Speaker 1: Hello, and welcome to another episode of the Odd Thoughts Podcast.
Speaker 1: I'm Chacy Alloway and I'm Joe Wisental. So Joe, uh,
Speaker 1: we just can't get away from semiconductors. You know. I
Speaker 1: thought we were going to end it with our five
Speaker 1: episodes series, but the people are clamoring for more chips. Tracy.
Speaker 1: That's just a fact I can't get can't get away
Speaker 1: from it. Yeah, It's one of those like just when
Speaker 1: you thought you were out, they pull you back in
Speaker 1: kind of things. Okay, So, by popular request, this is
Speaker 1: a bonus episode to our semiconductor series. It's going to
Speaker 1: be a little bit different to the other ones because
Speaker 1: we're going to be talking about a new technology, a
Speaker 1: new sort of how do I explain this? Well, I
Speaker 1: guess it's an open source hardware technology that could have
Speaker 1: a big impact on the chips industry and the way
Speaker 1: things have traditionally been done. Right. So a lot of
Speaker 1: our discussion has sort of talked about a few like
Speaker 1: basic business models. I mean, we've talked about Intel and
Speaker 1: the sort of integrated UM chip design and fab model
Speaker 1: boundary versus fab and then the fabless semiconductor companies which
Speaker 1: have given rise to the contract manufacturer Tawan Semi, which
Speaker 1: is sort of the ultimate fab. So we've sort of like,
Speaker 1: um got this sort of like broad contours of the industry,
Speaker 1: but in terms of like interesting new technologies or different
Speaker 1: directions or totally different models of where how things could go,
Speaker 1: still more to be discovered. Yeah, that's exactly right. So, uh,
Speaker 1: someone told us that we had to talk to this
Speaker 1: particular company because they were one of the leaders in
Speaker 1: trying to commercialize this open source hardware idea. It's called
Speaker 1: Risk five. It's a let me see if I can
Speaker 1: pull it up, it's R I S C and then
Speaker 1: five Risk five. So what we're gonna do is actually
Speaker 1: learn about what the technology is and then dive in
Speaker 1: a little bit to what it might mean for existing
Speaker 1: chip makers and how the whole ecosystem of semiconductors actually works.
Speaker 1: I can't wait. I don't know anything about any of
Speaker 1: this stuff, so I just want to learn more. Yeah, okay,
Speaker 1: we're all learning together. So without further ado, let's bring
Speaker 1: on Chris Latner. He's the president of product and engineering
Speaker 1: over at SCI five. He's also a long time tech
Speaker 1: guy and quite famous in the industry for reasons that
Speaker 1: we will get in. So Chris, welcome to our thoughts. Hey,
Speaker 1: thank you for having me. I'm excited to be here.
Speaker 1: Could you could you maybe give us a snapshot the
Speaker 1: elevator pitch for risk five before we begin. Sure sounds great.
Speaker 1: Let's start with what what is risk five? So when
Speaker 1: you start talking about these companies, companies like Intel or
Speaker 1: Arm or m D things like this, they generally make processors,
Speaker 1: and so the processor in your computer it's jobs to
Speaker 1: run software. And there's this complicated dance that happens between
Speaker 1: the software and the hardware and the thing that mediates that.
Speaker 1: The thing that lives in between these two worlds is
Speaker 1: a thing called an instruction set. That instruction set is
Speaker 1: often proprietor and so um. With Intel, for example, they'll
Speaker 1: use an instruction set called x A D six. ARM
Speaker 1: has a set of instruction sets that they named after themselves.
Speaker 1: They have the ARM Instruction Set UM. There are many,
Speaker 1: many of these things that have existed over the years.
