I might get some hate for this, but Google seems to be doing some really cool things, like in fintech as well as this silicon project. Google Finance is one of the only players I've seen with an interest of opening things up when so much of the industry is about pushing others out and restricting access. Like for example the CME deal, to open source live, low latency stock market data. Bloomberg might let you rent it for 25k a year if you're lucky. Google? Yeah just hook into the websocket bro, it's free.
Someone's gotta do it
Most of the stock market data the avg person sees is 15 minutes delayed by request of the NYSE, and in a world where trades are reaching the 3 millisecond and below mark, that's a very long time. So Google opening up what could be <20ms data might be able to help some applications. Not saying it's a silver bullet either.
I wish they would take on even more big projects that need to be tackled. Like I want to see a google branded remote controlled barge out in the pacific garbage patch that the public is controlling through a google web app or some other insane, good projects. Idk when you deal with finance companies all day, even google seems moral.
However, it's not looking good this quarter for all tech cos
> remote controlled barge out in the pacific garbage patch
Whilst I like the thought behind idea, these ocean garbage patches aren't easy to clean up with a barge.
> For many people, the idea of a “garbage patch” conjures up images of an island of trash floating on the ocean. In reality, these patches are almost entirely made up of tiny bits of plastic, called microplastics. Microplastics can’t always be seen by the naked eye. Even satellite imagery doesn’t show a giant patch of garbage. The microplastics of the Great Pacific Garbage Patch can simply make the water look like a cloudy soup. This soup is intermixed with larger items, such as fishing gear and shoes.
Better to clean things up at the source. It is estimated that 90% of all plastic waste in our oceans come from just 10 rivers in Asia.
There is actually already a (very nerdy, HN appropriate) project cleaning up the garbage patch.
And yes, they also started building river interceptors as that is more bang per buck. They still seem to think they can clean the existing stuff economically too.
Thanks for the link, it looks like an interesting project, and fun engineering challenge.
It would be interesting to see $ spent per tonne of garbage removed from the rivers vs ocean. Like you said, far more economical to focus on the source. Given no project has unlimited funds, why spend resources on the"garbage patch"? I suspect that they still work on the ocean part because:
Google main objective for many years was to get as many people online and using digital services as possible so that they can make money of them. I think it is quite under appreciated how much of todays web systems is because of Google using and promoting opensource as well as open sourcing its older tech stack.
> Like for example the CME deal, to open source live, low latency stock market data. Bloomberg might let you rent it for 25k a year if you're lucky. Google? Yeah just hook into the websocket bro, it's free.
Cursory search turned up nothing for me. Can you point me in the direction where I can find free (or low cost) market data that you mentioned?
That seems really cool, thanks for posting.
However, I did notice that their demo does not seem to have any live prices right now (the demo is a couple years old, so maybe no longer live):
https://showcase.withgoogle.com/marketdata
Also, to the point about Bloomberg's high subscription fees, they provide all imaginable financial data under the sun. This google demo with CME is just CME data, which is a small, albeit important, part of market data, let alone the broader financial data. Furthermore, in many cases the data itself is owned by the exchanges, so Bloomberg's fees reflect passing on the (at times exorbitant) exchange fees. NYSE, NASDAQ, CME, etc.. are historically the ones that are the gatekeepers of the data and putting up financial barriers.
Pretty sure a Bloomberg terminal subscription doesn't get you unlimited data at all the venues. You still have to pay extra to subscribe to individual feeds.
And yes, you're right on these costs. Some exchanges will charge large 5 figure sums annually just to give you a port so you can subscribe to some unreliable (UDP), poorly thought out, over-engineered-in-the-early-2000s, market data protocol that requires you to spend weeks of engineering effort to debug and normalize because hey... every exchange wants to use a different tech stack and none of their customers want to use a vendor library, so they don't exist.
The irony is a lot of organisations that are used to dealing with these feeds struggle when it comes to crypto, because they're not used to a world of websockets and public facing IPs, or the risk of exposing their machines to the internet.
