is like running on and off. Which is cool. I was like, yeah, I see some flashy lights and those are like blue micro LEDs. Maybe they'll carry data one day and so I was like, yeah, it's good. Sounds like a children's science museum or something. Like look, these things blink. I don't know. I see blinky things every day. All of these racks, racks were full of blinky things. They're like, you know, you're sure China laser at me. I'd be like, oh, that's optics. That's CPO. That's good. So okay, we talked a lot about networking. What about power? Do you see anything? I remember seeing, like I think a right kind of right as we came into one of those conference buildings, wasn't there like a bunch of wall of like power chips? Yeah, power was cool because everywhere on the show floor, you see this stuff. There's like 800 volts this and 800 volts that, you know, everybody had 800 volts in their racks. It doesn't matter who was making the rack. Every rack provider had an 800 volt system there. So I'm like, wait, are we are we already there now? Like this is the thing with shows like computer. You look at this stuff and you start to believe, oh, yeah, this is what's in the data center today. It's really not. It's like what's in the future. Yes. It's nice to see, but it's also important to keep in mind that not everything is running at volume today. Like, you know, that's a nice thing. So apart from that, like you say, when we walked in, we saw this entire wall of chips and it had like these power converter chips like 800 volts to whatever like 12 volts or 800 volts to 50 volts. All these chips from every provider was there. You know, you could see all of them. And it was cool because you're like, wait, this is your competitive analysis right here. If somebody gives me a lab setup, let's start testing this right now. And let's find the alpha from this wall. This wall has the alpha. I wonder what they would do if you started plugging in trying to test. Yeah. I'll just get my oscilloscope and just wheel in some power supplies and get to work. Right. Totally. I was surprised they had very different form factors and different shapes. I kind of thought like, you know, when when Jensen always does the demo of like, oh, here's everyone's hopper racks and it's like, rack, rack, rack, rack, rack. And they almost all look the same. Just like different colors or something. But these boards were different. some were like long rectangles, some were like L-shaped or whatever. Very different. Yeah, yeah. So I'm not sure how that slots into the actual application. Very interesting. Yeah, it's a good, it's a good observation. I don't know why they're all like so different, but yeah, yeah. These are like big chips. And I went to the light on power booth after that. And they had this like again, the whole array of chips that they have in the beginning, they had this like massive chip. And it basically converts from the medium voltage grid down to 800 volts. So this is like other side of 800 volts, you know, the grid side of 800 volts. And yeah, so I asked the guy like, what is this made off? And he's like, yeah, it's silicon carbide. And so then I asked him, what does all these other chips do? Like from 800 volts down, he said, those are all like silicon. It's like, I'm like, they're not silicon carbide. No, no, silicon. And what about again? Like, you know, again, it's still new. We didn't it's just silicon. I'm like, oh, it's cool. Wow. Okay. So grid to 800 volts was silicon carbide, but then 800 volts all the way down was just silicon. Yeah, that's why I took a whole video of this thing. So we definitely watched that too. This is light on chip conversion portfolio is really cool. So these are silicon carbide chips that use transformers and have single stage conversion down to 48 volts. All of these other conversions from 48 volts, whether it is to 12 volts or six volts direct are all silicon based. So the argument of always whether it's GAN or silicon carbide isn't it? All of this switch stuff, they're looking at here that converts voltages down is all silicon. So don't discount silicon yet. Man, it's so cool. There's so much to learn from just talking to people on the show floor. I think that's the best part is just asking what feels like dumb questions, you know, but I think there's just so much that you can learn. It's, you know, of course, it's like asking chat GPT that's patient and we'll answer the dumb questions, except it's the actual people that work for the companies and have the correct information, not something from 2024. Yeah, it's I wish I could stay there and everybody could explain to me for the whole week, but that's not to be the case. But yeah, I was like a kid in the candy store. So I walked up to this demonstration and there was this power whip, which is just this honking large cable and I took a picture of me holding it and you look at that thing and go, oh my God, like what sort of a cable is this? Look at the size of that thing. No wonder people want to go to 800 volts. So you can carry lesser current and you can reduce the size of this honking massive cable. It's ridiculous. Totally. Yes, yeah, the literally like the size of my forearm or something, you know? Yeah, that's how big it is. Yeah, yeah. So it's crazy and yeah, so the other thing was on the other end of it was insane. Like you go to the word of booth. By the way, before I even explain this, check out this video and I'll tell you what it is. By far, the word of booth is insane. Inside that thing is the entire cooling solutions they have built up. By the way, those are not real. This is just like pictures. I wish they were real though. But yeah, I'm going to go around there and see if I can show you the cooling hole, I guess. There you go. Wow. Shiny colors. Okay, so what that was was basically what they call a prefabricated AI infrastructure block. Okay. So what it is is it is a container home, like a container, you know, modular home built for AI racks. So the way it works is you wheel and all your racks into the data center. They could be like 800 volt racks or whatever, right? And but how do you hook just thing up? Like you have to give it power, you have to give it cooling and all of this stuff. So what word if and by the way, this is not just word of delta has this Schneider electric eat in all of them have the solution. But I just saw the word of one in a little bit more detail. You just roll this thing in and it is pre fitted with all the cooling infrastructure and the power