Assessing Economic Viability: A Comparative Analysis of Total Cost of Ownership for Domain-Adapted Large Language Models versus State-of-the-art Counterparts in Chip Design Coding Assistance

This paper presents a comparative analysis of total cost of ownership (TCO) and performance between domain-adapted large language models (LLM) and state-of-the-art (SoTA) LLMs , with a particular emphasis on tasks related to coding assistance for chip design. We examine the TCO and performance metrics of a domain-adaptive LLM, ChipNeMo, against two leading LLMs, Claude 3 Opus and ChatGPT-4 Turbo, to assess their efficacy in chip design coding generation. Through a detailed evaluation of the accuracy of the model, training methodologies, and operational expenditures, this study aims to provide stakeholders with critical information to select the most economically viable and performance-efficient solutions for their specific needs. Our results underscore the benefits of employing domain-adapted models, such as ChipNeMo, that demonstrate improved performance at significantly reduced costs compared to their general-purpose counterparts. In particular, we reveal the potential of domain-adapted LLMs to decrease TCO by approximately 90 advantages becoming increasingly evident as the deployment scale expands. With expansion of deployment, the cost benefits of ChipNeMo become more pronounced, making domain-adaptive LLMs an attractive option for organizations with substantial coding needs supported by LLMs