Slashdot Mirror
Adobe is Considering Whether it Wants To Design Its Own Chips (axios.com)
A growing number of technology companies are trying to manufacture their own chips, cutting their reliance on Intel and other chip providers. This week Adobe pondered making a similar move. From a report: At an internal innovation conference on Tuesday, Adobe CTO Abhay Parasnis posed the matter as a question for his colleagues, noting the significant increases in performance from chips designed specifically for specialized tasks, like machine learning. "Do we need to become an ARM licensee?" he said, referring to the company whose underlying chip design is used across a wide range of devices, including computers, servers and phones.
"I don't have the answer, but it is something we are going to have to pay attention to." Later on Tuesday, Parasnis told Axios that there are a range of ways that Adobe could get deeper into silicon. "ARM does afford a model for a software company to package its technology much closer to silicon," he said, adding Adobe could do that without literally making its own chips, including by partnering with an existing chipmaker.
"I don't have the answer, but it is something we are going to have to pay attention to." Later on Tuesday, Parasnis told Axios that there are a range of ways that Adobe could get deeper into silicon. "ARM does afford a model for a software company to package its technology much closer to silicon," he said, adding Adobe could do that without literally making its own chips, including by partnering with an existing chipmaker.
hummmm, from the people who brought us flash. I think I will stick with Intel, thank you very much.
learn to use the insane hardware we already have?
i am constantly amazed by how slow and large modern software has become
As someone who is a tad miffed at Adobe for forcing a subscription model on everyone, even the enterprise, I would be hesitant at best to buy any hardware offerings because I would fear that some additional monthly subscription fee would be tacked on.
If I needed hardware for a custom mass-produced gizmo, and wasn't bound to x86/amd64, I'd probably go ARM. Yes, it does have a license fee, but the technology is widely known and debugged, tools are available, finding multiple ARM fabs wouldn't be hard to do, to ensure second-sourcing is doable, and it would be easy to mass produce widgets with ARM products. If not ARM, then RISC-V or POWER.
Seriously, WHAT FOR?
The entire "lets design the silicon ourselves" push is because YOU'RE ALREADY USING SILICON, just paying someone else for 100% of the work, and the design is generic not customized for your use-case.
If you're a company which has NO HARDWARE PRODUCTS (not even rumors on the horizons) thinking "hey maybe we should license ARM, it worked for Apple" is the WORST KIND OF CORPORATE DRUG INDUCED NIGHTMARE.
Visit CryptoGnome in his home.
Just throw the whole company into the trash. You know when they diverge this deep, they have lost their way.
I am not sure why Adobe wants to make its own chips. They are a software company, if these chips are for their own server farm "cloud" what real benefit is it going to give them. Will Creative Cloud software be reasonably priced for amateurs? For the amount of time I need their products, I cannot justify spending more then $5.00 a month for Photoshop. Anything more it is worth my effort banging my head with The GIMP. (mostly due to how little I use the product)
Back in the olden days. I would get the Upgrade for $200 every 4 or 5 years. But the current pricing, is much more expensive for the low volume use of the product. Especially, because I don't need the upgrade all the time.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
will CC cloud Mobile device cover roaming, in flight wifi, cruse ship wifi, etc fees for license checks?
They'd match Flash, that's for sure...
With software, at least, you can uninstall their insecure crap. With hardware you're fucked. ...I say as I type on an intel machine. Still, they had a pretty decent track record until the latest debacle.
Mod me down with all of your hatred and your journey towards the dark side will be complete!
But the way this is brought up and posed it's obvious this CTO is likely your average clueless Slashdot user. Let's not hurt his feelings.
Why on earth would Adobe - exclusively a software company - need to design their own silicon?
Is this a prelude to a repeat of the bad old dongle-days?
This sig left unintentionally blank.
Their creative-cloud apps are slow as molasses and only make perfunctory use of the computing resources available to them, including GPUs and multiple CPU cores.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
So they want to both charge a monthly fee for 'cloud services' and lock us down with proprietary hardware?
In the 80s Kodak sold a # of awful computers for image manipulation. They ran on some proprietary non-DOS OS and you could never get them to run DOS because they ran off weirdly formatted 5.25 inch disks and they cost like $2000. They were horrible. Who would buy a proprietary box for a single use case in this era? It never even worked in the 80s when the hardware was sufficiently horrendous that you could ALMOST justify such specialization.
These days nobody does 3-D graphics without hardware acceleration, would certainly benefit PDF graphics as well.
If they want to do this its because they think they can make more money. I'm surprised how many people don't understand this.
In this specific instance I have to wonder how they plan to make more money with specific hardware.
nVidia makes graphics processors, albeit focused on 3D gaming, with a side of multiplication heavy coprocessing. Why mention ARM, a general purpose microprocessor, at all?
I don't need a cloud subscription to my computer.
As an engineer I'm intrigued with what they can do. As a consume, I don't need another gadget, computer, laptop, or tablet. Where is this chip going to go?
Why not RISC V, do companies really want to pay ARM forever? It's like, do you want to keep paying for a cloud subscription to software? Hmm.. I guess in Adobe's case they are cool with it.
