14 ms·
Top researchers leave Intel to build startup with 'the biggest, baddest CPU'
- Ocha 1y agohttps://archive.ph/BSKSq https://archive.ph/BSKSq
- esafak 1y agoCan't they make a GPU instead? Please save us!
- AlotOfReading 1y agoA GPU is a very different beast that relies much more heavily on having a gigantic team of software developers supporting it. A CPU is (comparatively) straightforward. You fab and validate a world class design, make sure compiler support is good enough, upstream some drivers and kernel support, and make sure the standard documentation/debugging/optimization tools are all functional. This is incredibly difficult, but achievable because these are all standardized and well understood interface points. With GPUs you have all these challenges while also building a massively complicated set of custom compilers and interfaces on the software side, while at the same time trying to keep broken user software written against some other company's interface not only functional, but performant.
- esafak 1y agoIt's not the GPU I want per se but its ability to run ML tasks. If you can do that with your CPU fine!
- mort96 1y agoWell that's even more difficult because not only do you need drivers for the widespread graphics libraries Vulkan, OpenGL and Direct3D, but you also need to deal with the GPGPU mess. Most software won't ever support your compute-focused GPU because you won't support CUDA.
- AlotOfReading 1y agoEchoing the other comment, this isn't easier. I was on a team that did it. The ML team was overheard by media complaining that we were preventing them from achieving their goals because we had taken 2 years to build something that didn't beat the latest hardware from Nvidia, let alone keep pace with how fast their demands had grown.
- mdaniel 1y agoI don't need it to beat the latest from nvidia, just be affordable, available, and have user servicable ram slots so "48gb" isn't such an ooo-ahh amount of memory I couldn't find any buy it now links but 512gb sticks don't seem to be fantasies, either: https://news.samsung.com/global/samsung-develops-industrys-first-hkmg-based-ddr5-memory-ideal-for-bandwidth-intensive-advanced-computing-applications https://news.samsung.com/global/samsung-develops-industrys-f...
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- kvemkon 1y agoAnd now, 4 years later, I still can choose only among micron and hynix for consumer DDR5 DIMM. No samsung or nanya which I could order right now. While micron (crucial) 64GB DDR5 (SO-)DIMMs are available since few months.
- mdaniel 1y agoNow that I'm back at my computer, can search harder and it seems one can legitimately buy 256GB sticks at approximately USD$2000 a pop <https://www.ebay.com/itm/267177294719 https://www.ebay.com/itm/267177294719> or 128GB for $790 <https://www.ebay.com/itm/205354052535 https://www.ebay.com/itm/205354052535> Since it seems A100s top out at 80GB, and appear to start at $10,000 I'd say it's a steal Yes, I'm acutely aware that bandwidth matters, but my mental model is the rest of that sentence is "up to a point," since those "self hosted LLM" threads are filled to the brim with people measuring tokens-per-minute or even running inference on CPU I'm not hardware adjacent enough to try such a stunt, but there was also recently a submission of a BSD-3-Clause implementation of Google's TPU <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44111452 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44111452>
- Bolwin 1y agoI mean you most certainly can. Pretty much every ml library has cpu support
- esafak 1y agoNot theoretically, but practically, viably.
- Asraelite 1y ago> make sure compiler support is good enough Do compilers optimize for specific RISC-V CPUs, not just profiles/extensions? Same for drivers and kernel support. My understanding was that if it's RISC-V compliant, no extra work is needed for existing software to run on it.
- AlotOfReading 1y agoThe major compilers optimize for microarchitecture, yes. Here's the tablegen scheduling definition behind LLVM's -mtune=sifive-670 flag as an example: https://github.com/llvm/llvm-project/blob/main/llvm/lib/Target/RISCV/RISCVSchedSiFiveP600.td https://github.com/llvm/llvm-project/blob/main/llvm/lib/Targ... It's not that things won't run, but this is necessary for compilers to generate well optimized code.
