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Hardware is hard. For Gorq to be successful - - The boards using their chips need to fit into commodity interfaces (PCIE? DIMM? ) in Open Compute hardware - S

Hardware is hard. For Gorq to be successful - - The boards using their chips need to fit into commodity interfaces (PCIE? DIMM? ) in Open Compute hardware - Someone needs to buy hundreds of thousands of these to even minutely impact their bottom line - Multiple such big volume wins need to consistently happen. - Their IP needs to actually be defensible. Otherwise, an Intel/Samsung whose manufacturing prowess & channel reach is multiple times that of Gorq will undercut the pricing with almost the same performance/watt. Oh, and they'll happily play nice with Open Compute, other standards bodies. - Most of all, their product needs to work as advertised, at scale, in a reliable fashion. This is easier said than done in semiconductors, especially for the kind of performance gains they're marketing. If they'd gotten here with ~$30M capital, and demonstrated traction in the marketplace, I'd give them a chance, but expecting Google's pay while working at an independent chip startup, with $0 in revenues portends financial doom. It's not the founder's fault though - hardware is capital intensive, not compatible with agile development & an MVP just won't cut it - it needs to be fully functional & reliable right out of the bat. I sincerely hope I'm wrong, as I'd like to see the silicon put back in silicon valley - having been in the semiconductor industry for 20 years, it just seems unlikely.

singularity2001 8y ago
- The boards using their chips need to fit into commodity interfaces USB? There are USB GPU boxes too.
- writepub 8y ago
  USB? USB 3.1 is 16X slower than PCIE and maybe 100X slower than DIMM. USB is not an OCP recommended peripherals interface, it's for consumer removable products. Then again, I'm not entirely sure about the requirement for a high speed interface in AI. I'm assuming a fast interface is needed as the amount of data ingested is typically large
  - akhilcacharya 8y ago
    People use DIMM as a general purpose interface?
    - ianhowson 8y ago
      No, but it can be done. I worked on an FPGA board interfacing through the DRAM interface once: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/4139277_Pilchard_-_A_Reconfigurable_Computing_Platform_with_Memory_Slot_Interface https://www.researchgate.net/publication/4139277_Pilchard_-_...
    - writepub 8y ago
      https://www.extremetech.com/computing/193983-sandisks-dimm-based-ssd-benchmarked-and-its-a-monster-in-some-tasks https://www.extremetech.com/computing/193983-sandisks-dimm-b...
    - cmrx64 8y ago
      http://www.ghielectronics.com/products/ucm http://www.ghielectronics.com/products/ucm
trhway 8y ago
they can be just acquired back to Google or by another player for about $10M/head.
- writepub 8y ago
  For what? Acquisition only makes sense if a market opportunity is so close that missing it will affect the bottom line. I believe companies can independently build their own TPUs at lesser than $60M within 2 years. And even then the volumes for these chips are ... ? Unless millions of units are being sold/month, it might just be cheaper to have some AI acceleration done in Intel's integrated CPU+FPGA offerings [1]. [1]: https://www.nextplatform.com/2018/05/24/a-peek-inside-that-intel-xeon-fpga-hybrid-chip/ https://www.nextplatform.com/2018/05/24/a-peek-inside-that-i...
  - trhway 8y ago
    >I believe companies can independently build their own TPUs at lesser than $60M within 2 years. I think we have very different work history wrt. the size/agility/cost of doing things/etc. of the companies that we've worked at :)
    - writepub 8y ago
      50 employees * $250,000/annum * 2 years = $25M. At 3 years, it's $37M. Realistically, for $35M you should have a working, reliable TPU if you're already a semi company, like Samsung
      - trhway 8y ago