One company I know pays a small 5 figure annual sum to a shitty "cloud solutions provider" for what is essentially just a dual NIC reverse proxy providing access to Coinbase via a stable IP. The is provider of course charges thousands per IP. Managing public cloud infrastructure is just outside of its comfort zone.
I see that CME is using GCP to offer its data stream, but it doesn't seem free.
"This innovative collaboration with Google Cloud will not only make it easier for our clients to access the data [...] CME Group customers will be able to access all real-time CME Group data [...]" (emphasis mine) [0]
As for [1], it has a Contact Us form and a link to [2] which talks about onboarding and an "On-demand, pay as you go model".
Could you point to the free market data pub/sub and/or specific steps to recreate the demo? Thanks!
I’m going to pile on the good times here because I think Google is doing an amazing job with YouTube, their search always seems to return what I’m looking for, I like the Google workspace suite, I love Google earth and maps, I’m totally for their approach with self driving with Waymo, I appreciate their ethical stances, like Google chrome, always loved gmail, love that they try so many moonshots and am grateful for android. I hope they make their own silicon soon. All of these seem to be unpopular opinions now but there it is.
Ibkr gives me close to real time data for about $6 a month - I've not read the fine print closely but I'd be shocked if it is 15min stale. It's localized to certain exchanges but covers most bases. Ultimately any retail investor is unlikely to be able to capitalise on millisecond data without developing their own hft bots
Last time I was heavily playing with IB's API they were 250ms rollups of the market. So not useful for HFT or anything, but plenty fast enough for prosumer trading.
>As a consumer, you want everything to be a commodity
True. But I'm also guessing that in 5 years I'll be more frustrated at the level of control they're exercising with thing they're currently building next to it. More so than I am with the market they're commoditising today.
I would expect a commodity to be produced with pretty low margins (since the competition is pretty fierce), but not for free. If Google is giving away the information for free, is that really a commodity? I mean either they are giving it away for some strategic reason, they are taking their cut in some more byzantine way, or they have decided to act as a charity for at-home traders for some reason.
Information itself is a commodity. An encyclopedia doesn't have value have because it costs money but the vice versa. Wikipedia is free, yet it has done more for the world in 20 years than the Brittanica has in 250.
I'm not suggesting Google gives away information as a purely altruistic endeavor. However, Google's ulterior motives, should they have any, are irrelevant to the value of the information itself so long as it hasn't been edited or tampered with.
In astronomy, aren't they in some sense equivalent? Andromeda galaxy is 2.5 million light years way, so we are seeing it as it was 2.5 million years in the past.
FYI there's apparently some retcon stuff about that, e.g. maybe the Kessel run is around a particularly dangerous area of space (black holes or w/e), so accomplishing it in LESS parsecs is something to brag about ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Don’t be too impressed. Every company is interested in “opening things up” when it’s to their competitive advantage.
You notice that “open” Android is increasingly dependent on closed source “Google Play Services” and Google uses the closed source parts to beat OEMs into submission?
Wow, how things have changed. I've been here since back when Google could do no wrong. Now they're a poster child for shady surveillance capitalism.
Same with Elon Musk. I remember him being compared to a comic book hero. Now he's an alt-right racist (if you are a leftist) or an evil globalist technocrat (if you are a rightist).
It may be hard to recall now, but their big thing was actually less intrusive and less scammy ads than the state of the art at the time.
It's also worth mentioning that lots of businesses that you pay money to, track you in similar ways. The origin of it was probably supermarket loyalty cards in the pre-internet era.
The association with no-cost products is not really appropriate, and mostly seems to be progaganda from people with other business models. It was the web scale and pure digital products that let the cost drop to near zero, which synergises with ad-supported offerings, (just as "free" ad-supported TV and radio were a thing for decades). However, it also allows other business models, such as non-profits like Wikipedia, netflix subscriptions, or subsidized by necessary hardware purchases.
Similarly, just because you pay money for various Google services, doesn't really gave them any motivation to not track you.
I also don't watch ad supported TV. T-Mobile has a promotion where you can get free Paramount+ with ads. I tried the free offering for 2 hours and I said forget it and upgraded to the ad free tier.
