🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <2548@spim.mips.COM> mash@mips.com (John Mashey) writes:
   In article <6286@optilink.UUCP> manley@optilink.UUCP (Dave Manley) writes:

   >Now, maybe your question should be: Will the day ever come when we can cheaply,
   >fast build custom CPUs?

   If only it were so easy ....
   One also needs to:
	   a) Cheaply and quickly generate the corresponding set of of
	   diagnostics for both design verification and production.
	   I especially want to see the ones for custom new designs with
	   multi-processor, 2-level cache coherency... generated quickly...
   and worse:
	   b) Cheaply and quickly generate the corresponding set of
	   compilers, debuggers, libraries....

   Now, there has been progress in both of those areas, so it's hardly
   hopeless..... but not easy :-)

Said the spider to the fly...the micro guys have ruined the CPU design game for
most folks, IMHO (yeah, I know, I'm one of them now.)

There's so very much more to this than the cost of designing and fabbing your
first working production parts.  You need to design the system, too.  You need
software, including OS, compilers, assemblers, debuggers, linkers, & profiling
tools.  You need a sales force that understands your product and can sell to
customers.  You need a marketing organization that knows where the customers
hide and how to reach them.  You need a benchmarking crew, because nobody's
technology is so much better than everyone else's that they can live with
off-the-shelf performance across the board.  You need field service.  And you
need a story as to why somebody should take a chance on your system or processor
instead of going with a sure bet by somebody bigger.

I believe that the only hope for future garage-shop hardware designers is to get
faster & much cheaper fabs, but also to get faster & much cheaper logic
synthesis and simulation tools.  Ultimately, I believe it's hopeless to try to
design "custom CPUs"; if you do manage to overcome the big guys' economies of
scale and captive process technology, and you also manage to get to market
quicker than they do, and you achieve all of the things mentioned above, you
still need a significant performance edge (or some other value-added.)  Good
luck with that, too.  Personally, I believe the day has already come and gone,
just as it has in the auto industry.

There's an auto museum near Cape Cod, Mass., with a display near the front door
of the logos of all the car companies that existed from 1910 through the present
day.  It's quite sobering to see how many there once were compared to how many
survive today.  Imagine what it would take to start up a new one nowadays.

Bob Colwell  colwell@ichips.intel.com  503-696-4550
Intel Corp.  JF1-19
5200 NE Elam Young Parkway
Hillsboro, Oregon 97124