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Senior Intel CPU architects splinter to develop RISC-V processors
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- osnium123 2y agoIntel losing design talent to startups.
- silisili 2y agoIt'll be interesting to see how it plays out. If these succeed, it'll indicate constraint and be a testament to how bureaucratic and broken Intel really is inside.
- speed_spread 2y agoIntel can just buy back their startup in three years if it worked and they need it. Probably cheaper than trying to develop whatever in-house and with better chance of success.
- znpy 2y agoIf the startup is successful it won’t be cheap to buy
- 0cf8612b2e1e 2y agoUnless the company stumbles upon some revolutionary novel computation approach (eg 10x more efficient) it seems a long road for a chip designer to become a financial success. Even if it could buy a RISC chip today that was magically 20% better than Intel, who is going to buy it for serious commercial installations? It has taken years since Zen1 before AMD started to gain real presence in servers and laptops.
- sitkack 2y agoRISCV chips that are way slower than Intel that are already being used in serious (?) commercial installations [that was a lot of words].
- astrange 2y agoThe ISA doesn't matter that much for performance at the high end. The most important difference between ISAs is security. ARMv9 is the best here (several well designed security extensions) and x86 might be the worst (part because of variable length instructions and part because Intel can't ship SGX.) I don't know about RISCV in particular.
- shiroiushi 2y agoHow long did it take Apple to make their ARM-based CPUs that totally outperform Intel CPUs in laptops? This group could very well do the same. The main problem, of course, is x86 compatibility, since most laptop users run Windows and not Linux and Windows only works on x86. They might be targeting a different market where x86 compatibility isn't important but power efficiency (or maybe some other metric that x86 sucks at) is: non-Windows mobile devices of some kind, for instance. I do really wonder what their business strategy is here.
- jorvi 2y agoIt took Apple ten years. Apple A4 was released in 2010, M1 in 2020.
- unnah 2y agoApple bought P.A. Semi in 2008 and put them to work on ARM cores right away. On the other hand, there were noises about the A-series being faster than x86 already at the time of Apple A13 in 2019. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P.A._Semi https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P.A._Semi
- astrange 2y ago
- BeetleB 2y agoHardware companies grow exponentially slower than SW companies. Given Intel spent (wasted?) over $10B each on Altera and Mobileye, I'm sure they'll be able to afford whatever this will be valued at. Of course, the real question is whether it'll be Intel that buys them or one of Intel's competitors.
- surfingdino 2y agonVidia?
- Rinzler89 2y ago>Hardware companies grow exponentially slower than SW companies Meh. That's only because that market is irrational and many SW companies are massively overhyped and overvalued. You can't possibly tell me with a straight face that WhatsApp is worth the 19 billion Facebook spent on it especially given WhatsApp is not making any money.
- lotsofpulp 2y agoWhatsApp was a very smart buy for $19B considering its ubiquity around the world. There are countries where business basically does not happen unless you are using WhatsApp. Also, Meta surely gleans tons of data from WhatsApp that they can use to better sell advertisements, even on other Meta properties.
- Rinzler89 2y agoBut there are no ads in WhatsApp, how do they make money from those using it?
- lotsofpulp 2y agohttps://business.whatsapp.com/resources/resource-library/whatsapp-business-platform-resources/ultimate-guide-to-the-whatsapp-business-platform https://business.whatsapp.com/resources/resource-library/wha... https://scontent-iad3-1.xx.fbcdn.net/v/t39.8562-6/454446299_1500388867536945_5578819804663964843_n.pdf?_nc_cat=108&ccb=1-7&_nc_sid=e280be&_nc_ohc=amULx3AuFcUQ7kNvgECDcQf&_nc_ht=scontent-iad3-1.xx&oh=00_AYAL5yfxkU4VtVAFHR59MBZwAdH6jEc3WOmw7BUPIVfAsg&oe=66D21D7C https://scontent-iad3-1.xx.fbcdn.net/v/t39.8562-6/454446299_... Given Meta’s net income trajectory and the very, very widespread usage of WhatsApp, it should be safe to assume that WhatsApp is a valuable asset. If not explicitly making money, at the least it is not in a competitor’s hands, which itself is surely worth billions of dollars to Meta. https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/META/meta-platforms/net-income https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/META/meta-platform...
