
Facebook Builds Chip Team, ASIC - baybal2
https://www.eetimes.com/document.asp?doc_id=1333716
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phire
This is a weird article.

Headline says they are building an ASIC. Provides absolutely no details other
than facebook are hiring hardware engineers. It could be a CPU (CPUs are ASICs
too), it could be a GPU. It could be something related to machine learning, or
it could be enterprise great switching fabric. Who knows?

Then the article goes off on a huge nig tangent about how facebook is working
on a compiler for generic machine learning accelerators. The article explictly
says that this compiler targets all machine learning accelerators, especially
a bunch that are already in development or released by other companies.

These are completely independant chunks of news, nothing facebook has said
links one to the other. Yet by putting both news items in a single article,
the author implies that facebook are working on a machine learning chip, while
providing absolutly no proof.

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Scaevolus
Why would Facebook build a CPU or a GPU? Custom routers generally use _off the
shelf_ switching fabric chips with custom software stacks, but it's board-
level hardware design, not ASIC design.

Machine learning consumes a huge amount of compute, and GPUs waste a lot of
power executing the workloads. Specialized accelerators for it pay back their
investments quickly.

~~~
phire
Facebook is a large company with many projects going on. While I admit that
machine learning accelerators is a likely candidate, there are a huge number
of possibilities for potential ASIC projects.

Facebook owns Oculus, I could easily see Oculus needing a custom ASIC, maybe a
low-latency display driver. Or a high-powered SoC if they decide to do an
untethered Rift. This is also where I could see them potentially making a GPU.
Making a whole SoC is hard, why not take an off the shelf one and attach it to
a custom mobile GPU chip.

It's also possible that Facebook might have a smartphone project on the go
(again). A custom SoC could be useful for that.

Or facebook might be considering post smartphone devices. There are lots of
places where a SoC could be useful.

Facebook has been making their own open servers (and switches) for a while.
But they still built around "backdoored" intel CPUs. I could easily Facebook
wanting a high-performance server grade open CPUs (probably RiscV based).

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iguessthislldo
This title is misleading, they are not building a general CPU (like x86 or
ARM) but a Application Specific IC, which in this case is solely for executing
machine learning programs faster than what a CPU could do.

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person_of_color
Are they hiring?

