AI chip startup Wave to buy Silicon Valley old-timer MIPS

Re:AI chip startup Wave to buy Silicon Valley old-timer MIPS by bogomipz on Thursday June 14, 2018 @06:06PM (#17315860)

I'm not understanding your comment. Weren't they always just that - a hardware vendor? I think they had some image editing stuff that only ran on their boxes but didn't they still essentially make their money on the high end hardware needed to run those programs?

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:AI chip startup Wave to buy Silicon Valley old-timer MIPS by pjmlp on Friday June 15, 2018 @01:06AM (#17317638)

All commercial UNIX vendors were hardware vendors.

What made them special is how they combined their hardware with their own version version of UNIX.

Hence why even trying to write portable code across UNIXEs wasn't as easy as many believe.

Irix had IrisGL, Iris Inventor, XFS and a few other goodies, before they became the Open variants.

SGI was also a big sponsor of the C++ STL work.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:AI chip startup Wave to buy Silicon Valley old-timer MIPS by trasz on Friday June 15, 2018 @04:51AM (#17318394)

Twenty different vendors combined their hardware with their own version of Unix. There was nothing special about that.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:AI chip startup Wave to buy Silicon Valley old-timer MIPS by pjmlp on Friday June 15, 2018 @05:25AM (#17318514)

Sure there was, the vertical integration and overall user experience.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:AI chip startup Wave to buy Silicon Valley old-timer MIPS by bogomipz on Friday June 15, 2018 @01:09PM (#17321457)

How did that make them different than all the other vendors that had their own hardware and versions of UNIX at the time - HPUX, Solaris, DEC etc?

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:AI chip startup Wave to buy Silicon Valley old-timer MIPS by walterbell on Friday June 15, 2018 @08:50AM (#17319367)

With the end of Moore's Law, are we returning to vertically integrated hardware+software?

Domain Specific Architecture talk by Hennessy & Patterson, 2018 talk for 2017 Turing Award: http://iscaconf.org/isca2018/docs/HennessyPattersonTuringLec...

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:AI chip startup Wave to buy Silicon Valley old-timer MIPS by pjmlp on Friday June 15, 2018 @12:47PM (#17321255)

I will watch the talk later.

However I can say yes, we are returning to those days.

Thanks to the thin razor margins you see OEMs now selling un-upgradable phones, laptops, tablets, 2-1, leaving the old desktop PC for a niche market that gets smaller every year, mostly targeted at gamers.

Also OEMs got envious of Apple as the surviving icon of those days, all of them want to be Apple of their market and sell experiences.

[ Parent | on HN ]