Adobe is Considering Whether it Wants To Design Its Own Chips (axios.com)

A growing number of technology companies are trying to manufacture their own chips, cutting their reliance on Intel and other chip providers. This week Adobe pondered making a similar move. From a report: At an internal innovation conference on Tuesday, Adobe CTO Abhay Parasnis posed the matter as a question for his colleagues, noting the significant increases in performance from chips designed specifically for specialized tasks, like machine learning. "Do we need to become an ARM licensee?" he said, referring to the company whose underlying chip design is used across a wide range of devices, including computers, servers and phones.

"I don't have the answer, but it is something we are going to have to pay attention to." Later on Tuesday, Parasnis told Axios that there are a range of ways that Adobe could get deeper into silicon. "ARM does afford a model for a software company to package its technology much closer to silicon," he said, adding Adobe could do that without literally making its own chips, including by partnering with an existing chipmaker.

Comments

Adobe?

[jmccue]

hummmm, from the people who brought us flash. I think I will stick with Intel, thank you very much.

Re:Adobe?

[zlives]

that was the old Adobe, the new adobe has the super secure PDF software that has never been exploited... before it is released.

Re:Adobe?

[Jeremy Erwin]

back in the early 1990s, you could buy photoshop accelerators.. Then again, you could get the same DSP ( AT&T 3210) by using a Quadra 660AV or 840 AV.

DRM chips?

[ctilsie242]

As someone who is a tad miffed at Adobe for forcing a subscription model on everyone, even the enterprise, I would be hesitant at best to buy any hardware offerings because I would fear that some additional monthly subscription fee would be tacked on.

If I needed hardware for a custom mass-produced gizmo, and wasn't bound to x86/amd64, I'd probably go ARM. Yes, it does have a license fee, but the technology is widely known and debugged, tools are available, finding multiple ARM fabs wouldn't be hard to do, to ensure second-sourcing is doable, and it would be easy to mass produce widgets with ARM products. If not ARM, then RISC-V or POWER.

Re:DRM chips?

[skinfaxi]

Every 12 months you have to re-buy your chips or your hardware stops working : (

Dubyah Tee Eff?

[Crypto Gnome]

Seriously, WHAT FOR?

The entire "lets design the silicon ourselves" push is because YOU'RE ALREADY USING SILICON, just paying someone else for 100% of the work, and the design is generic not customized for your use-case.

If you're a company which has NO HARDWARE PRODUCTS (not even rumors on the horizons) thinking "hey maybe we should license ARM, it worked for Apple" is the WORST KIND OF CORPORATE DRUG INDUCED NIGHTMARE.

Re:Dubyah Tee Eff?

[Sarten-X]

For just about anybody else, I'd agree with you... For Adobe, though, it kinda makes sense.

Adobe's cash cow is the media industry, and one of their biggest performance bottlenecks is video rendering. While not a particularly large market, having a premium hardware product that improves rendering speed is worth quite a lot of money to certain companies. I expect that's what Adobe is looking to capture with this push, with a model that would look very similar to how Bitcoin miners operated: Plug in an ASIC as a coprocessor, and it will handle the application workload.

Re:Dubyah Tee Eff?

[bob4u2c]

Rendering Speed? Are we talking video or full on 3D rendering? If were talking video, chips that can pump out 4K video at 30fps or better are a dime a dozen. I bought a cheap $50 roku over christmas that streams content from my media box in 4K to the tv in the kids play room. If your talking 3D rendering then they would be so far behind the curve that they would have to pump probably a billion or so at it just to play catch up. Assuming they do produce something good, then what, its just another video card that has special Adobe rendering.

If they wanted a special decoding of Adobe content, they should work with existing chip designers and push for their own decoders be built into products. Of course I'm assuming they already did that and got laughed at or someone gave them a billion dollar quote to get started.

Again, am I missing marketing speak somewhere?

Re:Dubyah Tee Eff?

[Sarten-X]

We're talking video rendering, which is almost entirely unrelated to the decoding process that's so fast (and already supported by custom silicon like inside that Roku player you mentioned).

As an AC said:

Once an editor is finished editing a film, they have to render it. This process [stitches] all the edits and effects together into one video file.

