today at 12:20 AM
Having worked with people doing bringup of specialized chips, I am awed at how the world has changed.
> 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.
today at 1:47 AM
Back in the day you'd write the code before the chip came back but I guess today it's faster to wait.
today at 3:25 AM
The longer you wait the faster you will go.
today at 3:52 AM
Like space travel.
today at 8:00 AM
The successive generations of spaceships won't built themselves. Who will be responsible for setting up real world and software feedback loop?
today at 5:14 AM
> “All our schedule assumptions are going to be based on the fact we have this capability now”
is the world we live in, planning things while waiting for a more powerful LLM
today at 5:17 AM
[dead]
today at 12:51 AM
With a few handy tips and tricks from apple insiders. But sure, I guess the LLMs helped too.
today at 7:13 AM
The lawsuit isn't for chip designers, but the consumer product lines. It's possible they also got IP for chips, but that was not brought up.
today at 5:53 AM
Yeah, how could those people even think of switching their owners!
today at 6:01 AM
Didn’t they not just switch employers but actually handed over a lot of proprietary documents from Apple?
today at 1:48 AM
today at 1:43 AM
This is the part forgotten. Apple is claiming this is their IP embedded on chips that OPenAI stakes the future on. Will they settle?
today at 1:46 AM
The lawsuit appears to be about consumer devices, not NPUs or ASICs. If you think Jalapeno stole from anyone it would be Google.
today at 1:45 AM
today at 1:49 AM
You people are so weird - gossiping on a site that literally reported the news as it broke smh. It's like sitting in the back of class gossiping about the popular kids.
Newsflash that lawsuit is about product designs not accelerator ASICs. And there wouldn't be anything to steal because Apple doesn't have any DC class accelerators.
today at 4:18 AM
[flagged]
today at 12:46 AM
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.
today at 4:22 AM
IEEE Spectrum is such a good publication. Early in my career I worked at a place where the magazine would be passed around every month with a coversheet listing all us engineers we had to pass it around and sign we had read it. Been a while since I visited the website but love what they did with it.
today at 6:39 AM
Every time their content appears here, it's a very shallow analysis written for a barely technical audience. And this article is no different, it's just "slop machine wrote verilog; all the hard bits were done by Broadcom, who have access to public AI models (we didn't talk to them and don't know if they used them, but ClosedAI wants us to think they did)"
yesterday at 11:25 PM
I grow Jalapeños. This conflation of AI and actual chili peppers irks me.
today at 12:08 AM
Guess how electrical engineers feel about the term "transformers".
today at 12:26 AM
As a former EE, attention was all I needed to not get zapped.
today at 12:39 AM
:groan:
today at 4:14 AM
> Guess how electrical engineers feel about the term "transformers".
There is more to this story than meets the eye.
today at 12:10 AM
This is an excellent comment. I'm still laughing.
yesterday at 11:32 PM
I do generative art (no relation to AI prompting). I feel your frustration.
today at 12:26 AM
Cryptographers also got the same raw deal with cryptocurrency, and every one just said "crypto?"
today at 1:13 AM
Or cyber…
today at 2:26 AM
Like traditional generative art? Like worms WMD map generation or something? Cool!
today at 12:10 AM
Oh my!
today at 1:37 AM
Same
yesterday at 11:28 PM
Just think of how the people of Xalapa, Mexico feel. They should send them a royalty check.
today at 2:39 AM
I thought I was in Reddit for a moment.
today at 12:28 AM
Jalapeño also used to be a Java VM written in Java at IBM.
today at 2:17 AM
I'm a licensed architect. Welcome to our hell of the last 40 years.
today at 12:05 AM
Feeling the burn?
today at 12:58 AM
To say nothing of the Red Hot Chili Peppers.
yesterday at 11:34 PM
> irks me
It's jalapeño grill would you say?
yesterday at 11:42 PM
Not sure what you're talking about. But I'll tell you, home grown Jalapeño peppers, fermented with 3% salt is the stuff of dreams.
today at 12:00 AM
"It's all up in yo' grill, would you say?"
today at 12:10 AM
You know what really grinds my gears? Friction.
today at 1:01 AM
slow claps
today at 5:38 AM
Thank you.
today at 12:06 AM
I'm annoyed that the meaning of the word "Agent" has been obliterated.
Like, why couldn't they invent a new word and not hijack an existing word?
today at 8:01 AM
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agent
Computing
* Agent architecture, a blueprint for software agents and control systems
* Agent-based model, a computational model for simulating the actions and interactions of individuals
* Agentic AI, autonomous artificial intelligence that can make decisions and act on those decisions on its own
* Forté Agent, an email and Usenet news client
* Intelligent agent, an autonomous, goal-directed entity which observes and acts upon an environment
* Software agent, a piece of software that acts for a user or other program
* User agent, software that is acting on behalf of a user
today at 12:19 AM
Call it GPTChippomatic or something. Please leave my peppers alone.
today at 12:15 AM
Did you not watch the Matrix documentary?
today at 12:21 AM
I guess I'll have to
today at 1:03 AM
Aw, I was expecting more details but this just seems to be a rehash of what they unveiled a month ago.
today at 8:34 AM
We were able to invent a chip that already existed so fast, you guys.
AI does not make anything new, it is not surprising that it can regurgitate what already exists much faster than humans can invent new things.
yesterday at 11:28 PM
At some point people will use an LLM to design an Apple M series competitor.
today at 12:10 AM
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/performance/area (PPA) metrics that make these products competitive. LLMs are not suitable for that kind of work.
