If you want your customers to spend supercomputing money, you need to have a way for those customers to explore and learn to leverage your systems without committing a massive spend.
ARM, x86, and CUDA-capable stuff is available off the shelf at Best Buy. This means researchers don't need massive grants or tremendous corporate investment to build proofs of concepts, and it means they can develop in their offices software that can run on bigger iron.
IBM's POWER series is an example of what happens when you don't have this. Minimum spend for the entry-level hardware is orders of magnitude higher than the competition, which means, practically speaking, you're all-in or not at all.
CUDA is also a good example of bringing your product to the users. AMD spent years locking out ROCm behind weird market-segmentation games, and even today if you look at the 'supported' list in the ROCm documentation it only shows a handful of ultra-recent cards. CUDA, meanwhile, happily ran on your ten-year-old laptop, even if it didn't run great.
People need to be able to discover what makes your hardware worth buying.
The implication wasn't to use the raspberry pi toolchain. Just that toolchains are required and are a critical part of developing for new hardware. The Intel/AMD toolchain they will be competing with is even more mature than rpi. And toolchain availability and ease of use makes a huge difference whether you are developing for supercomputers or embedded systems. From the article:
"It uses technology called RISC-V, an open computing standard that competes with Arm Ltd and is increasingly being used by chip giants such as Nvidia and Broadcom."
So the fact that rpi tooling is better than the imitators and it has maintained a significant market share lead is relevant. Market share isn't just about performance and price. It's also about ease of use and network effects that come with popularity.
The other company I can think of focusing on F64 is Fujitsu with its A64FX processor. This is an ARM64 with really meaty SIMD to get 3TFLOP of FP64.
I guess it it hard to compare chip for chip but the question is, if you are building a supercomputer (and we ignore pressure to buy sovereign) then which is better bang for the buck on representative workloads?
All processors are inherently behind. First research comes out or standards are made, then much time later silicon is fabbed. For example, pcie gen 6 was ratified years ago, but there's nothing I've seen that uses it. Maybe you could argue that their silicon is behind others' but it's all about what their market is and what their customers are demanding.
Also, in the case of the kind of chips we are talking about, the cadence is probably tied to contracts and projects. If the government built supercomputers more often then the chips would get updated more quickly?
Talking of farming, are there any numbers on if AcreTrader or other similar companies has been buying up farmland, and if so how JD Vance’s investment has been performing?
Double-plus-good upvote for your very good question. Tanking smaller players and putting more assets within the grap of current & future American Oligarchs seems to be the underlying playbook right now. This is 1991 Russia.
Fannie Mae and Freddy Mac going public? An opportunity for billionaires to own the mortgages that will default as the economy [intentionally] continues to tank leading to defaults and transfer of the homes and properties backing the mortgages as collateral to the oligarch class.
But at the same time they are fielding multiple new stealth aircraft and their jets and missiles outperformed western aircraft in the recent Pakistan India flare-up.
Roughly speaking, an aircraft must fulfill a certain amount of economy (cheap, low cost to operate), safety, and performance.
If you compromise on safety, you get something that is still suitable for the military. If you don't care about economics you can participate in the space race.
But for commercial air travel, you don't have the luxury to pick just two; a competitive commercial airliner has to perform exceedingly well in all three regards.
If you're an airline using expensive aircraft you will go bankrupt. If your aircraft is too slow then your competitors will eat your lunch, and if you have a reputation of being unsafe then your customers will run away or the government will pull the plug (likely both).
IMHO affordable commercial air travel is one of the biggest marvels of 20th century engineering.
China currently can't make the high-performance, efficient, long-life jet engines that US & Europe make. The commercial market is heavily cost-sensitive, so they can't compete there currently as a result.
This doesn't matter so much for military purposes: they can easily eat the cost of a higher maintenance and replacement schedule on a smaller number of military jets with fewer hours on them.
This gives them more iteration cycles, speeding their building up of experience.
They're catching up. Industrial espionage will help them along too, but not as much as the experience from engineering their own designs.
OP: "So you'd think they'd be able to build a commercial jet liner, no?"
Sigh, the OP chucked out a casual insult at the Chinese because - unlike the USA and EU - their society is unable to (to date) build an international airliner business.
I deftly pointed out that the USA - despite is historical achievements - cannot build a high speed rail network and industry.
It’s would be a result of where the money and resources go, I assume. Apparently they haven’t felt a need to manufacture their own commercial jets but they did for military jets. They definitely feel the need in the case of chips.
A handful of billionaires are in direct control of the West’s training/alignment. Then there are some sheiks in the Middle East and the communist party in China…
This is a tangent but i personally dream of the EU doing a university led effort to make a benign AI. Because it is the last crumbling bastion of liberal democracy.
Not sure that benign or alignment is that easy. I mean, as frequent authors have pointed out - I have a very much benign attitude towards ants. I don’t step on them if I can help it and I don’t maliciously go out to pour boiling water on them. But if I’m building a house or working in my garden I’m likely gonna kill tens of thousands of them. Same applies to AGI. If we’re just ants, we’re gonna get squashed.
