| Designing a modern ASIC requires experts across the whole spectrum, from top level architects who increase performance and reduce power from first principles, to RTL designers who have a feel for what kind of code will result in less area or less toggling wires, to standard cell designers who optimize a cell library for an optimal speed vs power vs area trade-off, to floor planning for the area density and speed while not running into IR drop and congestion issues, to DFT to make sure testing is as fast as possible with a high coverage, to DFM engineers who come up with strategies for optimal yield. All these aspects are part of the chip design, and being bad at one can significantly compromise the competitiveness of the final piece of silicon. So this statement is hopelessly naive and ignorant: > The chip design itself should be the secret sauce. Not the tools you make the chip with. Because all the steps that I listed above are done with tools. And in many cases, having better tools is the secret sauce that makes your design better than the competition. The article mentions a runtime of minutes instead of a day to do IR drop checking: that's the kind of acceleration that allows trying out multiple configurations for an optimal solution instead of settling for good enough. A lower amount of IR drop allows for a more aggressive, less conservative power curve. End result: a chip that can be clocked at a higher speed without needing to increase the voltage. A major competitive advantage. > are any companies other than Nvidia embarking up AI/ML chipmaking in a closed fashion? Of course there are. AI can be used for almost anything where large amount of data is already available, and where there's a clear cost function that must be optimized. AI is a natural for many steps in the ASIC design flow. You could have figured this out by yourself: Nvidia is talking about it. If it were such a big novelty, they'd keep it under wraps. > WD's Swerv RISC-V core for their driver controller ARM R-series replacement [snip snip] everyone but NVidia playing well together, trying for better, standardizing a future for participation & healthy competition & growth. Let's talk Swerv: a piece of IP that's definitely useful to Western Digital. Useful to general world too. But not something that scores particularly high on the list of the secret sauce ingredients that makes or breaks their products. Does Nvidia have similar open source IP offerings? Yes, they do! Check out NvDLA: Nvidia's open source DL accelerator. Your day must be a whole lot better now, knowing that, just like WD, Nvidia also open sources some non-critical IP. I'm sure that you're aware that AMD uses a neural network in their CPU branch predictor. Do you think that AMD should release the tool that was used to figure out the optimal weights? After all, the tool itself is not part of the actual CPU design... |