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...it was pretty obvious that Apple was in the wrong, allegedly caught red handed, and dug the hole deeper with their petty and vindictive reactions. Qualcomm claims to have multiple emails where Apple gave sensitive trade secrets to a competitor, then refused to allow Qualcomm to exercise their contractual audit rights. While there may be some more evidence not presented publicly, it sure looks like Apple was in the wrong.

Read Demerjian's whole piece here for a more complete picture:
https://www.semiaccurate.com/2...

Two days before AMD reports, three days before Intel reports, Semiaccurate floats this rumor with pretty much nothing to back it up. Here's the meat of their argument Note: The following is analysis for professional level subscribers only. So this is about signing up subscribers? Or an attempt at illegal stock manipulation? Both? It is certainly not about quality journalism.

I am definitely an AMD fanboy, full disclosure there. But that doesn't make me an Intel hater, at least not when they lay off the dirty tricks, which appears to pretty much the situation at the moment. So... balanced assessment: no reason to doubt Intel's revised 10nm production schedule. This is all about yields as Semiaccurate is fond of pointing out.

You can see from this that Intel's 10nm fin pitch is a bit more aggressive than TSMC's 7nm, 6% smaller. Intel's minimum metal pitch is a lot more aggressive, 22%. This is all right at the limit of what deep UV alone can do, so that might be Intel's bridge too far right there. I have a whole lot of difficultly believing that Intel did not learn enough from their aborted ramp up last spring to know exactly what they need to do to hit their yields, most probably including respinning their masks to a density nearly identical to TSMC.

Buried in there somewhere I did find one credible little nugget... Semiaccurate pointed out that last spring's 8121U Cannon Lake part, produced in limited quantities and only ever seen in the hands of a few reviewers, is specced without a GPU. Not because it doesn't have one, but because does have one but it doesn't work. I find that credible. Debugging both a processor and a GPU is much more work that just a processor or GPU alone. In contrast, AMD doesn't try to fab APUs until both the processor and GPU have been successfully fabbed separately. Excellent strategy, a big risk reduction.

Another huge thing AMD did to cut the 7nm risk was, jumping into bed with the phone industry. Intel convinced themselves it was a good idea to go it alone as usual, and were proved colossally wrong. Though I am not going to claim any special inside information, I think that Intel is going to bring up its Cannon Lake production successfully, 3 or 4 years behind schedule as they say, and that this is the end of the line for Intel as an independent fab. It's simple: the days of always being a node ahead are over, today they are half a node behind. From here on, there are no advantages to running an independent fab, only disadvantages. When Intel finally does ramp up Cannon Lake they will be in an excellent position to negotiate a new, cooperative deal with the rest of the industry, but if they persist in marching to their own drumbeat they will pay an enormous cost in market share and operating income over the next few years.

I am going to take a wild guess here: Intel plays around with EUV a bit, gets some first hand data on what horribly nasty stuff that is, then makes a deal with TSMC. Intel is going to do just fine as a pure Engineering/IP player like AMD but they risk everything by running their own vanity fab.

https://semiaccurate.com/2018/...

Charlie has been following and detailing Xpoint and its failures for a while now. He's got a half dozen articles or so with more specifics, including official marketing BS from Intel and how its changed over time. I haven't seen Charlie sink his teeth this deep into a story since bumpgate. If you remember that one, he was basically the one guy that bothered to do the legwork to prove an large number of Nvidia's GPUs were defective. This resulted in lawsuits against Nvidia and even caused Apple to move to AMD graphics.

Wow. You weren't kidding
https://www.semiaccurate.com/s...

Hopefully groo wander isn't one of those who complain about other sites paywalls

As the person who first dug out the specs on the next gen Playstation over two months ago here:

https://www.semiaccurate.com/2...

I found this 'report' to be laughable. No it was borderline ignorant and seems to be based on my work, rampant speculation, and a random technical phrase generator.

While I do agree with you (I found the details about the x86 based PS4 from your site long before anyone else knew anything about it)

The real problem here is that your superior information / insight is hidden behind a paywall

It isn't even a relatively affordable paywall that I might feel compelled to pay for once off to find out about this one thing.

Your $100 per year student subscription doesn't cover your PS5 news article.

And at $1000 per year, some Muppet is naturally going to pay that fee, make a video with extra speculation to pad it out, publish on Youtube, and contribute to the dumbing down of society in general while hoping to pull in ad revenue.