- Arnavion 1y agoYou want to optimize for specific chips because different chips have different capabilities that are not captured by just what extensions they support. A simple example is that the CPU might support running two specific instructions better if they were adjacent than if they were separated by other instructions ( https://en.wikichip.org/wiki/macro-operation_fusion https://en.wikichip.org/wiki/macro-operation_fusion ). So the optimizer can try to put those instructions next to each other. LLVM has target features for this, like "lui-addi-fusion" for CPUs that will fuse a `lui; addi` sequence into a single immediate load. A more complex example is keeping track of the CPU's internal state. The optimizer models the state of the CPU's functional units (integer, address generation, etc) so that it has an idea of which units will be in use at what time. If the optimizer has to allocate multiple instructions that will use some combination of those units, it can try to lay them out in an order that will minimize stalling on busy units while leaving other units unused. That information also tells the optimizer about the latency of each instruction, so when it has a choice between multiple ways to compute the same operation it can choose the one that works better on this CPU. See also: https://myhsu.xyz/llvm-sched-model-1/ https://myhsu.xyz/llvm-sched-model-1/ https://myhsu.xyz/llvm-sched-model-1.5/ https://myhsu.xyz/llvm-sched-model-1.5/ If you don't do this your code will still run on your CPU. It just won't necessarily be as optimal as it could be.
- speedgoose 1y agoI hope to see dedicated GPU coprocessors disappear sooner rather than later, just like arithmetic coprocessors did.
- wtallis 1y agoArithmetic co-processors didn't disappear so much as they moved onto the main CPU die. There were performance advantages to having the FPU on the CPU, and there were no longer significant cost advantages to having the FPU be separate and optional. For GPUs today and in the foreseeable future, there are still good reasons for them to remain discrete, in some market segments. Low-power laptops have already moved entirely to integrated GPUs, and entry-level gaming laptops are moving in that direction. Desktops have widely varying GPU needs ranging from the minimal iGPUs that all desktop CPUs now already have, up to GPUs that dwarf the CPU in die and package size and power budget. Servers have needs ranging from one to several GPUs per CPU. There's no one right answer for how much GPU to integrate with the CPU.
- otabdeveloper4 1y agoBy "GPU" they probably mean "matrix multiplication coprocessor for AI tasks", not actually a graphics processor.
- wtallis 1y agoThat doesn't really change anything. The use cases for a GPU in any given market segment don't change depending on whether you call it a GPU. And for low-power consumer devices like laptops, "matrix multiplication coprocessor for AI tasks" is at least as likely to mean NPU as GPU, and NPUs are always integrated rather than discrete.
- touisteur 1y agoWondering how you'd classify Gaudi, tenstorrent-stuff, groq, or lightmatter's photonic thing. Calling something a GPU tends to make people ask for (good, performant) support for opengl, Vulkan, direct3d... which seem like a huge waste of effort if you want to be an "AI-coprocessor".
- jmclnx 1y ago>AheadComputing is betting on an open architecture called RISC-V I wish them success, plus I hope they do not do what Intel did with its add-ons. Hoping for an open system (which I think RISC-V is) and nothing even close to Intel ME or AMT. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_Management_Engine https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_Management_Engine https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_Active_Management_Technology https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_Active_Management_Techno...
- constantcrying 1y ago>Hoping for an open system (which I think RISC-V is) and nothing even close to Intel ME or AMT. The architecture is independent of additional silicon with separate functions. The "only" thing which makes RISC-V open are that the specifications are freely available and freely usable. Intel ME is, by design, separate from the actual CPU. Whether the CPU uses x86 or RISC-V is essentially irrelevant.
- ahartmetz 1y agoI don't know, RISC-V doesn't seem to be very disruptive at this point? And what's the deal with specialized chips that the article mentions? Today, the "biggest, baddest" CPUs - or at least CPU cores - are the general-purpose (PC and, somehow, Apple mobile / tablet) ones. The opposite of specialized. Are they going to make one with 16384 cores for AI / graphics or are they going to make one with 8 / 16 / 32 cores that can each execute like 20 instructions per cycle?
- jasoneckert 1y agoMost of the work that goes into chip design isn't related to the ISA per se. So, it's entirely plausible that some talented chip engineers could design something that implements RISC-V in a way that is quite powerful, much like how Apple did with ARM. The biggest roadblock would be lack of support on the software side.
- ahartmetz 1y agoYeah sure, but the question remains if it's going to be a huge amount of small cores or a moderate amount of huge cores. What it can't be is something like the Mill if they implement the RISC-V ISA.
- mixmastamyk 1y agoArticle implies a CPU focus at first, though is a bit vague. Title is clear however.
- leetrout 1y agoFor those that don't know about the Mill see https://millcomputing.com/ https://millcomputing.com/ I came to this thread looking for a comment about this. I've been patiently following along for over a decade now and I'm not optimistic anything will come from the project :(
- ahartmetz 1y agoYeah, I guess not at this point, but the presentations were very interesting to watch. According to the yearly(!) updates on their website, they are still going but not really close to finishing a product. Hm.
