Have we decided when are we deprecating it? I'm already cultivating another team in a remote location to work on a competing product that we will include into Google Cloud a month before deprecating this one.
The original paper from DeepMind evaluates what they are now calling AlphaChip versus existing optimizers, including simulated annealing. They conclude that AlphaChip outperforms them with much less compute and real time.
Believe it or not, but there was a time where algorithms were worse than humans at layout out transistors. In particular at the higher level design decisions.
That’s somewhat still the case, humans could do a much better job at efficient layouting. The problem is that humans don’t scale as well, laying out billions of transistors is hard for humans. But computers can do it if you forego some efficiency by switching to standard cells and then throw compute at the problem.
Does this make any sense, really? - Define some common words and then let the media run wild with them. How about we redefine "better" and "revolutionize"? Oh, wait, I think people are doing that already...
Prior to AlphaChip, macro placement was done manually by human engineers in any production setting. Prior algorithmic methods especially struggled to manage congestion, resulting in chips that weren't manufacturable.