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It used to be the conventional wisdom that domain-specific ASICs were unlikely to take off because of the economics -- the cost of fab time for the small featur
by reidacdc 6y ago
It used to be the conventional wisdom that domain-specific ASICs were unlikely to take off because of the economics -- the cost of fab time for the small feature sizes (meaning an expensive fab) and small batch sizes mean that the unit cost would be astronomical, and you'd end up not beating the price/performance of general-purpose chips, which don't peform as well, but have unbeatable unit costs because, being general purpose, they are produced by the billions.
The exceptions were GPUs, where there is enough of a mass market, and maybe super-high-value-added niches, like aerospace, where high unit costs are not a deal-breaker.
The article seems to get there, in the TCO section, but it looks to me like maybe genomics is another niche, where there's enough demand to make the economics work.
I had some hope that maybe fab technology was saturating enough that fab access was getting cheaper, maybe driven by SoCs for phones and all those ARM devices and RPis and stuff, that a new era of awesome ASICs was at hand. This appears not to be the case.
- borramakot 6y agoDepending on your definition of cheap, fab access might be pretty cheap right now for old technology nodes, which have totally reasonable performance if you have an architectural advantage. This article suggests mask tapeout costs are under $1 million in older nodes, sometimes well under. If you have an architectural advantage in a problem domain with tens of millions or more in costs, a simple ASIC can be very worthwhile. That architectural advantage might be hard to find, especially when problem domains aren't fixed for long periods of time (e.g. how many ML accelerators only really work well for dense convolutions?), but I suspect too few companies are making custom chips, rather than too many. https://www.electronicdesign.com/technologies/embedded-revolution/article/21808278/the-economics-of-asics-at-what-point-does-a-custom-soc-become-viable https://www.electronicdesign.com/technologies/embedded-revol...
- jart 6y agoWhy pay for fab? Fabrice Bellard wrote a new kind of qemu last year that's tiny enough to boot operating systems in webbrowsers: https://bellard.org/tinyemu/ https://bellard.org/tinyemu/ Intel also taught us last year that 4kb of code is all it takes to decode every x86 isa (i.e. 1977-2020) https://github.com/jart/cosmopolitan/blob/d51409c/third_party/xed/x86ild.greg.c#L1223 https://github.com/jart/cosmopolitan/blob/d51409c/third_part... Thanks Mark Charney. https://github.com/intelxed/xed https://github.com/intelxed/xed
- detaro 6y agoWhat does that have to do with accelerators?