Speaker 1: A company called MIPS remember, a company may remember ages
Speaker 1: ago called Sun had an instruction set called Spark, and
Speaker 1: many of these things existed in their designed for different
Speaker 1: different configurations. Now these have all worked and these have
Speaker 1: been a good thing, and obviously we have a lot
Speaker 1: of successful computers today. Um, but there's a problem. The
Speaker 1: problem is that the software and the hardware lasts longer
Speaker 1: than the companies do sometimes and so MIPS for examples,
Speaker 1: in bankruptcy these days, Sun kind of went away and
Speaker 1: Spark is in a different world. And so one of
Speaker 1: the challenges that you end up having as a device
Speaker 1: manufacturer as a software provider is that you need something
Speaker 1: that will survive. And you know, companies in general go
Speaker 1: through changes and um, you know, as an industry, it's
Speaker 1: always evolving. It's a fast paced world. Now there's another
Speaker 1: challenge with this, which is also when you have a
Speaker 1: company that's tied to a specific construction set that they create,
Speaker 1: you only have a single provider. This can sometimes be
Speaker 1: limiting if you're building a serious advices around one company's technology,
Speaker 1: both if they go away, but also you don't have
Speaker 1: as much market pressure pushing them to innovate and pushing
Speaker 1: them to you know, have reasonable charges and rates and
Speaker 1: things like this. So RISK five is a different approach
Speaker 1: to this. Instead of saying it's a proprietary interface between
Speaker 1: hardware and software, Risk five is an open standard and
Speaker 1: so it's you can think of it as an open
Speaker 1: source kind of instruction set which allows many different implementations
Speaker 1: of hardware to work with all the software. And so
Speaker 1: in this in this in this vein you can see
Speaker 1: to something like t c P i P, which is
Speaker 1: an open standard for networking, or you could see this LINUX,
Speaker 1: which is an open standard for for software UM in
Speaker 1: the unex world and things like this. And so that's
Speaker 1: really what RISK five is is it's an old idea
Speaker 1: about this interface between hardware and software. But the new
Speaker 1: thing about it is that it's uh an open standard
Speaker 1: and it also has a fresh new design that really
Speaker 1: learns from what has happened in the industry and it's
Speaker 1: just technically better in most ways. So just to be clear,
Speaker 1: your company SCI five, is it manufacturing chips or is
Speaker 1: it just creating this software layer from which others could
Speaker 1: theoretically then build ships. Great question. So, if if I
Speaker 1: look backwards, Risk five started started at the University of Berkeley,
Speaker 1: and so it's about ten years old. It started in
Speaker 1: a research lab, and you know, initially they were just
Speaker 1: building an instruction set to support academic research, support some
Speaker 1: of the projects that they're interested in. And that that
Speaker 1: became a movement where a lot of people agreed that
Speaker 1: they needed a standardized system and that allowed people to
Speaker 1: do hardware research without having to do all the software work.
Speaker 1: Really was it was enabling new kinds of innovation coming
Speaker 1: out of the academic world. The founders of Risk five
Speaker 1: all came from that research lab in Berkeley and five
Speaker 1: years later decided to start a new company, and that
Speaker 1: company is called SCI five. So that's where that's where
Speaker 1: we We now are leading the Risk five revolution with
Speaker 1: the founders of Risk five, and we're building a new company,
Speaker 1: but we're also building and defining and driving much of
Speaker 1: the technology the powers this open cross ecosystem standard that
Speaker 1: Risk five is, and so SCI five as a company,
Speaker 1: we build Risk five implementations. And so you can think
Speaker 1: of as an analogy um T c P i P
Speaker 1: is an open standard for networking, but Cisco builds routers, right,
Speaker 1: and so we yeah, we're we're building implementations of Risk
Speaker 1: five and so uh we are the best place to
Speaker 1: go to if you want to build a product around
Speaker 1: Risk five technology. And we have a wide range of
Speaker 1: different implementations with different performance points, size area, power trade offs,
Speaker 1: things like this could you maybe give us a little
Speaker 1: bit of your background, So I teased it in the intro,
Speaker 1: But you are very well known within the tech and
Speaker 1: computer world, most notably well you might debate this, but
Speaker 1: for developing the Swift programming language, which I think is
Speaker 1: the thing underpinning iOS on Mac and Apple and things
Speaker 1: like that. How did you get involved in this space
Speaker 1: and what attracted you to sci five and the risk
Speaker 1: five idea. Yeah, so, so I've been kicking around the
Speaker 1: tech industry for a number of years now. Amazing how
Speaker 1: time flies. I spent eleven plus years of Apple, for example,
Speaker 1: but did a lot of work on fundamental low level
Speaker 1: software called compilers. And compilers are the thing that takes
Speaker 1: the application that a programmer rights and gets it to
Speaker 1: work with the hardware and so that instruction set that
Speaker 1: that that interface between hardware and software. Compilers are just
Speaker 1: on the software side of that and they handle that
Speaker 1: that making it work on the processor for you and
Speaker 1: so um. As part of that, I build a number
Speaker 1: of technologies that are all open source, including this thing
Speaker 1: called l VM and playing and a bunch of other
Speaker 1: compiler technologies that underpinn and enable a lot of that technology.
