Re:Designing Billions of Circuits with Code
by shadowgovt on Wednesday June 22, 2022 @01:57PM
(#31839506)
> Given how important EDA is to chip design you'd think there'd be more openness to innovation.
Hypothesis: the importance of EDA to chip design makes it change-averse.
I once had to chase down a delta between two triangle mesh files that resulted from two different builds of the same compiler, running on two slightly different hardware configurations, compiling the same source into different floating-point code that calculated a result of -0 instead of 0, which resulted in a no-difference rotation on the indices of every vertex on every triangle in the entire file.
Given that it's basically impossible to mathematically validate C++ code, if any change could cause a difference in output in a million-transistor layout, how would an engineer confirm that difference didn't matter? That kind of problem drives the cost way up for changes to the codebase.
Hypothesis: the importance of EDA to chip design makes it change-averse.
I once had to chase down a delta between two triangle mesh files that resulted from two different builds of the same compiler, running on two slightly different hardware configurations, compiling the same source into different floating-point code that calculated a result of -0 instead of 0, which resulted in a no-difference rotation on the indices of every vertex on every triangle in the entire file.
Given that it's basically impossible to mathematically validate C++ code, if any change could cause a difference in output in a million-transistor layout, how would an engineer confirm that difference didn't matter? That kind of problem drives the cost way up for changes to the codebase.