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I'm not a hardware design guy. I did work as a QA engineer at Transmeta, a 90s/00s CPU company for 2.5 years. My sense of things was the hardest part of deliv

I'm not a hardware design guy. I did work as a QA engineer at Transmeta, a 90s/00s CPU company for 2.5 years. My sense of things was the hardest part of delivering CPUs was the manufacturing, not the design. Building a chip took several weeks, debugging hardware was hard, and thr feedback loop was relatively long. The best designed chip could be damn slow if manufacturing was not optimal at every step. I'd guess there's not much risk in opening up the chip designs, and it might even make chip design cheaper, faster, and higher quality. Building a fab that can build chips sounds hard no matter what you do. Am I speculating in the right direction?

pkaye 8y ago
It all depends. If you are using existing IP, then the design part might be shorter. Conversely if you are using a proven process from a contact fab, you just need to follow their design rules and they will do all the manufacturing work for you. But companies like Intel, AMD, Nvidia push the boundaries of everything. They have separate teams working in parallel on different aspects (design, fab, etc) and generations of products.
wmf 8y ago
This thread isn't about CPUs, but... the hardest part of delivering CPUs was the manufacturing, not the design Now you basically have to outsource the manufacturing to TSMC and they are very good at what they do so in some sense that's not hard because you aren't doing it.