Posts by pimppetgaeghsr

Imagination licenses RISC-V CPU cores for smart TVs, IoT, embedded stuff

The "apparently" here is giving off mild alarm bells with reference to the PPA. Sounds like a product manager marketing product requirements than anything actually deliverable by an engineering team suffering from acute attrition as the sun sets on the recent RISC-V wave and the dumb money flocks to whomever says "AI" enough.

Re: There's a lot to be said for dumb

That IQ is considered smart relative an imgtec senior leader currently though.

UK businesses shockingly unaware of how to handle security threats

It's been quite visible to me for quite some time. All the security professionals seem to just walk into very highly paid jobs due to a lack of qualified people in that niche field, it's impressive and a lot have converted to that career path in recent years. Still, it only seems to improve companies abilities to figure out they have had security incidents retrospectively. I think a lot of legacy companies (so most of the UK economy) would rather just not hire security folks and pretend all is well.

SiFive is back with another 64-bit RISC-V dev board – hopefully

Few of which will ever have enough allocated capital. Most RISC-V startups are just hoping to get acquired.

Arm CEO warns AI's power appetite could devour 25% of US electricity by 2030

Good one Rene, keep that stock price inflated.

IBM CEO pay jumps 23% in 2023, average employee gets 7%

BoomerCorp

Dutch government in panic mode over keeping ASML in the country

Re: The deindustrialisation of the West

Or perhaps it is just democracy. You can't argue with masses of people willing to vote against their own best interest.

Brit chip industry wonders if UK budget will put its money where its silicon is

Wasn't the UKs response to the semiconductor landscape, and in a desperate bid to compensate for letting ARM be sold off, to install a group of Tory-boys on the EMB of Imagination Technologies when the Chinese investment firm that owns it tried to initiate a hostile takeover.

Reddit rolling out AI bouncer to halt harassment

The whole site is under lock and key anyway. I guess they are rolling out the jobsworth mentality to specific comments.

I suppose they only need a few bots to make the engagement seem organic at this point anyway.

Now OpenAI CEO Sam Altman wants billions for AI chip fabs

Softbank are interested? Surely that signals the peak.

eBay tells 1,000 employees their days at company are numbered

I'm surprised they even had 1000 employees.

Israel to plow $3.2B into $25B Intel fab project

Re: Waste

And when we open the fabs those pledges to protect Taiwan won't be honoured.

China's GPU contender Moore Threads reveals card that can cope with Nvidia’s CUDA

University education won't matter for making chips. They are being trained in our semiconductor companies from Apple to ARM to the chinese companies being supplied with arch licenses by ARM/Imgtec etc. to develop CPU/GPU. The political situation may prevent those employees from going back to China and working at gunpoint I suppose but I'm guessing there are only going to be increasingly ridiculous job offers for those folks once all the IP has been scooped up and China can decouple itself.

Broadcom halves subscription price for VMware's flagship hybrid cloud suite

Re: Someone is happy....

Broadcom is an insanely performant business in the ailing semiconductor industry. Not as flashy as NVIDIA or whatever tech stock is in fashion this quarter, it's a good stock for people that understand finance.

'Return to Office' declared dead

It was only an effort to get people to quit. But as nobody else is hiring, layoffs were the only inevitability to reduce costs. Leadership will move on like nothing happened and gaslight. Still a long way down if these interest rates hold.

AI chip outfit Graphcore's sales to China hit by US export rules

A long term hollowing out of the middle-class in a temporary effort to keep China's tech behind the US. This is affecting many companies around US and Europe. But don't worry, NVIDIA get's a pass.

Nvidia revenue explodes, led by datacenter products and … InfiniBand?

Anyone care to tell us whether this tripling is about price gouging or total number of units sold. One is more sustainable than the other.

Arm flexes financial muscles post-IPO, but shares get a reality check

Historically isn't this always the best quarter for ARM given the smartphone releases? I can't read too much into that net loss for the quarter until you see the full fiscal year 6 more months from now. They've already done the cliche 20% layoff in 2022 that all companies are now following (SiFive, imgtec, qualcomm, AMD etc.). So who knows if they will have to gut more fat in 2024, there is certainly plenty of it given the amount of middle-managers they have and so few products.

Apple lifts the sheet on a trio of 'scary fast' M3 SoCs built on a 3nm process

Re: We need a new metric

Software will just use up that RAM and cause the same issues. The issue isn't a lack of RAM, it's a lack of optimisation in software from a generation of SW devs that just assume things will double in capacity every 3 years. TSMC isn't cheap anymore.

