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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 bu

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
      Hardware design with synthesis is much easier than you think and costs a lot less.
    - vonmoltke 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. Maybe in SV. In Dallas, only top analog and digital designers are commanding that kind of salary. There's plenty of fab and board shop capacity there, too. Also, I don't see why you specifically need "somebody able to do hardware design in [the] AI space". Experienced digital and mixed-signal designers should be sufficient.
      - Eridrus 8y ago
        I think a lot of next generation chips are not just squeezing more compute into hardware, but examining whether we can change the nature of neural net compute ro better fit what we can do in hardware. That's Graphcore's pitch at least. And plenty of people are looking into whether you can do non-IEEE754 math in a way that works for compute, e.g. FP16, quantized arithmetic, etc. You probably don't need the entire team to be familiar with the math, but someone has to be. And as other comments have noted, Software is actually going to be a very big deal.
        deepnotderp 8y ago
        No one gets paid 250K because they know what fp16 minifloats are
        Eridrus 8y ago
        At some point it wasn't widely known that you could do NN training with fp16. Now it's common knowledge, but what is the next thing?
      - shard 8y ago
        Remember, the cost to the employer is roughly double the employee's salary, therefore the $250,000 per annum cost means the employee salary is $125,000 per annum. Not exactly top dollar.

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
    Hardware design with synthesis is much easier than you think and costs a lot less.
  - vonmoltke 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. Maybe in SV. In Dallas, only top analog and digital designers are commanding that kind of salary. There's plenty of fab and board shop capacity there, too. Also, I don't see why you specifically need "somebody able to do hardware design in [the] AI space". Experienced digital and mixed-signal designers should be sufficient.
    - Eridrus 8y ago
      I think a lot of next generation chips are not just squeezing more compute into hardware, but examining whether we can change the nature of neural net compute ro better fit what we can do in hardware. That's Graphcore's pitch at least. And plenty of people are looking into whether you can do non-IEEE754 math in a way that works for compute, e.g. FP16, quantized arithmetic, etc. You probably don't need the entire team to be familiar with the math, but someone has to be. And as other comments have noted, Software is actually going to be a very big deal.
      - deepnotderp 8y ago
        No one gets paid 250K because they know what fp16 minifloats are
        Eridrus 8y ago
        At some point it wasn't widely known that you could do NN training with fp16. Now it's common knowledge, but what is the next thing?
    - shard 8y ago
      Remember, the cost to the employer is roughly double the employee's salary, therefore the $250,000 per annum cost means the employee salary is $125,000 per annum. Not exactly top dollar.