
Facebook Is Forming a Team to Design Its Own Chips - jonbaer
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-04-18/facebook-is-forming-a-team-to-design-its-own-chips?href=
======
Talyen42
People are making fun of facebook/google for expanding beyond core competency,
but this is a market (AI training / inference) where Nvidia has a very real
monopoly that facebook and google must rely on for core competency products,
so it's critically important that one or both of them break the monopoly by
becoming a fabless chip designer and partnering with TSMC (or whoever) to make
training and inference chips. It's absolutely the right decision today, and if
there was one viable alternative to Nvidia (which AMD and Intel are not), it
wouldn't be necessary.

~~~
opencl
The entire reason that AMD hardware isn't considered a viable alternative to
NVIDIA is that it doesn't run CUDA, which is going to be true of these custom
chips too.

The chips FB are working on are probably far more similar to Google's TPUs
than anything NVIDIA makes though.

~~~
tsomctl
This is something that I've wondered about. There is nothing about Tensorflow
(for example) that is specific to CUDA. Why doesn't AMD dedicate a couple of
engineers to port it? They don't even have to do a complete job. Only about
half of the Tensorflow operations are used for most models.

~~~
patrickg_zill
If they make CUDA the industry standard by porting it to AMD, and then Nvidia
is still able to control the standard, over the long term AMD will always be
in the position of having to catch up.

~~~
jandrese
I think the GP is suggesting AMD port TensorFlow to OpenCL to break up the
CUDA monopoly.

------
bhouston
So they are going to design their own chips for the consumer devices (Oculus
Go and the speakers)? Those are two very different use cases, heavy 3D and
speakers generally are simple. I am not sure Facebook will have sufficient
volume of either of those to justify making its own chips. Apple sold 250M
iPhones in 2017. Facebook sold less than 1M Oculus Rifts in 2018.

The other place that Facebook could use its own chips is in its datacenter.
This would make a little more sense as it is easier to deploy custom chips
into a datacenter you fully control. There are theoretically cost and energy
savings possible from switching from Xeon D to ARM in the datacenter at
Facebook's scale.

~~~
reacweb
I think the point is not to become a chip producer, but to cut a hard point of
dependency. My point is easier to understand for software development. Imagine
a society outsourcing 100% of its software development. If it has a problem
with a provider, it has no other solution than to ask another one. As all
providers have similar business logic, the problem may not be solved. Imagine
the society outsources only 95% of its software development. It has a lot more
power over its providers because it can decide to do conflictual projects in-
house. IMHO all societies should keep technical expertise of their key
technologies by having some internal developments (software and if possible
hardware).

------
jpmattia
This is likely the FB job listing:
[https://www.facebook.com/careers/jobs/a0I1H00000LgnqFUAR/](https://www.facebook.com/careers/jobs/a0I1H00000LgnqFUAR/)
Looks like all of the difficulty of building a hardware startup, while
maintaining all of the downside of being part of a large company.

[IIRC, Cisco used the "spin-in" model to great advantage in order to address
some of the downside. However, that was 10-20 years ago, and I don't know any
recent examples.]

~~~
supahfly_remix
A more recent example for Cisco was Insieme from 2013, which became ACI and
Nexus 9k products.

[https://www.fiercetelecom.com/telecom/cisco-sharpens-sdn-
foc...](https://www.fiercetelecom.com/telecom/cisco-sharpens-sdn-
focus-683m-insieme-purchase)

------
nl
Yann LeCun posted the ad for this yesterday on FB.

Maybe they are doing Oculus too, but it sounds a lot to me like they are doing
custom A.I. related silicon.

There's a well proven path showing that custom silicon can save energy
relatively easily on inference ML tasks. Competing with NVidia on training is
harder of course, but maybe possible for specific tasks.

