paulpan

Personally I'm very eager to see AMD's upcoming RX 7000-series from a pricing as well as performance standpoint compared to Nvidia's new 4000 series.

As noted in the article, "Nvidia likely has a worse cost structure in traditional rasterization gaming performance for the first time in nearly a decade" due to the much lower die costs that AMD is targeting. I predict Nvidia's share price will continue its downward trajectory - both on the weakness of 4000 series (given high price and surplus 3000 series inventory) and on AMD pricing pressure.

What's more interesting is Nvidia's long term focus on ray tracing and continuing to dedicate more and more precious die space to it. AMD, on the other hand, seems to be more focused on the short term: rasterization performance. It's a bit reminiscent of Apple vs. Samsung, where AMD is Apple as it waits on technologies to become mainstream before full adoption and Nvidia is Samsung as it bets on new technologies (e.g. foldables).

Adobe is the new Oracle or Intuit. Somehow it escapes the antitrust scrutiny that other Big Tech companies are subject to. Buying up smaller competitors left and right.

To put it bluntly, the new page layout and color scheme absolutely sucks. Probably lost me as a regular reader.

Clearly it's intended to optimize mobile browsing experience since it's very vertically stacked - but at the cost of alienating non-mobile readers since now one is forced to scroll downward for new content. Also the color scheme makes it hard to differentiate the types of content/posts.

Seems assine to not give readers an option to use the old layout for an interim period, similar to how Reddit did their transition.

The implication is how it holds for the most recent cryptomining cycle, since this settlement was for 2018 and we've definitely seen another surge in demand in 2021. Coupled with the chip shortage, this most recent cycle could well be bigger than this 2018 one.

Nvidia arguably hedged their bets better this time by 1) releasing their cryptomining-specific versions of GPUs, and 2) releasing drivers that tried to cripple the mining performance on the GeForce 3000-series lineup. But whether this was done in good faith is debatable and whether they disclosed properlyin the eyes of the SEC will be interesting to see.

Agreed, though to add, there's also other ARM chip companies that will undoubtedly challenge Qualcomm: Mediatek, Samsung, Altra, etc. Even if the incumbent x86 duopoly of Intel/AMD loses, Qualcomm's track record doesn't inspire confidence.

One notable example is their former Kryo custom CPU cores. For a time ~2016, it seems like it gave Qualcomm a distinct advantage to own their destiny and move away from reliance on ARM for their CPU core designs (e.g. SD888 is all X1, A78, A55 cores). But it ended up flopping for various reasons and just like their competitors, Qualcomm was back to using ARM designs. This Nuvia acquisition is akin to having another go - but will it be better than ARM's X* lineup?

At the same time, there's 2 additional trends that seem to further erode Qualcomm's attempt:

1. Major Android manufacturers are increasingly moving away from Qualcomm's chips, e.g. Google's Tensor, Samsung's Exynos, Huawei's HiSilicon. This means less revenue for Qualcomm and conversely less money they can throw at R&D.

2. Extreme correlation with chip fabrication technology, aka TSMC. At this point, performance is heavily tied into whether you can secure production on TSMC's latest nodes. No one can outbid Apple.

I think you're referring to AMD's 3D V-Cache, which is already out in their Epyc "Milan X" lineup and forthcoming Ryzen 5800X3D. https://www.amd.com/en/campaigns/3d-v-cache

Whereas AMD's solution is focused on increasing the cache size (hence the 3D stacking), Apple here seems to be connecting the 2 M1 Max chips more tightly. It's actually more reminiscent of AMD's Infinity Fabric interconnect architecture. https://en.wikichip.org/wiki/amd/infinity_fabric

The interesting part for this M1 Ultra is that Apple opted to connect 2 existing chips, rather than design a new one altogether. Very likely the reason is cost - this M1 Ultra will be a low volume part, as will be future iterations of it. The other approach would've been to design a motherboard that sockets 2 chips, which seems would've been cheaper/faster than this - albeit at expense of performance. But they've designed a new "socket" anyway due to this new chip's much bigger footprint.

Great point. Apple is lauded for their 5-6 year of iOS updates but it's not an altruistic move - the updates enable users to keep using their apps/services.

Also there's an upper-bound on price for an iPhone Apple is able to charge and if I can speculate, the "Pro" lineup does not outsell the "base" iPhone significantly. For one, there isn't enough product differentiation for an average consumer to pay the $300/40% price premium.

So in the world of 3-4 year iPhone cycles, keeping up the walled garden and monetizing those within is the surest path to revenue growth.

I think Apple's stubbornness at keeping their commission ~30% underscores how critical that percentage is to their bottom line profitability - both present and future. "Services" is foundational to Tim Cook's vision to continue to grow the company and increase its revenue streams.

Based on latest Q4 earnings, Services is one of the highest growth segment of Apple at 25% YoY (others being Mac at 25%, Other Products at 13%). As the clamor for M1-based Macs subsides, monetizing its existing 500M+ users is the only major revenue-growth area. But what happens if their commission rate is cut in half to 15%? Apple doesn't break out the specific App Store revenue amount or percentage but it must be quite significant.

