In my experience talking to semiconductors folks, ARM is just not a concern anymore. The future is RISC-V, and ARM is already being seen as legacy tech. ARM's progress in the server space has stalled, the ARM Windows ecosystem is dead, Android has laid the groundwork for a move to RISC-V, and ARM has never and will never touch the desktop market.
> It proves my point beautifully when the only response to my comment
Your comment was beyond ignorant, and wrong. Most folks here are too smart, or busy, to reply to such nonsense. I am neither.
ARM is by far the most shipped and used arch every year. AMZ is even going in heavier on it. It's not legacy tech at all. So a person decided to show you how wrong you were, by listing what's probably the most impressive chip in all of our lifetimes, and it's guess what, ARM.
> Obviously I was referring to Linux/Windows workstations
The creator of Linux is using an ARM machine as a workstation today, AFAIK.
> if everyone was smart enough to pick up on that I wouldn't be paid as much as I am
If you're making more than a burger flipper at Wendy's, the world just isn't fair.
The one viable server ARM CPU core is now tied up in a Qualcomm-ARM legal spat and probably won't see the light of day and made it pretty clear to anyone not grandfathered in like Apple that it's not worth designing your own ARM core. ARM itself has been hemorrhaging employees both because of better offers from Apple and the RISC-V stealths, and because since the SoftBank push to get their money back has simply been a worse and worse place to work. Their ability to execute is extremely compromised.
Because if the long tail of the hardware industry, the writing can be on the wall long before it's clear based on what you can go out and buy off a shelf today.
I get it that you want RISC-V to succeed - so do I - and to advocate for it but I really don’t understand why it needs this sort of comment about Arm. I see exaggerated criticism of the Arm ISA elsewhere from people who ought to know better too - it’s really CISC, it’s 5000 pages vs 2 for RISC-V etc. It’s just not necessary.
I mean, nothing I said is exaggerated here. ARM doesn't even have a viable server core that can compete with x86 even as vaporware. SoftBank ruins everything they touch, and is super focused at the moment on stealing from Peter to pay Paul to get something out of the upcoming ARM IPO since their attempt to sell it off to Nvidia fell through. The rumor is they've been cutting R&D funding hard to get temporarily boost profitability. If anything this is more a dig at how vulture capitalism ruins productive companies.
As an aside, ARM has always been a hybrid CISC/RISC core. It has nothing to do with the number of instructions, but the fact that not having an I$ on the ARM1 forced it to have microcoded instructions to mainly to support LDM/STM. That's not a dig at ARM. It's a valid design; particularly at that gate count.
You jumped in in support of a comment that said Arm is ‘legacy’ tech. You said they don’t ‘even have a viable server core’. They are ‘haemorrhaging’ staff. Softbank have ‘ruined’ them.
Sounds more apocalyptic than exaggerated tbh.
I still don’t know why you think this is necessary.
The M1/M2 Macs run Linux pretty well. It's not perfect yet, but perfectly usable (especially as a desktop machine!) and support is improving every day.
I believe you're trying to move goalposts to avoid admitting you're wrong.
Graviton, M1/M2, Ampere etc but I’m sure you’ll be able to explain why Arm is seen as ‘legacy’ tech when billions of smartphones are being shipped every year with Arm CPUs.
Oh look, you named 4 areas where ARM development has already peaked. Hyperscalers are already looking to evolve from ARM in the near future, just look at how much attention Ventana got at RISC-V Summit. M1/M2 are Apple ecosystem specific phenomenon that haven't inspired any copycat products. Ampere has been a massive disappointment to everyone in the industry, see the fact that Nuvia had their entire business dead-to-rights pre-acquisition. ARM simply isnt at the cutting edge of the semiconductor industry anymore. Just because Apple and Qualcomm use it to great effect doesn't mean ARM is making any major innovative strides relative to the competition.
> ARM simply isnt at the cutting edge of the semiconductor industry anymore.
