Chapter 27: The Capability of the Reconstructed Futuristic GPU
Timothy stared at his reflection in the dark laptop screen, then at the clear vial on his desk.
He popped one, dry-swallowed, and braced a hand on the table as the familiar prickle spread across his scalp and down his spine. The fog lifted. Concepts that had felt slippery an hour ago now clicked into place—throughput vs. latency, memory coherence domains, NUMA topologies, quantization error bounds. Acronyms lined up in neat rows in his head like troops waiting for orders.
He exhaled, opened Zoom, and clicked the invite link.
The window bloomed to life. A face appeared: mid-50s, Korean-American, square glasses, careful eyes that didn’t waste motion. Bookshelves behind him, a whiteboard thick with graphs and block diagrams. "Dr. Ethan Kwan" in the lower left.
"Mr.... T.G.?" Ethan’s voice was even, skeptical but not unkind.
"Timothy," he said. "Guerrero."
"Timothy. I’m Ethan. I read your... submission." The faintest smile. "It’s been an interesting day."
"I imagine," Timothy said, keeping his own voice level.
Ethan glanced off-screen, then back. "I want to be transparent. Most cold submissions are noise. Yours is... not noise. It’s also not buildable with today’s supply chain. That’s the official position you already received. But I asked for this call because the architectural ideas are... unusually coherent."
Timothy nodded. "Understood."
"Before we talk theory," Ethan said, "do you, in fact, have any physical prototype? You’d be surprised how many people claim they do, and then show a plastic shroud with an LED strip."
Timothy picked up the card.
The camera auto-exposed against the matte, black body as he held it toward the lens. The shroud’s faint, vein-like tracery pulsed once, then settled. The heatsink fins, the unusual power distribution plane, the unfamiliar backplate geometry—all visible.
Ethan leaned closer to his camera. He wasn’t smiling anymore. He was studying. "That’s... not an off-the-shelf cooler. What am I looking at on the power side? I don’t see conventional 12VHPWR."
"Alternate bus," Timothy said carefully, angling the card. "The board steps from a 48V rail internally. The VRM array is distributed—sixteen phases per quadrant, phase-shifted, with interleaved inductors embedded in the plane. It reduces ripple at the die package boundary."
Ethan blinked once. "That’s a reasonable answer." He looked genuinely intrigued now. "Edge connectors?"
"Physically PCIe x16. Logically negotiates as Gen5, but the device multiplexes a secondary sideband for high-throughput DMA to the host over a proprietary link if the motherboard exposes a matching header. If not, it falls back to PCIe-only."
Ethan sat back a hair. "You’ve... thought through the deployment hurdle."
Timothy lowered the card. The pill kept his mind steady, quick, but he forced himself to speak slowly. "I also generated full schematics." He lifted a printed binder—his "sanitized" subset—and thumbed a few pages near the camera: macro floorplans, on-die HBM stack diagrams, thermal interfaces labeled "graphene lattice sheet," "phase-shift microchannel," "nano-fluidic reservoir."
Ethan’s eyes tracked every line. "Let me ask the blunt questions," he said. "Claimed performance?"
"Single-card exaflop-class throughput for AI-relevant math. In FP8 and lower formats it sustains into 10^18 ops/sec; in BF16 it degrades proportionally. Mixed-precision kernels can be fused on die—tensor units operate inside a quantum-assisted scheduler I labeled Q-Nexus Parallel Flow."
Ethan was quiet a beat longer than a beat. "So you’re claiming roughly one thousand times an H100 on comparable matrix ops."
"Yes."
He steepled his fingers. "And cooling?"
"Three-tier. A conventional vapor chamber at the base. Above that, a graphene lattice sheet spreads hotspots laterally into phase-shift microchannels. The channels cycle a nano-fluid that transitions between metastable states under load, dumping heat across a larger surface with minimal pumping overhead. There’s a passive capillary assist, so if the pump fails, it doesn’t cook itself."
"That language is... specific," Ethan said. He kept his face neutral but his eyes were alive. "And memory?"
"HBM is stacked on-die—no interposer. The stack is co-fabricated. Ultra-wide, low-swing links into the compute fabric minimize energy per bit. The memory controller can present as contiguous to software, but internally it’s four banks with a crossbar and predictive prefetch that cooperates with the scheduler."
"And the scheduler?" Ethan pressed. "Everyone overpromises on schedulers."
Timothy let the words come; the pill made the abstractions crisp. "The scheduler doesn’t just dispatch warps. It predicts dependency graphs across kernels, re-materializes subgraphs to minimize data movement, and assigns them to tensor tiles that are electrically near the relevant HBM banks. It treats the chip like a small city: keep work near its food."
That wrung a half-laugh out of Ethan, which he quickly suppressed. "You mentioned quantum-assisted?"
"Not qubits," Timothy said quickly. "Classical hardware augmented with quantum-inspired heuristics for optimization—think annealing-like behavior implemented in specialized units. They explore schedule permutations in parallel and collapse to low-cost solutions faster than a greedy approach."
