Thanks kinda how Japan works. Inventing something new is hard, but taking something that's a cool idea and making it actually usable is well within their wheelhouse.
I'm sure there's plenty of other stuff invented in Japan, but that's really beside the point.
The industry is now mature enough that nobody really wants the headache of a new architecture at this point in time, Risc-V got a pass for being a grassroots movement growing out off FPGA's since the IP situation was more or less clear or even predatory with all existing architectures, Power, Sparc,SuperH,68k,etc are buried for good reasons.
PPC could have any number of merits, the 2 nail in the coffin imho is that the community/implementations seems to have held on to a big-endian tradition whilst the mass of users/developers firmly shifted to little-endian when Apple went to x86 and that IBM didn't push it properly open in the 2005-2008 timeframe when PS3/Xbox360 were still relevant (OpenPower seems to have been created in 2013, after the creation of Risc-V and PS4/XboxOne going to x86).
Core solo/duo was the last in the P3 heritage (but that heritage itself traced all the way back to the Pentium Pro initially) via the 2 generations of Pentium-M (even if Core2 had parts they were 64bit so more of a major upgrade).
Whoever convinced the execs at Intel to put Pentium-M into production as a "mobile" chip really saved them when NetBurst reached it's end of line, I owned a first-generation Pentium-M laptop and it was really superb (seeing the Macbook Air introduced was a big meh).
It was really a turning point though, I remember posting some compile time and people didn't believe me, but the Pentium-M chips were good at compiling (since compilers are kinda "branchy" when it comes to execution in a way P4 didn't "like") but also because I had maxed out the RAM on the machine (1.25gb when 256mb was the base for the machine and similar for many desktops) so much of the code and libraries could be retained in disk caches.
With portable performance like that, why do you need a desktop?
Dunno, I think Risc-V's simplicity gave it the initial popularity rush rather than being from a certain institution (the institution perhaps gave it visibility, but it does have own merits and no idea if other archs from the time had those?), don't remembere exactly but iirc it was possible to implement with a ridiculously small amount of FPGA gates. Conversly heard some rumblings that it had parts t hat were unsuitable for scaling up but it seems to have gained enough momentum for people to engineer past stuff like that.
I had this idea that Fujitsu was one of those Japanese conglomerates that had operations in all kinds of markets, from electronics to heavy earth moving equipment to air conditioners to locomotives. But that doesn't appear to be the case so I'm wondering which company I'm confusing them with.
Fujitsu was a telco equipment spinoff from Fuji Electric, so Fujitsu do/did make a lot of things that would be in a phone exchange building over its history, from air conditioners to terminals to actual mainframes. Just not as everything as Mitsubishi, which was a do-all procurement company for the new government when the Tokugawa stepped down.
About 25 years back here in Australia they were advertising Fujitsu air-conditioners, they had the promise of some like "They will get the air down to 17c in all conditions."
About a month later there was a summer heat wave and I went to a friends house who had just bought one. It was wild walking in from a 45c day into, as advertised, a 17c house. Had to give it to them, they lived up to the claim.
That they come from the telecom/server space, it makes sense they had a good eye for aircon engineering.
I am in tech (okay now I am really wondering what % of people on here are NOT in tech). I have spent years in Japan for work, and ironically right now as I type this, I am sitting in a seat on JL2 from Tokyo to SFO. I worked with all of the large Japanese companies over the years and I can say Fujitsu has always been the most impressive, and to you comment, most like golden age IBM (I worked there for a brief time also). They, like IBM are most likely to have brilliant tech, and then shoot themself in the head for non-tech reasons.
Sun invented SPARC, Fujitsu just happened to be the last producer since they built mainframes on it. Reading it seems like they plan to stop producing Sparc processors and machines in a near timeframe so that makes this announcement less surprising.
For many years the Fujitsu SPARC implementations were much faster than the Sun SPARC implementations.
During the decade 1995-2005, until the 64-bit AMD Opteron servers with Linux offered an alternative that crushed any kind of SPARC CPU with Solaris by a much higher performance combined with a much lower price, the SPARC Sun or Fujitsu servers dominated the market for servers used to host the CAD/EDA design tools used in electronics engineering, for the design of integrated circuits or electronic equipment. This means that all the EDA software from vendors like Mentor, Cadence, Synopsis etc. was available only for Solaris. That kind of software could not be run on Windows, due to the 32-bit memory limit. During that time, whoever got Fujitsu servers instead of the sluggish Sun servers, was very lucky.
It was an issue of fundamentally differing directions.
In the mid-2000's, Sun decided to take SPARC towards designs with many small SMT cores. In the era of single-core processors, the UltraSPARC T1 had 8 cores x 4 threads per core. This was at the same time Intel released the Pentium 4 with hyper-threading, so it was an industry trend.
This of course works great for very specific applications, particularly considering efficiency, but is awful for others. Scientific computation was especially bad because the T1 had only one FPU for 8 cores.
Fujitsu's SPARC64 didn't go in this direction, and stayed with a conventional design (2 way SMT at most). Sun realized this and started to also sell the Fujitsu SPARC64 for customers who couldn't use the thread level parallelism, an arrangement that lasted until the end.
The idea of lots of slow cores is still a thing today: Intel's Sierra Forest Xeon is 144 E-cores.
1 FPU for 8 cores is wild, but then again they were selling webservers.
Still, iirc FPU's were silicon heavy back in those days and it'd be interesting to know how far ahead the foundries Sun and Fujitsu were, maybe it was simply a factor of being too far behind in the foundry race that left Sun with few options.
