A Look inside Russian 28nm MIPS CPU – Baikal-T1
zeptobars.com
zeptobars.com
I'm especially curious because the die shot from AMD's Ryzen has smaller but kind of similiar looking areas. [1] But there they look too uniform to be damage.
This CPU is used in a printer: http://katyusha-print.ru/ (but I doubt the product is any widespread - there are no such devices in stores, anywhere)
For PCs it's x86 (with a small fraction of ARM) - just like (almost) everywhere else.
Both for supercomputers and ordinary workstations they'd use the same hardware as everyone else, the price/performance is better that way due to economies of scale.
As for the PC (like in office PC) - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elbrus-8S is the main trend for state departmets and other places were security should be higher than your usual office. 8S will be replaced with 16S in 2018.
Incidentally, the reason why chip companies are worth so much more than IP companies is that the cost and risk of making chips is much larger. IP and chip companies are both fabless, if the costs and risks were about the same, then I don't see why profits wouldn't be about the same.
Now it could be that in this instance, marketability, schedule and budget weren't a particularly big deal, and maybe the performance is so bad that this in itself made a lot of problems disappear. But I think it's likely that someone still sweated quite some to make it work. (TFA claims they were the first to implement this CPU in silicon, BTW - again, could be easy enough if they didn't care about performance at all, or if Imagination did all the work on the synthesis scripts and the backend or held their hand, but if they wanted high performance and had to optimize synthesis and placement themselves, that's serious work. TSMC won't do it for you, either - they want a GDS-II file, and I don't think they outsourced the actual chip design.)
Many people with an ECE/CS background have probably had a FPGA + VHDL/Verilog course.
What are some additional skills needed to enter the chip industry?
Not true, it is closer to 2 to 3x, and it is (slowly) getting cheaper. While it will take a long time (~3 years) for 14/16nm FinFET processes to reach price parity with what 28nm is now, it is dropping in price faster than when the 28nm generation came out due to the massive volumes of Apple, NVIDIA, etc.
It is looking like the 28nm generation will be a mainstay node, with continued investments by the major pure play fabs to keep bringing costs lower.
Is that because it's essentially the last planar node? IIRC 20nm kinda sucked for both planar and FinFET so 28 is the last planar and 14/16 is looking like a long term node as well. Is that why you think 28 will be a mainstay?
I'm seeing 28,14 and 7 as pretty much stable and widespread over the next 10 years, with 14 and 7 being significant for cost/perf and cost/density reasons.
After a decade or so I actually made a concious decision to stop building chips, once the novelty wore off I found I was doing a month's creative work a year and 11 months of timing and DV. As a systems software hack I'd get somthing woprking today, and something else tomorrow - much more of a sense of accomplishment - these days I do a bit of hardware and a bit of software - mostly embedded systems - I definitely enjoy it more
Or you can use Chuck Moore's famous 500 lines of Forth to produce a chip for 180 nm that can't access DRAM and go on about everyone doing it wrong.
A single SoC can have multiple IP cores designed in the UK, US, India etc. but also some designed in smaller countries like Israel and Ireland.
Altogether, they have more fabs in the US than outside (7 vs 3).
http://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/jobs/locations/spain/...
I guess most Intel stuff is now designed almost everywhere ;-)
And it's American... because it's made by an US corporation.
EDIT: the Broadcom chipset used in the Rasp. Pi 3 is still at 40nm process, according to what I can find. So not sure why people would question the 28nm process' usefulness.