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In other words, having ARM is not a 40 year license to print money. Apple and Linux have demonstrated that they can easily move entire ecosystems to new architectures, and given the right motivation, are happy to do so.
The message to ARM, then, is clear: license your architecture on favorable terms or it will be replaced.
This is so desperately needed. We have 1 powerful architecture that nobody can keep up with in terms of single-core purrformance (amd64) and a few architectures that are way moar logical and actually make sense in their design, but they just can't purrform like an amd64 so they don't get considered. We need a new CPU war and I do think we are headed that way.
Tue Dec 12 2023 13:31:52 EST from IGnatius T Foobar
The message to ARM, then, is clear: license your architecture on favorable terms or it will be replaced.
RISC-V will win that war. ( well not yet, but by the time it starts, it will be able to wipe the floor with the rest ). ARM might come in 2nd, but the foundation's draconian recent license restrictions will spell the end of ARM, if its not changed.
But that said, i think that Intel has seen the writing on the wall, and is now involved in RISC-V. AMD, will need to as well ( if they have not already, i am not sure ).. I dont think we will lose either of those players, unfortunately, as long as they adapt. They also will be the diving force to what i see as a market fracture, the one thing ARM has going for it to help prevent.
Wed Dec 13 2023 01:10:03 EST from LadySerenaKittyWe need a new CPU war and I do think we are headed that way.
This is so desperately needed. We have 1 powerful architecture that
nobody can keep up with in terms of single-core purrformance (amd64)
ARM is closing the purrformance gap quickly. Consider that an AMD64 is typically RISC on the inside with microcode surrounding it to handle the complexity, and the complexity is mostly there to handle the fact that the architecture is overengineered; this is a blank slate for sensible architectures like ARM and RISC-V to use their transistor count to just make the damn thing run faster.
Consider the speed of a new Mac. It can hold its own against an AMD64 box quite easily. And as we discussed earlier, many of the new SBCs (particularly the ones that don't say "Raspberry Pi" on them) are incredibly fast. Combine that with the lower power consumption of these architectures and you have a recipe for a real shift. Finally!
IBM still sells mainframes, but they're generally only bought by those who have an existing investment in hardware and software for that platform. Ye Olde WinTel PC is doomed to follow that path. It might take five years, it might take twenty years, but it will happen.
ARM laptops can hold their own too.
While true, most ( but not all ) are still stuck being Chromebooks, if you break out of that they will keep pace with the 'same generation' of x86, and run cooler and suck less juice.
Broadcom lays around 3K as they restructure and "shifting its focus to subscription licenses of bigger software bundles." Well, of course they are. scumbags. They, and their new acquisition VMWare need to be shut down. Forcefully, with fire.
I have a feeling that was quite a lot of them. VMware is utterly failing to compete in the cloud space despite having billed itself as a "cloud first" company (like everyone else). Over at ${dayjob} we are suspecting that the focus of the VMware group will be little more than to provide software and services focused on the needs of Broadcom's top 500 customers.
We use VMware heavily for both multitenant and private cloud environments, and they keep raising their prices, making it unfavorable for us to build with them.
Now here's something that'll *really* bake your noodle:
You can buy something called "Azure Stack" which is basically a Microsoft Azure region running on your own hardware. It's like having the entire VMware management stack, but instead of running vCenter and vCloud Director and all the other stuff, and maintaining it, you use the existing Azure portal to manage it. You still have to buy the hardware, of course. The per-month license costs can be less than half of what VMware charges! And you don't have to install and maintain it!
So why on earth would you run VMware at this point? If you want a commercially-supported offering, you go with Azure Stack. If you want the autonomy of an open source offering, you go with OpenStack or Proxmox.
VMware is toast. [And if you happen to know where I work, my opinion is not necessarily that of my employer.]
While partially true, its still indicative of a hit taken by the company. Even if its fluff they trim, they are still trimming it.
Where i work we invented fluff, and id say its more like only 70% here, not 90%.
Sun Dec 17 2023 09:10:16 EST from zelgomerDevil's advocate maybe, but I will never question a tech company laying anyone off. If where I work is any indication of the industry at large, I estimate that most of the tech we enjoy is a product of about 10% of the work force and the remaining 90% are pretending just enough to barely stay employed.
While i agree 100% ( no surprise there :) ) , we also still use the crap, and i dont see it changing anytime in what is left of my career. We also still use citrix, which is in the crap boat. Both paddling off into the abyss of irrelevancy, due to their own mistakes and greed.
And while i dont personally like them any more than Microsoft, you also have AWS and G-cloud as valid enterprise level options for hosting. ( and of course oracle, but they suck as much if not worse than VMware as their licensing is even more draconian from what i have been told )
Id much rather see us pull it all into proxmox, use a % of the savings form Azure/AWS/etc and help fund the the project with a few extra million.. and perhaps give some cash to the ceph folks too, and get rid of our convoluted storage nonsense that always seems to break. Our support staff, i doubt would need to be changed much. We actually had to add MORE staff when we started moving stuff to Azure.. ( like email, AD, etc )
Now that said, one of the recently announced goals is to move in-house apps off native OS's and into containers which would go towards making our hosting agnostic ( and even tho i dont like containers at a personal level for my own things, i will fully admit its not a bad move in our case, and surprising coming from our management of late ).. But we hired AWS to help, and the team we have is incompetent.
