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

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

#331

Post by chii » Wed, Jul 08, 2020, 2:40 AM UTC

whatshisface wrote: post #182

BoysenberryPi wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you have data to back this up? Because all accounts I've heard say that it's incredibly difficult to make money in open source.

The easiest way to make money in open source is to be a company that makes money from a product that depends on, but isn't, the open source product. Then other businesses will improve your infrastructure for free and make you more money.

aka the free-rider problem.

That's why i don't think hardware opensource will work, but that this model "worked" in the software world is a miracle. By "worked", i mean that it exists.

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

#332

Post by perl4ever » Wed, Jul 08, 2020, 3:04 AM UTC

moftz wrote: post #281

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 PowerPC 7457 was built on a 130nm process, used in the AmigaOne XE as well as the Apple G4 machines. That's probably about as good as you will get for an community-led chip fabrication. You could probably get it up to over 1GHz if you made a 68k at this size. A modern FPGA is probably the better way to go for this kind of thing. I doubt this free fab includes things like die testing and packaging. That's an expen…

>You could probably get it up to over 1GHz if you made a 68k at this size

That would be a fun upgrade if I had an old 68k Mac in good condition. I've thought occasionally about what if Motorola had had the resources to continue developing 68k like x86.

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

#333

Post by techslave » Wed, Jul 08, 2020, 3:33 AM 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…

also have you seen what passes for software in the hardware world? i’m talking about EDA. i haven’t used cadence etc but altium is an trash fire and it’s $5k/seat. below that level the tools are even more atrocious. i’m mystified why someone doesn’t come in and disrupt that space.

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

#334

Post by HansHamster » Wed, Jul 08, 2020, 3:40 AM UTC

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…

Check out IceStorm (+Yosys, nextpnr...) for a pretty complete open source toolchain for ice40 FPGAs. It's really amazing to go from the infuriating to use vendor tools with all their quirks and bugs to a single 'make' that just generates the bitfile without using the broken IDE or complaining about licenses...

The FPGAs are also relatively inexpensive (The tools should also support the more powerful ECP5 FPGAs, but I haven't tried them yet.

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

#335

Post by xeeeeeeeeeeenu » Wed, Jul 08, 2020, 3:49 AM UTC

pjc50 wrote: post #77

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…

What happened to freescale/NXP "Coldfire"?

FireBee (http://firebee.org), which is a modern clone of Atari ST, uses it.

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

#336

Post by visarga » Wed, Jul 08, 2020, 4:23 AM 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…

'Survival of the fittest' when applied to groups implies cooperation as an essential skill between individuals. It's not all competition. The fittest group is not the one made of the most individually fit members, they also need to function well together.

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

#337

Post by ac29 » Wed, Jul 08, 2020, 4:26 AM UTC

manquer wrote: post #251

yjftsjthsd-h wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even if you could technically make it work, I'd be very nervous around the legalities of that. Or is the Wi-Fi spectrum so unregulated that you can run without any certification at all?

Certification has to do power of the signal and frequency. licensing is not required in some frequency bands like in 2.4 GHz used by WiFi.

WiFi equipment (and pretty much every other radio) requires certification in order to be sold in every country I am aware of. WiFI doesn't require a license to operate, but that doesn't mean you can just use any hardware you like (though I think there may be exceptions for hardware you build yourself, at least in the US).

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

#338

Post by [deleted] » Wed, Jul 08, 2020, 4:27 AM 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…

[deleted]

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

#339

Post by denkmoon » Wed, Jul 08, 2020, 4:30 AM UTC

klyrs wrote: post #323

UncleOxidant wrote: post #232

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

FWIW a lot of c++ developers see std:: and TODO as synonyms. OTOH, having used some of Xilinx's tool, I'd be terrified to read the internals.

> std:: and TODO as synonyms

What does this mean? I've only been in the C++ game for 6 years and for me if I can get something from std rather than rolling my own or pulling in another library, I'm cheering.

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

#340

Post by denkmoon » Wed, Jul 08, 2020, 4:35 AM 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.

Think of all the chips from then and before then that are becoming rare. The hobbyist and archivist community do their best with modern replacements, keeping legacy parts alive, and things like FPGAs, but to be able to fab modern drop in replacements for rare chips would be amazing.

Things don't have to be ultra modern to offer value.