Stories
Slash Boxes
Comments

SoylentNews is people

Google Will Fab Your Chips for Free

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

looorg writes:

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

Original Submission

 
This discussion has been archived. No new comments can be posted.
Google Will Fab Your Chips for Free | Log In/Create an Account | Top | 67 comments | Search Discussion
Display Options Threshold/Breakthrough Mark All as Read Mark All as Unread
The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. We are not responsible for them in any way.

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

    by rigrig (5129) <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.
    Starting Score:    1  point
    Moderation   +3  
       Interesting=2, Touché=1, Total=3
    Extra 'Interesting' Modifier   0  
    Karma-Bonus Modifier   +1  
    Total Score:   5  

  • (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