this post was submitted on 03 Aug 2024
372 points (97.7% liked)

Technology

60061 readers
2965 users here now

This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.


Our Rules


  1. Follow the lemmy.world rules.
  2. Only tech related content.
  3. Be excellent to each another!
  4. Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
  5. Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
  6. Politics threads may be removed.
  7. No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
  8. Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
  9. Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed

Approved Bots


founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
top 50 comments
sorted by: hot top controversial new old
[–] Armok_the_bunny 239 points 4 months ago (15 children)

The marketing and advertising and sales teams took over management from the engineering team, and decided to cut all the corners. It's a classic tale at this point, same thing happened to Boeing and Apple and Google and etc. It's why everything sucks nowadays.

[–] Ghostalmedia 75 points 4 months ago (8 children)

There might be things that Apple is stagnating on, but silicon and ARM CPU transitions definitely ain’t one of those things. The rest of the industry is scrambling to catch up with them asap.

[–] db2 34 points 4 months ago (1 children)

Just ask Apple, they'll tell you so.

[–] Ghostalmedia 38 points 4 months ago (3 children)

Don’t trust any silicon manufacturer’s marketing department. Let the processing and battery life benchmarks and real world tests do the talking.

[–] [email protected] 49 points 4 months ago (8 children)

AMD's CPUs are faster and more power efficient on the same process node. (i.e. 5nm vs 5nm)

https://www.cpu-monkey.com/en/compare_cpu-amd_ryzen_ai_9_hx_370-vs-apple_m2

Apple just has a big budget to buy out TSMC process nodes a generation early, their designs and architectures aren't actually faster or more power efficient than AMD's x86 cpus.

https://www.macrumors.com/2023/02/22/apple-secures-tsmc-3nm-chips/

[–] herrvogel 10 points 4 months ago (2 children)

Am I blind? I don't see any information in there to draw any conclusions about power efficiency. The little information that I do see actually seems to imply the apple silicon chip would be more efficient. Help me out please?

[–] [email protected] 12 points 4 months ago (2 children)

Both chips are 20w class cpus, but the AMD cpu is much faster.

Apple CPUs don't report wattage, so it's a bit tricky to measure actual power consumption, but I can't imagine the AMD cpu uses 50% more power under load.

The Apple CPU might score some wins for idle power consumption though, considering the optimizations in MacOS, and the focus on power consumption across the whole system design.

load more comments (2 replies)
[–] [email protected] 7 points 4 months ago (1 children)

24 threads at 2.00 GHz vs. 8 threads at 0.66 GHz with a 40% difference in TDP. The AMD chip may draw more power, but has much higher performance. Simplifying things, it can perform 9x the operations as the Apple silicon for only 1.4x the power draw.

[–] herrvogel 17 points 4 months ago (1 children)

That... is very naive and inaccurate approach. You can't use frequency and core counts to guesstimate performance even when the chips in question are closely related. They're utterly useless when it's two very different chips that don't even use the same instruction set. But anyway, there are benchmarks in that page and they clearly show that the amd chip is clearly not performing 9x the operations. It is obviously more powerful, though not nearly by that much.

I desperately want something to start competing with apple silicon, believe me, but knowing just how good the apple silicon chips are from first hand experience, forgive me if I am a little bit sceptical about a little writeup that only deals in benchmark results and official specs. I want to read about how it performs in real life scenarios because I also know from experience that benchmark results and official specs alone don't always give an accurate picture of how the thing performs in real life.

load more comments (1 replies)
[–] pycorax 7 points 4 months ago (3 children)

Iirc the die area for Apple's chips are also a lot larger and that's expensive. It's a lot easier for them to tank that cost because they are building them for themselves rather than selling them to vendors who manufacture products like AMD.

load more comments (3 replies)
load more comments (6 replies)
load more comments (2 replies)
load more comments (7 replies)
[–] nifty 13 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago) (1 children)

It’s not just the big tech, some startups are the same because they’re vying for VC cash and that’s the best way to do it

load more comments (1 replies)
[–] [email protected] 11 points 4 months ago

Microsoft is on the same path, yay!

load more comments (12 replies)
[–] [email protected] 96 points 4 months ago (1 children)

Probably bureaucracy. Also an inability to pivot even when things make no sense. Everything is a giant freight train that has very little ability to change direction or stop.

Oh and of course a healthy taste of not being transparent or honest.

Source: I used to work there years ago.

[–] [email protected] 26 points 4 months ago

This happens easily for big successful organisations. Over decades a strong culture aligned with how they succeed forms. Once the market changes requiring a culture change, a seemingly invincible company suddenly stumbles. They simply can’t respond even if they what they should change.

Ex. Rolls Royce CEO stated this phenomenon well: culture eats strategy for breakfast.

[–] Hugin 84 points 4 months ago (4 children)

The company had always been run by engineers that came up from chip fab. Then they fired both the CEO and the head of fab for sexual harassment.

Then they make the CFO with a MBA the new CEO. A year or two latter and chip design is having problems and fab is falling behind.