- mixmastamyk 1y agoI was hoping they’d work with existing RV folks rather than starting another one of a dozen smaller attempts. Article says however that Keller from Tenstorrent will be on their board. Good I suppose, but hard to know the ramifications. Why not merge their companies and investments in one direction?
- constantcrying 1y agoThe article is so bad. Why do they refuse to say anything about what these companies are actually trying to make. RISC-V Chips exist, does the journalist just not know? Does the company refuse to say what they are doing?
- pragma_x 1y agoIt reads like they're trying to drum up investment. This is why the focus is on the pedigree of the founders, since they don't have a product to speak of yet.
- muricula 1y agoThe article is written for a different audience than you might be used to. oregonlive is the website for the newspaper The Oregonian, which is the largest newspaper in the state of Oregon. Intel has many of its largest fabs in Oregon and is a big employer there. The local news is writing about a hip new startup for a non-technical audience who know what Intel is and why it's important, but need to be reminded what a CPU actually is.
- Ericson2314 1y agoTBH this is a bad sign about job sprawl. The fact that California housing pushed Intel to Oregon probably helped lead to its failures. Every time a company relocates to get cost of living (and thus payroll) costs down by relocating to a place with fewer potential employees and fewer competing employers, modernity slams on the breaks.
- Ericson2314 1y agohttps://www.aheadcomputing.com/post/everyone-deserves-a-better-computer https://www.aheadcomputing.com/post/everyone-deserves-a-bett... sheesh, even the company's own writing is kinda folksy too.
- muricula 1y agoThat might have been true in the early 2000s when they were growing the Hillsborough Oregon campus but most new fabs are opening in Arizona for taxation and political reasons. I don't have the numbers to back it up, but based on articles about Intel layoffs I believe that Intel has been shedding jobs in Oregon for a while now. This wiki page has a list of Intel fab starts, you can see them being constructed in Oregon until 2013, and after that all new construction moved elsewhere. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Intel_manufacturing_sites https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Intel_manufacturing_si... I can imagine this slow disinvestment in Oregon would only encourage some architects to quit an found a RISC-V startup.
- 1970-01-01 1y agoStaring at current AI chip demand levels and choosing to go with RISC chips is the boldest move you could make. Good luck. The competition with the big boys will be relentless. I expect them to be bought if they actually make a dent in the market.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- saulpw 1y agoThe traitorous four.
- asplake 1y ago> The traitorous eight was a group of eight employees who left Shockley Semiconductor Laboratory in 1957 to found Fairchild Semiconductor. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Traitorous_eight https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Traitorous_eight
- saulpw 1y agoThanks, I guess that particular history and analogy would not be known universally :)
- ahartmetz 1y agoOnly two forks left before they'd need to start with half a person.
- Foobar8568 1y agoBring back the architecture madness era of the 80s/90s.
- aesbetic 1y agoThis is more a bad look for Intel than anything truly exciting since they refuse to produce any details lol
- guywithahat 1y agoAs someone who knows almost nothing about CPU architecture, I've always wondered if there could be a new instruction set, better suited to today's needs. I realize it would require a monumental software effort but most of these instruction sets are decades old. RISC-V is newer but my understanding is it's still based around ARM, just without royalties (and thus isn't bringing many new ideas to the table per say)
- ItCouldBeWorse 1y agoI think the ideal would be something like a Xilinx offering, tailoring the CPU- regarding cache, parallelism and in hardware execution of hotloop components, depending on the task. Your CPU changes with every app, tab and program you open. Changing from one core, to n-core plus AI-GPU and back. This idea, that you have to write it all in stone, always seemed wild to me.
- dehrmann 1y agoI'm fuzzy on how FPGAs actually work, but they're heavier weight than you think, so I don't think you'd necessarily get the wins you're imagining.
- FuriouslyAdrift 1y agoYou should definitely look into AMD's Instict, Xynq, and Versal lines, then.
- jcranmer 1y ago> RISC-V is newer but my understanding is it's still based around ARM, just without royalties (and thus isn't bringing many new ideas to the table per say) RISC-V is the fifth version of a series of academic chip designs at Berkeley (hence it's name). In terms of design philosophy, it's probably closest to MIPS of the major architectures; I'll point out that some of its early whitepapers are explicitly calling out ARM and x86 as the kind of architectural weirdos to avoid emulating.
- dehrmann 1y ago
- logicchains 1y agoI wonder if it'll be ready before the Mill CPU?
