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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

#331

Post by kQq9oHeAz6wLLS »

surajrmal wrote: post #307
zgao wrote: post #266

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The typical way a chip effort in a non-chip company works is that the "design" is the RTL (e.g. SystemVerilog that defines the behavior of the chip) and then this is handed off to a third-party "design house" (such as Broadcom) that turns that code into a real image of a chip, which is called a GDS (basically you can think of this as a very big layer by layer photoshop file) that can actually be sent to a fab. This i…

I wonder if broadcomm borrowed IP between the Google tpu and this design. How would you ever know it didn't happen?

More likely that the AI training set contained the IP of others, and we all know how that turns out.

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

#332

Post by rasz »

mschuster91 wrote: post #276
kccqzy wrote: post #230

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well Google has reduced reliance on Broadcom already. They found a new hardware partner, MediaTek, that’s probably much, much cheaper than Broadcom. https://finance.yahoo.com/sectors/technology/articles/broadc...

> Well Google has reduced reliance on Broadcom already. They found a new hardware partner, MediaTek Oh dear god. I'm actually feeling sorry for Google at that point. Good luck, you'll need it...

MediaTek was spun out of UMC. UMC was a powerhouse of ASIC design.

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

#333

Post by mdp2021 »

cmrdporcupine wrote: post #100
Catloafdev wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It'd be cool to see more of this type of thing, but I have to imagine the ability for it to be updated to a brand-new model as new models come out is limited. If that is the case, it's going to be an extremely hard sell.

I think the model they chose is out of date and hard to sell, but there are plenty of use cases where today's dumb small models are fine. A Qwen 3.5/3.6 or Gemma 3 model on silicon at those speeds would be genuinely world changing even if it's only 1-3B params. Such a model at those speeds will remain extremely useful even over a 5-6 year timespan, I think. If you consider the places you could deploy it -- with no ne…

> I think the model they chose is out of date and hard to sell

I understood it as a proof-of-concept, not a for-mass-production single blueprint - i.e.: "if you need your NN in a CIM form on ASIC, we can do it".

Their next proof-of-concept was said to be meant to be about size: "we showed you we can do it with 8b, now we are working to show you we can do 24b or 32b". Then, "and we plan to go bigger and faster".

> Our second model, still based on Taalas’ first-generation silicon platform (HC1), will be a mid-sized reasoning LLM. It is expected in our labs this spring and will be integrated into our inference service shortly thereafter. // Following this, a frontier LLM will be fabricated using our second-generation silicon platform (HC2). HC2 offers considerably higher density and even faster execution. Deployment is planned for winter (19 Feb 2006)

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

#334

Post by fc417fc802 »

dofm wrote: post #146
Aurornis wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 1) OpenAI genuinely have AI technologies that can improve chip design (bold, unlikely claim, needs evidence) Chip design languages (HDLs like Verilog or VHDL) are well understood by LLMs. They don’t need specialty tools to use GPT-5.5 or other LLMs with them. You could even try it yourself with open source chip design tooling if you wanted to see it.

Yes, obviously. But do we think LLMs without access to proprietary information do a better job with them than Broadcom's human experts or existing proprietary tools at this level of operations? It is still a bold claim and it still needs evidence. We would obviously get a bit more of the evidence if it were to be more useful for the upcoming IPO than this rather open-ended, reinterpretable phrasing.

> do a better job with them than Broadcom's human experts or existing proprietary tools

No, obviously. They'd be expected to do a substantially worse job and yet still drastically accelerate the design process.

LLMs make all sorts of dumb mistakes when writing c++ or python yet are nonetheless massively beneficial.

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

#335

Post by [deleted] »

SCUSKU wrote: post #235
sharkjacobs wrote: post #61

> Developed from design to production in nine months, accelerated by OpenAI’s models > the use of OpenAI models to accelerate parts of the design and optimization process. I wish there was more about this. As is I kind of have to assume that this is just meaningless marketing, like saying development was accelerated by Microsoft Office or their 5k LG Ultrafine 40-inch monitors. Like, if this was as big a deal as it k…

My girlfriend works at Broadcom doing chip design, and based on what she's told me they JUST got claude code like 3 weeks ago, so I really doubt this means anything beyond them vibe coding some scripts or something...

[deleted]

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

#336

Post by wmf »

bigyabai wrote: post #316
Schiendelman wrote: post #301

Earlier quoted context omitted.

With the M6 theoretically coming later this year, Apple seems to be realizing they need to catch up with more lanes of GPU.

Personally, I doubt it. Apple hamstrung themselves with unified SOC memory, there are cheap dGPUs that smoke the M5's prefill speeds and even have faster decode too. Apple is running up against the limitations of putting a mobile integrated chipset up against the desktop form factor. An SOC stops looking like a smart decision at that scale. The software side is still pretty sketchy, too. Apple's ecosystem is fracture…

I love those 128 GB dGPUs.

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

#337

Post by nullbio »

Big tech AI labs will develop LLM accelerators and hardware LLMs that increase frontier model output to tens of thousands-hundreds of thousands of TPS.

These chips will be used internally for their own business goals, giving them the capability to iterate at such an insane pace they will be able to clone every software product and software company on Earth. Meanwhile they'll trickle out 100-300 tps access to the rest of subscription users to drain them of their cash and keep the beast fed with fresh training data.

How can any individual company building a product, with access to 100-300 TPS behind-frontier security-gated, censored and capability gated models expect to compete with a company like Anthropic or OpenAI with frontier, unrestricted, unlocked models that can produce 100-1000x the output? 3-5 of their employees working to clone your 500 staff business will likely be easy pickings for them.

This should concern everyone.

The only reason they aren't 100% in on the strategy of replacing everyone is because they need us for training material and they needed the bootstrap. But the bootstrap problem is already gone, and they don't need to give us fair access to keep training data rolling.

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

#338

Post by dndmfnfn »

zgao wrote: post #125
sharkjacobs wrote: post #61

> Developed from design to production in nine months, accelerated by OpenAI’s models > the use of OpenAI models to accelerate parts of the design and optimization process. I wish there was more about this. As is I kind of have to assume that this is just meaningless marketing, like saying development was accelerated by Microsoft Office or their 5k LG Ultrafine 40-inch monitors. Like, if this was as big a deal as it k…

Chip CEO here. It really depends on what "design" or "production" means. Does "design" mean that the design was complete? Does "production" mean the beginning of production, i.e. tapeout? 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. If measuring from concept (no RTL at all, block diagram o…

[dead]

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

#339

Post by remexre »

holoduke wrote: post #279
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…

One day we can design our own pcb with chips, hardware and other io. Companies will accept these as files and you can collect your pcb the same day. I think in China they are doing this already

hasn't pcbway been doing this for years?

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

#340

Post by HDThoreaun »

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…

How would the pipelining work when the next token depends on the last token?
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