Perhaps it is simpler to say that Intel was disrupted
medium.learningbyshipping.com
medium.learningbyshipping.com
When platforms failed to come together because Intel was not delivering the goods, Nokia had to scramble to get new phones ramped up around alternative platforms. Nokia lost a lot of valuable time this way right when Apple and Android started kicking its ass. I wouldn't point at it as the root cause for Nokia's rapid collapse but it certainly was a contributing factor. E.g. Meego was years late to the market partly because of this and ultimately killed off in favor of the deal with Microsoft (another ill fated bet). And yes, Intel Atom was a big part of that failing as well.
Bottom line is that Intel tried and failed to get into the mobile market repeatedly and failed while being way too comfortable milking desktops and servers. Now that that market finally seems to be drying up, they have a problem and still no viable strategy to deal with it. Atom flopped. Itanium flopped. AMD is back looking stronger than ever. MS is has retired the wintel brand years ago and is seemingly open to running on ARM and getting quite cozy with Linux. Apple is widely rumored to also consider switching to their quite credible in house ARM based processors.
Perhaps like many others who frequent the industry news, I'm wondering if the future simply looks like macOS on ARM with people moving clang targets to an `arm-apple-darwin` that's macOS compatible.
I wonder how far off this future is and what it means for the valuation of Intel. Will it translate to a small dent in their share price?
Does the Mac App Store require submission as source code?
If not, consider the implications.
They implemented a dynamic binary translator to ease the transition (which they discontinued a couple versions later -- initially released in Tiger, and was removed in Lion).
Or they could slowly make it required.
No. You do not submit source code.
> They require (I think -- maybe just strongly encourage) submissions to the iOS App Store to include LLVM bitcode.
Apple does not currently require LLVM bitcode for iOS. It does require it for Apple TV and Apple Watch.
Additionally, LLVM bitcode is not architecture agnostic. It would not solve the problem of going from x86 to ARM.
> (anyone remember fat binaries i.e. the ones including both PPC and Intel executables in one .app container?)
This was also used in Apple's transition from 32-bit to 64-bit on Mac. And later again on iOS.
So yes, if Apple were to transition CPU architectures again, fat binaries would be the likely approach.
I think this is the best line in the whole thing. Intel didn't notice, and it was super weird, and it was the best thing they ever did.
Fun fact: the first thing the engineers did with their new toy was bolt then-new R700 pipes to a hypertransport bus, so it used hypertransport to fulfill memory requests instead of a native Radeon GDDR controller.
The purchase of AMD and the Christmas morning giddiness of unwrapping that gift and turning it into what eventually became the prototype of the APU was the most brilliant thing ever.
To put it in perspective, lets count all x86 sales: all the desktops, all the laptops, all the servers, all the weird little things like x86 chinese tablets, all of it.
Combined Xbox One and PS4 sales (both massive APUs, essentially) dwarf all of the sales both Intel and non-console AMD do; it dwarfs it in per chip and per thread. Intel only claims more sales in dollars than AMD (incl. MS and Sony deals) because of Intel tax, no legitimate reason.
Similarly, lets do the same with Radeon sales vs Nvidia GPUs... take all of the Nvidia GPUs (desktop, laptop, ARM SoCs like the Shield and the Nintendo Switch, server compute, etc), and all the AMD GPUs that aren't XBOne and PS4... console sales dwarf everything else that both companies make.
AMD won both races and no one even paid attention: AMD makes more x86 CPUs (both per chip and per thread), and more GPUs. Optimizing performance software (ie, games) has far more focus on both of AMD's platforms than anything else.
Intel and Nvidia are now the underdogs in their own races. This happened silently, and the cheer-leading for Team Blue and Team Green drowned out reality for a bit.
Combined Xbox One and PS4 sales (both massive APUs, essentially) dwarf all of the sales both Intel and non-console AMD do; it dwarfs it in per chip and per thread."
Ummmm, no...
"PC vendors shipped a total of 263 million computers last year, down from 270 million in 2016." https://www.statista.com/chart/12578/global-pc-shipments/
And that's not counting chips sold to those building their own computers nor does it count servers.
