Three of Apple and Google’s former star chip designers launch NUVIA

[ISL]

How do people start new ventures like this without falling afoul of past non-disclosure agreements?

[monocasa]

Don't publicise more than the minimum in uarch details, and give a friendly reminder to anyone who sues that their IP is also dependent on other IP secretly and starting a nuclear war is probably not worth it?

[K0SM0S]

Late reply: we don't know the details but it's entirely possible that part of their knowledge from their experience at Apple is allowed to be used so long as they do not compete with Apple products using that knowledge; and the server / enterprise target is clearly the one space where Apple is de facto absent in tech.

If I were to bet, I'd say it's actually a mutual understanding of 'taking A-chips' to their full potential for these use-cases. It's also smart to make it a startup, because why spend the full power of a corporation when a small tight band is actually better. Sort of a separation of concerns; friendly relationship, possibly deals between the two entities — I'm sure Apple's datacenters could use some A-chip mojo in their blades.

[empath75]

You get your lawyers to talk to their lawyers, I would presume.

It sounds like they’re focusing on cloud computing which isn’t something Apple is working on.

[ksec]

Assuming they are well connected to ARM, I wonder if they get to be working on uArc based ARMv9?

And I think this also shows that Apple has no intention to build an ARM chip for its Desktop and Mac Pro products. Had this been the case I think the three would not have jump the chance for its own Startup.

[PossiblyKyle]

They could’ve possibly done this move to get acquired by Apple for a larger sum than plainly working there

[hartator]

NUVIA =~ NVIDIA. That’s a bad name.

[robocat]

New VIA? It looks like VIA are still producing CPUs: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/VIA_Technologies

[tekkk]

I have to agree. They could have tried to distinguish themselves with a name resembling something novel, yet they decided to go with one that sounds like a copy-cat version of company already in the industry. Why not something like XCHIP, POWER2 or whatever. I hope the lack of imagination does not extend on their chip design.

[partiallypro]

Also it name sounds both like Nivea (skin care) and Nuva (birth control)

[vpribish]

yeah, what the fuck. Maybe they are counting on the inevitable lawsuit to raise their profile before changing their name or something?

[rwmj]

Also Jon Masters, ex Red Hat.

[newshorts]

my question to the group is:

How will this affect Apple’s ability to innovate going forward? Were these executives a crucial part of Apple’s competency?

[Angostura]

Tech Crunch has the foulest of cookie control systems. Not reading that.

[panpanna]

Someone please create a mirroring service for HN submissions.

Even Reddit has one

[rough-sea]

I wonder if they are considering RISC-V. Probably not - they don’t sound like risk-taking people. But given the timelines of chip production, I would think a couple years from now a solid RISC-V server might be very much in demand.

[ip26]

You're saying these are risc-averse people?

[als0]

The vector extensions would need to be finished before that can happen.

As a side note, a couple of jobs on their careers page seem to want ARM assembly experience...so it's likely to be an ARM core?

[Tuna-Fish]

The RISC-V ISA is pretty awful for high-end designs. No competitive servers can be built with it.

Plenty of people seem to have been caught up in the hype of RISC-V taking over the world and doing everything, but that's never going to happen. The ISA is heavily optimized towards making very low-end devices very cheap. Like, don't think cellphone chips, think appliances. This is not a bad call, as it's the area where greenfield designs with cost advantage have the best chance to get market share. However, there is no path of extending the ISA that will make it competitive with ARM or x86 on high-end devices. The only way to do that is to design RISC-VI, that abandons most of the things that RISC-V what it is.

[Symmetry]

The big names involved are all heavily involved in ARM so I expect that's what they'll use.

[panpanna]

Or maybe risc-v is just good enough?

[unnouinceput]

I wish him good luck. The more the merrier for us, consumers.

[tambourine_man]

What’s sad is that he had to exit Apple and found a company. Maybe to sell it back to Apple in the future.

It seems symptomatic that he couldn’t inside Apple.

Sad that it’s so hard to do some things inside humongous companies. Even when you’re obviously incredibly talented and accomplished.

