I’m curious, what problems does EE have?
309 karma · joined February 14, 2017
The more interesting question to me is what would any single (major customer of Arm) company gain from owning Arm? For instance, if NVIDIA wants to be competitive in data center CPUs (which would put them at equal footing with AMD and Intel, not more monopolistic), why couldn’t they go the Apple approach with a perpetual license and design it entirely custom (or not) as they see fit? (AFAIK they already design custom mobile CPUs.)
What do you gain by buying out an expensive, large licensing company that essentially makes no money that leaves you in a weird position with various rivals? Doesn’t quite click for me.
Want to set myself up to have the freedom to demand certain things at work, whether that’s taking a sabbatical or working only 4 days a week without being chained to my work for a living. And eventually I’d like to consider early retirement.
Mobile completely passed it by.
I’ve been seeing more hype about ARM servers for a while with AWS Graviton instances, the new #1 supercomputer in the TOP500, etc.
And of course today we see that Apple plans to transition their Macs to their own ARM chips. Even Microsoft made an ARM-based Windows/Surface product but it didn’t seem to amount to much. I wonder if they’ll want to make another stab at it seeing Apple’s direction with strong vertical integration.
While I don’t think x86 as a platform is going away anytime soon, I feel like its market share and by extension its relevance will slowly dwindle over the next decade or two. Interesting times.
> [Canadians] generally go out of their way to not criticize their southern neighbors. Despite this, there is a burning nationalism deep down that can take the form of disgust toward many aspects of American culture
The above quote is pretty humorous considering the article's message. I've always found it saddening that a strong part of a Canadian's identity is that they're not American. While the US definitely seems to have more problems (greater political divisiveness), I feel like that's mostly seen in the news and not a reflection of most people in day-to-day life, at least in SV.
As for the idea that Toronto can become the North's SV, I'd love to see it happen; I think they have a great opportunity with how the US is currently handling skilled immigrants. I hate living in the Bay Area. But for that to happen, we need to see salaries increase competitively with SV. There's often talk about a "Brain Drain" in Canada as college grads and techies in general move to the US for double the earning potential. I even know someone who was attending university in Canada as a PR and as soon as he became a citizen, he got a TN visa to work in SF.
I've seen others on HN who had issues with the H1-B system mention that they plan to try for Canada and go through the TN system to work in the US. So it's my belief that as soon as the US ends its hostility towards skilled immigrants (Trump removed this year?) and as long as salaries remain much higher in the US, Toronto will always play second fiddle to the many US tech hubs. But who knows, perhaps this COVID-19 situation will prove to be the great equalizer for remote work being seen as ubiquitously viable, in which case these existing tech hubs may fall to the wayside.
I remember that video because it always struck me as not being far off from reality. It’ll make the current set of online game cheats/hacks seem like child’s play if it can be done effectively (read: human-like and undetectable). Maybe then a server-running AI will be needed to detect AI-like gameplay mimicry.
Q: Have you ever considered alternative payment schemes, e.g., student pricing, loyalty pricing (pay $X first year and then $Y for all subsequent years, Y < X)?
1. AMD has struggled in the past and even today on being profitable with their GPUs. Makes it difficult to entice an army of knowledgeable devs without consistent cash flow. Granted, the tide is turning with their profitable CPU business and equity has shot up.
2. More importantly I think that, being the underdog, AMD has to have a cheaper, open solution to compete. Why would a customer choose to go with AMD’s nascent and proprietary stack over Nvidia’s well established and nearly ubiquitous proprietary stack?
To be clear, I don’t think the problems are insurmountable. AMD won a couple HPC deals recently which should afford them the opportunity to build up their software and invest in a competitive hardware solution.
The only thing I wonder is how difficult is it to take advantage of some of the new arch features, such as TF32 format or sparsity tensor ops.