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Ask HN: Are there new hardware startups working on new CPUs or GPUs?
Are there hardware startup companies that designs a new CPU/GPU that interrupts the status-quo. (3GHz in 2004, 3.8GHz in 2006, ~4GHz in 2014)
We had some in the 1990s like 3dfx (GPU) and Cyrix (CPU):
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/3dfx
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyrix
We had a discussion about it (as off-topic discussion) today: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7658275
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- pjc50 13y agoThere's the Mill CPU people, and I personally worked briefly with a small CPU startup, and there are startup-ish IP core companies out there .. but it's an extremely hard market to enter. Simply ramping up the clock speed is not going to happen much; the problem of waiting for your data to traverse the huge distance from the socketed DRAM all the way over to the processor is already severe.
- tachyonbeam 13y agoThere's several factors making it hard to enter the CPU market besides technical challenges. One is that there's so many offerings already, covering various niches (embedded, DSP, desktop, mobile, server, GPUs), all with existing toolchains. Another is that accessing a fabrication plant is extremely expensive/difficult/lengthy. Then there's all the IP and lawyer issues. And finally, I'd say that CPUs are mostly a "solved problem". Can we make better CPUs? Sure. But can you get enough millions invested to develop a whole new family of CPUs and hope to compete with what's out there? That's going to be very very hard.
- trsohmers 13y agoIn semi-stealth mode, but currently working on a new floating point focused architecture that is rethinking a lot of concepts in order to focus on energy efficiency in the high performance computing space. The biggest problem historically has been software development related, as even if you have a kickass new architecture, if you can't write software for it, it is worthless. Thankfully we think we have a pretty good solution to this.
- rhb 13y agoNot a general purpose CPU/GPU, but related: http://www.nervanasys.com/ http://www.nervanasys.com/ Founded by experts in machine learning, neuroscience, processor architecture, and chip design, Nervana Systems is bringing unprecedented scale and simplicity to the application of brain-inspired algorithms. Deep learning has emerged as the leading strategy for making sense of a wide variety of data but is very computationally intensive. We are developing a scalable hardware solution to solve these types of problems. By making unsupervised learning dramatically faster and more scalable, customers at all levels can derive meaningful insights from their data, an ability previously available only to an elite few companies.