2 ms·

> I think it's an example of a company suited for venture capital. I guess it makes sense from the investment angle. Ie. need to grow, and need to grow fast, t

> I think it's an example of a company suited for venture capital. I guess it makes sense from the investment angle. Ie. need to grow, and need to grow fast, therefore need for lots of cash, therefore need for risk takers. But at the same time not so much so for the angle of is growth realistically possible for this type of company? It took ARM over 30 years to organically grow with ups and downs to what it is today, in an age where the foundry landscape was much less complex wand wild chip design innovations were much more common. (We had SPARC, PowerPC, MIPS, PA-RISC, Alpha AXP, i960, 68k, Itanium, Transmeta in the nineties.) From what I read, SiFive had broad ambitions and wasn't very focused. Not sure if it is viable, but expecting it to turn $$$ into competitive chip designs in a couple of years was a bit of a stretch.

kragen 3y ago
68k is 70s sparc, mips, pa-risc, i960 are 80s arm is 80s too transmeta didn't ship shit until 02000 i'll give you alpha, powerpc, and itanic tho
- pipo234 3y ago
  You're absolutely right of course and I stand corrected. I was thinking of the cool, companies (Silicon Graphics, Apple, NeXT, BeOS) and high end stuff (SUN, Hewlett Packard, DEC), of the pre-WinTel era. When CPUs had one core, integrated memory and periphery controllers and even floating point co-processors weren't ubiquitous and "graphics cards" did not include a "GPU". Acorn worked with a single company (VLSI) to produce the first ARM chips. When ARM came of age, there wasn't a complex "foundry ecosystem" where dozens of companies specialize in different stages of what results in a SoC.
  - kragen 3y ago
    i feel like the complex foundry ecosystem makes wild stuff a lot more doable now from my perspective i see a lot of totally wild stuff, not all of it successful: yosys, esp32, fram, reram, optane, tensilica, cortex-m0 socs, padauk's fppas, gigadevice, apple's m1 and m2, graviton, tpus, ambiq's subthreshold utter insanity, stm32g, the unbelievable explosion of photovoltaic, wch's ch32v003, gallium nitride, mram, wlcsps, jlcpcb's smd assembly service, mass-market lidar chips with picosecond timing, chalcogenide pram, greenarrays, silicon carbide, modern silicon mosfets (not to mention igbts), led streetlights, petabit interconnects in data centers, nvme ssds, the zillion variations of risc-v, bitcoin mining asics, oled displays (though those aren't chips), gpgpu, submillimeter phased-array mass-market products like starlink, indium phosphide amplifiers in oscilloscopes, amorphous-silicon-on-glass products from sharp hitting the mass market (look, ma, no cog!), and skywater's open-source pdk and the associated shuttle program so i have a hard time agreeing that "wild chip design innovations were much more common" in the 01990s than now; from my perspective that could hardly be farther from the truth

kragen 3y ago

68k is 70s sparc, mips, pa-risc, i960 are 80s arm is 80s too transmeta didn't ship shit until 02000 i'll give you alpha, powerpc, and itanic tho

pipo234 3y ago
You're absolutely right of course and I stand corrected. I was thinking of the cool, companies (Silicon Graphics, Apple, NeXT, BeOS) and high end stuff (SUN, Hewlett Packard, DEC), of the pre-WinTel era. When CPUs had one core, integrated memory and periphery controllers and even floating point co-processors weren't ubiquitous and "graphics cards" did not include a "GPU". Acorn worked with a single company (VLSI) to produce the first ARM chips. When ARM came of age, there wasn't a complex "foundry ecosystem" where dozens of companies specialize in different stages of what results in a SoC.
- kragen 3y ago
  i feel like the complex foundry ecosystem makes wild stuff a lot more doable now from my perspective i see a lot of totally wild stuff, not all of it successful: yosys, esp32, fram, reram, optane, tensilica, cortex-m0 socs, padauk's fppas, gigadevice, apple's m1 and m2, graviton, tpus, ambiq's subthreshold utter insanity, stm32g, the unbelievable explosion of photovoltaic, wch's ch32v003, gallium nitride, mram, wlcsps, jlcpcb's smd assembly service, mass-market lidar chips with picosecond timing, chalcogenide pram, greenarrays, silicon carbide, modern silicon mosfets (not to mention igbts), led streetlights, petabit interconnects in data centers, nvme ssds, the zillion variations of risc-v, bitcoin mining asics, oled displays (though those aren't chips), gpgpu, submillimeter phased-array mass-market products like starlink, indium phosphide amplifiers in oscilloscopes, amorphous-silicon-on-glass products from sharp hitting the mass market (look, ma, no cog!), and skywater's open-source pdk and the associated shuttle program so i have a hard time agreeing that "wild chip design innovations were much more common" in the 01990s than now; from my perspective that could hardly be farther from the truth