Yes, just like we have CPU-bound software and IO-bound software, we have area-limited and pin-limited chips. Pin-limited chips are where the I/O balls are keeping chips from becoming bigger - you see this as CPUs, SoCs, chipsets and other utility chips (many bus architectures are redesigned to be more conservative on their pin usage - why consume 64 pins when you can use 16).
You sounds like a good advocate for TSVs.
That said, defects in memory devices probably don't limit the maximum chip size all that much-- memory devices can contain lots of redundant elements to repair defects. Simple chips/wafer cost considerations--because no one wants to pay much for memory--probably has a lot more to do with it. It's just straight-up cost limiting area, not defect density. And when it comes to the push for 450mm, it's not necessarily higher yield that's expected, but lower cost per chip and higher fab throughput. Yield may actually decrease at first, but processing cost per chip would ideally outweigh that.
Similarly, I think the GlobalFoundries fab in Malta, NY is supposedly "450mm ready" or maybe the annex will be. But regardless, "450mm ready" doesn't mean all that much.
My experience is that things begin to break down with the underperformance quotas after layoffs. It's exactly the issue that at the "thousands of employees" level-- following a layoff, you've removed everyone who was in that lower tier. If you maintain the underperformer quotas after layoffs, you really kill morale. Not only are people pissed that their colleagues got kicked out, they're now looking at a regime that immediately begins sorting out who's next.
My guess would be the ranking system was appropriate whenever Microsoft was hiring at a rapid clip, a bit annoying when hiring slowed, and an absolute kick-in-the-balls to employees once layoffs happened. As with anything MS, a lot has to do with the company "maturing." Well, switching from a system that assumes there are lots of new guys to one that doesn't may be part of that process. As people have said, Microsoft hired compentent people, and good employees were generally the motivated ones. I don't disagree that in any group there will be apathetic people, for whatever reason. Once a company isn't hiring people who somewhat randomly become the apathetic undermotivated people, this system tends to turn otherwise decent employees into those apathetic underperformers. You end up pushing people towards a "why bother" attitude rather than motivating them away from it.
The story about the reformulated foam causing the Columbia accident is largely the doing of Rush Limbaugh, who seized on a lie from one of his typically ill-informed listeners, and kept repeating it until it became accepted as fact by everyone on the right.
http://mediamatters.org/research/200508090007
Credulity when it comes to pithy stories about "tree huggers" getting their comeuppance? Inconceivable! Why be skeptical?!?
The linked article refers to Florian Mueller as a patent expert. What exactly constitutes one?
When it comes to this particular case, this "expert" predicted Motorola's doom by fronting the ideas that it (Motorola), was suing over what he termed as "standards essential" and therefore "weak" attack or defense patents.
No wonder he sounds humbled by this development on his blog.
Jeff Bezos is an infamous micro-manager. He micro-manages every single pixel of Amazon's retail site.
Whut?
Amazon's retail site is a mess. It looks like it was created by checking "Do you want to use the default presentation?" on a retail-boxed online-store app.
So either Bezos isn't quite as involved as this dude thinks, or Bezos is incredibly lax in his personal standards for information, organization, and aesthetics.
The weakness of Facebook to me is their developer API... but only because it's far too much of a whore. It reminds me of trying to secure Windows 98 boxes for student use, except (to be as bad) Microsoft would have to log in remotely every other night and change the settings so there's another configurable security hole added with the default setting set to "open".
That may be a weakness in your eyes, but remember that Win95 was an incredibly huge success for Microsoft. Just like the developer API is for Facebook. Warts and all.
You're right, of course, with the Douglas Adams comment. No one should really want to be an admin there.
But that's not really as much of a problem as the huge barrier to entry that byzantine rules create. They're probably even running short on OCD recluse zealots.
Bullshit. The typical white male on a dating website likes Tom Fucking Clancy because he knows the ladies dig guys who read fatass books.
The ladies on the other hand, can discriminate Tom Fucking Clancy from Toni Fucking Morrison, so they're not impressed, and all the Tom Fucking Clancy lovers stay in web dating purgatory.
Something thats been in development for even 5 years and doesn't show any concrete signs of success should at least have alternatives developed for it. After 5 years if you still can't say for certain if its ever going to work, you definitely need to start looking in different directions.
You are misinformed. On our Alpha development machines, working 22 nm devices were already manufactured last year. (source) We are shipping the first commercial EUV lithography machines in the coming year (source, source) A problem for the chip manufacturers is that the capacity on the alpha machines is rather low and needs to be shared among competitors.
Yeah, I think the OP has a little intuition of the relatively common situation where an ailing older technology's flaws are somewhat obvious and well publicized for years and years, but the older technology staggers on far far longer than expected. For both the reason that EUV has been slow to mature, and that 193nm has been surprisingly resilient. It's wrong to conclude that EUV will never be practical, just that one should be very careful about declaring when it is necessary.