Speaker 1: Right at the hardware software boundary. There are many things
Speaker 1: that happened in Apple. We build a lot of really
Speaker 1: great things. The Swift programming language is one of them,
Speaker 1: and so I've done a lot of work and that
Speaker 1: that space. Since then, I've worked a number of other places,
Speaker 1: including Tesla and Google, workd on machine learning, infrastructure, large
Speaker 1: scale TPUs, whole bunch of things, and it's all been
Speaker 1: mostly this systems software working with the hardware. So when
Speaker 1: I was considering enjoining a SCI five, the really exciting
Speaker 1: thing to me about SCI five is is a number
Speaker 1: of things. Is this focus on open technologies, which you
Speaker 1: kind of have an unfair advantage when it comes to
Speaker 1: changing the world right because people love open technologies and
Speaker 1: a lot love the reach that you can have with them. Um,
Speaker 1: it's just the the idea of instead of being on
Speaker 1: the software side of the hardware software divide, be able
Speaker 1: to straddle that. And so SCI five is both a
Speaker 1: software company and a hardware company, and so we're able
Speaker 1: to innovate by spanning that that gap and really doing
Speaker 1: things that are quite next generation because we bring this
Speaker 1: combination of knowing how the transistors work and your silicon,
Speaker 1: but also how how to get programmers to use it.
Speaker 1: And that's something that UM typically UH companies have really
Speaker 1: bifurcated on. You have software companies, you have hardware companies.
Speaker 1: It's really rare to be able to span that gap.
Speaker 1: So give us an example of a theoretical customer, or
Speaker 1: if you want an actual customer who comes to Risk five,
Speaker 1: what are they looking for? What can they Why do
Speaker 1: they go to you as opposed to someone else. What
Speaker 1: can they get from you in terms of performance, in
Speaker 1: terms of a product that makes sense for them that
Speaker 1: from a business standpoint, UM can't get from somewhere else. Absolutely,
Speaker 1: So there's many different categories. This one example is a
Speaker 1: replacement customer. So somebody is using a product from, for example,
Speaker 1: Myths and they're saying, hey, wow, we're building our technology
Speaker 1: on a technology staff built by a company in bankruptcy.
Speaker 1: Maybe that's not a good idea, right. We also have
Speaker 1: many customers coming to us from arm designs, and so
Speaker 1: the arm arm company has a number of CPU designs
Speaker 1: in their portfolio, and for a variety of reasons, customers
Speaker 1: are not as happy with that as they used to be,
Speaker 1: and so a replacement of existing products typically they're looking
Speaker 1: for something that is um you know, solves the same
Speaker 1: kind of a job as what they were using before,
Speaker 1: but is better in terms of UM the area, the
Speaker 1: size of the hardware, or the power consumes UM and
Speaker 1: things like this, and so Risk five as a technology
Speaker 1: is better than many of these things out there. Is
Speaker 1: better designed and engineered, mostly because it's much newer. And
Speaker 1: so the technology industry has invented a lot of things,
Speaker 1: and as with any any space, there are mistakes that
Speaker 1: are made along the way, and Risk five is a
Speaker 1: fresh start that allows us to get those things right
Speaker 1: and be able to draw the best ideas from across
Speaker 1: the industry into one one system. I think that the
Speaker 1: other more interesting and exciting part of what sci Fi's
Speaker 1: business is propelled by is differentiated solutions. And so while
Speaker 1: many people come to us saying like, hey, I want
Speaker 1: to swap this thing out, that the most fun pieces
Speaker 1: are that we're able to enable products that nobody else
Speaker 1: can build. And that happens because we build our processors
Speaker 1: and our other technologies as kind of as software. And
Speaker 1: so we build hardware with the spirit of software that's
Speaker 1: very configurable, dynamic, and you can tune it for the
Speaker 1: use case. And this allows you to say, hey, well,
Speaker 1: I want to build, you know, an AI powered thing
Speaker 1: that does voice recognition and this stuff, and so we
Speaker 1: can give you the world's best implementation of that that's
Speaker 1: really tuned to the use case. And here we are.
