Posts by zipityzi

Non-x86 servers boom even faster than the rest of the AI-infused and GPU-hungry market

Re: Power and performance

*dominates mobile

Re: Power and performance

I think it is more because ARM just has so much more competition and dominates: we will naturally have some efficiency focused fabless design firms like Apple, Qualcomm, and Arm itself.

X86’s AMD and Intel lost mobile a long time ago and Intel is in no hurry to license x86 to anyone else. So, they don’t have the the market pressure to even try (much less succeed) for 1T perf / W.

I don’t think an ISA’s technical aspects are the biggest restriction, but the ISA’s licensing and subsequent lack of competition is the problem.

//

That is, most cross-platform tests show that Apple, Qualcomm, and Arm itself have significantly superior 1T perf / W than AMD and Intel on similar or even identical nodes. See Lunar Lake or AMD Zen5 designs.

Neoverse V2 was shown with a 1.4 W per core design target, per Arm’s Hot Chips 2023 slides. Even as V2 targets data centers, it kept power consumption tight. Graviton4 is a live example of V2.

Intel Arrow Lake to be made elsewhere as 20A process node canned

Re: Reportedly this saved them half a billion dollars

What’s unusual to me: 20A as a testing ground was the financially prudent choice. Isn’t $500m of validation worth it to ensure 18A rolls out near-perfectly?

20A as a validation step was billed as critical. Intel getting cocky about 18A and trying to save costs sounds like a terrible 2010-era Intel mentality.

It is illogical, or at least inconsistent.

Cut costs in other places, not anything related to 18A’s delivery. The latest nodes are the wrong place to cut funding, especially in what is essentially a major validation test.

Using 1Password on Mac? Patch up if you don’t want your Vaults raided

Why aren't CVEs noted in1P release notes?

I read 1Password Release notes pretty religiously and 1Password never mentioned this CVE (nor any security vuln fix) in the 8.10.36 patch notes. Luckily, I'd already updated.

https://releases.1password.com/mac/8.10/#changelog

Critical security patches should always be mentioned in release notes: it gives users a heads up & pushes them update other devices. Not a good look as a security-focused company.

Rivals and legal action cast shadows over Windows on Arm market

> Snapdragon maker accounted for 10 percent of Arm's total revenue for the fiscal year ended March 31, 2024, meaning that any victory against Qualcomm could be a Pyrrhic one.

IIRC, doesn’t Qualcomm use Arm codes in its WiFi chipsets and what-not? So Snapdragon SoCs alone can’t be all 10%.

Maybe Arm thinks Qualcomm is moving to totally abandon Arm and migrate to RISC-V? I know they’re making an Android watch SoC, but that’s a far cry to replace the likely thousands of individual Qualcomm dies that incorporate Arm cores.

Arm CEO aims to conquer half the Windows world in 5 years

Re: I don't get it

Nah, a lot of macOS users in the past few years had never used macOS for any serious amount of time.

macOS jumped from 18% to 24% in six years across all U.S. desktops, a significant +33% growth:

Source: https://gs.statcounter.com/os-market-share/desktop/united-states-of-america/#quarterly-201801-202402

It’s a messy measurement rate, but it’s clear a lot of Windows users (see decline) have no problem with macOS or ChromeOS.

Re: Wishful thinking indeed

Very few PC consumers care about ancient Windows software. There’s a reason old software hasn’t been updated in decades: it probably has good enough perf on a potato emulator via four levels of virtualization.

The # of lines of x86 code that simply exist are irrelevant. It needs to be x86-exclusive code that doesn’t have an official native Arm port times the number of active users. And then subtract any with no enough alternatives that do have a popular Arm native port from other vendors. And subtract any that work well enough under Prism.

Major Windows software has already been ported to Arm native that you conveniently ignore: Chrome, VLC, Handbrake, MS Teams, GIMP, Paint.net, Da Vinci Resolve, the Affinity Suite,7-zip, NotePad++, Everything, MS PowerToys, etc.

Synology stretches into a backup appliance, with object stores to come

Active Backup is one of the least reliable, most finicky backup suites I’ve used. Well, backing up was easy. Restoring was a nightmare: nonsense criteria restrictions (even on the same hardware), convoluted driver backup with incomplete drivers in their PE environment, and incomprehensible error codes.

I used it on DSM 7.1 & 7.2 for two weeks, stress testing its backup & restore process. I felt like they’d borrowed Microsoft’s 2010-era disk imaging platform with how incomplete it was.

Just read Synology’s own docs to see how finicky it is.

I’ve seen too many YouTube influencers peddling it, without making a serious comparison to veteran SME / SMB backup platforms.

I’d much rather point people to Veeam, Macrium, Nakivo, etc.

Active Backup for Business, I fear, is ”free” for a reason, like much else first-party apps in Synology’s Package Center: barely supported, looks pretty and useful on the surface, and full of annoying or fatal restrictions that other vendors fixed and improved decades ago.

I don’t mean to be overly harsh, but so much feels like abandonware that was developed to “fill a niche, poorly, but just check off the box.”

Maybe with this new push, Synology will take it more seriously. But I doubt it: ABB has shown little improvement in years.

Intel's foundry business bled $7B in 2023 with more to come

But why was Foundry revenue down -31% in 2023?

Why did more Intel Foundry have more sales / revenue in 2022 than 2023?

I understand Intel used “modeling” to edit its older financial data to create the split between Intel Foundry vs Intel Product, so maybe 2022 had been previously underreported.

But 2022 & 2023 were under Gelsinger’s reign. Surely Intel Foundry revenue should at a minimum hold steady year over year, if this plan is working.

How did Intel Foundry sell less in 2023? Lower profits, sure. Lower revenue?

Now you can compare your Chromium browser with that other Chromium browser using Speedometer 3.0

It doesn’t test CPU JS execution?

> However, "Using a different computer with a different amount of memory, a different processor or a different operating system makes the biggest difference of all, and these tests do not cover any of that."

That is an unexpected comment. Shouldn’t Speedometer 3.0 also include the JS execution time, which would depend on the CPU?