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This sounds like a fun project to do. Maybe I will look into the technical feasibility of this.

Yes. It's the best thing happened for the Chinese semiconductor ecosystem. All those Chinese phones, networking equipment etc can't risk using the suppliers in the West as it can be shut down with a decree. Now Huawei, Xiaomi etc are funding so many start-ups and they are buying their products even if it's slightly worse than the state-of-the-art. The next generation of chips are going to be state-of-the-art for sure as there's not much of a gap.

Chinese companies used to open design offices in the West to keep connected to the talent here. In the last 6 months they're massively divesting. This means EEs in China will be valued even more. Add this to 80% of the research in the field happening in Chinese universities now (as opposed to less than 10% 20 years ago), they have everything nicely aligned.

Most people don't realize but the biggest thing China has going on for it is the start-up scene in semiconductors.

There's too much focus on the chip production in the news, but the industry ecosystem is much bigger than that. Especially chip design and design automation are stagnated fields in the West because of the limited talent pool and lack of investment. You guys here are used to all the VC money, but in HW development world the story is different. There's simply a lack of investors to put down 10s of millions with 5-10 years horizon. Couple this with lack of talent: there aren't enough EE graduates with necessary training, you get a bleak situation. So most if the industry relies on foreigners from developing countries: Iran, China, India, Bangladesh.. Now that those Chinese EEs have better prospects at home, most of them are returning back to China to start their own companies.

Similar trend is happening in design automation tools. We have 3 monopolies in the West extracting 20-30 peecent of the revenue from the semicon companies. There are competitors showing up in China. They aren't on par yet but it's just SW, so it's a matter of time. Since there's competition their pricing is so much better too. Unfortunately we don't have access to these SW, but Chinese companies do.

Because at the international stage there's no rule. It's pure anarchy. This is why the countries with big military might and and economy to back it can bully the other countries into submission, or bribe them into submission (post-WW2 US and USSR did both). With this they can boost their economy, and with that their military so there's a superpower born. This is super stupid of course. What you describe requires rationality and humility. So far not happening.

Apart from nothing lasts forever.. This is a speculative take too, as the OP. We don't know what will happen in China in the future. One thing is true: at the moment their change is towards more democracy and personal rights, and it's the exact opposite in the West. My theorty, a counter-theory to yours if you will, is that the wealth growth for the lower and middle classes declined or reversed in the West (US, Europe, Canada etc) since 70s, which coincides with the West divesting from industrial production and embracing the financialization of the economy. Today EU is officially applying censorship on media and trying hard on controlling the personal communications of persons, similar trends in US. We think we are better than China, but from the non-Western countries the difference isn't that big anymore.

Global scale is different indeed.

EU scale there are tons of solutions: iDeal (expanding to EU from NL), Klarna, sofort..

I'm waiting to get my hamds on Threadripper Pro 9995WX, which is Turbo at 5.4GHz. Currently I'm using Ryzen™ 9 9950X, Turbo at 5.7 GHz. It's a 7% difference.

I don't have those numbers, but here is AMD's on results on Cadence Spectre X with different gen EPYC CPUs, maybe this helps for you to understand the issue: https://www.amd.com/content/dam/amd/en/documents/epyc-techni...

About the technical problem: it's ODE solution for a sparse matrix of 10s of millions elements. Sparsity comes from the locality of interactions within a chip: not every transistor is connected to thd others. So the modern simulators make use of this sparsity to divide the circuit to independent chunks and spread over to multiple independent threads.

Scale of the compute time is not objective, but typically anywhere from couple hours to couple of months. Most top level chip integration verification jobs take weeks. Because of this we spend months for verification after the design is pretty much finish before the tapeout. This applies for every single reasonably complex chip.

Don't they get paid at the end when you are roaming?

If you are running engineering jobs (HPC) like electrical simulation for chip design the only two thingd you care about are the CPU clock speed and memory RW speed.

It's unfortunate that we can only have 16 core CPUs running at 5+ GHz. I would have loved to have a 32 or 64 core Ryzen 9. The software we use charge per core used, so 30% less performance is that much extra cost, which is easily an order of magnitude higher than a flagship server CPU. These licenses cost millions per year for couple 16 core seats.

So, at the end, CPU speed is determining how fast abd economically chips are developed.

that makes a lot of sense actually. thank you.

Everyone in the comments rightly complaining about this being am extortion, which it is! But tge more interesting part is the source of this behaviour: stock markets.

