alt Hacker NewsHow Taalas “prints” LLM onto a chip?
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This would be a very interesting future. I can imagine Gemma 5 Mini running locally on hardware, or a hard-coded "AI core" like an ALU or media processor that supports particular encoding mechanisms like H.264, AV1, etc.
Other than the obvious costs (but Taalas seems to be bringing back the structured ASIC era so costs shouldn't be that low [1]), I'm curious why this isn't getting much attention from larger companies. Of course, this wouldn't be useful for training models but as the models further improve, I can totally see this inside fully local + ultrafast + ultra efficient processors.
> Kinda like a CD-ROM/Game cartridge, or a printed book, it only holds one model and cannot be rewritten.
Imagine a slot on your computer where you physically pop out and replace the chip with different models, sort of like a Nintendo DS.
If we can print ASIC at low cost, this will change how we work with models.
Models would be available as USB plug-in devices. A dense < 20B model may be the best assistant we need for personal use. It is like graphic cards again.
I hope lots of vendors will take note. Open weight models are abundant now. Even at a few thousand tokens/second, low buying cost and low operating cost, this is massive.
I wonder how well this works with MoE architectures?
For dense LLMs, like llama-3.1-8B, you profit a lot from having all the weights available close to the actual multiply-accumulate hardware.
With MoE, it is rather like a memory lookup. Instead of a 1:1 pairing of MACs to stored weights, you suddenly are forced to have a large memory block next to a small MAC block. And once this mismatch becomes large enough, there is a huge gain by using a highly optimized memory process for the memory instead of mask ROM.
At that point we are back to a chiplet approach...
So if we assume this is the future, the useful life of many semiconductors will fall substantially. What part of the semiconductor supply chain would have pricing power in a world of producing many more different designs?
Perhaps mask manufacturers?
Note that this doesn't answer the question in the title, it merely asks it.
Is Taalas' approach scalable to larger models?
Very nice read, thank you for sharing this so well written.
Edit: reading the below it looks like I'm quite wrong here but I've left the comment...
The single transistor multiply is intriguing.
Id assume they are layers of FMA operating in the log domain.
But everything tells me that would be too noisy and error prone to work.
On the other hand my mind is completely biased to the digital world.
If they stay in the log domain and use a resistor network for multiplication, and the transistor is just exponentiating for the addition that seems genuinely ingenious.
Mulling it over, actually the noise probably doesn't matter. It'll average to 0.
It's essentially compute and memory baked together.
I don't know much about the area of research so can't tell if it's innovative but it does seem compelling!
Could we all get bigger FPGAs and load the model onto it using the same technique?
ChatGPT Deep Research dug through Taalas' WIPO patent filings and public reporting to piece together a hypothesis. Next Platform notes at least 14 patents filed [1]. The two most relevant:
"Large Parameter Set Computation Accelerator Using Memory with Parameter Encoding" [2]
"Mask Programmable ROM Using Shared Connections" [3]
The "single transistor multiply" could be multiplication by routing, not arithmetic. Patent [2] describes an accelerator where, if weights are 4-bit (16 possible values), you pre-compute all 16 products (input x each possible value) with a shared multiplier bank, then use a hardwired mesh to route the correct result to each weight's location. The abstract says it directly: multiplier circuits produce a set of outputs, readable cells store addresses associated with parameter values, and a selection circuit picks the right output. The per-weight "readable cell" would then just be an access transistor that passes through the right pre-computed product. If that reading is correct, it's consistent with the CEO telling EE Times compute is "fully digital" [4], and explains why 4-bit matters so much: 16 multipliers to broadcast is tractable, 256 (8-bit) is not.
The same patent reportedly describes the connectivity mesh as configurable via top metal masks, referred to as "saving the model in the mask ROM of the system." If so, the base die is identical across models, with only top metal layers changing to encode weights-as-connectivity and dataflow schedule.
Patent [3] covers high-density multibit mask ROM using shared drain and gate connections with mask-programmable vias, possibly how they hit the density for 8B parameters on one 815mm2 die.
If roughly right, some testable predictions: performance very sensitive to quantization bitwidth; near-zero external memory bandwidth dependence; fine-tuning limited to what fits in the SRAM sidecar.
Caveat: the specific implementation details beyond the abstracts are based on Deep Research's analysis of the full patent texts, not my own reading, so could be off. But the abstracts and public descriptions line up well.
[1] https://www.nextplatform.com/2026/02/19/taalas-etches-ai-mod...
[2] https://patents.google.com/patent/WO2025147771A1/en
[3] https://patents.google.com/patent/WO2025217724A1/en
[4] https://www.eetimes.com/taalas-specializes-to-extremes-for-e...
So why only 30,000 tokens per second?
If the chip is designed as the article says, they should be able to do 1 token per clock cycle...
And whilst I'm sure the propagation time is long through all that logic, it should still be able to do tens of millions of tokens per second...
Who's going to pay for custom chips when they shit out new models every two weeks and their deluded CEOs keep promising AGI in two release cycles?
>HOW NVIDIA GPUs process stuff? (Inefficiency 101)
Wow. Massively ignorant take. A modern GPUs is an amazing feat of engineering, particularly about making computation more efficient (low power/high throughput).
Then proceeds to explain, wrongly, how inference is supposssedly implemented and draws conclusions from there ...
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This read itself is slop lol, literally dances around the term printing as if its some inkjet printer
Isn’t the highly connected nature of the model layers problematic to build into physical layer?
8B coefficients are packed into 53B transistors, 6.5 transistors per coefficient. Two-inputs NAND gate takes 4 transistors and register takes about the same. One coefficient gets processed (multiplied by and result added to a sum) with less than two two-inputs NAND gates.
I think they used block quantization: one can enumerate all possible blocks for all (sorted) permutations of coefficients and for each layer place only these blocks that are needed there. For 3-bit coefficients and block size of 4 coefficients only 330 different blocks are needed.
Matrices in the llama 3.1 are 4096x4096, 16M coefficients. They can be compressed into only 330 blocks, if we assume that all coefficients' permutations are there, and network of correct permutations of inputs and outputs.
Assuming that blocks are the most area consuming part, we have block's transistor budget of about 250 thousands of transistors, or 30 thousands of 2-inputs NAND gates per block.
250K transistors per block * 330 blocks / 16M transistors = about 5 transistors per coefficient.
Looks very, very doable.
It does look doable even for FP4 - these are 3-bit coefficients in disguise.