melgross
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EU pressing on with USB-C charger legislation on Thursday
Actually, the metric system is used here more than you think. Most everything that designated as Imperial, other than imperial measuring systems themselves, is already metric. For us, they’re designated as imperial, but look at the numbers, and you’ll realize that it’s a conversion from the metric.spheric said:
Dude. If you're gonna argue against anybody trying to establish a universal standard, it's really best you NOT bring up the metric system.rob53 said:The EU can do whatever they want to but the metric system is not the standard in the US and I doubt there will ever be a single world-wide standard for much of anything. USB is an Intel standard, meaning the EU is defining a no-substitute requirement for mobile phone chargers. I have to wonder how much Intel is bribing the EU. If Apple goes with a mag-safe charger and no physical charging port, I bet the EU will complain and try and sue Apple to provide a physical charging port.
Because the United States' refusal to this day to adopt the metric system (only on the surface — any industry in a globalised world cannot afford NOT to be metric) is so utterly ridiculous and total luddite buffoonery that it demolishes whatever argument you might be trying to make.
congress stated in ‘66 that the country should proceed moving to metric as quickly as possible in order to enhance industry as well as scientific progress. That statement, by the way, was made in 1866, not 1966.
having said that, the British, now that Brexit is there have stated that they’re going back to imperial, which really, is completely stup if they really do it, if even in a limited way.
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Apple just now feeling global chip shortage, while rivals suffer
Maybe that includes the one year new phone purchase with the rebate from the old phone. We’re seeing the same thing here, where you can get a new 13 Pro Max for $300 on that plan.gatorguy said:Interesting that in China the iPhone 13 lineup is initially being sold for less than Chinese buyers can currently buy a corresponding iPhone 12 model, 300 yuan to 800 yuan cheaper. Why would that be?
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Apple just now feeling global chip shortage, while rivals suffer
Yeah. That country is the USA. According to Cook, Apple bought over $50 billion from USA suppliers in 2019. That consisted of parts and materials. In 2020, it rose to over $60 billion.TenApplesUpOnTop said:Imagine that! Planning ahead gives you a competitive advantage. If only Apple planned ahead for depending too heavily on one communist country for the majority of their components....
while Apple does buy from Chinese suppliers, it isn’t the majority of what goes into their products. And don’t confuse assembly of products to manufacture of products.
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Apple investigating RISC-V instruction set architecture, job listing shows
As a founder of ARM, it’s believed that Apple has a license to ARM in perpetuity. How that affects their costs, I can’t say but it’s also believed that Apple has a long term contract as to licensing costs.command_f said:
At least a defensive move while it is unclear who will own ARM. While the ARM architecture remains available to all, there are benefits to using it but a 'hostile' (or just misguided) new owner could try to increase licensing costs.OutdoorAppDeveloper said:A reaction to NVIDIA buying ARM?
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Apple investigating RISC-V instruction set architecture, job listing shows
Right now, RISC-V is years behind even the simplest ARM general purpose CPU. It’s being used for specialized tasks. It’s designed to be a controller for other sub units, such as a neural engine, or a machine learning processor, or optical analytics.nadriel said:RISC-V processors are already used in multitude of specialised cases: Seagate is testing them for creating "enable massive parallel computational" storage solutions; Nvidia uses RISC-Vs in their GPUs, likely handling some IO, ("and beyond"); Western Digital is going for RISC-V controllers to their hard drives.Don't take my words as gospel, but one of the advantages of RISC-V (as an ISA) over ARM (and x86) is that it doesn't carry baggage from ages ago. Not that information theory and computation theory has really advanced so far that they're from a different universe, but some things can be done more efficiently with modern approaches. Benchmarks made by RISC-V developers highlight some specifics where their platform has an advantage over the others, but in general the difference is really really small or goes to something like +/- 5% difference in a specific compilation on a specific compiler (like GCC). Note the minus.
The other advantage is that it's really "modular (core is really small) and easy to customise" and create custom instructions for ASIC purposes (for example for handling high amount of IO in a GPU). Even if it's free and open source, the same problem comes around as with other ISAs, if you want something done, you need to hire people or buy the service if you can't do it yourself.
I'd see the RISC-V becoming a huge thing in accelerators and in some specific controllers (Power, USB, Modem etc.) within the next 5 years. Even if there are already some machines running Linux on RISC-V, they are low performance and have a really long uphill way to become even remotely mainstream.
It will take years to be useful, if it ever is, for a low end phone, or similar device. A major reason it’s so efficient is that it only has 50 instructions.
I can see Apple being interested because it would be irresponsible to look the other way. Notice that the engineer they’re looking for Also needs experience with ARM. I suspect that Apple is looking to see if some aspects of this can be used inside their ARM based instruction set chips, but not to replace them
