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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.


Ah, sorry, then I carried over an assumption from OpenGL (where GLSL is actually what's packaged, or at least was a couple of years ago when I last looked at it).

In any case, that intermediate representation is probably still easier to compile to hardware-specific code, especially if the hardware has a Direct3D implementation. That's what it's designed for, after all!


OpenGL also supports SPIR-V, a similar intermediate format, since 2017 (it came into core in OpenGL 4.6).


Technically true but if you are going to use SPIR-V you might as well jump over to Vulkan. Do you know of any OpenGL games that actually ship SPIR-V? I can imagine it getting used in CAD applications with huge legacy OpenGL code bases but for Games OpenGL+SPIR-V doesn't really have a good use case.


I guess not a lot of games really use OpenGL at all anymore? But I haven't gone around and tried making a survey. :-)


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.


TSMC 7nm has all the required stuff to build a DC-DC converter from 3V or 1.8V. Nobody would use on-chip inductors for high power DC-DC.

As for skillset, there are a bunch of IP companies with silicon proven designs available. I'm sure they didn't design their SERDES or PLL(s) in-house either.


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.


7nm core voltage is 0.75V. If they want good reliability, 0.7V underdrive is understandable. So, 2.2kA at 0.7V sounds reasonable to me.


how much of that power actually reaches the chip though? (it's hilarious that this is one chip)? this thing is mostly a water pump - I just can't - everything about it is just wild


Most of it. The water pump and other stuff consumes probably less than 500W total. There's some efficiency loss in the actual power converters, but they're likely designed to be >95% efficient (probably >98%), otherwise cooling them would be a nightmare.


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.


It means it's designed as a direct drop in replacent for a traditional microblaze ISA code..sure software must be recompiled, but hardware interfaces match what was there before for peripheral access, debug, instruction offload, etc. This makes the transition to using RISC-v much more seamless if you were already using microblaze


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.


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