Ethan nodded slowly, as if convincing himself he could keep listening without stopping the call. "Okay," he said softly. "If—if—this is real, one card like that could stand in for roughly a thousand H100s. Which means a single desktop could do the work of a datacenter aisle. Which means... we are in a new world."
Timothy didn’t smile. "That’s my read."
Ethan’s posture changed; he switched from skeptic to operator. "Why did you send it to us?"
Timothy weighed his answer. "Because you’re the only group on Earth with the full stack: software, compilers, libraries, customers, and—most importantly—distribution. I could email a paper to a lab, but they won’t ship anything for a decade. You ship."
"That’s... fair," Ethan said. "And your intent?"
Timothy met the camera. "To sell it. The prototype, and the full blueprint."
The words seemed to turn a key behind Ethan’s eyes. He didn’t hide it. "All right," he said, voice clipped. "Here’s what happens next. We do not evaluate something of this magnitude over Zoom from an unknown laptop in Manila. We need to see it in person, in a controlled environment. Chain of custody. Benchmarks we trust. NDA. Legal. The works."
"I expected that."
"I’m going to recommend we bring you here," Ethan said. "Santa Clara. We can book you as an external collaborator to expedite visas, fly you in business to keep the unit safe, and set you up in a secure lab. If the prototype runs our internal test suite and even 10% of your claims hold, we escalate to the CTO within the hour. If it hits 100%—" He stopped himself, breath hitching once. "—then this is the most important call I’ve had in twenty years."
Timothy’s pulse tapped at his throat. He kept his tone even. "Ground rules on my side. The prototype does not leave my possession without a signed NDA that explicitly covers reverse engineering. Any ephemeral imaging is done in my presence. No destructive analysis until after a term sheet. And the blueprints stay with me until we agree on valuation and conditions."
Ethan’s mouth twitched—not a smile, not a frown. "You’ve done your homework."
"I’ve been burned before," Timothy lied smoothly.
"Understood." Ethan glanced off-screen. "I’ll loop legal and a VP in Research Ops. We’ll send you a draft NDA in the next twenty-four hours—tight, fast, protective. Once signed, we schedule travel. I’ll be your point of contact, and I’ll personally staff the lab with two people I trust."
"Deal," Timothy said. "One more thing: the prototype uses a nonstandard 48V rail adapter. I’ll ship the harness spec with the NDA so your lab can prep a clean bench."
Ethan nodded. "We can source 48V easily. We’ll also prep instrumentation for power telemetry and thermal mapping. Do you have any constraints we should know about?"
"Don’t run synthetic power viruses; the thermal system will handle it, but it’s designed to operate under AI-like workloads—matrix multiplies, attention, convs—not FurMark-style nonsense. Also, we’ll need to build a slim compatibility layer so your test harnesses see the device as a CUDA target."
"Can you do that?"
Timothy lifted a thin sheaf of paper. "I already wrote stubs for the driver API, shimmed against your user-space calls. It’s enough to run matmul and GEMMs."
Ethan blinked again. "All right." He drew a slow breath, and when he spoke next, the scientist vanished and the executive peeked through. "If this bears out, Timothy, you realize what you’re holding, yes? One card could replace a thousand of ours. Training timelines collapse. Inference costs evaporate. Entire product lines become... legacy. This is not just a faster chip. It’s a strategic weapon."
"I’m aware," Timothy said.
"You chose well," Ethan said. "We know how to move fast when it matters."
They both fell quiet a moment, the soft hiss of Zoom’s audio filling the pause.
Ethan leaned forward. "If we—hypothetically—get through validation, we’ll talk structure: acquisition, licensing, joint venture. There are paths where you keep a royalty on every unit, or a lump-sum plus equity, or a skunkworks inside our org with you leading. We’ll keep options open until we have data."
"Fair," Timothy said.
"And Timothy," Ethan added, voice lower, more personal, "until we meet in person, do not show that card to anyone else. Not a friend. Not a journalist. Not a ’potential investor.’ You don’t want to trigger attention you cannot control."
"I won’t," Timothy said. "One last sanity check—your internal back-of-the-envelope. You said one card could replace a thousand H100s. You stand by that?"
Ethan looked straight into the camera. "If your stated exaflop range is real, yes. One NX-1 equals roughly a thousand H100s for the kinds of tensor ops that drive modern AI. That is... revolutionary. In compute, in economics, in geopolitics." He let the weight hang. "It’s the kind of thing countries fight over."
"I figured," Timothy said softly.
Ethan exhaled, decisive again. "Watch for an email from me and Legal within the day. Use a secure address. When we have signatures, we move. Fast."
The call ended a minute later with formal goodbyes, nothing flowery. The screen went black. The room seemed to exhale with it.
Timothy set the NX-1 down on the desk like a sleeping animal and pressed his palms flat to the wood until the pill-fueled buzz eased into a steady hum.
Santa Clara. NDAs. Lab benches. A thousand H100s in one hand.
"Shit this is really valuable."