BRIAN SANTO: Interesting, interesting. If you’re an enormous company, like one of the hyperscalers, you’ve probably got the expertise to do this in-house. If you’re a smaller company, AI’s kind of knew, you might not have that expertise in house; you might not want to have that expertise in house, because you might not need it consistently. I imagine that for companies in that class, going out and finding somebody who has the combination of expertise in IP and design expertise is a premium.
MATT GUTIERREZ: It is. And don’t forget the tools part of it as well. So there’s the hardware piece, which you just described accurately Customers are, depending on the size of those customers, making trade offs. It’s the classic build versus buy. If I can find off-the-shelf components — IP, for example — that meet my requirements, my PPA — my Performance, Power and Area requirements — then that’s probably the best path for me to go.
And I can take my precious resources and devote them to doing things that are more differentiated.
And so customers are making those choices among the vendors that they talk to. The more that they can get from one vendor, usually the better. But the tools aspect is also important. And I don’t only mean the kinds of tools that it takes to implement an SOC, I’m also talking about the tools that go along with the processor architecture. Processors by themselves, no matter how cleverly architected, are not valuable if you can’t program them. It’s not a revolutionary thought to understand that most of the effort goes into developing software, and you need to be able to take that investment in software from one processor generation to the next. So the tools are hugely important for programmers to be able to create in an efficient way and also interoperability amongst standards, optimizing their software so that it runs in an efficient way on the hardware resources available.
And also, in the case of edge devices, you got to worry about memory. How much memory is on the device? So code density. Nobody in the cloud worries about code. About how big their program is. Memory is free for the most part in those kinds of applications.
In constrained devices, it’s not. So you’re even looking at things like, Do my compilers create very dense programs? And so some of the compilers are more optimized and better at doing that than others. And so you take all of these things into account — the tools that are required, the operating systems that are available, the library building blocks for doing machine learning applications, and how well do they allow me to map onto the different hardware resources I have — all of those things are taken into account by developers of SOC when they’re looking at making vendor choices.