Thread

1. pama · 1789777255 · focus · HN ↗

   Having worked with people doing bringup of specialized chips, I am awed at how the world has changed.

   > When the first chips came back from the foundry in May, the team pointed its internal AI models at designing software to run benchmarks such as SemiAnalysis’s InferenceX. On DeepSeek’s multi-head latent attention kernel benchmark, performance climbed from 0.31 percent of the theoretical ceiling (set by the chip’s compute and memory bandwidth) to 88.94 percent in roughly 40 hours. Ho says this result is repeatable, so the time between when foundries deliver the first chips and when production ramps up can be reduced. “All our schedule assumptions are going to be based on the fact we have this capability now,” he says.

   1. wmf · 1789782465 · focus · HN ↗

      Back in the day you'd write the code before the chip came back but I guess today it's faster to wait.

      1. brookst · 1789826154 · focus · HN ↗

         Makes me wonder about AI and FPGAs. If the cost and effort to (re)program them goes to zero, maybe interesting new applications?

         1. gregsadetsky · 1789843791 · focus · HN ↗

            I’m also very curious! I got a pair of icebreaker boards [0] and they’ve been great to toy around with.

            The tooling is open source, and Fable in a loop - especially when paired with a digital scope that Fable interfaces with (the Saleae’s [1] are great) - gives you a level of verifiability that feels like beyond what software typically gives you. ie it feels more like Lean than code with tests.

            I had ai implement a few toy circuits (sha hashing, 8088 emulation, a tiny llm) but yeah. Still looking for fun applications.

            There have been a few recent fpga threads on hn, check them out. [2][3]

            [0] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;1bitsquared.com&#x2F;products&#x2F;icebreaker" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;1bitsquared.com&#x2F;products&#x2F;icebreaker

            [1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.saleae.com&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.saleae.com&#x2F;

            [2] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=49564064">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=49564064

            [3] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=49531525">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=49531525

            1. brookst · 1789858512 · focus · HN ↗

               Thanks for sharing experience and links. Think I’m going to have to do this.

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