- gary_0 2y agoIn fact, Intel already tried and failed to buy SiFive for $2B. https://www.tomshardware.com/news/intel-failed-to-buy-sifive https://www.tomshardware.com/news/intel-failed-to-buy-sifive
- oldpersonintx 2y ago[dead]
- snvzz 2y agoThey'll be laughed out of the room. As happened when they tried this with SiFive.
- mgnn 2y agoIt's the cycle of life. Intel was founded by people leaving Fairchild, and that in turn was founded by the Traitorous Eight from Shockley. The ecosystem is healing.
- dyauspitr 2y agoMeh all that happened in an environment with a complete lack of competition. Now it just seems like East Asia will eat everyone’s lunch while the ecosystem is healing.
- akira2501 2y ago> Meh all that happened in an environment with a complete lack of competition. It was an insanely competitive environment. Shockley had the leg up due to being the literal inventor of the thing he was intending to manufacture and from getting an early investor to start his laboratory. > Now it just seems like East Asia will eat everyone’s lunch while the ecosystem is healing. They've got good labor prices but almost no legitimate IP.
- indulona 2y ago> They've got good labor prices but almost no legitimate IP. They don't care about your IP. If it can be manufactured and sold, they will do it. And that's how it should be.
- DaoVeles 2y agoThey are making up ground in terms of IP even if it is things like Loongsuns LAA64 which is basically just MIPS and RISC V slammed together. China is hungry and their goverment is throwing a lot of investment behind that hunger. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loongson https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loongson
- oldpersonintx 2y ago[dead]
- armaautomotive 2y agoI wonder which markets these risc-v processors will target. I have a 64 core Milk-V computer i'm testing compatibility with a Java application on. Looking forward to seeing where this goes.
- ramshanker 2y agoThe old saying....Some variation of.... If you fire your bottom 10%, your top 10% will also leave.
- skyyler 2y agoNo one told Jack Welch
- elzbardico 2y agoHe fired the one who told him that. It didn't matter, as long as the books looked great on the next quarter and the bonuses kept flowing, Mr Welch didn't give a fuck.
- DaoVeles 2y agoWelch was an addict (addicted to growth for himself) that made his problems everyone else's problems.
- bee_rider 2y agoDouble the savings! (This quarter).
- Rinzler89 2y agoThat so called "old saying" you mention makes no sense in the real world. From my experience top % engineers hate working with bottom % engineers since they massively drag things down for everyone, so firing the bottom % ones actually makes life better for the top % and convinces them to stay, and vice versa, keeping bottom % engineers around for long actually convinces top % engineers to leave since they want to work with equally competent people who can get shit done and not be around incompetent people who coast and watch the clock, or worse, drag everyone down.
- yvdriess 2y agoOver here in the real world of bottom 10% firing company cultures: those top engineers are leaving the company because they are tired of the culture of infighting and backstabbing, because setting up to others to fail and blaming them is just as effective as doing good work. Also, your super helpful generalist collaborator just got fired because everyone on your small team is highly performing and top down ruling was to fire 1/10 of each team. I cannot think of a successful tech company that is still applying the GE 10% management style. It has consistently been shown to fail.
- a_e_k 2y agoThe headline may be misleading. It initially read to me as though Intel is forming a new division to work on this. Instead, these folks are going to a new startup outside of Intel.
- cedws 2y agoMoonshot teams incubated inside of a huge, slow bureaucracy rarely work. Spinning it off as a startup of its own gives it the best shot.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- bee_rider 2y agoDid they change it later? Splinter does not seem likely to be interpreted as forming an internal group.
- bitcharmer 2y agoEnglish is my second language but I interpreted "splinter" as leaving the org entirely. Was the title changed some time ago or is my English that bad?
- Redoubts 2y agoSplinter definitely implies separating from the parent entirely. A “spinoff” would be a related corporate entity.
- inamberclad 2y agoDo these companies simply sell verilog source trees? Or do they deliver fully packaged wafers?
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- hedgehog 2y agoOften the product is "hard IP" which is a design which has been tuned and validated for a specific manufacturing process. A rough software analogy would be buying a license for a proprietary library that's been validated on a specific platforms. Labor and risk reduction.