        >$250,000/annum it is bare minimum that you'd have to pay to an engineer, and i'm still not sure that you can find somebody able to do hardware design in AI space on that kind of low money today. Also - the actual cost of an employee is significantly higher than what you pay to the employee. Plus everything else you need to run R&D company, especially if it involves hardware prototyping, etc. I mean i can believe that a hot startup where people would take equity and see good chances at good exit can probably reach some reasonable prototype (not actual product) stage on $60M. For any bigger established company - it would be several times more expensive with an order of magnitude higher chances to screw the project (due to incorrect product fit, internal politics, overall internal inefficiency, managers actually hiring a crowd of "AI hardware designers" at $250K :), etc.) Look at Cisco - the company does understand that they can't do anything new in house, so they regularly spin-off a $100M wad of cash (with usually the same 3 guys attached) and buy it back 1-2 years later for $700-800M. If Cisco attempted to invest those $800M into new tech development in-house the chances for a good outcome would be much lower.
deepnotderp 8y ago
> The boards using their chips need to fit into commodity interfaces (PCIE? DIMM? ) in Open Compute hardware I mean, it's not exactly like pcie interfaces are ultra hard, must be done in house, cutting edge technology anymore. And why the huge emphasis on OCP? Nothing there necessitates any kind of extreme innovation. > Their IP needs to actually be defensible. Otherwise, an Intel/Samsung whose manufacturing prowess & channel reach is multiple times that of Gorq will undercut the pricing with almost the same performance/watt. Oh, and they'll happily play nice with Open Compute, other standards bodies. This has been true historically, but TSMC currently can out manufacture both intel and Samsung wrt 7nm. In addition, the steamroller of Moore's law no longer really holds with dennard scaling dead and wire/MOL rc and variation soaking up performance gains. Btw, most of these criticisms could have been levied against nvidia way back when.
- writepub 8y ago
  Not a criticism, merely truths about the industry. Also, from Nvidia's founding to now, things have radically changed. It's depressing how winner-take-all semi has become. Nvidia could tape-out at $300k, today it's $2M. Number of semi players has reduced drastically even within the last 5 years
- pk3469 8y ago
  Nvidia didn't succeed because of their hardware manufacturing. They succeeded because they were dirty and ruthless on the market, and to this day will buy or sue the living fuck out of anything that could threaten their dominance.
foobiekr 8y ago
If you look at the spaces where ASICs are still successful, one thing that is clearly important that you don't mention is the software kit around the chip(s). Half the team (or more) will be software guys. It's not about fabbing (since these companies are fabless and typically TSMC), it's about software support.
- Eridrus 8y ago
  This is a great point; AMD has had chips for quite a while, but only just announced a TensorFlow release that can use them, and it's a binary release, rather than them successfully upstreaming their changes.
slewis 8y ago
I'd add one more: they need to be able to ship new product at the cadence of Nvidia, Intel et al. Showing wins in the lab is very different from getting that product to market before the next round of improvements from competitors overtakes you. And then you need to do it again.
- sitkack 8y ago
  I think this was more true back when Intel was in the thick of the slope of Moore’s law. If new accelerators slip into existing hardware and don’t increase the power budget, one could get millions of installs in old and existing hardware. If this is a beefy hot accelerator, that is a totally different story.
willart4food 8y ago
Maybe. I am not saying you're wrong, but we're dealing with orders of magnitude Innovation, and Clayton M. Christensen has shown us that when it comes to disruptive tech, the status-quo standard and incumbents are not the yardstick that they once were. The Future is not what it used to be. I stand by my "Maybe", 100% guaranteed.

