Comment by Lramseyer
12 hours ago
Production grade CPU design is more than just the RTL (the source code.) To achieve the performance numbers that these companies get, you have to do a ton of optimization in your physical design to achieve the power/performance/area (PPA) metrics that make these products competitive. LLMs are not suitable for that kind of work.
There are people working on PPA optimization and trying to shake up how things are done, just not with LLMs.
That's exactly where LLMs can shine, because design space exploration requires tedious work and endless simulations.
Something that I think is fascinating, though, is that labs are no longer beholden to the limitations of commercial design software. Want to replace your simulator and optimizer with a fully custom verifiable stack of Lean proofs of optimality and correctness? Just throw your unlimited token budget at it.
I don't work in the business, but my understanding was that even with these companies' budgets, it's still too expensive to do any kind of verified performance optimality.
And I think correctness for anything near the size of a CPU is off the table.
> LLMs are not suitable for that kind of work.
I wonder why not or you meant not suitable yet?
This is just speculation on my part, but LLMs work best when they get immediate, verifiable feedback on their task, and the kind of physical optimizations they mean might not give that to LLMs.
Also a speculation but I'm almost certain that physical optimizations are first done through simulators running on a computer.
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