What you really mean is Arm isn’t the hot new thing anymore. Well it hasn’t been that for 20 years. Meanwhile billions of arm devices in leading edge nodes are being shipped. Oh well.
If RISC-V support by Microsoft is as bad as it has been for ARM, then I'm afraid RISC-V will never touch the desktop market, at all. Contrary to ARM, which is being pushed there with great success by Apple. Server-wise of course it's a different story...
If great success to you is that they put the M1 and M2 in a tower, I don't know what to tell you. Intel, AMD, and the x86 industrial complex don't care in the slightest what instruction set your Mac runs
Might I suggest taking a step back, re-reading your first comment and all the replies under it, and asking yourself "is it possible I might not be 100% correct, and maybe other opinions have enough merit to be worth considering why people aren't agreeing with me, rather than just changing my argument to make sure I'm still the winner of this thread"?
I’m not sure I expressed my point clearly. It wasn’t quite about Apple. So I will reformulate it here: the fate of any instruction set on the desktop is primarily decided by Microsoft.
Do you have any information that Microsoft is planning to support RISC-V at least as well as x86/x64? (That is to say, not with something like Windows RT, or Windows CE)
That would be tremendously good news, I shall add.
>In my experience talking to semiconductors folks,
Most, if not all SemiCoductor “folks” I know are very pragmatic. As in how a Real Engineer should be, unlike software engineers. And in my experience, only HN and the Internet are suggesting ARM is dead. Everything will be RISC-V.
RISC-V is free and open as in libre, by contrast to x86 and ARM which must be licensed from Intel/AMD and ARM and are thus subject to potential western economic sanctions.
Now, yes, China will just espionage and kangaroo court their way through and around such legalities anyway, but nonetheless RISC-V is less effort for more reward for China if it becomes at least on par with x86 and ARM.
Put more basically, it's a matter of national security. China can have an entire RISC-V ecosystem indigenously, unlike x86 and ARM.
If the US and/or UK place sanctions on exporting microprocessor technologies to China then that's that. Intel/AMD and ARM are subject to US and UK laws and regulations respectively.
RISC-V by contrast is much, much harder for any given country to regulate because of its free and open nature. At most the US and UK can embargo individual developments made within their jurisdictions, but they can't regulate the entire architecture. RISC-V doesn't have a kill switch named Intel/AMD or ARM.
ARM China is a wildly different animal than ARM. They went rogue a few years back and though SoftBank/ARM did a lot to get things back in line, it still shows up like this:
I'm loving it. I used cheap risc-v boards for several of my projects, most notably a GD32V in my keyboard. The equivalent stm boards weren't too expensive, mostly in the 10-20$ range, but weren't as easily available (and 10$ is still 3x the price of the chinese risc board)
Though the rp2040 has largely ended my cheap risc-v addiction
Between 2010 and 2018, no country in the Eurozone increased their GDP per capita by 1% or more annually. Finland and Italy both experienced negative GDP per capita growth. The actual reality is that Europe is the single most economically stagnant region in the world. Whether that is due to the EU or not is absolutely an open question though.
Romania experienced extreme per capita growth over that period ~51%, or 5.3% ish per year.
But if you want to cherry pick a few years it’s worth understanding the details. Germany’s per capita income increased from 41,572$ in 2010 to 47,974$/year in 2018 that’s a 15.4% increase despite a 14.4% drop in 2015. Notably that 14.4% 2015 drop was was linked to over 1.1 million asylum seekers from the Syrian War and part of a huge wave of legal and illegal immigration. Exclude that 2015 and Germany saw roughly the same per capita growth rate as the US.
> Some people still use stats from 2008. Since then EU is flat, both USA and China growing like crazy. India might catch up with EU in the next 20 years as well.
They are a member of the EU, but the seven non-eurozone members of the EU are Bulgaria, Czechia, Denmark, Hungary, Poland, Romania, and Sweden.
I also pointed out that BlueTankEngine‘s statements about the eurozone was also wrong.