The only time that ads don't really bother me are the rare occasions I watch sports. The breaks are more natural.
> Same with Elon Musk. I remember him being compared to a comic book hero. Now he's an alt-right racist (if you are a leftist) or an evil globalist technocrat (if you are a rightist).
He hasn't changed though, and little has changed in what he's actually doing too. If anything, he's more mellow now than he was when he was younger. People's impressions of him have been highly twisted IMO.
Yeah, he's neither a comic book hero nor a monster. He's a rich dude who's pretty smart and decided to risk a bunch of his helping build up companies working in important innovative fields, but unfortunately he also trolls and overshares on Twitter like a 13 year old.
When the first open SkyWater 130nm PDK came out, with Google paying for free shuttle runs I did wonder how long the money would keep going. I assumed they'd fund a handful of shuttles in the hope that kick starts wider usage.
I think there's great potential in open silicon but precious little of it around right now. Open tooling is still in early development stages in particular for implementation flows (i.e. actually producing a silicon layout from your RTL design). Development here is stifled by how closed this world is. Open PDKs, that can be used for real chips, are a great boon and I hope will really accelerate developments.
Very excited to see another foundry join up! Welcome GlobalFoundries!
Last week SkyWater announced a 90nm PDK, which is smaller than the current SkyWater 130nm. Also crucially, this one is FDSOI (fully-depleted silicon on insulator), which keeps chips from leaking power, meaning this should be much more ideal for any kind of mobile always-on design. Neat.
And now comes GF's 180MCU PDK. At first, it's like: this is bigger, what the heck! But it's designed for mixed signal & power designs, like Power Management Integrated Circuits (PMICs).
Really neat having something a little smaller and something a little bigger right near where we started. I really hope some of the existing people who've done open chip design on the existing shuttles get to make similar-ish chips on the new bigger & smaller processes & can nicely characterize some of the performance differences.
This all just makes so much sense. Making sure chipmaking is a healthy, robust, creative, growing industry is in everyone's interest. Without efforts like this, it feels like the industry is at risk of too much consolidation, of everyone getting bought out and/or giving up, and there not being vibrant chipmaking at all. The wave of buyouts across the 201X's was shocking. I continue to think part of the chipmaking crunch was just that there are so many less independent entities now; the diversity of the ecosystem is way down.
Important note: this is a high voltage process for things like power+battery management chips. It is not a general logic process. The press release really should mention this.
The transistors on this process are very slow and power-hungry, even for such an old process -- the lowest rated supply voltage for this process is 3.3 volts whereas 1.8 volts is typical for 180nm. That's ~3.35x the active power consumption and slower switching speeds due to higher threshhold. It's meant for people who had 350nm designs (mid-1990s) and want to migrate them with the minimum possible effort (nearly all fabs have shut down their 350nm lines).
It is totally awesome that Google were able to convince GF to release this PDK! But they should be more up-front about the fact that this is a High Voltage process; most people won't notice the "MCU" at the end of the process name or know what it stands for. Their announcement about a 90nm process with Skywater last week is a big deal; this not so much, unless it's just the first of a series of process releases from GloFo.
Also this does make this 180 nm variant much more useful.
There are many kinds of interfaces or analog devices for which such a high-voltage process is absolutely needed.
Now, you can design a complete chip set for certain applications, e.g. with a central chip designed with the 90 nm Skywater PDK and one or more peripheral chips designed with the 180 nm GlobalFoundries PDK, for power management or various interfaces.
Super excited for this! Right now I’m working on a project to build open source DNA synthesis chips (if deployed right, drops DNA synthesis cost by 100-500x market price), and efabless with their tools created with Google’s support have simply enabled the project to even be possible. I am grateful to Google for doing this.
> have simply enabled the project to even be possible
Are you sure about that? The mandatory "Caravel" pad ring occupies the entire top layer of the chip as well as a ring around the edges. It hermetically entombs the design area that you control.
There is no exposed surface under your control for any kind of chemically-relevant device like a microwell.
