FastFT

They (GF) do not make DRAM. They might have an eDRAM process inherited from IBM, but it would not be competitive.

You’re correct that DRAM is a very specialized process. The bit cell capacitors are a trench type that is uncommon in the general industry, so the major logic fabs would have a fairly uphill battle to become competitive (they also have no desire to enter the DRAM market in general).

There are no large scale pure play DRAM fabs that I’m aware of, so Apple is (more or less) buying from the same 3 companies as everyone else.

Both cases occur in industry. The parts that only go through additional testing (radiation lot acceptance testing aka RLAT) are commonly sold as “radiation tolerant”. Parts that undergo hardening via design/manufacturing changes are often branded “radiation hardened”. In either case though, the available part portfolio is much smaller than commercial. Further increasing cost is that these parts are often geared for military/aerospace so have expanded temperature ranges, stricter qc, weird package types, etc.

Not a developer in the field, but I believe generally the HLSL isn’t packaged in the game. Instead an intermediate format called DXIL is produced at build time from the HLSL, and that’s what is packaged.

Not sure if its from Quickturn’s acquisition, but Cadence still makes a hardware simulation platform called Palladium.

Couple of likely reasons:

1. Process limitations (no high voltage devices, poor analog characteristics, limited resistor choice, etc)

2. The skill set for power device/analog IC design is very different than digital design (and harder to recruit for as the talent base is relatively small).

3. On chip power converters universally suffer from poor inductor quality which trashes your efficiency (thus increasing cooling demands as well).

From a business perspective it would be quite risky and likely not cost effective.

Core voltage is going to be in the ballpark of 1V, and given the stated power consumption is 15kw that means a minimum of 15kA. So, it is indeed a lot but the math checks out.

Hardware compatible doesn’t mean very much in this case. It’s a different ISA so you’ll need a different tool chain and recompilation (possibly rewrite given that assembly is very common in deeply embedded processors). It’ll also have different LUT usage, etc.

High end NICs like Mellanox ConnectX are probably more similar to the 82586 in terms of breadth of functionality. They have (R)DMA, hardware timestamping, encryption, etc. Although, I wouldn’t expect to see much hand crafted logic design outside of the very high speed signal paths like in the serdes.