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Comment by baybal2 | Hacker News Reader

I believe Intel couldn't have imagined with what ease their biggest customers can turn into their biggest competitors overnight.

Even a decade ago that would've been unthinkable, but today, making a cookiecutter SoC is relatively easy because nearly everything can be taken off the shelf.

Production costs though.... sub-10nm mask set costs completely rule out anything resembling a startup competing in this area.

I think 65nm was the last golden opportunity to jump on the departing train. It was still posible to ship a cookie cutter chip under $1m, now... no way.

Now, Semi industry is basically Airbus vs. Boeing.

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Startups can absolutely compete here. There is sufficient capital to fund chip design (integration) and it is relatively low risk. We are going to see a huge number of Arm and RISC-V solutions on the market 14 months from now.

What companies are working on RISC-V solutions? I always feel like it's "5 years away" but not sure if that's just my own perception

A few RISC-V SBCs are already on the market. I suspect RISC-V will come to dominate the IoT/Edge space in the next few years before graduating to other market segments.

IoT/Edge deployments are less standardised than other computing workloads. Developers and integrators in this area already expect to deal with a lot of bother when working with a new chips. Also, the margin on these devices is usually razor thin, so the potential savings from not paying ARM licensing fees would be more appreciated.

Finally, RISC-V's modular approach allows for a greater level of flexibility and innovation, which will allow manufacturers to further differentiate and gain a competitive advantage. This is especially relevant for IoT/Edge solutions where thermal and power budgets are heavily constrained.

SiFive is probably the leader, though I admit I don't know much about their competition.

Agreed .. except weren't Ampere (2017) and Nuvia (2019) startups?

Ampere kinda was an acquisition of Applied Micro, but its internal X-Gene uarch was dropped into the trash very quickly in favor of Arm Neoverse…

Ampere basically started as a re-labeled XGene from Applied Micro which started back in 40nm days. And they came with quite some cash to start with: their backer is Carlyle Group, the biggest LBO shop in the world.

Nuvia basically never intended to really compete Intel, or AMD heads on. Their $30m stash would've been just enough for a single "leap of faith" tapeout on a generation old node, and a year of life support after.

They were aiming for a quick sell from the start too.

Depends on your definition of startup I guess. Certainly seems to be enough capital available.

I definitely don't agree with premise that it's now Boeing vs Airbus now (certainly less so than it was a few years ago when x86 was the only game in town).

Do you actually know how much a sub-10nm mask set costs? There’s a lot of speculation from people who don’t have access to those numbers. Those who do are bound by NDAs.

I do hear figures in single megabucks for relatively small tapeouts.

Back in 65nm, 40nm days, big tapeouts were already costing in high 6 figure digits in masks.

And... masks are not the most expensive items on the signoff costs these days.

Specialist verification, outsourced synthesis, layout, analog, physical, test, and other specialist services will easily cost more than the maskset for <40nm.

I would not be surprised if tier 1 fabless already spend $10m+ per design just on them.

You are absolutely correct that design costs swamp mask costs by far. For 7 nm, it costs more than $271 million for design alone (EDA, verification, synthesis, layout, sign-off, etc) [1], and that’s a cheaper one. Industry reports say $650-810 million for a big 5 nm chip.

[1] https://semiengineering.com/racing-to-107nm/

Cookie cutter?

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