In the '90s, general-purpose chips wiped out the specialists. The original Thinking Machines, Cray Computer, and a wave of others shut down, and their best ideas got absorbed into other chips.

Zain Asgar of @gimletlabs argues the conditions that made generalists win have changed. Dennard scaling (shrinking transistors made chips faster at the same power) ended around 2005, transistor costs stopped falling around 2012, and memory bandwidth never kept up with compute.

Meanwhile, token demand is projected to grow 24x by 2030 while available power grows about 2x. When power is the bottleneck, performance per watt wins, and that's where specialized chips shine.

Full piece from Zain on why "the time of specialization is upon us": https://www.a16z.news/p/why-hardware-specialization-is-back