StrongARM, actually XScale, was sold to Marvel some 10 years ago.
The 80386EX did enjoy some support, after its predecessor the 80376 fizzled out. Incidentally, has AMD discontinued its 386 as well? How about Via, which had acquired Cyrix ages ago? Some of the 386 CPUs of yesteryear would be fine on embedded systems if they were sold.
So what was the product Intel was positioning for the IoT market? The 386SX? If they just took that design, added some level 1 cache and put it on their current most inexpensive process, they'd be optimal for it.
Why wouldn't a 386 be much of a selling point, when every embedded OS out there - not just Linux or BSD, but also things like FreeDOS, QNX, Minix, Minuet, et al exists for that platform. If one is looking for flexibility in number of hardware sources, one can limit themselves to Linux & BSD and go look there. If one is looking for flexibility in the choice of OS platforms, then it makes sense to go w/ 386. Only question - is Intel still the only game in town, or does Via or SiS still have their solutions?
Sadly, ARM is becoming a monoculture in many areas of computing, as x86(-64) is in desktop/laptop space.
I'd like to see more architecture choices (MIPS and POWER) in some markets.
Unfortunately, a lot of the semiconductor companies out there have reduced: just like Freescale & NXP have been digested by Qualcomm. Hardly looks like there's much out there. If a company chooses MIPS or Power, they have to make a business case for it to embedded customers on why it should be preferred over ARM, that has all the momentum. And if they choose ARM, they run up against goliaths like Qualcomm, Apple & Samsung.
Maybe there could be some companies running it on RISC V, where one USP is that since it's a FOSH (Free Open-Source Hardware) architecture, there may be less to pay in terms of patents to ARM or MIPS or IBM. In fact, RISC V could be something that some fabs could decide to do themselves whenever they need to fill capacity: they do have to have designs-in, though
True. But yield also gets complicated when factoring in other parameters that may be affected as a result of a shrink. Yeah, you'll get the square of as many die/wafer, but that doesn't necessarily imply that you won't have more defects per wafer.
But even that power reduction has limits. Like 0.7V is the voltage that a diode must have before current flows, so internally, there is going to be clamps on Vdd: one can't just keep reducing it w/ process shrinks the way one did when going from 5V to 3.3V to 1.8V. So while there may have been in-circuit level shifters in the past, one can't keep shrinking and hoping to go from 12 hr battery life to 24.
CPUs generally will be made on the cutting edge processes, and so will higher density semiconductor memory - both RAM and Flash. What I was arguing was that we are getting to the point - if we ain't there already - where it makes less sense to shrink a CPU. Skylake or Kaby lake - I've lost track of which one's most recent - may be the last process shrink for the core series.
- As shrinks get closer & closer to atomic scales, they become more difficult, and therefore, more expensive. As a result, despite other trends like larger diameter wafers, process shrinks no longer result in cost savings, which is the only reason (other than capacity) that one would wanna do those in the first place
- Unlike past years, where applications would grow in complexity to quickly overwhelm CPUs at the time, multiprocessing has completely changed the game. Although programming using multithreading & multiprocessing techniques have been around for a while, there ain't too many applications that can overwhelm multiple cores. That is a good part of the reason that Intel & AMD have slowed down in their CPU sales: not too many people have to replace laptops that they've had for years. When that gravy train is drying up, there ain't much of a case to spend billions in process shrinks.
Sessions may be in the administration, but he's not the one in any of the science related positions - be it EPA, Energy or FCC. Bringing up what he did as a senator is irrelevant.
Point is that the president has been burned badly by Obama holdovers. Leaks that never happened in previous administrations have happened in this one. There is a bureaucracy run amok, and so the president has major trust issues w/ the people he inherited from Obama. As a result, he's decided to expedite something that was gonna happen anyway - the replacement of previous administration officials w/ his own nominees.
Even when there ain't a change in parties, the new president comes in w/ a government and personnel that look very different from the previous one. See Bush 41's cabinet vs Reagan's. Had Hilary been elected, there would still have been major changes in personnel. To expect everybody from the Obama administration to stay on b'cos they're the 'Science Advisors' is pretty stupid
And they'll get however many they need. As it is, everytime a government changes, staff overhauls happen - not just at cabinet level, but also the bureaucrats. Yeah, there was always the argument that one needs the bureaucrats for continuity, but this time, you have a bureaucracy that's hell bent on sabotaging the agenda of the new administration. We saw it w/ Sally Yates & the travel ban, and more recently w/ 'Reality Winner'.