You used the word humiliating, which I found so strong I had to check the numbers myself. They are every bit as shocking as you made it sound. Yet another area of Japanese culture that Korea/China has been able to just take minor steps to digitally modernize, and in turn exponentially improve it's globally mass-marketability. Korea did it in music, China (and to some extent Korea) has done it in gaming, and it really does seem like Korea/China have done it in comics. Thanks for the tip, info I've gained from the last few hours of reading due to your comment will hit the pages of at least a handful of my slide decks next year.
Looking at what has actually come out of that push for "global mass-marketability", which is to say a lot of huge money machines and not a lot of art, the worst thing that could result from this is Japanese publishers trying to replicate this, as basically none of the internationally successful Japanese auteur creators would have had their works greenlit if they'd had to pass some global mass-marketability criteria.
Yeah I agree with you on all the way down to the very foundational fiber of my being. Luckily though Japanese publishers will at most just add webtoons on top of their current operations and that will be that. Jpop still more or less exactly the same as before YG and Hybe made Idols universal, Japanese games are for the most part still as unique as the were before Mihoyo and Smilegate changed the ARPG industry landscape. I sincerely believe that Shueisha, Kodansha, and the broader manga sphere will remain largely the same as we move in to the future.
I work in Media merchant banking (Investment Banking + Private Equity), so what webtoons will possibly allow me to do is show Western-raised or older generation generation capital holders another vector by which Asian literary media is a worthwhile investment. I'd walk a mile through broken glass to funnel 100 mil USD into the manga industry, but obviously the amount of opportunities that arise where I can attempt to push the needle in that direction is slim. Webtoons might be a viable vector in some cases where manga isnt financially, and I've seen enough relatively impressive webtoons to feel that money is better spent there than most other places.
Are you following what's going on with these online serial novel platforms like Qidian and Japanese equivalents? They seem to be the wellspring for a lot of the IP recently but penetration to the west still seems kinda low.
It's really interesting how authors use these kind of narrative dark patterns to keep readers buying chapters and the effect that has on the story they end up writing.
Like Shousetsuka ni Narou? I've actually seen novels originating there in an English small-town HMV with surprisingly prominent placement, and a similar amount of shelf space as Marvel and DC comics combined. Listed as "Manga Novels" for some reason. There were a few xianxia-looking titles there, but I don't follow Chinese media so I don't know whether they were originally web novels or not.
Given that HMV is a huge chain that mainly sells records and BluRays, they'd have to be pretty established to be there and not in a specialist bookseller or comic shop.
On the last paragraph: With how frequently audiences end up being dissatisfied with the endings of popular serialised works, I'm quite close to just giving up on serialised fiction entirely, or at the very least only considering reading or watching something once it's over. Whether it's manga (good anime adaptations avoid this problem, bad ones exacerbate it with filler arcs), US seasonal TV, live-service games, or novels that have "Part 1" in their title, the problems all end up being the same. Either it's unpopular and has to wrap up in less time than planned, resulting in aborted arcs and contrived endings, or it's popular and the author decides (or is encouraged by big piles of money) to drag it out beyond the original planned run, resulting in poor pacing, retcons, dubious plot twists, re-treading old narrative points and filler arcs.
Yeah I've been hip to the web novel stuff for the last 5 years. The stuff has an absolute death grip on Chinese fiction, and some of it is really quite spectacular. On a whole I consider it to be a very Chinese development, but some titles get surprisingly large global readership. It's a clever modernization of the Japanese light novel industrial complex, but I think fictional literature as leisure is just not practiced enough in the West for web novels to ever have a similar type of impact.
basically none of the internationally successful
Japanese auteur creators would have had their works
greenlit if they'd had to pass some global
mass-marketability criteria
Agreed. Japan has produced a lot of properties with global appeal, but I can't think of any successful properties that were intentionally designed with the international market in mind.
