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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

#291

Post by jfkebwjsbx »

gentleman11 wrote: post #278
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 am finding game development to be a tiny bit like this also: very little open source, lots of home-made clunky code, lots of NDAs and secrets. Generally, a much worse developer experience with worse tooling overall. To play devils advocate, it this makes game dev harder, which isn’t entirely bad because there is already a massive number of games being made that can’t sell, so it reduces competition a tiny bit. Also…

Commercial games benefit way less than other code from being open source, since they are very short-lived projects once released.

Further, games would be very easy to copy for users, to develop cheats for multiplayer, to duplicate by competitors, etc.

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

#292

Post by moonchild »

raverbashing wrote: post #183
timerol wrote: post #171

TFA doesn't really summarize what's available very well, so let me take a shot from a technical perspective: - 130 nm process built with Skywater foundry - Skywater Platform Development Kit (PDK) is currently digital-only - 40 projects will be selected for fabrication - 10 mm^2 area available per-project - Will use a standard harness with a RISC-V core and RAM - Each project will get back ~100 ICs - All projects must…

I'm thinking 10mm^2 so kinda 3.3mm x 3.3mm. In 130nm (Remember 130nm gave us the late models Pentium 3s, the second model P4s and some Athlons, though all of these had a bigger die size) I'm thinking you could have some low power or very specific ICs, where these would shine as opposed to a generic FPGA solution

> 10mm^2 so kinda 3.3mm x 3.3mm

3.16mm x 3.16mm?

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

#293

Post by gentleman11 »

jfkebwjsbx wrote: post #291
gentleman11 wrote: post #278

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am finding game development to be a tiny bit like this also: very little open source, lots of home-made clunky code, lots of NDAs and secrets. Generally, a much worse developer experience with worse tooling overall. To play devils advocate, it this makes game dev harder, which isn’t entirely bad because there is already a massive number of games being made that can’t sell, so it reduces competition a tiny bit. Also…

Commercial games benefit way less than other code from being open source, since they are very short-lived projects once released. Further, games would be very easy to copy for users, to develop cheats for multiplayer, to duplicate by competitors, etc.

The games, sure. But what about the tooling? Behaviour trees, fsm visualizers, debug tools, better linters, multiplayer frameworks, ecs implementations, or even just tech talks. Outside of game dev, there are so many tech talks all the time on every possible subject, sharing knowledge. In game dev, there is GDC and a few others, but it’s just far less common

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

#294

Post by phkahler »

Ericson2314 wrote: post #272
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.

"Miracle" as in tireless efforts of the GNU project decades ago, not random act of the cosmic rays, let's be clear.

It's far too easy for people new to this to overlook the importance of the Free Software Foundation.

The original RMS email announcing the project is a nice read. When placed in the context of his personal frustration with commercial software it can also be seen as a line in the sand.

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

#295

Post by StillBored »

Because apparently no one remembers the other "free" fab service.

https://www.themosisservice.com/university-support

Previously MOSIS would run select a few student/research designs to go along with the commercial MPW runs, frequently on pretty modern fabs. I'm not really sure how much they still run.

(oh here is the MOSIS/TSMC runs for this year https://www.mosis.com/db/pubf/fsched?ORG=TSMC)

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

#296

Post by yummypaint »

zrm wrote: post #267
yummypaint wrote: post #237

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Your suggestion was more what i was thinking, perhaps something more limited in scope than a general processor. An application that comes to mind is an intentionally simple and auditable device for e2e encryption.

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

#298

Post by josemanuel »

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…

The interesting thing with open source is that it devalues the contribution of the software engineer. Your effort and ideas are now worth 0. You either do that work for free, on your spare time, or are paid by some company to write software that is seen, by the company paying you, as a commodity. Open source is at the extreme end of neoliberalism. It is really a concept from the savage capitalist mentality of the MBA bots that run the corporate world. They certainly love open source.

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

#299

Post by _bxg1 »

Nokinside wrote: post #113
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…

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…

> Nice thing to do

I don't believe Google does anything because it's a "nice thing to do". There's some angle here. The angle could just be spurring general innovation in this area, which they'll benefit from indirectly down the line, but in one way or another this plays to their interests.

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

#300

Post by [deleted] »

nwallin wrote: post #268
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…

> 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 w…

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