The PS4 has sold about 80 million console while the XBox One has sold about 40 million over around 4 years.
So the OP was so wrong I am not even sure where to start. ( And to make thing worst HN are upvoting him, talk about fake news problem. )
[1] https://www.jonpeddie.com/press-releases/gpu-market-increase...
AMD's revenue is half of NVIDIA's and about 9% of Intel's. There's something missing from your analysis...
https://ycharts.com/companies/AMD/profit_margin
Margin vs Volume
I guess you and I have different definitions of what an 'underdog' means. Intel ships more CPUs (and GPUs) overall than AMD, and Nvidia does more discrete GPUs (at least in PCs):
https://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey
I'm not sure how valuable and relevant console sales are, since manufacturers make pennies on each unit. It makes sense that AMD, being the more "discount" brand, would be in more consoles than Intel. Except the first Xbox, has Intel ever been in a console?
AMD has turned around with Ryzen, and by some accounts is selling better lately, but Intel has had bigger numbers for a decade.
Semiconductors are a scale business. The one with most scale wins. The margins are of less relevance.
Intel has always been the unbeaten one, with most chips out there by an order of magnitude. Now that they lost this lead, everything (including P&D and margins) is expected to suffer.
On top of that, Nvidia was valued at much less than ATi at the time and was willing to sell to AMD, given the requirement that Jensen Huang be the CEO of the new combined company. A competent CEO was exactly what AMD needed at that time, given their turnover of three inadequate CEO's previous to Lisa Su. And Huang has proven to be quite competent [1].
I’m not an Nvidia evangelist or anything, but one has proven results and the other only has failure after failure under their belt.
What do you mean by "win"? Total number of chips sold? Then why not declare Qualcomm the winner because they have shipped billions of ARM cores with integrated graphics processors?
The IP was sold off directly due to the debt AMD leveraged in their purchase of ATi.
For Nvidia specifically I think that's only true of the gaming market (maybe crypto as well?), but my understanding is their massive increase in value over the last half-decade or so is predominantly from the deep learning market, where they continue to dominate by no small margin due to CUDA being a hard dependency of the major DL frameworks.
I don't have any hard numbers on it, but I wouldn't be surprised if the CUDA-tax is more than the Intel-tax ever was.
I very much agree, but I also don't have the skills or knowledge to say what kind of effort it takes to build such a language/toolchain. It seems like such an obvious opportunity for AMD, and has for so long, could it be less incompetence and more engineering difficulty and/or adoption struggles?
I know I've seen talk of CUDA-killers around these parts before, would love to hear more details from people more familiar with this stuff.
From the market perspective, it seems to me that a "CUDA killer" would not actually help. I think we need a free CUDA toolchain.
Heck even a non-open, AMD-specific toolchain would probably be great for consumers, but an open, cross-compatible toolchain would be even better for us, and might be better for AMD as well by allowing non-AMD-employed experts to contribute.
There's OpenCL. Except OpenCL performance is worse than CUDA performance on NVidia, so anyone using NVidia's hardware (essentially, everyone) pretty much wants to use CUDA instead.
SPIR was too little, too late.
Margins on console chips are garbage. AMD was the only chip maker desperate enough to take the deal.
Intel has 12x gross revenue and 90x operating income as AMD.
AMD is doing good work. But they’ve got a long, long ways to go.
Recently I looked into AMD's 2400G APU with much superior graphics but I don't understand what is it for. Sure it can sort of run some games at mediocre frame rates on last-century 1080p monitors, but not higher. But everything else Intel will do just as well... Looks like all these integrated GPUs are starved of memory bandwidth anyway. So what's the point of these APUs then? Where's the AMD graphics advantage? And what's problem then with Intel's integrated graphics?
It wasn't until Broadwell, and later Iris Graphics era, which I think is 2012 / 2013 before things starting to pick up. Intel actively optimising their drivers for stability, OpenGL, and Performance.
