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Comment by CalChris | Hacker News Reader

Well, NUVIA has to first design something with a competitive advantage over Intel's chips, then they have to manufacture it and then they have to sell it. Those are three separate and hard problems.

With the first problem, they can simplify things considerably by paying an ARM tax. The RISC-V tax is less ($0) but then it offers them less as well. If they design their own ISA, well, good luck with that. Also, clouds like tweaks, so one size won't fit all.

With the second problem, there's fab space to be had for sufficient coin. But there's more to manufacturing than filling out a webform and sending a tape with a check.

If they can get past the first two hurdles and actually deliver silicon which is significantly better than Intel's then marketing to the big clouds should be the least problematic.

Gonna take some money and time. Gulati left Google in March.

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This is why I think they plan to develop some patentable IP, and get acqui-hired in the end. Its just too daunting a task to get to real silicon for a startup, given the costs of 7nm.

An alternative would be to take a major cloud on as an investor+customer. If they can deliver a truly cloud worthy CPU, it will have a market and especially if a major cloud is already a customer.

This investor+customer approach has a history. Yahoo did this with Google (search) and Apple did this with Adobe (laser printers).

How different is a "cloud worthy" CPU from a regular server CPU? And if there is a difference, is it big enough worth spending 270M $ on it? Double that for 3nm? Maybe! I honestly don't know, but I would suspect AMD and Intel are already hard at work figuring out what the cloud vendors like.

If they could shed historical ballast that the established vendors cannot get rid of due to compatibility constraints, it would make sense. But they need to be compatible x86 or ARM (maybe RISC-V) anyway, or else you're talking about boiling the ocean.

Same thing. It's just that neither ARM nor any of its architecture licensees have yet designed a server CPU which, for lack of a better term, is cloud worthy or this opportunity wouldn't exist. They're certainly phone worthy and car worthy. But if you look at the big XEON chip specs, that's what NUVIA has to match and then Intel+AMD will also keep moving the line markers along.

NUVIA can't do everything and be everything because they're a startup. They have to make choices. I'm incapable of thinking they'd choose anything but ARMv8. Transmeta learned that x86 is really hard and then you get to compete with Intel. RISC-V is incomplete and I haven't heard much from Esperanto of late.

So I think they're going to build a cloud worthy ARMv8 chip. There's a lot of historical ballast to be shed in just getting rid of x86. Indeed, I think that is both their market opportunity and their market risk.

I don't think the world revolves around Spectre, Meltdown and MDS but designing a microarchitecture that makes them impossible would be gain a lot of market good will.

But at the end of the day, they have outperform Intel.

The cloud CPU might be very different from regular server CPU.

For one example, if there are many workloads reading same shared resource, the CCPU (Cloud CPU) can use that to reduce access overhead. Even the program might be a shared resource - you can easily run several dozens of copies simultaneously in vectored fashion.

This might be exploited even further - the queueing operations, for example, can be transformed into parallel scans, yielding less than 1 clock cycle for a synchronization on the work queue.

Etc.

Cray tried similar things to somewhat good results with their Athlon-pin-compatible accelerators. But I think we can do and get more.

> hard problems

Understatement of the year. The number of man hours Intel has sunk into optimizing each of these boggles the mind. And this is coming from someone who worked there for 2 years.

Can you share some insights on those optimizations?

Maybe I am naive but Intel has a lot of legacy baggage, perhaps a design from scratch can make it simpler.

You missed the OS support for the architecture.

Scheduler models for LLVM as well. It surprises me that RISC-V chips have been avoiding this.

I still want to see the mill cpu in silicon. It sounds too good to be true.

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