Sun Dec 17 2023 09:06:42 EST from IGnatius T Foobar
So why on earth would you run VMware at this point? If you want a commercially-supported offering, you go with Azure Stack. If you want the autonomy of an open source offering, you go with OpenStack or Proxmox.
VMware is toast. [And if you happen to know where I work, my opinion is not necessarily that of my employer.]
Devil's advocate maybe, but I will never question a tech company laying
anyone off. If where I work is any indication of the industry at large,
I estimate that most of the tech we enjoy is a product of about 10% of
the work force and the remaining 90% are pretending just enough to
barely stay employed.
You're not wrong.
Look at what happened at Twitter. Massive cuts to a mostly useless workforce.
And the company just kept going, just more efficiently.
Twitter was a cesspool to start with, I hate to use it as an example for anything. And regardless of their title, I suspect most of the people let go were part of the 'disinformation management task force'
Tue Dec 19 2023 09:22:20 EST from IGnatius T FoobarYou're not wrong.
Look at what happened at Twitter. Massive cuts to a mostly useless workforce.
And the company just kept going, just more efficiently.
Not going to get one, dont need it.
But.. ran across a couple of Chinese laptops that are doing it the right way. All laptops should be built this way. A carrier board that runs all the peripherals, + a standard industrial SOM socket so you can stick whatever processor/ram/etc you want on it, AND upgrade, or downgrade, as you want. ( they are selling it with an RK3588 is how i noticed ).
Sort of how i wished the Pine Pro laptops were going to be.. but didnt quite work out that way.
Wow, just now hearing about this but Don Lancaster died last July.. I think most of us here can appreciate what he did for the industry.
2024-01-03 12:05 from Nurb432
Wow, just now hearing about this but Don Lancaster died last July..
I think most of us here can appreciate what he did for the
industry.
Thanks for bringing the story up.
This guy comes from well before my generation. We don't make us like they used to.
Its old but i dont think qualifies for ancient..
Going thru old stuff and tossing again this weekend. Ran across my 'pocket edge' tablet thingie.
Great idea, well implemented. Was a android tablet + a eink reader, that opened like a book. Ink on one side, LCD on other. Would fold all the way around back to back, and could be used as a stand in 'tent mode' ( like many chromebooks today. ) Even had a stylus that worked both on the ink and LCD.. which was rare back then.
Really liked it, but the company folded just before i bought the larger version.
They marketed to schools, which was the right market, but not yet.. in 2010 the world was not quite 'there yet'.
Was in the same box as my Newton. Another fail story, tho that was murdered by dick-head Steve Jobs as one of the first acts of his return. So, not for technical or marketing reasons. He wanted his future phone, and no competition from other BUs allowed. Really there was room for both and the market for that sort of device was going to explode in a few years.. I bet he hated to eat his words when he had to allow the iPad ( loved my newt, as you can tell )
Guess ill drill a hole thru it and toss it.. Not really useful for collectors its so obscure, and i dont do that anymore. ( the Newt, no.. it stays )
Ran across an old BT speaker too. ( i retired it as i replaced it with on that had a bigger battery + FM radio, in case of emergencies ). Testing to see if it still works, and charging. Its been so long i had to go look up the light colors for when it was charged and it commented:
"Note: Battery will last up to 4 hours when connected wirelessly and up to 12 hours when connected through Line-In Audio Jack."
BT takes that much power ? Really? I didnt think it was THAT bad..
that is a shame. Spartan 3 FPGA was a mainstay for hobbyists. Sad to see it go.
I think i still have a spartan II in my FPGA box..
2024-02-05 17:04 from Nurb432 <nurb432@uncensored.citadel.org>
that is a shame. Spartan 3 FPGA was a mainstay for hobbyists. Sad
to see it go.
I think i still have a spartan II in my FPGA box..
https://www.eejournal.com/article/amd-discontinues-coolrunner-and-xc9 5
00-cplds-and-spartan-ii-and-3-fpgas-buy-em-while-you-can/
How do you program those things? Do you use the vendor HDK or are there open source options?
Depends on the chip. some have OSS solutions, others you are stuck with vendor.
Mon Feb 05 2024 18:20:44 EST from zelgomer2024-02-05 17:04 from Nurb432 <nurb432@uncensored.citadel.org>
that is a shame. Spartan 3 FPGA was a mainstay for hobbyists. Sad
to see it go.
I think i still have a spartan II in my FPGA box..
https://www.eejournal.com/article/amd-discontinues-coolrunner-and-xc9 5
00-cplds-and-spartan-ii-and-3-fpgas-buy-em-while-you-can/
How do you program those things? Do you use the vendor HDK or are there open source options?