
Big Bets on A.I. Open a New Frontier for Chip Start-Ups - joubert
https://nytimes.com/2018/01/14/technology/artificial-intelligence-chip-start-ups.html
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Symmetry
We should expect that as Moore's law slows down specialized hardware will more
and more often become a viable solution. As new process nodes take longer to
come online the optimal number of different designs per node goes up. At some
point computation will probably end up switching to a different substrate
because we're not particularly close to the efficiencies allowed by physics.
But I expect quite an interregnum after MOSFETS get as small as they can.

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scottlegrand2
Sure, a few of these companies are going to win. But good luck picking the
winners. Meanwhile, Nvidia has the deep pockets to build a custom chip of
their own and a well-established ecosystem to drive it. And up until they
decided to dictate where you can place their GPUs and to reserve the right to
audit your usage of their GPUs and software, I believed they had already won
the war before the first shots were fired.

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erikj
Nvidia will keep focusing on GPUs to the detriment of anything else. That's
how larger established corporations always work, they have a lot of
institutional inertia.

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scottlegrand2
So the thing is that as long as Nvidia tapes out a new architecture every
single year, the best you can really do is beat them by a factor of two or so
by matching them without the constraint of fixed function graphics transistors
along for the ride.

And I think you need to beat them by a factor of 5 to 10 against currently
shipping hardware (not last year's model or worse) to get traction. Also you
have to deliver perf, not just perf/W. Those two constraints alone will
eliminate 80% or so of these companies I suspect.

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thisisit
When I was reading rationale on Broadcom's hostile takeover of Qualcomm, the
oft repeated mantra is - semiconductor growth has stagnated. So, now the
industry is consolidating.

In which case, what exactly is the growth expected out of these companies?

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ThomPete
can someone fix the typo in the headline?