AMD's Graphics Advantage is that their drivers are better tested. Over the near three decades of history has taught us, the GPU hardware is absolutely nothing with out top notch drivers support. Intel I740, Matrox, 3Dfx, S3 Verge, 3Dlabs, PowerVR......
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/System_Controller_Hub#Poulsbo
There /still/ isn't support for this closed platform on Linux/etc based systems due to a combination of (now) outdated hardware, very few systems in developer hands (even lower interest), and the lack of performance even with proper drivers* (I don't have a good citation for that).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bonnell_(microarchitecture)
It didn't help that the power requirements fell very solidly in to the uncanny valley between 'crappy, but very low power so we can forgive it' and 'good, but uses lots of power'.
The Intel GPUs just do not have the FLops to complete with the high end offerings from NVIDIA and AMD. Here is a realistic benchmark of GPUs and notice that Intel isn't even listed in the first page, that is how slow Intel's GPU is:
In particular, if you set a 4k monitor to 1440p effective resolution in macOS, it renders a 5k (1440p doubled) image and then down-scales that to 4k. This seems like it would be ideal but in practice, things are too laggy.
I upgraded from a 1440p monitor to a 4k one, but I ended up going down to 1080p effective in order to get acceptable performance due to intel's under-powered integrated graphics. I'm fairly positive that AMD's APUs would be sufficient in this scenario.
On the gaming side, I also just got a GPD Win 2, which is a little handheld gaming computer that runs on a Intel Core m3 (graphics and all). At 720p, the Intel integrated graphics can actual run a lot of games, especially older ones. But OF COURSE I'd like to see better performance there. Unfortunately, AMD doesn't have anything available yet for that power/TDP range (7w).
This seems lazy. Instead of properly supporting 2160p you get a sad kludge instead.
Intel GPUs are underpowered and have been for a long time. Their drivers are also full of bugs and odd edge cases.
Intel saw iGPUs as a value-add for makers of cheap systems and treated them as such. That's a major point of Sinofsky's piece: graphics ended up being important and Intel knee-capped themselves and all their partners by failing to understand that. He gives an example: You can't put a discrete GPU into that 10" laptop or Intel will kill you by removing your discounts and kickbacks, making your laptop more expensive than your competitors.
Essentially, the current gen Intel GMAs are more or less equivalent to AMD's last gen APUs. Ryzen with Vega is around 3x faster. In the past, AMD tended to focus on the iGPU at the expense of the CPU, but with Ryzen, it's also comparable to Coffee Lake while maintaining the massive GPU lead.
> And what's problem then with Intel's integrated graphics?
I play video games. The problem with Intel's integrated graphics is simple: they have historically not been powerful enough that you can run many video games at a playable fps.
Historically, AMD/ATI integrated graphics chipsets were a budget-friendly alternative to avoid the performance void that Intel integrated graphics provided. Everyone who gamed on the budget end knew this. You looked for AMD/ATI integrated, or if you had the money to spend, NVIDIA had some discrete solutions as well.
Over the years, Intel stepped up their game and closed the gap. However, these days even the Intel Iris platform is poor where used, because it's typically utilized on higher-end computing where high resolution monitors are provided to match.
Because pixel fill rate is a bottleneck for all graphics solutions, the gains that Intel Iris provide are set back by the higher resolutions they tend to be required to drive.
Were you around in the last century? :)
I don't remember 1080p monitors becoming common anywhere before circa 2005.
onion, belt, etc.
Still, I'd want as much power as humanly possible for gaming on the go. 15-20 extra frames per second matters a lot.
So depending on the execution paths you could even trigger software rendering by relying on wrong assumptions.
Their refusal to fab ARM chips hurts them more than the design-rule complexity of their process.
"Interposers, Chiplets and...ButterDonuts?" -- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G3kGSbWFig4
Something has happened with Intel, which has lost its vaunted intelligent "paranoia."
After two years, I was still "the new guy."
They also totally goofed mobile, as the article explains. Everyone knew mobile would be a big deal; it was "obvious." Even Moore's law predicted mobile. (Every 18 months the number of transistors you can fit in a given area doubles = every 18 months you can make the same chip use half the space.)
