In the '90s, general-purpose chips wiped out the specialists. The original Thinking Machines, Cray Computer, and a wave of others shut down, and their best ideas got absorbed into other chips. Zain Asgar of @gimletlabs argues the conditions that made generalists win have changed. Dennard scaling (shrinking transistors made chips faster at the same power) ended around 2005, transistor costs stopped falling around 2012, and memory bandwidth never kept up with compute. Meanwhile, token demand is…