bippingchip

Same here. What’s this about? Anyone who can see willing to share some more info?

These gate and metal pitch numbers don’t tell the whole story. In the end it’s logic gate density that counts.

And while decreasing the gate and metal pitch, also the logic gates have shrunk to be smaller (typically expressed by measuring the height of a gate in amount of metal tracks) from 9tracks down to 6tracks.

Changing the transistor from planar to fins, and now hopefully to ribbons with eventually stacked pmos and nmos are a big enabler.

That said, we’re still not hitting the ideal scaling numbers. We’re just doing somewhat better than what’s suggested by poly and metal pitch only.

This looks like a treasure trove on what it takes in terms of algorithms to enable tools like Cadence Innovus or Synopsys ICC. It’s not a user guide on how to use these tools, but rather a perk behind the curtain.

I’ve worked with Andrew, one of the authors on occasion in the past, and he and his team of students are among the best academic teams in the world on this topic.

I do think a lot of the secret sauce lives as trade secret with Cadence, Synopsys, Mentor… They see all the real problems in designs from all their customers in bleeding edge nodes like 3nm and beyond.

Thank you for the write up! Very enlightening to see how things went for you. I was on the fence recently whether to go for contractor work but ended up just switching companies in the end. In part because I didn’t know what to expect. Articles like these hwould have helped!

Thank you! For now I am just binding c++ to Python but I expect/fear the lines might start blurring, so cython might come in handy then.

Thank you! - I’ll give pybind11 a go.

Thank you! Swig indeed can be a pain but having used it before I have become somewhat blind to it. But eg smart pointers are not easy to deal with well, I’ve found out recently… I’ll have a look at pybind11. I’ve worked on Cython codebases too, which indeed allows to really nicely compile Python code and interact with c code. It does get weird when using eg pyqt and native qt…

This is a somewhat tangential question to the new release, but there might be folks here that can answer this question.

Having used swig to create Python bindings for C++ code over 10 years ago, what’s the recommended way to do this in 2023? There’s still swig, there’s Cython, pybind11 and a few others. I do know swig and how complicated it can get with footguns abound when things grow more complex.

Is Cython the way to go? How does it hold up to the alternatives? Google search gives many articles on the topic, but many typical SEO optimized low-value, and those that do show a bit of depth, focus on the basic mechanics, not really on things hold up for larger projects…

If you just need a nice print: fmtlib is a really nice c++23 style implementation without needing c++23 compiler support. Highly recommend it. It’s simple. It’s fast.

Not really knowing Vercel, I thought, based on the title, that it might have been a new GPU competitor (accelerator card) but it’s a startup accelerator.

A lot of companies are indeed trying to build AI accelerator cards, but I would not necessarily call them ASICs in the narrow sense of the word, they are by necessity always quite programmable and flexible: NN workloads characteristics change much much faster than you can design and manufacture chips.

I would say they are more like GPUs or DSPs: programmable but optimised for a specific application domain, ML/AI workloads in this case. Sometimes people call this ASIPs: application specific instruction set processors. While maybe not a very commonly used term, it is technically more correct.

+1 for UTM. I use it to run an arm Linux distro that uses Rosetta for x86 binary only programs. Works like a charm and blazingly fast!

The article overlooks a fundamental side of the social contract that is at least equally, if not more, important: how much time and effort (not money) do personally invest to spend time with your friends.

In my view, it's only awkward when the money side of things is not aligned with the personal investment.

That dinner example from the article actually shows this: I buy you all Olive garden dinner, or: I take the time to invite you to my home, spend some time clean the house think on what to by and prepare, what music to play, maybe a movie to watch after etc. in order to have a good time together. This is a much more thoughtful and mutually beneficial form of investment in friendship than just throwing money at it.

Another example could be: Hey, I bought a new board game (or PS5 or something else), wanna come over and play? You might have spent quite some money, but the goal is to be able to invest in spending time with your friends.

The moment that is (or is perceived to be) your main intent, most folks would have a hard time looking at this as bribery.