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$30M Raised to Redo the CPU

$30M Raised to Redo the CPU

shioyama

Comments (118)

  • Animats
    This is a "build it and they will come" project. It's not a "we put the inner loop of ML entirely in hardware" project. That would make more sense technically. You could cram a lot of little independent neural net inference units on one chip. But if it was pitched that way, the questions would be "Why isn't NVidia doing this", and "After you do it, what keeps NVidia from doing it". There are lots of people pitching "AI chips", with modest success.The history of general-purpose massively parallel machines isn't good. From the Illiac IV to the Playstation 3, there's been dud after dud in this space. You can build them, but the users don't come. This sort of architecture is great if you have some specific problem that parallelizes, such as finite-element analysis or neural networks.(I've used an NCube, and I kind of liked the Transputer concept. But both were dead ends.)
  • tyingq
    Hmm. The story over at https://millcomputing.com/ always looked compelling.Pitchbook shows it as "Out of Business" since 2019.
  • librasteve
    By my reckoning you can build about 256 small fast CPUs each with 16kiB RAM and IO on an M4 die area. Most of a modern CPUs gates are wasted on out of order execution and cache coherency.https://bil-lang.org is a more explicit language that imo is needed for coders (or LLMs) to grapple with hammering algorithms onto a CPU array. But AI is a big lever to overcome this historic barrier.
  • AlotOfReading
    This feels a decade late. I don't really see the value prop for customers in 2026 (or realistically, 2030+). Let's say I'm willing to rewrite all my software to a language that compiles down into interaction nets. Why don't I use HVM2 instead and buy GPUs from Nvidia? If I just want to use an exotic architecture, AMD is shipping dataflow processors at scale today, and they'll license related IP. And if I just want a massively parallel architecture to run my existing ML code on, I could just rent google cloud TPUs instead.Who's the customer that wants an exotic architecture on an old process node running a custom programming language half a decade from now?
  • nukanse
    As a programmer, I always wanted a cpu which instead of having n 64 bit registers, had a single register with 2^m bits, which could be split in arbitrary length sub registers, not all the same size, and could be treated as an array of bits, or a swar machine
  • MiroslavPokorny
    What about putting a million 6502s or 65816 or maybe a 32 bit address capable on single die ? Surely a million of them would get more done than a single modern X86 or ARM for a lot less power and price ?
  • jojohohanon
    I thought greenarrays was incredibly cool. (144 native-forth cores on a chip)I loved the mill architecture (self declared clean sheet cpu).I thought transmeta had a good chance because they could inline across kernel boundaries.But none of them was special enough.
  • Lichtso
    1985: Inmos - Transputer2006: Sony & Toshiba & IBM (STI) - Cell Broadband Engine2009: GreenArrays - GA1442012: Adapteva - Parallella2021: Esperanto Technologies - ET-SoC-12024: Inspiresemi - Thunderbird
  • hingler36
    New CPU architectures have lived and died by supporting existing software, with Rosetta on Apple Silicon being an example of it working and Itanium an example of it falling apart.All the best to anyone trying to design a new paradigm of processor, but I'm interested to hear how they'll avoid the pitfalls of their predecessors.
  • kiradoki
    Become the revenger of the philosophy "the right thing" if you can inherit the legacies given by interaction nets.
  • MiroslavPokorny
    I always wonder where will x86 be in 10 or 20 years time. As data paths widen for SIMD, how many can they possibly cram , such as more generations of wider and wider groups of instruction with different opcodes and characteristics.
  • fuddle
    This is my first time hearing about Vine - https://vine.dev/ I have to say the landing page is terrible, at least show an example of the language.
  • mikewarot
    I think we all have projects and ideas like this that go back decades. In my case, it's the BitGrid, which is a theoretical sea of look up tables that are clocked in alternating phases like a chessboard, to eliminate race conditions and the need to worry about timing.I couldn't quite follow the diagrams of the theory page, but I'd be willing to bet a very small sum of cash that it'll eventually be something very much like the BitGrid.
