from Hacker News

Top researchers leave Intel to build startup with 'the biggest, baddest CPU'

by dangle1 on 6/6/25, 2:07 PM with 137 comments

  • by zackmorris on 6/6/25, 6:36 PM

    I hope they design, build and sell a true 256-1024+ multicore CPU with local memories that appears as an ordinary desktop computer with a unified memory space for under $1000.

    I've written about it at length and I'm sure that anyone who's seen my comments is sick of me sounding like a broken record. But there's truly a vast realm of uncharted territory there. I believe that transputers and reprogrammable logic chips like FPGAs failed because we didn't have languages like Erlang/Go and GNU Octave/MATLAB to orchestrate a large number of processes or handle SIMD/MIMD simultaneously. Modern techniques like passing by value via copy-on-write (used by UNIX forking, PHP arrays and Clojure state) were suppressed when mainstream imperative languages using pointers and references captured the market. And it's really hard to beat Amdahl's law when we're worried about side effects. I think that anxiety is what inspired Rust, but there are so many easier ways of avoiding those problems in the first place.

  • by johnklos on 6/6/25, 6:07 PM

    One of the biggest problems with CPUs is legacy. Tie yourself to any legacy, and now you're spending millions of transistors to make sure some way that made sense ages ago still works.

    Just as a thought experiment, consider the fact that the i80486 has 1.2 million transistors. An eight core Ryzen 9700X has around 12 billion. The difference in clock speed is roughly 80 times, and the difference in number of transistors is 1,250 times.

    These are wild generalizations, but let's ask ourselves: If a Ryzen takes 1,250 times the transistor for one core, does one core run 1,250 times (even taking hyperthreading in to account) faster than an i80486 at the same clock? 500 times? 100 times?

    It doesn't, because massive amounts of those transistors go to keeping things in sync, dealing with changes in execution, folding instructions, decoding a horrible instruction set, et cetera.

    So what might we be able to do if we didn't need to worry about figuring out how long our instructions are? Didn't need to deal with Spectre and Meltdown issues? If we made out-of-order work in ways where much more could be in flight and the compilers / assemblers would know how to avoid stalls based on dependencies, or how to schedule dependencies? What if we took expensive operations, like semaphores / locks, and built solutions in to the chip?

    Would we get to 1,250 times faster for 1,250 times the number of transistors? No. Would we get a lot more performance than we get out of a contemporary x86 CPU? Absolutely.

  • by joshstrange on 6/7/25, 12:13 PM

    I tire of “Employees from Y company leave to start their own” and even “Ex-Y employees launch new W”.

    How many times do we have to see these stories play out to realize it doesn’t matter where they came from. These big companies employee a lot of people of varying skill, having it on your resume means almost nothing IMHO.

    Just look at the Humane pin full of “ex-Apple employees”, how’d that work out? And that’s only one small example.

    I hope IO (OpenAi/Jony Ive) fails so spectacularly so that we have an even better example to point to and we can dispel the idea that if you did something impressive early in your career or worked for an impressive company, it doesn’t mean you will continue to do so.

  • by kleiba on 6/6/25, 5:32 PM

    Good luck not infringing on any patents!

    And that's not sarcasm, I'm serious.

  • by Ocha on 6/6/25, 3:00 PM

  • by Foobar8568 on 6/6/25, 4:10 PM

    Bring back the architecture madness era of the 80s/90s.

  • by jmclnx on 6/6/25, 3:17 PM

    >AheadComputing is betting on an open architecture called RISC-V

    I wish them success, plus I hope they do not do what Intel did with its add-ons.

    Hoping for an open system (which I think RISC-V is) and nothing even close to Intel ME or AMT.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_Management_Engine

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_Active_Management_Techno...

  • by aesbetic on 6/6/25, 4:14 PM

    This is more a bad look for Intel than anything truly exciting since they refuse to produce any details lol

  • by esafak on 6/6/25, 3:12 PM

    Can't they make a GPU instead? Please save us!

  • by pstuart on 6/6/25, 5:30 PM

    If Intel were smart (cough), they'd fund lots of skunkworks startups like this that could move quickly and freely, but then be "guided home" into intel once mature enough.

  • by ngneer on 6/6/25, 7:00 PM

    I wonder if there is any relation to the cancelled Royal and Beast Lake projects.

    https://www.notebookcheck.net/Intel-CEO-abruptly-trashed-Roy...

  • by rajnathani on 6/9/25, 10:43 AM

    Side: Just like I mentioned in another HN comment [0] (and got 5-6 upvotes), I wish that HN titles could be expanded to have more necessary information when possible, which in this case is the name of the startup "AheadComputing", and if we're fortunate to even have RISC-V somehow mentioned in the title.

    [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44105572

  • by saulpw on 6/6/25, 3:49 PM

    The traitorous four.

  • by phendrenad2 on 6/6/25, 8:24 PM

    Previous discussion 9 months ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41353155

  • by mixmastamyk on 6/6/25, 3:34 PM

    I was hoping they’d work with existing RV folks rather than starting another one of a dozen smaller attempts. Article says however that Keller from Tenstorrent will be on their board. Good I suppose, but hard to know the ramifications. Why not merge their companies and investments in one direction?

  • by energy123 on 6/6/25, 5:34 PM

    I like the retro-ish and out of trend name they've chosen: AheadComputing.

  • by logicchains on 6/6/25, 5:21 PM

    I wonder if it'll be ready before the Mill CPU?

  • by guywithahat on 6/6/25, 4:22 PM

    As someone who knows almost nothing about CPU architecture, I've always wondered if there could be a new instruction set, better suited to today's needs. I realize it would require a monumental software effort but most of these instruction sets are decades old. RISC-V is newer but my understanding is it's still based around ARM, just without royalties (and thus isn't bringing many new ideas to the table per say)

  • by bluesounddirect on 6/6/25, 10:45 PM

  • by ahartmetz on 6/6/25, 3:18 PM

    I don't know, RISC-V doesn't seem to be very disruptive at this point? And what's the deal with specialized chips that the article mentions? Today, the "biggest, baddest" CPUs - or at least CPU cores - are the general-purpose (PC and, somehow, Apple mobile / tablet) ones. The opposite of specialized.

    Are they going to make one with 16384 cores for AI / graphics or are they going to make one with 8 / 16 / 32 cores that can each execute like 20 instructions per cycle?

  • by constantcrying on 6/6/25, 3:34 PM

    The article is so bad. Why do they refuse to say anything about what these companies are actually trying to make. RISC-V Chips exist, does the journalist just not know? Does the company refuse to say what they are doing?

  • by whobre on 6/7/25, 4:34 PM

    They should have named it Zilog…

  • by 1970-01-01 on 6/6/25, 3:38 PM

    Staring at current AI chip demand levels and choosing to go with RISC chips is the boldest move you could make. Good luck. The competition with the big boys will be relentless. I expect them to be bought if they actually make a dent in the market.

  • by neuroelectron on 6/6/25, 6:08 PM

    Tldr: RISC-V ASICs