[HN Gopher] Chips for the Rest of Us
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       Chips for the Rest of Us
        
       Author : hasheddan
       Score  : 22 points
       Date   : 2025-12-03 20:57 UTC (2 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (engineering.nyu.edu)
 (TXT) w3m dump (engineering.nyu.edu)
        
       | alecco wrote:
       | > Consequently, the NYU researchers' goal is to make chip design
       | more accessible, so nonengineers, whatever their background can
       | create their own custom-made chips.
       | 
       | What?
        
         | bigyabai wrote:
         | I'm just as confused as you are, honestly. It feels like we've
         | seen the "ASIC for everything" campaign so many times over, and
         | yet only FPGAs and CUDA typically find adoption in the
         | industry.
         | 
         | A lot of my questions went away when I got to this line though:
         | 
         | > He's also fully engaged in the third leg of the
         | "democratizing chip design" stool: education.
         | 
         | This is a valiant effort. Chip design is a hard world to break
         | into, and many applications that _could_ benefit from ASICs
         | aren 't iterating or testing on it because it sucks to do. It's
         | a lot of work to bring that skill ceiling down, but as a
         | programmer I could see how an LLVM-style intermediate
         | representation layer could help designers get up-and-running
         | faster.
        
       | fleshmonad wrote:
       | We have textual slop, visual slop, audio slop, so we asked: "What
       | else do we want to sloppify?". And then it dawned on me. ICs. ICs
       | haven't been slopped yet -- sure, we could ask the machine to
       | generate some vhdl, but that isn't the same. So we present:
       | Silicon Slop.
       | 
       | I am actually astonished. Is this what happens when the NYU board
       | of directors tells every department they have to use and create
       | AI, or they will stop funding? What is going on?
        
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