[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...

[vlovich123]

I feel like you're kind of twisting my words (maybe because I wasn't clear & you got confused?).

My specific advice was originally towards the marketing strategy. So "all software must be rewritten" is not a marketing strategy. That is a go to market strategy. Additionally note that I'm specifically providing my thoughts on the go to market strategy a new entrant (i.e. startup) might use. I don't know why you think I would be saying that the go to market strategy for a startup would be the same as Apple. It's not. Apple has the scale and bankroll that they can operate & innovate on multiple fronts simultaneously. That is not an avenue available to a smaller competitor.

I'm talking about general trends & general advice. I'm saying if you're starting a new chip company, you do not start by boiling the ocean. If you're Google you already make ~40 billion dollars of (relatively high margin) revenue each quarter (Apple makes ~100 billion). The kinds of investments you make with that cash flow is very different from if you're a chip company with a few hundred million in the bank from VCs to bankroll development & no revenues to speak of initially (Nuvia, Cerebras). It's also immediately apparent from this general framework that something like Mills is DOA & will never get anywhere. The company either doesn't have the focus OR they're extremely underfunded to land what actually needs to be done. Likely the latter. They're trying to innovate too much on too many different parts from reading their forums while simultaneously trying to build a company on principle free of VCs & generally alien from how SV works.

If you want advice on how to a completely new chip is brought to market & the extreme hyper-focus that kind of start up needs, I think you can use my advice on that to help you be more successful (or, if you're an investor, evaluate whether such a company is worth investing in or trying to do too much). None of these are necessarily hard & fast rules of course. The specifics of the situation can matter (although usually not as much as you think) but I use this as a first principles starting point before adjusting for the specifics of the situation. For example, if an asynchronous chip + a matching novel language can reduce asynchronous program costs by 20% & provide performance 1000x greater per watt but you also need a paired custom OS, I'd probably say "go & build your own language & operating system" but pair it with "what's the developer story? Do we build something like Rosetta? Is there a non-trivial amount of code we'd need ported to make our solution attractive? etc". I'd of course first evaluate what amount of money that company is looking to raise & whether they're banking on their own abilities to be able to actually generate novel industry-leading inventions or if they're just taking existing tech/concepts that aren't popular yet & polishing it. Building world-class teams on multiple fronts, especially in both chip design & compilers, operating systems, & language design is extraordinarily hard. No one does it all at the beginning. Like it took Facebook a while to get to a point where they built their own PHP compiler for their needs. The cost of it didn't make sense when FB had smaller revenues & needed more of that revenue to focus on other ares of the business.