The CPU is commodity, nothing else is. Costume Mainboard and firmware without BIOS and their own BMCish thing and their own Root of Trust. Same for their router. Standard chip, everything else is costume.
5,493 karma · joined July 29, 2010
They are likely looking at future racks with GPU as well, but as a first product getting the basics right makes more sense.
This one is just baffling. He is literally the most important private person helping Ukraine right now.
He like once suggested that total victory maybe wasn't a viable goal and that at some point in time some compromise peace might have t be made. Something lots of political scientists have also predicted would happen.
Shotwell is great, but so are lots of other people that work for SpaceX.
> Literally EVERYONE said the cement base was a stupid idea
They expected it to break but be ok for one launch. Its a reasonable risk to launch sooner.
> Every time he forces his idiotic ideas on his engineers he puts the future of the whole business at risk.
And yet the he has lead the business for 20+ years and the company has been getting more and more and more successful. I guess that just happens by magic.
> At least he’s been so distracted by the Twitter debacle the adults have been able to make decisions
When SpaceX does good its because Musk wasn't there, when it does bad its because of Musk. Classic.
We often see this in infrastructure, like train electrification, tunnel boring and so on. Trams is a good one, so many cities got ride of their tram system, 50 years later they want to build it again and many of them issues.
I believe, quite simply, they wouldn't have the battery packs available even if they built the factory.
Addressing modes have never been mentioned as a limiting factor. Its not clear at all that addressing modes are a game changer for performance.
You can also argue that any other unique feature of ARM or x86 is the 'magical pile' that allows for much higher performance. The more reasonable assumption to me is that its simply about how much is invested to make it happen. I think based on its design, less investment into RISC-V will lead to a higher performance core compared to ARM because of that complexity.
Qualcomm motivation here seems pretty clear, and I don't believe its actually because they have pure technical merit at the heart of their desires.
So should I really believe the company that has clear financial motivation to push their line?
Second, the software ecosystem is huge, far more then compiles. And given how everybody today uses open source, making all that available for Qualcomm seems like a losing effort.
Is Qualcomm gone pay to make Android Qualcomm-RISC-V ready. Are they gone provide advanced verification suits. Formal analysis and all that stuff?
RISC-V has already been deployed widely, including 64-bit. Various medium performance cores are out there being used or are being interceded soon.
There are also various companies making high performance RISC-V designs, not a single one of them has suggested that RISC-V design isn't gone work well for their effort. In fact quite the opposite.
And then Qualcomm shows up making
> group such as Qualcomm deciding to just release their version anyway.
They are free to do so. The can even call it 'RISC-V' as long as the base ISA is ok. But its unlikely to be a standard.
It would be, very, very, very hard for them to make all the distros, compilers, and other tools available for their distribution. And Google isn't gone make Android available for Qualcomm specifically unless they get paid a lot.
There is a reason Qualcomm want to be the new standard, they know they can't finance all the software work themselves.
The reality here is not that RISC-V can't be competitive, but rather that Qualcomm doesn't want to invest lots of money in changing their designs to be 'RISC-V native' so they simply propose RISC-V to be almost exactly like AArch64. This seem to me to simply be a pretty transparent Qualcomm short term money saving effort that nobody else asked for.
This really just seems to be Qualcomm wanting it to be more like ARM so they can use their existing cores. That seem pretty clear from what they are proposing.
OpenSPARC is really only truly open in its 32 bit version. The 64 bit was not open in the same way. Sparc having things like register windows and delay slots also technically didn't have a clear advantage over ARM or MIPS. Also its strong association with Oracle wasn't gone help.
RISC-V was truly open from first principle and did some technical clean up. Additionally, very early, before RISC-V was even a standard, they had already released a bunch of 32-bit cores that could compete with ARM cores, and a bunch of students built it. The ISA was easy to build for, and that helped in education. The university of Berkley got eyes on the project and then quickly the ETH and others jumped on in. So there were multiple open cores both in modern Chisel and SystemVerilog.
They were also clear about trademarks and how to use them once the foundation was established. There was a path forward to evolve it, not a fixed standard. Companies could get involved and help get RISC-V to where they needed it. In the standard, a way to add custom instructions without clashing with any future RISC-V instruction.
OpenSPARC is just a fixed IEEE Standard. There simply wasn't gone be a dynamic Linux like community around OpenSPARC.
What Sun did was amazing, but I think people wanted a fresh start with everything we have learned from OpenSource and OpenHardware over the last 30 years.
Sometimes things just aren't purely technical, sometimes starting something new just builds a community that dynamically drives things forward.
Because more weight requires more energy.
> they want their funds to go towards subsidizing someone they'd rather not see gain more power
Rivian subsidizes Ford and Amazon. Ford 100 year influence on politics has been far worse then anything Musk has ever done. And Amazon is arguable the most influential company in the world, far more so then Tesla. Amazon principle concern is to have low skilled workers.
But I guess Musk had some tweets somebody didn't like that much.
If you want something 'specific' then I would point you to the Open Compute Project that has now basically mandated that certified servers allow consumers to install alternative fireware. That required a lot of effort and lobbying.
At the same time creating a community of users and vendors that enable new platforms before they are even released. Go look at the coreboot git to see this work.
The lobbying of the community has lead to AMD next generation boot firmware, OpenSil to be open source. Again, this didn't come out of no-where.
> providing additional power to spacecraft in deep space
Very likely an extreme niche application or wont happen.
> powering lasers for light sails
Again, an extreme niche or wont happen.
> or maybe as a directed energy weapon.
Same thing.
In a world where Starship exists, you can throw a deep space probe with gigantic amounts of solar panels, that seems cheaper then having a separate space craft.
But lets not pretend the lackluster growth isn't related to issues with energy.
Germany on its own very much could develop its own rocket, the question if just if this is a priority or not. And it isn't.
> Nothing useful is coming out.
They are doing engine test and structural test. Same as pretty much most second generation rocket startups.
And of course they are going 'nowhere' but that has nothing to do with Germany and everything to do with the economics of launch. There is a reason Virgin Orbit went bust. Astra is about to be bust. And a few others will follow soon enough.
Europe has literally just spend 5 billion $ on a SINGLE rocket. Its not hard to understand why they don't have money for anything else.
SpaceX was saved by COTS because they were able to borrow money against that contract. And it really only included a couple 100 million to develop the initial Falcon 9. The waste majority of the money was for Dragon.
And they could do it that cheaply and fast because they had the legacy of the Falcon 1 and its infrastructure to build off. And that was mostly developed privately.
At the end of the day SpaceX underbid on COTS and actually didn't make money, it only helped them develop things that would make money other ways.
They are committed to Orion service module and have no interest in going back to cargo resupply. Given how close the ISS is to the end. By the time they would have finished a new cargo ship, the station is gone be close to gone.
And they simply don't really have the budget for CCDev. It simply doesn't fit in their budget. And even worse, given how absurdly high the cost for the Ariane 6 are, you would expect 6-10 billion for a crew capsule. And you know the European would go for some dumb space plane idea that's gone cost even more.
And as for the German government paying for everything, not really gone happen. They are already unhappy about what they have to pay for Ariane 6. They never even wanted Ariane 6. And they have been slushing their space budget.
This seems to me to be a news site making to much of some early concept that are not close to be happening.
> bullshit lawsuit about SpaceX not hiring enough foreigners (ITAR regulations specifically ban hiring of foreign nationals).
Matters are more complicated. Many companies are sued by the justice department, it very common. Its just not news usually. And very often its pretty baseless, just as with SpaceX.
Its the first costume built factory. And has been expanded. Its hard for the others to catch up.