11 comments

  • pama3 hours ago
    Having worked with people doing bringup of specialized chips, I am awed at how the world has changed.<p>&gt; When the first chips came back from the foundry in May, the team pointed its internal AI models at designing software to run benchmarks such as SemiAnalysis’s InferenceX. On DeepSeek’s multi-head latent attention kernel benchmark, performance climbed from 0.31 percent of the theoretical ceiling (set by the chip’s compute and memory bandwidth) to 88.94 percent in roughly 40 hours. Ho says this result is repeatable, so the time between when foundries deliver the first chips and when production ramps up can be reduced. “All our schedule assumptions are going to be based on the fact we have this capability now,” he says.
    • wmf1 hour ago
      Back in the day you&#x27;d write the code before the chip came back but I guess today it&#x27;s faster to wait.
      • threatripper5 minutes ago
        The longer you wait the faster you will go.
  • program_whiz2 hours ago
    With a few handy tips and tricks from apple insiders. But sure, I guess the LLMs helped too.
    • stogot1 hour ago
      This is the part forgotten. Apple is claiming this is their IP embedded on chips that OPenAI stakes the future on. Will they settle?
      • wmf1 hour ago
        The lawsuit appears to be about consumer devices, not NPUs or ASICs. If you think Jalapeno stole from anyone it would be Google.
    • mathisfun1231 hour ago
      You people are so weird - gossiping on a site that literally reported the news as it broke smh. It&#x27;s like sitting in the back of class gossiping about the popular kids.<p>Newsflash that lawsuit is about product designs not accelerator ASICs. And there wouldn&#x27;t be anything to steal because Apple doesn&#x27;t have any DC class accelerators.
  • muchdoubt2 hours ago
    Seems pretty obvious now that OpenAI is just hyping their models in order to get companies (in this case, chip developers) to use their products in order to learn from their (exfiltrated) IP. Any corporation would be foolish to use any of their or Microsoft’s products, particularly those with valuable IP. There’s nothing in the article that says AI did anything creative but rather that it was used for software development within the overall project. Clear misleading title. Suggest to mark this as clickbait.
  • karim794 hours ago
    I grow Jalapeños. This conflation of AI and actual chili peppers irks me.
    • amelius3 hours ago
      Guess how electrical engineers feel about the term &quot;transformers&quot;.
      • frangonf3 hours ago
        As a former EE, attention was all I needed to not get zapped.
      • karim793 hours ago
        This is an excellent comment. I&#x27;m still laughing.
    • Lalabadie3 hours ago
      I do generative art (no relation to AI prompting). I feel your frustration.
      • karim791 hour ago
        Like traditional generative art? Like worms WMD map generation or something? Cool!
      • fragmede3 hours ago
        Cryptographers also got the same raw deal with cryptocurrency, and every one just said &quot;crypto?&quot;
      • TomGarden3 hours ago
        Oh my!
      • DrewADesign1 hour ago
        Same
    • asveikau4 hours ago
      Just think of how the people of Xalapa, Mexico feel. They should send them a royalty check.
    • damowangcy51 minutes ago
      I thought I was in Reddit for a moment.
    • seanmcdirmid3 hours ago
      Jalapeño also used to be a Java VM written in Java at IBM.
    • Duanemclemore1 hour ago
      I&#x27;m a licensed architect. Welcome to our hell of the last 40 years.
    • glitchc3 hours ago
      Feeling the burn?
    • smitty1e2 hours ago
      To say nothing of the Red Hot Chili Peppers.
    • Razengan3 hours ago
      &gt; <i>irks me</i><p>It&#x27;s jalapeño grill would you say?
      • karim793 hours ago
        Not sure what you&#x27;re talking about. But I&#x27;ll tell you, home grown Jalapeño peppers, fermented with 3% salt is the stuff of dreams.
        • wiml3 hours ago
          &quot;It&#x27;s all up in yo&#x27; grill, would you say?&quot;
          • Razengan3 hours ago
            You know what really grinds my gears? Friction.
      • chrismarlow92 hours ago
        <i>slow claps</i>
    • honeycrispy3 hours ago
      I&#x27;m annoyed that the meaning of the word &quot;Agent&quot; has been obliterated.<p>Like, why couldn&#x27;t they invent a new word and not hijack an existing word?
      • karim793 hours ago
        Call it GPTChippomatic or something. Please leave my peppers alone.
      • Razengan3 hours ago
        Did you not watch the Matrix documentary?
  • xpct2 hours ago
    Aw, I was expecting more details but this just seems to be a rehash of what they unveiled a month ago.
  • gozucito2 hours ago
    It is surprising to me that recursive self-improvement seems more plausible now than it did in 2023. Am I the only one to be surprised?<p>I remember the paper proving that hallucinations could never be fully solved back in 2024: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;arxiv.org&#x2F;abs&#x2F;2409.05746" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;arxiv.org&#x2F;abs&#x2F;2409.05746</a><p>I also remember the hang-wringing about running out of new datasets to train on. Now it appears humans are always generating more data. It&#x27;s just not as cheap to acquire as legacy data? Meta has to give a deep discount on their API prices to entice people.<p>I thought back then that humans had a few more breakthroughs in them as meaningful as the seminal Attention is all you need paper. Enough to 100x the capabilities of LLMs back then (10x the smarts and 10x the speed simultaneously).<p>RSI with a 20 month turnaround for a chip to be made is not exactly breakneck speed though. Physical manufacturing and logistical constraints are going to be and remain a hard obstacle to that process for the foreseeable future.
