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Google offers free fabbing for 130nm open-source chips

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

#261

Post by _zamorano_ »

naringas wrote: post #187
m12k wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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…

Well, I'm yet to see a free (as in beer) lawyer, helping people for free after his regular workday.

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

#262

Post by hinkley »

cromwellian wrote: post #13

This reminds me of how cubesats kind of got off the ground because some launch commpanies allowed extra spare capacity to be sold or donated to student projects.

I couldn't tell which was the cart and which the horse, but the SpaceX telecommunications satellite launch I saw had a rideshare arrangement going on. I suspect what happened is that someone only needed half a payload, and SpaceX filled the rest with their own stuff. But the PR person made it sound like the opposite was happening.

I'm not sure what happens when they reach full capacity on their sat network. Space for research projects, or launching surplus consumables?

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

#263

Post by ian-g »

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…

My last job was supporting some hardware companies' design VC. Absolutely insane.

I think it's also a cultural thing. Like you said, lots of your own special secret sauce, and so many issues trying to fix bugs that may have to do with that secret sauce.

Can't say I miss it at all really.

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

#264

Post by pflanze »

yummypaint wrote: post #237
jagger27 wrote: post #229

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

My understanding is that architectural improvements (i.e. new approaches to detect more parts in code that can be evaluated at the same time, and then do so) need more transistors, ergo a smaller process.

(Jim Keller explains in this interview how CPU designers are making use of the transistor budget: https://youtu.be/Nb2tebYAaOA)

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

#265

Post by canada_dry »

phendrenad2 wrote: post #259

This is cool! But I fear the workflow to get a chip out the door requires a lot of niche specialized knowledge. Making a logic design work on an FPGA is much easier, because the chip overhead (stuff like I/O pins) is all handled for you. If I had to design my own I/O pins at the silicon level, I wouldn't know where to start. And having access to open-source tools that give me the ABILITY to build a chip doesn't help…

> a logic design work on an FPGA is much easier

Whelp... definitely crossing fabbing off my list.

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

#266

Post by fgonzag »

_zamorano_ wrote: post #261
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…

Well, I'm yet to see a free (as in beer) lawyer, helping people for free after his regular workday.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pro_bono

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

#267

Post by zrm »

yummypaint wrote: post #237
jagger27 wrote: post #229

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Probably the fastest processor made on 130nm was the AMD Sledgehammer, which had a single core, less than half the performance per clock of modern x64 processors, and topped out at 2.4GHz compared to 4+GHz now, with a die size basically the same as an 8-core Ryzen. So Ryzen 7 on 7nm is at least 32 times faster and uses less power (65W vs. 89W).

You could probably close some of the single thread gap with architectural improvements, but your real problems are going to be power consumption and that you'd have to quadruple the die size if you wanted so much as a quad core.

The interesting uses might be to go the other way. Give yourself like a 10W power budget and make the fastest dual core you can within that envelope, and use it for things that don't need high performance, the sort of thing where you'd use a Raspberry Pi.

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

#268

Post by nwallin »

naringas wrote: post #187
m12k wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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…

> but let's not forget the non-material nature of software allows this, hardware will always be a physical (material) artifact.

Sort of?

I tried to get into FPGA programming a while ago, and it turns out the entire software stack to get from an idea in my brain to a blinking LED on a dev board is hot garbage. First of all, it's insanely expensive, and second of all, it really, really sucks. Like how is it (I forgot what year it was, but it was 2016-2018 timeframe) and you've tried to reinvent the IDE and failed?

I think projects like RISC-V and J Core are super cool, but I couldn't possibly even attempt to contribute to them based on how awful the process is.

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

#269

Post by Ericson2314 »

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…

The negligible unit economics of software mean that the successfulness of Free Software should be derivable from those old theories. The monopolistic and rent-seeking alternative that is the proprietary computer industry is also really far from some Ricardo utopia.

I don't mean to engage in some "no true capitalism" libertarian defense, but rather point out that a lot of fine (if simplistic) economic models/theory have been corrupted by various ideologies. A lot of radical-seeming stuff is not radical at all according to the math, just according to your rightist econ 101 teacher.

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

#270

Post by neltnerb »

rcxdude wrote: post #255
neltnerb wrote: post #250

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why is it so high if the fab is free? Intrinsic cost of development time and tooling?

Time especially (though costs are also high). Even with infinite budget you still have a cycle time of months between tape-out and silicon in hand.

Ah, you're talking about this as a current-day commercial project. Carry on :-)

I'm a professional PCB designer among other things. Most of what I have learned came from hard-won experience designing PCBs for projects done for myself and my own education even though a custom PCB was hardly cost effective in a commercial sense. They were just much cheaper since my time was free. They weren't useless projects in that what I made was not easy with off the shelf parts, but it would have been possible and there wasn't a timeline to pressure me yet.

But I would not be a professional PCB designer now if it had not been approachable to someone without a budget but with plenty of time and motivation. I've basically spent as much money learning how to make PCBs as other people spend on things like ski trips or going on vacations or other hobbies. A free fab and tools to create designs is a godsend when designing these things is something you want to do for interesting experiments and learning in an otherwise totally inaccessible field. Even if you think now one needs a masters or PhD to do this right, being able to fail cheaply is a pretty amazing learning tool...

That's what this announcement means to me -- free fab means I can finally learn how to do this and get good enough at it that when the time comes that this is a better solution than trying to combine off the shelf functionality I will be well positioned to take advantage of that change.

I am thrilled to release open source designs for cool chip functionality once I'm skilled enough to do it and the only way I'd get there is if the direct cost to me was nothing (even if it's slow).

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