Nvidia R&D chief on how AI is improving chip design
Did nvidia just promise us singularity? :)<p>Hard to read a talk like this from a pulpit &amp; not see shout outs to the incredibly super-fantastic open-source innovative projects like OpenROAD which have been shipping amazingly well-routed-by-AI chips for a while now. There&#x27;s papers you can cite, galore, many open source designs[1].<p>It&#x27;s not like Nvidia is promising anyone else will benefit from this work. This seems to be very high level coverage their R&amp;D department is looking at, perhaps&#x2F;perhaps not using. The article makes it hard to find out what is available, what has been published or otherwise deeply discussed (which is I think the best we can hope from Nvidia not real participation). There&#x27;s only one paper linked, on NVCell[2], described as:<p>&gt; <i>The first is a system we have called NVCell, which uses a combination of simulated annealing and reinforcement learning to basically design our standard cell library. </i><p>This just feels like so much else going on in computing. WSL coming to windows, the recent Unity vs Unreal topic[3]. It&#x27;s hard to imagine refusing to participate with others. It&#x27;s hard to imagine not being part of the open source community working shoulder to shoulder to push for better. NVidia patently doesn&#x27;t get it, patently isn&#x27;t participating, patently isn&#x27;t there. It&#x27;s cool we can hear what they are up to, but it&#x27;s also extremely NVidia that they&#x27;re doing it all on their own. Anyhow, Looking forward to more AI based chip power system design starting to emerge; that sounds like a good idea NV.<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;theopenroadproject.org&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;theopenroadproject.org&#x2F;</a><p>[2] 
<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;research.nvidia.com&#x2F;publication&#x2F;2021-12_nvcell-standard-cell-layout-advanced-technology-nodes-reinforcement-learning" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;research.nvidia.com&#x2F;publication&#x2F;2021-12_nvcell-stand...</a><p>[3] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=31064552" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=31064552</a> (412 points, 3 days ago, 311 comments)