Why did they goof mobile? I think the article explains the symptoms well, but even I have trouble explaining "why" given that everyone could see mobile coming.
Intel did great in process technology and the ecosystem around their chips. They were extremely well positioned to grab the smartphone market. Contrary to popular belief, x86 is entirely capable of the TDPs required by mobile phones. The Core m3 has a configurable TDP under 4W while making none of the compromises of Atom. It might have taken another skunkworks project to cut some modules and bring it down to the milliwatt range, but it could have been done. Intel simply allowed itself to be outmaneuvered out of the smartphone market, by complacency and unwillingness to lower the "tax". That worked fine for a decade, but now they're seeing the side effects of the resulting brain drain.
No. This is best to say a safety measure: going over 4w over 5 seconds? turning on deep throtlinng.
Real engineering datasheets you get as a client tell very clearly that TDP of Y line chips is 17w.
Intel chips at such wattages are just a lot of dark silicon.
Your analysis is wrong.
Okay, so exactly how do you sell:
"Hey, we need to get in on this mobile thing. It's an order of magnitude more chips, but instead of margins of 30 dollars per chip, we'll only receive ... get this ... 30 cents. Isn't that a great idea?"
Kinda like saying "why should this big company named Sears care about this little company named Amazon"
https://anthonysmoak.com/2016/03/27/andy-grove-and-intels-mo...
This line has a "Moore's law ended" marked all over it. One player expected it, the other didn't.
Intel has always been on top so they had less incentive to prepare for that. As Ben thompson said in his article Intel just assumed they could keep going without running into process shrink problems of the magnitude they have.
Intel survived because they bet on Moore's Law--while DEC and IBM could get 30-40% more performance out of good design, Intel could just wait 6 months. That eventually crushed the companies that could do excellent VLSI design.
Suddenly, now that Moore's Law finally broke, everybody needs VLSI designers back. However, those designers are all gone--dead, retired, or so screwed over by management that they are never coming back.
I know a lot of people in their late 40's to early 60's from that industry and they all have similar sentiment: "I will run a hot dog stand before working in a semiconductor company ever again."
Couldn't younger people learn good VLSI design? I guess they would need mentors though to help them get up to speed quickly.
Things like: "Why don't you tie a pass transistor to a storage node directly to a long bus?" killed at least 3 microprocessor designs (that I know of).
There are a million things like this, and none of them are worth writing down since they are of zero use to anyone outside of the industry/company and often are specific to design techniques or fabrication lines.
Samsung moved almost 100 engineers to Boston in order to try to second source manufacturing for the Alpha, had DEC engineers who were happy to help them, and still was only marginally successful.
In VLSI, 6 nines means you still have 200 failing transistors on your 200 million transistor chip.
I'd say that kicked butt.
Had its execution been perfect, its Roadmap of better IPC, more Core, and 10nm / 7nm node, it would still have lots of room to adjust. Although I think a better execution is only just delaying the problem. Like the article have said, it really is a multiple things.
Had Intel set out to make the best SoC for Netbook.
Had Intel set out to make the best Graphics within those die space.
This is the classic case, where Steve Jobs describe companies with a monopoly are ran by sales and marketing people.[1] And Product people ( Pat Gelsinger ) are driven out of management decision process.
I still remember in one of the video interview, Pat Gelsinger; I cant remember if it was EMC or VMware era, clearly describe how x86 would rule Sever space as long as it continue to improve and innovate. And trying create a half hearted SoC with x86 into Mobile wouldn't work. And it was all too late. ( I can no longer find that video )
And some people might think S.Sinofsky view on Intel graphics a little strange, remember Intel graphics didn't became good until Apple forces them to be better. And S.Sinofsky left M$ in 2012, the design of those Surface devices must have happened during 2010 era, and to make matter worst the graphics on Atom were generation behind what Intel had on the desktop.
They have had a ton of flops and misdirections. The 186. iAPX. i740. Xscale. Itanium. The FDIV bug. Pentium 4.
