2h ago

Reiner Pope builds a multiply-accumulate unit from logic gates and covers systolic arrays, FPGAs, ASICs, and brain architecture in a timestamped blackboard lecture

Dwarkesh Patel shared the lecture spanning 0:00:00 to 1:11:49.

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New blackboard lecture w @reinerpope How do chips actually work – starting with basic logic gates, and working up to why GPUs, TPUs, FPGAs, and the human brain each look the way they do. 0:00:00 – Building a multiply-accumulate from logic gates 0:16:20 – Muxes and the cost of data movement 0:25:59 – How systolic arrays work 0:39:00 – Clock cycles and pipeline registers 0:51:40 – FPGAs vs ASICs 1:03:14 – Cache vs scratchpad 1:07:16 – Why CPU cores are much bigger than GPU cores 1:11:49 – Brains vs chips 1:15:22 – A GPU is just a bunch of tiny TPUs Look up Dwarkesh Podcast on YouTube/Spotify/etc to watch. Enjoy!

9:12 AM · May 22, 2026 View on X

Reiner Pope is him

Dwarkesh PatelDwarkesh Patel@dwarkesh_sp

New blackboard lecture w @reinerpope How do chips actually work – starting with basic logic gates, and working up to why GPUs, TPUs, FPGAs, and the human brain each look the way they do. 0:00:00 – Building a multiply-accumulate from logic gates 0:16:20 – Muxes and the cost of data movement 0:25:59 – How systolic arrays work 0:39:00 – Clock cycles and pipeline registers 0:51:40 – FPGAs vs ASICs 1:03:14 – Cache vs scratchpad 1:07:16 – Why CPU cores are much bigger than GPU cores 1:11:49 – Brains vs chips 1:15:22 – A GPU is just a bunch of tiny TPUs Look up Dwarkesh Podcast on YouTube/Spotify/etc to watch. Enjoy!

4:12 PM · May 22, 2026 · 80.5K Views
5:39 PM · May 22, 2026 · 2.8K Views
Reiner Pope builds a multiply-accumulate unit from logic gates and covers systolic arrays, FPGAs, ASICs, and brain architecture in a timestamped blackboard lecture · Digg