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"Seamus Blackley apologized on Twitter to the AMD engineers who worked with Microsoft to create the prototype Xbox consoles that the company used in the lead-up to the OG Xbox's release in November 2001. To AMD CEO Lisa Su, Blackley said, "I beg mercy."

"I was standing there on the stage for the announcement, with [Bill Gates], and there they were right there, front row, looking so sad," he said of AMD engineers in the room. "I'll never forget it. They had helped so much with the prototypes. Prototypes that were literally running the launch announcement demos ON AMD HARDWARE."

"I felt like such an ass," Blackley said."

https://www.gamespot.com/articles/20-years-later-xbox-creato...

Wow. I mean there's a colloquial "last minute" but that sounds like a literal, last minute.

The engineering teams were probably running both programs in parallel. I've had this happen to me several times. Sometimes, project B is just leverage [1] so that a better deal can be negotiated, so you half-ass project B, and that's fine and just business. But sometimes it's not, and that situation sucks.

[1] Factory resources are scarce, so it's obvious to the engineering team how serious management is about things. Word spreads.

That's kinda what I was thinking too. There is a privacy loss for sure, but the average consumer also gained things for that loss.

Maybe Amazon in 2000 wasn't so icky but there was also no free same day shipping. Apple II could be repaired without "special tools" but those machines were huge, heavy, mostly empty space, and gap and glass alignment was way worse. I wish I could say something smart about Windows 95 but I've worked hard to erase it from my memory, so I can't. :)

Electronics things, just in general, did a lot less in the past. With that comes good and bad.

Privacy is a trade-off and right now the general public doesn't place a high value on privacy so they're happy to trade it away for anything. Honestly I understand it. I'm convinced I'm going to get bombarded with marketing nonsense regardless so I might as well get something for it.

It does take a time investment, but it’s absolutely possible today. https://tinytapeout.com/specs/analog/

If you’re willing to do something that’s not manufacturable, but way easier to understand, then you might try this: https://tinytapeout.com/siliwiz/

I just remembered your article on the standard cells of Pentium and there you noted bicmos was used by some gates for a reduction in propagation delay in some instances. Were any of the gates in the adder structures bicmos?

If anyone is interested in adder taxonomy and why one might select one architecture over another in VLSI I can highly recommend this slide deck.

https://pages.hmc.edu/harris/cmosvlsi/4e/lect/lect17.pdf

In particular slides 36 and 37

A difference in potential between grounds in industrial settings is also really common. Especially if one plugs two different pieces of equipment into two different branches of the building's circuit, without knowing it, and then connects those devices with something like ethernet. With 20m+ cables, it happens. :) You'll be very happy for isolation then. 1 to 5V difference is enough to damage electronics.

Interesting. What compiler options would you have used? Do you know if the options are applicable for ARM as well?

There is a huge amount of software in every single step of making an ASIC, digital or analog. Or even a PCB for that matter. Long gone are the days of cutting tape and etching anything yourself. Apple's M3 has 25 billion transistors. No human drew those.

EDA software has some of the most amazing algorithms. I'm always surprised more CS people aren't into it.

You can find many great opensource projects here: https://theopenroadproject.org

But to get some context, and try out the flow and how everything works together, start here: https://tinytapeout.com

Now we just have to define what’s “essential” and how to identify it, across states, countries and jurisdictions. Should be easy. ;)

Maybe not privacy in general but this is about location privacy.

If you have a smartphone in your pocket, then, for better or worse, you're carrying a location tracker chip on your person because that's how they all work. The cell phone company needs to know where to send/get data, if nothing else.

It seems disingenuous to put a tracker chip in your pocket and be up in arms that someone knows your location.

Unless this kerfuffle is only about Apple.

> Do you consider this feature to be a violation of your privacy, requiring an opt-in?

I suppose in some sense it is, as it a reverse-geo lookup service, but it's also no where near to the front in the location privacy war.

Cell phone providers basically know your exact position at all times when you have your phone on you, credit card companies know basically everything, cars track driving directly, etc. etc.

I can see why some people would be up in arms but for me this one doesn't feel like missing the forest for the trees, it feels like missing the forest for the leaves.

That was an entire body of research at the University of Minnesota and the “hypocrite commits” weren’t found until the authors pointed people to them.

https://www.theverge.com/2021/4/30/22410164/linux-kernel-uni...

Thank you so much for asking, I have oh so many requests...

Personally, I'm mostly interested in the ARM vs RISCV compare and contrast.

