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Nvidia R&D chief on how AI is improving chip design
- b20000 4y agothe last time I checked autorouters were still not capable of doing all the routing on a multi layer PCB properly, and manual work was still required to produce a decent design.
- TomVDB 4y agoHow is that a relevant comment in a discussion about ASIC design? I hope you don't have the idea that chip routing is done manually.
- tboerstad 4y agoAre the analog parts (current nitrist etc) autorouted now? I worked on MCU layout around 2011, and only the digital logic was autorouted/placed.
- TomVDB 4y agoMy comment is in the context of this topic: large digital ASICs with billions of wires, where the only analog parts are PLLs, DLLs, and digital IOs.
- beambot 4y agoIIRC, Place & Route is a known NP complete problem. In this regard, autorouters (whether IC or PCB) can benefit from "better" heuristics -- i.e. it's an optimization problem where AI can help.
- TomVDB 4y agoPCB routing is generally considered a much harder problem. There are a bunch of reasons that add up, but one of them is almost certainly that a PCB is supposed to look good too. The routing on an IC is total chaos (which actually reduces crosstalk issues), but nobody will ever notice.
- raverbashing 4y agoThat's an interesting point PCBs "look good" because of different production contraints (and I guess because you're mostly connecting tight-timed busses together) In ICs you're doing the above but also pulling signals from 10 different places together.
- Taniwha 4y agoSo here's my autorouter first-guess analog computer design: On a basketball court create a pile of metal plates with bar codes and hooks, each one represents a gate, robot uses rubber bands of sizes vaguely representing timing budget from synthesis to hook the gates together. Robot picks up the whole thing using rubber bands representing the external ports and gives the whole thing a few shakes. Puts it all back down, goes over each metal plate and reads the bar code and resting position - that's your initial routing guess - anneal from there
- atq2119 4y agoWhat you've described is actually for placement, not routing, and is in fact a good analogy for the first step in many placement algorithms. Interestingly, placement is much harder than routing from a complexity theory point of view (specifically, there are fairly strong inapproximability results for placement-style problems).
- Taniwha 4y agotrue - most chip tools I've used for layout do both place and route (and iterate, moving std cells apart to create routing resources) so I've always sort of thought of place&route as a single thing (though I've also interrupted it before initial routing to do scan insertion)
- orangebeet 4y agoI really hope that they can apply some of these AI approaches on the driver situation on Linux as well. I will never buy an Nvidia product after the nightmares they've put me through.
- _blz2 4y agoI remember him from the vlsi text dally and poulton.
- rektide 4y agoDid nvidia just promise us singularity? :) Hard to read a talk like this from a pulpit & not see shout outs to the incredibly super-fantastic open-source innovative projects like OpenROAD which have been shipping amazingly well-routed-by-AI chips for a while now. There's papers you can cite, galore, many open source designs[1]. It's not like Nvidia is promising anyone else will benefit from this work. This seems to be very high level coverage their R&D department is looking at, perhaps/perhaps not using. The article makes it hard to find out what is available, what has been published or otherwise deeply discussed (which is I think the best we can hope from Nvidia not real participation). There's only one paper linked, on NVCell[2], described as: > The first is a system we have called NVCell, which uses a combination of simulated annealing and reinforcement learning to basically design our standard cell library. This just feels like so much else going on in computing. WSL coming to windows, the recent Unity vs Unreal topic[3]. It's hard to imagine refusing to participate with others. It's hard to imagine not being part of the open source community working shoulder to shoulder to push for better. NVidia patently doesn't get it, patently isn't participating, patently isn't there. It's cool we can hear what they are up to, but it's also extremely NVidia that they're doing it all on their own. Anyhow, Looking forward to more AI based chip power system design starting to emerge; that sounds like a good idea NV. [1] https://theopenroadproject.org/ https://theopenroadproject.org/ [2] https://research.nvidia.com/publication/2021-12_nvcell-standard-cell-layout-advanced-technology-nodes-reinforcement-learning https://research.nvidia.com/publication/2021-12_nvcell-stand... [3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31064552 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31064552 (412 points, 3 days ago, 311 comments)
- nomel 4y ago> but it's also extremely NVidia that they're doing it all on their own. Having a lead in chip design is their literal bread and butter. I think it's extremely "publicly traded company" more than "NVidia". Do you have an example of a company releasing an open source version of their secret sauce (foundation of their profits)?