There is no reason for any Obama holdovers. Those 9 Science advisors ain't the only scientists in the land. First of all, w/ a $20T deficit, the administration does need to take a hard look at what sort of people are needed, and then, staff up accordingly. Also, the confirmation of all of this president's appointees have been historically slow - be it cabinet, ambassadors, department spokespeople, et al. So let them fill what they need as and when needed.
One solution would be - don't hire any men. Then the only sexual complaints will be about lesbianism. Of course, this assuming one can't leave Silicon Valley in the first place
There are other, nicer places with better culture.
Finally, the comment I was looking for about the location.
First of all, it's the most expensive part of the country, & gives Manhattan a run for its money. In the 90s, I understood the argument that 83% of the world's VCs were based there. However, that was not a good reason not to explore and establish other 'valleys' - be it Seattle, N Sioux City (former Gateway land), Huntsville, et al. A diversification of that would have ensured a more even availability of talent, rather than try & relocate the entire population to places like the Bay Area, and helped keep cost of living expenses in check. Plus a lot of companies, such as Yelp!, could be located out of anywhere, and not need a presence in San Francisco. Yet too many of the 'tech people' have a fetish for the valley, even while they bitch about the costs of doing business.
The sexual harassment thing is a laugh, given how off the deep end they've been - from everything from gay marriage to transgender restrooms. On one hand, they are the ultimate progressives - going above and beyond what even the LGBTQ community demands, and OTOH, merrily bullying/harassing female employees. The investors are right to worry. If I were them, I'd lay off Silicon Valley altogether: not only are the social controversies bad enough in & of themselves, but just requiring a company to be based in other places in the country would do wonders to the bottom line. Don't bother hiring snowflakes who want to get 6 figures b'cos they want a shack in the Mission district
I have a whole bunch of music videos that I downloaded from YouTube. Most of which are not available in iTunes. So I want to download those videos. I can, but guess what! I can only watch them under Photos, not Music. Which sucks, b'cos I want to put those in Music under a playlist, so that when I'm driving, I don't need to do anything but listen, while paying attention to the road.
Why do I use Apple for this? Reason - my car has an iPod player in the console/dashboard navigation system, so it can play an iToy, but for anything else, it has to be by Bluetooth, and there, I can't switch things around while driving. I have a Lumia as well w/ all the songs, but Groove doesn't play music videos like Apple Music does, and Movies doesn't allow playlists. Once upon a time, Microsoft had Windows Media Player on PCs, but they never took it to Windows Phone - at least not 8.x or 10. And an Android device - my car has trouble reading that even through the Bluetooth.
Except that in India, all Windows XP & 7 copies are pirated (dunno about 8). You can't upgrade a pirated Windows 7 to 10, and you can't upgrade XP to 10 w/o paying for it
India has had EVERY opportunity to get off of Microsoft's garbage platform. Superior, FREE alternatives have existed for decades now. But instead, they chose to steal and pirate Microsoft's proprietary software, and now they want a bail-out. This makes me sick. Fuck Gulshan Rai and all of the asshole Indians who refuse to switch to Free and open source software. People have worked damn hard to create these alternatives to proprietary software—often the reasoning being that it is more accessible to those in the third-world—yet it's easier for them to simply steal. India deserves all of the ransomware it gets. Pricks.
The 'superior, free alternatives' that you describe assumes that a huge % of Indians are like Stallman, or/. whizzes who know how to tweak files in/etc to make their computers work. They DON'T! Computer education in India is nowhere near what it is here.
However, an increasing number of Indians do their internet on cellphones rather than PCs, and so the latter has lost a lot of its clout when it comes to India. Nonetheless, that doesn't mean Linux can take over. Maybe chromebooks can make headway, but given internet speeds in India, there has to be more storage - one can't just assign storage to 'the cloud'.
Does Europe lose bragging rights on Raspberry Pi due to Brexit? Interesting that Minix chose its ARM implementation to be on the Beaglebone rather than Raspberry Pi. A combination of Minix on the Pi would have been a very good learning platform
American equivalents of that - Beaglebone & Arduino. But I'd like to see a US solution that's not based on the British ARM, but on a US born CPU, such as RISC-V or MIPS. Or maybe even SPARC or Power.
Quite agree. They should have called it Popi-Linux or some Linux, to make it obvious to the customer that it's Linux. Or if they did a FreeBSD based thing, they could have called it Popi Unix or Popi BSD.
Like I suggested, they should have improved on SteamOS, which is itself an Ubuntu distro
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StrongARM, actually XScale, was sold to Marvel some 10 years ago.
The 80386EX did enjoy some support, after its predecessor the 80376 fizzled out. Incidentally, has AMD discontinued its 386 as well? How about Via, which had acquired Cyrix ages ago? Some of the 386 CPUs of yesteryear would be fine on embedded systems if they were sold.
