@SemiAnalysis

@SemiAnalysisAug 15 at 09:06 AM

Great to see @dotsstudioai from the popular Chinese social media app (@xiaohongshu, known as RedNote in English) join the open-weight community! ❤️ The team is still trying it out for day-to-day use to see the actual quality of the model or if it is eval maxed.

Regardless, it is always great to see another company join the open community!

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@SemiAnalysisAug 10 at 04:06 PM

How do different operating systems and microarchitectures affect the end user experience with agentic AI?

We looked through 2.91M actual Claude tool use responses to find out.

By our data, it appears that Linux is typically faster than Windows by a factor of about 3x in execution of shell commands. (1/2)🧵

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@SemiAnalysisAug 10 at 12:06 PM

NPO presents an interim solution under the transition from pluggable to true CPO. NPO has certain benefits over CPO that bypass current production and reliability challenge of CPO, while maintaining most of the benefits CPO provide.

Pros:

🟠 Better serviceability (field replacable)

🟠 Lower blast radius (blast radius limited to the individual NPO module)

🟠 Easier assembly (Optical Engine are packaged separately from the Switch ASIC/XPU)

Let's look at how NPO differentiate from CPO architecturally. (1/3)🧵

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@SemiAnalysisAug 9 at 12:06 PM

THIS IS AN ENGAGEMENT BAIT & HOT TAKE 🚨Percy Jackson is a better movie than Odyssey in terms of storytelling. Odyssey is one of Christopher Nolan's worst films. The storytelling was so poor that they had to distract viewers by adding IMAX 70mm cameras.

Also FYI for those of y’all who did not have the luxury of watching in IMAX 70mm film, you are missing 40% of the movie.

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@SemiAnalysisAug 6 at 06:22 PM

Most of AMD’s top 10x AI engineers are in Shanghai 🔥 This includes AMD’s MoRI collective and UMBP KV-cache offloading and pooling team, its disaggregated-applications forward-deployed engineering team, and other AMD teams that understand how to approach inference engineering from first principles.

Many of the most important components of the ROCm software stack are built in mainland China.

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@SemiAnalysisAug 5 at 07:02 PM

The datacenter fight in the US has so far run through county boards and city councils. But that ended on July 14, when Gov Kathy Hochul signed Executive Order 62 and New York became the first state to implement a datacenter moratorium. (1/5)🧵

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@SemiAnalysisAug 4 at 08:26 PM

SemiAnalysis Datacenter team tracks all dc sites. Datacenter team started noticing new builds missing the gensets. Datacenter team checked the Industrials Model and now tracks 15GW+ of capacity with no gensets, no central UPS, or neither. (1/3)🧵

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@SemiAnalysisAug 4 at 11:56 AM

How often does Claude use tools?

We looked through 2.27M Claude responses we collected to find out.

The Opus models show a clear downward trend in tool calls from Opus 4.6 to Opus 4.8. However, Fable 5 stands out against that pattern, averaging 1.00 tool calls per response compared with 0.76 for Opus 4.8 and 0.79 for Opus 5. (1/2)🧵

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@SemiAnalysisAug 3 at 09:06 PM

We believe the MI455 is the first known chip to ship with active Local Silicon Interconnect (LSI) bridges, the chiplet-to-chiplet links inside a CoWoS-L package.

In CoWoS-L's short history, those bridges have always been passive: wiring and capacitors, nothing more. Active LSIs carry real circuitry. At ISSCC 2026, TSMC demoed active bridges with a low-power repeater that regenerates signals mid-channel.

Why it matters: once the bridge shares the signal-integrity burden, the PHYs on the top dies can shrink meaningfully at near-zero energy cost, reclaiming leading-edge silicon and shoreline for compute and memory.

The giveaway that this is a shipping product rather than a research vehicle: the interposer TSMC showed matches the MI455 exactly. Two base dies, twelve HBM4 stacks, two IO dies.

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@SemiAnalysisAug 1 at 12:06 PM

AMD MI355X vLLM HAS BEATEN B200 vLLM ON KIMI K2.5 (THE SAME MODEL ARCH AS XAI CURSOR COMPOSER 2.5)🚀🚨

This uses upstream AMD kernels from the @GPU_MODE community. We explain below 👇 1/6🧵

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@SemiAnalysisJul 31 at 12:06 PM

Indium Phosphide (InP) LASERs are suddenly catching everyone's interest since it suddenly became one of the more strategic components in computing. As optical connectivity moves ever closer to the package, every optical engine and laser source inevitably runs on InP LASERs. But supply isn't keeping up with demand, particularly for Continuous Wave (CW) Distributed Feedback (DFB) LASERs which enable near-package optical connectivity. (1/2)🧵

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@SemiAnalysisJul 30 at 08:06 AM

Ever wonder why PCB folks throw around "M8" or "M9" like a spec sheet magic word?