AMD has had Intel up against the ropes more times than they can count. Faster and cheaper 386 and 486 clones threatened them. The K6 came around and beat the Pentium II. AMD leap-frogged them with their 64-bit chips. Intel has always came back and stomped them right back into oblivion. They'd probably be close to turning the lights off if it weren't for Ryzen.
Intel illegally abused their monopoly to prevent AMD from getting as much traction as they should have gotten. They've been convicted and payed billions in fines over that behavior.
Intel should have suffered much more at the hands of the Opteron and Athlon 64 chips; if they hadn't been abusing their market position things would have worked out better for AMD and their stumble with Bulldozer wouldn't have hurt as much as it did.
For the curious, Intel would sell CPUs at retail to OEMs, then provide a rebate/kickback to discount those CPUs. Shipping AMD processors would reduce those rebates. Shipping too many AMD processors would eliminate the rebates outright. This made selling AMD-based systems non-tenable for many OEMs.
https://www.ft.com/content/f460ef98-930f-11e7-bdfa-eda243196...
https://www.google.com/search?q=Intel%20wins%20review%20of%2...
I'm not sure whether or not the latest jabs at Intel and the prophecies of their inevitable decline are accurate this time or seeded in people's hate of older giant tech companies, but this is not the first time I've read of Intel's demise. Just going by earnings its at best premature to cede the future to AMD. I will say that BK's abrupt departure did raise some concerns in my mind.
https://www.anandtech.com/show/1517
Intel never definitively reclaimed x86 until Conroe/Core 2.
One a related note, to my knowledge AMD is still essentially absent from the Autonomous Driving market, with NVIDIA and Intel fighting to be top dogs through different approaches¹. With some estimates for the size of that market (including non-chip portions) going as high as trillions of dollars², I hope for AMD's sake it has a plan to catch up sooner rather than later.
__________
1. https://www.benzinga.com/top-stories/18/02/11148965/which-ch...
2. http://fortune.com/2017/06/03/autonomous-vehicles-market/
I wish they're aren't so behind in everything I care about and give us some competition so those graphic card goes down in prices already.
https://www.cnbc.com/2017/09/20/tesla-building-an-ai-chip-fo...
It's just way too early to start picking winners and losers in the hardware space for autonomous given that nothing is being mass-produced. And there is no price-competition in the space because the major players are willing to pay whatever it takes as part of their R&D efforts to win the race.
That said, Intel is viewed from the outside as sort of an old monopolistic monolith, but a lot of that profit gets plowed into a bunch of truly innovative semiconductor R&D going on that I do not believe is being replicated by competitors. 3D XPoint is probably the most visible example. AMD, TSMC, Samsung, etc. I doubt will pick up the torch.
You make it sound both like they do struggle lately but they have stuff lined up that cannot be competed with. Slightly confusing for me, could you elaborate?
But at the same time, aren’t there competent cloners lurking behind every corner ready to jump on your product market fit and outpace you?
This article pushed me a little further into the “don’t worry about moats; make your partners successful” camp. But I waver.
So they went to Intel. They’re now on the same treadmill as everyone else. Can’t do better, can’t be totally stuck. But Intel isn’t progressing very fast, and they don’t seem to be focusing on the things Apple wants like ultra-low power.
But Apple’s chip division is kicking ass. The 10.5” iPad Pro is a monster, and could easily power a MacBook faster than an Intel chip. The real question is what to do on the MBP and iMac Pro.
Apple has never been keen on AMD for some reason, not sure if they have a chance on the high end. My impression is they don’t compete on low end/low power but I don’t know how accurate that is.
Very true. I have that exact iPad Pro (10.5") and the MacBook 12" and I can tell you that the iPad Pro is much stronger. The damn thing never stops for breath. Even trendy games with very very detailed graphics take 10 seconds to start on a bad day (usually 5-6) and they run at 60+ FPS at all times.
If we are talking about everyday apps and Safari, the iPad Pro is the last tablet you will ever need in your life. It's simply perfect.
> The real question is what to do on the MBP and iMac Pro.
My only complaint about my other MacBook (Pro 15", 2015) are the loud fan noises, to be fair. I know Apple's thin and beautiful laptops are what people love but I'd buy some slightly bulkier MacBook if it was quiet.