infrastructure, all this stuff. All you do is like you roll it in over the racks and you hook it up and it's ready to go. And the guy, I think this was a delta. He was telling me that this kind of reduces the time of deployment by half, you know, it takes us the time to hook up power and cooling solutions. So these are like prefabricated infrastructure solutions. They're like it's insane, right? What do you have to think of? You just can't think about the chips on one side. You see all these chips that convert, you know, you see even little chips that do the voltage regulator modules. But on the other side that they're wheeling in these, you know, room sized infrastructure just to power up these racks. It's fascinating. That is fascinating. You know, it's amazing. I hear lots of different companies as a value prop state that they're trying to reduce the time to stand up a data center. You could call it time to first token if you will, but in a different context, you know, time to be very first token that's ever generated. And of course it makes sense, right? If you're, you know, Elon and you are building your XAI data center and you bought, you know, billions of dollars of GPUs, they're just sitting there depreciating every day. So obviously you want to turn them on as quick as possible. So it's fascinating to think about even from like the physical infrastructure, power and water, like how can you modularize that in such a way that it just makes it very quick to roll thing in, plug everything in off you go. Yeah, that's very interesting. And it's just that these cooling solutions are not only at the data center scale. Like I saw one solution there. I'm not sure if you were in, when you were there when we were looking at this, like, there were like a bunch of people, but probably not. So I'll tell you what it is. There's this edge AI deployment, right? Like so let's say you don't want to deploy this whole data center thing and just want to put, I don't know, like eight or 16 GPUs in your office server closet and, you know, provide some influencing tokens to your employees. I kind of think it's going to become more and more popular for, for just overall cost optimization. You know, so they had this one company called Ketaflow Technologies, which is basically like, you know, a chest freezer in your garage, right? So you open up the chest freezer and what you see inside there is liquid. It's just like a transparent liquid. It looks like water, but it's kind of like an oily thing. They let us touch it even. So I went like stuck my finger in it and it's like, all oily. And they know that people are going to do this. So they get hand out tissues after. So like we all wipe your hands over there. You know, so it's funny. So but yeah, there's this liquid. It wasn't warm to touch anything. But inside that liquid is basically immersed an entire rack of GPUs and power and cables. So it's just like dipped in there and it's doing liquid cooling, right? The whole thing is dipped. And so we were trying to ask like, how does electronic still work? And he said it's a non-conductive liquid. This is not like water. Yeah. So the non-conductive liquid and I think it's going to happen to it. So you can put like racks in here. He's like, yeah, it's running as we speak right now. It's nice. And this is really fun. Yeah. It is mind boggling the first time you think about it. You're like, wait a minute. I just always think liquid, short circuit, conductive. And then you're like, wait, there's non-conductive liquids. Huh? Fascinating. Yeah. You could just drop the whole thing in and it works. And then of course it dissipates heat because the liquid helps carry that heat away. Exactly. Amazing, amazing. So let's see. So we talked networking. We talked power. Let's talk Intel a little bit. I went to Intel's keynote and had a front row seat for lit Bhutan. And you know, the audience loved him. And you know, he started by speaking in Mandarin. And I thought that was really cool. Like talking to the local, you know, we're obviously in Asia. And you know, you can watch the keynote online. I just thought really quick since we're kind of getting close to the end of time. I talk one of the things that really stood out to me was one of the big introductions was the Intel Z on six plus with E cores, aka clear water forest. And so you know, high level 288 E cores, 12 channel DDR, five, a thousand mega transfers, a big L3 cache, you know, the kind of things that you expect Intel products to be shipping. This is very much like the space of going after AMD and turned dense, trying to catch up there. So good specs. But I just couldn't stop thinking about like what a positive signal this is for Intel Foundry. And as they went through the chip, some of the specs that I thought I'd talk about how it was built, which is really cool. That just shows that Intel Foundry is like putting in good reps and these the types of technologies that are being, you know, perfected on their internal customer, if you will, although I know that Intel Foundry doesn't position them as an internal customer anymore. They very much want to say like we treat Intel products as any other customer, you know, we're trying to become a real Foundry and not give them preferential treatment. So let's just call it like their best customer, their biggest customer. So Intel products came and said, hey, we want to build this data center CPU. And we want to use, I think there's something like 17 chiplets and it's two IO tiles or dies that are built. using Intel 7 technology, three active base tiles on Intel 3. And so this is for like cash, mesh, fabric, stuff like that. And then there's 12 compute tiles on Intel 18A. And these are the dark mock e-cores. And so then the cool thing is the active-- and there's like a nice picture of it. We can try to include that. But the active base tiles on Intel 3, those are connected to the IO tiles using EMib. So which, by the way, I think we're going to try to talk about EMib in a future podcast. So here's a teaser for listeners. I wrote about it recently. But so obviously, Intel's got these chips that are built on different process technologies all Intel Foundry. They're connected with EMib. And then on top of it, they're using Fowleros Direct 3D to stack the compute tiles on top of those active base tiles. So this is hybrid bonding, which everyone likes to talk about, like, bumpless copper to copper bonding. But it's also silicon on-- like logic on logic. So active silicon stacked on top of active