So what was the product Intel was positioning for the IoT market? The 386SX? If they just took that design, added some level 1 cache and put it on their current most inexpensive process, they'd be optimal for it.
Why wouldn't a 386 be much of a selling point, when every embedded OS out there - not just Linux or BSD, but also things like FreeDOS, QNX, Minix, Minuet, et al exists for that platform. If one is looking for flexibility in number of hardware sources, one can limit themselves to Linux & BSD and go look there. If one is looking for flexibility in the choice of OS platforms, then it makes sense to go w/ 386. Only question - is Intel still the only game in town, or does Via or SiS still have their solutions?
Sadly, ARM is becoming a monoculture in many areas of computing, as x86(-64) is in desktop/laptop space. I'd like to see more architecture choices (MIPS and POWER) in some markets.
Unfortunately, a lot of the semiconductor companies out there have reduced: just like Freescale & NXP have been digested by Qualcomm. Hardly looks like there's much out there. If a company chooses MIPS or Power, they have to make a business case for it to embedded customers on why it should be preferred over ARM, that has all the momentum. And if they choose ARM, they run up against goliaths like Qualcomm, Apple & Samsung.
Maybe there could be some companies running it on RISC V, where one USP is that since it's a FOSH (Free Open-Source Hardware) architecture, there may be less to pay in terms of patents to ARM or MIPS or IBM. In fact, RISC V could be something that some fabs could decide to do themselves whenever they need to fill capacity: they do have to have designs-in, though
True. But yield also gets complicated when factoring in other parameters that may be affected as a result of a shrink. Yeah, you'll get the square of as many die/wafer, but that doesn't necessarily imply that you won't have more defects per wafer.
But even that power reduction has limits. Like 0.7V is the voltage that a diode must have before current flows, so internally, there is going to be clamps on Vdd: one can't just keep reducing it w/ process shrinks the way one did when going from 5V to 3.3V to 1.8V. So while there may have been in-circuit level shifters in the past, one can't keep shrinking and hoping to go from 12 hr battery life to 24.
CPUs generally will be made on the cutting edge processes, and so will higher density semiconductor memory - both RAM and Flash. What I was arguing was that we are getting to the point - if we ain't there already - where it makes less sense to shrink a CPU. Skylake or Kaby lake - I've lost track of which one's most recent - may be the last process shrink for the core series.
Why do some people believe that all the crap out there is put out from Russia? There are enough skeptics out there in all countries.
It's also hitting a wall for 2 reasons:
- As shrinks get closer & closer to atomic scales, they become more difficult, and therefore, more expensive. As a result, despite other trends like larger diameter wafers, process shrinks no longer result in cost savings, which is the only reason (other than capacity) that one would wanna do those in the first place
- Unlike past years, where applications would grow in complexity to quickly overwhelm CPUs at the time, multiprocessing has completely changed the game. Although programming using multithreading & multiprocessing techniques have been around for a while, there ain't too many applications that can overwhelm multiple cores. That is a good part of the reason that Intel & AMD have slowed down in their CPU sales: not too many people have to replace laptops that they've had for years. When that gravy train is drying up, there ain't much of a case to spend billions in process shrinks.
You mean like college snowflakes pretending that they can pick whatever gender they want to be on any given day?
You may live in Stockholm, but that syndrome ain't what you think it is
Like the one I responded to?
Sessions may be in the administration, but he's not the one in any of the science related positions - be it EPA, Energy or FCC. Bringing up what he did as a senator is irrelevant.
Point is that the president has been burned badly by Obama holdovers. Leaks that never happened in previous administrations have happened in this one. There is a bureaucracy run amok, and so the president has major trust issues w/ the people he inherited from Obama. As a result, he's decided to expedite something that was gonna happen anyway - the replacement of previous administration officials w/ his own nominees.
Even when there ain't a change in parties, the new president comes in w/ a government and personnel that look very different from the previous one. See Bush 41's cabinet vs Reagan's. Had Hilary been elected, there would still have been major changes in personnel. To expect everybody from the Obama administration to stay on b'cos they're the 'Science Advisors' is pretty stupid
Likewise, cretin!
No, he's the Middle Eastern scholar on Abrahamic religions (TM)
And they'll get however many they need. As it is, everytime a government changes, staff overhauls happen - not just at cabinet level, but also the bureaucrats. Yeah, there was always the argument that one needs the bureaucrats for continuity, but this time, you have a bureaucracy that's hell bent on sabotaging the agenda of the new administration. We saw it w/ Sally Yates & the travel ban, and more recently w/ 'Reality Winner'.
