Google offers free fabbing for 130nm open-source chips • Hacker News Board

Re: Google offers free fabbing for 130nm open-source chips

#51

Post by innocenat » Tue, Jul 07, 2020, 8:53 AM UTC

walrus01 wrote: post #38

DCKing wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

130nm was used to make the Athlon XP, Athlon 64, Pentium M, Pentium 4 and PowerPC G5 in the 2001-2003 timeframe [0]. So at the peak of 130nm's performance spectrum, it was able to produce stuff that can still run 2020 software quite okay. The Athlon 64 is probably the best 130nm silicon produced in its heyday and it's in the ballpark of a Raspberry Pi 4 (which has a 28nm SoC) in single core benchmarks. I don't think…

As I recall from that generation, also the first models of AMD opterons, commonly built into dual socket motherboards. For the time they were very speed competitive with the Intel option.

I think at that time, Opterons was THE server processor.

Re: Google offers free fabbing for 130nm open-source chips

#52

Post by innocenat » Tue, Jul 07, 2020, 8:55 AM UTC

why_only_15 wrote: post #9

lnsru wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don’t know, why do you refer 14 nm as common. It’s for the newest consumer toys. Regular electronics in your dish washer is made using 65, 90 or even 130 nm process.

Samsung galaxy A20, a ~$150 phone, uses the exynos 7884 which is fabbed on a 14nm process pricing: https://www.androidauthority.com/cheap-android-phones-269520... soc: https://www.samsung.com/semiconductor/minisite/exynos/produc...

That falls into "newest consumer toys". The bulk of the IC chip is no where near 14nm process.

Re: Google offers free fabbing for 130nm open-source chips

#53

Post by leojfc » Tue, Jul 07, 2020, 8:59 AM UTC

Strategically, could this be part of a response to Apple silicon?

Or put another way, Apple and Google are both responding to Intel/the market’s failure to innovate enough in idiosyncratic manner:

- Apple treats lower layers as core, and brings everything in-house;

- Google treats lower layers as a threat and tries to open-source and commodify them to undermine competitors.

I don’t mean this free fabbing can compete chip-for-chip with Apple silicon of course, just that this could be a building block in a strategy similar to Android vs iOS: create a broad ecosystem of good-enough, cheap, open-source alternatives to a high-value competitor, in order to ensure that competitor does not gain a stranglehold on something that matters to Google’s money-making products.

Re: Google offers free fabbing for 130nm open-source chips

#54

Post by DCKing » Tue, Jul 07, 2020, 9:00 AM UTC

herio wrote: post #49

DCKing wrote: post #31

From a hobbyist and preservation perspective, it would be cool if this could be used to produce some form of the Apollo 68080 core to revive the 68k architecture a little bit, and build out the Debian m68k port [0][1]. The last "big" 68k chips were produced in 1995 (that would be a 350nm process?) so this could be hugely improved on 130nm. The 68080 core is currently implemented in FPGAs only and is already the faste…

The Apollo core is not open source. There are some other pretty nice and featured 68k cores that are open source (TG68, WF68K30L etc.) but none that is really close to the features and performance of the Apollo 68080.

Ah that's a shame. I suppose this could be used to perform a revival of 68k without the Apollo core, but it's a shame that the engineering effort already there would not be available. Maybe this would be an incentive for them to open source it, but yeah.

Re: Google offers free fabbing for 130nm open-source chips

#55

Post by lowwave » Tue, Jul 07, 2020, 9:01 AM UTC

lowwave wrote: post #23

moring wrote: post #14

With the PDK being open, does anyone know if any kind of NDAs are still required to get a chip fabbed? While free-of-charge fabbing is quite nice, I think being NDA-free is even more important so all work including the tweaks necessary for fabbing can be published, e.g. on GitHub. BTW, it will be nice to try this together with the OpenROAD tools [1]. They have support for Google's PDK on their to-do list (planned for…

yup, NDAs destroys economic productivity.

From talking to VC. NDA are useless. It really comes down to whether you trust the people or not. It is like patent just a gesture. Everything is in the implementation.

Re: Google offers free fabbing for 130nm open-source chips

#56

Post by temptemptemp111 » Tue, Jul 07, 2020, 9:03 AM UTC

Let's build a Ryzen 9 inspired RISC-V with more care for latency please! :)

Re: Google offers free fabbing for 130nm open-source chips

#57

Post by novaRom » Tue, Jul 07, 2020, 9:09 AM UTC

Can someone please tell me how photo-masks are produced? I don't understand how can tiny features be printed at almost the same scale as a final structure? With a laser beam?

Say, as an input you have a layer description (schematics) - how can you transfer it to a tiny scale so precisely to produce a mask?

Re: Google offers free fabbing for 130nm open-source chips

#58

Post by janekm » Tue, Jul 07, 2020, 9:10 AM UTC

leojfc wrote: post #53

Strategically, could this be part of a response to Apple silicon? Or put another way, Apple and Google are both responding to Intel/the market’s failure to innovate enough in idiosyncratic manner: - Apple treats lower layers as core, and brings everything in-house; - Google treats lower layers as a threat and tries to open-source and commodify them to undermine competitors. I don’t mean this free fabbing can compete…

My first reaction was that it could be a recruitment drive of sorts to help build up their hardware team. Apple have been really smart in the last decade in buying up really good chip development teams and that is experience that is really hard to find.

Re: Google offers free fabbing for 130nm open-source chips

#59

Post by ArchD » Tue, Jul 07, 2020, 9:12 AM UTC

novaRom wrote: post #57

Can someone please tell me how photo-masks are produced? I don't understand how can tiny features be printed at almost the same scale as a final structure? With a laser beam? Say, as an input you have a layer description (schematics) - how can you transfer it to a tiny scale so precisely to produce a mask?

Lenses are used so the feature size on the mask is larger than the feature size on the wafer.

https://www.nikon.com/about/technology/product/semiconductor...

Re: Google offers free fabbing for 130nm open-source chips

#60

Post by walrus01 » Tue, Jul 07, 2020, 9:15 AM UTC

innocenat wrote: post #51

walrus01 wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As I recall from that generation, also the first models of AMD opterons, commonly built into dual socket motherboards. For the time they were very speed competitive with the Intel option.

I think at that time, Opterons was THE server processor.

I recall the dual socket (everything was single core at the time) Xeon being particularly unimpressive.

In fact it was somewhat of a step backwards from the better thermals/power efficiency of a dual socket, 1.13 to 1.4 GHz / 512KB cache Tualatin pentium 3.