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Comment by amelius | Hacker News Reader

At some point people will use an LLM to design an Apple M series competitor.

Production grade CPU design is more than just the RTL (the source code.) To achieve the performance numbers that these companies get, you have to do a ton of optimization in your physical design to achieve the power/performance/area (PPA) metrics that make these products competitive. LLMs are not suitable for that kind of work.

There are people working on PPA optimization and trying to shake up how things are done, just not with LLMs.

Something that I think is fascinating, though, is that labs are no longer beholden to the limitations of commercial design software. Want to replace your simulator and optimizer with a fully custom verifiable stack of Lean proofs of optimality and correctness? Just throw your unlimited token budget at it.

I don't work in the business, but my understanding was that even with these companies' budgets, it's still too expensive to do any kind of verified performance optimality.

And I think correctness for anything near the size of a CPU is off the table.

> LLMs are not suitable for that kind of work.

I wonder why not or you meant not suitable yet?

This is just speculation on my part, but LLMs work best when they get immediate, verifiable feedback on their task, and the kind of physical optimizations they mean might not give that to LLMs.

Also a speculation but I'm almost certain that physical optimizations are first done through simulators running on a computer.

Yes, they are, but the most important subtasks of designing a CPU are not physics related. They are picking the right parameters for things like: how wide do I make this bus, how many registers do I put in the register file, how large do I make this cache, how deep do I make this pipeline, etc., etc. To find optimal parameters requires a lot of simulations, and humans do this, but LLMs could do them just as well and maybe better because they excel at tedious work.

The right way is to throw LLMs at building tools that reframe the problem into a shape LLMs are good at navigating, and then have LLMs use those tools to solve it.

That's exactly where LLMs can shine, because design space exploration requires tedious work and endless simulations.

Yes, but that's only the first part of it. The LLM can create 100 good, working, and verified designs. You still need to lay them out and optimize the physical designs. That kind of optimization is not something language models are good at. You need something fundamentally different.

That's the sort of the AI (including non-LLM AI) is really good at - even more so than the actual design work.

Isn't that weird? The full knowledge of how to make such chips may one day be accessible to anyone, yet only the entrenched companies will remain the makers.

If we imagine machines being able to do the full process end-to-end, and the quality of that process only dependent on capital spent on tokens, I don't see how new companies could ever enter the market.

It is probably doable right not to push a risc-v design into that performance space.

They won't, because they'd need an ARM architecture license.

I mean you can design anything without a license. Selling it is where the problems come up. Even then there are likely places in China that would still make it for you.

Why, the LLM can make up its own architecture.

The value lies in the design space exploration, which is what an LLM can easily do.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Design_space_exploration

Arm sells architecture licenses to anybody these days.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but don't legal regulations around monopolistic behavior kind of mandate that?

There are some investigations starting about this but no rulings yet.

Or they'll just build a competitor in RISC-V instead and that's fine.

Except the problem is not restricted to the actual ISA or its HDL implementation, etc.

It's even just getting space / time in a fab at that advanced of a process node.

Qualcomm have an architecture license and the Snapdragon X2 Elite Extreme X2E-96-100 isn't too far off the M5 Pro.

[1] https://browser.geekbench.com/processors/snapdragon-x2-elite...

[2] https://browser.geekbench.com/macs/macbook-pro-14-inch-2026-...

Are they using LLMs to close that gap, or is this their Nuvia acquisition doing the heavy lifting?

watt about in performance per watt?

And be super-bankrupted by patent litigation from Apple. I don't think they're worried.

After all, they successfully threatened Adobe with spurious patent litigation unless they joined w/ apple in illegally fixing wages.

You don't think a criminal like apple would absolutely decimate any competition given the opportunity? They didn't hold back when it was a unambiguous crime, they surely wouldn't if it was merely bad for the world.

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