Speaker 1: One of the macro phenomena that's going on today is
Speaker 1: the thing that many people would call the end of
Speaker 1: Moore's law. And so the process technology, the fabs are
Speaker 1: not not not moving at the speed that they used to,
Speaker 1: and the economics are really shifting. And what this means
Speaker 1: is this means that there's an increased desire and increased
Speaker 1: need for custom solutions. And custom solutions can be much
Speaker 1: more power efficient, they can be more cost efficient, they
Speaker 1: can be just better for the you know, being part
Speaker 1: of your life as a human and they fit in
Speaker 1: as IoT light bulbs are like all these other things.
Speaker 1: And so that's really driving customization way that we haven't
Speaker 1: seen before. And this is really what SCI five strength is.
Speaker 1: So I want to go back to that replacement idea
Speaker 1: because a big theme running through this entire semiconductors series
Speaker 1: is the politicization of chips. And of course we've seen
Speaker 1: the US put restrictions on China and things like that.
Speaker 1: I think one of your customers was reported to be
Speaker 1: Ali Baba, So I mean, is this a way for
Speaker 1: companies too, I guess accelerate a reduction in their dependency
Speaker 1: on things like TSMC chips or maybe Western chips from Intel. Also,
Speaker 1: I think that's a complicated topic and I'm certainly not
Speaker 1: an expert on that. I think there's many factors that
Speaker 1: are going on here. Risk five is an open standard,
Speaker 1: allows collaboration, and that collaboration happens across political boundaries, and
Speaker 1: so the US and sci FI, for example, is investing
Speaker 1: a lot in Risk five. China is also investing a
Speaker 1: tremendous amount into Risk five software in particular, and they're
Speaker 1: starting to look at Risk five hardware and so um.
Speaker 1: From a technology perspective, this just kind of flats all
Speaker 1: boats like this just makes things go faster, the technology
Speaker 1: curve go that way. In terms of the plutotas politicization
Speaker 1: of fabs and things like this, I think it really
Speaker 1: comes down to the business model of the individual companies.
Speaker 1: And from sci Fi's perspective, we're very happy to work
Speaker 1: with UH, Samsung and TSMC and multiple different fabs and
Speaker 1: UH for that. For US it's really about what our
Speaker 1: customers are looking for and what the products they're trying
Speaker 1: to build are and trying to find the best possible
Speaker 1: answer for their their outcome. So the big FABS that
Speaker 1: everybody knows when it comes to the annual manufacturer, your
Speaker 1: their client. UM. Generally, the way it works is that
Speaker 1: we provide technology to other hardware companies and so UM
Speaker 1: let me give you an example of this. UM. We
Speaker 1: we recently launched. UH there's an FPGA company called Microchip,
Speaker 1: and they launched a product that incorporates our technology into
Speaker 1: their product. UM, they package it up, they work with
Speaker 1: the FABS, they do all of that work. We we
Speaker 1: are what's called a fabulist semiconductor company, and so we
Speaker 1: provide technology to other companies that then build build a
Speaker 1: larger product pulled together documentation and software and things like this,
Speaker 1: and then we enable that product to be built. UM.
