3 ms·

I dislike the framing of this period as "wars" but understand the colloquialism. We are entering another interesting period with people building RISCV processo

I dislike the framing of this period as "wars" but understand the colloquialism. We are entering another interesting period with people building RISCV processors and SoCs on budget FPGA hardware. The distance between a working FPGA design and a working bit of custom silicon is a lot shorter than the distance between a simulated design and silicon. What I find amusing however is that we don't have a big "killer app" like the PC was at the time. We have cutthroat cost reduced embedded designs which are unforgiving. Still, if you are someone who dreamed of designing your own bespoke processor architecture, now is a great time to be alive.

gumby 4y ago
> we don't have a big "killer app" like the PC I think we do, though at a layer down the stack: do more at the edge using less power in the process. Just as the CPU<->memory pipeline lead to all sorts of interesting on-chip development (huge multi level cache architectures) network bandwidth in portable devices will increasingly be a bottleneck (it takes power to run the radio, and more and more devices will be competing for that bandwidth).
- tyingq 4y ago
  Another thing that's different is the concentration of compute within a few big vendors like AWS, Azure, GCP. That makes it easier to introduce new server chips, as you don't have to convince as many different customers. And the big 3 can abstract away some of the work.
  - convolvatron 4y ago
    the real downside of this market dynamic is that if you can't get one of those players interested in your product - you don't have a business. and if one of those deep pocketed agents feels like replicating your work instead of buying it - not much you can do. overall I think this means a lot less interesting work lower down in the stack
    - gumby 4y ago
      FWIW the term for this is "monopsony" -- like a monopoly but on the buy side. Antitrust law focuses on this less.

gumby 4y ago

> we don't have a big "killer app" like the PC I think we do, though at a layer down the stack: do more at the edge using less power in the process. Just as the CPU<->memory pipeline lead to all sorts of interesting on-chip development (huge multi level cache architectures) network bandwidth in portable devices will increasingly be a bottleneck (it takes power to run the radio, and more and more devices will be competing for that bandwidth).

tyingq 4y ago
Another thing that's different is the concentration of compute within a few big vendors like AWS, Azure, GCP. That makes it easier to introduce new server chips, as you don't have to convince as many different customers. And the big 3 can abstract away some of the work.
- convolvatron 4y ago
  the real downside of this market dynamic is that if you can't get one of those players interested in your product - you don't have a business. and if one of those deep pocketed agents feels like replicating your work instead of buying it - not much you can do. overall I think this means a lot less interesting work lower down in the stack
  - gumby 4y ago
    FWIW the term for this is "monopsony" -- like a monopoly but on the buy side. Antitrust law focuses on this less.