>If measuring from RTL-freeze to tapeout, this is a fairly typical (even somewhat unimpressive) timeline (accounting for some unexpected issues) for a large, complex 3nm chip.
Big companies are lumbering behemoth, crude assemblages of barely cobbled-together incentives and principal agent problems in a trenchcoat. Getting them to change direction, or worse, try something new at scale, is a massive undertaking
Nah, you just need to get the CEO behind it. Most coordination issues get solved when the CEO is breathing down your neck to get something done. Trouble is that they don't do this enough.
The Fire Phone was Jeff Bezos' personal baby, and we know how that went. Then there was the Apple G4 Cube with Steve Jobs, the Model X' Falcon Wing doors and Elon, and lets not even talk about the Metaverse and Zuck.
Actually, you've provided examples that prove the point. None of those were especially good (though everyone wanted the G4 Cube), and yet they made it to market anyway. Why?
Because the CEO was behind it, breathing down their necks.
If all it took to get viable fusion power was a FAANG CEO with $10B to burn, I'd be first to petition for it to happen, and even throw whatever money I can spare onto that pyre.
I've never seen a real effort to make fusion happen and I believe the issue here is that starting small may well be big (like a small elephant). If it costs say $30 billion to build a fission reactor, I don't think anyone will get it done for less than $3B a year in R&Do over ten years.
I'm talking fusion because it's something out there. And in the context of something like the metaverse.
An Amazon phone with Amazon Video, playing Amazon Music, making phone calls throug the Amazon messenger, with an Amazon Browser that overlays ads to Amazon products, and has Amazon Voice Recognition ... blah blah blah
I imagine when you are a billionaire from one company, every time you hear the name of the company you hear your name, so you can't really think about what Joe Schmoe wants in a phone independently of your ego.
I guess this is what Steve Jobs was better at. SOME focus on the customer independent of his ego and Apple Apple Apple. I did say ... SOME.
The typical way a chip effort in a non-chip company works is that the "design" is the RTL (e.g. SystemVerilog that defines the behavior of the chip) and then this is handed off to a third-party "design house" (such as Broadcom) that turns that code into a real image of a chip, which is called a GDS (basically you can think of this as a very big layer by layer photoshop file) that can actually be sent to a fab. This is called "backend design", in contrast to the "frontend design" (the RTL itself).
As another commenter said, Broadcom is very experienced with backend design (as well as the supply chain management, testing, etc. that comes after the chip is taped out) and so this can't be regarded as a "first chip". Richard Ho (the head of hardware at OpenAI) is also extremely experienced and used to be the head of the Google TPU effort -- where he actually worked with Broadcom in a similar tapeout already. So yes, this is not a "first design"!
There is no real way to prevent this, but there are ways to increase the cost of doing so. For example, one level of obfuscation is, OAI could internally run synthesis and adopt a “netlist-in” model in which Broadcom gets a netlist - a description of a huge amount of gates and wires and how they connect - instead of the plain Verilog (or other language). It is possible to reverse engineer the netlist, but it’s a certain level of indirection and effort.
A big part of the semiconductor industry also operates on a reputation basis. Broadcom (like TSMC) is a neutral party as a design house, but if they did something like this, it might ruin that reputation.
Yeah, "first chip" here likely means they contracted Broadcom (or a firm with similar experience) to do all the heavy lifting. Building out your own in-house teams for this sort of thing is a decade-long project - just look how much inside Apple's early chips was licensed ARM / PowerVR cores
Apple didn't have the talent in-house until they bought Intrincity who worked with Samsung on Apple's earlier Arm chips as well. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intrinsity
That’s not quite fair. As I recall there were about 1,500 people in that part of the hardware org circa mid 2000s. Before PA Semi there were pretty established teams already doing VLSI/PD/verification/validation, PCB, and of course analog/mixed hardware, in their own work and in conjunction with samsung, old broadcom, qualcomm, etc. Lots of inhouse work went in to all those bespoke monitors, phones, apple tv, airports, etc etc.
My recollection is that PA Semi was very much for the architectural and design talent, even though it was an “asset purchase” and all the existing Power & military chips were hived off.
For Intrinsity I recall a lot of interest was actually in their existing graphics work and EDA. ISTR that those early mobile GPUs were what they focused on.
I was in the mansfield org circa ‘07-11. I spent a lot of time flying between cupertino and austin/bee caves that first year.
The way I heard it PA Semi was the singular driving force that led to Apple Silicon, but I'm not any kind of insider that's just the chatter I heard.
Whoever it was, whooo, that's hot shit. I remember an M1 MacBook Air just cleaning the clock of an Intel MacBook Pro and thinking "x86_64 has real competition again".
Great silicon. I'm over it with not having root on my own machine, so I've left the ecosystem, but it's really nice hardware, can't dispute that.
it would be interesting to know apple's true/inside attitude towards people putting linux on their hardware. they don't seem very interested in helping, but donno whether they actively sabotage either.
Even for a company’s first design?