Speaking of which, the iMac Pro is the quietest machine of its class out there. Definitely gonna gather some cash and buy it. I don't think I'll need another desktop machine for at least 7 years, if not 10-12...
Never been a fanboy in my life but I honestly can't wait to see Apple chip exclusive iPhones and MacBook. (I am mentioning iPhones because they still use Qualcomm's or Intel's radios and chips for their signals stack.)
The iPhone 8 CPU is competitive with a Core i5
For such a claim to be true, you would have to expect that the phone CPU is somehow 10 times more efficient per Watt, while having the same kind of architecture (general CPU, not GPU/TPU/...).
Apple A11 has 297 GFlops CPU performance. (1)
That “7th gen i5” is apparently i5-7360U. 32 FLOPs/cycle/core (2) * 2 cores * 3.50 GHz (=max turbo) = 224 GFlops.
> the phone CPU is somehow 10 times more efficient per Watt
Not 10 times. The i5’s TDP is just 15W. I don’t know about A11 but high-end Qualcomm chips can be up to 5-6W, just 3 times difference.
> while having the same kind of architecture (general CPU, not GPU/TPU).
That’s a continuum. They both CPUs, they both have SIMD that’s how they achieve that high flop/cycle, but the architecture can be quite different. A11 has 6 cores. Intel spends many transistors, and therefore energy, doing very complicated things: branch prediction, indirect branch prediction, cache synchronization between cores, speculative execution… Apple has full control over OS and software, they can probably get away with not doing some of these. Intel and AMD have to maintain compatibility with all software (including single threaded), built by all compilers and languages, that’s why they have fewer tradeoffs available to them.
What happens is that people see a benchmark and they see low power consumption and now conclude that it must have 10 times better performance per watt. x86 is bad, ARM is good
But the thing is you cannot have your cake and eat it too. The ARM SoC is clearly more efficient but only during standby or low intensity workloads and because everything is integrated into a single chip. As soon as you use a constant CPU/GPU intensive workload like servers or video games or even just google maps [1] you will have the same energy efficiency as intel chips.
[1] My phone battery barely lasts 2 hours with google maps
Intel has not been optimizing for TDP/power draw as aggressively as Apple has. Apple started from that position and went up in performance. Intel started more in performance and had tried to keep TDP in check.
"Geekbench comparisons between phones and laptops used to be pretty meaningless, as the tests were not directly comparable, but that hasn’t been the case for some time now. Founder John Poole confirmed that it is legitimate to directly compare scores across platforms"
Look at these workloads[0] and tell me what doesn't look comparable across platforms? Parsing a 1.5MB HTML page, running SQLite queries, compiling code using LLVM, running Dijkstra's algorithm on a huge graph, repeatedly rendering PDFs, etc, etc.
[0] https://www.geekbench.com/doc/geekbench4-cpu-workloads.pdf
But wow does it look like it will pay off.
Apple's mobile CPUs are several years ahead of all the competition in terms of single core performance.
1. Well that's stupid. Why would they do that? Nobody needs this.
Within a few months...
2. Huh. This is actually really sweet. Nobody else has this technology.
And then a few years pass...
3. It's really nothing groundbreaking.
I think it's more likely that Apple will make iOS more flexible on the iPad and make it a true laptop alternative.
I don't think they are though. The current ARM chips in the high-end iphones and ipads are too powerful for mobile. They don't make sense from an investment standpoint (why not spend that hardware effort on rejuvenating the mac line which can make more money?). They make a lot of sense as a midway point to a performance tier where the A series can serve as a laptop chip.
From a software side, WatchOS is a trimmed down version of iOS and share many of the same frameworks. The HomePod is an even further trimmed down version of iOS.
"Designing x86 based hardware" is relatively easy. Intel does all of the heavy lifting with designing and integrating the components. Apple has shown any expertise in designing chips that are a match for Intel's on the high end.