A similar situation is going on with the broader issue discussed here-- the eventual replacement of CMOS with some other technology. People are eager to declare the death of CMOS and the need for diamond substrates or nanotubes or whatever, but CMOS will stagger along much longer than the advocates of the new technologies hope because it is easier to extend CMOS than it is to make something truly different more mature and practical.
Probably not, since Apple does not have the kind of market share in the PC market that IBM has in the mainframe market. Last I checked, something like 90% of mainframes were IBM, versus something like 6% of PCs being Apple products.
Yes, but only something like 0.00006% of servers are mainframes.
If you're going to pretend Apples and PCs are interchangeable, you can depend on the fact that the same sort of substitute goods comparison will occur to IBM.
I was wondering too about the wisdom of this move, but it shows that they are not going to hitch their wagon to anyone's horse but their own, and that they have the ability to modify the horse to pull whatever load is necessary at that moment, a new iPad, new iPhone, AppleTV,
If you're going to discuss consumer electronics manufacturers getting screwed by IDMs and commodity chips, the best example is the first Xbox. Microsoft went with Intel, but Intel's business is offering faster chips for the same price, not the same chip at lower prices every couple years. Some MS ended up with a chip that never got cheap enough. With the second Xbox, Microsoft also designed its own chip (licensed tech from IBM rather than ARM) and they've been shrinking that sucker constantly. Console margins have been increasing constantly.
Apple may hope to have "new" products using the A4 years from now using an A4 that's 1/8th the current cost. That's what owning your own chip allows... not necessarily some awesome roadmap where there's an A8 four years from now, but a roadmap where the phone's using the same processor with very minor redesigns for a fraction of the cost now. It's not that owning the IP allows them to upgrade faster, it's that it allows them to increase margins faster by stringing along the manufacture of the same old chip beyond the point where an IDM would retire it and push something faster and more expensive. Oh, they may call the next thing an A6 or whatever, but the processor performance will eventually be deemed "good enough" and they'll widen their margins on that part and they'll start pushing the other features like much improved battery life.
The SEC review process exists so that new monopolies aren't created.
It's the FTC (Federal Trade Comission) that would review the acquisition, not the SEC.
And the European regulators have been more active in the arena. They certainly mulled Oracle buying Sun for an excessively long time, and famously nixed the GE acquisition of Honeywell. I do think even the FTC would not allow the designer of the iPhone to acquire the designer of the processor in many other smartphones.
I doubt Apple would want to buy ARM and then kill the sales to ARM's other customers.
But that is exactly what Apple did when it acquired P.A. Semi.
On a much smaller scale, and with many fewer customers, but it is at least clear what the motivation is.
Not sure about the blade you purchased, but it's common for each Power6 processor chip to share a package with a 32MB L3 cache chip. The bandwidth between the processor and L3 is huge.
Sure, buy a company and kill off their highest revenue generating, and highest margin products which coincidentally are chosen more than any other platform to deploy your own database product.
Servers were Sun's highest margin stuff? No wonder they plummeted and got bought. But if Oracle doesn't find value in offering servers bundled with software, one would wonder why IBM does. It's pretty clear that servers are now second fiddle to IBM's software business.
Is it just me or was he explicit about maintaining Sparc, but said nothing about x86 servers? I'll have to find the rest of the interview on Reuters.
The people who ran that IBM are dead.
I guess people have not forgiven the US for electing Richard Nixon, either, but it would sound pretty weird to choose Nixon-hating as your number one reason to dislike the US.
I'd be surprised if more that 1/4 of any major nuclear force could be launched on any particular day, unless there was a lot of build up time to get all the parts reassembled and tested. Just look at how long it takes to get a satellite launch vehicle or the scuttle ready to go.
That's kind of like saying that you're surprised your car starts every morning because it doesn't have a NASCAR pit crew to attend to it. I'd be surprised if 499 of the 500 remaining ICBMs aren't required to be ready to launch immediately. They're solid-fueled, and sitting on their launchers. If we've figured out how to launch the damn things from submarines, I think we can figure out how to launch them from nice, stable bunkers.
I didn't see any circuit diagrams, just some flowcharts and a lot of descriptions of them. It seems to me there's a vast difference between patenting a flowchart and building a circuit in silicon
The invention is the idea, so a flowchart works. The requirement is that you've "reduced the idea to practice." So in this case a logic circuit simulation (not hardware) or more abstract behavioral simulation would be sufficient.
So basically to patent an idea, you should demonstrate that it will work, not that you can make it yourself. If you thought of it first and wanted to patent a Dyson Sphere, you could, even though no one will be making one any time soon. I'm sure many patents have preceeded prototypes.
