Hacker News: zerohp

New comment by zerohp in "OpenAI unveils its first custom chip, built by Broadcom"

zerohp — Wed, 24 Jun 2026 18:52:47 +0000

That’s exactly what this is.

9 months to production is completely impossible anyway.

9 months from design to early samples is probably impossible given than TSMC takes 3 months after tape out to produce them. Then it’s up to the customer to qualify and revise for production. TSMC doesn’t do that.

There’s no AI that makes this happen in 9 months.

New comment by zerohp in "I admire Fabrice Bellard. He is almost certainly a better overall programmer"

zerohp — Tue, 16 Jun 2026 18:39:43 +0000

The Buddha lived before writing in India. We have plenty of other stories that were passed by oral tradition before they were written down.

New comment by zerohp in "How do you build a semiconductor company on something that's free?"

zerohp — Tue, 26 May 2026 17:15:51 +0000

The time from tapeout to first samples is 3-4 months even for the biggest customers of TSMC.

Shorter for a metal only change.

New comment by zerohp in "Windows 11's Patch Tuesday nightmare gets worse"

zerohp — Tue, 27 Jan 2026 02:52:51 +0000

In the chip design world, 2:1 for design verification to design is on the low end of normal.

Some organizations have gone as low as 1:1 but that is considered an emergency that must be fixed. It’s so important that designers will be intentionally underworked if there are not enough validation engineers on staff.

When you can’t fix bugs in the field, quality is important.

New comment by zerohp in "Anthropic blocks third-party use of Claude Code subscriptions"

zerohp — Fri, 09 Jan 2026 05:11:18 +0000

The joke is that AI companies pretend to care about doing legal things.

New comment by zerohp in "Charlie Kirk killed at event in Utah"

zerohp — Wed, 10 Sep 2025 21:54:54 +0000

* * *

New comment by zerohp in "Ask HN: How do I prevent AI from reading/training off my content?"

zerohp — Tue, 22 Jul 2025 20:40:19 +0000

My solution is that I no longer contribute to the public internet in any meaningful way. No more open source projects. No more contributions to free software. Bug reports only when it helps me. The hacker ethos is dead. Selfishness and greed won.

Silicon Valley builds empires off the back of free intellectual labor. I'm done with all of it. If they want something from me they can (and do) pay for it.

New comment by zerohp in "ChatGPT can accurately estimate Body Fat Percentage from photos"

zerohp — Fri, 16 May 2025 19:38:17 +0000

Methodology doesn't support the conclusion.

Try using images that it wasn't trained on.

New comment by zerohp in "Intel's Redwood Cove: Baby Steps Are Still Steps"

zerohp — Mon, 23 Sep 2024 17:24:11 +0000

I don't know of any CPU that speculates both sides of a branch. I work on a CPU design team.

Modern CPUs speculate hundreds of instructions ahead, and with just a dozen branches you can have a few thousand different paths. It makes more sense to speculate down one path with very high accuracy.

New comment by zerohp in "Adding 16 kb page size to Android"

zerohp — Sat, 24 Aug 2024 19:00:30 +0000

Software table walk performance is bad on modern out of order processors because it has to finish every older instruction in flight and redirect the front end to the exception vector. This can take several hundred cycles. Hardware table walk can take <20 cycles to hit in the next level cache.

New comment by zerohp in "Do not taunt happy fun branch predictor (2023)"

zerohp — Wed, 03 Jul 2024 19:05:33 +0000

In AArch64, `BR LR` and `RET` do not perform the same logic when FEAT_BTI (Branch Target Identification) is present.

New comment by zerohp in "Apple introduces M4 chip"

zerohp — Tue, 07 May 2024 16:52:22 +0000

As a professional EE, I know that ARM Cortex-M4 is not a chip. It's an embedded processor that is put into an SOC (which is a chip), such as the STM32-family from ST.

New comment by zerohp in "Apple to wind down electric car effort after decadelong odyssey"

zerohp — Wed, 28 Feb 2024 00:08:01 +0000

More cooks can't make one meal better but more cooks can make dozens of different meals and you can choose the best result.

New comment by zerohp in "Meta's big vision for face computers might be better than Apple's"

zerohp — Wed, 14 Feb 2024 17:50:59 +0000

John Carmack had some things to say about it:

https://www.forbes.com/sites/paultassi/2022/12/17/john-carma...

EDIT: direct link https://www.facebook.com/permalink.php?story_fbid=pfbid0iPix...

New comment by zerohp in "Vision Pro teardown part 2: What’s the display resolution?"

zerohp — Wed, 07 Feb 2024 19:55:38 +0000

How is your wifi network? Have you tried changing the display resolution on the Mac while you're connected to the Vision Pro?

The virtual display doesn't look as good as the laptop screen, but it looks as good or better than the 1440p monitor I normally use at my desk.

New comment by zerohp in "USB-C power for your Amiga 500, 600 and 1200"

zerohp — Fri, 02 Feb 2024 13:10:37 +0000

You can read the theory of operation for generating negative voltage in this application note from Analog Devices: https://www.analog.com/en/resources/design-notes/generating-...

New comment by zerohp in "US developers can offer non-app store purchasing, Apple still collect commission"

zerohp — Wed, 17 Jan 2024 02:02:25 +0000

Compare phones to game consoles.

New comment by zerohp in "Ask HN: Ways to make side income as a SWE?"

zerohp — Thu, 09 Nov 2023 19:08:05 +0000

Can you make a compelling argument? Just saying it’s wrong is not an argument.

If employers don’t like it then they should pay by the hour for 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.

New comment by zerohp in "Everything I've learned building the fastest Arm desktop"

zerohp — Fri, 27 Oct 2023 16:04:15 +0000

Having multiple threads does not mean that they are all doing equally useful work. Single threaded performance is absolutely critical for a desktop machine.

Even in multithreaded desktop applications, it's rare to see them effectively use more than 8 threads.

New comment by zerohp in "Evolution of the Samsung Exynos CPU Microarchitecture [pdf]"

zerohp — Fri, 01 Sep 2023 14:33:22 +0000

100% of the CPU design team at Samsung in Austin was laid off in 2019. That's why none of the authors in this 2020 paper have a Samsung email address.