Every other processor transition that Apple has done - 68K -> PPC -> Intel involved a massive CPU advantage that made emulation viable. That wouldn't be the case with x86 -> ARM. On the other hand, Apple had to migrate processors just to stay competitive with Wintel each time. If they stay with Intel, they don't have to worry about not having competitive performance with other PC manufacturers.
Finally, Apple has shown no expertise in delivering chips that are competitive with Intel on the high end. I'm sure they could do it, but they don't get the benefit of spreading their engineering fixed costs across almost a quarter billion devices a year if they develop a high end ARM desktop chip like they do with iOS devices.
So? The iPhone was part of the pc ecosystem, for years you needed a pc to even set it up. That says nothing about its architecture or the resources required to develop it.
The Mac doesn't benefit enough from the iPhone tie-in to make it worthwhile as an adjunct to the iPhone.
But I think Tony’s point was it would be nice for Apple to not have to pay the tax. It would help their bottom line.
If they don’t do it, expect Microsoft to perfect a future version of the Surface.
MS is beating apple at their own game.
The iPad pro is a great example of how out of touch apple is.
I still can’t get windows 10 to stop turning down the brightness on my screen or keep my ssh sessions open if I undock with a closed lid though, and this is on two different laptops.
As for use outside of an enterprise setup, I really dislike how it auto installs installers for free2play Facebook styled games. I don’t want my operation system to do anything remotely like that.
And people say that Linux is the OS that requires bizarre incantations to do basic things.
Do your W10 Pro copies also include a way to disable Bing in the start menu search bar without multiple registry edits? I would love that. It was by far the most obnoxious change in the 1803 update.
I just removed all the tiles from the status bar, reverting to a plain old start menu.
Also I only use standard Windows accounts, with a special one for testing UWP and store related stuff.
My W10 Pro copies surely don't.
As Apple tells it, they do not foresee merging MacOS and iOS, as the user interface is to different.
Microsoft is more willing to ship products with bad UX, and power through based on their market position, and willingness to stick with it until they get it right.
I cannot see Apple, as it is, releasing something like Windows 8.
The other thing is that iOS is the money maker. Even if iPad doesn’t sell as much as it might, it supports the critical mass of the iOS ecosystem, which is a vulnerability for Apple, due to much smaller market share.
FTFY. The first time a colleague requested an iPad pro with a keyboard and got it, I was blown away by how much origami apple expects you to do to properly use it.
Not to mention it's impossible to use the Smart Cover in portrait mode so holding recipes while I'm cooking means propping it up against the toaster.
I’ve argued this point repeatedly in real life and on HN. The people who don’t want to use any of AWSs proprietary infrastructure or developers who want to use the repository pattern for the sole purpose of “not locking themselves” into one vendor.
I’ve never in 20+ years seen a major organization switch from a well known vendor to save a few dollars. Even if you theoretically can change your infrastructure, the risks and the amount of regression testing you have to do hardly ever makes it worthwhile to switch infrastructure.
As far as open source coming to the rescue, if someone else doesn’t takeover an open source project, more than likely, your company won’t either.
However, once the startup takes off and becomes cash-positive and has to scale, then AWS in particular becomes a huge point in your balance sheet. It's a very well executed vendor lock-in, I will give them that.
Many companies are using European VPS hosting and once they have mid-level business contract that guarantees 99.9999% uptime because the provider can replicate to 3 separate physical data centers, they are happy both with the service and the cost. Granted they need their own Ops teams but long-term this scales much better and is sustainable.
Managed cloud infrastructure is mostly overrated and the complexity of it is by design. AWS in particular is borderline crazy lately, they have dozens and dozens of inter-connected services and "AWS consultant" is now a commonplace title in CVs.
How is it less complex to host your own database servers, load balancers, queuing system, redundant storage, CI/CD servers, ELk stack, redundant memcache or Redis servers, distributed job scheduler (I’ve used Hashicorps Nomad in the past), configuration servers, etc. These are just the services that you don’t have to manage the underlying servers and you get redundancy.
I’m first and foremost a developer. But the money the company I work for saves by not having to hire dedicated people to manage and babysit servers more than makes up for the cost of AWS.