The "M" traces back to Panasonic's Megtron series — long the benchmark for low-loss, high-speed copper clad laminate (CCL).

Each generation from Megtron 4 to 8 progressively lowered the dissipation factor (Df), meaning less signal loss at high frequencies.

Because Megtron set the bar, it became industry shorthand for a performance tier rather than a Panasonic-exclusive part number. Say "M8 grade" today, and it simply means "meets Megtron 8 electrical specs" — whether it's made by Panasonic, EMC, or Doosan.

As AI servers demand ever-higher SerDes speeds, high-tier CCL has become the critical bottleneck material. That makes it one of the tightest, fastest-growing segments in the entire hardware supply chain.

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@SemiAnalysisJul 29 at 09:04 PM

GREAT WORK BY @GPU_MODE 🚨 FOR LAUNCHING THE $1.1mil AMD KERNEL HACKATHON.

The GPUMODE Readonflow Team’s kernels improved end-to-end MI355X performance by over 2x. We explain the optimizations below. 1/4🧵

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@SemiAnalysisJul 29 at 05:14 PM

The Wild Wild West Of LEGO Datacenters

Everyone Says They're Modular,

Do The Vendor Claims Hold Up?

Zuck's Tents, AWS's Houdini,

60GW+ Modular Capacity Tracked,

Full Vendor Landscape Mapping,

Vertiv's 2x Content Uplift Per MW

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@SemiAnalysisJul 27 at 04:04 PM

AMD's warrant deals with OpenAI and Meta usually get described as equity sweeteners. Run the math, and these look more like a rebate that matches the price of the compute itself, with up to a 105% discount for OpenAI. (1/3)🧵

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@SemiAnalysisJul 22 at 09:45 PM

Vera Rubin NVL72 vs GB200 NVL72? Inference TCO & Architecture Analysis:

Rubin LUT Based Tensor Core, Feynman,

Rack Scale, Perf Per MegaWatt, Perf Per Dollar,

Software Improvements, Public Rubin Software,

PyTorch, vLLM, OpenAI Triton

Read Now:

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@SemiAnalysisJul 21 at 02:52 PM

ALERT🚨🚨: META's CUSTOM AMD MI400-series chip will be half the size of a normal MI455X chip. It is "optimized" for recsys workloads and $/Memory Bandwidth. It will use ~144GB of HBM instead of 432GB. We break it down below👇️ 1/7🧵

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@SemiAnalysisJul 21 at 08:32 AM

Datacenters have always kept reciprocating engines on site as emergency standby, kicking in when the grid drops and running a handful of hours a year. That role is changing, as recips are increasingly being repurposed to prime power, energizing datacenters around the clock. We estimate that recip OEMs (e.g., Caterpillar, INNIO, Cummins) have been contracted to supply ~1 GW of BTM power this year, and 4+ GW in each of 2027 and 2028. Our SemiAnalysis Energy Model tracks these BTM contracts OEM-by-OEM, project-by-project. Yet, that is dwarfed by the opportunity to come. (1/3)🧵

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@SemiAnalysisJul 20 at 03:21 PM

Great work by the AMD @sgl_project team on enabling nightly disaggregated serving CI to improve code quality! It has already caught and prevented 2 massive bugs from reaching customers, as we explained before 👇️ 1/7🧵

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@SemiAnalysisJul 17 at 05:51 PM

Similar to the panic over DeepSeek R1, some uneducated people think Kimi K3’s use of linear attention (KDA) is bad for NVIDIA, HBM, DRAM, and networking because it has relatively lower KV-cache requirements. The opposite is true, and we explain why below. 👇️ 1/8🧵

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@SemiAnalysisJul 17 at 09:01 AM

BREAKING: Broadcom is diversifying away from long-time foundry partner TSMC. Lego will be the new manufacturing partner for Broadcom's flagship hyperscaler ASIC products in 2028. Broadcom President of Semiconductor Solutions, Charlie Kawwas, has already showed off package samples at RAISE Summit in Paris last week. With TSMC supply constrained, customers are alternative sources of chip supply from unexpected places. One of the major differentiators Lego brings is industry leading defect repair, "plug and play" chiplet interoperability, as well as built in self-alignment technology for 3D stacking. Mattel and Hasbro were also under consideration, but Lego's proven track record won out in the end. We have ordered multiple Millennium Falcon Sets set to our Portland teardown lab for competitive teardown analysis.

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