silicon. And that would be different than active silicon stacked on a passive silicon interposer, for example, or even cache memories stacked on active silicon. This is active silicon on active silicon, which has its own thermal things that you have to think through and power delivery. And so then, of course, speaking of power delivery, Intel 18A is the first generation for Intel Foundry of using backside power delivery. They brand it power via. And then they're also from a transistor perspective. This is using gait all-around transistors or ribbon-fet, I believe is what they call it. So as we're going through these slides, and it's really talking about pitching things from an Intel product perspective, all I could think the whole time about was Intel Foundry and how there's a lot of really interesting technology going on here. And I know everyone just likes to be like, what's 18A's yield? It's bad. It's good, whatever. But I'm like, no, man, it's so much more than that. There's even an economic story here about being able to build a chip. And of course, this is the benefit of disaggregated design or chiplets, different than monolithic design, which is like you can use the right process node that has the right economic. So for example, I think that they're even just reusing the I/O tiles from granite rapids. Like, I don't think those are even new designs. And then SRAM does its scale that great. So just leave it on Intel 3. That's fine. Only use Intel 18A for compute. And then obviously from a yield perspective, you've got little dies instead of a big monolithic die. And yet, it also goes to show how good Intel Foundry must be at advanced packaging to be able to take all these dies, stitch them together, not only with EMib, which is not new, they've been doing EMib for a while. But then, especially with this Foveros 3D logic on logic stacking, I just thought like-- and it wasn't really even hammered home because that was in the purpose of the talk. But I guess I'm doing Intel favor here and just like as sort of a foundry person with foundry interest, I thought like, wow, this is actually a really compelling Intel Foundry story. So that was my takeaway from the whole Computex, which was not the story that Intel was probably even trying to tell. But that was my story, which was just like, dude, this is sweet technology that they're building. But of course, and I'm sure that their customers, Intel Foundry customers, should be able to see that and think like, oh, yeah, this is the type of technology we want to use. And by the way, if it's on 14A eventually, that'll be second generation ribbon-fed, second generation backside power. So Intel Foundry is learning all of this on behalf of their biggest customer Intel products, but they're also like improving on it, too. Yeah. So what I'm hearing you say is that it's not so much as a whole CPU flex or anything. It's just like, oh, look at my advance packaging that I'm capable of doing. It's a packaging flex, really. When you can package up all this stuff nicely and do it at scale or whatever. Yeah, it's good to see that E-Mib is coming up the way it is. There has been news that Google is also engaging with Intel Foundry for their TPUs. I don't exactly know in what context, whether they're actually going to use 18A, which would be really, really cool, or they're just going to use the E-Mib packaging part of it, which is also amazing for their TPU products. But it's so good that there is a product that is not co-os from TSMC, because it's so supply constrained. I'm not just talking about this from a business perspective. Oh, yay. We have Intel winning. Had enough of TSMC. It's not that. It's just more that I would like to see technology accelerate only for the reason that I don't know what other cool applications are there for AI. And I would hate to see it constrained by the inability to package something or by the inability of lasers or something like benign like that. I'm like, it's a simple solution. It's not a technological problem. Why don't you just make more-- it's the thing I want to say. But obviously, reality is more complicated than that. You just can't make more. That everything takes time and capacity. Builders are a real thing. Yeah, so I'm happy in that sense to see that there's a second packaging option. So we can just make more chips in some regard. Totally, totally. And to your point, TSMC is an awesome company. And it was so cool to be in Taiwan. I wish I would have been able to go to TSMC. I would love to meet the folks from TSMC and take a tour someday. But to your point, TSMC is doing everything they can within reason to increase their capacity. But ultimately, there is a limitation on just the amount of chips that can be built on the amount of interposers that can be built on the amount of packaging that can happen. And it's not to any fault of TSMC because they-- it is very, very expensive. And it's a huge investment to spin up fabs. And you have to be very confident that the demand will still be there by the time you ramp these things up in two years. And so it is not physically responsible to just build tons and tons of fabs because Jensen wants it today or Sam Altman wants it today or Elon wants it today, right? So they're doing everything correct and by the book. But zooming out to your point, if there's really only of one big supplier, then the whole industry is limited, which means there are innovations that can't come to bear or can't come to bear as quickly. And so just from an industry perspective, the more packaging capacity-- because of course, even OSATs would be able to do EMib if they want-- but the more packaging that Intel Foundry can show off, the more waivers that Intel Foundry can build, just the better. We will be as a society because we'll have more capacity and we can bring innovations to light quicker and potentially cheaper if you have competition. And you can kind of keep prices and check and so on. So I'll stop my spiel there. We could talk a whole episode on just that. But I think it's net positive for everyone to see Intel Foundry having success. Agreed. Well, let's call it there. Everyone, I hope you liked this episode. Our Computex breakdown. Enjoy the videos, enjoy the pictures. Thanks to everyone who watches this on YouTube. I know I call you out, but we get-- I think our last video was our best one yet, as far as engagement. So thank you for all the comments on there. On please share it with a friend. 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