If an AI can live-learn (so like we do at night, fine tuning our neural net weights etc), which we need to get anywhere from here (just no-one knows how yet), there is nothing currently that can make that alignment stick; humans drop out of alignment all the time for self preservation or just 'everyone does it, so...'.
From the outside the US has shifted to a oligarchy where money buys elections. Europe's democracies are certainly straining. Primarily from its news companies being minimized by Google and Facebook (and now TikTok) which have extracted most ad revenues on which news depended.
The higher spender won twice and lost twice. 2016 is particularly striking - Clinton outspent Trump by roughly $200-450 million depending on how you count it, yet lost.
Why are Democrat candidates consistently outspending Republican candidates? I thought the Republicans were the party for rich? And thus should be getting more money from the rich.
> I thought the Republicans were the party for rich?
Isn't it the other way around? I mean, in the Internet, it's the democratic side that's constantly complaining about how stupid, uneducated rednecks elected dictator Trump.
This story doesn’t really gel with my understanding as an EV owner in Europe.
The post says that Tesla hold their value better than Chinese newcomers but that absolutely isn’t the prices I’m seeing in Europe.
In Europe Tesla resale value has plummeted due to brand destruction. Tesla was super popular when they launched as the first realistic EV to hit the main time. But they quickly got a poor reputation for build quality and never delivering on self-driving, and that was before the political damage the owner did which seems never recoverable in at least a generation.
Meanwhile comparable Chinese entrants are so new they aren’t yet at the 3 year mark where fleets sell off to second hand market.
Another interesting thing about non-Tesla EVs is that there aren’t a lot being resold; if you got one, you likely hang onto it. Personally I’ve just not yet let go of my Kia EV6 even though it sailed past the normal trade in point recently.
Tesla mostly focused on the American market anyway. In my understanding there are a lot of facilities for Tesla's that we don't have in Europe like the program where you can buy a refurbished Tesla from Tesla.
Additionally there is a political drive to not trust Chinese manufactured products so those EV's are probably harder to maintain, get support for and in general it is socially considered less status to have a Chinese EV instead of a Tesla. Where in Europe this cultural drive is not as present in Tesla vs Chinese . In my experience in the EU the drive is more about is it EV and the Chinese EV's often offer more features/value for less money.
> Tesla mostly focused on the American market anyway.
Not true at all. In 2023, before the brand became toxic, they sold more cars outside the US than internally. They were a huge percentage of the market in parts of Europe, especially Scandinavia. There was a lot of noise about the manufacturing centres in Germany as Tesla fought around labour laws and traditions, too.
They also bet big on China where they almost got to the point where they were selling as many cars as in the USA. Elon fell hook, line, and sinker for the classic Chinese government move to invite them into the market and then steal the tech and flood the market with domestic brands (this is not to say that they haven't improved on it, though).
Focusing on one market, by for instance releasing new programs in that market first does not mean you can't outsell in another market (Europe or Asia). It just means that those markets will follow your main market. USA is the home country of Tesla after all.
Also didn't Elon famously open up the Tesla patents for other companies to use?
I assume the Chinese EV manufactures where not looking the other way as other manufacturer probably also shouldn't have.
Not all the tech is the same, but I wasn't specifically referring to the batteries (I did say the Chinese have innovated themselves).
But it's an open secret that there was a lot of "turnover" at the Chinese Tesla plants, both shortly after building and operating them, as the Chinese took a lot of the manufacturing processes, tech, etc. And yeah, it also wasn't just Tesla - but it did allow the Chinese to catch up (and eventually surpass) them. The fact that there was so much direct and indirect supports from the government was a huge benefit. This has happened multiple times (French fell for it with high speed rail, Germans and to a lesser extent Americans with cars, Apple/Koreans with mobile phones, everybody with microelectronics, etc).
To be fair, every developing industrial nation has done this, including the US in the late 19th century, the Asian "tigers" during the 80s/90s and others.
Personally, I don't find anything particularly immoral or unethical about the Chinese actions. Respect for intellectual property regimes only applies with nations that have IP to protect.
Note that China has become more protective of IP rights as they advance to be a major player in the initial development of technology rather than "just" the manufacturing hub.
Right, when the Europeans say the tax is paid as you earn and the authorities let you file differences free and easily, they mean the vast majority of tax payers. It is rare to be the exception.
Whereas I guess American Exceptionism (tm) means you all have to pay a rent seeking company to file taxes…?
In Ireland, and I think many other countries, if you have under 6k non-employment income, it’s ~trivial; you fill in a form on the website. It only gets complicated over that (though you would still typically do it all online; the form just gets _a lot_ scarier)
As an European with multiple sources of income, all that boils down to is literally excel style fill in the boxes deal. There's even free tools that can handle the simple formulas if I don't trust my calculator enough. 1 hour a year at absolute worst; definitely no space for a finacial parasite to latch onto.
You have a very simple tax situation. Many people do not.
In the US, if you just have wage/salary income and an investment account, and you lived the entire year in one state, your taxes are also very simple. You can fill everything out yourself in one evening, or pay $100 to do it with tax preparation software.
But things can rapidly get complicated. Did you move from one state to another during the year? Do you live in one state but work for an employer in a different state? Are there any credits or deductions you're eligible for? Or god forbid you live abroad, at which point you're dealing with double-taxation treaties and the like.
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