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by teleforce·5y ago·view on hn ↗
For those in ASIC and chip design industry, the two of the largest chip companies namely Intel and AMD buying two of the largest FPGA companies is inevitable, it's just a matter of "when" rather than "if".

I think the more interesting news is what they are going to do pro-actively with these mergers rather than just sitting on it.

I really hope their respective CEOs will take a page from the open source Linux/Android and GCC/LLVM revolutions. I'd say the chip makers companies are the ones that benefit most (largest beneficiary) from the these open source movement not the end users. To understand this situation we need to understand the economic rules of complementary goods or commodity [1].

In the case of chip makers if the price of designing/researching/maintaining OS like Linux/Android and the compilers infrastructure is minimized (i.e. close to zero) they can basically sell the hardware of their processors at a premium price with handsome profits. If on another hand, the OSes and the compilers are expensive, their profit will be inversely proportional to the complementary elements' (e.g. OSes & compilers) prices.

Unfortunately as of now, the design tools or CAD software for hardware design and programming, and also parallel processing design tools are prohibitively expensive, disjointed and cumbersome (hence expensive manpower), and if you're in the industry you know that it's not an exaggeration.

Having said that, I think it's the best for Intel/AMD and the chip design industry to fund and promote robust free and open source software development tools for their ASIC design including CPU/GPU/TPU/FPGA combo design.

IMHO, ETH Zurich's LLHD [2] and Chris Lattner's LLVM effort on MLIR [3] are moving in the right direction for pushing the envelope and consolidation of these tools (i.e. one design tool to rule them all). If any Intel or AMD guys are reading this you guys need to knock your CEO/CTO's doors and convinced them to make these complementary commodity (design and programming tools) as good and as cheap as possible or better free.

[1]https://www.jstor.org/stable/2352194?seq=1

[2]https://iis.ee.ethz.ch/research/research-groups/Digital%20Ci...

[3]https://llvm.org/devmtg/2019-04/slides/Keynote-ShpeismanLatt...

1 comments
I don't recall where I read this, but hardware vendors have been trying to comoditize software, and vice-versa.

It's really obvious when you think about it. If you sell nails, you want to make sure that everyone has or can afford a hammer, and hammer manufacturers like to make sure that there is a large supply of compatible nails.

As much as I would like to see it, I am not sure the equation is that simple in the case of CAD software. Sure, that would make it easier to use FPGAs, but it would also make it easier to create competing products, as a stretch.

I still think it's worth it, and wish bitcode format was documented, at the very least.