Hence they're willing to risk these continued lawsuits and regulatory backlash. The day that Services division no longer reports 20%+ YoY growth could well be one when Apple stock faces the reckoning like FB/Meta.

Spotify may have won this battle but will lose the war.

Ultimately it's not a question of revenue but whether Spotify has to follow the footsteps of Meta/Facebook and YouTube to moderate content on their platform. This was largely a non-issue before they started their exclusive deals with the likes of Rogan - the onus was on music labels and publishers.

But now Spotify's position as a content platform has been thrust into the spotlight and will likely have to invest in content curation (e.g. algorithms, human raters). Furthermore if other artists follow in Young's footsteps, then this could get quite messy.

Agreed except there's only 2 outcomes: #1 (win) or #3 (lose). The chips business is a winner-take-all market where if your product isn't the best (in efficiency, performance, whatever metric), then it can't command a price premium nor the attention of OEMs. Also the core business isn't consumer but for enterprise/datacenter market where efficiency/performance is paramount.

If #1, then everything is rosy and Intel will regain its dominance from the days of Sandy Bridge. Its chips will be fabricated internally and they get to enjoy the profits from vertical integration.

If #3, then Intel will certainly spin off or sell off its manufacturing/fabrication business very similar to AMD more than a decade ago.

The caveat is that I don't think Intel's problem right now is simply a manufacturing issue. Sure their Alder Lake is competitive but it's not superior to AMD's offerings or even measured against Apple's SOCs. Remember that unlike the last iteration (Rocket Lake), Alder Lake doesn't suffer from a mismatch in design vs. manufacturing cadence - it's arrived as expected.

It'll depend on the perspective.

For the gaming industry, this seems to push Microsoft into 3rd place (by size) behind Sony and Tencent. So hardly a monopoly and akin to T-Mobile's acquisition of Sprint a few years ago. It makes Microsoft much more competitive against Sony and even Nintendo since it'll likely bolster their 1P offerings in the future.

But if Microsoft uses their ownership to favor their own game subscription services (aka GamePass) as well as platforms (aka Windows 11, Xbox console), then certainly that'll be monopolistic behavior. Interesting to note that they're probably #1-#2 in either of those sub-industries. It's possible to end up with an "Internet Explorer-esque" antitrust scenario if Microsoft removes or heavily discourages Activision and Bethesda from making their titles cross-platform.

Would really love to hear the Qualcomm lead PM on the real world use cases where this would be valuable. As for now, it's an extra reason to stay away from Qualcomm-powered devices.

The X factor will be the external factors outside of Qualcomm's control. Sure they have the Nuvia team likely designing a new architecture but the 2 other major pillars are:

1. Microsoft's work to "ARM-tize" Windows 11. Will they make a serious effort and succeed, or get scuttled like the Windows RT & 10X efforts previously?

2. TSMC's latest and greatestfab process, whether it be 3nm or beyond. Can Qualcomm secure capacity on it? If not, then it'll be very tough to stay competitive with Apple.

Looks like the i5-12600K is the real value play for Intel's 12th gen. It essentially beats Ryzen 5600X at similar power consumption. LTT review: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-EogHCFd7w0

That said, the cost of ownership is likely much higher for Intel vs. AMD - due to requiring DDR5 RAM and new motherboard.

Also value-oriented builders probably wouldn't want to use the ITX form factor given they're always more expensive than mATX with a on-par feature set at best. ITX builders likely are not price conscious.

mATX cases can also be quite small (e.g. Fractal Node Define 7) but you get 2 more RAM slots, can use ATX PSU, and can get bigger coolers so not have to resort to price AIO.

The article title is a bit bait-clicky but the M1 Pro/Max GPU performance does beg the speculation of "how far can Apple take it?"

Without a doubt Apple has the resources to take it pretty far by scaling the GPU core count further to 64, 128 cores and beyond, but what's their incentive? It'd be a colossal chip in both size and price for only 1-2 products: the Mac Pro and iMac Pro. I doubt those product volumes would justify the investment to make such chips.

This then begs the question: what GPU would power the future Mac Pro? Would Apple add PCIe5 integration to allow AMD GPUs to be added, or truly go solo?

+1 and my thought exactly. Spillover effect could be fairly significant given that more investors now hold crypto.

Last week CFTC fined both Tether and Bitfinex $42.5M for allegedly not holding enough reserves and colluding together. https://www.cftc.gov/PressRoom/PressReleases/8450-21

Seems like a fairly small fine in grand scheme of things no? If the critics are right and $70B+ supply is just made up paper money, then it'll be huge losses for all Tether holders. I'd conjecture it would tank the entire crypto market - and possibly the equity market too.

Tensor SOC seems pretty impressive on paper, will be curious about how it benchmarks and performs in real-life. The Pixel 5 with its "mid-tier" SOC (Snapdragon 765G) was actually pretty good thanks to the software optimizations.

