Episode 93 - Things are happening in the CPU and AI chip space...

Quite a ways back, we did an episode about our first computers… Cody’s was recent enough to almost be usable today, Eric’s was long enough ago it arrived as spare parts that more resembled a TI calculator, and mine was right in the middle… the hallmark of mid-90’s computing it was an off-white beast of a tower with dual disk drives, fans you could hear from the driveway, and enough RAM to almost run 3 programs at once… as long as one of those programs was Calculator… 

I remember everything about that computer because it was “mine”, but the one I remember possibly even more fondly than it came several years later… they had a lot in common… the tower was still obnoxiously large (just black now with a glass see-through panel on the side), it still had two disk drives but one was a DVD player now, and at the heart of it was an Intel Core2Duo “Allendale” series CPU. It had two cores (hence the “Duo”), was built on a 65 nanometer processes, and consistently hit temperatures normally reserved for the molten core of a small moon or large planet-killing space station… 

All of those specs are burned into my brain because this particular computer was the first one I built entirely myself, from scratch. I had upgraded and modded my PCs for years of course, but my freshman year of college I saved every dollar I could find and built one part at a time what felt like a colossus of gaming and computing horsepower.

Today, the phone in my pocket would literally run circles around that beast many times over. But the hours I spent on that one component at its heart, choosing that “perfect CPU” was a labor of love that obviously is etched into my memory even today. 

So as we look at the computing landscape right now of AI chips, “Copilot Plus” PCs, and an arms race of cores, nanometers, and TOPS figures, the common thread is the beating heart at the middle of it all. The CPU wars are in once again in full swing, and frankly there are already a few casualties. Let’s dive in…