The domestic Japanese manga scene is so competitive and so crowded... creators basically push themselves to within an inch of their lives trying to make it in that market, appealing to the home audience. Most don't succeed. The anime market is largely fueled by manga properties, so this is largely true for that industry as well.
The game market is somewhat similar, aside from the (absolutely enormous, but fairly singular) exception that is Nintendo.
I'm actually quite thankful for this. Despite much of it being readily available in a translated form for American audiences... maybe I'm fooling myself but it feels like Japanese pop culture has remained relatively undiluted.
I'd question if Sonic the Hedgehog was 'designed' at all. The scattershot approach to media and branding they've taken over the decades feels largely reactive.
It has definitely been an uneven and chaotic ride compared to Nintendo's handling of the Mario franchise, though. Scattershot, indeed.
It's an interesting contrast in other ways too.
Mario is something close to a blank slate with no real personality. He's basically just a "seal of quality" - if it's a Mario game, you know it's a game that has received Nintendo's full attention to quality and is going to be accessible to all ages. You don't ever really "like" Mario. You like Mario games.
Whereas Sonic is an actual character, albeit one that has been developed in wildly inconsistent ways.
What's really baffling to me is the uneven quality of Sonic games. There have been some downright bad ones. You'd think Sega would have viewed him as their crown jewel. But there are a lot of times it felt like they were cranking out bad Sonic games just to stay afloat or something. It is almost impossible to think of Nintendo releasing bad Mario games.
It's odd to suggest that Chinese games have eclipsed Japanese games in global mass-marketability. The complete and exhaustive list of games developed in China with global mass-market appeal: Genshin Impact. Meanwhile, in Japan's corner: gestures broadly at half the gaming industry. Are you including games like LoL or PUBG that were merely purchased by Chinese companies after becoming popular?
I've had a somewhat similar feeling with the American-developed offshoot of Stable Diffusion by NovelAI suddenly granting everyone the ability to churn out hundreds of pieces of fanart of Japanese IPs with little effort. I also remember reading a Japanese tweet that spoke of the same sentiment related to foreign countries adapting parts of Japan's culture (Genshin Impact being one example).
If you don't mind answering, I'm really curious how much cash you were offering up front and what the page count you were commissioning was. Been talking to some art consultancies recently and I'm curious to how your experience compared to mine.
I apologize if this comes off as aggressive, but all four of your points are totally wrong and I am sick of seeing these ideas parroted all over HN.
1. Google does not have a solid track record of killing things. IF you actually go through the list of all the "products" Google has "killed", you find that 95% of them are just consolidated into other areas of the Google product stack. Stadia was a herculean undertaking that involved a capital deployment that, at the time, was unprecedented in the gaming space. Stadia wasn't killed because it didn't grow quickly, it was killed because it didn't grow at all and was losing money, not to mention failing to acquire market share. Would you prefer the product be destroyed to put it on indefinite life support like Amazon has done with Twitch?
2. Google is an absolute giant in corporate communications via G-Suite. Just because their video chat didn't win out doesn't mean they have no competency in the space.
3. Google now does have a strategy for comms tools. Workplace text chat is part of the Gmail end of G-Suite, all video chat is under Meet. This would slip right into their new Meet ecosystem. Unfortunately many of the people who parrot your talking points also were the ones criticizing google for attempting to reign in their comms ecosystem because it was "killing" products, when in reality they were just being re-bundled
4. Google delivers legendary levels of hardware support for their Pixel devices, the absolute best in the Android ecosystem. Not to mention they run the single most compatible smart home ecosystem and have supported Chromecast for a decade.
Can you even name a division that Google could just spinoff in your world? Stadia couldn't sustain itself without the Google Cloud backing it. Really tired of all the HNers essentially making up this narrative about Google when it rally doesn't exist.
> 1. Google does not have a solid track record of killing things…95% of them are just consolidated into other areas
Public opinion still stands, they now garner a reputation of “won’t support for long, might kill” on new products they launch. You can’t even trust their owns comma - a month out of Stadia being axed they were talking about how they were going to continue supporting it.
