Posts by tomgid

SoftBank to stop investing 'randomly' after losing billions of dollars

The only business that actually has substantial value, apart from the other techy startups the SoftBank Group has invested of which many of them haven't even reached the summit of the burning phase, and generate cash flow from outside Japan now carries meaning more than as a mere investment portfolio.

They're not going to surrender their shares in ARM so easily from now on as it became the girder of the fragile bloated group. Mismanagement will continue. Such a great misfortune for the semiconductor industry.

Samsung unveils 512GB DRAM CXL module in E3.S form factor

The speed of interconnections between main memory and the processor is accelerating, meaning we can store more data as caches, another boost for high performance processing and AI, despite the fast-paced miniaturisation of VLSIs is coming to an end.

Europe's GDPR coincides with dramatic drop in Android apps

Symbian used to rule the market of mobile OS for about more than a decade. It's been almost a decade since Google and Apple started to make a duopoly of the market. Time for a change is coming, unless the entrepreneurs & leaders of Europe have lost their spines over the last 10 years.

RISC-V CEO seeks 'world domination' by winning over the likes of Intel

Re: Problem

Even if the CCP started to wage a war against us right now, there's nothing we can do about them using ARM architectures. ARM is in the hand of Softbank, a Japanese investment company highly exposed to Chinese assets, and more importantly they've sold off a majority stake in the Chinese venture to companies bearing names like "China Investment Corp", etc.

So in the case of ARM, as of now we don't own it and we don't control it in one of the "unfriendly nations" and its biggest market. Looks like a bleak scenary if we were to depend the West's future in semiconductor on the company, isn't it?

RISC-V is indeed open source and basically everybody can use their ISA but usually when you design a chip, you don't start it all over again from scratch. And the biggest library developer of RISC-V right now is American company Si-Five. Not a UK company and it employs a lot of Asian talent but at least it's based in the US.

I'd call it a tie comparing the risk you're worrying about. Would like to see the Gov nationalise ARM but could it be realised?

Re: a RISC-Y buisness

Fair point but every other attempt to open source an architecture while still keeping them from being too much open has failed. I can think of OpenSPARC right now for example.

All this gained traction while ARM was hanstrung by Softbank's rule, under which there's been all sorts of bad decisions. But what I think one of the worst among them is the fact that Softbank had ARM invest heavily on the Internet of Things sector.

Well, yes IoT is a thing but was it a right decision a company like ARM, who supplies the best in class architectures in the mobile area, focused on cheap, low power, small processors, sacrificing a chance to increase shares in desktop and server? ARM under Softbank even bought a company called Treasure Data, a California-based company processing IoT data, which btw was actually founded by the Japanese.

As for RISC, they totally get it. That's why they're investing heavily on the high power areas. They rightly believe that even as ARM now being selected by Apple computers and cloud operators like AWS, ARM's indecision for the last five years has rewarded them an invaluable chance.

FBI: Cyber-scams cost victims $6.9b-plus worldwide in 2021

Unimpressed with the figure tbh considering the sheer size of the digital economy today.

Revealed: Intel's plan to sell software simplifying computer vision training

Would've been great if the relationship between the platform and Mobileye, Intel subsidiary as well as one of the biggest names in automotive CV, was clearly written. They've got an established platform in their own right, design their processors independently.

China plans to toss foreign-made PCs from government agencies 'in two years'

They have much better outlooks than Russia. No need to elaborate when they're a country of a couple of billion with decent education and culture upon which a functioning society could thrive. Too bad the West in the 90s couldn't figure out if the Japanese could emulate our success, so can the Chinese.

And they impose a lethal ban on drugs, by which their people still ardently abide. Big difference compared with the West.

Facebook deliberately took down Australian government pages during pay-for-news negotiations: report

What do you think about Net neutrality? If they're mere private entities unabashedly following their corporate interests, why should they ever be protected?

Soon it'll be a continent on a map, not a HTML page, vanishing when FB releases the metaverse platform.

Legacy IT to blame for UK's inflexible benefits system

Maybe yes for a significant contract but abs not when you're mainly dealing with numbers. Low productivity and human error. That's what you're paying for. Not that they're building Fax machines all over again here but usually Gov systems involve big data that comprise of number and string waiting to be processed and stored.

If I were at position selecting vendors, I wouldn't entrust an Gov enterprise system to a entity that is not thought to be culturally compatible with envisioning/working on such a process. But of course it may be a problem beyond the issues at play right now.

First off, start doing away with a whole bunch of old Fujitsu, NTT software from the government systems. They're nightmare according to my friend working in the industry. Why do we employ them, paying a lavish amount, when the country they are from is being laughed at worldwide for using Fax machines to report the number of Covid patients in this day and age?

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/asia/coronavirus-japan-fax-machine-online-hanko-a9501906.html

Google cancels bi-annual performance reviews, shifts to GRAD system

Soon Amazon will go a monthly basis and Netflix an hourly, so it seems... Must be a great business opening for all the shrinks in Bay area.

Germany makes new move to attract chip manufacturers

You clearly don't understand the industry. Due to automation, the so-called fabs are now running almost without human workforce. It's the robots that ship, bake, wash, inspect, dice the semiconductor chips while human workers monitor them in a separate control room. A recent fab complex built in Germany employs only a half thousand people. This is why the US is trying to bring back the chip manufacturing onshore right now since with labor costs evening out, subsidies could make a great difference in competing with cheap Asian countries.

Aside from that, the semiconductor industry is generally considered to be making high tech jobs.

Arm China CEO refuses to go despite SoftBank taking control

Re: So just IPO without the Chinese subsidiary

According to a report published on yesterday, looks like SB/ARM already conceded additional chunk of ARM China to the Chinese investors in exchange for agreeing to ousting of Wu, which translates to virtually zero prospect of the Chinese venture getting included in the expected IPO...

Also, it turns out Wu himself has had a quite legitimate say for awhile, as he himself has built more than a 16 percent stake in the JV.

ARM has been totally wrecked since the delisting/acquisition and meanwhile the UK gov didn't even bother to take a look at "the most successful tech company of the land". Shame, shame.

Source :https://www.scmp.com/tech/big-tech/article/3176645/softbank-wins-key-corporate-battle-china-ousting-defiant-ceo-arm

Company Destroyed

So it seems ARM's Chinese business is gone and so is at least a quarter of ARM's annual revenue. Adding insult to injury, the Chinese arm is already making a move to become a formidable rival to ARM in the region, by having been actively developing their own IPs, if you consider a lot of Asian electronics manufacturers depend on the Chinese market for their living. The Chinese will def use their homegrown design if it's akin enough to replace the original.

The only solution left to this mess right now is to nationalise ARM to deter further damage to the company, which is crucial to the semi industry of UK and the World. The Gov has to step in and take actions just like it had BP pull back from its Russian business. Enough is enough.