Speaker 1: There are other cases where we actually are the the
Speaker 1: the device manufacturer, and so we do have developer boards,
Speaker 1: for example, and so we'll make little boards that developers
Speaker 1: can use to write software and work with risk five
Speaker 1: and that's been very popular. I mean, all of those
Speaker 1: sounds really great. UM. And obviously you're making a good
Speaker 1: case for the technology, but what's what's adoption like? Do
Speaker 1: you find that anyone is resistant to this new idea
Speaker 1: or is everyone um sort of jumping on board with
Speaker 1: the customization pitch. Well, So I think that there's different
Speaker 1: aspects of this. One is risk five as a industry trend,
Speaker 1: and there we see just a complete explosion in adoption
Speaker 1: from kind of the who's who of companies including Google
Speaker 1: and Video, Qualcom, Samsung, UM, Western Digital, also Ali Baba
Speaker 1: and all kinds of all kinds of companies are are
Speaker 1: working within doing things with Risk five, and so I
Speaker 1: think there's a question of when, when and if does
Speaker 1: Risk five take over everything, which I think is an
Speaker 1: entirely possible future where you know, you fast forward a
Speaker 1: hundred years from now, it could be risk five and
Speaker 1: um and hopefully much sooner than a hundred years um.
Speaker 1: With SCIE five we're in we're in effectively all of
Speaker 1: the big semiconductors products, and we don't talk about our
Speaker 1: customers specifically, but the adoption and the drive we're seeing
Speaker 1: is quite intense. It's very exciting time right now. So
Speaker 1: do you have any competitors in the Risk five space
Speaker 1: or is it too early for that and would you
Speaker 1: expect them to emerge at some point? Yeah, So, so
Speaker 1: there are other companies that build risk five processors. UM
Speaker 1: Risk five as an open standard really enables this, and
Speaker 1: we encourage that. It depends on what you mean by competitors. So,
Speaker 1: for example, UM risk five is why is widely adopted
Speaker 1: within the academic context, and so there's many university projects
Speaker 1: where people are building risk five course. UM. I don't
Speaker 1: see these as competition. I see these as you know,
Speaker 1: the next generation of engineers and we'd like to hire UM.
Speaker 1: But you could say that they're playing in the same space. UM.
Speaker 1: Many companies are also building small risk five cores themselves,
Speaker 1: and I think that they're playing with the technology in
Speaker 1: many cases and they're starting to understand it. UM. There
Speaker 1: are a relatively small number of companies that are commercial
Speaker 1: productizing and commercializing risk five course the way we are,
Speaker 1: and I think that is also great. That's that's one
Speaker 1: of the great things about this standard is that you
Speaker 1: can get different implementations from different companies. UM. In comparison,
Speaker 1: SCI five has been at it for you know, our
Speaker 1: our team has been at for ten years. UH. SCI
Speaker 1: five as a company has been at it for five years,
Speaker 1: and so we're just much further ahead and than the
Speaker 1: pack in terms of the breadth for a portfolio, the
Speaker 1: maturity of the technology, um the established customer base. And
Speaker 1: so I'm very thrilled that our customers love our products,
Speaker 1: and that's really what I am We focus on. So
Speaker 1: one of the things that's come up a few times
Speaker 1: in some of our discussions has been, you know, you
Speaker 1: sort of hinted at it, which is the sort of
Speaker 1: death of Moore's law, you know, the sort of the
Speaker 1: the increasing difficulty of the arms race, how much it
Speaker 1: costs to improve speed size. And when we've heard from
Speaker 1: a couple of people, they say things like you asked
Speaker 1: the question like, okay, what could theoretically up end the
Speaker 1: dominance of a company like Taiwan Semiconductor. And the answer
Speaker 1: that a couple of people have given up is, well,
Speaker 1: maybe customers don't necessarily need the very fastest chip anymore.
Speaker 1: Maybe like the sort of traditional metrics of performance that
Speaker 1: we sort of think about with chips, certain measures of
Speaker 1: speed and so forth do not become the key things
Speaker 1: that people absolutely need. I'm trying to understand a little
Speaker 1: bit more like does risk five, does your model sort
Speaker 1: of create the avenue for a sort of I get
Speaker 1: maybe break in the arms race of chips such that
Speaker 1: the industry can go in a more direction, or in
Speaker 1: a direction that's not just about more expensive, faster chips
Speaker 1: and offer different value propositions. But I think that it's
Speaker 1: it's hard to paint the entire industry with one brush.
