Hacker News Reader

Comment by nickysielicki | Hacker News Reader

There's no way Google lets this leave their datacenters. Chip fabrication is a race to the bottom at this point. [1]

Google is doubling down on hosting as a source of future revenue, and they're doing that by building an ecosystem around Tensorflow.

What I think is interesting is how weak Apple looks. Amazon has the talent and money to be able to compete with Google on this playing field. Microsoft is late, but they can, too.

Where's Apple? In the corner dreaming about mythical self-driving luxury cars?

[1]: http://spectrum.ieee.org/semiconductors/design/the-death-of-...

View on HN

Apple designs their own CPUs. I think they'd be able to field a massively parallel FMAC chip if they thought that was a good idea.

Where Apple really looks weak is in datacenters, networking, and cloud services.

What does the iPhone of 2021 look like?

I get the feeling from today's announcements that Google sees the 2021 version of Google Now as the selling point for their 2021 Nexus line.

I don't think Apple is preparing to compete on that.

I would say they're already not competing on the assistant side. Siri is considerably worse than Google Now, even though it came out first

Apple's strength is in consumer (and to a lesser extent, developer) ecosystems; the cozy comfortable bubble you get when you're surrounded by everything Apple. Getting access to your stuff across multiple devices is virtually effortless and continually seamless, with almost no configuration required.

Whether that's good or not may be arguable, but it's certainly a selling point for many and I don't see Google or any other company's offerings approaching the same experience, and I suspect that's by design; they have to be more open and support all devices but that kinda dilutes everything. Apple will only get stronger in that aspect IMO.

I'm not sure I agree with you, long term (about the chips). I think that the value here is in the ecosystem. If Google can compete with CUDA, they'll be doing really well.

> There's no way Google lets this leave their datacenters. Chip fabrication is a race to the bottom at this point. [1]

I’d hope someone somewhere steals the blueprints and posts all of them publicly online.

The whole point of patents was that companies would publish everything, but get 20 years of protection.

But by now, especially companies like Google don’t do so anymore – and everyone loses out.

EDIT: I’ll add the standard disclaimer: If you downvote, please comment why – so an actual discussion can appear, which usually is a lot more useful to everyone.

Same misuse happens with copyright. Both were invented to foster publishing and not creating life-long monopolies. The life times of copyright and patents must be way shorter as well. Everyone builds on something that came before. It's impossible to build a better bike if you have to test drive on a street with patent mines.

Re EDIT: Downvotes must be comment-mandatory or not allowed otherwise.

There's little need for anyone to steal the blueprints. It's unlikely there's anything particularly "special" there other than identifying operations in Tensorflow that take long enough and are carried out often enough and are simple enough to be worth turning into an ASIC. If there's a market for it, there will be other people designing chips for it too.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com