To achieve radical improvement over GPUs, you cannot build a derivative architecture — you must be fundamentally different, which is why Cerebras chose wafer-scale chips the size of a dinner plate.

Feldman explains that Cerebras's core architectural bet — wafer-scale chips — was necessary to achieve order-of-magnitude improvements over GPUs, and that critics called it impossible until they proved it worked in 2019. ✦ AI generated

Andrew Feldman · No Priors · 2026-05-21 · original ↗

I think to be radically better, right? You can't build something that is a similar architecture, right? You're not going to get 15 or 20 times better than the GPU with a minor modification to their architecture. And that's probably true across the board, that if you're going to aspire to a radical improvement, your design has to be different. And from the beginning, we chose wafer scale, which means we build a 46,000 square millimeter chip, a chip the size of a dinner plate, whereas everybody else is building chips the size of postage stamps. They told us we were out of our mind, it would never work. They listed reasons why it was impossible. But in 2019, we proved it was possible.

verbatim transcript · starts at 3:05