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OpenAI unveils its first custom chip, built by Broadcom

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Re: OpenAI unveils its first custom chip, built by Broadcom

#241

Post by swiftcoder »

formerly_proven wrote: post #171
nonethewiser wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>If measuring from RTL-freeze to tapeout, this is a fairly typical (even somewhat unimpressive) timeline (accounting for some unexpected issues) for a large, complex 3nm chip. Even for a company’s first design?

This isn't Broadcom's first design.

Yeah, "first chip" here likely means they contracted Broadcom (or a firm with similar experience) to do all the heavy lifting. Building out your own in-house teams for this sort of thing is a decade-long project - just look how much inside Apple's early chips was licensed ARM / PowerVR cores

Re: OpenAI unveils its first custom chip, built by Broadcom

#242

Post by jacques_chester »

kccqzy wrote: post #236
nickpinkston wrote: post #86

This is very cool to see - seems like soooo much efficiency waiting to be unlocked at the chip level. What's everyone think of Taalas? They're actually burning the LLM model into the silicon, with some onboard memory for fine-tuning. They claim huge cost / latency wins. Super fast demo live at: https://chatjimmy.ai/ https://taalas.com/ https://www.reddit.com/r/singularity/comments/1r9frzk/taalas...

> seems like soooo much efficiency waiting to be unlocked at the chip level Well if you are exclusively using GPUs that are general purpose, of course you leave so much efficiency on the table. That’s why Google started making TPUs more than a decade ago. I remember that kerfuffle when Google fired Timnit Gebru when Gebru’s paper used GPUs to calculate the environment impact of LLMs while ignoring the efficiency of T…

That ... wasn't the kerfuffle

Re: OpenAI unveils its first custom chip, built by Broadcom

#243

Post by Computer0 »

cruffle_duffle wrote: post #208
londons_explore wrote: post #192

I wanna see an inference chip where the weights are part of the rom of the chip. There would be 1 multiplier per weight (and since they're constant, the whole thing turns into a bunch of simple adders), and the total pipelined system throughput would be one token per clock cycle. That means you can probably have millions of users simultaneously using a single bit of silicon, with perhaps 500 million tokens per second…

“ Wafer level faults probably won't matter though - neural nets are resistant to a few missing or wrong weights.” Brain science people “love” traumatic brain injury cases because it can help explore what happens when bits of the “brain wafer” get damaged. We’ve learned a lot from such things. I wonder if people are intentionally “destroying” parts of the model weights to learn more about what happens? Like could you…

Reminds me of Golden Gate Claude (https://www.anthropic.com/news/golden-gate-claude)

Re: OpenAI unveils its first custom chip, built by Broadcom

#244

Post by yuriyguts »

londons_explore wrote: post #192

I wanna see an inference chip where the weights are part of the rom of the chip. There would be 1 multiplier per weight (and since they're constant, the whole thing turns into a bunch of simple adders), and the total pipelined system throughput would be one token per clock cycle. That means you can probably have millions of users simultaneously using a single bit of silicon, with perhaps 500 million tokens per second…

I've also been thinking about this. Although the forward pass of a transformer model also involves some heavier operations like normalization, reciprocals, exponentiations or other non-linearities (GeLU, SiLU) which may (though typically don't) involve learned weights as operands.

Re: OpenAI unveils its first custom chip, built by Broadcom

#245

Post by jauntywundrkind »

Is there any actual content on what the chips are?

You can't purchase Microsoft or AWS chips, but both of them do pretty good write-ups on what they've done. https://blogs.microsoft.com/blog/2026/01/26/maia-200-the-ai-...

This seems utterly empty of actual substance.

Re: OpenAI unveils its first custom chip, built by Broadcom

#246

Post by aurareturn »

cptskippy wrote: post #239
aurareturn wrote: post #231

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Broadcom already has a ton of IP for AI SoCs. I'm guessing the hard parts of this inference chip was already designed by Broadcom and OpenAI simply told Broadcom what it wanted. It's likely very similar to Google's TPU. Early testing shows that the first-generation accelerator will deliver performance per watt substantially better than current state-of-the-art What is substantial here? Vera Rubin is shipping in volum…

Why do you assume Broadcom has a ton of IP for AI SoCs but hasn't done any of the other work around data center scale deployments?

They have. That's why OpenAI was able to get a working demo in 9 months. But going from a small scale system to a full fledged data center deployment is likely much harder.

I don't know how much of the things outside of the chip Broadcom has vs Google's proprietary tech that is not shared with Broadcom.

Nvidia's Vera Rubin has 6 unique chips working together in a single rack.[0]

[0]https://developer-blogs.nvidia.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/0...

Re: OpenAI unveils its first custom chip, built by Broadcom

#247

Post by [deleted] »

IshKebab wrote: post #117
Aurornis wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The hardware description languages (HDL) used in chip development are like programming languages. The existing models understand them and can do a lot with them. You don’t need to have separate, specialty models designed for this work to use LLMs in chip design workflows. Design verification also involves a lot of traditional programming which benefits from LLMs. So it’s not meaningless at all. You could download som…

> The existing models understand them and can do a lot with them. In my experience they are not especially good at SystemVerilog. There's a lot of knowledge about it that is locked behind paywalls and it's very niche. My guess is the "from scratch" here is quite the exaggeration. Otherwise why did they need Broadcom?

[deleted]

Re: OpenAI unveils its first custom chip, built by Broadcom

#248

Post by threecheese »

aurareturn wrote: post #246
cptskippy wrote: post #239

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why do you assume Broadcom has a ton of IP for AI SoCs but hasn't done any of the other work around data center scale deployments?

They have. That's why OpenAI was able to get a working demo in 9 months. But going from a small scale system to a full fledged data center deployment is likely much harder. I don't know how much of the things outside of the chip Broadcom has vs Google's proprietary tech that is not shared with Broadcom. Nvidia's Vera Rubin has 6 unique chips working together in a single rack.[0] [0] https://developer-blogs.nvidia.com…

I’m just happy to see diversity here; sometimes I feel like Nvidia is going to eat the world, with buying other fabs and branching out - or up, I guess - from chips and racks to models, frameworks, and end user stuff.

Re: OpenAI unveils its first custom chip, built by Broadcom

#249

Post by rebeccajae »

nickpinkston wrote: post #86

This is very cool to see - seems like soooo much efficiency waiting to be unlocked at the chip level. What's everyone think of Taalas? They're actually burning the LLM model into the silicon, with some onboard memory for fine-tuning. They claim huge cost / latency wins. Super fast demo live at: https://chatjimmy.ai/ https://taalas.com/ https://www.reddit.com/r/singularity/comments/1r9frzk/taalas...

It seems technically interesting, but they seem very sparse on details. I don't know if I like the idea of a single unchanging model forever on a chip. How much more expensive would the silicon be if they used rewritable ROM for the weights? Such an arrangement would permit fine-tunes of the model it was designed for, which might minimize concerns about the model becoming outdated.

Re: OpenAI unveils its first custom chip, built by Broadcom

#250

Post by MisterTea »

swiftcoder wrote: post #241
formerly_proven wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This isn't Broadcom's first design.

Yeah, "first chip" here likely means they contracted Broadcom (or a firm with similar experience) to do all the heavy lifting. Building out your own in-house teams for this sort of thing is a decade-long project - just look how much inside Apple's early chips was licensed ARM / PowerVR cores

Apple didn't have the talent in-house until they bought Intrincity who worked with Samsung on Apple's earlier Arm chips as well. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intrinsity
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