Intel's E-Cores still are functionally complete for most parts though (excl Avx512?)? Todays limits seems to be memory bandwidth and power and I guess many of the 144 core customers are in it for virtualization and servers?
My understanding is the lots of small cores are for applications where you have lots of simple, independent tasks that tend to be IO-bound: web and other front-end servers, databases, transaction processing. SMT is optimal here because you can execute other threads while waiting for IO.
I haven't been closely following it, but the Intel E-cores are definitely less wide and have less execution units. The FPU/Vector hardware is 128-bits wide instead of 256. If you ask it to do 256-bit SIMD, the front-end breaks it into 2 operations.
Many common SOC's MediaTek, Realtek, and Broadcom SOC's quite often used modern audio capable devices analog pins can be software defined either input or output.
IIRC I saw already Bruce Schneider's blog some team proof of concept where they listened using laptop speakers what was spoken in that room. Audio quality wasn't perfect, but it making sense what was spoken was good enough.
"…I saw already Bruce Schneider's blog some team proof of concept where they listened using laptop speakers what was spoken in that room."
Users need to know the electrical features of their H/W and its limits. If a loudspeaker output stage is designed (hardware wired) so that it can never act as an input then no later firmware update can turn the speaker into a microphone.
This is why hardware authentication is becoming more and more important.
Right, it's true that if there is an amplifier stage then it doesn't work. But some devices have had also tiny speakers used for for user interface audio feedback mechanism also used beeping error codes etc. Those SoC can drive that kind load of quite well directly and there is just a tiny speaker coil from IO-pins. That kind of speaker can function lousy microphones. That's what that PoC was all about.
"The main downside of this is the fact that object storage doesn't have transactions, so you can't make sure that both appending the event and updating the state of the world happen in one atomic unit. We write the state first and the event second, so a process dying in between leaves the state correct and the history missing an entry. Nothing detects that, because detecting it would mean something reads the log and compares it to state, and the entire point is that nothing does. So every entry in the log really happened. What you don't get is a guarantee that everything that happened is in it."
So, they built a thing that pretends to, but does not actually properly handle transactions?
I guess I should be glad they are not a fintech startup...
Iceland is in EEA. EEA is already EU-lite, where they have to comply with plenty of EU regulations, don't get a vote on those regulations, but get some exemptions (such as their fishing thing).
Other two countries in EEA are Norway and Liechtenstein.
I'm not saying that Iceland should join the EU. Nor that it shouldn't. I don't live in Iceland.
I was explaining to the commenter above me that Iceland already has to comply to EU regulations, because he seemed unaware of that.
Unsurprisingly, every thread on HN that mention EU seems to attract all sorts of people that have absolutely no idea of what the hell they are talking about.
The presence of EU across the sea is making their exporters to comply, same goes for UK. Does not matter if you are a member or not. You can either comply with the roles or not export to EU.
They are selling 10000 gallons a day at some locations, so I find it hard to believe.
More like they don’t have a need to make a profit and they run the station in a barebones manner on real estate that they get as part of the larger site. So it would be a loss leader for anyone else.
It really doesn't sound good. A loss leader is meant to get you into the store; the gas station is usually far away, in the back of the parking lot.
Their $5 chicken now, that's a great "loss leader" (if it even is; that isn't confirmed). Because that forces you not just into the store, but all the way to the back. So you go in for the $5 chicken and leave with $20 of blueberries, $20 of cereal $20 of milk $20 of mayo.
AI companies could certainly release the scans of any book that is no longer covered by copyright in the USA, for free download and get some positive publicity for a change.
I do wonder who is running PR at the major AI companies, as they seem rather insensate to how they are perceived...
The other thing they could be doing is using some of that lobbying money to try to reform copyright law to allow them to release the scans that are still covered.
It would likewise earn goodwill from a lot of people.
The United States can't make copyright weaker than what those agreements require without pulling out of the WTO.
The core of copyright law is about who has the right to redistribute a work. If I buy a print of a photograph, scan it and use that as my desktop image... I can do that. I cannot redistribute the scanned image, and if I was to sell the print later I should delete the scanned image.
Note that format shifting is covered under fair use... which is what training is taking place under. However, that doesn't mean that they can release that format shifted content... nor can then re-release the original work if they are retaining the format shifted content.
Under § 106 of the Copyright Law of the United States, the owner of the copyright in a work has the exclusive right to make copies of that work, unless an exception applies. When considering reformatting media, please note that individuals do not have an automatic right to reformat a work from one format to another. In order to legally convert media, your use must fall into one of the following categories:
you own the copyright in the work,
you have permission from the owner of the copyright, or
you have done a fair use analysis and have determined that fair use applies
They could be, however that would weaken their position as the sole source of knowledge which seems to me is half the purpose of their book destroying initiative.
Sun Microsystems had hardware and a version of Unix that was POSIX-compliant. This passed the government openness/interoperability test in existence and anyone with authority and budget could buy Sun, and then buy approved applications and run them.
NeXT had a superior development environment, but, Steve Jobs didn't spend the 1 or 2 engineer-years it would have taken to make the OS be POSIX-compliant. Thus, in addition to authority and budget, a waiver needed to be signed off on, in order to buy NeXT hardware.
The "three letter agency" or "TLA" portion of the US government, didn't always need off the shelf apps, but they had to build their own; and they didn't have to pass scrutiny over a waiver for something with a national-security implication.
Thus the CIA, DIA, NSA etc. bought both Sun and NeXT hardware.
Seems they have decided they don’t want to create their own architecture, but take the popular architecture and build on it.
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