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A comment on Olympus quits camera business after 84 years. Parent comment

Re:Olympus quits camera business after 84 years by starky on Friday June 26, 2020 @01:59AM (#23649145)
It is even more tenuous than that. If just one of a company's fabs goes down much of the imaging industry will have problems. A few years ago when the earthquake affected Sony's Kumamoto sensor fab it caused some serious issues for some camera vendors. Nikon for example had announced their DL 1" sensor compact line to compete with Sony's 1" sensor cameras and reportedly due to the earthquake they delayed and eventually completely scrapped the project.
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Re:Olympus quits camera business after 84 years by killjoywashere on Friday June 26, 2020 @02:32AM (#23649304)
Are sensor fabs functionally similar enough to CPU fabs that if China tried to take back Taiwan, or just made it hard for Taiwan to ship chips to the West, the Japanese sensor fabs could retool for chips?
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Re:Olympus quits camera business after 84 years by sudosysgen on Friday June 26, 2020 @02:50AM (#23649395)
Absolutely not. The lithographies, processes, and packages are completely different. Some sensors are still made on 300nm processes, useless for modern CPUs. 45 nm is considered cutting edge for imaging sensors, but would be a huge setback for computing. Intel, GlobalFoundries and even IBM fabs would be much better.
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Re:Olympus quits camera business after 84 years by makapuf on Friday June 26, 2020 @03:59PM (#23656286)
Sure. But in th he grand scheme of things 45nm is intel core2quads Q9400. My main pc has this cpu and the only thing I miss is not enough ram.
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Re:Olympus quits camera business after 84 years by bayindirh on Friday June 26, 2020 @05:39PM (#23657359)
The increase in CPU power doesn't become apparent until you start to use vectorization heavily or use your CPU for floating point-heavy scientific computing.

Some of the code I've written can speed up 3x just by using newer SIMD instruction sets and bigger caches. It's unbelievable until you see it.

I also manage HPC clusters, so we see strange effects when developers excessively hand-tune their code for a specific architecture.

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Re:Olympus quits camera business after 84 years by makapuf on Friday June 26, 2020 @08:01PM (#23658346)
Well of course hpc can benefit from 13 years of cpu advances. (And gpus). Noting that sse4 was even available on it. My point was we still wouldn't be relegated to stone age if we were stuck on 45nm processes, and we could also benefit from better architectures.
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