ghettoimp

Woah. I can't believe this is still online!

How do we know this is a "shameful misrepresentation" until we see how it pans out?

The depositors did nothing here but put their own money in a bank account?

What possible nefarious motive are you implying?

This is a superpower during refactoring.

Binning is definitely a possibility. Separately from binning, there are often just features that don't work right and get disabled with "chicken switches" or "feature enable bits."

Any two-ANE design would have a lot of control logic that has to be right, e.g., to manage which work gets sent to which ANE, which cache lines get loaded, etc. It's easy to imagine bugs in this logic which would only show up when both ANEs are enabled. So it's likely that there is a chicken bit that you could use to disable one of the ANEs and run in single-ANE mode.

Counter-opinion: industry simply has no plausible alternative to Verilog/SystemVerilog and succeeds in producing chips only in spite of the language's glaring flaws.

I worked for several years at a world class company verifying CPU designs. Even into the late 2010s, designers were afraid to use basic features like structs because who knows what tool might not support it correctly. They emulated structures using piles of defines that set all the bit offsets. I wouldn't know how to begin to estimate the amount of senseless work that this led to during debugging. The lack of any type safety was appalling. If you were lucky, you could catch gross type confusion by having a linting tool notice a size mismatch. These tools found hundreds of real errors that should never have compiled in the first place. I could go on and on...

But there's no escaping it. There are so many amazing tools built around it. The vendors love the moat the complexity gives them. The IP developers have huge investments in legacy code bases. Compatibility is worth too much.

Is AMZN stock really flat? Looks close to 4x its price from 5 years ago.

Uh. The US is suffering another 9/11 every few days. In huge parts of the country, life is nowhere near normal.

That's what they beat, and God willing will beat again.

Maybe the magic is just the discipline to somehow keep tuning and optimizing everything across the chip. Year after year they release another power-sipping design with another 10-20% performance. It's not a sudden tsunami, but an ever rising tide.

Ugh. Truly an abomination.

It does seem like TSMC has strong leverage since it would take Apple a lot of time and work to move to a competitor.

On the other hand, the incentives seem pretty well aligned. TSMC presumably makes a lot of money when Apple is successful and sells a lot of chips. Having a customer that is demanding and willing to pay for huge volumes of bleeding edge parts helps TSMC build on their lead. Having early access to the best process helps Apple differentiate, and their business model gives them the margins to afford all of this.

Anyway, I don't see why either side would want to really change this setup.

If it can emulate x86, is there really a motivation for developers to switch to ARM? (I don't have an M1 and don't really know what it's like to compile stuff and deploy it to "the cloud.")

For other ARM manufacturers, I wonder how much of this is a software problem.

I mean, what would the market be for a super-fast ARM laptop/desktop machine? It would run Windows RT, I guess?

How much better than Intel/AMD would the ARM machine need to be to justify buying it and running that? It seems like the M1's "magic" is not just the chip, but very much also the Rosetta thing.