Recent comments in /f/gadgets

MarcoVinicius t1_j8hv3m4 wrote

Reply to Can 3-D Printing Help Solve the Housing Crisis? - Standard construction can be slow, costly, and inefficient. Machines might do it better. by speckz

That article was so frustrating to read. The writer had no idea about what they were writing about and wrote no details about how the 3D houses work and which part of construction it would make cheaper. It was empty, devoid of details and critical thought. Truly a waste of time for the reader.

Are all articles for the New Yorker really this dumb?

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knockatize t1_j8hq378 wrote

Reply to comment by TheMasterGenius in How Big Tech rewrote the nation’s first cell phone repair law - Documents reveal tech lobbyists revised a right-to-repair bill before New York's governor signed it. by speckz

It took 20 years and Preet Bharara to get rid of Sheldon Silver.

Andrew Cuomo’s career lasted 44 years.

In other words, somebody other than a sacrificial lamb has to primary her, because the GOP isn’t willing or able.

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FLINTMurdaMitn t1_j8hpfj2 wrote

Reply to Worldwide Shipments of Tablets and Chromebooks Declined Sharply in 2022, According to IDC Tracker by Majestic-Praline-696

Turns out capitalism is eating itself and infinite growth and profits aren't a real thing, rising prices are causing more people to be unable to afford the basics let alone stupid gadgets year after year and the whole system is probably going to collapse in the next 10-20 years, if not sooner.

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nipsen t1_j8hp1ym wrote

Reply to comment by imposter22 in Open-Source, RISC-V Laptop Will Be Easy to Make and Upgrade by Avieshek

a) RISC-V is a general, abstract and formulaeic scheme for how computing elements will work together. There's nothing that stops Intel from offering their compute elements as part of a RISC-V design. Which will have very obvious usage-scenarios, and will have abysmal performance. But there is nothing stopping Intel from doing that.

b) There are parts of Intel that certainly had ambitions of not being married to the cisc-designs from the 90s forever. But those parts of the company mysteriously suffer layoffs, or else are shut down altogether. Projects they are involved in - by sheer chance, I'm sure - end up modifying the prototypes to include monolithic designs with "secret" cisc-optimisation on closed fpga-solutions.

c) Although Intel were promoting a "silicon pre-production stage" of Risc-V chips, this project is now cancelled. They are not producing any Risc-V chips -- no one are producing Risc-v chips. There will be chips based on the schema, for certain, but they will not be the kind of chip that will have the makeup of a protected, instruction set bound specific fpga. In other words: nothing stops Intel from marketing their bullshit offering as "RISC-V", even though they might not offer much in terms of performance, or really use the overall schema at all. That's what they have been gearing up towards, and that's what failed. That's why they now have nothing in it. It's literally not compatible with their "Business model".

d) The Risc-V international foundation - by sheer chance, I'm sure - has relocated to Switzerland in order to specifically -- by sheer chance -- escape very specific concerns about US trade regulations and potential lawsuits.

e) The contribution to this foundation from Intel was 1bn dollars. It's a vanishingly small sum in the sceme of things.

Lastly: is really Risc-V a competitor to arm? I hear tons of people say that, and I certainly read it in industry insider-infested american (spiritually or otherwise) publications. But is it really the case?

What is the case is that ARM offers a very specific type of solution where their basic functions can be enhanced by adding various instruction sets. The m1 at Appul is probably a well known enough example, where adding instruction sets to the hardware layer, both programmable to a certain extent and specified on beforehand, is part of the design. A lot of Arm's customers do not use this part of the design at all, though. And there has been a very specific push from Qualcomm, among others, to gear ARM into having higher core-speeds and better out of order single instruction performance.

ARM's reaction to that has been to produce what the customers want, but there is a very obvious problem here in that as these chips are more and more geared into where the design just does not have any actual strengths - that it will be immediately gobbled up by if not Intel's x86 offerings, then AMD's. So as an alternative Risc-based schema takes shape -- a screaming necessity if you know anything useful about programming, I could add -- what that means is that ARM will then be able to compete with general Risc designs on specific applications. While the codebase that is needed for both ARM and RISC-V to have any point whatsoever - will be developed.

As opposed to being supplanted by an attempt to get x86 into the mobile sphere, and into anything, like Intel has been attempting for decades now. And where they actually have succeeded to a certain degree thanks to the power of marketing, lawsuit and a throwaway budget for this that dwarfs the GDP of a medium-sized European country.

So no - ARM is not a direct competitor to RISC-V, or vice-versa. The road back to RISC will happen, and Intel will not be part of that. At least not in the way the company does business now, or the way it has done business in the past. Intel will disappear as the company it is now, if it even becomes involved with making general contributions to Risc-V schema type chip clusters. And that's just not going to change, regardless of how many billions of dahllars go into marketing.

You will claim differently until the end of time, I'm sure. But your opinon, as shocking as it may seem, does not, in fact, alter reality.

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