------
deboboy
Frightening to think of how FB will manage a chip platform given their
reckless behavior with our data. I hope it never leaves the whiteboard.

~~~
kickopotomus
You do realize that FB has been designing their own servers for years, right?
Also, what does personal data privacy have to do with silicon design? I know
that FB privacy rules are a hot topic right now but how does that have
anything to do with this article?

------
patrickg_zill
They can spend say $5 million in employee time and fpga devkits and know
within a few percent what the chip performance is, and they have a huge corpus
for testing. Doesn't seem to be a huge financial risk.

------
ai2323
This makes perfect sense. It's all about economics both w respect to intel and
nvidia. You can't be paying 8-10k per gpu, and you are not going to pay that
when you can make something far cheaper and faster. Google got this done in
what two years?? All the debates around the tech comparisons miss the economic
picture. Who cares if 4tpu's being compared to one volta. Point is those 4
chips together cheaper than buying one v100. Bitcoin mining no different. Do
you care how many chips (196) are in an antminer s9? No! What matters is that
it mines 13000x faster than a gpu for roughly double the price. Facebook,
Amazon and the likes have every incentive to go down this custom ASIC path.
Google is now hiring sales folks for their tpu cloud. There is a reason they
are not selling the hardware. It's more valuable to them to get tenants the
other hyperscale competition can't match. So think all the hyperscale guys now
looking for ways to keep up which obviously is horrible for nvidia. A lot of
people have missed how much of nvidia's story been about essentially killing
it on one very narrow use case, ml training, in a very short time. This is
basically 50%+ of all profit growth they have achieved last two years. Nvidia
has got some serious challenges ahead.

------
cpeterso
Would these new chips be based on ARM, RISC-V, or some new ISA?

------
mtgx
Hardware-level user tracking? You just know they must be thinking about doing
this.

~~~
LinuxBender
Sorry you are getting down-voted. In fact, Intel and AMD have thousands of
undocumented instructions that folks have only started [1] to enumerate. Even
then, some of the instructions may not be visible through this method of
enumeration. FB would have the option to add their own instructions. I would
be curious to see how transparent they might be around the production and
documentation of these chips.

[1]
[https://github.com/xoreaxeaxeax/sandsifter](https://github.com/xoreaxeaxeax/sandsifter)

------
amelius
Intel ME on steroids ...

~~~
squarefoot
Possibly. Copyright laws protect closed source hardware/software everywhere,
so anyone putting spyware into a closed source chip would gain one more
perfectly legal layer of protection against auditors.

------
Romanulus
Heartbleed? Get ready for Facegash!

~~~
noir_lord
I prefer Clusterzuck.

As in "The handling of Cambridge Analytica was a complete clusterzuck from the
start".

------
raister
I love when companies wander beyond their core business and venture on
something they are not familiar! That idea has everything to work it out just
fine, don't worry!

~~~
adventured
Microsoft should stick to basic interpreters.

Apple should only do desktop PCs. Music players, that's ridiculous.

Oracle should only do databases.

Google should stick to search. What do they know about operating systems? They
also have no business running their own datacenters, what could they possibly
know about allocating ten billion dollars in capital annually to such an
operation.

Amazon is a retailer. Cloud services, artificial intelligence, devices, is
that a joke?

Intel makes memory chips, what do they know about processors?

Facebook has $41 billion in cash. They're about to start piling up $20 billion
per year. Zero debt.

They can do almost anything they want to within reason and not worry about the
financial consequences. Their shareholders will be a lot more upset if they
don't take pragmatic business risks and pursue opportunity.

~~~
CamTin
"They can do almost anything they want to within reason and not worry about
the financial consequences."

No, they need to make the soundest possible investments with that money. Lots
of free cash flow is not license to do "anything they want to within reason,"
especially for a publicly-traded company (sure, if you're talking about a
private partnership and all the partners agree, go nuts, I guess). If they
don't actually need it to run the business making the profits, they should
return it to shareholders since, you know, that's whose money it is.

~~~
dingaling
But there's no point paying dividends to shareholders who aren't demanding
them.

Why would a company 'throw away' surplus cash to passive uncomplaining
shareholders instead of intercepting it upstream and ploughing it back into
tax-reducing activities? Like burning cash on R&D that provides opportunities
for pivoting in the future. Now that is prudent and sound.

Eventually shareholders might gain enough voting power to demand dividends but
there's no point in piling-up taxable cash until that happens.