> Google is an absolute giant in corporate communications via G-Suite.
Email and stuff, sure. Video conferencing, less so.
> Google delivers legendary levels of hardware support for their Pixel devices, the absolute best in the Android ecosystem
Is this a joke? Their hardware support is lacking, and the fact that it’s the “best of the Android ecosystem” says a lot about the quality of that sector. Basically every time this topic comes up on the pixel and Android subreddits, users who have those phones bemoan googles lacking and inconsistent support.
1. Stadia wasn't even first to market. Multiple startups have a better product.
2. G-Suite did well because it was free and had a good collaboration model. It has stagnated, and things like search and folder navigation are hilariously bad. Quip has innovated much more in this space in recent years.
3. If they rolled old chat into new chat, it put my buddy list somewhere, and didn't just delete it without prompting, right? Google voice still exists with the old feature set? Can I have my auto deleted vanity number back? Presumably Meet is always e2e encrypted, like zoom, and its predecessor from Google, right? No? No to all these questions? Wow. Maybe they don't provide feature continuity after all.
4. I am typing this on a pixel 6 pro. Meh.
The following divisions would be better off as spinoffs, IMO:
Stadia (small companies lapped it), Waymo (small companies lapped it), their MVNO, android (then it could stop being a privacy tire fire), chrome (the Mozilla model works, and this would let Microsoft and Brave upstream more easily), g-suite+gmail (no tie in to search or ads), search, double click, AdWords, YouTube.
I meant the engineer to manager salary ratio is worse than it is in the US - managers make nearly twice the money for a given level of experience.
Afaik the gap is not as bad in the US, but I may be wrong?
Engineers turned managers would actually be fine, but we're talking traditionally educated managers who are often hired separately/brought in from outside.
Needless to say, they're not all that good, especially with modern startups/software businesses. Which plays a part in making Europe suck at them.
PIA continues to prove in court over and over again that they do not keep traffic logs. The extreme fear mongering over Kape has never been backed up by any evidence other than "they used to do bad things under their previous management." As I always say in these threads, all the people who shill Mullvad over everything probably just use them for web-browsing or adjacent activities, and not anything that requires a specialty product like p2p or bypassing national firewalls.
>all the people who shill Mullvad over everything probably just use them for web-browsing or adjacent activities, and not anything that requires a specialty product like p2p or bypassing national firewalls.
On the contrary. Mullvad gives you more flexibility than PIA in that regard and doesn't limit you to whatever features are built into the client like PIA does. You can build tunnels to whatever endpoint in whichever country you want. You can associate multiple ports to your tunnel or separate tunnels for inbound connections. It's very convenient if you want a P2P tunnel where you can get a wireguard interface on the client and then configure your P2P application to only use that tunnel so that there's no chance of leaks (Up to you if you want to also configure the P2P service to use DNS over the VPN or just the system resolver if you don't care) and you don't have to tunnel everything over the same VPN. You can have multiple interfaces going to different applications if you wanted. You have the flexibility to configure your client in whatever way you want without having to deal with proprietary endpoints to request a temporary forwarded port for the connection like what PIA makes you use.
I used to use PIA before the owner hired con artist Mark Karpeles as the CTO and jumped ship when that happened. Even though I only picked Mullvad because it was recommended on HN and wasn't PIA, I much prefer it from a technical standpoint. If I knew how much better it was originally I never would have went for the cheaper more popular option of PIA. People shilling Mullvad are probably doing so because it has many technical advantages over traditional VPNs used by more casual customers. Mullvad also supports bridge servers for shadowsocks. I've never had an opportunity to test it but I'd expect Mullvad to be more reliable in China than PIA.
PIA is cheap, and they don't seem to keep traffic logs. That's basically all they have going for them.
Anecdotally PIA performance seemed to drop around then, port forwarding was frequently broken and Wireguard wasn't making much progress (looks like maybe they've finally rolled it out now)
Maybe things were already bad before Kape but it was around the same time