singularity2001 8y ago

- The boards using their chips need to fit into commodity interfaces USB? There are USB GPU boxes too.

writepub 8y ago
USB? USB 3.1 is 16X slower than PCIE and maybe 100X slower than DIMM. USB is not an OCP recommended peripherals interface, it's for consumer removable products. Then again, I'm not entirely sure about the requirement for a high speed interface in AI. I'm assuming a fast interface is needed as the amount of data ingested is typically large
- akhilcacharya 8y ago
  People use DIMM as a general purpose interface?
  - ianhowson 8y ago
    No, but it can be done. I worked on an FPGA board interfacing through the DRAM interface once: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/4139277_Pilchard_-_A_Reconfigurable_Computing_Platform_with_Memory_Slot_Interface https://www.researchgate.net/publication/4139277_Pilchard_-_...
  - writepub 8y ago
    https://www.extremetech.com/computing/193983-sandisks-dimm-based-ssd-benchmarked-and-its-a-monster-in-some-tasks https://www.extremetech.com/computing/193983-sandisks-dimm-b...
  - cmrx64 8y ago
    http://www.ghielectronics.com/products/ucm http://www.ghielectronics.com/products/ucm

trhway 8y ago

they can be just acquired back to Google or by another player for about $10M/head.

writepub 8y ago
For what? Acquisition only makes sense if a market opportunity is so close that missing it will affect the bottom line. I believe companies can independently build their own TPUs at lesser than $60M within 2 years. And even then the volumes for these chips are ... ? Unless millions of units are being sold/month, it might just be cheaper to have some AI acceleration done in Intel's integrated CPU+FPGA offerings [1]. [1]: https://www.nextplatform.com/2018/05/24/a-peek-inside-that-intel-xeon-fpga-hybrid-chip/ https://www.nextplatform.com/2018/05/24/a-peek-inside-that-i...
- trhway 8y ago
  >I believe companies can independently build their own TPUs at lesser than $60M within 2 years. I think we have very different work history wrt. the size/agility/cost of doing things/etc. of the companies that we've worked at :)
  - writepub 8y ago
    50 employees * $250,000/annum * 2 years = $25M. At 3 years, it's $37M. Realistically, for $35M you should have a working, reliable TPU if you're already a semi company, like Samsung
    - trhway 8y ago
      >$250,000/annum it is bare minimum that you'd have to pay to an engineer, and i'm still not sure that you can find somebody able to do hardware design in AI space on that kind of low money today. Also - the actual cost of an employee is significantly higher than what you pay to the employee. Plus everything else you need to run R&D company, especially if it involves hardware prototyping, etc. I mean i can believe that a hot startup where people would take equity and see good chances at good exit can probably reach some reasonable prototype (not actual product) stage on $60M. For any bigger established company - it would be several times more expensive with an order of magnitude higher chances to screw the project (due to incorrect product fit, internal politics, overall internal inefficiency, managers actually hiring a crowd of "AI hardware designers" at $250K :), etc.) Look at Cisco - the company does understand that they can't do anything new in house, so they regularly spin-off a $100M wad of cash (with usually the same 3 guys attached) and buy it back 1-2 years later for $700-800M. If Cisco attempted to invest those $800M into new tech development in-house the chances for a good outcome would be much lower.

deepnotderp 8y ago

> The boards using their chips need to fit into commodity interfaces (PCIE? DIMM? ) in Open Compute hardware I mean, it's not exactly like pcie interfaces are ultra hard, must be done in house, cutting edge technology anymore. And why the huge emphasis on OCP? Nothing there necessitates any kind of extreme innovation. > Their IP needs to actually be defensible. Otherwise, an Intel/Samsung whose manufacturing prowess & channel reach is multiple times that of Gorq will undercut the pricing with almost the same performance/watt. Oh, and they'll happily play nice with Open Compute, other standards bodies. This has been true historically, but TSMC currently can out manufacture both intel and Samsung wrt 7nm. In addition, the steamroller of Moore's law no longer really holds with dennard scaling dead and wire/MOL rc and variation soaking up performance gains. Btw, most of these criticisms could have been levied against nvidia way back when.

writepub 8y ago
Not a criticism, merely truths about the industry. Also, from Nvidia's founding to now, things have radically changed. It's depressing how winner-take-all semi has become. Nvidia could tape-out at $300k, today it's $2M. Number of semi players has reduced drastically even within the last 5 years
pk3469 8y ago
Nvidia didn't succeed because of their hardware manufacturing. They succeeded because they were dirty and ruthless on the market, and to this day will buy or sue the living fuck out of anything that could threaten their dominance.

foobiekr 8y ago

If you look at the spaces where ASICs are still successful, one thing that is clearly important that you don't mention is the software kit around the chip(s). Half the team (or more) will be software guys. It's not about fabbing (since these companies are fabless and typically TSMC), it's about software support.

Eridrus 8y ago
This is a great point; AMD has had chips for quite a while, but only just announced a TensorFlow release that can use them, and it's a binary release, rather than them successfully upstreaming their changes.

slewis 8y ago

I'd add one more: they need to be able to ship new product at the cadence of Nvidia, Intel et al. Showing wins in the lab is very different from getting that product to market before the next round of improvements from competitors overtakes you. And then you need to do it again.

sitkack 8y ago
I think this was more true back when Intel was in the thick of the slope of Moore’s law. If new accelerators slip into existing hardware and don’t increase the power budget, one could get millions of installs in old and existing hardware. If this is a beefy hot accelerator, that is a totally different story.

willart4food 8y ago

Maybe. I am not saying you're wrong, but we're dealing with orders of magnitude Innovation, and Clayton M. Christensen has shown us that when it comes to disruptive tech, the status-quo standard and incumbents are not the yardstick that they once were. The Future is not what it used to be. I stand by my "Maybe", 100% guaranteed.