  • amelius4 hours ago
    At some point people will use an LLM to design an Apple M series competitor.
    • Lramseyer3 hours ago
      Production grade CPU design is more than just the RTL (the source code.) To achieve the performance numbers that these companies get, you have to do a ton of optimization in your physical design to achieve the power&#x2F;performance&#x2F;area (PPA) metrics that make these products competitive. LLMs are not suitable for that kind of work.<p>There are people working on PPA optimization and trying to shake up how things are done, just not with LLMs.
      • btown3 hours ago
        Something that I think is fascinating, though, is that labs are no longer beholden to the limitations of commercial design software. Want to replace your simulator and optimizer with a fully custom verifiable stack of Lean proofs of optimality and correctness? Just throw your unlimited token budget at it.
        • xpct2 hours ago
          I don&#x27;t work in the business, but my understanding was that even with these companies&#x27; budgets, it&#x27;s still too expensive to do any kind of verified performance optimality.
          • thfuran1 hour ago
            And I think correctness for anything near the size of a CPU is off the table.
    • xpct2 hours ago
      Isn&#x27;t that weird? The full knowledge of how to make such chips may one day be accessible to anyone, yet only the entrenched companies will remain the makers.<p>If we imagine machines being able to do the full process end-to-end, and the quality of that process only dependent on capital spent on tokens, I don&#x27;t see how new companies could ever enter the market.
    • bhouston3 hours ago
      It is probably doable right not to push a risc-v design into that performance space.
    • nullc1 hour ago
      And be super-bankrupted by patent litigation from Apple. I don&#x27;t think they&#x27;re worried.<p>After all, they successfully threatened Adobe with <i>spurious</i> patent litigation unless they joined w&#x2F; apple in illegally fixing wages.<p>You don&#x27;t think a criminal like apple would absolutely decimate any competition given the opportunity? They didn&#x27;t hold back when it was a unambiguous crime, they surely wouldn&#x27;t if it was merely bad for the world.
    • bigyabai4 hours ago
      They won&#x27;t, because they&#x27;d need an ARM architecture license.
      • nr3782 hours ago
        Qualcomm have an architecture license and the Snapdragon X2 Elite Extreme X2E-96-100 isn&#x27;t too far off the M5 Pro.<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;browser.geekbench.com&#x2F;processors&#x2F;snapdragon-x2-elite-extreme-x2e-96-100" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;browser.geekbench.com&#x2F;processors&#x2F;snapdragon-x2-elite...</a><p>[2] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;browser.geekbench.com&#x2F;macs&#x2F;macbook-pro-14-inch-2026-18c-cpu-20c-gpu" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;browser.geekbench.com&#x2F;macs&#x2F;macbook-pro-14-inch-2026-...</a>
        • bigyabai1 hour ago
          Are they using LLMs to close that gap, or is this their Nuvia acquisition doing the heavy lifting?
      • amelius3 hours ago
        Why, the LLM can make up its own architecture.<p>The value lies in the design space exploration, which is what an LLM can easily do.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Design_space_exploration" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Design_space_exploration</a>
      • wmf3 hours ago
        Arm sells architecture licenses to anybody these days.
      • pixl973 hours ago
        I mean you can design anything without a license. Selling it is where the problems come up. Even then there are likely places in China that would still make it for you.
      • cmrdporcupine3 hours ago
        Or they&#x27;ll just build a competitor in RISC-V instead and that&#x27;s fine.<p>Except the problem is not restricted to the actual ISA or its HDL implementation, etc.<p>It&#x27;s even just getting space &#x2F; time in a fab at that advanced of a process node.
  • ramshanker2 hours ago
    So when can we start getting cheap chips? RAM anyone please!
    • faitswulff2 hours ago
      Everyone&#x27;s still bottlenecked on foundries, not designs.
      • jeffybefffy5192 hours ago
        Cant AI build foundries?
        • altcognito2 hours ago
          Something we can all agree with is we need more foundries and green power.
        • senectus11 hour ago
          yup, but it&#x27;ll take about 3-5 years.
  • geraneum2 hours ago
    Whatever happened with the Apple lawsuit?
  • google2341232 hours ago
    Congrats to the former TPU team
    • mathisfun1231 hour ago
      I was surprised to see they were using XLS but then I remembered Chris went there a couple of years ago.
  • cute_boi3 hours ago
    openai should figure out how to make lithography machine, so ASML don&#x27;t have monopoly on it.
    • TomGarden3 hours ago
      The Chinese have been working on EUV for a while
    • bigyabai3 hours ago
      &quot;Reverse engineer this DARPA project, make no mistakes&quot;