- pstuart 1y agoIf Intel were smart (cough), they'd fund lots of skunkworks startups like this that could move quickly and freely, but then be "guided home" into intel once mature enough.
- cjbgkagh 1y agoThat creates a split between those who get to work on skunk works and those stuck on legacy. It’s very possible to end up with a google like situation where no-one wants to keep the lights on for old projects as doing so would be career suicide. There have been some attempts at other companies at requiring people to have a stake in multiple projects in different stages of the lifecycle but I’ve never seen a stable version of this, as individuals benefit from bending the rules.
- pstuart 1y agoThose are valid problems, however, they are not insurmountable. There's plenty of people who would be fine doing unexciting dead end work if they were compensated well enough (pay, work-life balance, acknowledgement of value, etc). This is ye olde Creative Destruction dilemma. There's too much inertia and politics internally to make these projects succeed in house. But if a startup was owned by the org and they mapped out a path of how to absorb it after it takes off they then reap the rewards rather than watch yet another competitor eat their lunch.
- cjbgkagh 1y agoA spin-out to reacquire. I've seen a lot of outsourcing innovation via startups with much the same effects as skunk works. People at the main company become demoralized that the only way to get anything done is to leave the company, why solve a problem internally when you can do it externally for a whole more money and recognition. The causes brain drain to the point that the execs at the main company become suspicious of anyone who choses to remain long term. It even gets to the point that even after you're acquired it's better to leave and do it over again because the execs will forget you were acquired and start confusing you with their lifers. The only way I've seen anyone deal with this issue successfully is with rather small companies which don't have nearly as much of the whole agency cost of management to deal with.
- kleiba 1y agoGood luck not infringing on any patents! And that's not sarcasm, I'm serious.
- neuroelectron 1y agoIntel restructures into patent troll, hiring reverse engineers and investing in chip sanding and epoxy acids.
- energy123 1y agoI like the retro-ish and out of trend name they've chosen: AheadComputing.
- laughingcurve 1y agoTogether Compute SFCompute And so on … definitely not out of trend
- badc0ffee 1y agoComputing sounds retro, but Compute does not.
- johnklos 1y agoOne of the biggest problems with CPUs is legacy. Tie yourself to any legacy, and now you're spending millions of transistors to make sure some way that made sense ages ago still works. Just as a thought experiment, consider the fact that the i80486 has 1.2 million transistors. An eight core Ryzen 9700X has around 12 billion. The difference in clock speed is roughly 80 times, and the difference in number of transistors is 1,250 times. These are wild generalizations, but let's ask ourselves: If a Ryzen takes 1,250 times the transistor for one core, does one core run 1,250 times (even taking hyperthreading in to account) faster than an i80486 at the same clock? 500 times? 100 times? It doesn't, because massive amounts of those transistors go to keeping things in sync, dealing with changes in execution, folding instructions, decoding a horrible instruction set, et cetera. So what might we be able to do if we didn't need to worry about figuring out how long our instructions are? Didn't need to deal with Spectre and Meltdown issues? If we made out-of-order work in ways where much more could be in flight and the compilers / assemblers would know how to avoid stalls based on dependencies, or how to schedule dependencies? What if we took expensive operations, like semaphores / locks, and built solutions in to the chip? Would we get to 1,250 times faster for 1,250 times the number of transistors? No. Would we get a lot more performance than we get out of a contemporary x86 CPU? Absolutely.
- johnklos 1y ago> and the difference in number of transistors is 1,250 times I should've written per core.
- colechristensen 1y agoGPUs scaled wide with a similar number of transistors to a 486 and just lots more cores, thousands to tens of thousands of cores averaging out to maybe 5 million transistors per core. CPUs scaled tall with specialized instruction to make the single thread go faster, no the amount done per transistor does not scale anywhere near linearly, very many of the transistors are dark on any given cycle compared to a much simpler core that will have much higher utilization.
- zozbot234 1y ago> Didn't need to deal with Spectre and Meltdown issues? If we made out-of-order work in ways where much more could be in flight and the compilers / assemblers would know how to avoid stalls based on dependencies, or how to schedule dependencies? What if we took expensive operations, like semaphores / locks, and built solutions in to the chip? I'm pretty sure that these goals will conflict with one another at some point. For example, the way one solves Spectre/Meltdown issues in a principled way is by changing the hardware and system architecture to have some notion of "privacy-sensitive" data that shouldn't be speculated on. But this will unavoidably limit the scope of OOO and the amount of instructions that can be "in-flight" at any given time. For that matter, with modern chips, semaphores/locks are already implemented with hardware builtin operations, so you can't do that much better. Transactional memory is an interesting possibility but requires changes on the software side to work properly.