It just so happens that I know AWS well enough and have experience as an “architect” (and have the certifications to give them a warm and fuzzy) to be competent at the netops and devops side of things.
It is not less complex. It is definitely more complex and is harder. My point was that financially it is more sustainable long-term. And once your org is bigger, dedicated Ops team gives much more peace of mind. Whoever is on shift flips 3 switches and things are back to normal in 2 minutes, 99% of the time. That is not always the case even with a huge provider like Amazon and Google.
> But the money the company I work for saves by not having to hire dedicated people to manage and babysit servers more than makes up for the cost of AWS.
Disagreed. Periodically, there pop up articles here in HN that prove with numbers and historical timelines that AWS only saves you time and white hair while you are smaller. Once you start to scale up and/or use more of their services, bills start to pile up quicker than before (people have mostly analyzed the exponential growth of their billing). Apologies that I don't keep the links but I remember that I've read at least 5 such articles in the last year, right here in HN.
> It just so happens that I know AWS well enough and have experience as an “architect” (and have the certifications to give them a warm and fuzzy) to be competent at the netops and devops side of things.
Good for you, many of us don't however. I honestly have no intention to either. It's a very specific vendor cloud system with a huge amount of proprietary tech baked in, and I have no desire to entangle my career prospects with its success. Career preferences. ;)
Can you set up a duplicate infrastructure that’s close to your international facilities worldwide cheaper? Even support would be cheaper because you can have one central team manage your worldwide infrastructure. Netflix moved their entire infrastructure to AWS. You’re not taking into account the cost of enploying people to babysit and do the “undifferentiated heavy lifting”, the cost of over provisioning just in case, the cost of the red tape to provision backup hardware for failover, etc.
* And once your org is bigger, dedicated Ops team gives much more peace of mind.*
You can easily outsource netops to a dozen companies that can be cheaper because they can manage multiple accounts and they can outsource the grunt work to cheaper labor. I know, I’ve worked in two companies that outsource day today management of netops.
Whoever is on shift flips 3 switches and things are back to normal in 2 minutes, 99% of the time. That is not always the case even with a huge provider like Amazon and Google.
You’ve never had to deal with a colo center. Have you ever dealt with AWS support as a representative of a large company?
Disagreed. Periodically, there pop up articles here in HN that prove with numbers and historical timelines that AWS only saves you time and white hair while you are smaller. Once you start to scale up and/or use more of their services, bills start to pile up quicker than before (people have mostly analyzed the exponential growth of their billing).
If the fixed cost of your infrastructure is growing faster than your revenue...you’re doing it wrong. Even if you can get simple VPS elsewhere (and yes you can). Thsts not where you get the win from AWS. You can host VPS anywhere and still take advantage of all of AWSs services.
Good for you, many of us don't however. I honestly have no intention to either. It's a very specific vendor cloud system with a huge amount of proprietary tech baked in, and I have no desire to entangle my career prospects with its success. Career preferences. ;)
That’s just what the original article said. You always tie yourself to a specific technology and risk that technology becoming out of favor. The trick is to stay nimble and to keep learning. Right now, there is a lot more money and opportunity in being a “Cloud Architect” than knowing how to set the same things up on prem.
I am a fan of AMD because I like competition, especially from a spunky competitor. I'd say the same about Nintendo, which keeps finding ways to win by focusing on fun over specs.
> ...
> Discrete graphics
I get the impression that Steven is willing to make up the history to match the conclusion.
Also, he seems to act as if Itanium was developed in response to AMD64:
>Brilliant brilliant choice by NT team was the bet on the AMD 64 bit instructions. Seeing AMD64 all over the code drove them “nuts”.
>That led to Itanium…more proprietary distraction.
It was pretty close to the opposite. IA64 was Intel's plan for the future for more than half of the 90s, and the spec for AMD64 wasn't even published until 2000/2001 or thereabouts. Actual AMD64 processors came out about two years after Itanium. His quote to support the above assertion even mentions this, which confuses me more.
Anyways, seeing people communicate and expressing themselves in different ways is pretty cool to me.
.ui lojban