I'm not sure how much control you have over this or if it's even a good fit for your business model, but I might be compelled to pay for that one bit of information at a price that doesn't involve choosing between paying the rent or find out about PS5 before everyone else

As the person who first dug out the specs on the next gen Playstation over two months ago here:

https://www.semiaccurate.com/2...

I found this 'report' to be laughable. No it was borderline ignorant and seems to be based on my work, rampant speculation, and a random technical phrase generator. Also do note that the phrase I used in the story was Playstation 5/Next, I did that for a reason.

So what do we know? Navi is slated for ~Q2/2019, likely early, next year. Lisa Su held one up at Computex during her keynote, this is not a 2020 product, nor is it tied to the Sony roadmap. I won't go into the sheer technical ignorance of these statements, but lets just say that GPUs don't have a >18 month validation cycle.

As for the bit about Vega being designed for Apple and Navi for Sony, do I really need to comment on that? It sure sounds good if you are at Youtube levels of technical understanding but, well, just thinking about it makes my brain hurt. Go look back at Polaris, the pre-Vega architecture that formed the basis of the PS4 Pro and the XBox OneX, look at the release cycles for those consoles versus the release cycles for the GPUs. See a pattern?

And delaying the APUs because of a console? Really? You might want to consider the current launch cadence for AMD chips, roughly yearly on the consumer side. The Ryzen 1xxx launched about a year ago, March 2017. Ryzen 2 launched in March of 2018. That puts Ryzen 3, presumably with Navi, when? I guess that is up to Sony, NOT.

All in all this 'article' makes my head hurt. It is a rehash of technical stupidity and rumors slapped together by someone with no sources, no clue about how things work, and desperate for clicks. (Note: I am often accused of that but my site doesn't have ads, clicks buy me nothing) For once I wish people on the net would just try and logically parse 'articles' a bit before they repeated them as 'truth', the internet is a big, relatively worthless echo chamber for a reason.

              -Charlie

One, now older benchmark: http://semiaccurate.com/2017/0...

Scrolling to the bottom on discussion of performance/watt, Intel's Broadwell 6950 is ahead by ~15% compared to Ryzen 1800. Intel's Skylake and upcoming Coffee Lake represent an incremental update in transistor and computer architecture, and may be expected to further improve efficiency. Haven't seen any Threadripper numbers though.

The bottleneck for most problems isn't CPU cycles/second, it's the bandwidth of getting data to/from those CPUs. Adding CPUs does nothing to improve performance unless you also give it a much wider I/O path to memory.

Threadripper parts have quite a lot of bandwidth. The pro parts ("Epyc") will have even more.

Threadripper is intended for the PC enthusiast market, not so much for data centers. Frankly I don't think that for even an enthusiast home user memory bandwidth will be a major differentiating point. CPU speed, number of cores, and cache size will likely matter more. (I'm not worried about any of the above. I can't find L1 or L2 cache size numbers but I found that the L3 cache is 32 MB and since AMD was very focused on instructions-per-clock I am confident they didn't skimp on the cache.)

For data centers AMD will be selling the Epyc chips, and those can support up to 2 TB of RAM per socket (i.e. a dual-socket server would max out at 4 TB of RAM). In contrast, Intel tops out at 1.5 TB, and to get that you now have to buy their special and more-expensive chips with the "M" suffix; the non-M chips top out at 768 GB of RAM.

https://semiaccurate.com/2017/07/11/intel-launches-purley-aka-metal-xeons/

Threadripper also has a really large number of PCI-E lanes (64) so in theory you also could set up a really wide-bandwidth SSD or RAMdisk or something.

AMD has nothing for the Laptop Market in the Zen Class Architecture.

Coming in Q3. In other words, 2-4 months from now.

Laptops refresh twice a year, and the Ryzen launch wasn't in time for the last laptop refresh. No big deal; they're coming.

https://semiaccurate.com/2017/05/22/amd-talks-threadripper-ryzen-mobile-ryzen-pro/

While Zen Server parts (Epyc) look good on paper, it reamis to be seen if there will be Adoption from server makers, and demand from server purcharsers...

Well, sure. But unless the paper is a lie, those chips will do well. They will offer much-improved price/performance compared to Intel's server chips, they offer some tasty new security features (like VMs running with the in-RAM data encrypted so that there's no way for one VM to spy on another's memory), and they are doing it right when Intel is jacking their server customers on price.

corporate parts without IGP? Really? I mean, REALLY?!?!?

