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posted by Fnord666 on Monday July 06 2020, @11:46PM   Printer-friendly
from the free-as-in-beer dept.

Google is offering to produce free chips for you. They have to be open source, they are using 20 year old technology and you'll get 100 of them. Could someone reverse engineer a SID-chip and have Goggle start to crank those suckers out?

https://www.theregister.com/2020/07/03/open_chip_hardware/
https://fossi-foundation.org/2020/06/30/skywater-pdk


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  • (Score: 5, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 07 2020, @12:00AM (15 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 07 2020, @12:00AM (#1017404)

    Google is doing something, and I can't find any evil intentions. It's like 2002 again.

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  • (Score: 3, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 07 2020, @12:07AM (5 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 07 2020, @12:07AM (#1017410)

    They take your open source design, add the backdoor for Mossad, then ship you 100 chips for free.

    • (Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 07 2020, @12:48AM (4 children)

      by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 07 2020, @12:48AM (#1017436)

      Joke's on them, they'll spend more to add the backdoor and the chips I would be using won't even know Internet exists.

      • (Score: 1, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 07 2020, @12:56AM (3 children)

        by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 07 2020, @12:56AM (#1017439)

        Joke's on you... you won't even know they created a wireless link to the Internet using a protocol you haven't heard of.

        • (Score: 2, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 07 2020, @01:11AM (1 child)

          by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 07 2020, @01:11AM (#1017442)

          Neutrino-Assisted Router Communication

          • (Score: 3, Interesting) by Kell on Tuesday July 07 2020, @06:58AM

            by Kell (292) on Tuesday July 07 2020, @06:58AM (#1017522)

            NARC for short.

            --
            Scientists ask questions. Engineers solve problems.
        • (Score: 0, Disagree) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 07 2020, @03:21AM

          by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 07 2020, @03:21AM (#1017489)

          Joke's on you... you won't even know they created a wireless link to the Internet using a protocol you haven't heard of.

          Inside an earthed Faraday cage, in the middle of nowhere, running on batteries charged from small solar panels.
          I don't think there's a physical process that can support, on a low energy budget, that wireless link and protocol I haven't heard of.

          So, yeah, joke's still on them.

  • (Score: 3, Insightful) by takyon on Tuesday July 07 2020, @12:20AM (3 children)

    by takyon (881) <reversethis-{gro ... s} {ta} {noykat}> on Tuesday July 07 2020, @12:20AM (#1017418) Journal

    https://fossi-foundation.org/2020/06/30/skywater-pdk [fossi-foundation.org]

    Doesn't seem to be much evil potential, unless you portray it as a nefarious low-cost way for Google to get a bunch of open source hardware designs that they will build on and make into new proprietary chips.

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    • (Score: 4, Funny) by krishnoid on Tuesday July 07 2020, @12:43AM (2 children)

      by krishnoid (1156) on Tuesday July 07 2020, @12:43AM (#1017434)

      So *that*'s their evil plan!

      • Obtain old chip fabrication systems
      • Offer free fabrication as a smokescreen
      • Get HURD [gnu.org] working on them, along with Duke Nukem Forever
      • ...
      • Profit!

      Ingenious.

      • (Score: 5, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 07 2020, @01:51AM (1 child)

        by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 07 2020, @01:51AM (#1017458)

        I think they want to know who is self motivated to actually DO stuff. Lotsa people have the "leadership" skill to tell someone else to do stuff. Very few people are personally driven by passion to actually do it.

        Google wants to know who they are.

        I have already seen the disaster of placing passionate designers subordinate to PHB types. Both sides fight, and the one who controls the employment status of the other always wins, while the other is dismissed, often because of a "bad attitude".

        Google has seen what happened at some former top notch MIC corporations as they bled off their passionate engineers and retained their handshakers.

        It was passionate engineers at JPL, NASA, Autonetics, and many other companies that got men to the moon. But that seems to have died out as those in search of ever higher profit and cost cutting took over control, and now we get planes that have serious errors in design, stuff that has minimal acceptable utility, planned obsolence, landfills full of junk, and copyright patent messes where farmers can't maintain their machines.

        I think Google has a lot to gain by finding who comes wired, right out of the womb, with a passion for creating new stuff.

        While other corporations hire the "leadership" skills to evaluate employees on ass kissing finesse.

        It happened to me. Nicolai Tesla had the same problem. Galileo. Socrates.

        Think Steve Wozniak could have held onto a job under a modern management style type PHB?

        If you are a creative type, you either have to work for yourself or directly with the owner of the company.

        If even ONE suit-and-tie handshaker gets between you and the company owner, it's game over. Any contribution you make puts the more highly paid handshaker in competition with you and will use his privilege of rank to place obstacles in your path, withold information, to justify your dismissal before the top guy finds out.

        • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 07 2020, @03:35PM

          by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 07 2020, @03:35PM (#1017708)

          Don’t be so down on the PHB they figured out how the system works and are working it, successfully, to their advantage

  • (Score: 5, Interesting) by rigrig on Tuesday July 07 2020, @01:19AM (1 child)

    by rigrig (5129) Subscriber Badge <soylentnews@tubul.net> on Tuesday July 07 2020, @01:19AM (#1017447) Homepage

    I'm guessing the non-evil plan is to get more people into hardware design, hopefully improving/cheapening future generations of hardware. They are a software company after all [joelonsoftware.com]. (and with any luck find some talented people to hire for their neural-net processor design team)

    Evil plan: they predict/noticed the rise of a low-end custom chip market and want to pre-emptively monopolize it. Good luck with that hobbyist foundry startup, now that Google is throwing money at giving away your product for free.