"Thank you for reaching out to Efabless! To answer your questions, we can support requests for bare die in our QFN shuttle programs, with the next QFN shuttle having a tapeout of November 14, 2022. Also, the material that you were asking about is aluminum."
Correct me if I am wrong, this means I could do this. Perhaps I am wrong! In which case I should find a different chip supplier.
The padframe and top metal layer which "entomb" Caravel designs are both part of the die. They are not part of the package. Omitting the package does not help you here.
You might be confusing the padframe with the leadframe. The padframe is part of the die, the leadframe is part of the package. In a QFN package they are connected to each other by extremely thin gold wires.
"From the ChipIgnite program you can get bare die; from the Open MPW program, you can't. If you submit something on a ChipIgnite shuttle run, then the pads will be exposed, along with any other places on the chip that you place overglass cuts (i.e., you can place your own pad cuts internal to the user area)."
The other problem is that even for $10,000 the ChipIgnite program won't give you a confirmed booking. You have to submit your design and then they decide if they feel like manufacturing it. Any chip worth paying $10k to fab is going to involve an engineering sunk cost of around 5 times that amount. Which is why Real Fabs take your money and give you a confirmed booking.
This is a very imperfect analogy, but CPUs are typically designed using a high level language like SystemVerilog (equivalent to something like C++ in the software world.) To actually get the CPU manufactured, you have to "compile" it into a binary format that specifies the physical layout of the chip while respecting a set of design rules for whatever process you're targeting. These rules are usually considered highly confidential since they can reveal manufacturing details that the foundry wants to keep secret. This secrecy is part of the reason that open source never really took off for silicon the way it did in the software world - imagine if every time you wanted to compile your code for a new machine you had to pay a bunch of money and sign an NDA.
The hope here is that open sourcing the design rules will help build an ecosystem of open source silicon. While it's true that 180nm is too big for anything high performance, it's perfectly fine for hobbyists who don't have the money required for more advanced nodes anyway. On the foundry side, they don't need to be as secretive about old nodes and it might increase demand for underutilized manufacturing capacity.
I dream of a world where public libraries have CPU printers.
180nm isn't crazy awful though, is it? That's about 20 years back, so you won't be doing ML, but it's enough to have industry applications and low power general purpose computing.
180 nm is what the first generation of Intel Pentium 4 and the second generation of AMD Athlon have used, in 2000.
While you would not want to make a CPU in 180 nm now, or any purely digital circuit, which could be better made with a FPGA, unless you need clock frequencies over 1 GHz, if you want to make any mixed digital-analog circuit with an important analog part, 180 nm can be fine.
Any analog circuit part made in 180 nm will not be much larger than in any up-to-date process, because the dimensions of the analog components are determined by functional requirements, such as noise or maximum current, not by the lithography limits.
once a process is no longer bleeding edge, what's the benefit of keeping manufacturing details secret?
at this stage, presumably no one would risk the capital and time required to copy the foundry while publishing details increases the likelihood of attracting more clients.
thanks in advance for the clarification on why the industry operates the way it does.
> once a process is no longer bleeding edge, what's the benefit of keeping manufacturing details secret?
Even if it's not bleeding edge, there still might be special features or secrets they want to protect. For really old nodes, I think it boils down to two reasons: 1) Clients with money don't care about open design rules, so there was basically no demand for it. 2) Foundries generally have a pretty strong culture of secrecy, so without someone asking externally they're not going to open source anything.
assuming no one will invest the time and capital to build a similar foundry, is it fair to say that such secrecy has minimal benefits? or can an existing foundry learn these secrets and improve their own products pretty easily?
There's a lot of risk for new nodes and less for old ones. Exactly how much, I'm not sure.
I guess let me put it this way - I think it's entirely rational for them to be cautious. There's currently not a lot of upside to being more open, so it's usually not worth it even if the risk is small. Programs like this are great because they hit both sides of the equation: increasing demand for open PDKs while lowing the perceived risk by building a track record of successful releases.
china is adamant about taiwan, like putin about the donbass. So it is not unreasonable to think that what is happening for the donbass, will happen for taiwan sooner or later.
maybe it is time for top-notch foundries to move out (and the ppl who would require more freedom that the china regime tolerate, like in hong-kong).