Does "IGP" mean integrated graphics? AMD is all over integrated graphics, they call such products "APUs" and the mobile lineup will be pretty much all APUs. So my guess is Q3 for corporate products with APUs as well. (I hope AMD supports ECC RAM on APUs, finally.)

AMD has nothing for the Laptop Market in the Zen Class Architecture.

Coming in Q3. In other words, 2-4 months from now.

Laptops refresh twice a year, and the Ryzen launch wasn't in time for the last laptop refresh. No big deal; they're coming.

https://semiaccurate.com/2017/05/22/amd-talks-threadripper-ryzen-mobile-ryzen-pro/

While Zen Server parts (Epyc) look good on paper, it reamis to be seen if there will be Adoption from server makers, and demand from server purcharsers...

Well, sure. But unless the paper is a lie, those chips will do well. They will offer much-improved price/performance compared to Intel's server chips, they offer some tasty new security features (like VMs running with the in-RAM data encrypted so that there's no way for one VM to spy on another's memory), and they are doing it right when Intel is jacking their server customers on price.

corporate parts without IGP? Really? I mean, REALLY?!?!?

Does "IGP" mean integrated graphics? AMD is all over integrated graphics, they call such products "APUs" and the mobile lineup will be pretty much all APUs. So my guess is Q3 for corporate products with APUs as well. (I hope AMD supports ECC RAM on APUs, finally.)

AMD has nothing for the Laptop Market in the Zen Class Architecture.

Coming in Q3. In other words, 2-4 months from now.

Laptops refresh twice a year, and the Ryzen launch wasn't in time for the last laptop refresh. No big deal; they're coming.

https://semiaccurate.com/2017/05/22/amd-talks-threadripper-ryzen-mobile-ryzen-pro/

While Zen Server parts (Epyc) look good on paper, it reamis to be seen if there will be Adoption from server makers, and demand from server purcharsers...

Well, sure. But unless the paper is a lie, those chips will do well. They will offer much-improved price/performance compared to Intel's server chips, they offer some tasty new security features (like VMs running with the in-RAM data encrypted so that there's no way for one VM to spy on another's memory), and they are doing it right when Intel is jacking their server customers on price.

corporate parts without IGP? Really? I mean, REALLY?!?!?

Does "IGP" mean integrated graphics? AMD is all over integrated graphics, they call such products "APUs" and the mobile lineup will be pretty much all APUs. So my guess is Q3 for corporate products with APUs as well. (I hope AMD supports ECC RAM on APUs, finally.)

They still have their equivalent of Intel's IME. Until they gut that ****, I'm not buying new hardware with my own money.

According to SemiAccurate, the AMD security stuff is way better than the Intel stuff.

Why is it better than Intel?

...SemiAccurate questioned AMD about the details surrounding SME, SVE, and the PSP. On the PSP front we were similarly impressed with the answers we got. First and foremost is the simple fact that the PSP firmware must be correctly signed to run. Having the hardware that controls the root of all your platform security running only signed code seems like an obvious, basic, bare minimum requirement for any security related technology. It also seems like something even a 3rd grader would flag as mandatory, but how can we say this politely, INTEL DOES NOT DO THIS. No joke.

http://semiaccurate.com/2017/06/22/amds-epyc-major-advance-security/

Still, if you want hardware that absolutely doesn't have a tricky security system, you should be trying to help the EOMA68 project succeed. I backed their Kickstarter and one of these days I will receive a little mini desktop, running Linux on an ARM core. It's the one made from stacked wood.

https://www.crowdsupply.com/eoma68/micro-desktop

AMD took forever to get Ryzen out, but they really did do a good job with the chips. No games, no tricks, and 50% more instructions per clock. And to specifically answer your question: yes, each core has its own FPU.

http://www.pcworld.com/article/3176907/components-processors/ryzen-cpus-explained-everything-you-need-to-know-about-amds-disruptive-multicore-chips.html

The most interesting thing about the new Ryzen PRO chips: much more PCI-E lanes. From an article a month ago: "...AMD committed offering all 64 PCI-E lanes and 4 DDR4 memory channels on every ThreadRipper SKU regardless of price, clockspeed, or core count. These [Intel] Core X-series chips haven't even been publicly announced for a full 24 hours and already it's clear that AMD's offering the better chip."

http://semiaccurate.com/2017/05/31/amds-ryzen-threadripper-brings-socket-tr4-x399-chipset/

Doesn't this means that Secure Boot as much as UEFI is moot now and that only Coreboot or Libreboot have any legitimacy on a computer?