  • stmw
  • brainless
    This is above my pay grade but since LLMs have become the 24/7 code writers, I started to wonder if our processing architecture could see much more innovation. I see light-enabled processing, analog processing and other headlines on posts/YouTube. Most are focused on inference though. But there is also the need to run generated code on cheaper, efficient chips.I guess these are all really expensive and need VC funding. But perhaps there are existing architectures that allow baking code into silicon, or new architectures for NNs and so on. If costs are low, there is a massive demand coming for code that we want to write and forget - keeps on running on low powered last-mile devices. From factories, farms to home equipment.
  • shrubble
    From the URL:"Instead of starting from a sequential design, we’re building our processor to have thousands of cores operating in parallel. This requires moving beyond the notion of shared mutable memory and linear instruction sequences. To make this possible, we’re working in tandem on the open-source language Vine, which has been designed from the beginning to target a new wave of parallel-first architectures."I wish them well but from their Vine language docs:"For example, a < b < c is equivalent to (a < b) & (b < c)"So how do you parallelize that? You can run the first part on 2 cores in parallel, but there is still a single check, a single cache, a single CPU for this to go through to complete the operation, right?
  • largbae
    Isn't this basically a GPU?
  • quilombodigital
    Am I missing something?I couldn't find any parallel constructs in the language. So, as I understand it, it's a regular language that gets compiled into a graph, and the runtime parallelizes the execution of that graph.This factorial won't run any faster with more cores, since each step depends on the previous one: fn fat(n: N64) -> N64 { if n <= 1 { 1 } else { n * fat(n - 1) } } This other version can run in parallel, but only because the algorithm was deliberately written that way: fn fat(n: N32) -> Nat { if n == 0 { 1 as Nat } else { prod(1, n) } } fn prod(lo: N32, hi: N32) -> Nat { if lo == hi { lo as Nat } else { let m = (lo + hi) / 2; let left = prod(lo, m); let right = prod(m + 1, hi); left * right } } So the programmer still has to think about parallelism; the language just removes the need for threads and locks.Also, as the graph grows, sequential dependencies still limit the speedup, and more cores means more data moving between them. How does the hardware deal with that?
  • anon
    undefined
  • nathan_f77
    Vine sounds like it has a similar philosophy to Bend [1]. I'm sure it would be possible to compile Bend to run on one of these chips as well.[1] https://bend-lang.com/
  • avazhi
    Didn’t Apple already do this?
  • philipwhiuk
    This feels like a bad use of the UK Sovereign AI Fund.
  • exabrial
    Wasn't that what RISCV was supposed to do? apologies, dumb question
  • nonesuchthing
    Have you seen the new CPU architecture? It's on Mill. It's literally on Transputer. It's on Rock with Sun. It's literally on AMULET. You can probably find it on Itanium. Dude it's on Tesla. It's a CDC STAR original. It's on E1. You can program it on E1. You can go to E1 and program it. Get onto E1 right now. Go to E1. Dive into E1. You can E1 it. It's on E1. E1 has it for you. E1 has it for you.In all seriousness congratulations on finding $30 million to launder and lose immediately. Hope your Porsche runs good.
  • trashb
    My first thought was: $30 million that's not a lot for a project of that size. > Instead of starting from a sequential design, we’re building our processor to have thousands of cores operating in parallel. Additionally they try to make a hyper parallel cpu? that seems like it would be hard to program. If they can make it easy to program parallelism it may be interesting. But perhaps they will just reinvent the Lisp machine.
  • mrandish
    The chip might be great but they really need to rework their overview blurb. I'm no CPU designer but even I know every single thing they mention like it's bold, new 'think different' stuff, hasn't been a 'new idea' since at least the 1990s. For example:> Instead of starting from a sequential design, we’re building our processor to have thousands of cores operating in parallel. This requires moving beyond the notion of shared mutable memory and linear instruction sequences.Hey! Sounds like Thinking Machines, that hot new startup out of MIT. Yeah, their Connection Machine was bleeding edge stuff... in 1983 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thinking_Machines_Corporation). Look, I get that it's an overview but they need to at least hand-wave at something new and different before talking like it's new and different.
  • eluusive
    How do I get people to give me $30 M to work on nonsense?
