The Future of Frontier Model Architectures with Walter Goodwin, Fractile Founder and CEO

Fractile is betting inference economics hinge on memory bandwidth, not flops, to beat NVIDIA-style HBM chips on speed.

• Full-stack chip bet: Fractile, a 150-person startup founded in 2022, builds inference chips end-to-end — architecture, front-end design, physical design, packaging — unlike most AI ASIC players who outsource to houses like Broadcom (a $2T company).
• Memory bandwidth over SRAM: After two years on an SRAM-based design (like Groq/Cerebras), Fractile pivoted toward high-bandwidth DRAM access, targeting ~25x more bandwidth per chip than HBM-based GPUs to handle long-context agents.

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