Senior Intel CPU architects splinter to develop RISC-V processors

https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/senior-intel-cpu-architects-splinter-to-develop-risc-v-processors-veterans-establish-aheadcomputing

by osnium123 • 2 years ago

156 73 2 years ago

tomshardware.com

osnium123• 2 years ago

Intel losing design talent to startups.

silisili• 2 years ago

It'll be interesting to see how it plays out. If these succeed, it'll indicate constraint and be a testament to how bureaucratic and broken Intel really is inside.

speed_spread• 2 years ago

Intel can just buy back their startup in three years if it worked and they need it. Probably cheaper than trying to develop whatever in-house and with better chance of success.

znpy2• 2 years ago

If the startup is successful it won’t be cheap to buy

snvzz2• 2 years ago

They'll be laughed out of the room.

As happened when they tried this with SiFive.

mgnn• 2 years ago

It's the cycle of life. Intel was founded by people leaving Fairchild, and that in turn was founded by the Traitorous Eight from Shockley.

The ecosystem is healing.

dyauspitr• 2 years ago

Meh all that happened in an environment with a complete lack of competition. Now it just seems like East Asia will eat everyone’s lunch while the ecosystem is healing.

armaautomotive• 2 years ago

I wonder which markets these risc-v processors will target. I have a 64 core Milk-V computer i'm testing compatibility with a Java application on. Looking forward to seeing where this goes.

_alex_• 2 years ago

How’s it going?

rblatz• 2 years ago

I thought Java had a really good test suite to ensure platform/jvm compatibility. Are you running on an official Java machine?

ramshanker• 2 years ago

The old saying....Some variation of.... If you fire your bottom 10%, your top 10% will also leave.

skyyler• 2 years ago

No one told Jack Welch

elzbardico• 2 years ago

He fired the one who told him that. It didn't matter, as long as the books looked great on the next quarter and the bonuses kept flowing, Mr Welch didn't give a fuck.

bee_rider2• 2 years ago

Double the savings! (This quarter).

Rinzler896• 2 years ago

That so called "old saying" you mention makes no sense in the real world. From my experience top % engineers hate working with bottom % engineers since they massively drag things down for everyone, so firing the bottom % ones actually makes life better for the top % and convinces them to stay, and vice versa, keeping bottom % engineers around for long actually convinces top % engineers to leave since they want to work with equally competent people who can get shit done and not be around incompetent people who coast and watch the clock, or worse, drag everyone down.

yvdriess2• 2 years ago

Over here in the real world of bottom 10% firing company cultures: those top engineers are leaving the company because they are tired of the culture of infighting and backstabbing, because setting up to others to fail and blaming them is just as effective as doing good work. Also, your super helpful generalist collaborator just got fired because everyone on your small team is highly performing and top down ruling was to fire 1/10 of each team.

I cannot think of a successful tech company that is still applying the GE 10% management style. It has consistently been shown to fail.

_a_a_a_• 2 years ago

It makes perfect sense in context. You're assuming that the bottom % of engineers drag things down because they're bad. That's not what it's about.

Some companies imposed rather brutal policies of "we do an annual review and sack the bottom x% of employees". This is done irrespective of whether they are bad, or simply the lowest strata (by your, possibly flawed, estimation) but still good. Because workers often don't know which group they will fall into, it produces enormous stress throughout. Few people like working under those conditions so those that can, leave. Who will that be? Those most able to leave. Who were they? Your best workers. Goodbye top tier...

Be aware that some people who contribute least to the bottom line are actually still very useful.

This kind of management brutality I believe is mostly died out now, for good reason.

epolanski• 2 years ago

From my experience top % engineers hate working with bottom % engineers since they massively drag things down for everyone

You live in a different world than I do then, because the overwhelming majority of people don't care at all, let alone they would "hate".

zerreh50• 2 years ago

In the real world companies have no idea who the top and bottom 10% are because they use extremely low quality productivity metrics

a_e_k• 2 years ago

The headline may be misleading. It initially read to me as though Intel is forming a new division to work on this. Instead, these folks are going to a new startup outside of Intel.

cedws• 2 years ago

Moonshot teams incubated inside of a huge, slow bureaucracy rarely work. Spinning it off as a startup of its own gives it the best shot.

bee_rider2• 2 years ago

Did they change it later? Splinter does not seem likely to be interpreted as forming an internal group.

bitcharmer• 2 years ago

English is my second language but I interpreted "splinter" as leaving the org entirely. Was the title changed some time ago or is my English that bad?