There is no reason for any Obama holdovers. Those 9 Science advisors ain't the only scientists in the land. First of all, w/ a $20T deficit, the administration does need to take a hard look at what sort of people are needed, and then, staff up accordingly. Also, the confirmation of all of this president's appointees have been historically slow - be it cabinet, ambassadors, department spokespeople, et al. So let them fill what they need as and when needed.
One solution would be - don't hire any men. Then the only sexual complaints will be about lesbianism. Of course, this assuming one can't leave Silicon Valley in the first place
There are other, nicer places with better culture.
Finally, the comment I was looking for about the location.
First of all, it's the most expensive part of the country, & gives Manhattan a run for its money. In the 90s, I understood the argument that 83% of the world's VCs were based there. However, that was not a good reason not to explore and establish other 'valleys' - be it Seattle, N Sioux City (former Gateway land), Huntsville, et al. A diversification of that would have ensured a more even availability of talent, rather than try & relocate the entire population to places like the Bay Area, and helped keep cost of living expenses in check. Plus a lot of companies, such as Yelp!, could be located out of anywhere, and not need a presence in San Francisco. Yet too many of the 'tech people' have a fetish for the valley, even while they bitch about the costs of doing business.
The sexual harassment thing is a laugh, given how off the deep end they've been - from everything from gay marriage to transgender restrooms. On one hand, they are the ultimate progressives - going above and beyond what even the LGBTQ community demands, and OTOH, merrily bullying/harassing female employees. The investors are right to worry. If I were them, I'd lay off Silicon Valley altogether: not only are the social controversies bad enough in & of themselves, but just requiring a company to be based in other places in the country would do wonders to the bottom line. Don't bother hiring snowflakes who want to get 6 figures b'cos they want a shack in the Mission district
I have a whole bunch of music videos that I downloaded from YouTube. Most of which are not available in iTunes. So I want to download those videos. I can, but guess what! I can only watch them under Photos, not Music. Which sucks, b'cos I want to put those in Music under a playlist, so that when I'm driving, I don't need to do anything but listen, while paying attention to the road.
Why do I use Apple for this? Reason - my car has an iPod player in the console/dashboard navigation system, so it can play an iToy, but for anything else, it has to be by Bluetooth, and there, I can't switch things around while driving. I have a Lumia as well w/ all the songs, but Groove doesn't play music videos like Apple Music does, and Movies doesn't allow playlists. Once upon a time, Microsoft had Windows Media Player on PCs, but they never took it to Windows Phone - at least not 8.x or 10. And an Android device - my car has trouble reading that even through the Bluetooth.
Did they make Windows phones? How do they have debt to Microsoft?
Except that in India, all Windows XP & 7 copies are pirated (dunno about 8). You can't upgrade a pirated Windows 7 to 10, and you can't upgrade XP to 10 w/o paying for it
'8b' is the world's population (actually, somewhat less than that), not India's
Dot, not feather
India has had EVERY opportunity to get off of Microsoft's garbage platform. Superior, FREE alternatives have existed for decades now. But instead, they chose to steal and pirate Microsoft's proprietary software, and now they want a bail-out. This makes me sick. Fuck Gulshan Rai and all of the asshole Indians who refuse to switch to Free and open source software. People have worked damn hard to create these alternatives to proprietary software—often the reasoning being that it is more accessible to those in the third-world—yet it's easier for them to simply steal. India deserves all of the ransomware it gets. Pricks.
The 'superior, free alternatives' that you describe assumes that a huge % of Indians are like Stallman, or /. whizzes who know how to tweak files in /etc to make their computers work. They DON'T! Computer education in India is nowhere near what it is here.
However, an increasing number of Indians do their internet on cellphones rather than PCs, and so the latter has lost a lot of its clout when it comes to India. Nonetheless, that doesn't mean Linux can take over. Maybe chromebooks can make headway, but given internet speeds in India, there has to be more storage - one can't just assign storage to 'the cloud'.
Does Europe lose bragging rights on Raspberry Pi due to Brexit? Interesting that Minix chose its ARM implementation to be on the Beaglebone rather than Raspberry Pi. A combination of Minix on the Pi would have been a very good learning platform
American equivalents of that - Beaglebone & Arduino. But I'd like to see a US solution that's not based on the British ARM, but on a US born CPU, such as RISC-V or MIPS. Or maybe even SPARC or Power.
Despite this, the Iranians want nukes. It won't be noticably hotter if a nuke goes off in Ahvaz
Quite agree. They should have called it Popi-Linux or some Linux, to make it obvious to the customer that it's Linux. Or if they did a FreeBSD based thing, they could have called it Popi Unix or Popi BSD.
Like I suggested, they should have improved on SteamOS, which is itself an Ubuntu distro