Slashdot Mirror
Yes, just like we have CPU-bound software and IO-bound software, we have area-limited and pin-limited chips. Pin-limited chips are where the I/O balls are keeping chips from becoming bigger - you see this as CPUs, SoCs, chipsets and other utility chips (many bus architectures are redesigned to be more conservative on their pin usage - why consume 64 pins when you can use 16).
You sounds like a good advocate for TSVs. That said, defects in memory devices probably don't limit the maximum chip size all that much-- memory devices can contain lots of redundant elements to repair defects. Simple chips/wafer cost considerations--because no one wants to pay much for memory--probably has a lot more to do with it. It's just straight-up cost limiting area, not defect density. And when it comes to the push for 450mm, it's not necessarily higher yield that's expected, but lower cost per chip and higher fab throughput. Yield may actually decrease at first, but processing cost per chip would ideally outweigh that.
No. D1X is just 450mm ready.
Similarly, I think the GlobalFoundries fab in Malta, NY is supposedly "450mm ready" or maybe the annex will be. But regardless, "450mm ready" doesn't mean all that much.
My experience is that things begin to break down with the underperformance quotas after layoffs. It's exactly the issue that at the "thousands of employees" level-- following a layoff, you've removed everyone who was in that lower tier. If you maintain the underperformer quotas after layoffs, you really kill morale. Not only are people pissed that their colleagues got kicked out, they're now looking at a regime that immediately begins sorting out who's next.
My guess would be the ranking system was appropriate whenever Microsoft was hiring at a rapid clip, a bit annoying when hiring slowed, and an absolute kick-in-the-balls to employees once layoffs happened. As with anything MS, a lot has to do with the company "maturing." Well, switching from a system that assumes there are lots of new guys to one that doesn't may be part of that process. As people have said, Microsoft hired compentent people, and good employees were generally the motivated ones. I don't disagree that in any group there will be apathetic people, for whatever reason. Once a company isn't hiring people who somewhat randomly become the apathetic undermotivated people, this system tends to turn otherwise decent employees into those apathetic underperformers. You end up pushing people towards a "why bother" attitude rather than motivating them away from it.
-Steve
Sun signed a cross-licensing deal with IBM.
Which failed to prevent an ensuing three decades of continuous patent litigation between the two companies. Oh. Wait....
Signing a cross-licensing deal is a good outcome for both parties, depending on the terms.
Some of EE Doc Smith is at gutenberg.org. Fun stuff.
The story about the reformulated foam causing the Columbia accident is largely the doing of Rush Limbaugh, who seized on a lie from one of his typically ill-informed listeners, and kept repeating it until it became accepted as fact by everyone on the right.
http://mediamatters.org/research/200508090007
Credulity when it comes to pithy stories about "tree huggers" getting their comeuppance? Inconceivable! Why be skeptical?!?
The linked article refers to Florian Mueller as a patent expert. What exactly constitutes one?
When it comes to this particular case, this "expert" predicted Motorola's doom by fronting the ideas that it (Motorola), was suing over what he termed as "standards essential" and therefore "weak" attack or defense patents.
No wonder he sounds humbled by this development on his blog.
See signature below.
Jeff Bezos is an infamous micro-manager. He micro-manages every single pixel of Amazon's retail site.
Whut?
Amazon's retail site is a mess. It looks like it was created by checking "Do you want to use the default presentation?" on a retail-boxed online-store app.
So either Bezos isn't quite as involved as this dude thinks, or Bezos is incredibly lax in his personal standards for information, organization, and aesthetics.
R. T. F. A.
The weakness of Facebook to me is their developer API... but only because it's far too much of a whore. It reminds me of trying to secure Windows 98 boxes for student use, except (to be as bad) Microsoft would have to log in remotely every other night and change the settings so there's another configurable security hole added with the default setting set to "open".
That may be a weakness in your eyes, but remember that Win95 was an incredibly huge success for Microsoft. Just like the developer API is for Facebook. Warts and all.
But that's not really as much of a problem as the huge barrier to entry that byzantine rules create. They're probably even running short on OCD recluse zealots.
Tell the NIMBYs to STFU
Good luck with that.
Bullshit. The typical white male on a dating website likes Tom Fucking Clancy because he knows the ladies dig guys who read fatass books.
The ladies on the other hand, can discriminate Tom Fucking Clancy from Toni Fucking Morrison, so they're not impressed, and all the Tom Fucking Clancy lovers stay in web dating purgatory.
Something thats been in development for even 5 years and doesn't show any concrete signs of success should at least have alternatives developed for it. After 5 years if you still can't say for certain if its ever going to work, you definitely need to start looking in different directions.