Tesla market cap was so high that any other normal producer felt the pressure. Simply designing and delivering good cars won't do it, because then you aren't a service company. Investors want you to exploit the customers to the last drop financially. You should try to make the product a service, because products are so 20th century! You shouldn't stop there though, you should also exploit their data. Because that's where the money is, because how else would you get ad revenue.

This is not meant to be satirical btw. It's really what's going on. VW tried to build a tech company as Cariad, which imploded because it's an old school industrial production company. They keep trying to throw tech at it but they can't do it like Tesla. They can build good EVs if they wanted, but they can't focus because imvesters are pulling them to ten different directions. One day it's software stack, the other day it's zonal architecture. It's sad to see them die a painful death like this.

So yeah, this was what I was thinking for a while. What about a more nonlinear estimator? Intuitively seems similar to me.

It's up to the committee to protect that honour

In Germany you get the fine with the photo where the face of the driver is very visible/recognizable 99% of the time. Even in villages have this type of cameras so they can't be expensive. Oh you get fined for driving without a seatbelt too.

Oh we do! There's a nice statistic fron the Netherlands about the number of invasive species, which is exponentially growing: https://www.clo.nl/en/indicators/en162202-alien-species-in-t...

Most of these are from Asia and Noth America.

These days you can buy any standard as a soft IP from Synopsys or Cadence. They take their previous serdes and modify it to meet the new standard. They have thousands of employees across the globe just doing that.

EE here. There's no reason to not deliver power directly to the GPU by using cables. I'm not sure if it's sooving anything.

But you are right, there's no hierarchy in the systems anymore. Why do we even call something a motherboard? There's a bunch of chips interconnected.

Fun fact: a modern car takes up to 10 hours to flash at the factory. They have so many microcontrollers and CPUs, it's getting a huge cost to just load up the initial FW during production. Is it all necessary? Hell no.

Same with TV manufacturers, or early phones (Nokia, Ericsson, Motorola, LG, Samsung.. had all different OSes and UIs.)

Here in the Netherlands, they help government avoid taking responsibility. 90% of the decisions are outsourced to consultancy firms. When there's a controversy, they hire another consultancy firm to investigate. I think GenAI can replace this perfectly well.

a) Because they just camnot fore you if you are performing ok for the given position. You need to have 3 years of bad reviews which needs to be meticulously proven by the employer that you didn't improve, even though they offered you training, different set of responsibilities etc etc. So in practice it's 3 years pay + legal costs to build up a file against you + possible legal costs of going to a court if the employee wishes to do so. Btw, the emploer has no case if they are trying to fire a group of people. The most practical and common ways to go around: go through a reorganization and make those people redundant, meaning you shut down the operations related to these operations, with the caveat that if you ever start those operations again first you need to ask the people you just fired of they want to take the job, 2- settle to a good severance package, ideally by nefotiating with the trade union or a lawyer representing the group. 6 months is on the very low end.

b) If they have permanent contracts, yes. It's rare to have permanent contracts at a burger joint though. They often have 0 hour contracts. It's no communism here in those sectors.

This is how things are set up. Companies open shop here because the salaries are 2-3x lower than the Silicon Valley, for exactly this reason (job security).

If it is about the European office as the article mentions, specifically the Netherlands office, 6 months severance is quite low as the layoff is due to an arbitrary reason (moving to AI) instead of a necessary reason (financial difficulties). I would sue them if it was me, get minimum a year pay as severance.

it's all about capacity requirement. If the capacity demand is high, you might want to build really long trains and run them as frequently as possible (e.g. Istanbul Marmaray)

True, but the throttled performance on battery is enough for office work / coding / browsing workloads. Is it matching Apple silicon, probably not. Is Linux matching MacOS on SW/HW optimization? Probably not either.

Laptops with Intel Lunar Lake (i.e. 258V) CPUs get upwards of 12 hours easily, often in 15-18 hour range depending on the battery size. Just a quick search reveals for example Dell XPS 13 9350 (Core Ultra 7 258V) is Ubuntu certified [1], weighs 2.6 pounds, and has long battery life (17-18 hours video streaming on Windows).

[1] https://ubuntu.com/certified/202407-34214

Yes.

It's not a small population. There's estimated 40k Brazilians in the Netherlands for example, most of them illegal. They need a payment system which doesn't require a European bank account.

PS: I don't think anyone is illegal, but the system push them out.

That's for Nvidia GPUs. Margins are much smaller for AMD CPUs.

800mm^2 die would roughly cost 300-350 usd axcoeding to [1]. That's the Taiwan price and dor N4. This doesn't include the memory or the package. The silicon cost for N3 is close to 2x.

[1] https://www.tomshardware.com/pc-components/gpus/spitballing-...