74 karma · joined October 6, 2018
Plus Chrome not going anywhere as well as the Google home. But would still expect them to iterate. So even though Android has over 80% share still would not be surprised to see them move to Fuchsia.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_most_popular_smartphon... List of most popular smartphone apps - Wikipedia
Yes ASICs cost a lot more up front. But as the companies get bigger and bigger they can afford that up front cost.
The cost of making an ASIC has already dropped and would expect that to continue to happen.
Plus we have the issue of needing to integrate memory with computation to lower power use of moving around data and that is a even harder to do on a FPGA then an ASIC.
Here is a recent article on creating a process.
https://depletionmode.com/zircon-process.html
One correction on this article I noticed is that the PCI driver is currently in the kernel and not user space.
Had heard they are working on it. But had not heard a date?
Look at windows in cars today and being able to see. It drives car designs.
But with SDC it is not longer needed to make seeing how necessary and therefore would allow cars to be made completely differently.
That is what I am most interested to see. Today Waymo and others are just using "regular" cars.
Waymo has purchased up to 82k cars which are Fiat Mini Vans and Jaguar i-Pace.
Would hope Waymo at some point buys the capability to make their own cars and start designing cars optimized for SDC.
Waymo parent now has over $100B in cash with less than $5B debt.
Ten years ago Jaguar and Land Rover combined sold to Tata forr $2.8B. So would not be any problem for Waymo parent to buy equivalent.
Or even outsource a lot of it like the i-Pace was outsourced to Magna.
But you would also push some of the work out to cheaper labor and centrally.
So replace the entire wheel instead of the tire. Then ship off the wheel with the old tire to be replaced somewhere else and centrally.
But it is about the economics. Today car dealers lose money on every car sold and make their money from maintenance.
“Yes, the typical new car sold loses a dealership about $200.”
https://www.cargurus.com/Cars/articles/show_me_the_money_how...
Which is why maintenance is so expensive. I would expect Waymo to invest heavily on improving this significantly.
Waymo will not be a tier 1 provider, IMO. They have shared rolling out their commercial ride sharing in Arizona later this year and testing today.
The thing is they started way earlier then others. This is from nine years ago.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4V2bcbJZuPQ
Google was the top place to work for six straight years and so they were getting the cream of the crop. They then get to triage those engineers and send the cream of the crop of the cream of the crop to Waymo.
Then there is the massive infrastructure that Google has to leverage.
SDC is an software engineering exercise. Who is better at software engineering?
Look at the automated testing that Waymo has.
https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2017/08/insid...
How would you ever do SDC without this?
Today cars are sold through dealers. Those dealers lose money on every car sold.
“Yes, the typical new car sold loses a dealership about $200.”
https://www.cargurus.com/Cars/articles/show_me_the_money_how...
They make their money from maintenance and why maintenance is so expensive and so common.
Waymo or any other company running very large fleets of cars would fix this.
They would take the service data each year and invest to improve. Plus you have perfect data on how the car was used with SDC.
Car designs will also change. Today you have to design around the person being able to see when driving.
No longer needed.
Ten years ago Jaguar and Land Rover was sold to Tata for $2.8B USD. Waymo parent, Alphabet, has over $100B in cash with less than $5B debt.
So if they want could just buy a car line.
Ultimately cars will change for self driving and you really want to ultimately be making those cars.
Safety and durability will be far better when you align ROI with running a large fleet of cars.
It was leaked they will roll out in San Fran and Mount View next.
They have up to 82k cars on order. It sounds more like they want to buy smartphones from others and then add their chip and then "rent" use of the phone.
If that makes sense.