You are misinformed. On our Alpha development machines, working 22 nm devices were already manufactured last year. (source) We are shipping the first commercial EUV lithography machines in the coming year (source, source) A problem for the chip manufacturers is that the capacity on the alpha machines is rather low and needs to be shared among competitors.
Yeah, I think the OP has a little intuition of the relatively common situation where an ailing older technology's flaws are somewhat obvious and well publicized for years and years, but the older technology staggers on far far longer than expected. For both the reason that EUV has been slow to mature, and that 193nm has been surprisingly resilient. It's wrong to conclude that EUV will never be practical, just that one should be very careful about declaring when it is necessary.
A similar situation is going on with the broader issue discussed here-- the eventual replacement of CMOS with some other technology. People are eager to declare the death of CMOS and the need for diamond substrates or nanotubes or whatever, but CMOS will stagger along much longer than the advocates of the new technologies hope because it is easier to extend CMOS than it is to make something truly different more mature and practical.
Probably not, since Apple does not have the kind of market share in the PC market that IBM has in the mainframe market. Last I checked, something like 90% of mainframes were IBM, versus something like 6% of PCs being Apple products.
Yes, but only something like 0.00006% of servers are mainframes.
If you're going to pretend Apples and PCs are interchangeable, you can depend on the fact that the same sort of substitute goods comparison will occur to IBM.
I was wondering too about the wisdom of this move, but it shows that they are not going to hitch their wagon to anyone's horse but their own, and that they have the ability to modify the horse to pull whatever load is necessary at that moment, a new iPad, new iPhone, AppleTV,
If you're going to discuss consumer electronics manufacturers getting screwed by IDMs and commodity chips, the best example is the first Xbox. Microsoft went with Intel, but Intel's business is offering faster chips for the same price, not the same chip at lower prices every couple years. Some MS ended up with a chip that never got cheap enough. With the second Xbox, Microsoft also designed its own chip (licensed tech from IBM rather than ARM) and they've been shrinking that sucker constantly. Console margins have been increasing constantly.
Apple may hope to have "new" products using the A4 years from now using an A4 that's 1/8th the current cost. That's what owning your own chip allows... not necessarily some awesome roadmap where there's an A8 four years from now, but a roadmap where the phone's using the same processor with very minor redesigns for a fraction of the cost now. It's not that owning the IP allows them to upgrade faster, it's that it allows them to increase margins faster by stringing along the manufacture of the same old chip beyond the point where an IDM would retire it and push something faster and more expensive. Oh, they may call the next thing an A6 or whatever, but the processor performance will eventually be deemed "good enough" and they'll widen their margins on that part and they'll start pushing the other features like much improved battery life.
The SEC review process exists so that new monopolies aren't created.
It's the FTC (Federal Trade Comission) that would review the acquisition, not the SEC. And the European regulators have been more active in the arena. They certainly mulled Oracle buying Sun for an excessively long time, and famously nixed the GE acquisition of Honeywell. I do think even the FTC would not allow the designer of the iPhone to acquire the designer of the processor in many other smartphones.
I doubt Apple would want to buy ARM and then kill the sales to ARM's other customers.
But that is exactly what Apple did when it acquired P.A. Semi. On a much smaller scale, and with many fewer customers, but it is at least clear what the motivation is.
Not sure about the blade you purchased, but it's common for each Power6 processor chip to share a package with a 32MB L3 cache chip. The bandwidth between the processor and L3 is huge.
Servers were Sun's highest margin stuff? No wonder they plummeted and got bought. But if Oracle doesn't find value in offering servers bundled with software, one would wonder why IBM does. It's pretty clear that servers are now second fiddle to IBM's software business.
Is it just me or was he explicit about maintaining Sparc, but said nothing about x86 servers? I'll have to find the rest of the interview on Reuters.
As far as your analogy is concerned, if the world hates the US, the actions of Bush are an excellent reason to do so.
That was exactly my point. You'd sound like an ass whining about Nixon, and you sound like an ass whining about the IBM of the 1960s and 1970s.
"Burroughs, DEC, and Unisys just can't compete on a level playing field! IBM is a monopoly!"
The people who ran that IBM are dead. I guess people have not forgiven the US for electing Richard Nixon, either, but it would sound pretty weird to choose Nixon-hating as your number one reason to dislike the US.
IT Jungle seems to think a top end 595 with 64 cores would cost upwards of $8 million.
You should keep an eye on unmannedspaceflight.com (forum) and planetary.org (huge monthly updates with one due soon).
So basically to patent an idea, you should demonstrate that it will work, not that you can make it yourself. If you thought of it first and wanted to patent a Dyson Sphere, you could, even though no one will be making one any time soon. I'm sure many patents have preceeded prototypes.