RISC-V champ SiFive confirms it's laying off 1 in 5 workers

The message from their founder on Linkedin debunked this article. The reason for the layoff had nothing to do with strategy. The lights need to stay on and 20% of people need to leave.

qualcomm is laying off, imgtec is laying off. Who doing RISC-V is actively hiring? Qualcomm may just be using RISC-V as political leverage and the fact of all these layoffs means sales are unlikely to come soon.

Re: Quiet quitting

What makes you think those layed off are the most dedicated of the engineering cohort? Usually the easy targets are the first to go and make up more than 20% of a lackluster startups ranks.

Where is that 3arn0wl fella to tell us how amazing Risc-V is going to be (any minute now!)

Re: Death by MBA

Imagination Technologyies and Sifive both in the same week with 20% headcount reductions. ARM must be laughing themselves to sleep now that their engineers are getting 30% of base as RSUs before any other bonuses are factored in.

Apple jacks prices to juice profits because $19.3B a quarter isn't enough

The M1 and M2 chips and software stack are second to none in the laptop segment. Qualcomm and NVIDIA are about to fall flat on their face having to deal with Windows on ARM adoption from rest and vest over at MSFT.

AI chip biz Graphcore seeks capital to remain going concern

From what I gather the company was run like an old boys club at the top and an exclusive tech-bro treehouse club below. Friends of the founders getting VP of engineering roles whilst what little talent the UK has was getting turned away if they couldn't say why Graphcore was the best company to ever exist convincingly in the interviews. All that money went to their head and they missed the biggest opportunity in a lifetime. Over-engineered hardware and non-existent software strategy. It's kind of a microcosm for the entire UK tech culture right now.

Chan Zuckerberg org to spin up 1,000+ H100 GPU cluster for AI medical research

I love it when billionaires do philanthropy with no other ulterior motive behind the steps what so ever.

As TikTok surveils staff's office hours, research indicates WFH is good for planet

RTO has been good for forcing attrition though. Layoffs are expensive.

Post-IPO, Arm to push purpose-built almost-processors

Price seems to be going the wrong way.

Arm IPO kicks off today with CPU slinger valued at $54.5B

So we can expect a massive dump some time later in the future only to find out at their quartlery earnings that Softbank have exited a significant portion of their position?

Re: British chip designer to trade on Nasdaq only

There are no senior managers in Cambridge dude. It's all mid-tier flunkeys and JIRA jockeys.

Re: All a mess

Far better investments than a 120 PE company my dude with no growth in earnings visible.

I would say thanks to Softbank for paying you 50% premium at the time, this price will crater within 6 months.

Arm's lawyers want to check assembly expert's book for trademark missteps

Re: What would Sophie Say?

Hermann doesn't leave much up to the imagination and the other founders are nowhere to be found in ARM, either in person, or in any other capacity. They have been erased from everything but the wikipedia page.

This isn't the company it was 20 years ago. It's not a gang of working friends in a rented barn in Cambridge. It's been filled with useless MBAs that couldn't get into FAANG and prostituted to the PE industry many times and has no resemblence of the innovative tech company it once was. Lawsuits, like I predicted a few years ago to negative reaction on this site are one of a few pathsconsidered as a viable way forward for the company to grow, including going full architectural license too. If you think these lawyers aren't going to start going after RISC-V in the same way if they sense their cease and desists will land anywhere near the mark you are mistaken. When you have a group of hobbyists that don't know the ins and outs of trademarks you are in for trouble.

When I saw anti-trust lawyers being hired faster than architects and engineers I knew the writing was on the wall. But maybe riscv-basics did that, I can't remember.

No decisions are these days. All the management has been consolidated on the US side and live in their own San Jose bubble. VP levels and up are all sqeaky clean MBAs these days without a clue about technology but fully brimmed with buzzwords. There's a running joke/competition in the Cambridge office to make up buzzwords and terms in meetings and see how far they travel into the upper layers of management.

The future of the cloud sure looks like it'll be paved in even more custom silicon

What ever happened to Qualcomm's Nuvia? Did they just abandon that server chip for more middle-managers and diversity quotas?

TSMC warns AI chip crunch will last another 18 months

Don't worry, by then the demand will have dropped off.