Speaker 1: So I think that if you look at UM, for example,
Speaker 1: the Internet of Things, IoT space for example, there are
Speaker 1: time to market is worth a lot, right because a
Speaker 1: lot of it is finding product market fit, and so
Speaker 1: spending three to five years to build a chip is
Speaker 1: really kind of an untenable place because five years from
Speaker 1: now the industry will be changing, and you know it
Speaker 1: doesn't it doesn't really make sense to do that. And
Speaker 1: so I think that that that is a pretty big
Speaker 1: shift and how people think about things from back in
Speaker 1: the Windows PC days, where until it would come out
Speaker 1: with a chip every every so often and it was
Speaker 1: just the steady, say, march up and performance. On the
Speaker 1: other hand, I think you look in the server space,
Speaker 1: for example, and there there you're kind of limited by power,
Speaker 1: and so each each socket in a large scale cloud
Speaker 1: data center can dissipate roughly two hundred fifty watts, and
Speaker 1: so the question is how much how do you get
Speaker 1: how much can you get out of that? Right? And
Speaker 1: so to me, uh, we we as an industry have
Speaker 1: solved that problem by pushing, pushing process technology and chasing
Speaker 1: from one fab node to the next, which is very
Speaker 1: expensive and as you say, it's it's not a particularly
Speaker 1: scalable approach. The other way to tackle this is to
Speaker 1: innovate in the hardware. And so what we're seeing now
Speaker 1: is we're seeing a rise of GPUs, and we're seeing
Speaker 1: a rise of machine learning accelerators, and we're seeing a
Speaker 1: rise of other other accelerators, and to date they're primarily
Speaker 1: purpose built. So I want to accelerate video and cooding,
Speaker 1: you know. And so if I want to accelerate video
Speaker 1: and cooding, I can build a box that does video encoding,
Speaker 1: and I can build a chip for video encoding. The
Speaker 1: far extreme of that is I want a fully general
Speaker 1: box that can do anything. And that's what you see
Speaker 1: with typical CPUs. There's a big space in the middle
Speaker 1: where you say, if you're a cloud provider, for example,
Speaker 1: I want to be able to run a wide range
Speaker 1: of different specialized workloads. And so I want to do
Speaker 1: a little bit of video encoding, I want to do
Speaker 1: a little bit of signal processing. I want to do
Speaker 1: a little bit of machine learning. I want to do
Speaker 1: a little bit of graphics. I want to do a
Speaker 1: little bit of this. And so what you can do
Speaker 1: is you can build what are called heterogeneous computers. And
Speaker 1: these heterogeneous computers can have accelerators for different domains and
Speaker 1: assembling those together into one package is something that you know,
Speaker 1: Risk five is standard and a lot of the ecosystem
Speaker 1: that we're helping drive well, I think really changes the
Speaker 1: nature of compute. And so I think that we as
Speaker 1: an industry or shifting and it's kind of hard to
Speaker 1: see the end state from you know, we're halfway through
Speaker 1: this transition, but it's a really exciting time. So going forward,
Speaker 1: how do we know if people are using Risk five?
Speaker 1: So my understanding is that you know, if you're using
Speaker 1: something from ARM, you have to sign like some sort
Speaker 1: of licensee agreement and we can kind of figure out
Speaker 1: who signed those. But I don't think using Risk five
Speaker 1: you necessarily have to disclose what you're doing because it's
Speaker 1: open source. How how do we know what adoption actually
Speaker 1: looks like and how how much this gets embedded in
Speaker 1: the actual industry. Well, so it's it's hard to get
Speaker 1: precise metrics. So for example, in video has proactively said
Speaker 1: we use RISK five and our g v us, right,
Speaker 1: and so if they if they had not said that,
Speaker 1: then nobody would know. It's just an internal implementation detail
Speaker 1: and it's not exposed. And so, UM, I don't think
Speaker 1: you'll ever get a true number. But what we can
Speaker 1: see is the number of members of the open Risk
Speaker 1: five Foundation, for example, is just exploding, right. We know
Speaker 1: that the number of design wins coming out of companies
Speaker 1: like sci Fi for example, is just going exponential. We
Speaker 1: see we see, uh, you see the metrics and the
Speaker 1: the secondary indicators that that you can tell that there's
Speaker 1: there's a lot of momentum and a lot a lot
Speaker 1: driving this. And so while it's very difficult to know
Speaker 1: the precise number of design winds or the precise number
Speaker 1: of transistors configured for Risk five, we know it's it's incredible.