- neuroelectron 1y agoTldr: RISC-V ASICs
- zackmorris 1y agoI hope they design, build and sell a true 256-1024+ multicore CPU with local memories that appears as an ordinary desktop computer with a unified memory space for under $1000. I've written about it at length and I'm sure that anyone who's seen my comments is sick of me sounding like a broken record. But there's truly a vast realm of uncharted territory there. I believe that transputers and reprogrammable logic chips like FPGAs failed because we didn't have languages like Erlang/Go and GNU Octave/MATLAB to orchestrate a large number of processes or handle SIMD/MIMD simultaneously. Modern techniques like passing by value via copy-on-write (used by UNIX forking, PHP arrays and Clojure state) were suppressed when mainstream imperative languages using pointers and references captured the market. And it's really hard to beat Amdahl's law when we're worried about side effects. I think that anxiety is what inspired Rust, but there are so many easier ways of avoiding those problems in the first place.
- zozbot234 1y agoIf you have 256-1024+ multicore CPUs they will probably have a fake unified memory space that's really a lot more like NUMA underneath. Not too different from how GPU compute works under the hood. And it would let you write seamless parallel code by just using Rust.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- jiggawatts 1y agoCheck out the Azure HBv5 servers. High bandwidth memory on-package with 352 AMD Zen 4 cores! With 7 TB/s memory bandwidth, it’s basically an x86 GPU. This is the future of high performance computing. It used to be available only for supercomputers but it’s trickling down to cloud VMs you can rent for reasonable money. Eventually it’ll be standard for workstations under your desk.
- nullc 1y agoit's kind of concerning that it's only available as a hosted product. Not good news for anyone that needs to run on-prem for confidentiality or availability reasons.
- ngneer 1y agoI wonder if there is any relation to the cancelled Royal and Beast Lake projects. https://www.notebookcheck.net/Intel-CEO-abruptly-trashed-Royal-Core-project-in-early-2024-as-leak-details-canned-Beast-Lake-Next-architecture.882771.0.html https://www.notebookcheck.net/Intel-CEO-abruptly-trashed-Roy...
- phendrenad2 1y agoPrevious discussion 9 months ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41353155 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41353155
- bluesounddirect 1y agohttps://archive.ph/BSKSq https://archive.ph/BSKSq
- joshstrange 1y agoI tire of “Employees from Y company leave to start their own” and even “Ex-Y employees launch new W”. How many times do we have to see these stories play out to realize it doesn’t matter where they came from. These big companies employee a lot of people of varying skill, having it on your resume means almost nothing IMHO. Just look at the Humane pin full of “ex-Apple employees”, how’d that work out? And that’s only one small example. I hope IO (OpenAi/Jony Ive) fails so spectacularly so that we have an even better example to point to and we can dispel the idea that if you did something impressive early in your career or worked for an impressive company, it doesn’t mean you will continue to do so.
- nchmy 1y agoI immediately redflag anyone who advertises themselves as "ex-company". It shows a lack of character, judgment, and, probably, actual results/contributions. Likewise, it shows that they're probably not a particularly independent thinker - they're just following the herd of people who describe themselves like that (whose ven diagram surely overlaps considerably with people who describe themselves as "creatives" - as if a car mechanic working on a rusty bolt or a kindergarten teacher, or anyone else, is not creative. Moreover, if the ex company was so wonderful and they were so integral to it, why aren't they still there? If they did something truly important, why not just advertise that (and I'm putting aside here qualms about overt advertising rather than something more subtle, authentic, organic).
- lofaszvanitt 1y agoThere are other forces at play. Same happens with video games. People can't see how many "variables" must be tuned in order to become notified and successful.
- 627467 1y agoYeah... "Combined 100 years of experience" and in previous article [0] it was "combined 80+ years" for the same people... What happened there? Accelerated aging? [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41353155 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41353155
- whobre 1y agoThey should have named it Zilog…
- rajnathani 1y agoSide: Just like I mentioned in another HN comment [0] (and got 5-6 upvotes), I wish that HN titles could be expanded to have more necessary information when possible, which in this case is the name of the startup "AheadComputing", and if we're fortunate to even have RISC-V somehow mentioned in the title. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44105572 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44105572