Google Developing "SiliFuzz" For Fuzzing CPUs To Uncover Electrical Defects

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Google Developing "SiliFuzz" For Fuzzing CPUs To Uncover Electrical Defects

With OSS-Fuzz for continuous fuzzing of open-source projects and along with working on the various sanitizers for compilers, Google has been doing a lot for proactively uncovering software defects in key open-source projects. Now though a group of their engineers have been working on SiliFuzz for software aiming to discover new CPU defects...

https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?pa...zz-CPU-Defects

[tildearrow]

I wonder if Google is trying to build a domestic CPU or just putting x86 to shame

[er888kh]

Typo:

We have detected a large number of detects

[boxie]

I wonder if Google is trying to build a domestic CPU or just putting x86 to shame

they are, It's ARM based and in the Pixel 6 :P

I am sure however there is a similar observation to "for every 1000 lines of code, on average, there are X number of bugs" for silicon, so fuzzing x86 is a pretty smart idea

[NobodyXu]

I wonder if Google is trying to build a domestic CPU or just putting x86 to shame

They are doing both with one move.

[Vistaus]

I wonder if Google is trying to build a domestic CPU or just putting x86 to shame

They already have: it's called ‘Tensor’ and will be present in the Pixel 6 that's going to be announced today.

[kingu]

So this gets added to every CI pipeline, and it uses how much power for what tangible benefit?

[CKing123]

So this gets added to every CI pipeline, and it uses how much power for what tangible benefit?

As it turns out some cores just turn out to be unreliable, and Google and Facebook kept discovering them in their data centers. See this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QMF3rqhjYuM
This allows Google to detect defective CPUs

Also since it compares the results with other machines and x86_64 simulators, they found a few bugs in simulators as well (including QEMU) so not just CPUs. So more bug fixes in QEMU and other x86_64 simulators as well

[skeevy420]

They already have: it's called ‘Tensor’ and will be present in the Pixel 6 that's going to be announced today.

Really? Thanks for the heads up.

[smitty3268]

They already have: it's called ‘Tensor’ and will be present in the Pixel 6 that's going to be announced today.

They already had their own custom chips before the Pixel Tensor cpus as well, just not quite as general purpose.

Youtube uses custom "Argos" video encoding chip. Their cloud has a 45 TFLOP "TPU" machine learning tensor chip. Prior Pixel phones include custom google designed Titan M security chips and image processing chips.