"It took me three months to design it, but it's nine months until I can actually start to use it."

Former Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger on the manufacturing bottleneck between designing hardware with AI and actually getting it built:

"Let's say we're off to do a great new chip together, the one that's gonna leap ahead because we have understanding of the AI workloads... And let's say we turn our AI tools loose. Within three months we have an awesome design."

"[But] we still have like a couple of really major bottlenecks today. One is we still have nine months of silicon processing time... So I can design the thing in three months, but I can't actually get it into real silicon at scale for nine months."

"We have to really see that bottleneck improve if we're gonna have this innovation."

"If it takes me a year and a half until I actually get scale and software on it, my understanding of the AI workloads is no longer applicable to the chip that I designed."

"All of those aspects somewhat obviate the fact that AI has made the design piece easy. All of those manufacturing scale issues to me become a huge bottleneck."

@PGelsinger @appenz @RaghuRaghuram

a16z's Christian Keil makes the case for why manufacturing, testing and iteration are the next frontier for AI in hardware: https://www.a16z.news/p/superhuman-hardware-design-is-the