There are people working on PPA optimization and trying to shake up how things are done, just not with LLMs.
today at 6:18 AM
> LLMs are not suitable for that kind of work.
I wonder why not or you meant not suitable yet?
today at 7:26 AM
This is just speculation on my part, but LLMs work best when they get immediate, verifiable feedback on their task, and the kind of physical optimizations they mean might not give that to LLMs.
today at 12:27 AM
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.
today at 1:07 AM
I don't work in the business, but my understanding was that even with these companies' budgets, it's still too expensive to do any kind of verified performance optimality.
today at 1:44 AM
And I think correctness for anything near the size of a CPU is off the table.
today at 1:15 AM
Isn'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.
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't see how new companies could ever enter the market.
yesterday at 11:43 PM
It is probably doable right not to push a risc-v design into that performance space.
yesterday at 11:30 PM
They won't, because they'd need an ARM architecture license.
yesterday at 11:38 PM
Why, the LLM can make up its own architecture.
The value lies in the design space exploration, which is what an LLM can easily do.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Design_space_exploration
today at 12:45 AM
Qualcomm have an architecture license and the Snapdragon X2 Elite Extreme X2E-96-100 isn't too far off the M5 Pro.
[1] https://browser.geekbench.com/processors/snapdragon-x2-elite...
[2] https://browser.geekbench.com/macs/macbook-pro-14-inch-2026-...
today at 3:50 AM
watt about in performance per watt?
today at 1:43 AM
Are they using LLMs to close that gap, or is this their Nuvia acquisition doing the heavy lifting?
yesterday at 11:45 PM
Arm sells architecture licenses to anybody these days.
today at 12:28 AM
Or they'll just build a competitor in RISC-V instead and that's fine.
Except the problem is not restricted to the actual ISA or its HDL implementation, etc.
It's even just getting space / time in a fab at that advanced of a process node.
yesterday at 11:34 PM
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.
today at 1:43 AM
And be super-bankrupted by patent litigation from Apple. I don't think they're worried.
After all, they successfully threatened Adobe with spurious patent litigation unless they joined w/ apple in illegally fixing wages.
You don't think a criminal like apple would absolutely decimate any competition given the opportunity? They didn't hold back when it was a unambiguous crime, they surely wouldn't if it was merely bad for the world.
today at 12:53 AM
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?
I remember the paper proving that hallucinations could never be fully solved back in 2024: https://arxiv.org/abs/2409.05746
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's just not as cheap to acquire as legacy data? Meta has to give a deep discount on their API prices to entice people.
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).
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.
today at 4:50 AM
> I remember the paper proving that hallucinations could never be fully solved back in 2024
The papers that use the halting problem or the Gödel's incompleteness theorem to prove something about LLMs are dime a dozen. The problem is they prove their results for any computable system. You need to also believe that the human brain contains "magic" to think that humans are exempt.
I believe I've said the same at the time this paper was published. There is no need for hindsight to notice the problem.
The required amount of compute and training data and whether the existing training methods were up to the task had the real potential to be show stoppers though.
today at 8:29 AM
> Am I the only one to be surprised?
Did you think RSI cured "hallucination"?
today at 4:58 AM
> Jalapeño can reduce end-to-end latency (the time between prompt to last token) by up to 3.6 times
I'm never sure what on earth this kind of impressionistic math is supposed to tell me. Is the comparison between 4.6 and 1.0? 3.6 and 1.0? Clearly the comparison isn't supposed to be 1.0 and -2.6, even though that's what the words literally mean. I can't be the only person who finds this infuriating and distracting. These numbers shouldn't be impressionistic. They should be precise. That this is an article on spectrum.ieee.org makes the imprecision all the stranger. I'd expect their readershipt to care, for instance, about what's even being measured. Is this the geometric mean of something? The arithmetic mean? And what latency has improved?
today at 7:50 AM
That odor you are detecting is just good old fashioned bullshit, my friend. It’s just that nowadays everything and everyone is covered in it, and we are not supposed to notice. The emperor has no clothes… and is covered in shit.
today at 7:56 AM
It's... written right there? Like what?
Suppose you send in your marvelous prompt and hit Enter.
Machine churns for 18 seconds, types out a "reply", then yields back control.
18 / 3.6 = 5
So now the machine will only churn for 5 seconds before yielding back control.
This is confusing how exactly?
Why would an "up to" figure be a mean, or a geometric mean? It's clearly a max, that's why it's called "up to"...
Am I missing something?
today at 1:02 AM
So when can we start getting cheap chips? RAM anyone please!
today at 1:18 AM
Everyone's still bottlenecked on foundries, not designs.
today at 1:22 AM
Cant AI build foundries?
today at 1:29 AM
Something we can all agree with is we need more foundries and green power.
today at 1:33 AM
yup, but it'll take about 3-5 years.
today at 5:17 AM
AI can barely fold a shirt
today at 12:37 AM
Whatever happened with the Apple lawsuit?
today at 12:39 AM
today at 1:02 AM
Congrats to the former TPU team
today at 1:58 AM
I was surprised to see they were using XLS but then I remembered Chris went there a couple of years ago.
yesterday at 11:57 PM
openai should figure out how to make lithography machine, so ASML don't have monopoly on it.
today at 12:18 AM
The Chinese have been working on EUV for a while
today at 12:08 AM
"Reverse engineer this DARPA project, make no mistakes"