- userbinator 2y agoI wonder if they have any non-competes that'll prevent them from going to develop x86 processors.
- mkl 2y agoIt's patent licenses that prevent more x86-64 compatible CPUs appearing. All the best recent stuff is controlled by Intel and AMD, who have cross-licensing agreements with each other. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_x86_manufacturers https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_x86_manufacturers, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X86 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X86
- yvdriess 2y agoEven without the patents, there is a lot in x86 and it would take an order of magnitude more engineers to make a compatible x86 CPU than a RISCV with standard extensions.
- treyd 2y agoThey don't need to. Recompilation techniques like Rosetta2 are well understood now and they can add extensions to RISC-V processors that aid in reimplementing x86 behavior on top of RISC-V.
- graton 2y agoAs a note, non-competes are for the most part illegal in California, from my understanding.
- Y-bar 2y agoThe linked company page says they are located in Hillsboro, Oregon[1]. Which is where Intel also has a campus[2]. My guess is that most people of this new company just moved across the street. How are non-competes in that state? 1. https://www.aheadcomputing.com/#comp-lzm51d9d https://www.aheadcomputing.com/#comp-lzm51d9d 2. https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/corporate-responsibility/intel-in-oregon.html https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/corporate-responsibi...
- ksec 2y agoWhat does it mean by Open Specification Core IP? There are plenty of RISC-V CPU IP out there. What sort of target market are they aiming at ?
- newswasboring 2y agoI guess they are claiming they can make it better. Which given the team is likely. Making a CPU, specially one which is validated on a process, is a hard problem. There is definitely room for improvement for RISC-V processors.
- DaoVeles 2y agoI do hope that moves like this accelerate RISC V development in a significant way. While there are a lot of RISC V cores in the wild, the top end of performance is not great. Way behind in terms of performance per watt. But the upwards trend is clear, all they need is a bit more gusto and it could be a matter of time until they are nipping at ARM/X86's heels.
- sugarkjube 2y ago> the top end of performance is not great I wonder how much is possible on that level. Not an expert myself, but I've read a critique on RISCV ISA by a ISA designer [1] which I think mentioned several design choices that may make it more difficult optimize for performance (e.g. longer pipelines, issues with branch prediction), an easy to understand issue is explained in the introduction of that critique. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24958423 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24958423
- brucehoult 2y ago> critique on RISCV ISA by a ISA designer You mean an ex-Arm engineer. Of which Arm has thousands. And not an ISA designer or (more relevantly) CPU designer, but as the post itself says a verification engineer. Actual top high performance CPU designers, such as Jim Keller, say that RISC-V is just fine.
- mrinfinitiesx 2y agoGood. Those high talent genius minds deserved better. They deserve all the support and love they can get on their new ventures.
- sylware 2y agoAnd some folks are still questioning why RISC-V ISA is much less toxic than any PI locked CPU ISA. I think RISC-V has also some GPU oriented instructions, hasn't it?
- crest 2y agoRISC-V is a mess of dozens of extensions vendors can decide to implement with the option of adding custom instruction as well. The application profiles are recommended sets of extensions to implement for certain use-cases e.g. microcontrollers without operating systems, embedded systems with full operating systems etc. The base ISA is very minimal resulting in long inefficient code sequences for common GPU tasks. It would be tempting to implement the vector extension and see how well it maps to GPU workloads, but afaik nobody has done this in earnest. The more traditional way would be to implement lots of small cores and extend them with packed SIMD (at least 4x Int32+FP32).
- sylware 2y agoI know a bit of AMD GPU machine code, and it seems based on what I heard that RISC-V has only support for 'GPU vector' instructions, not 'GPU scalar' instructions, namely no "hardware thread mask" definition. And I heard that RISC-V GPU ISA was already extended with raytracing hardware instructions. For sure, 3D pipeline programing will be specific to one implementation, but since vulkan/dx12, it would have to be hardware command ring buffers (like for AMD GPUs).
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- Kon-Peki 2y agoSo, this team wants to build a “RISC-V, but you have pay for a license” portfolio, and people are celebrating. I must be missing something.
- thunkshift1 2y agoYou want them to do it for free? Do you know how hard that is
- snvzz 2y agoIt means another participant in a free market. This is very welcome.