  • bix6
    > Sources say that the company is already discussing a fast follow-up raise that would potentially value the firm at more than $1 billion. Neither round has previously been reported. Benchmark declined to comment.https://www.newcomer.co/p/scoop-benchmark-backs-early-stageVC is such a meme lmao. What’s next, Sam gonna acquire the company? No product needed!
  • throwaway2037
    How will this be better than RISC V?
  • thesz
    > Tendrils is answering the question: what if we redo the CPU? Instead of starting from a sequential design, we’re building our processor to have thousands of cores operating in parallel. This requires moving beyond the notion of shared mutable memory and linear instruction sequences. To make this possible, we’re working in tandem on the open-source language Vine, which has been designed from the beginning to target a new wave of parallel-first architectures. So they used a new and unknown language Vine.Ten days ago there was a post that linked a Haskell-specialized CPU, please: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50319896The link to the CPU demo: https://bathtub-01.github.io/technical/ouros-demo/The Ouros CPU is a dataflow CPU, which means it is very, very scalable. It does not, from what I read there, contain content-addressable memory, which is a bottleneck for dataflow architectures. It supports multithreading from the ground, a parallel Haskell program will be executed very efficiently there.There was an Id, a dataflow lenient functional programming language. The Id90 version of it was ported to Thinking Machines Connection Machine (then) supercomputer (I believe it was ported to CM-4 and CM-5).Id90 programs running on Connection Machine demonstrated linear scaling to the available compute and, sometimes, even superlinear scaling - Id90's Content Addressable Memory was implemented in software and when CAM slice become smaller, there were less cache misses. Some of Id90 programs produced so much parallel computations that compiler had to introduce throttling so CAM will not overflow.Here's a thesis on compilation of lenient functional programming languages to CM-5: https://www2.eecs.berkeley.edu/Pubs/TechRpts/1994/5850.htmlI guess it shows that functional programming languages can be efficiently executed through parallel dataflow architectures and that dataflow architectures scale efficiently with compute.I am putting it all here because I see the same pattern over and over again. People create some new language with some unknown properties (Rust, for example, got Turing-complete type system before being able to control for I/O) instead of first taking Haskell and embed their ideas there or, even, add an extension to play and/or investigate.In this particular case, they take some Vine programming language instead of Haskell, despite Haskell already having several specialized CPU implementations, including dataflow one, guaranteeing scaling. And Haskell has a pretty mature infrastructure and tons of libraries.Why? I don't know.
  • 0xKapi
    I'm quite interested to see how this evolves. But part of me is still being sad, because hardware is rarely the bottleneck these days - as opposed to software.
  • jordemort
    it’s the Transputer again, or the Emotion Engine again, depending on how old you are
  • tintor
    This is amazing!
  • christkv
    There is also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XMOS which was funded by people behind the transputer.
  • briansm
    Maybe now the cpu arena is a patent graveyard instead of a patent minefield, some fresh developments can appear.
  • SanjayMehta
    FTA:"Instead of starting from a sequential design, we’re building our processor to have thousands of cores operating in parallel. This requires moving beyond the notion of shared mutable memory and linear instruction sequences. To make this possible, we’re working in tandem on the open-source language Vine, which has been designed from the beginning to target a new wave of parallel-first architectures."Reminds me of the Transputer and Occam. Each transputer had 4 comm links to form a flexible network of processors and Occam supported parallelism. Also one of the first languages to use indentation for block structures.For a long time I missed their folding editor.
  • mohamedkoubaa
    Let's not call it a CPU if it doesn't have SoTa single threaded performancr
  • tonymet
    let's re-do the OS too. we only need about 10 syscalls. authorization is totally backwards (look how android runs a user per process).
  • astrodust
    Was about time we had another Transmeta.
  • Onavo
    Bet you they will turn into yet another ML accelerator company within the year.
  • qotgalaxy
    [dead]
  • Yeabu369
    [dead]
  • exmadscientist
    TL;DR: it's basically Niagara/GreenArrays/etc again.Not sure why this one will succeed where its forebears didn't.
  • Alice_0307
    [dead]
  • phendrenad2
    [flagged]
  • JK-Swizzle
    [dead]