Dwarkesh Podcast

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Reiner Pope – Chip design from the bottom up

Explore episode May 22, 2026
Technology
Multiply-accumulate from first principles: AND gates and DADA multipliers

Reiner Pope – Chip design from the bottom up · May 22, 2026 Technology

The fundamental AI chip operation — multiply-accumulate — requires exactly p×q AND gates to generate partial products, then p×q full adders (3-to-2 compressors) to sum them in a DADA tree. Every atomic step in long multiplication maps directly to a physical logic gate. This is why area scales quadratically with bit width.

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