Been a while since I was in the semiconductor industry, but it looks like this open-sourcing is intended to free up the ecosystem from dependence on Cadence EDA. Nice, could open up opportunity for creation of a lot of cottage fabless semiconductor startups. (does anyone known whether Cadence had ever gotten on the freemium offering model?)
Except that there are also a few people like myself. I am now at my 3rd Android smartphone and I have always used all of them without GMS and without a Google account and I do not feel that I have missed anything.
All the mobile phone services, camera, clock/calendar, file storage, Web browsing, including the use of anything accessible on the Web, e.g. Google Maps, all work OK, and I do not need anything else from my phone.
The very few extra applications that I have installed, e.g. an authentication app for the VPN of my company, have been side loaded, not from the Google Store.
The only problem that I have ever had with the lack of a Google account was that one of the banks with which I work has discontinued their Web interface for online banking and has mandated the use of a phone app for authentication. As their staff seems very stupid, they had not provided any way to side load their app, but it could be installed only from the Google Store.
Seeing that they cannot be reasoned with, I have canceled my online banking service at that bank and I have reverted to an older form of SMS service, which still provides me most of the features that I need, e.g. receiving notifications on transactions from my accounts and interrogating the accounts balance. The loss is theirs, because I now do more frequently banking operations at other banks, which do not have stupid conditions tied to their online banking services.
I just used a Huawei phone for like 2 year without GMS, but you and I are not 99.999 of the general phone users out there.
I used Aurora store to access the Playstore, youtube vance to play youtube movies.
For the rest i only use Facebook Messenger(for family), whats app, Telegram and my banking app doesn't need GMS to function. Those messenger app have their own notification services so not completely dependent on GMS stuff. For the rest i'm more interested in camera specs and not really in mobile app ecosystem outside of those couple of apps i just need to talk with family and friends..
It is totally doable but don't think 99.999 of the phone users will take the effort to find everything out.
How did you install Google Maps though? I assume you are a technical users?
I'm also running LineageOS+MicroG+Aurora and it works for me, but 95% of the populace isn't going to have much luck doing this, which is as Google intended.
It's an off-topic complaint. Just because someone posts a link about Google (or substitute any other company) doesn't mean it's okay to post whatever complaints about Google you want. Particularly when they're the same sort of repetitive complaints people post every time. We've heard it, give it a rest.
Is it a random complaint though? How is it any different from everyone regularly warning against investing in google services because they are shut down so often? Seems pretty relevant for anyone who is considering investing in this project but isn't aware of Google's behavior with other large open source projects, e.g. Android.
Imagine if people told naysayers to shut up when Microsoft was trying to destroy Linux with the SCO lawsuits. Your argumebt actively damages the open source cause.
It’s not any different and that’s exactly the problem. Everyone is well aware by now that sometimes Google shuts down services. Been there, lived it. Writing low-effort comments about how Google often shuts down services makes the Google-related topics on Hacker News more tedious to read and you should stop doing that.
Better to share links to interesting and relevant content. News about what was happening with the SCO lawsuit was interesting back in the day. Low-effort complaints about it were not.
I appreciate your opinion, but not your commands about what I should do. I respectfully disagree - I don't think everyone is fully aware of all of Google's particular misdeeds and bad practices, and I don't think the tone around Google efforts is negative enough. My post is one of activism, not complaint.
Someone's gotta do it
Most of the stock market data the avg person sees is 15 minutes delayed by request of the NYSE, and in a world where trades are reaching the 3 millisecond and below mark, that's a very long time. So Google opening up what could be <20ms data might be able to help some applications. Not saying it's a silver bullet either.
I wish they would take on even more big projects that need to be tackled. Like I want to see a google branded remote controlled barge out in the pacific garbage patch that the public is controlling through a google web app or some other insane, good projects. Idk when you deal with finance companies all day, even google seems moral.
However, it's not looking good this quarter for all tech cos