akuma73

A lot of ex-Alpha engineers went to PA-Semi which Apple then acquired. Those people are responsible for the epic custom Apple ARM CPUs.

This isn't totally surprising.

x86 vs. ARM/RISC-V has fewer registers which can mean more spill/fill to the stack which results in more instructions to do the same work.

The instruction decode length for x86 has been creeping up with 64-bit encodings and SIMD extenstion (prefix bytes) as you can see it's 3.96 for x86 vs. 4.00 for ARM.

Isn’t that a huge conflict of interest?

It’s hard to see how AMD would get capacity ahead of Intel CPUs.

Because of the initial conditions of the universe and the laws of physics. That's as deep as we can go right now.

They should drop their custom ASICs and just stick a Qualcomm Snapdragon as a replacement. They could use Android and create a platform with an app store with APIs to access their sensor. Opening up the hardware in this standard way to developers would really add a lot of value to their cameras.

I have no idea why they haven't done this already.

Nuvia is a startup that is planning to do just that https://nuviainc.com/blog

You need to be competitive on single thread performance to have a chance at datacenter. Amdahl's law is still very relevant. Up until very very recently, the CPUs were not up to par.

Not sure why this is downvoted? The top score shows a 6.472GHz clock speed - clearly not stock.

https://browser.geekbench.com/v5/cpu/4644694.gb5

Fake news. These are not Macs and are very overclocked PCs (Hackintosh).

Apple also fully controls the hardware and software stack for both CPU and GPU.

What always confused me was that "its" is meant to denote possession. For example, I find this to be more consistent.

Bob's purpose vs. It's purpose

For consistency, shouldn't we use: Bobs purpose

Good answer here: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/257418/do-while-0-what-i...

The cortex m0/m3 CPUs most certainly do have breakpoints, svc (trap), interrupts and an optional memory protection unit.

The Atmel CPU is more constrained but still has hardware breakpoints, IO instructions, watchdog timers and interrupt support. It also has far more complex addressing modes (more CISC-y) to save on instruction counts and a variable length instruction set encoding where memory space to store code is a first order concern.

I’m also sure there is a memory controller to control the SRAM.

So, even if you were to build a simple micro controller, you’d need a lot more features and most likely higher performance (and power efficiency) than you would get from a trivial 2-stage pipeline. Not to mention there are no instruction or data caches in this RISC-V machine.

Sorry to burst any bubbles here, but this is s very incomplete implementation.

You couldn’t run anything but small toy programs on this machine. This is more like what a student would build in an undergraduate course in computer architecture.

For example, there is no MMU, no debug support, no traps, no interrupts, no exception handling, no OS privledge levels, no FP, no memory controller etc.

Of course, one wouldn’t implement all of these in a few hours.

The fact that this is RISCV is somewhat of a red herring as you could do a similar thing with a restricted subset of MIPS or ARM or even x86 as they do in UT Austin’s comp arch class.

Have you heard of Amdahl’s law?

Bring back more interesting logos:

https://www.designweek.co.uk/issues/26-february-4-march-2018...

Dr. Greger's talk is excellent with respect to how diet can influence longevity.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7rNY7xKyGCQ

Not all math is beautiful IMHO.

The proof of the 4 color theorem "reduced the infinitude of possible maps to 1,936 reducible configurations (later reduced to 1,476) which had to be checked one by one by computer and took over a thousand hours."

Of course beauty is subjective and not well defined. Some might consider that proof beautiful.

I assume you mean stacking transistors? This has been tried, and there are serious thermal issues. Where does the heat go in the intermediate layers?

My point was that a new transistor shrink would give you lower power vs. the same transistor in previously larger node. You get more compute-per-watt with small transistors. If scaling stops, then all kinds of things get more difficult.

What are your thoughts on the drivers for reducing the cost of computing beyond CMOS?

if you can power them, cool them, and connect them up in a useful way.

Good luck with that. Power costs go up linearly at best with cores if you don't have any more transistor scaling.

Have a look at this photo: http://m.eet.com/media/1169843/120906_intel_22_3.jpg

That's a fin of a modern transistor (Intel 22nm). The dots in the photo are atoms. It's fair to say that Moore's law is nearing an end or has already ended.

As a shareholder, they should raise the dividend. If you can't find opportunity to invest the money, it should be returned to the shareholders. I'm all for keeping cash around for a rainy day or for future opportunities but not 33% of your market cap. That is an absurd misallocation of capital.

I had a different college experience. A degree in computer engineering required very little coursework outside of engineering. Due to human nature, I ended up hanging out with primarily other engineering students. All of the non-academic socializing, in retrospect, was very limited to a narrow college bubble.

It was only after I graduated and lived in the real world for a few years that I felt more 'well rounded'.

The tools to become a 'well informed citizen' should be taught at the high school level since not everyone goes to college.

That's right.

The stock price reflects the market's overall expectation of all future cash flows discounted to the present value - all the way out to infinity.

When you buy at stock, you are implicitly betting that reality will exceed those expectations.

So, you just said that massive growth is priced in, and the fact you hold the stock implies that you are betting on even more massive growth - relative to expectations.

Whale brains are absolutely enormous but I don't see them doing quantum field theory.

WhatsApp is 'just SMS' but it was bought for 20+ billion.

Twitter has a multitude of opportunities to monetize their user base. Their management has just done a poor job.

Overwhelmingly liberal is not 99%. It's more like 66-80%. For example,in very liberal San Jose, Trump got 20% of the vote. It's still a large percentage of the potential customers.

What about the other half of the country?

Intel competes with itself. It needs to encourage people to upgrade as frequently as possible.