[cushychicken]

It's not so sad or surprising. Apple is heavily leveraged to build chips in support of its core business, which is building iPhones. He can likely achieve his goal of becoming a top executive in the semiconductor industry (within Apple or other company) faster by getting acquihired into a larger corporation as head of this new server development company.

It's all about mission orientation vs. functional orientation. Apple is heavily leveraged in a functional orientation to build chips for iPhones. NUVIA is heavily mission oriented in building server chips. Mission oriented companies win on speed. An acquihire of NUVIA shortens the total time this fella would need to ascend to the top tier of semiconductor executives just by virtue of the fact that they are a company that moves faster. He either becomes a top executive in a successful chip startup, or he gets acquihired at a high level into a big semiconductor company. Either way - he wins.

Andy Grove has some great insights on mission orientation vs functional orientation if you're interested. Chapter 8 of High Output Management - cliffs notes available here:

https://medium.com/@iantien/top-takeaways-from-andy-grove-s-...

[yabadabadoes]

I don't see it as sad, the existence of NeXT as a separate entity allowed many possibilities. I.e. it left room open for a completely different startup to roll new tech directions back into Apple and NeXT to end up as new direction at SGI, HP or whatever. Even if the end looked a lot like the status quo should have looked, a wider range of possibilities shape the industry and individual motivation.

[friedman23]

>What’s sad is that he had to exit Apple and found a company. Maybe to sell it back to Apple in the future.

I don't understand why this is sad? This is just a negotiating tactic.

[scarface74]

He wants to make server chips. Apple doesn’t sell servers. It would be more of a Google thing to invest money on random products that either and fail inside the company.

[ddingus]

There were companies who encouraged these things. Lifted up whole regions, and in some cases, kicked off whole new industries.

Tektronix in it's prime, run by it's original founders, did exactly this. The benefits still play out today.

https://www.opb.org/television/programs/oregonexperience/epi...

[leppr]

What would be sad is if he was unable to take the financial risk of leaving Apple. The whole point of capitalism is encouraging experimentation with limited liability companies, that falls apart if you try to experiment inside another company. The magic of our economy is in the connections between companies, inside individual companies it's just boring old dictatorships.

[dang]

Related and recent: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21547850

[known]

Alternative to RISC-V? https://archive.is/fFw5T

[jaytaylor]

Is it possible or probable they'll go into mobile chips to compete with Qualcomm?

In any case, best wishes and godspeed. I believe an increase in competition in the CPU space is good for humanity and only improves our chance of surviving as a species.

[scarface74]

Let’s be honest. They aren’t building a company to take on Intel and AMD. They are at most “building a company” to either be an acquisition for one of the major chip producers (maybe even Apple) or to be acquihired.

[discardable_dan]

While I like this idea, I think supporting a full x86-64 instruction set for high-performance applications, from scratch, is likely years out. This company will need a 10-year runway to see any market impact.

[throwGuardian]

Where is x86-64 mentioned? I assumed they were building ARM chips.

In any case, they don't mention any secret sauce. Intel has strong channels, fabs and the x86-64 ISA with massive software compatibility on the server side. Even with better performance/power, Intel can simply undercut the competition to drive them out of business. If Qualcomm's sales channels couldn't dent the server space, I am sceptical about upstarts, unless their [power, performance, cost] is significantly better than Intel.

[Symmetry]

A lot of the press has been talking about how they'll be taking on Intel and AMD but that's just because those are the only server chip makers their readers are familiar with. Don't take it literally.

[raverbashing]

"Nobody" cares about x86 anymore except those married to the platform.

Even Windows runs on Arm now

For servers they care about price, performance, support and volume/availability

If you can have a non-x86 platform that will save power/cooling to the big datacenter users (FAANG basically) they will be willing to give you money

[russler23]

TechCrunch has more details than Reuters does. Such as confirming ARM ISA, but custom arch. https://techcrunch.com/2019/11/15/three-of-apple-and-googles...

[gigatexal]

Nuvia like the ring ;)

[keymone]

Any news from Mill computing?