Sparse silicon could be the next 10x for AI compute, argues hardware veteran
blelbach · x · 2026-09-17
In a follow-up post, blelbach argues that today's AI hardware is essentially dense linear algebra machinery, with only some support for structured and block sparsity. Given sparsity's promise for AI workloads, radically different chips built around true sparsity may be the path to the next 10x in compute.
Together with his previous post, the thread's thesis: low-precision quantization gains are ending, and architectural innovation — especially sparse specialized compute — is the main way forward.
Related event: Veteran: CMOS Scaling Is Tapped Out, Sparsity Is AI's Next 10x(4 posts)→
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