Speaker 1: So I have a weird question. But um, we've talked
Speaker 1: a little bit about this on the podcast the sort
Speaker 1: of culture around open source technology on Silicon Valley. We've
Speaker 1: spoken about it with the Camille Fournier and people like that.
Speaker 1: But is it weird too commercialize and open source technology
Speaker 1: like this. I've seen some people like in Risk five
Speaker 1: to Linux, like does it does it feel weird to
Speaker 1: be doing that or does it feel like this sort
Speaker 1: of commercialization is what's needed to get that technology rolled
Speaker 1: out to a wider group. Yeah, So, I mean, I
Speaker 1: there are many different ways of looking at this. I've
Speaker 1: I've worked on open source and open technologies for a
Speaker 1: couple of decades. Now I can I can share some
Speaker 1: examples of that. So at Apple, for example, we built
Speaker 1: these compiler tools and these technologies that that application developers
Speaker 1: used to build their apps, right, which is a very
Speaker 1: meta thing. Um. And so Apple is a company that
Speaker 1: believes in producing value and keeping it proprietary, of course,
Speaker 1: but even in that context, there was incredible value in
Speaker 1: making that open and sharing sharing contributions that they were
Speaker 1: doing with the world, because they then were able to
Speaker 1: benefit from the work that everybody else in the industry
Speaker 1: was doing. And so that open standard, the open technology,
Speaker 1: the open source code that was being developed, was not
Speaker 1: the differentiating value for their products. It was the enabling
Speaker 1: technology that they benefited from. You know, Google used the
Speaker 1: same technology in their data centers and like that was
Speaker 1: actually great for Apple because you know, all the work
Speaker 1: that Google put into it directly benefited Apple and Apple's products.
Speaker 1: So um, I think that there's a long, long balance
Speaker 1: of trying to figure out what to open, how best
Speaker 1: to work in foster communities. With five, I think I'm
Speaker 1: seeing very similar results that I saw I've seen in
Speaker 1: other domains where open has a lot of advantages that
Speaker 1: are hard to quantify. So for example, there are you know,
Speaker 1: we're all humans, and humans like to work on things
Speaker 1: with large scale impact, and so um, open technologies arguably
Speaker 1: are it's easier to draw the best minds into working
Speaker 1: on open technologies because they end up having larger impact
Speaker 1: on the world. The way that risk five is defined
Speaker 1: and standardized and driven in the ecosystem is by an
Speaker 1: open committee development standardization process, and it's kind of the
Speaker 1: who's who's of gurus in the industry. They are coming
Speaker 1: together to make sure that the best ideas win and
Speaker 1: you get you get a really good result, and it's
Speaker 1: kind of hard hard to match that with a company
Speaker 1: off in the corner that even if they're a massive
Speaker 1: semiconductor company, they still have only a slice of the bright,
Speaker 1: bright minds in the industry. And so there's there's a
Speaker 1: lot of there's a lot of nuanced pieces of this.
Speaker 1: But then also you there has to be a business model,
Speaker 1: right we have sci fi or for profit company we
Speaker 1: are you know, we're we're here to build a scalable
Speaker 1: business that is an amazing an amazing feed by itself.
Speaker 1: And so the question is how do you fund and
Speaker 1: propel and make the open technologies thrive while also having
Speaker 1: sustainable businesses that you can you know, pay your engineers
Speaker 1: to work on the open technology and that that divide
Speaker 1: is often tricky. But if you look you look to
Speaker 1: the industry, Red Hat for example, as a company that
Speaker 1: was built on Linux and they put tons of engineering
Speaker 1: at the Linux and they build a great services business
Speaker 1: and there are now a huge part of IBM. Right. Um.
