[pjc50]

> pushing chip makers to consider silicon designed to workload spec

Well .. the big one of these is GPUs, which started as fixed-function pipelines and turned into massively parallel execution systems repurposed to cyrptocurrency.

Various people have tried to do niche things such as neural net coprocessors. General-purpose or GPU-like or DSP-like systems tend to win in the market ... because they're run on software, which is more flexible.

There's a reason ARM are now up to 180 billion cores shipped; the easiest way of making a custom IC is to wrap it around an ARM core with some firmware. The code is burned into ROM (which has security advantages and disadvantages!), but to me it still counts as "software".

At some point the iPhone will cross the triple digit of number of CPU cores onboard (counting across the whole board, not just the SOC and radio). It will be rather difficult for anyone other than apple to count when that is.

[notTheAuth]

I’m going to rely on the insight of my friends in the chip biz working at Intel and Qualcomm back in the day; generic CPUs “won” as it became aware manufacturing anything different was literally impractical 10+ years ago.

The goal of custom to spec silicon never went away it just had to bide it’s time, then Intel got taken over by MBAs.

Choices were made based upon real data. That generic CPUs “won” due to consumer choice; anything winning due to consumer choice is just a handy political meme. We get what supply side can sell for the most profit.