The deal is they have a bunch of half-broken XPoint shit they need to sell off in some form to recoup some $.

XPoint (Currently "Optane" products from Intel) isn't fucking ready: http://semiaccurate.com/2016/0...

If Intel & Micron can get to the point where it fucking works as planned then it'll be great. But who the fuck knows if/when that'll actually happen. What you're seeing now is a broken mess that is shippable only because they're loading it up with tons of redundancy / overprovisioning for when it fails, and it works only at about the same speed as a high end SSD.

Stay away from Xpoint (Optane) products for a while.
They're far, far off their initial promises, which points to manufacturing issues.

http://semiaccurate.com/2016/0...

I imagine OCZ must have mixed feelings about any Optane story given their Octane SSDs debuted 5 years ago

Stay away from Xpoint (Optane) products for a while.
They're far, far off their initial promises, which points to manufacturing issues.

http://semiaccurate.com/2016/0...

Both are fine but they don't actually address what QC3 does, they just deliver more juice. QC3 will change voltage in 200mV increments on the fly, allow 2 chargers for lower temps and better heat distribution, and actively monitor the battery for conditions which degrade life. There is a lot more to it, but pushing more wattage through USB-PD is REALLY BAD FOR BATTERY LIFE. I wrote up some pretty in-depth articles on both USB-PD and QC3 lined below if you care.

This is the long way of saying what Google is asking for is idiotic. If you look at the size of modern batteries and the rate at which USB-C can deliver power, we are bordering on all-night charges already. If you up the delivered power via PD, you will not meet the 500 charge minimum life carriers demand thus not sell any phones. Worse yet that number is about to go to 800 really soon if it is not already there. Plus you will have people pissed off that their phone is drawing more current than the charger is supplying while plugged in and being used.

In short I question Google's sanity on this one. I am asking around to see what the official take on this is from involved parties, but I suspect the original article's take is way off base. I won't say why yet, I like to know before I mouth off publicly.

              -Charlie

http://semiaccurate.com/2012/0...

http://semiaccurate.com/2015/0...

Both are fine but they don't actually address what QC3 does, they just deliver more juice. QC3 will change voltage in 200mV increments on the fly, allow 2 chargers for lower temps and better heat distribution, and actively monitor the battery for conditions which degrade life. There is a lot more to it, but pushing more wattage through USB-PD is REALLY BAD FOR BATTERY LIFE. I wrote up some pretty in-depth articles on both USB-PD and QC3 lined below if you care.

This is the long way of saying what Google is asking for is idiotic. If you look at the size of modern batteries and the rate at which USB-C can deliver power, we are bordering on all-night charges already. If you up the delivered power via PD, you will not meet the 500 charge minimum life carriers demand thus not sell any phones. Worse yet that number is about to go to 800 really soon if it is not already there. Plus you will have people pissed off that their phone is drawing more current than the charger is supplying while plugged in and being used.

In short I question Google's sanity on this one. I am asking around to see what the official take on this is from involved parties, but I suspect the original article's take is way off base. I won't say why yet, I like to know before I mouth off publicly.

              -Charlie

http://semiaccurate.com/2012/0...

http://semiaccurate.com/2015/0...

AMD is saying there's a x5+ performance improvement in specific workloads.

Sounds like cherry picking? think again. One such specific workload is 8k res terabyte file (for render) operations. Fuck it let Charlie tell you how it is -> http://semiaccurate.com/2016/0...

Every so often this innovative company just changes the game. Don't you wish you bough their stock when it hit $1.8?

Meet GDDR5M, the memory on SO-DIMM that would have been used with Kaveri (7850K etc.) but was abandoned.

http://semiaccurate.com/forums...

Perhaps that was why HSA has been sort of a failure or pseudo-vaporware.
Now future Opteron are rumored - with interconnects, contrary to the Kaveri bet that went nowhere on servers.
http://vrworld.com/2016/02/12/...
The one that was known about first and has more ground is an MCM with two 16-core CPU ; other one might be an MCM with CPU + CPU.

Transmeta with a hardware morphing layer?

Maybe, maybe not. An article about them on SemiAccurate says "SM can run what it calls personalities in software but they are not implemented in the expected way. Personalities are software and are loaded at boot time, but they are both light and low-level. They don’t emulate code, they just translate it to the native ISA, a 32-bit add is a 32-bit add on both native and emulated hardware, but probably have differing opcodes." and "Personalities are not purely software though, there are hardware hooks to assist in with the job, unfortunately SM did not go into more detail here."