[–] kamenlady 45 points 4 months ago (1 children)

Ah, similar to Boeing's problems, minus the sexual harassment.

[–] [email protected] 32 points 4 months ago (2 children)

And ~~assassinations~~ suicides

load more comments (2 replies)
[–] Angry_Autist 32 points 4 months ago (6 children)

The more I see MBAs taking c-suite positions, the quicker the company collapses. Seen it more than six times now in person, and countless in the news.

I wonder how long before they notice.

[–] [email protected] 16 points 4 months ago

The people who make those decisions are insulated from the consequence

Forcing them to take responsibility is the only solution

[–] sudo42 8 points 4 months ago

Wall St destroys yet another company through sheer greed. Film at 11.

load more comments (4 replies)
[–] juice702 16 points 4 months ago

Sounds similar to what happened to Boeing. Once ran by engineers now ran by people suckling the teat of board members. Quality goes down, profits go up for these assholes.

[–] Buffalox 12 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago)

Intel fell behind on chip manufacturing while the CEO came from that department.
Allegedly because their strategy was too ambitious at the time, or at least that was the official excuse at the time.
So your summary is not entirely fair.

[–] [email protected] 59 points 4 months ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 19 points 4 months ago

Yeah they had an accountant for a CEO that didn’t understand R&D, so they fell behind.

[–] TheFeatureCreature 48 points 4 months ago

Large amounts of greed, corruption, and complacency.

[–] JPSound 37 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago)

🌈 shareholders 🌈

[–] [email protected] 36 points 4 months ago (1 children)

Intel was once a Silicon Valley leader.

Well, any specific stuff that Intel has done recently aside, Silicon Valley has been more about software, not hardware, for quite some years.

Intel is a hardware company.

load more comments (1 replies)
[–] ohlaph 30 points 4 months ago (1 children)

Poor practices. They focused on shorr term gains over quality.

[–] essteeyou 33 points 4 months ago

Their solution? Lay off a bunch of people to reduce costs and increase profitability immediately.

[–] Magister 25 points 4 months ago
[–] [email protected] 17 points 4 months ago
[–] [email protected] 16 points 4 months ago (1 children)

Anything they go after today is 18-24 months out. Chasing after AI would be pretty risky. Desktops and laptops are moving to ARM and RISC-V. Their best bet is to go after whatever enterprise data centers will need a couple of years from now.

If I were laying bets, it would be to go after power and heat efficiency. Like, hard. Take their time out in the wilderness, then come back with chips that save the planet from climate collapse.

load more comments (1 replies)
[–] [email protected] 13 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago) (1 children)

Just watched a video on the failure of windows phone, they went from 34% market share ( world top 1) to 1.4% in 5 years. Then they recover a little bit to 3%, just to drop to 0.4% 5 year later and then completely dead 2 years after.

[–] EncryptKeeper 30 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago) (2 children)

Never at any point in time did the Windows phone reach 34% market share or anywhere near #1. I’m not even sure Windows phone had a bigger share than BlackBerry at the time.

Their peak market share was 3.4%, not 34%. It failed because virtually nobody bought them.

[–] [email protected] 13 points 4 months ago (1 children)

The only piece of Microsoft tech that I actually loved, so sad it flopped. I had two Windows phones, beautiful devices. Gorgeous screens, great design, the Windows 8 tiles unironically were fantastic on mobile.

Everything was butter smooth, I never had them crash or freeze up. Zeiss cameras, they took great pictures.

But there were almost no apps for them. It was basically the Microsoft mobile office suite, and a few random ports like Evernote. Nobody bought them because there was zero ecosystem for them.

load more comments (1 replies)
[–] [email protected] 9 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago) (1 children)

It was 34% in 2006, Window phone 6 is still "windows phone". It was BEFORE the iPhone. Windows phone doesn't mean just the Lumia.

https://youtu.be/SNEF1ujd2Mc

[–] EncryptKeeper 17 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago)

That’s not “Windows phone” that’s “Windows mobile”, the precursor to Windows Phone, which didn’t release until 2010.

Shifting to Windows Mobile now, in 2006, Windows Mobile 6 had only about 10% market share, behind both Palm OS and Symbian, the latter of which held a whopping 60%. I looked further back in time and I do see that Windows Mobile had a 34% market share in 2001, however it was again dwarfed by PalmOS. It’s also worth it to note that that 34% wasn’t comprised mainly of cellphones, but rather barcode scanning guns in warehouses and logistics, because you could make custom applications for them with relative ease. There are still warehouses today that use those old windows mobile scanner guns.

[–] Ghostalmedia 12 points 4 months ago

Going through a period of little competition in a space seems to do that to just about every company in that position.

[–] [email protected] 11 points 4 months ago (3 children)

Comfort zone and believed in Microsoft's talk that the market of the future would be desktops, but Apple came and said: Not today

Apple killed Blackberry and Intel

[–] [email protected] 16 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago) (1 children)

You’re next republican-lead Qualcomm

load more comments (1 replies)
load more comments (2 replies)
load more comments
view more: next ›