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

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

#231

Post by mercer » Tue, Jul 07, 2020, 4:31 PM UTC

ballenf wrote: post #218

mercer wrote: post #198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the principles underlying FOSS are found everywhere. It's just that the idea of 'markets' and 'transactions' being the ubiquitous thing has infected our thinking.

I think the truth is in the middle: there are many examples of secret processes throughout history and craftsmen jealously guarding processes except through apprenticeship programs where payment was years of cheap labor.

Oh yeah, it's not a binary thing. That said, in the case of craftsmen and their apprentices, I think the relationship was much less cold and transactional than, say, my startup friends who got a bunch of interns as cheap labor. At times perhaps, but not generally.

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

#232

Post by UncleOxidant » Tue, Jul 07, 2020, 4:38 PM UTC

Taek wrote: post #151

I've spent some time in the chip industry. It is awful, backwards, and super far behind. I didn't appreciate the full power of open source until I saw an industry that operates without it. Want a linter for your project? That's going to be $50k. Also, it's an absolutely terrible linter by software standards. In software, linters combine the best ideas from thousands of engineers across dozens of companies building on…

I've also worked on the hardware side a bit as well as in EDA (Electronic Design Automation)- the software used to design hardware. Since you already commented on the hardware side of things, I'll comment on the EDA side. The EDA industry is also very backwards and highly insular - it felt like an old boys club. When I worked in EDA in the late aughts we were still using a version of gcc from about 2000. They did not trust the C++ STL so they continued to use their own containers from the mid-90s - they did not want to use C++ templates at all so generic programming was out. While we did run Linux it was also a very ancient version of RedHat - about 4 years behind. The company was also extremely siloed - we could probably have reused a lot of code from other groups that were doing some similar things, but there was absolutely no communication between the groups let alone some kind of central code repo.

EDA is very essential for chip development at this point and it seems like an industry ripe for disruption. We're seeing some inroads by open source EDA software - simulators (Icarus, Verilator, GHDL), synthesis (yosys) and even open cores and SOC constructors like LiteX. In software land we've had open source compilers for over 30 years now (gcc for example), let's hope that some of these open source efforts make some serious inroads in EDA.

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

#233

Post by [deleted] » Tue, Jul 07, 2020, 4:38 PM UTC

m12k wrote: post #194

naringas wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

but let's not forget the non-material nature of software allows this, hardware will always be a physical (material) artifact. however the line does blur when talking about blueprints and designs. in any case, I think that free software movements are a sociological anomaly, I wonder if there is any academic research into this from an antropological or an historical economics viewpoint. also, it seems to me that in som…

I'm curious to hear what you mean when you say the entire market works in cooperation? I mean, strategic partnerships happen, and companies work as suppliers for other companies. But that's not the market - the market is where someone wanting to buy something goes and evaluates competing products and picks the one they want to buy. It's pretty comparable to natural selection, where the fittest animals survive and the…

[deleted]

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

#234

Post by jsnell » Tue, Jul 07, 2020, 4:43 PM UTC

kingosticks wrote: post #149

> All open source chip designs qualify, no further strings attached! Surely they have some threshold requirements that the thing actually works? How is this going to work? I mean, if there's no investment required from me, what's the incentive for me to verify my design properly? What's the point in them fabbing a load of fatally bugged open-source designs?

All open source designs qualify, doesn't mean they get selected :/ If you look at the slides, they say that each run will be 40 designs, and they'll do one run this year and multiple next. Criteria for how they'll choose if there are more than 40 applicants TBD.

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

#235

Post by madengr » Tue, Jul 07, 2020, 4:44 PM UTC

monocasa wrote: post #223

pjc50 wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem is that analogue IC design is a field that even digital IC design people regard as black magic. It's clearly possible for that to happen but the set of people who have the skills to do it is very narrow and most of them are probably prevented from doing it in their spare time by their employment agreements. I wonder how many "test chips" Google will let a non-expert team do to get it right? And whether th…

They're only allowing parts that stay within the bounds of the PDK (which only allows digital designs) for now.

How does the PDK limit it to digital? Unless they are limiting you logic cells and not allowing scaled transistors.

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

#236

Post by robomartin » Tue, Jul 07, 2020, 4:47 PM UTC

Taek wrote: post #151

I've spent some time in the chip industry. It is awful, backwards, and super far behind. I didn't appreciate the full power of open source until I saw an industry that operates without it. Want a linter for your project? That's going to be $50k. Also, it's an absolutely terrible linter by software standards. In software, linters combine the best ideas from thousands of engineers across dozens of companies building on…

This is a reality that exists in any limited market. Tools like nginx and mysql count their for-profit users in the in the millions. This means that there are tremendous opportunities for supporting development. By this I mean, companies and entities who use the FOSS products to support of their for-profit business in other domains, not directly profiting from the FOSS.

