[marcosdumay]

Even performance specification gets harder. How does one benchmark the latest AMD and Intel processors if performance is different for each unit (and completely changes for each workload)?

Asynchronous circuits are full of promises (the largest ones on the low power segment), the reason they are not standard is because the are hard.

[gradschool]

Aren't we heading for the same problem the way things are going with dynamic frequency scaling in AMD and Intel processors? How do you predict when a particular workload running a little hotter than anticipated will make it kick in? If the answer is to benchmark them at the factory under carefully controlled conditions and reject those that don't fall within a narrow range, then what's the difference?

[marcosdumay]

It's similar. The difference is that there are way more dimensions in asynchronous processors.

Anyway, when I was studying the subject, the one problem people wrote about was testing. I think the GP's problem and the one I pointed can only get some attention after tests get reasonably solved, and they both may be easier than they look like.

[dnautics]

> the reason they are not standard is because the are hard.

With your first sentence, I was really hoping that the punchline was going to be "because they are hard to market"...

Not only because superficially I'm a cynic, but also because it implies that there's some hope since the MHz/GHz wars are probably at their end or near their end.

[marcosdumay]

They are hard at every dimension.

To market included. But it doesn't get much attention right now because people are still stuck at the designing, building and testing stages.

[vlovich123]

Follow the Apple strategy for marketing. Focus on real-world use-cases and how much better they are (current performance at less battery, new use-cases that weren’t possible before, etc).

[dnautics]

Yeah that's fine if you're vertically integrated already and have a captive customer that would likely line up around the block for your chip even if it was worse.

My question is, if you're a hw startup that is looking for a bulk buyer, how do you land that buyer. Or, alternatively how do you get bought by apple so they put your startup's chip? How do you compete with sham artists like nervana that are good at talking the talk?

Or is it hopeless? Is there only room for skunk works internal hardware r&d embedded in multibillion dollar companies?

[vlovich123]

Nope. Apple (& many others) buy hardware companies all the time. The tech (or at least some of it) behind AirPods was an acquisition if I recall correctly.

I disagree that you need to be vertically integrated to make that kind of claim. Figure out the niche market you are targeting that is underserved by the big entities today (eg smart speakers, headphones, deep learning in mobile phones, flexible chips, etc) and why your HW solution is better.

The more challenging situation is if your solution has a higher switching/training cost. If suddenly optimizing your chip requires a lot of training be up front with that and the training materials for SW devs will need to be top notch. If your chip has integration challenges with existing external components simplify them or make sure it’s a training thing for the HW engineers integrating your component.

Just as with SW the harder part is figuring out how to position your solution to be an easy yes. The parts that make HW difficult as a business is that prototyping and manufacturing require much larger lead times generally so all your costs go up (meaning you need deep deep pockets to bring it to market and patient partners).

Like don’t do what Mill CPU did. If your solution means “all SW ever needs to be rewritten” that’s a non starter of a business unless you’re targeting a small niche where that’s not prohibitive (eg military applications with 20 year duty cycles). Generally you want easy ways to make migration possible. So in the mill example, if they can’t focus on just the compiler to make their CPU perform well, they’re DOA. This pivot of “we also need to write our own OS” tells me they’re not going to be successful. Not because they’re technical claims are incorrect (they may be) but because the market they’re going after (or at least that they said) was the “x86” general compute market which is dominated by existing OSes. why not fix the parts of Linux that are a problem for Mill?). Their approach is fundamentally incoherent and misdirected IMO.

[dnautics]

Do you understand how this second post you have made, which is more substantive, has absolutely nothing in common, and in many ways is diametrically opposite to your initial advice of "follow apples strategy for marketing", since apple has done literally all the things you say not to do, "all software must be rewritten" (sometimes in alien languages to boot), "don't require another OS" oh I seem to remember apple having a different operating system from what everyone else does...