I spent two days touring Intel’s most advanced fab and talking to its technical leadership to understand what the chips of the future will look like.A lot of what's coming next – gate-all-around transistors, backside power, CFET, hybrid bonding – is hard to follow without actually seeing it, so we made all the awesome animated explainers that I wish I had while I was prepping.I also asked Intel’s leadership how the semiconductor industry will cope with the enormous shock in demand from AI.AI compute has grown 3x a year for the last decade, but according to Intel's CTO, Intel could only double leading-edge wafer production with today’s global stock of chipmaking tools.What kinds of tricks can foundries pull to extend this crossover point where demand surges way ahead of supply?This was a totally new format for us - hope you enjoy!I also made flashcards for the concepts I had to learn to prep for this episode here.Watch on YouTube; read the transcript.SponsorsWorkOS helps you do business with enterprises. It gives you access to all the features most commonly required by enterprises: SSO, SCIM, RBAC, audit logs, and more. It’s easy to plug these features in — it only takes a few lines of code — and WorkOS is releasing new functionality all the time, including things like auth for agents. If you want to join the 3,000+ companies that rely on WorkOS, go to workos.comJane Street built a powerful tool called magic-trace to help analyze and debug their trading systems. It only exists because one engineer noticed a feature on Intel chips called Processor Trace and thought it’d be valuable to build on top of. Now, traders and developers across Jane Street use magic-trace every single day! If you want to be trusted to pursue the ideas you think matter most, Jane Street is hiring. Go to janestreet.com/dwarkeshAntithesis’ testing platform lets you perfectly reproduce every single bug you find. That’s because it runs on a fully deterministic computer, which strips out all the unpredictability that can make certain bugs flaky and hard to pin down. To build it, Antithesis found every source of non-determinism in Intel’s x86 architecture and either sealed it off or replaced it with a controlled simulation. Learn more at antithesis.com/dwarkeshTimestamps

– Intro

– How Intel brings up a new process node

– What Intel learned from 10nm

– From planar transistors to gate-all-around

– Why High-NA EUV pays off for Intel but not TSMC

– Could chips have evolved completely differently?

– Inside Intel’s “Hot Topics” meeting

– Replacing copper wires with ruthenium

– Why stacked transistors take a decade to ship

– Hybrid bonding and the chip-to-chip bottleneck

– There aren’t enough tools to 10x chip production

– Can Intel catch up to TSMC?