zimmie

rob53 said:

In other words worthless security and business as usual. 

Not exactly. It's Google making their competitors' data less valuable. Most people who use Android use it with a Google account. Google can, of course, track all the activity on your Google account such as which applications you buy. Removing advertising IDs which in-app ads from other companies can use prevents those advertisers from recognizing that you see their adds from multiple applications. Google can still tell, though.

This is textbook anticompetitive behavior, but is actually an improvement if you use Android without a Google account.

foregoneconclusion said:

That's good news. It doesn't really sound clear as to what problem they were trying to solve in the first place. The IRS has used methods like requiring users to provide specific numbers from specific lines of the previous years tax return as a form of verification in the past. That seemed to work just fine. 

It was meant to prevent identity theft. Unemployment fraud is pretty significant right now. Faking a video is harder than faking a scan of a driver license or scan of a bill. Most thieves wouldn't go to the trouble, so they could be found out by looking for the same face in videos from multiple people. As a result, a lot of states started using this service for identity verification to cut down on said fraud.

The IRS then chose it because it already had accounts for a large number of citizens. Wouldn't require people do another invasive verification process with a whole second service.

GeorgeBMac said:

Amazon has never been known to do something without a purpose and clear reasons why.

So, why would they want Peloton?   What is their goal?  What are they trying to gain or accomplish?

My bet is:  They gain marketing info on the growing population of fitness enthusiasts for targeted marketing so they can sell them fitness related stuff -- clothing, equipment, etc...    Yoga pants to yoga enthusiasts, running shoes to treadmill users, helmets to cyclists, etc...

Come on. Bezos does all kinds of things without a good reason why.

He bought Woot. When Woot's founder asked why, Bezos said it was the thing he didn't understand, so he had to have it. Woot was the breakfast octopus.

cogitodexter said:

waveparticle said:

cogitodexter said:

Serious question:

What does an Intel Core i9 do that requires it to be as power inefficient in the same processing circumstances as an AS M1 Max?

Presumably there's a reason why it draws so much more current to achieve the same ends? Are there features in it that are not replicated in the M1 Max? 

I'm assuming the architecture is radically different, but what stops Intel from changing to that architecture?

Power is consumed when a transistor switch from 0 to 1 or 1 to 0. Switching is controlled by clock cycles. The more switching the more power is consumed. 

Well, that is presumably a given. And possibly at a slightly lower level than I was alluding to. More specifically, is there some set of processing or overall design feature that Intel does wrong? Or does it do more 'stuff' that the M1 doesn't do? Is it required to support legacy ways of doing stuff that the M1 is free from? 

Short answer is that x86 and amd64 instruction sets are old, and they tried to be everything to everyone. As a result, they are extremely complex. Instructions and data are put together (for example, the instruction to move data, the source register or value, and the destination register are strung together into one bit sequence), and instructions have variable bit sizes. Determining which part is the instruction and which part is the data basically requires a whole tiny CPU by itself.

Intel's "Core" line was built in part because they were having trouble getting older designs to go faster. They built a new internal architecture which is a lot simpler, then added a sort of translation layer which takes the more complex instructions and breaks them into "micro-operations". That approach has served them well, but there's only so much you can do in hardware without removing instructions and simplifying what the processor offers to software.

ARM is radically simpler than x86.

bobolicious said:

Well if one needs GPU performance - I am running into software for example that simply will not run (bricked) without a beefy GPU...

from the Macworld article:

  59,774   Apple M1 Max 32 core GPU
143,594  nVidia 3080 Ti

240% faster, presumably not 'within margin of error'

Even more pronounced seem the desktop options (AMD) with the relatively inexpensive nVidia 3060 outperforming passmark scores for many higher priced cards as well as having 12GB VRAM  www.bestbuy.com/site/evga-nvidia-geforce-rtx-3060-xc-gaming-12gb-gddr6-pci-express-4-0-graphics-card/6454329.p?skuId=6454329

I understood Apple is working on a 'boost' option which may help, and will presumably also ramp up the power and fan requirements...?

This gets a little complicated. With Apple's "unified memory", their GPU cores have access to everything in the whole up-to-64-GB of RAM. A lot of non-gaming uses of GPUs involve manipulating huge datasets. If the data you're working with is bigger than can fit in the card's VRAM (12 GB for the 3080, 24 GB for the 3090), you're basically going to be swapping between VRAM and normal RAM. That seriously hurts performance and is why Nvidia has been making their compute-specific cards (Tesla, until that brand was retired in 2020) with 12+ GB per GPU since 2014.

For math across large datasets, the M1 Max can actually beat the RTX 3080 just because it doesn't have to spend so much time shuffling data around.

This is also the idea behind AMD's Radeon Pro SSG (Solid State Graphics). They added a 2 TB NVMe SSD to use as on-card swap space for VRAM. It's meant for video editing and allows you to keep a huge chunk of the video all on the card.

foregoneconclusion said:

 The IRS already requires you to be able to provide specific numbers from specific lines in the previous years tax return as part of identity verification online. I don't see how taking a low quality video selfie + photos of utility bills is any better than that. 

It's a lot cheaper to keep printed documents around than it is to have access to a computer with a video camera. This helps exclude poor people from access to government services, pushing them towards other options like TurboTax, which cost money in most situations.

It's the same reason the IRS doesn't file our tax returns for us. They already have the data, after all. Differences between what you provide and what they already have are one thing which can trigger an audit.