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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 13th, 2023

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  • The business strategy decisions behind CPU fab is really interesting over the past 15 years.

    AMD made a budget clone of Intel two decades ago. Then Intel made a misstep and released Northwood Pentium 4. AMD used less power and was faster. And AMD decided to go with DDR memory, while Intel went RDRAM. Then AMD was king when they went AMDx86-64 for 64 bit and Intel went Itanium.

    Then AMD made a huge miscalculation on the future of multicore computing and designed Bulldozer, while Intel got their shit together and went down the hyperthreading route and released CORE/Core2/Core2Duo chips. And Intel was king for a decade.

    I don’t know the exact timing, but AMD needed cash and sold their fabs to raise money, which became TSMC GlobalFoundries, sorry. GF learned how to make stuff small since smartphones became a huge market. Then AMD let an engineer run the company and she invested in the Zen architecture, which could be made by GF with their lessons from the mobile world.

    This is my take. By AMD turning GF loose, GF could date other people work on mobile projects, which helped them learn.

    It’s a side note now, but Intel hung on to their fabs and lagged behind GF. AMD let their fab go and benefitted from it. EDIT: I had some facts wrong. It’s possible Intel fabs are ahead of GF.

    As a side note, Intel did try fairly hard to get into mobile like GF. They had the Atom chips and went for tablet, Ultrabook, netbook, and mobile. I had an ASUS Android phone with an Intel SOC. So it’s not like they ignored mobile, but it didn’t benefit them as much as TSMC.



  • There are methodical ways of valuating a private (and public) company. Some are pessimistic and some are wildly optimistic. Your can legally use whichever one you want, only you must only use that valuation method for everything. It’s illegal to value the company low for taxes and high for loan collateral. And if you sell it, you can owe back taxes if your valuation was off (sale price is the new valuation).

    This is overly-simplified US accounting rules (from finance class 10 years ago)





  • Almost a decade ago that was true. I use budget Android phones, and Brave was the only ad-blocking browser I could use. Firefox with ad-blocking plugins was slower than Chrome with ads. Brave was chromium based and was by far the most responsive way to browse the web.

    Firefox got their act together and now the Android version is great. And the plugins work well. Brave began substituting some site ads for their own ads, if I remember correctly. You’d see fewer ads, but Brave was getting some money to let a few through.



  • It’s not nearly as common today, but occasionally someone will still make a comment about global warming and scientists being wrong. And I’ll get to say, “yes, they were wrong. Average temperature is increasing faster than the initial forecasts.” IPCC 2018 report didn’t look the greatest, and it included effects of a carbon sequestering process that hasn’t been invented yet.

    At this point, we know the world will look different in 50 years (where water is, where crops are grown, where floodplains are). Avoiding major changes is now impossible. BUT, it’s a continuum. We still have control over it being a new struggle to overcome vs a major catastrophe.

    I was reading lots of buzz about the IPCC report and had an opportunity to visit a glacier in Alberta. On the hike to the glacier, they had signs showing where the glacier was over the years. At first, there would be a sign saying “1890” and 100 meters farther, a sign reading “1920”. Then it was “1940” and a hundred meters away “1960”. Then it became “2004” and 100 meters away “2008”. I forget the exact spacing, but it was very obvious that the glacier is melting at an accelerating rate. That plus the IPCC report was my realization that climate change is happening, and we’ve passed the period where it’s only observable on instruments. Most people are entering into the phase where it has real effects on our daily lives.