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pjc50 • yesterday at 11:31 AM • 4 replies • view on HN

Where are those numbers from? It's not immediately clear to me that you can distribute one model across chips with this design.

> Model is etched onto the silicon chip. So can’t change anything about the model after the chip has been designed and manufactured.

Subtle detail here: the fastest turnaround that one could reasonably expect on that process is about six months. This might eventually be useful, but at the moment it seems like the model churn is huge and people insist you use this week's model for best results.

Replies

aurareturn • yesterday at 11:37 AM

  > The first generation HC1 chip is implemented in the 6 nanometer N6 process from TSMC. Each HC1 chip has 53 billion transistors on the package, most of it very likely for ROM and SRAM memory. The HC1 card burns about 200 watts, says Bajic, and a two-socket X86 server with ten HC1 cards in it runs 2,500 watts.
https://www.nextplatform.com/2026/02/19/taalas-etches-ai-mod...
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mike_hearn • yesterday at 6:11 PM

Well they claim two month turnaround. Big If True. How does the six months break down in your estimation? Maybe they have found a way to reduce the turnaround time.

adityashankar • yesterday at 11:40 AM

This depends on how much better the models will get from now in, if Claude Opus 4.6 was transformed into one of these chips and ran at a hypothetical 17k tokens/second, I'm sure that would be astounding, this depends on how much better claude Opus 5 would be compared to the current generation

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empath75 • yesterday at 2:01 PM

100x of a less good model might be better than 1 of a better model for many many applications.

This isn't ready for phones yet, but think of something like phones where people buy new ones every 3 years and even having a mediocre on-device model at that speed would be incredible for something like siri.