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Ask HN: Chip startups?
51–60 of 75 posts
Re: Ask HN: Chip startups?
#52Earlier quoted context omitted.
I mostly agree except that I'm not sure I'd say its very challenging technically. The logical design itself that I've seen is mostly extremely simple, just extensive. Verif is a bit fiddly but not really that hard, compared to e.g. writing a compiler or automating GUI testing. I don't know anything about physical design though; maybe that's really hard? I 100% agree with your other points though. It costs an absolute…
> Maybe it's different elsewhere but I was amazed how much convincing I had to do to get people to adopt practices that are just taken for granted in the software world, like auto-formatters. Tell me more about this place where people don't get hung up on how I indent my comments.
stop it you tease
Re: Ask HN: Chip startups?
#53> I think this falls in the 'sounds like a bad idea' bucket With enough funding, it's quite a good thing to work on. With Moore's law dead, the odds of success of weird chips got much better.
> With Moore's law dead Jim Keller: Moore’s Law is Not Dead: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oIG9ztQw2Gc
Cost of memory transistors has gone up on the last couple of nodes. NVIDIA has complained about it publicly.
Batteries are not on Moore's Law and more of our systems are battery powered so portable electronics is not on Moore's Law. Transistors are not cheaper if you can't turn them on.
Power goes as area squared and voltage squared. We can't turn voltage down any further and cheaper transistors mean area goes up. This means that most computation chips are fairly close to their thermal limits. Transistors are not cheaper if your cooling solution costs 10x more.
Re: Ask HN: Chip startups?
#54Earlier quoted context omitted.
> With Moore's law dead Jim Keller: Moore’s Law is Not Dead: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oIG9ztQw2Gc
I'm not watching a 1 hour video, sorry. I've jumped around it and didn't see any mention of cost/transistor going down. So I assume that isn't a respected engineer saying the opposite of what all the data clearly shows, and instead it's a hyped title to a talk about something slightly different.
This is one of the most respected engineers in the industry, he built chips for Intel, Amd64 and even Tesla chips. He talks about how there are lots of innovations at different places in cpu stack that keep giving performance gains. Even stuff like prediction of what future code will run, and run multiple copies in parrellel and only use the result of the computation that’s needed .
Re: Ask HN: Chip startups?
#55join a fab
Re: Ask HN: Chip startups?
#56Plug for my startup, Ephemeraltronics.
I'm designing an affordable electron microscope for high schools and small businesses. While that doesn't sound like a chip startup, the long term goal is to create multipurpose tools that enable semiconductor fabrication with electron beam milling and chemical vapor deposition.
Re: Ask HN: Chip startups?
#57Earlier quoted context omitted.
I mostly agree except that I'm not sure I'd say its very challenging technically. The logical design itself that I've seen is mostly extremely simple, just extensive. Verif is a bit fiddly but not really that hard, compared to e.g. writing a compiler or automating GUI testing. I don't know anything about physical design though; maybe that's really hard? I 100% agree with your other points though. It costs an absolute…
> There are a lot of luddites. In chip design, there are a lot of non-software people who have been burned by software people. Given the amounts of money flying around, there are always a lot of charlatans looking to take a chunk out of you. We used to do CI--a complete CI on our chip took 4 days . The library took 3 weeks to go through CI. Version control sucks unless your data is text--generally that's only your Ve…
> a complete CI on our chip took 4 days
So rather than just say "ok we won't do simulations of the full chip in CI; we'll just do module testbenches which are much quicker" you scrapped the whole thing?
> Version control sucks unless your data is text--generally that's only your Verilog.
So you don't use version control because it "only" works with the most important things in your repo?
> Tcl is a decent enough language
Sure, compared to Bash or BASIC or other ancient terrible languages. It's pretty terrible compared to any vaguely good language. Even PHP or 90s JavaScript are leagues better.
>the stuff you write is no more than a one off and the real product is your chip--so nobody is going to reward you for a "good" script in any language.
Yeah I've heard this from people at my company too. So do you really completely throw away your entire infrastructure and start from scratch for every chip? If not it's hardly a "one off". And yes, people are going to reward you - your future selves will say "thank god you didn't choose to use such a bug prone language that I spend all my time fixing basic type errors".
> I've seen more verification in hardware before shipping a product than I EVER have seen in any software role.
For obvious reasons. Chips are much simpler than software and therefore way easier to verify, and missed bugs are extraordinarily expensive. I bet FPGAs don't get as much verification.
Your post is exactly the sort of attitude I was talking about - thanks for the demonstration!
Re: Ask HN: Chip startups?
#58I work for one now, it's very challenging * very cash heavy(EDA tools, IP license, engineer wage, fab money,etc) * very challenging technically(balance of computation, power, size,etc) * lots of work needed on the software side(compiler,SDK,optimized libs,etc) It is in a totally different world comparing to MVP or the lean startup concept. Hardware(circuit board related) startup is already challenging(cash heavy, log…
I mostly agree except that I'm not sure I'd say its very challenging technically. The logical design itself that I've seen is mostly extremely simple, just extensive. Verif is a bit fiddly but not really that hard, compared to e.g. writing a compiler or automating GUI testing. I don't know anything about physical design though; maybe that's really hard? I 100% agree with your other points though. It costs an absolute…
I dont think I understand the point you are making?
I would not call an X64 cpu or M2 cores simple.
Re: Ask HN: Chip startups?
#59Earlier quoted context omitted.
I mostly agree except that I'm not sure I'd say its very challenging technically. The logical design itself that I've seen is mostly extremely simple, just extensive. Verif is a bit fiddly but not really that hard, compared to e.g. writing a compiler or automating GUI testing. I don't know anything about physical design though; maybe that's really hard? I 100% agree with your other points though. It costs an absolute…
> There are a lot of luddites. In chip design, there are a lot of non-software people who have been burned by software people. Given the amounts of money flying around, there are always a lot of charlatans looking to take a chunk out of you. We used to do CI--a complete CI on our chip took 4 days . The library took 3 weeks to go through CI. Version control sucks unless your data is text--generally that's only your Ve…
[deleted]
Re: Ask HN: Chip startups?
#60Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm not watching a 1 hour video, sorry. I've jumped around it and didn't see any mention of cost/transistor going down. So I assume that isn't a respected engineer saying the opposite of what all the data clearly shows, and instead it's a hyped title to a talk about something slightly different.
This is one of the most respected engineers in the industry, he built chips for Intel, Amd64 and even Tesla chips. He talks about how there are lots of innovations at different places in cpu stack that keep giving performance gains. Even stuff like prediction of what future code will run, and run multiple copies in parrellel and only use the result of the computation that’s needed .
Yep, that's what I got from jumping around the video, thanks for the confirmation.
None of that has any relation to Moore's law.