Perhaps there's more hardware assistance than in Transmeta's chips, where I think the instruction set was somewhat oriented towards emulating an x86 and some hardware features helped, but the translation itself was done in software - maybe there's some hardware assistance in the translation process, although that might bias it towards particular instruction sets if done naively.

Yep - the B1700 did this in the 1970s. Been there, done that... (I was a CPU engineer on one of them.)

But they didn't translate programs compiled to the various S-languages directly into microcode and execute the microcode. From this article about them, it sounds as if that's what they're doing:

The next issue on the list was the ISA which moves from a 32-bit one on the prototype to a full 64-bit version in the Shasta/Mojave pair. SM can run what it calls personalities in software but they are not implemented in the expected way. Personalities are software and are loaded at boot time, but they are both light and low-level. They don’t emulate code, they just translate it to the native ISA, a 32-bit add is a 32-bit add on both native and emulated hardware, but probably have differing opcodes. Occasionally this software will need to do something more complex but the bulk of the work is basically a big lookup table.

Personalities are not purely software though, there are hardware hooks to assist in with the job, unfortunately SM did not go into more detail here. One thing they did say is that the code is not user accessible and runs underneath everything including a hypervisor where applicable. In x86 terms, think of this as ring -2 or something similar. To running code and users, everything should appear to be native hardware, assuming it all works as promised.

so this looks more like Transmeta.

Wow, a research project that uses Ultrasound to scan fingerprints in 3D? This would be amazing if Qualcomm didn't have a near production version (Likely showing up in phones early next year around CES) that they were showing off at MWC months ago. I played with it here, it works, it does '3D', it scans beneath the surface, it is ultrasound based, etc etc. It also does other neat tricks that they aren't making public.

http://semiaccurate.com/2015/0...

So why is this 'new' one all the rage again?

              -Charlie

x86 did gain reliability features years ago, with the Nehalem-EX series and successors.

http://www.anandtech.com/show/...

Not sure if that's close enough for you. A year ago there were some additional RAS features (lower quality article : ) http://semiaccurate.com/2014/0...
Perhaps it doesn't go as far as the most paranoid mainframes but I wonder if such systems can be called a minicomputer.

Previously, Nvidia said that it would license it's Kepler GPU cores to third parties. Semiaccurate maintains that this licensing program was in fact bogus and was conceived purely to justify future patent trolling activities. Semiaccurate also claims that
Nvidia tried to "shakedown" Apple with the same patents and Apple subsequently gave the contract for the Mac Pro GPU to AMD as punishment.

http://www.eteknix.com/memory-...
http://semiaccurate.com/2014/0...

Can one calculate b/s simply from number of bits * clock?

17 GB/s for 2133 MHz DDR3?

The GTX 770 would put that at 224 GB/s ..

New AMD APUs are supposed to have "stacked memory" or something such though.

Like the things that they announced last year, which have simply disappeared off the roadmap without mention. In other words, they are falling behind schedule, and trying desperately to spin this as ongoing progress.

The rest of the desktop stuff that people care about spending $$$ to make faster would be faster on an Intel CPU.

You mean something like this? (Or similar solutions for other languages?)

And server. Don't forget Metro on the Server. Because... we don't know why. Just because.

All measures are pointless when the Intel chipsets on the motherboards have backdoors called vPro or Business Advantage.

One secret command sent to the chipset through the onboard NIC and it's over, you get access to ram/storage/video, all happening behind the OS, even when the machine is turned off.

It is our understanding that if the cpu has vPro / Small Business Advantage in it, it is backdoor'd, that means almost all the new Intel cpus in the past 5 years are backdoored, if not the past 10 years.

