• 5 Posts
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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: October 17th, 2023

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  • At first I thought the goal of chip sanctions on China was to bring them to the negotiating table, negotiate out fair play and go on our way.

    But if instead it keeps going the way it’s going, I wonder if 20 years from now we’re sitting in a split world, where the west has one set of ISAs, fabrication plants etc, and China has another which don’t communicate with each other, since China can’t use any new ARM extensions and eventually all of ARMv9 will be deprecated too.

    I know it’s harder to get past about 5nm without EUV machines, but I wouldn’t really doubt that China putting a national effort into it could eventually get there, even if it puts them some years back for now.

    Is…Is that split world even a goal? Or is that an accidental consequence of neither side getting what they want and a default path no one wanted?


  • Windows got even snappier after I ran I think it was the LeDragoX Win Debloat tool, turned off all the telemetry and bing in the start menu stuff that made simple search slower by adding in networking, and turned on the visual performance profile.

    Miles and miles away from the default macOS “look how smooooth I am” animation now, pretty much as fast as I go. I also set the animation times for macOS all the way down, but some are just in different places.





  • What stands out about these tests to me, apart from Apple Silicon remaining highly impressive, is that AMD in both and Intel at least in multicore are beating the Snapdragon on performance per watt. Many people boil Apple’s efficiency down to an ARM vs x86 thing, but that’s a tiny part of the chip by now, it’s more in Apple’s bespoke architecture around it.

    Here we see AMD even on x86 beating an ARM chip on Perf/watt, Intel on multicore, and Meteor Lake launching within a month will drop power use by 50%. It’s not just or even mostly the ISA, it’s everything else around it that matters more.