$30M Raised to Redo the CPU

Re:$30M Raised to Redo the CPU by AlotOfReading on Tuesday November 10, 2026 @10:33PM (#50449476)

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?

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Re:$30M Raised to Redo the CPU by yieldcrv on Tuesday November 10, 2026 @11:22PM (#50449718)

because rewriting your software is easy now, there are plenty of examples of Language Models looking at the architecture in front of them and recompiling themselves, their inference engine and harnes for faster inference on it or whatever their need may be

others have made entire OS's or gone back in time reinventing of removal of the OS and just running a single application with its own I/O stack per application

this is a guess that exotic architecture on old nodes means that the hardware can come out now at a lower price - or at least fulfill market needs at the price the market can bare without the delay - all because using exotic architecture is easy now, unstable opaque drivers are no longer an issue, and there is just a need to fulfill compute demands efficiently

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Re:$30M Raised to Redo the CPU by AlotOfReading on Tuesday November 10, 2026 @11:57PM (#50449898)

If software stacks and compatibility didn't matter, AMD GPUs would be in nearly the same demand as Nvidia's. But we know they aren't and that's despite the fact that porting between GPUs is much easier than what we're talking about here.

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Re:$30M Raised to Redo the CPU by yieldcrv on Wednesday November 11, 2026 @12:46AM (#50450092)

its honestly just network effects at this point

this technology to make it easy is only a couple quarters old

the antiquated understanding of “CUDA being sooo stable and AMD drivers not” just takes a while to be revised

hyperscalers are buying AMD GPUs

AMD’s stock has tripled this year based on investment into their driver stack getting better and others realizing they don’t need to wait for AMD to leverage the compute

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Re:$30M Raised to Redo the CPU by imtringued on Wednesday November 11, 2026 @03:10AM (#50450882)

No that proves the point. It took the invention of LLMs and agentic software development for AMD to fix their drivers.

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Re:$30M Raised to Redo the CPU by yieldcrv on Wednesday November 11, 2026 @04:08AM (#50451190)

A point that stopped being relevant as soon as it was proven possible, I don't know what kind of validation you need to see about exotic hardware being easier to develop for, but being slower to pick that up doesn't change the viability of the exotic hardware built on more available nodes now that there are examples of it being easier to run things on

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Re:$30M Raised to Redo the CPU by nukanse on Wednesday November 11, 2026 @12:50AM (#50450114)

Language models are efficient because they are trained with millions of examples that don't exist for newer architectures, and they are still mediocre to bad on stuff where they hadn't been trained

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Re:$30M Raised to Redo the CPU by selfhoster11 on Wednesday November 11, 2026 @02:16AM (#50450564)

They are also good at TDD loops. With good enough testing harnesses and simulators, they can get things done quickly.

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Re:$30M Raised to Redo the CPU by jurgenburgen on Wednesday November 11, 2026 @05:21AM (#50451736)

> because rewriting your software is easy now

Doesn’t really matter how easy rewriting something is, it’s still a waste of time if it brings no value.

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Re:$30M Raised to Redo the CPU by orbifold on Wednesday November 11, 2026 @12:39AM (#50450061)

What dataflow processors is AMD shipping?

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Re:$30M Raised to Redo the CPU by AlotOfReading on Wednesday November 11, 2026 @12:59AM (#50450155)

The XDNA NPU is a small dataflow processor. Originally derived from xilinx IP.

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Re:$30M Raised to Redo the CPU by ipsum2 on Wednesday November 11, 2026 @03:57AM (#50451128)

Is this a joke? No one uses HVM2, and hasn't been touched in years. It's a single one-off prototype that some guy made.

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