Intel Small Business Advantage is a security nightmare
New Intel Chips Contain Back-Door Processor, Hackable Even When Computer is Turned Off

Nothing is safe.

http://semiaccurate.com/2013/10/21/microsoft-admits-image-net-consumer-negative/

Because they've realized the 'Microsoft' name has such negative connotations in the consumer market, that they don't want CxO's shooting it down based on its name, and one that wasn't directly tied to their Windows environment, since its where they want you to run your Linux VMs "In The Cloud":

  "...we knew that we needed to ensure that Windows is the best platform to run Linux workloads as well as open source components. ..."

http://blogs.technet.com/b/in_the_cloud/archive/2013/07/24/what-s-new-in-2012-r2-enabling-open-source-software.aspx

If their first offering wasn't called a Surface (a meaningless name) but instead the Xbox Tablet, the response would have likely been quite different

Here's my take on why they named the tablets "Surface":

Microsoft wanted the announcement of the Surface to be a surprise. Using any new name (such as "Xbox Tablet") would have required filing paperwork for trademarks, reserving domain names, etc. and would have tipped their hand early. Luckily, they had a brand name, "Surface", on a product that wasn't doing much, so they could lift the brand name and use it on the new product, with nobody able to see it coming ahead of time.

The OEM partners were not happy when Microsoft announced it would be making and selling its own computing devices. The secrecy helped Microsoft keep the OEMs from finding out as long as possible.

As support for my theory, note that Microsoft filed for the trademark on Zune on August 16, 2006 and then announced the Zune officially on November 14, 2006. Thus there was about a three-month window where people knew Microsoft was preparing something named "Zune". A name like "Xbox Tablet" would have basically announced what Microsoft was up to, three months early.

P.S. SemiAccurate published an article claiming that Microsoft was being crafty, looking at the coming Windows tablet devices as they planned their own tablets. If this is true, the need for the secrecy to continue until the last possible minute is clear.

From TFA:

From a components standpoint, a 7-inch Surface RT tablet with a Qualcomm chip shouldn't cost much more to produce than the Nexus 7. If Google can afford to price the Nexus 7 at $199, then Microsoft can certainly aim for similar build quality at a similar price.

This assumes that Microsoft is willing to give away Windows to hit the price point. This in turn means buying in on the "sell cheap razors, make money selling razor blades" idea, which Microsoft did actually try with the XBox, but would represent a change in strategy with respect to mobile.

Can Microsoft make that decision quickly? I can imagine endless bickering among the multiple layers of middle management about whether that's a good idea or not.

Also, Windows needs a more powerful device to run compared to Android, which drives up device costs.

By producing multiple Surface RT models, Microsoft can reassure its partners that Windows RT is worth supporting.

This is just fantasy. The OEMs are not happy about any aspect of the Surface situation (Microsoft making its own hardware in direct competition with the OEMs, lousy sales, etc.) and this sort of abstract reassurance is worthless.

3. Microsoft needs device fanfare to accompany Windows 8.1, and to coincide with enterprise hardware upgrades.

Again, just fantasy. Microsoft has completely failed to gin up any excitement around the current crop of Surface products and it's silly to just assume they can do better with a new product.

Also, TFA suggests that "excitement over Windows 8.1" would help sell Surface tablets, and I don't think there will be enough excitement there to help anything.

A larger Windows RT tablet might be attractive to a mobile salesperson, for instance, whereas a 7-inch model that syncs perfectly with a Surface Pro could be a nice secondary device for a traveling executive.

Wow. Just, wow. Traveling executives who likely already have a Macbook Air and an iPad are going to get rid of them in favor of a Surface Pro and a baby Surface RT?

Oh wait, I forgot, the new tablets will have Outlook so it's totally plausible! Yeah, no.

Uhhh...did you read my post or just see the words "X86" and automatically think of a PC? What I thought I had made clear was the much lower power usage of the new chips by AMD and Intel is gonna lead to them both being used in the places that ARM is used today such as tablets and phones. If you want to get a taste or if any devs want to try AMD already has a prototyping board out that is 4 inches by 4 inches for $199.

And this isn't even the latest and greatest, the new APU they just released a few weeks ago uses less than 3w under typical loads and that is for a dual core like this with a Radeon GPU that does 1080P and I bet even plays a lot of games, I know on my nearly 4 year old Bobcat dual i play the Portal series, L4D and GTA:VC (it would probably play the others but I don't have them) and there are plenty of videos of guys playing even more hardcore games like Crysis on them and getting 30FPS with reduced bling.

So you seem to be confused friend, nobody is gonna make you go back to a PC if you don't want to, you are simply gonna be able to have the power of the PC in your pocket. Once Intel and AMD phones and tablets start hitting en masse I'm sure that all your favorite phone apps will be ported, after all its the form factor not the arch that makes the app work, you'll just be able to do a HELL of a lot more with your mobile devices thanks to the insane lead X86 has when it comes to IPC. Hell Intel has said both the new Atom and the new CULV mobile chips will have "reduced function" mode which is where the majority of the chip shuts completely down but its still able to do basic tasks, like say listen to music or receive messages.