Bigger news is Qualcomm being left out. Will they go the way of Intel by incentivizing their customers build their own SOCs?

This denotes how important TSMC and having the fabrication node advantage is for Apple. The A15 seems to be an all-around good chip, just not the magnitude of performance jumps (20%+) Apple has shown since the A7. For reference, this chip is on an improved TSMC 5nm (N5P) node but still 5nm nonetheless like last year's A14.

Last year's M1/A14 cores had performance gains due to the combined architecture improvement and the shifting from TSMC 7nm to 5nm fabrication. At the time it was difficult to determine the % of gains attributable to either, so now it seems we have a better idea that node advantage could be the majority.

It'll be very interesting to see what happens in the next M-series chip announcement, e.g. M1X or M2. I still think it's plausible Apple switches the M-series chips to 3nm first in order to cement their superiority over Intel. That said, porting architectures across nodes is no small feat (as we saw in Intel's Rocket Lake, though that was small -> big).

Would be very pleasantly surprised if this holds true.

I was expecting dual X1 cores to be the mainstay of 2022 flagship SOCs, so to see Google do this at least 6 months earlier (Samsung S22 should come out in Feb) could bode well for the Pixel 6 and its public perception.

Someone correct me if I'm wrong, but this ruling only applies for in-app purchases correct? E.g. Apple cannot force apps to default to and only use to its payment infrastructure for post-sale and within app transactions (which comes with 30% fees).

In other words if my app costs $10 and in-app transactions are $1 apiece, Apple still gets $3 from initial purchase but instead of $.30 from each subsequent in-app transaction, I could potentially keep $.97 (assuming 3% credit card fees).

If so I think the long-term impact will be most interesting in that will Apple raise its developer fee significantly and/or discourage "free" apps to cover its hosting, review, other overhead costs. It would also incentive app developers to become more like game developers: every feature becomes its own add-on/DLC.

Quite an audacious move by Facebook. Tech specs look good, but the biggest challenge is going to be privacy.

I recall years ago when the first Google Glass came out, certain venues like museums put up rules banning their usage. And that was for a halo product whereas this is clearly targeted more at mainstream users.

With rumors of Apple also offering up something similar soon, we'll see how this sort of gadgetry is "normalized" by society.

(Google Glass apparently still exists! Albeit only for enterprise: https://www.google.com/glass/tech-specs/ )

Very curious about the performance gains being hinted here: 19% for Golden Cove (vs. Cypress Cove), and 1.5X for Gracemont (vs. Skylake Atom?).

The 19% Golden Cove jump doesn't seem very impressive given Cypress Cove was a regression. As noted, it should've been measured against the newer Willow Cove (e.g. Tigerlake cores) for better indication.

As for Gracemont, 1.5X perf sounds great but how capable will be it for everyday tasks? E.g. if the Big/Performance core has to spin up for almost everything, then it won't be very useful. Furthermore Skylake was initially released in 2015 so 1.5X better after 6 years is way below Moore's Law.

This seems like the rumored AMD Van Gogh for low power configurations: Zen2 CPU + Navi2 GPU. Essentially it's AMD's stop-gap solution before the launch of Rembrandt (Zen3 + Navi2). https://www.tweaktown.com/news/78815/amd-van-gogh-apus-zen-2...

Also agreed that this looks very price competitive. Given storage is SSD-expandable, $399 gives you a fairly powerful mobile gaming platform and PC.

From a purely implementation standpoint, defaulting to opt-in instead opt-out leads to a long and arduous user migration process. Especially if it's a major change and/or somewhat controversial. Furthermore it tends to fragment the userbase and accumulation of tech debt (e.g. feature disparity). I think this is a huge factor in iOS versioning having such good consistency across its install base.

Seems a development worth tracking given the prevalence of existing protocols such as TLS - that rely on cryptographic techniques classical computers have difficulty solving.

Relevant snippet: "As a security researcher, Chen is particularly interested in quantum computing’s ability to solve two types of math problems: factoring large numbers and solving discrete logarithms (essentially solving the problem bx = a for x). Pretty much all internet security relies on this math to encrypt information or authenticate users in protocols such as Transport Layer Security."

This is getting stupid. Newest iPad Pros with M1 obviously have the capability to do so much more, yet the OS holds it back. Are Federighi and Temus still on speaking terms?

Instead of proper multitasking, virtualization and external monitor support, we just gain new and iPad-only gestures to learn and memorize. The iPads, especially iPad Pros, have become an increasingly complicated method of computing. I thought their emphasis was on making computing more accessible/approachable to everyone.

I was wondering what made HN special, aside from its user community. The simplicity and self-governance model are atop that list.

In other words, what if HN was a subreddit? There is actually a parallel one already set up: https://www.reddit.com/r/hackernews/

Good point, higher utilization is one of Southwest's key competitive advantages since they're able to squeeze 1 extra trip for their aircraft than competitors.

Significantly cutting travel time should also enable higher utilization. E.g. cutting LA-Sydney route in half (15hrs to 7hrs) theoretically enables fitting in a roundtrip in the timespan of a one-way.