2024 might be the breakout year for efficient ARM chips in desktop and laptop PCs.

2024 might be the breakout year for efficient ARM chips in desktop and laptop PCs.

  • fubarxEnglish
    12·
    6 months ago

    How long before indie devs can make their own custom processor chips?

    • stealth_cookies@lemmy.caEnglish
      71·
      6 months ago

      Now? FPGAs have been a thing for decades and are the closest thing I can see to getting custom chips made without massive investments.

      • fubarxEnglish
        12·
        6 months ago

        Yup. But was thinking more of ultra-small-run ARM or RISC-V processors. Be cool if we ever get there.

        • rasensprenger@feddit.deEnglish
          1·
          6 months ago

          It would be cool, but photolithography masks are insanely expensive, and completely independent of run size. So, not happening any time soon. Even when you use old processes above 40nm and share the mask costs between multiple projects, you need 10s to 100s of thousands of dollars.

        • StarDreamer@lemmy.blahaj.zoneEnglish
          11·
          6 months ago

          You can build a risc core using an fpga. Plenty of people have done that.

          Performance will probably be an issue.

    • sir_reginald@lemmy.worldEnglish
      11·
      6 months ago

      do you know how a CPU is designed? it’s just crazy hard to study the design of simple RISC CPUs we studied in college. And those were very simple, old processors.

      A modern processor with performance that can match modern CPUs is no task for one indie dev, at all.

      You need a team of professionals in the field, a huge budget and the technology to manufacture it, which you would probably end outsourcing to one of the big manufacturers anyway because it’s very rare.

      So the answer to your question is never, unless you’re expecting low performance CPUs based on FPGAs.