I'm telling you all you have to do is look at the benches to see the writing is on the wall for ARM as their latest and greatest can't beat a first gen Core Solo or Athlon 64 and those are 6+ year old chips, you compare the best ARM has to offer against the weakest AMD and Intel offers today and its no contest, the X86 units just curbstomp ARM when it comes to the amount of useful work per cycle. Will ARM die? No but most likely it'll go back to the original use before the ARM craze took off, being embedded controllers in everything from MP3 players to kiosks.

a few notes:
- RRAM (aka ReRAM) is memsistor based RAM
- super simple design
- requires less power (lower voltage too) than FLASH and racetrack memory.
- 10ns switching (faster than DDR some DDR RAM)
- 1 trillion write operations according to US startup Crossbar
- possibly scaled down to 2nm (when they invent the manufacturing process)

so if this really works out, it may be a replacement for RAM and FLASH memory in lots of stuff. i'm not sure if this includes computers but at the very least, it could be used to retain data on RAM sticks (hopefully directly on them) when you turn off your PC.

So you agree that you're wrong, then. Good. Clearly if 56% of consumers are buying the Mac Air instead of an Ultrabook, they're selling a lot of them.

No I think the market segment is a bit of a failure.

Ultra-hyped ultrabooks ultra-flopped in 2012 http://www.networkworld.com/news/2013/010713-ultrabooks-265469.html
http://www.digitaltrends.com/computing/are-ultrabooks-an-epic-failure/ http://www.digitaltrends.com/computing/are-ultrabooks-an-epic-failure/
A year on, Ultrabooks are a worse disaster than most expected http://semiaccurate.com/2012/10/02/a-year-on-ultrabooks-are-a-worse-disaster-than-most-expected/
Remember Ultrabooks? Yeah, That Was A Good Time http://techcrunch.com/2012/10/01/remember-ultrabooks-yeah-that-was-a-good-time/

as I said apples sales are down 22%, 2% and 7%

http://semiaccurate.com/2013/07/12/apple-has-their-own-fab/

Take it with a pinch of salt

Found it:

http://semiaccurate.com/2013/05/01/sonics-licenses-fabric-tech-to-arm/

"Sonics and ARM just made an agreement to use Sonics interconnects patents and some power management tech in ARM products."

"If Sonics is to be taken at face value on their functionality, then you can slap just about any IP block you have on an ARM core now with a fair bit of ease."

This is kind of relevant too, the internet will eat all our electricities:

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/11/26/interview_rod_tucker/

"and if we don’t do anything, it could become ten percent between 2020 and 2025"

Although if you read it, the lion shares of internet electric usage is actually those amp happy DSL connections we have.

That depends. A few years ago when "netbooks" (cheap subnotebooks) and "nettops" (cheap small form factor PCs) with an Atom CPU were all the rage, people would buy these nettops, which were just powerful enough to decode high-definition video in real time, and use them for noninteractive home theater uses such as listening to music and watching movies. Use for recently published video games, on the other hand, requires a little more GPU power than a lot of these Atom PCs were capable of. Could Gigabyte's Brix nettop make a useful set-top console?

Assuming they aren't leaving all of Windows behind

That is where you go wrong.

Microsoft has a habit of padding their sales results. How many of those 100 million licenses are currently in use? Does it include bulk purchases by OEMs? Does a Windows 8 license get subtracted when a user upgrades to Windows 7 or Linux?

Hopefully, they are more successful than the Z-60, a product that had so few design wins that it almost never existed:
http://semiaccurate.com/2013/05/06/where-are-amds-z-60-tablets/

I spotted a 23" phone at CES.....

http://semiaccurate.com/2013/01/15/prototype-intel-core-i7-phone-platform-spotted-and-tested/

(Note: Yes that is me...)

