The quote at the end of the posted Reuters article (not the one you’re responding to) says that it doesn’t require extensive code modifications. So is the “custom software” is standard for the target customers of nextsilicon?

The article says they are also developing a RISCV CPU

Yeah, it's an unfortunate overlap. The Mill-Core in NextSilicon terminology is the software defined "configuration" of the chip so to speak that represents swaths of the application that are deemed worthy of acceleration as expressed on the custom HW.

So really the Mill-Core is in a way the expression of the customer's code. really.

They are completely different designs, but the name is inspired by the same source: the Mill component in Charles Babbage's Analytical Engine.

Archive.is is broken if you use cloudflare dns.

All processors are inherently behind. First research comes out or standards are made, then much time later silicon is fabbed. For example, pcie gen 6 was ratified years ago, but there's nothing I've seen that uses it. Maybe you could argue that their silicon is behind others' but it's all about what their market is and what their customers are demanding.

If you want your customers to spend supercomputing money, you need to have a way for those customers to explore and learn to leverage your systems without committing a massive spend.

ARM, x86, and CUDA-capable stuff is available off the shelf at Best Buy. This means researchers don't need massive grants or tremendous corporate investment to build proofs of concepts, and it means they can develop in their offices software that can run on bigger iron.

IBM's POWER series is an example of what happens when you don't have this. Minimum spend for the entry-level hardware is orders of magnitude higher than the competition, which means, practically speaking, you're all-in or not at all.

CUDA is also a good example of bringing your product to the users. AMD spent years locking out ROCm behind weird market-segmentation games, and even today if you look at the 'supported' list in the ROCm documentation it only shows a handful of ultra-recent cards. CUDA, meanwhile, happily ran on your ten-year-old laptop, even if it didn't run great.

People need to be able to discover what makes your hardware worth buying.

The implication wasn't to use the raspberry pi toolchain. Just that toolchains are required and are a critical part of developing for new hardware. The Intel/AMD toolchain they will be competing with is even more mature than rpi. And toolchain availability and ease of use makes a huge difference whether you are developing for supercomputers or embedded systems. From the article:

"It uses technology called RISC-V, an open computing standard that competes with Arm Ltd and is increasingly being used by chip giants such as Nvidia and Broadcom."

So the fact that rpi tooling is better than the imitators and it has maintained a significant market share lead is relevant. Market share isn't just about performance and price. It's also about ease of use and network effects that come with popularity.

You should check out AMD's NPU architecture.

So, a Systolic Array[1] spiced up with a pinch of control flow and a side of compiler cleverness? At least that's the impression I get from the servethehome article linked upthead. I wasn't able to find non-marketing better-than-sliced-bread technical details from 3 minutes of poking at your website.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Systolic_array

Text on the front page of the NS website* leads me to think you have a fancy compiler: "Intelligent software-defined hardware acceleration". Sounds like Cerebras to my non-expert ears.

* https://www.nextsilicon.com