Now, note that those edits include computing special effects (like chroma key), compositing layers on top of other layers, as well as arranging different clips into one big video, then the whole result must be encoded. Typically, the video codecs are asymmetric, doing a lot more processing during the encoding step so the decoding can be faster and easier (and therefore supporting higher framerates with cheaper decoding hardware).

4K video, in 24-bit color and uncompressed (which is really necessary to do the full compositing operation) is about 25 megabytes per frame. At 60 FPS, that's 1.5 gigabytes per second, or 12 Gbps, to use typical bandwidth units. In comparison, that will just about fully saturate a PCI-e x16 slot and some of the lower DDR4 specs. That's okay, because you won't be storing that data in memory for very long anyway... 64 GB of RAM will only store 42 seconds of uncompressed video. During the encoding process, you'll want to have that old video accessible, because it's useful for making more efficient compression of future frames.

That's a lot of data, all to get a seamless composition, which is really rather important for having modern CGI effects blend invisibly into the recorded footage. Without the full rendering process, the effect layers may get different handling, so they'll appear noticeably different in the final render. In the effort to produce uncompromising results for you, the viewer, studios just take longer for rendering, spending more money on salaries so you get a better result... or they just cut corners and render at a lower resolution.

Having custom devices (and custom silicon) would mean that Adobe (or another vendor) would be able to take advantage of things like dedicated GDDR5X memory for high-bandwidth (256Gbps per chip, and lots of chips to increase capacity) storage, ARM processors for processing (though not necessarily rendering (in the non-video usually-3D sense)) special effects, and ASICs for the compositing and encoding operations, only relying on the host computer for storing the final product. In theory, a shoebox-sized peripheral could replace a data center render farm, enabling near-real-time rendering of edited film. That means directors and production crews can see their results more quickly, allowing them more time to reshoot or otherwise make a better product.

It's certainly a commercial gamble for Adobe... but like I said, they're one of very few companies with a market position that makes custom hardware sensible.

I cannot justify creative cloud.

[jellomizer]

I am not sure why Adobe wants to make its own chips. They are a software company, if these chips are for their own server farm "cloud" what real benefit is it going to give them. Will Creative Cloud software be reasonably priced for amateurs? For the amount of time I need their products, I cannot justify spending more then $5.00 a month for Photoshop. Anything more it is worth my effort banging my head with The GIMP. (mostly due to how little I use the product)

Back in the olden days. I would get the Upgrade for $200 every 4 or 5 years. But the current pricing, is much more expensive for the low volume use of the product. Especially, because I don't need the upgrade all the time.

Re: I cannot justify creative cloud.

[Billly Gates]

Simple for DRM. You need a USB with a custom crypto chip plugged in to use Adobe Cloud. As soon as the cert expires you throw it out and buy another one for an expensive price. More money!

What people fail to realize is Adobe has a monopoly as they bought all their competitors. It's ridiculous. I also notice Adobe took all their menu items in Photoshop and made them separate products so you are forced to buy something now for each function. Now you can't even save a file as a PDF at work without an expensive license. The free one used to do this.

will CC cloud cover roaming fees for licene checks

[Joe_Dragon]

will CC cloud Mobile device cover roaming, in flight wifi, cruse ship wifi, etc fees for license checks?

Why?

[YuppieScum]

Why on earth would Adobe - exclusively a software company - need to design their own silicon?

Is this a prelude to a repeat of the bad old dongle-days?

Or they can learn how to write software instead

[JoeyRox]

Their creative-cloud apps are slow as molasses and only make perfunctory use of the computing resources available to them, including GPUs and multiple CPU cores.

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

RISC V

[backslashdot]

Why not RISC V, do companies really want to pay ARM forever? It's like, do you want to keep paying for a cloud subscription to software? Hmm.. I guess in Adobe's case they are cool with it.

Re: RISC V

[enriquevagu]

I am slightly involved in RISC-V development. At the moment there exist a total of zero RISC-V multicore open designs that work. And by "that work" I mean to be at least capable to boot the OS. It will be competitive in a couple of years, there is a huge community pushing for it, but nowadays it is not ready for prime time.