SiFive: Design and produce custom RISC‑V CPUs and SoCs | Hacker News Reader

SiFive: Design and produce custom RISC‑V CPUs and SoCs

sifive.com

56 pointsgeektips14 comments

This looks interesting, but curious what sort of ball park the price is in for final production, and what sort of minimum runs?

I'm not clear what 'fabless' means - is it like 'serverless', whereby it really just means 'not your server'. I.e. 'not your fab'.

That's what "fabless" about means. I think using it as an attribute to the chip it's a misapplication of the term. Many companies today don't own chip fabrication plants, so that's kind of the norm, apart from IBM, Samsung and Intel. For instance the new Ampere ARM processor is manufactured by TSMC.

IBM relies on Global Foundries today IIRC.

Edit: maybe still have older generation fabs for military contracts.

Ah, I think you are right. They "sold" the fabs to Global Foundries.

I think GF is former AMD used to be. I think TSMC is former IBM. But I might have my history wrong.

Accorsing to wikipedia, GF is former AMD, which then later aquired IBM's fab business. TSMC has always been independent.

Global Foundries no longer is pushing for 7nm however, leaving IBM in a bad spot. AMD saw the writing on the wall and began to switch their designs to TSMC years ago (so the 2019 release of Zen2 / Ryzen3 will likely proceed on schedule)

Many, if not most, chip companies are fabless these days, including the very major ones (Broadcom, Qualcomm, Nvidia, etc. I think even AMD).

It means that they do not own any foundry/factory to produce chips.

They design chips then send the designs to a third party foundry for production, like you would perhaps do for PCBs.

This is the case for the latest process nodes for the fastest CPUs. But even aside from memory makers, there are microcontroller and analog vendors who still run their own fabs. For example Texas Instruments, NXP, STMicroelectronics and Analog Devices.

Back in the 80s it was the norm for chip design companies who produced their chips in high volumes to own their own fab. As the price and complexity of fabs went up they've mostly switched to outsourcing their fabrication to take advantage of economies of scale (since the fab equipment, which costs hundreds of millions of dollars for cutting-edge nodes, can be shared), hence "fabless".

There are only 4 companies that make chips anymore, at least at the latest CPU technology.

GloFo (serving IBM and AMD), TSMC (Serving Apple, NVidia), Samsung (serving Qualcomm, Samsung), and Intel (serving themselves).

GloFo ran out of money this year however, and will no longer compete with the high-end. Forcing AMD to make their next generation chip on TSMC.

Memory makers are their own market, and are ignored (ex: Micron).

---------

Fabless just means you send your chip designs to one of these fabrication labs (TSMC or Samsung... since GloFo is now out). And its TSMC or Samsung who makes the chips for you.

This level of centralization is a disaster.

It costs over a billion dollars to build a new fab lab on the latest tech. Maybe $5 billion or more.

Fewer and fewer companies can even attempt to reach 7nm. Its the nature of the beast. The technology is approaching silicon's natural limits, and the amount of research and development needed to advance is getting more and more costly.

Allowing the fabs to be in the hands of private investors and under a dictatorial government is well beyond "the nature of the beast".

That level of secrecy and lack of accountability is not a necessary evil.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com