Redoubts• 2 years ago

Splinter definitely implies separating from the parent entirely. A “spinoff” would be a related corporate entity.

inamberclad• 2 years ago

Do these companies simply sell verilog source trees? Or do they deliver fully packaged wafers?

hedgehog• 2 years ago

Often the product is "hard IP" which is a design which has been tuned and validated for a specific manufacturing process. A rough software analogy would be buying a license for a proprietary library that's been validated on a specific platforms. Labor and risk reduction.

userbinator• 2 years ago

I wonder if they have any non-competes that'll prevent them from going to develop x86 processors.

mkl• 2 years ago

It's patent licenses that prevent more x86-64 compatible CPUs appearing. All the best recent stuff is controlled by Intel and AMD, who have cross-licensing agreements with each other.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_x86_manufacturers, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X86

yvdriess2• 2 years ago

Even without the patents, there is a lot in x86 and it would take an order of magnitude more engineers to make a compatible x86 CPU than a RISCV with standard extensions.

treyd• 2 years ago

They don't need to. Recompilation techniques like Rosetta2 are well understood now and they can add extensions to RISC-V processors that aid in reimplementing x86 behavior on top of RISC-V.

graton• 2 years ago

As a note, non-competes are for the most part illegal in California, from my understanding.

Y-bar• 2 years ago

The linked company page says they are located in Hillsboro, Oregon[1]. Which is where Intel also has a campus[2]. My guess is that most people of this new company just moved across the street. How are non-competes in that state?

1. https://www.aheadcomputing.com/#comp-lzm51d9d

2. https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/corporate-responsibi...

ksec• 2 years ago

What does it mean by Open Specification Core IP?

There are plenty of RISC-V CPU IP out there. What sort of target market are they aiming at ?

newswasboring• 2 years ago

I guess they are claiming they can make it better. Which given the team is likely. Making a CPU, specially one which is validated on a process, is a hard problem. There is definitely room for improvement for RISC-V processors.

DaoVeles3• 2 years ago

I do hope that moves like this accelerate RISC V development in a significant way. While there are a lot of RISC V cores in the wild, the top end of performance is not great. Way behind in terms of performance per watt. But the upwards trend is clear, all they need is a bit more gusto and it could be a matter of time until they are nipping at ARM/X86's heels.

sugarkjube• 2 years ago

the top end of performance is not great

I wonder how much is possible on that level. Not an expert myself, but I've read a critique on RISCV ISA by a ISA designer [1] which I think mentioned several design choices that may make it more difficult optimize for performance (e.g. longer pipelines, issues with branch prediction), an easy to understand issue is explained in the introduction of that critique.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24958423

brucehoult• 2 years ago

critique on RISCV ISA by a ISA designer

You mean an ex-Arm engineer. Of which Arm has thousands. And not an ISA designer or (more relevantly) CPU designer, but as the post itself says a verification engineer.

Actual top high performance CPU designers, such as Jim Keller, say that RISC-V is just fine.

mrinfinitiesx• 2 years ago

Good. Those high talent genius minds deserved better. They deserve all the support and love they can get on their new ventures.

sylware2• 2 years ago

And some folks are still questioning why RISC-V ISA is much less toxic than any PI locked CPU ISA.

I think RISC-V has also some GPU oriented instructions, hasn't it?

crest• 2 years ago

RISC-V is a mess of dozens of extensions vendors can decide to implement with the option of adding custom instruction as well. The application profiles are recommended sets of extensions to implement for certain use-cases e.g. microcontrollers without operating systems, embedded systems with full operating systems etc.

The base ISA is very minimal resulting in long inefficient code sequences for common GPU tasks. It would be tempting to implement the vector extension and see how well it maps to GPU workloads, but afaik nobody has done this in earnest. The more traditional way would be to implement lots of small cores and extend them with packed SIMD (at least 4x Int32+FP32).

sylware2• 2 years ago

I know a bit of AMD GPU machine code, and it seems based on what I heard that RISC-V has only support for 'GPU vector' instructions, not 'GPU scalar' instructions, namely no "hardware thread mask" definition.

And I heard that RISC-V GPU ISA was already extended with raytracing hardware instructions.

For sure, 3D pipeline programing will be specific to one implementation, but since vulkan/dx12, it would have to be hardware command ring buffers (like for AMD GPUs).

Kon-Peki• 2 years ago

So, this team wants to build a “RISC-V, but you have pay for a license” portfolio, and people are celebrating.

I must be missing something.

thunkshift1• 2 years ago

You want them to do it for free? Do you know how hard that is

snvzz2• 2 years ago

It means another participant in a free market.

This is very welcome.

Senior Intel CPU architects splinter to develop RISC-V processors

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