Posted by elorant 13 hours ago
How long before China develops indigenous EUV capability?
There has been major increase in demand for housing and supply cannot be built fast enough to match. Its turned most of the island into a construction site so rampant that I made an online tracker for urban planning permits so folks can get ahead on knowing whats going on around them.
Idk if you have any wisdom but there's no creative solutionising happening, just the rich able to buy whatever property they want causing prices to rise which is pricing out the middle class, causing a whole lot of grief and downstream issues (such as plummeting fertility rate because homes are too expensive).
Is there a magic toggle we missed to unlock this creativity or am I being realistic by being skeptical that limiting important resources just leads to harsher inequality?
Creativity has been unlocked but it's not the magic kind, it's the rather mundane Robber Barron kind, where the robbers occupy the sources and hoard a bunch of goods to resell or rent at higher profits. It's true for housing, GPUs, RAM, etc. [1]
[1] Microsoft CEO says the company doesn't have enough electricity to install all the AI GPUs in its inventory - 'you may actually have a bunch of chips sitting in inventory that I can’t plug in'
https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/artificial-intell...
Funny you mention mercury tower. Thats a rich person's idea of what good housing is... which is way over the price any middle or even upper class person can afford. It isn't affordable housing, it's a parking lot for excess liquidity.
For what its worth it's the raising of property height limits that helped kick off a lot of the construction boom. One could argue the situation was better when the restrictions were bigger.
What I actually see, living in one of those metro regions that is land-constrained, is very little infill development and actually implemented creative thinking, and lots of homelessness and unaffordable homes. Sure, being supply-constrained gets people thinking about infill development and mass transit and densification and walkable neighbors. But there's always a barrier, usually multiple ones, to actually putting that into practice. Instead, you get the obvious effects: the supply of homes is constrained, their price rises to the point where only rich people can afford them, everyone else either goes homeless or moves out of the area. Sometimes, very often, a supply constraint simply means that people do without. Even when there is multi-family infill development, people don't want to live there. Everybody wants their SFH, even though intellectually they know it's unsustainable.
I suspect it's going to be the same here. More expensive CPUs and GPUs are just going to mean more expensive CPUs and GPUs with no real silver lining.
Presumably, higher profits will incentivize other players to enter the market and increase supply, and/or the company earning high profits plows at least some back into R&D to at least create better chips, which can result in eventually lower prices for the previous generation of chips.
This isn’t a possibility with land and land rights, however, so I wouldn’t expect the same dynamics to play out.
Starting a semiconductor company and constructing a few fabs at cutting-edge process nodes takes at least that amount of time, so I'd expect semiconductors to have similar dynamics.
Mama mia, cabrone.
Man, what a cancer. Straight up using the bare TSMC logo here would work just fine.
It's generally very usable util you open firefox and browse a modern website. Chrome/chromium aren't any better.
The issue with old hardware is web browser and web pages, particularly web pages. Modern websites are incredible resource drains, it's unbelievable.
I can easily read documentation from old-school cool websites like https://pubs.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/9699919799/ but anything fancier than that gets the fan wheels spinning...
I would also sumbit that the person who is still using a computer from 2011 would never have bought an i7 in the first place. They’re not going to follow an upgrade path where they say “I had a core i3 in 2011 that is too slow now so I’ll replace it with something that had a 2011 i7 that I couldn’t justify purchasing at the time.” Instead they’re more likely to say “I bought this laptop 15 years ago and I’ve battered the hell out of it and I’ve been frugal and it’s time for a new one,” and when they buy that new one it will also be a very modest configuration.
So the fact that a top of the line processor from 15 years ago is still serviceable is not really all that relevant. It’s going to not even be worth it on power consumption alone if you’re running it 24/7.
In other words, there’s more to a chip than raw performance.
Even if you're a gamer performance on the desktop has eclipsed demand so much that you can play anything on a few years old machine. It used to be way worse in the "olden" days when only 10% of people had a system that was able to play Crysis.
I would love an x86 laptop that can operate at 5W or less, even if it isn't blazing fast. If they can squeeze more performance out of a CPU for the same power budget, why can't they make a CPU with the same capability with less power use?
The CPU alone can operate below 5W:
A laptop running below 5W needs to turn down its storage, RAM, GPU, LAN, WiFi, USB controllers, etc. The OS needs to act more like a smartphone, put everything to sleep, and use consolidated polling and interrupts for async behaviors.
I think this is the real advantage Apple has with their vertical integration. They can play a lot of complementary games between hardware and OS.
ARM faking x86 is probably the way to go for this case.
I guess maybe 35w covers usage plus recharging the battery, so actual consumption is 15w?
The issue with those cpus is that they're pretty much never used in laptops meant to do anything serious. They usually are employed into cheap plastic laptops using ridiculous batteries.
I would really like the form factor of 2011-2013 thinkpads, with the chonky 90WHr battery on the back and the 12" form factor.
With a modern cpu (low tdp and low power draw) that would be unbeatable everyday carry.