There are a lot of little cores in phones doing little core things. Having a first rate design team experienced in an ISA that is royalty free probably makes sense. They'll be able to expand the use of RISCV up the value chain ver time.
Buying a team that's already working on RISCV also reduces the chances of ARM lawyers getting involved.
Why would you acquire massive out-of-order super fast CPU team if you wanted a bunch of small cores. There are much cheaper teams and cores you could use for that.
Sure but there are teams that work on radios and modems that likely could be acquired and not sure Qualcomm needs that. RISC-V isn't so different that you need to acquire a team.
Ventana is a company founded and build around a team to do massive ultra wide chips for data-center, and their focus was not efficiency primary. The kinds of chips they build are just not the right fit. Moving all that team over to something on the literal other end of the spectrum and dropping their existing products and costumers seems a bit silly.
The neo cloud providers, especially those outside the US, with dubious financial backing, that are buying Nvidia chips as if they were an appreciating asset, kind of like being a bitcoin treasury, will be tempted to create some income in ways that break sanctions.
Think of everyone. Unless your roboots are weak as a kitten, they are a danger to humans if allowed to be close. Robots that are sold for real money to do real work don't walk around and are strong enough to crush a human like a bug. Or if they're built for dexterity, their hands aren't human-like. Zero surgical robots have human-like hands, and for very good reasons.
Can all the extremely smart people developing humanoid robots be wrong? Wrong question: can all of the investors in those companies be wrong? Hell to the yes.
It's like how lots of species evolve into crabs, or crab like things. Instead of dying out evolutionarily, failed giants like IBM evolve into Computer Associates.
On consulting engagements, 0% of the time are Jira and git provisioned correctly for an outside consultant. I used to be appalled at being paid for two or three days of waiting for the IT guy to fix this. Now I use the time to find cleaning supplies and deep clean my cubicle and chair. People do look at me funny, but I feel better not just sitting there reading.
Don't underestimate the extent to which this is bothrsome to Elon. Elon went to great length to do a financially dubious deal in which investor-backed X.ai paid full price for Twitter. Rolling Twitter into an AI bubble valuation company saved Twitter investors from having to admit their investments were losing bets. You would think X.ai investors would be displeased. But everybody's looking real good on paper. Nobody wants to be reminded what a lousy deal the Twitter LBO was, especially when AI valuations look a bit vulnerable.
Given what the fine is for, violating transparency rules, I think that there has to be some pretty important skeletons in this particular closet for it to be a hill worth fighing over.
Mixed metaphors aside, Musk doing this for a good reason of course assumes Musk understands X.com's skeletons better than he understands Diablo's gameplay.
Energy, cooling, and how much of the building you're taking up do matter. They matter less and in a more manageable way for hyperscalers that have a long established resource management practice in lots of big data centers because they can phase in new technologies as they phase out the old. But it's a lot more daunting to think about building a data center big enough to compete with one full of Blackwell systems there are more than 10 times more performant per watt and per square foot.
The mask shops at TSMC and Samsung kind of are a dark art. It's one of the interesting things about the contract manufacturing business in chips. It's not just a matter of having access to state of the art equipment.
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