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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

#341

Post by jiveturkey »

neltnerb wrote: post #270
rcxdude wrote: post #255

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 w…

> free fab means I can finally learn how to do this

hate to tell you this, but probably not. there are only 40 slots. those are going to quickly be eaten by people that already know how to do this.

the fab isn't the expensive part anyway. you can get a small run of ASICs done for a few single digit $thousand

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

#342

Post by shaklee3 »

denkmoon wrote: post #339
klyrs wrote: post #323

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Lots of people replace STL with a faster one. See EA

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

#343

Post by klyrs »

denkmoon wrote: post #339
klyrs wrote: post #323

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yes they're wonderful to have, don't get me wrong! They're general-purpose and robust! But they're also insufficient for a lot of needs. One thing that comes up for me a lot is a lack of static-allocated structures, and sometimes there are optimizations that can be made by sacrificing certain functionality.

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

#344

Post by whatshisface »

chii wrote: post #331
whatshisface wrote: post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It's not a free-rider problem if you were the one that released the open source infrastructure, or if you use it, need to change it, and send the patches back in. (That's why the GPL is a good license.)

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

#345

Post by neltnerb »

jiveturkey wrote: post #341
neltnerb wrote: post #270

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 w…

> free fab means I can finally learn how to do this hate to tell you this, but probably not. there are only 40 slots. those are going to quickly be eaten by people that already know how to do this. the fab isn't the expensive part anyway. you can get a small run of ASICs done for a few single digit $thousand

If the fab isn't that expensive, all the more reason to learn how to do it proficiently for free, no? Even if it doesn't get produced it seems like a good learning project.

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

#346

Post by snovv_crash »

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…

You wouldn't get access to ASIC fab just to make a CPU. Fill it with tensor cores, or fft cores, plus a big memory bus. Put custom image processing algorithms on it. Then it will be competitive with modern general silicon despite the node handicap.

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

#347

Post by kilburn »

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…

> 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.

I don't have the proper background to make a strong case about this, but I feel like middle ages guilds would be closer to the open-source model than to the current "trades secrets" one, wouldn't it?

Likewise, I don't see farmers of ye olde times keeping their crop-growing tricks to themselves as secrets and so on.

Furthermore, we've known about many indigenous cultures where "the tribe" is regarded as more important than the individual, meaning that sociologically they should be more aligned with the open-source model than the capitalistic one, shouldn't it?

Again, I'm not an expert in the area, but it seems to me that our current society is more "historically anomalous" at the commoner level than any more socially-conscious one would be (i.e.: common people has leaned to greed/individuality these days than almost always in the past).

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

#348

Post by JDEW »

dimva wrote: post #239
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…

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.

Yes but competing in a cooperation is different than cooperating in a competition.

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

#349

Post by brnt »

chubot wrote: post #324
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…

Yes 100%. Maybe software is really unique in this regard, and HN and such forums are a gift? Tangent: I've noticed this problem in dentistry and sleep apnea! The methods of knowledge transfer in the field seem to be incredibly inefficient? Or there are tons of dentists not learning new things? (I recall a few dentists on HN -- I would be interested in any comment either way on this.) The reason I say this is that man…

> mandibular advancement device

Those things are in the basic apnea treatment palet over here (Netherlands), actually more common than PAP machines. Why do you think they are alternative?

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

#350

Post by mercer »

shard wrote: post #302
mercer wrote: post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Whatever one might think of socialism, and I really don't mean to start a political discussion here, FOSS is an example for me that shows that at the very least we're not purely driven by competition.

Haven't thought very deeply about this, but FOSS doesn't seem like socialism, as the capital being competed for is user attention. FOSS projects without enough capital does not gain enough developers, and falls into disrepair and obscurity. Not sure what a socialist FOSS movement might look like, but maybe developers would be assigned to projects as opposed to them freely choosing the projects to work on?

> Haven't thought very deeply about this, but FOSS doesn't seem like socialism, as the capital being competed for is user attention.

I think that's stretching the definition of 'competition' a bit too much.

First off, many people work on FOSS just because they want to, or because they believe that it's a good thing. Not because they want 'user attention'. Furthermore, I'm pretty sure that even the people that are motivated by user attention don't see it as a competition.

> FOSS projects without enough capital does not gain enough developers, and falls into disrepair and obscurity.

There are plenty of FOSS projects that do fine with just a handful of developers, or even just a single one. with perhaps the occasional pull request from others.

> Not sure what a socialist FOSS movement might look like, but maybe developers would be assigned to projects as opposed to them freely choosing the projects to work on?

Maybe I misunderstand, but I get the impression that you're thinking of 'state' socialism. I wouldn't say being assigned stuff is a core aspect of socialism.

All that said, it's not so much that I think FOSS is like socialism, but rather that FOSS is a counter-example to a common argument I hear from especially the more hardcore 'everything should be market forces' capitalists, which is that we're primarily driven by competition.

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