It's already a bad day for Redmondians. Haswell is slated to be introduced in 2014 will mostly offer the BGA designed Broadweil "System-on-a-Chip CPU", pre-sodered on an Intel motherboard like Atom chips are now. There will be nothing to upgrade - in effect this will be a device in PC clothing. There are rumors of high-end LGA packaging, but the upgrade possibilities will be limited to a few paltry offerings. No one will be making consumer upgradable parts anymore. Another way of saying it is that It will become cheaper for Dell just to replace the whole "PC-thingy" than to repair it. Yet Another Way... Intel's Ivy Bridge product cycle ends in 2014. Its successor, Haswell, will not have a desktop chip. The English story: http://semiaccurate.com/2012/11/26/intel-kills-off-the-desktop-pcs-go-with-it/#.UTU5hjZMn2A As tablets and smart phones replace desktops and notebooks, Intel, Microsoft and the desktop manufacturers struggle for market-share. The end of the desktop in 2014 does not mean the demise of the notebook, or of Microsoft, or of the support jobs they bring. It does foreshadow their end though. This time its a question of what and who will be left behind. Intel's market-based decision will shrink the computer field in general, and IT departments everywhere. With a paradigm shift away from a smart-client/server model to a dumb-portal/Cloud one, the computer becomes just another office supply, and the IT department becomes marginalized. When in the cloud, other services seem more viable. Virtual storage and backup deals mean goodbye to lots of servers, and that backup guy too. No longer dependent on the IT department, HR, Customer Service - hey, every department can find alternatives in the cloud. And those alternatives in the cloud will be supplied by the same people who make the software installed on their computers now. By putting Office online, Microsoft separates their biggest revenue stream from their troubled operating system. Microsoft will want to make up for the loss of revenue. They will “incentivise” their cloud products, making services cheaper than anything an IT department can provide. The stakes are even higher because Microsoft has to move into cloud, which is Google’s home turf. Google enters the market meeting Microsoft head on, feature-to-feature and with a better price - for now. Both competitors want a piece of the IT department, especially in these changing times. So count on predatory pricing to make the move even cheaper. These giants are in a fight for their corporate lives, so don’t think for one moment they’ll do anything that’s not in their financial interest. Every perk will have its price. The original story: http://translate.google.com/translate?sl=ja&tl=en&js=n&prev=_t&hl=en&ie=UTF-8&layout=2&eotf=1&u=http%3A%2F%2Fpc.watch.impress.co.jp%2Fdocs%2Fcolumn%2Fubiq%2F20121122_574440.html

SemiAccurate reported that HP was very annoyed by the Microsoft Surface, was dropping any plans for "WART" devices ("Windows on ARM"), and would embrace Android.

http://semiaccurate.com/2012/06/29/hp-said-to-dump-microsoft-over-surface/

Intel really needs to get its act together: It's Atom processors are a decent low power x86 solution, but as usual Intel has delivered them with a crappy 3D graphics to the point the graphical benchmarks can't even run on them, let alone any recent computer games. For the Atom Cedar Trail release they didn't even do DX10 drivers, and sheepishly back-speced it to the now outdated DX9. ARM tablets can deliver decent 3D, so why can't Intel? Even AMD can provide 3D graphics for low-power PCs. Why can't Intel? And Intel wonders why it's becoming irrelevant to the future of computing!?

No DX10 for you!
http://semiaccurate.com/2012/01/03/intel-thinks-cedar-trail-is-a-dog-reading-between-bullet-points/#.UOY58uRJNxA

Windows must live with DX9. Linux can't do anything at all...
http://tanguy.ortolo.eu/blog/article56/beware-newest-intel-atom

Oh and did I mention it doesn't work on Windows 8.
http://communities.intel.com/message/175674
http://www.eightforums.com/hardware-drivers/12305-intel-gma-3600-3650-windows-8-driver.html
http://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/forum/windows_8-hardware/windows-8-on-intel-atom-d2700dc-graphics-driver/2a6015d3-af92-453d-b0c2-20cc56b764de

There you have it a 1.5 mW-445 mW superscalar X86 processor.

They have been catching up quite quickly. Most of their issues are not in manufacturing but in chip design. They simply did not have in-house designs for all the additional functionality you can find on your average ARM SoC. They also did not have any low power CPU designs which they could manufacture. Their solution was quite simple: you pick up a 1990s Pentium processor design and port it to a modern manufacturing process. The result was a chip with more performance and about the same power consumption as the top notch ARM CPU core designs.

Using $ is not stupid its for emphasis. It was mostly a thing done for Microsoft, because they print money, and yet offer very little of real value for it due to their monopoly status. They have become a utility. Its one of the reasons why nobody wants them on their phones. I use $ in Microsoft to emphasise where Microsoft is making money for nothing an example would be "Sales down, Micro$oft raises prices radically" http://semiaccurate.com/2012/12/03/sales-down-microsoft-raises-prices-radically/#.UNHwpNE49yA