    --
    No one remembers the singer.
    • (Score: 4, Interesting) by DECbot on Tuesday July 07 2020, @04:34PM

      by DECbot (832) on Tuesday July 07 2020, @04:34PM (#1017752) Journal

      Evil Plan: They are looking for chip designer to make clever & novel ways to design circuits and forcing them to open source the design so they can scoop it up on the cheap for their own chips for their data centers. I'm inclined to believe they are looking for low power draw, simplicity, and IOPS per watt chips manufactured on low end lithography/LPCVD/etc equipment that is cheaper to run and easier to maintain high chip yields. Instead of hiring a bunch of chip designers, they will encourage and scrap from open source chip designs and have their engineers compile a google version for themselves--just how they built their software stack.

      --
      cats~$ sudo chown -R us /home/base
  • (Score: 4, Interesting) by Rosco P. Coltrane on Tuesday July 07 2020, @02:29AM

    by Rosco P. Coltrane (4757) on Tuesday July 07 2020, @02:29AM (#1017473)

    Google is doing something, and I can't find any evil intentions. It's like 2002 again.

    Yes, but this is 2020, so you can be sure Google has something in mind that's not in your best interest - otherwise they would openly disclose what it is they're getting out of the deal. TINSTAAFL...

  • (Score: 3, Funny) by Lagg on Tuesday July 07 2020, @02:41AM (1 child)

    by Lagg (105) on Tuesday July 07 2020, @02:41AM (#1017477) Homepage Journal

    There can still be a deep financial incentive for a company that sees the writing on the wall to make fab domestic and make themselves appealing [skywatertechnology.com] so they can use the machines they would have to keep spinning anyway to get free PR points. It seems kind of logical for an ad company to advertise in this indirect way.

    Low batches of not-really-dense wafers (god I hope I'm using the terms right here, I don't know fab science lower than opcode layer very well) on surface area that doesn't back up their production line would seem to be quite an easy project for a company that has as many apparently-competent engineers as Skywater does.

    Goog is in dire need of "don't be evil" points and both them and Skywater are parasites. So ultimately the idea might be to entrench themselves and Skywater as the "domestic chip fab guys who also did that cool thing for those projects! And it's google too!".

    It's like, the guy above you eating popcorn and farting giving you a fresh candy bar in exchange for being quiet about it.

    I'm sure if you asked plenty of people though, this is exactly what a good company would do for its shareholders.

    I myself hold no opinion. Because I'm okay with being able to study the bare metal layer to an academic extent. And the PDKs will be conducive towards it. Google is an ad and software company (in that order). So it's entirely possible the grand goal here is a guy in management going "Okay I'm sick of the chinese and japanese having us by the balls. I just want to ship our bloated out crap to Android HEAD already. Let's move this domestic and have reliable uninfected firmware while we're at it and get some PR".

    I'm sure the ties that Goog management wear are atrocious. And the place is filthy with MBAs. There might be a spectrum of evil there. Especially the ties. Have you ever seen the google campus souvenir shops?

    --
    http://lagg.me [lagg.me] 🗿
    • (Score: 4, Interesting) by DECbot on Tuesday July 07 2020, @05:22PM

      by DECbot (832) on Tuesday July 07 2020, @05:22PM (#1017776) Journal

      I worked in a chip fab about a decade ago--it was more expensive to idle or shutdown the equipment that to keep it running. On any piece of equipment, if it was down for any length of time (measured in hours), it took about half a week to get it to run stable enough and most importantly, clean enough to go back to processing product again. There were many times that equipment when down for maintenance for a routine tube change (typically 12-hours PM), cycle through verification runs and maintenance/troubleshooting for a week or two before going down again for a second tube change before going back into production.
       
      It could be Google/skywater have identified this trend and since the profitable product demand is low, in order to keep the equipment running without dumping product onto the market, they are opting to donate some of their production capacity to open source chip makers.
       
      The second possibility, LPCVD furnaces will run with dummy wafers on the top and bottom of the boat to keep the same number of wafers in the process chamber for each batch in order to maintain the same surface area and thermal properties. These dummy wafers are necessary as the diffusion across these sacrificial wafers are not always uniform. Also, if the batch is for 75 wafers, but the boat holds 150 wafers, fillers are added to fill the boat. Perhaps some passionate engineer convinced some PHB that the boats could be filled with open source wafers, thus getting some productive use out of the fillers besides the process requirements. This would also reduce the thermal cycling of the designated filler wafers--those do have limit of how many times they can be processed before they start breaking in half and causing all sorts of troubles. Donating wafers for open source chips would extend the life of the fillers and dummy wafers, perhaps identify new designer talent, encourage designers to share with google novel new circuits, and as a bonus provide "unlike the other guys, Google isn't evil" PR.

      --
      cats~$ sudo chown -R us /home/base