Posts by confused and dazed 113 publicly visible posts • joined 27 Nov 2012
30+ years ago I visited one of their Korean fabs - looking at 16M DRAM. They claimed even then that they would be more recognised as Sony in home entertainment. I admit to smirking a little. Well here we are, they're aggressive, ambitious, ruthless and often quite admirable ..... wish our industry could match that ....
Samsung have had a fab in Austin for many, many years. I agree though that the history of semiconductors in the UK has mostly been take the money, and eventually, leave.
I think the Koreans did it best with their "joint ventures" with the Japanese DRAM guys. LG, who became Hyundai who became SK Hynix did very well our of their partnership with Hitachi IMHO.
Absolutely agree, the use-case for recent Mac Studio Ultra is pretty much niche.
Wafer fabs need to shrink and ship large quantities of wafers to stay viable. hardware vendors need to trump the other hardware vendors for sales. Users don't need the extra compute. The result must be that things last longer. I'm writing This on a 4 year old machine and feel no need to change it. Once every house is saturated and there is no new app, then there will be a culling
I had some sympathy with this stance until the M series products came along. Now there is a valid functional/performance justification to have no memory upgrade possible. So long as you know it, you either choose an apple and plan accordingly or you go elsewhere. It's your choice.
It's always the young and the poor that disproportionately die in these things. Conscripts in Russia, civilians and volunteers in Ukraine. Poor people where job opportunities are limited to the armed forces.
It's just a tragedy. I sincerely hope the Russian soldiers do put down their weapons - that would be heroic.
even if I had access to gazzillions of $ I'm not sure I'd invest in wafer fabs. You need to have nerves of steel. It's fine now while cash is rolling in, but it's inevitable that a glut and associated crash will come. I've seen many household names fail after the boom. Yes this boom is extreme, but you'll have to adapt quickly when all these new fabs come on line.
Seems a bit like my fantastic British Gas wifi enabled thermostat. Instead of having a dial on my wall that was linked to my boiler I have a battery powered monstrosity that has to link to my router and then to the connected boiler controller..... Not once did the old thermostat give me an error code or complained about connectivity. Not once did I need to download an app ....
That's an interesting point - cheapness of quality science and engineering graduates links to technological leadership ..... maybe. I suppose it depends on whether there is a direct correlation between quantity of those graduates and your dominance.
As for losing the 21st century - we still have a long way to go
The problem with our versions of democracy (or at least the UK version) is that we select parties. This means that get to choose between set of policies A or set of policies B every 5 years .... that's it. Even if the parties are different on the issue that your care about ....
A thoughtful response. But I think Apple are big enough to just say not.
They will not scrutinise what it on your phone, (whatever the method). Have the debate with legislatures out in the open.
Today it's pedos and terrorists, tomorrow it's activists.
It's easy to agree that fixing a $2K Mac or a $20K car is worth-while , but when a gadget costs $100, fixes are going to have to be very quick and very simple before they're un-economic and become land-fill.
The issue is that we consume too much, me included. I'm just looking at my wireless phone charger. What was I thinking ? ... it's another totally unnecessary thing, consumes more power that it needs, but saves we the "onerous" task of plugging a cable in...I'm now looking at two 24 inch monitors that I am hoping will break so that I can order bigger ones .....
Anyone for a consumption tax ?
I understand your concern, but sometimes the software might be there to protect the device. Maybe over-riding the software should negate your warranty ? Dunno - you might be back on shore with a goosed engine.
While I appreciate the legitimate cynicism on corporate behaviour and motivations ....
Guys,
lots of moaning here, but most stuff is dramatically cheaper than it was and dramatically ore reliable. My Dad used to carry s socket set and a bunch of spares wherever he drove. A lot of the extra stuff helps make things more reliable.
The real issue is that stuff is too cheap. 200 quid for a washing machine .... of course it's not going to last 20 years. Try making one that does, and nobody will buy it because it's just too expensive. and that's before feature creep.
Maybe we should have to pay more tax on new stuff ?
I don't think this will help much I'm afraid. As far as I understand the M1 memory is already TSV 4 Hi (8Gb or 16Gb) and this is then package-over-package onto the M1 itself. ie 2 packages of 4Hi stacks - albeit DDR4 interface.
I guess they could move it to 8-Hi 16Gb like this to give 32GB, but I suspect costs might become prohibitive in terms of 8 stack yields ?
I bought an Apple Watch about a year ago. I only bought the 200 quid one, but for me it more than paid for itself when my watch started ringing when I was putting the bins out with the phone in the house, and I ended chatting to my wrist, (not an euphemism) ! Just seemed silly and very space 1999
Maybe lock-down is getting to me ..
Seems to me that the US have lost Si process leadership. 2nd place is a terrible place to be, as you need to spend almost as much on R&D and lose all the price gouging opportunities. Re-gaining #1 is going to be a hideously expensive proposition, and how long for ? ..... can we really go much beyond 3nm ?? I know we've said this for a long time but really there are fundamental limits nor far away now.
Maybe advanced packaging techniques and interconnect would generate more bang for buck .....
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