FOSS development isn't cost-less. And so the business equation is always present.

The degree to which purely academic support for open source can make progress is asymptotic. People need to eat, pay rent, have a life, which means someone has to pay for something. It might not be directly related to the FOSS tool, but people have to have income in order to contribute to these efforts.

It is easy to show that something like Linux is likely the most expensive piece of software ever developed. This isn't to say the effort was not worth it. It's just to point out it wasn't free, it has a finite cost that is likely massive.

An industry such as chip design is microscopic in size in terms of the number of seats of software used around the world. I don't have a number to offer, but I would not be surprised if the user based was ten million times smaller than, say, the mysql developer population (if not a hundred million).

This means that nobody is going to be able to develop free tools without either massive altruistic corporate backing for a set of massive, complex, multi-year projects. If a company like Apple decided to invest a billion dollars to develop FOSS chip design tools and give them away, sure, it could happen. otherwise, not likely.

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

#237

Post by yummypaint » Tue, Jul 07, 2020, 4:48 PM UTC

jagger27 wrote: post #229

Nokinside wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

These are not related at all. Only common element is making silicon. Apple spends $100+ millions to design high performance microarchitecture to high-end process for their own products. Google gives tiny amount of help to hobbyists so that they can make chips for legacy nodes. Nice thing to do, nothing to do with Apple SoC. --- Software people in HN constantly confuse two completely different things (1) Optimized hig…

> few generations old And by old, I mean /old/. 130 nm was used on the GameCube, PPC G5, and Pentium 4.

That's not terribly long ago, really. My understanding is that a sizeable chunk of performance gains since then have come from architectural improvements.

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

#238

Post by JakeCohen » Tue, Jul 07, 2020, 4:52 PM UTC

mercer wrote: post #198

chii wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Want a linter for your project? That's going to be $50k. the thing is that i think the open source software is a miracle that it even exists, and i don't find it strange that nowhere else has replicated the success. Because open source, at heart, is quite altruistic.

I think the principles underlying FOSS are found everywhere. It's just that the idea of 'markets' and 'transactions' being the ubiquitous thing has infected our thinking.

No. We have an inherent sense of fairness and at the scale the average person would not work for free. It’s the opposite, FOSS has infected our thinking, causing young people to work for free for idealistic reasons while corporations take their work and make billions. Linus Torvalds should be a billionaire right now, more than Bezos and Gates.

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

#239

Post by dimva » Tue, Jul 07, 2020, 4:55 PM UTC

m12k wrote: post #170

Taek wrote: post #151

I've spent some time in the chip industry. It is awful, backwards, and super far behind. I didn't appreciate the full power of open source until I saw an industry that operates without it. Want a linter for your project? That's going to be $50k. Also, it's an absolutely terrible linter by software standards. In software, linters combine the best ideas from thousands of engineers across dozens of companies building on…

I've been thinking about this a lot lately. In economics, the value of competition is well understood and widely lauded, but the power of cooperation seems to be valued much less - cooperation simply doesn't seem as fashionable. But the FOSS world gives me hope - it shows me a world where cooperation is encouraged, and works really, really well. Where the best available solution isn't just the one that was made by a…

FOSS is super competitive, too. Teams splinter off and fork projects, new projects start up that try to dethrone the industry leaders, people compete for status/usage, etc. The main difference is that the work product/process is public and so ideas spread much more rapidly.

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

#240

Post by phkahler » Tue, Jul 07, 2020, 4:55 PM UTC

BoysenberryPi wrote: post #208

ddevault wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Making money only writing open source is possible, but complicated and out of scope for this comment. But writing some open source - making your tools (compilers, linters, runtimes), libraries, frameworks, monitoring, sysops/sysadmin tooling, and so on open source is much more profitable, and that's a huge subdomain of open source out there right now.

This doesn't really answer my question though. Seems like the other comment to my question is spot on. If you divide all company actions into making money or saving money then open sourcing your toolset is more of a saving money thing as you can get people who aren't on your payroll to contribute to them. That's all well and good but not exactly what I think of when someone says "making money with open source."

That seems like an accounting mindset. Engineering is not a cost center (to be minimized) it's an investment in the future. This view offers a lot more flexibility and options - including cooperation. It also suggests that you may get back more than you put in. Invest wisely of course.