Speaker 1: So there's many, many of these companies that have found
Speaker 1: different business models. Google, for example, is apparently a profitable company,
Speaker 1: you could say, um and and they are built and
Speaker 1: contribute a tremendous amount of open technologies. And so it's
Speaker 1: it's all about figuring out the divide and there's different
Speaker 1: divides that makes sense for different industry sectors and different
Speaker 1: technologies and different companies, but I think it's a pretty
Speaker 1: proven model by this point, and and for it's worth,
Speaker 1: I think that open software is much further ahead than
Speaker 1: open hardware, and so I think that we're really on
Speaker 1: the leading edge of that for hardware, and I think
Speaker 1: that ten years from now it's going to be a
Speaker 1: completely different world. Well, Chris, that was really really interesting,
Speaker 1: and I think we're all going to be um watching
Speaker 1: what happens with Risk five and with SCI five for
Speaker 1: years to come. So thank you so much. We really
Speaker 1: appreciate that. Yeah, thank you for having me. Thanks Chris.
Speaker 1: That was awesome. So Joe, I'm glad we had Chris on.
Speaker 1: Definitely a little bit different to what we spoke about
Speaker 1: on some of our other semiconductor podcasts, But I think
Speaker 1: there are two things that probably stand out. One is
Speaker 1: that idea of Risk five as a cheat for the
Speaker 1: end of Moore's law, Like if you can't eke out
Speaker 1: any more efficiencies in terms of the actual technology, then
Speaker 1: maybe you could do it through customization and the way
Speaker 1: that technology works with the rest of the system. And
Speaker 1: then I guess the second one is this idea that
Speaker 1: Risk five might actually be a way of increasing independence
Speaker 1: away from some of the big manufacturers. Yeah. No, I
Speaker 1: thought that was super interesting and just this like this
Speaker 1: idea that's like, Okay, you have all these companies that
Speaker 1: could build the chips, you have these end customers that
Speaker 1: have specific needs, you know, you could I think, like
Speaker 1: he said, I don't know the exact word, but the
Speaker 1: idea of like mindshare, like people like working on open
Speaker 1: source products, people like being part of something that's potentially
Speaker 1: world changing. So it seems like potentially one of these
Speaker 1: things where it's like sure, like the sort of dominant
Speaker 1: players in the industry, the dominant platforms X say, the
Speaker 1: six arm et cetera, aren't going anywhere, but you can
Speaker 1: very easily, as he describes it, imagine it just continuing
Speaker 1: to gather steam over the long term. Yeah. Um, definitely
Speaker 1: an interesting one to watch. And I guess the issue
Speaker 1: is who comes out and announces that they're actually using it,
Speaker 1: so we get a good idea of what adoption actually
Speaker 1: looks like. All right, well but no, definitely, UM going
Speaker 1: to have it on my radar. Yeah, um, this is
Speaker 1: our gift to add thoughts listeners demanding more semiconductor content. UM,
Speaker 1: hope you enjoyed it, and I'm sure we'll be recording
Speaker 1: more semiconductor episodes eventually, but for now, we're going to
Speaker 1: move on to some other things. Right. I think there's
Speaker 1: some other stuff going on that we should talk about
Speaker 1: in markets No way, Okay, all right, this has been
Speaker 1: another episode of the All Thoughts Podcast. I'm Tracy Alloway.
Speaker 1: You can follow me on Twitter at Tracy Alloway and
Speaker 1: I'm Joe Why Isn't All? You can follow me on
Speaker 1: Twitter at the Stalwart. You can follow our guest Chris
Speaker 1: Latner on Twitter. He's at Sea Latner Underscore l l
Speaker 1: v M. Follow our producer Laura Carlson. She's at Laura M. Carlson.
Speaker 1: Follow the Bloomberg head of podcast, Francesco Levie at Francesco Today,
Speaker 1: and check out all of our podcasts under the handle
Speaker 1: AD Podcasts. Thanks for listening.