🚨 Chip design is one of the most closed industries on earth. Handful of giants hold the keys. A new subnet just put it on a public leaderboard. $TAO @ChipForge, SN108, from the @TatsuEcosystem team. It's formerly SN84 and now re-registered on mainnet. The first NPU challenge goes live today, Oct 6. Here is what they are doing: • Before: miners submitted Verilog for individual hardware blocks. ChipForge's own words: "good start, but limited scope" • They also ran RISC-V core design, checking performance, IPC, power and area • Now: miners design complete NPUs (neural processing units) and write the optimized kernels to run on them • Every design is tested on real ML models (MLPerf Tiny) and scored on speed, power and area • The hardware is open source. A good design doesn't die when the challenge ends Why I find this interesting: Bittensor works best when output can be scored objectively. A chip runs the model faster, cooler and smaller, or it doesn't. No opinions, just a number. The target is edge AI: phones, cameras, sensors and wearables. Tatsu's framing: everyone is fighting over datacenter GPUs, while the AI chips that ship in volume go into everyday devices. Benchmark score is not a taped-out chip. No silicon has been fabricated here, MLPerf Tiny models are small, scoring systems get gamed, and the account has 161 followers. This is early. Folks. Fair enough. But early is where a public leaderboard matters most. You can watch miners compete in the open. If those designs keep improving week over week, that's something the chip industry has never had: a public scoreboard. I'm watching the first challenge closely. Sources: ChipForge, Tatsu, chipforge.io, TatsuProject GitHub. $TAO / Not financial advice, always DYOR.