4 ms·

You already needed a corporation just to create a regular, but state of the art general purpose processor. You're not going to do what Intel or Samsung does in

You already needed a corporation just to create a regular, but state of the art general purpose processor. You're not going to do what Intel or Samsung does in your garage. Sure, with something like RISC-V you can design a processor and implement it in an FPGA, but that's going to run a lot slower than a processor that is a full-custom design. There are some smallish competitors in the AI accelerator space (Groq and Graphcore come to mind) that are trying to innovate architecturally, but I suspect the door is closing for these companies for the reasons you suggest. The ones with some good ideas will likely be bought out by the likes of Google and Microsoft.

deleted 6y ago
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alecco 6y ago
There are big players capable of opening it up like Philips, Sony, IBM, Microsoft, and several more. Or even if, in a weird twist of fate, China embraces an open hardware alliance. But it's looking very, very bad as things are right now.
- UncleOxidant 6y ago
  China is already a big player in the RISC-V space and will likely dominate there. Ironically, this is at least partially due to the policies of the previous US Administration which is driving China to adopt the open RISC-V ISA so that they're not frozen out of US technology. But still, these are large players with a lot of money (gov funding in China's case). > There are big players capable of opening it up like Philips, Sony, IBM, Microsoft You forget Apple which with the M1 has proven that they can even outdo Intel. But again, Apple has a lot of $Billions to throw around. Microsoft seems to possibly also be making some processor moves, but we'll see how that works out (and again, $Billions to throw around)
  - alecco 6y ago
    Apple is definitevely part of the FAANG pseudo-oligopoly. And they are even less open than Google. They all buy up any competition who might disrupt the market. It's very sad. Even OpenAI turned out to be propietary and practically bought out by Microsoft. And that's mostly software.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

alecco 6y ago

There are big players capable of opening it up like Philips, Sony, IBM, Microsoft, and several more. Or even if, in a weird twist of fate, China embraces an open hardware alliance. But it's looking very, very bad as things are right now.

UncleOxidant 6y ago
China is already a big player in the RISC-V space and will likely dominate there. Ironically, this is at least partially due to the policies of the previous US Administration which is driving China to adopt the open RISC-V ISA so that they're not frozen out of US technology. But still, these are large players with a lot of money (gov funding in China's case). > There are big players capable of opening it up like Philips, Sony, IBM, Microsoft You forget Apple which with the M1 has proven that they can even outdo Intel. But again, Apple has a lot of $Billions to throw around. Microsoft seems to possibly also be making some processor moves, but we'll see how that works out (and again, $Billions to throw around)
- alecco 6y ago
  Apple is definitevely part of the FAANG pseudo-oligopoly. And they are even less open than Google. They all buy up any competition who might disrupt the market. It's very sad. Even OpenAI turned out to be propietary and practically bought out by Microsoft. And that's mostly software.