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

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

#371

Post by tpxl » Wed, Jul 08, 2020, 12:49 PM UTC

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 closest of multiplayer games die the day they shut down the servers.

The longest lived games are the longest lived because they are open enough for the community to keep them alive.

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

#372

Post by ynfnehf » Wed, Jul 08, 2020, 12:55 PM UTC

0xcde4c3db wrote: post #316

patwillson22 wrote: post #280

My advice to anyone who's looking for a pathway into open source silicon is to look into E-Beam lithography. Effectively E-Beam lithography involves using a scanning electron microscope to expose a resist on silicon. This process is normally considered to slow for industrial production but it's simplicity and size make it ideal for prototyping and photo mask production. The simplistic explanation for why this works i…

> I should also mention that commercial E-beam machines are pretty expensive (something like 1-Mil) but that I dont think it would be that difficult to engineer one for a mere fraction of that price. I'm not sure where it was, but I remember a seeing a project where someone made a rudimentary homebrew electron microscope by chemically etching the tungsten filament from a light bulb (to get the tip sharp enough) and a…

That sounds like a pretty standard STM (scanning tunneling microscope). They had a couple of those at the university I went to. We had to cut the tips ourselves with pliers, which was a quite annoying process as you couldn't see if they were sharp enough by eye (the tips were supposed to be only a few atoms thick). They seemed pretty cheap to construct, but they are not the same thing as a scanning electron microscope.

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

#373

Post by cmrdporcupine » Wed, Jul 08, 2020, 1:15 PM UTC

perl4ever wrote: post #332

moftz wrote: post #281

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Coldfire is what they would have, and did, make. By dropping a few problematic instructions they were able to use a more RISC-like approach and produce a nicer core. Most code just needs a recompile, or you can trap the old instructions and work around them.

I have a "Firebee", an Atari ST-like machine built around a 264mhz coldfire, and it's quite nice.

My understanding is that Coldfire got used in a lot of networking hardware, due in part to its network order endianness, and partially because Freescale put network hardware support into some of the cores.

But there is no continuing demand for Coldfire, really, so it has stalled, NXP never continued on with it and is going the ARM route now, like everyone else.

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

#374

Post by cmrdporcupine » Wed, Jul 08, 2020, 1:20 PM UTC

herio wrote: post #97

pjc50 wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What happened to freescale/NXP "Coldfire"?

ColdFire is still around but is also not fully binary compatible with 68k. There have been attempts at making Amiga accelerator cards using Coldfires, but I don't think I've ever seen one that was fully finished.

It's not fully binary compatible but pretty damn close. People working on the Firebee were able to make it run pretty smooth, there's some things you can do to trap the old instructions and rewrite. It's never going to work for games and the like, but games and the like from that era have all sorts of other video hardware specific dependencies that are even more difficult to satisfy.

It really is "spiritually" a 68k series processor, just with some cleaning up. I like it.

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

#375

Post by kwccoin » Wed, Jul 08, 2020, 1:41 PM UTC

The difference is one is pure public good but hardware is not that pure. And hence you have other concerns and other means.

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

#376

Post by jeffbee » Wed, Jul 08, 2020, 2:19 PM UTC

shagie wrote: post #315

pjc50 wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Does Google have a silicon team?

It wouldn't surprise me. They've been designing custom hardware for some time. Look at the Pluto switch and the "can we make something even more high performance" or "we can make it simpler, cheaper, more specialized and save some watts" (which in turn saves on power for computing and power for cooling costs). At the scale that Google is at, it really wouldn't surprise me if they were working on their own silicon to…

Pluto is merchant silicon in a box, like all their other switches.

"""Regularly upgrading network fabrics with the latest generation of commodity switch silicon allows us to deliver exponential growth in bandwidth capacity in a cost-effective manner."""

https://conferences.sigcomm.org/sigcomm/2015/pdf/papers/p183...

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

#377

Post by sixothree » Wed, Jul 08, 2020, 2:45 PM UTC

ladyanita22 wrote: post #356

sixothree wrote: post #322

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google has never created a product that does not collect data in a unique manner apart from its other products.

They must be some kind of genius. I don't see how are they going to be able to extract personal information out of here.

They're not doing this out of the kindness of their heart. Just because we don't know the data being collected here (yet) does not invalidate my statement. Name a google product and you can easily identify the unique data being collected.

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

#378

Post by emiliobumachar » Wed, Jul 08, 2020, 2:47 PM UTC

ladyanita22 wrote: post #356

sixothree wrote: post #322

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google has never created a product that does not collect data in a unique manner apart from its other products.

They must be some kind of genius. I don't see how are they going to be able to extract personal information out of here.

Not necessarily personal. Maybe training a robot to design circuits?

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

#379

Post by agumonkey » Wed, Jul 08, 2020, 3:54 PM UTC

pradn wrote: post #242

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…

Classical economics thinks of people as "rational utility-maximizing actors", which doesn't approximate reality in quite a lot of ways. There's been a move toward more sophisticated models - like that people minimize regret more than they seek the optimal reward ("rational actors with regret minimization.") This switch to more complex underlying models is similar to computational models used in computer science. Algo…

> "rational actors with regret minimization."

I keep seeing something like this in workplaces people don't join forces they avoid friction. Until something (crisis) or someone (capable leader) flips the thing on its head.

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

#380

Post by shagie » Wed, Jul 08, 2020, 4:17 PM UTC

jeffbee wrote: post #376

shagie wrote: post #315

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It wouldn't surprise me. They've been designing custom hardware for some time. Look at the Pluto switch and the "can we make something even more high performance" or "we can make it simpler, cheaper, more specialized and save some watts" (which in turn saves on power for computing and power for cooling costs). At the scale that Google is at, it really wouldn't surprise me if they were working on their own silicon to…

Pluto is merchant silicon in a box, like all their other switches. """Regularly upgrading network fabrics with the latest generation of commodity switch silicon allows us to deliver exponential growth in bandwidth capacity in a cost-effective manner.""" https://conferences.sigcomm.org/sigcomm/2015/pdf/papers/p183...

I wasn't intending to claim that Pluto is custom silicon but rather that Pluto is an example of Google looking for simplicity, more (compute) power, and less (electrical) power.

The next step in that set of goals for their data center would be custom silicon where merchant silicon doesn't provide the right combination.