I doubt that is really significant - fabs are happy to work with anybody. What they will likely bring is:
* Physical design team (stupidly known as the "backend"). This is extremely specialised knowledge and most chip companies don't really want to have to deal with it if they can avoid it.
* IP blocks. Especially for annoying things like phys, memory controllers, USB controllers, PLLs, power, etc. These things are difficult to do, difficult to test, and often critical (good luck if your clock doesn't work...) I would not at all be surprised if Broadcom supplied CPUs too.
My total guess at what happened is Broadcom supplied most of a SoC and OpenAI added an LLM coprocessor module to it, and probably asked them to add like 10x more DRAM interfaces.
I doubt that is really significant - fabs are happy to work with anybody. What they will likely bring is:
* Physical design team (stupidly known as the "backend"). This is extremely specialised knowledge and most chip companies don't really want to have to deal with it if they can avoid it.
* IP blocks. Especially for annoying things like phys, memory controllers, USB controllers, PLLs, power, etc. These things are difficult to do, difficult to test, and often critical (good luck if your clock doesn't work...) I would not at all be surprised if Broadcom supplied CPUs too.
My total guess at what happened is Broadcom supplied most of a SoC and OpenAI added an LLM coprocessor module to it, and probably asked them to add like 10x more DRAM interfaces.