Guild behind actors' strike fears video game workers also at risk from AI

With the amount of uncreative crap in films/tv/games I am all for these people losing their jobs. Maybe we'll have less celebrity actors with millions patronising us.

Northern Irish cops release 2 men after Terrorism Act arrests linked to data breach

so some neckbeards downloaded it online and the PSNI had to show face and arrest them to make it seem they had things under control despite it being available to anyone willing to get it.

Dell and Samsung grab first-class tickets for AI hype train

I hope all these LLM solutions find a problem soon.

Arm wrestles assembly language guru's domains away citing trademark issues

Sounds like a lawyer making work for themselves. I doubt the blog writer was directly in contact or had explicit permission to use the ARM name, it is plasted all over their products and building and has been forever. Sounds like a handshake agreement that was tolerated by other engineers until some suit got wind of it.

ARM is a big corporation now though, so get used to being alienated like this, it's run by a slimy US salesman and a bunch of burnouts from Accenutre and Deutsche Bank like everything Softbank touches. They've sent threatening letters to old employees too just to puff their chest for reference.

Arm execs to cash in on IPO, but clouds gather over prospects

Golden parachutes for the slick salesmen at the top. Worthless paper and negative log trajectory for everyone at the bottom locked up and unable to sell for 6+ months. It is still no wonder what talent actually left in the company is still applying for jobs, in this market I think most of them have missed the boat as hiring freezes and layoffs have taken the industry by storm. I feel sorry for all those junior colleagues that joined during the pandemic boom and are now stuck in a company with little experienced folks left and fending for themselves.

It's official! Arm files for IPO on Nasdaq

The founder culture was part of what made ARM the sort of company that cared about its employees, like shelling out more stock and less bonuses in 2008 to avoid layoffs which minted a few millionaires in the engineering ranks. Unheard of these days.

Only way this is worth Masa's imaginary price tag is if the big players buy in to ensure some sort of control at a high premium. With some of those named wanting cheaper licenses or less competition you just wonder what is going to happen. The softbank era well and truly destroyed the founder culture that made it great and made it more American, much like IBM, Qualcomm or Intel and I don't mean in a good way.

Former DEC employees to rally against stagnant pensions post-HP

Poor boomers getting the millenial end of the stick. What happened to pulling yourself up by your bootstraps.

Softbank snaps up Vision Fund's stake in Arm ahead of IPO

Re: Wishful thinking

There's a lot of companies looking to move to RISC-V but none of them seem to want to be the ones to share their secret sauce or knowledge, And many of them are practically giving away their designs in the hope of it spreading (Sifive, whom are full of academic leaders that don't care so much for a thing called profit).

Re: Insider deal

With 10% only being put to market he can issue more stock and dilute any investor as his empire becomes strapped for cash. It's a dud and the only thing driving this IPO is a bad deal with a bank he made to finance the ARM acquisition.

Oh dear

All this means is Softbank think it is worth $64 billion and the Saudis, ahem, Vision Fund investors, think it is nowhere near that. Kind of hard to drive a hard bargain anyway for Masa when he has been suggesting it is worth that anyway. Looks like the Vision Fund got a deal here and don't have to worry about IPO. The only difference here is he is now holding 100% of the stock rather than just a portion of it. So now Softbank are not holding a $40bn company, they are holding at a break-even price of somewhere in the $50+ billion range. With little value added to this stock (remember their IoT nonsense) and the market in a massive AI bubble, how do you convince anyone with money to throw at this stock that a bunch of low power edge devices are going to benefit from the monolithic LLM models that are driving valuations at the moment. I may not agree with it but that is what is driving this years tech rally. ARM was never a growth stock, it is a value stock and with a daily culture that rivalled Twitter pre-Elon Musk there needs to be serious downsizing to get rid of all the jobsworths.

I don't hear too many of Masa's evangelicals singing his praises like they were in 2021. Wonder what changed.

80% of execs regret calling employees back to the office

Re: Ha ha, no

Their workday consists of talking crap in meetings which is probably very annoying through Teams with the delays, mic mutes and connection dropouts. If they all want to go in and see each other face to face it's fine by me. Rents post-covid are astronomically higher for businesses and energy isn't any better for sure.

Downsize the offices and leave people alone.

Amazon's rumored investment in Arm's IPO might be good insurance

With the investors all knowing that Softbank has no other option as they put the ARM equity down as collateral I suspect softbank will be getting their eyeballs ripped out over this.