For the mass market, they have not only multi-core CPUs, but also drivers for graphics cards. On modern PCs, that's a lot of compute power. So three questions: /. crowd?
- Could they really improve performance by a significant amount (better be at least 3x), on custom hardware?
- Are there a lot of power users who would shell out serious bucks for that custom hardware?
- Will that be enough to justify the extra development effort, to create a customized version of their products?
It seems to me that the answer to all three questions is "no". In order for this idea to make sense, the answer to all three needs to be "yes".
Comments from the
Enjoy life! This is not a dress rehearsal.
Only if we're free to use any processor extensions the way we want. If we're getting into proprietary paths/instructions that only certain licensed software can use then no thanks.
I'm nearly speechless...
Why the F does Adobe think any measurable amount of their customer base is going to buy Adobe specific hardware?
Sure, I could see some hyper-focused businesses maybe buying special Adobe rigs but I certainly couldn't see anyone else doing so.
Focus on your software, Adobe. You are not in the hardware game.
Sounds a bit expensive.
Sounds like they're dropping the consumer market
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
I hate pdfs and bloaty McBloatface Reader. There, I said it.
No, but you can bet that they will deactivate your software if your network connection roams outside the region lock, even if you haven't.
Careful, Adobe chips may brick your device!
Today the cool companies that want to unshackle themselves from Intel or ARM are doing their own thing with RISC V.
Adobe doesn't create any hardware at all, so why not "innovate" and create one of the most complex parts of a computer when you have absolutely zero experience, knowledge or know how. Yeah, makes total business sense, if you just hired a 5th grader as your CEO that is. Is Trump running Adobe now?
Sounds like Adobe is trying to design their way into extinction. Why don't they start making cars or airplanes next?
See title. I'm sure patching their bug laden hardware will be even more fun - cheaper too. /sarc
that's all I got.
I'm glad they are re-imaging themselves. Other than the PDF plugin I'm not sure what they do these days. All that AI for fake Photoshop and that audio faker they have?
Vector formats also made a 56K speed web usable. Plus Flash was doing things only now that HTML has caught up.
Which is the more mature market, with greater experience as well as fabbing ability?
Just think of the number of software bugs and patches for ill written zero days they have since patched. How many people know even a thing about patching hardware microcode? Applying hardware updates would be a bit harder to perform and therefore it would be more likely skipped by the admins due to this. Now you have a piece of vulnerable hardware hanging off the net that no one wants as their responsibility to manage.
Sounds like the old days of specialized graphics workstations: Hell, Intergraph, Apollo, Silicon Graphics, etc.
Does anyone want to go back to those days? Hell, no!
One thing that might make sense, and I'll stress the might part, is a graphics co-processor. If you created a plug-in card that worked as an optional copro, then maybe. The software works faster when the copro is present and slower when the copro is absent.
Even that seems pretty "out there", TBH. There is a significant amount of software engineering involved to make use of the coprocessor happen properly. I'm assuming the copro is an option and it's easier from a design point of view to make the copro mandatory. Adobe isn't a hardware company and never has been, so is this a skillset they want bad enough to pay for it? I doubt it.
My guess is, this CTO is thinking aloud, and justifying his pay as a CTO. Sure, we could re-implement the old solutions of dedicated graphics workstations, but that ignores the factors that led us to abandon those in the first place. Small markets, proprietary solutions, high prices and limited customer choice. That was the reality and those market characteristics will re-emerge from custom silicon.
Once upon a time, that was the only way to get a graphics solution. Those days are gone; even very basic computers can perform acceptably given limited graphics tasks (see: smartphone, NUC, tablet, media device).
Who would buy a proprietary box for a single use case in this era?
I see it as no more unusual than buying an Xbox One game console just for the latest Halo game or a Nintendo Switch game console just for Super Smash Bros. Ultimate.
Why bother with soon obsolete ISAs? It's open and royalty free also, so, go creative! ;-)
Until they start selling older versions of their software, support-free, for pennies on the dollar, they can get bent. Would you rather someone pirate your latest and greatest or get like $45?
really, are we going back to the time when you had so many different systems and architectures which barely worked together? ...
an Atari for music, an Amiga for Video, Mac for DTP/Design, PC for office work,
On a long enough timeline, the survival rate for everyone drops to zero.
> from the people who brought us flash
You are wrong. Flash was developed by Macromedia.
Bought by Adobe in later years. And Flash was a great platform. Not today of course.
Back in the 1980's, Apple ][ computers ran on 6502 chips. They were OK for small apps and games, but not for bigger apps. There was a company that had an office suite called Starburst. They saw a large number of Apple ][ PCs that couldn't run the software. So they bought a bunch of Zilog Z80 cards, that could be inserted into a slot, and run CP/M, thus being able to run the Starburst office suite. These cards were often sold together with the Starburst office suite for Apple ][. The suite included...
* a little-known spreadsheet called Calcstar
* a little-known flat-flie database called Infostar (aka Datastar/Reportstar)
* a well-know word-processor called Wordstar... yes *THAT* Wordstar
The company's name was Micropro.
I'm not repeating myself
I'm an X window user; I'm an ex-Windows user