- I'd be very interested in comparing static memory and ram memory requirements for programs that are as similar as you can make them at the c-level using whatever toolchain Nordic wants you to use.

- Since you're looking to do deep dives I think looking into differences in the interrupt architecture and any implications on stack memory requirements and/or latency would be interesting, especially as VPR is a "peripheral processor"

- It would be interesting to get cycle counts for similar programs between ARM and RISCV. This might not be very comparable though as it seems the ARM architectures are more complex thus we expect a lower CPI from them. Anyway I think CPI numbers would be interesting.

I could go on but I don't want to be greedy. :)

It feels bad to loose but you also need the wins to feel good. Beating a low ELO player is about as fun as beating small kids at basketball or something. For me it’s not the win/loss that drives me but making fewer mistakes. If I loose a game where my opponent punished a minor mistake, fair enough, that took skill and I’ll learn from it and I don’t feel bad. But if I loose because I made a blunder (obvious tactical error) that sucks and I hate that.

As a chess aficionado and a former tournament player, who didn’t get very far, I can see pros & cons. They helped me train and get significantly better than I would’ve gotten without them. On the other hand, so did the competition. :) The average level of the game is so much higher than when I was a kid (30+ years ago) and new ways of playing that were unthinkable before are possible now. On the other hand cheating (online anyway) is rampant and all the memorization required to begin to be competitive can be daunting, and that sucks.

There are many similarities in your comment to how grandmasters discuss engines. I have a hunch the arc of AI in math will be very similar to the arc of engines in chess.

https://www.wired.com/story/defeated-chess-champ-garry-kaspa...

If Apple somehow implements interoperability perfectly, sure. But I don’t believe that they, or anyone else, can. I’m sure any API will have unforeseen consequences and bugs, and those will affect me.

And I don’t really get to opt out either as eventually I’ll be forced to update my software.

> If TPU's are really that good why on earth would google not sell them.

nVidia sells nearly 4M GPUs per year. Google claims like 100K TPUs. Scaling a production line by 10x is very difficult and Google has not shown aptitude in this area of expertise.

Even if Google wanted to scale 10x I'm not sure they could. nVidia is believed to be taking like half of TSMC's new capacity (existing capacity is not idle). I suppose technically that means the other half could be consumed by Google but it's likely TSMCs other customers wouldn't appreciate that.

Thanks for the links to the data. I wanted to see if they broke it out by state, but I don't think they did.

I did notice many of the top countries have this fun footnote, "National Defined Population covers less than 90 percent of National Target Population (but at least 74 percent)". Which probably translates to they didn't measure the worst performing kids which likely gooses the numbers pretty decently...

The U.S. has this one, "Met guidelines for sample participation rates only after replacement schools were included." Which means some schools declined to participate so they had to ask others.

Today sure. If you want to custom make "serious" system then x86 is likely your best bet. But this isn't about today, you can have that system right now if you want, it's still there, so this is about the future.

All the use cases, except gaming PC, have "less serious" solutions in Linux/ARM and Linux/RISCV today, where I would argue there is more interoperability and diversity. Those solutions get better and closer to "serious" x86 solutions every day.

Will they be roughly equivalent in price/performance in 5 years... only time will tell but I suspect x86 PC is the old way and it's on it's way out.

> only grown semiconductor fabs left on US soil

not sure what a "grown" semiconductor fab is but follow this link and sort by location https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_semiconductor_fabricat... The number of homegrown companies with fabs is greater than 1

Depends on what Apple wants…

Yes Congressman, we agree to take over Intel fabs if you agree to drop this antitrust nonsense. And we would like our $20B from Google back too.

On the one hand I do get the concern, on the other there’s never been a better time to be a hardware hacker. Cheap microcontrollers abound, raspberry pi etc, cheap fpgas, one can even make their own asic. So I just can’t get that worked up over pc architectures getting closed.

Not a gamer but I would guess it depends on the graphics settings. At lower resolutions, and with less lighting features, etc. one can probably turn a GPU bound game into a CPU bound game.

It's interesting to ponder if this is a good thing or a bad thing. The knee jerk reaction is this is all very unhealthy but I wonder if it is really. Imagine we were talking about back-up quarterbacks in the NFL. That individual is probably one heck of a quarterback and athlete, and they did excellent in lesser teams which is what got them into the NFL in the first place. But, they are a back-up quarter back in the NFL, not a starter. If they continue to remain a back-up quarterback, should they be PIP'ed or not?