- bawolff 4y agoNetscape. Worked out great for them /s (albeit writing was already on the wall for them by that point.)
- bsder 4y agoWhat is extremely telling is what is missing ... Design Rule Checking (DRC) and Layout Vs Schematic (LVS). These require: 1) Longer bit length arithmetic 32-bit float simply isn't enough. 64-bit float is close, but limited. You really want 128-bit integer. And nVidia isn't delivering that. 2) Real algorithmic improvements We're still stuck with computational geometry algorithms that don't parallelize. It would be awfully useful if nVidia would actually research some new algorithms instead of just waving around the ML/AI marketing wand. But, then, this is the company that built itself on benchmarketing, so ...
- Dylan16807 4y ago> You really want 128-bit integer. And nVidia isn't delivering that. How much slower (per unit area) is that to do in software, compared to a full 128-bit hardware unit?
- erwincoumans 4y ago"as of 11.5, CUDA and nvcc support __int128_t in device code when the host compiler supports it (e.g., clang/gcc, but not MSVC). 11.6 added support for debug tools with __int128_t." See: https://developer.nvidia.com/blog/cuda-11-6-toolkit-new-release-revealed/ https://developer.nvidia.com/blog/cuda-11-6-toolkit-new-rele... https://developer.nvidia.com/blog/implementing-high-precision-decimal-arithmetic-with-cuda-int128/ https://developer.nvidia.com/blog/implementing-high-precisio...
- FutureZeitgeist 4y agoCan you explain why you need greater precision/range?
- tboerstad 4y agoDRC and LVS are just logical checks right? “Is the minimal distance between all metal routing > 10 nm” etc. Can you explain why high precision is needed for that?
- atq2119 4y ago
- W-Stool 4y agoI've got a whole "HAL9000" feeling going here right now. "Sorry Dave - I can't quite do that ..."
- productceo 4y agoPlease keep up the processing power progress! Economics of the software industry (or at least the products that I work on) depend on the assumption that cost of computing (including storage) diminish exponentially over time! <3
- kevincox 4y agoYou say this like it is a good thing. It seems to me that if a whole industry is dependant on exponential growth of another than the former is being quite reckless. Of course exponential growth will help, but relying on it seems like a bit too much risk.
- hurflmurfl 4y agoI think that's the point GP is making with his sarcastic remark :)
- maxwells-daemon 4y agoI work on this team! (Specifically: applied deep learning research, chip design). It's a shame to see so many people dismissing this work as marketing. I see lots of clever people working hard on really novel and interesting stuff, and I really do think that ML has real potential to customize a design much more "deeply" than traditional automation tools.
- xbmcuser 4y agoIt is the same with a lot of the machine learning stuff posted here the 2nd or 3rd comment is that how it could be achieved with normal algos etc. But slowly as more people start applying to different problems machine learning is solving many of them.
- selimthegrim 4y agoHa, this does sound awesome. Are you guys hiring?
- marginalia_nu 4y agoThis is directed at AI marketing in general: "AI" has been used to market so much nonsense it's probably becoming a problem communicating actual interesting uses of AI. I very much get a dot com vibe off it, like nobody on the team knows how it works but we're sure we're gonna be rich somehow! In my head, I've begun substituting AI with "wizards" when I read it. It's very much the sort of problems crypto is having. So many grifters actual interesting uses of the technology are very hard to identify and take seriously.
- q-big 4y ago> "AI" has been used to market so much nonsense it's probably becoming a problem communicating actual interesting uses of AI. On the other hand: if the people who do serious work in this area don't call out this nonsense, they must accept that their (serious) work becomes devalued. > It's very much the sort of problems crypto is having. So many grifters actual interesting uses of the technology are very hard to identify and take seriously. Here, the same holds.
- ImportOllie 4y agoI don't understand the backlash here. The jist seemed to be traditional tools that are exact take a long time to process complex designs. Deep learning offers a statistical approach that can give a 'coarse' prediction and they're using this to reduce development time. That seems to make sense to me, especially in the earlier verification phases of the hardware design lifecycle. To me this sounds like a good use-case of AI and Neural Nets. It doesn't appear to be looking to replace the traditional tools, just augment.
- jonnycomputer 4y agoI seem to recall that the original title of the post was more sensationalist; something about replacing human designers.
- Linda703 4y ago[dead]