https://andrewphunter.com/tags/dataflow/ Recent content in Dataflow on Andrew Hunter — Systems Architect & Builder Hugo en-us Thu, 29 Oct 2026 00:00:00 +0000 https://andrewphunter.com/writing/what-makes-an-rdu-different-from-a-gpu/ Thu, 29 Oct 2026 00:00:00 +0000 https://andrewphunter.com/writing/what-makes-an-rdu-different-from-a-gpu/ <p>I was preparing for an interview when I started looking into SambaNova&rsquo;s SN40L. It is a Reconfigurable Dataflow Unit, or RDU, and I could follow the claims about inference performance before I could explain to myself what the machine was actually doing differently.</p> <p>The interview got rescheduled. The question stuck around.</p> <p>I&rsquo;ve been building inference engines and working on GPU kernels, so I had somewhere to start. But trying to understand the RDU as another kind of GPU kept getting in the way. I had to back up to field-programmable gate arrays, FPGAs, and work forward from there. The connection that finally helped was the idea of giving different parts of a computation their own places on the chip, with paths between them.</p> <p>Once I could picture that, the datacenter implications started to make sense too. To get there, we need to start with what the GPU is doing when a model gives us its next token.</p>