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At some point people will use an LLM to design an Apple M series competitor.
by amelius 7d ago
At some point people will use an LLM to design an Apple M series competitor.
- bigyabai 7d agoThey won't, because they'd need an ARM architecture license.
- pixl97 7d agoI mean you can design anything without a license. Selling it is where the problems come up. Even then there are likely places in China that would still make it for you.
- amelius 7d agoWhy, the LLM can make up its own architecture. The value lies in the design space exploration, which is what an LLM can easily do. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Design_space_exploration https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Design_space_exploration
- wmf 7d agoArm sells architecture licenses to anybody these days.
- cmrdporcupine 7d agoOr they'll just build a competitor in RISC-V instead and that's fine. Except the problem is not restricted to the actual ISA or its HDL implementation, etc. It's even just getting space / time in a fab at that advanced of a process node.
- nr378 7d agoQualcomm have an architecture license and the Snapdragon X2 Elite Extreme X2E-96-100 isn't too far off the M5 Pro. [1] https://browser.geekbench.com/processors/snapdragon-x2-elite-extreme-x2e-96-100 https://browser.geekbench.com/processors/snapdragon-x2-elite... [2] https://browser.geekbench.com/macs/macbook-pro-14-inch-2026-18c-cpu-20c-gpu https://browser.geekbench.com/macs/macbook-pro-14-inch-2026-...
- bigyabai 7d agoAre they using LLMs to close that gap, or is this their Nuvia acquisition doing the heavy lifting?
- pazimzadeh 7d agowatt about in performance per watt?
- bhouston 7d agoIt is probably doable right not to push a risc-v design into that performance space.
- Lramseyer 7d agoProduction grade CPU design is more than just the RTL (the source code.) To achieve the performance numbers that these companies get, you have to do a ton of optimization in your physical design to achieve the power/performance/area (PPA) metrics that make these products competitive. LLMs are not suitable for that kind of work. There are people working on PPA optimization and trying to shake up how things are done, just not with LLMs.
- btown 7d agoSomething that I think is fascinating, though, is that labs are no longer beholden to the limitations of commercial design software. Want to replace your simulator and optimizer with a fully custom verifiable stack of Lean proofs of optimality and correctness? Just throw your unlimited token budget at it.
- menaerus 7d ago> LLMs are not suitable for that kind of work. I wonder why not or you meant not suitable yet?
- Systemerror7A69 7d agoThis is just speculation on my part, but LLMs work best when they get immediate, verifiable feedback on their task, and the kind of physical optimizations they mean might not give that to LLMs.
- xpct 7d agoIsn't that weird? The full knowledge of how to make such chips may one day be accessible to anyone, yet only the entrenched companies will remain the makers. If we imagine machines being able to do the full process end-to-end, and the quality of that process only dependent on capital spent on tokens, I don't see how new companies could ever enter the market.
- nullc 7d agoAnd be super-bankrupted by patent litigation from Apple. I don't think they're worried. After all, they successfully threatened Adobe with spurious patent litigation unless they joined w/ apple in illegally fixing wages. You don't think a criminal like apple would absolutely decimate any competition given the opportunity? They didn't hold back when it was a unambiguous crime, they surely wouldn't if it was merely bad for the world.