• 4 Posts
  • 6 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
cake
Cake day: June 9th, 2023

help-circle
  • ARM offers, in the best case and ideal situation, a vastly more power efficient package that offers pretty good and modern performance. Peak performance with x86 is much higher, but at a very disproportionate cost in power. Something like 2x performance for 20x the power. (Measurements are not exact, direct comparison is impossible and there are many chips of each architecture)

    So for any device with a battery, ARM is generally superior. That’s why basically all mobile phones are ARM and have been for 10+ years.

    The move for windows for arm is largely about the future of laptops and not so much desktop, however, as performance increases for ARM chips and complexity In design improves, there is a good argument for ARM becoming a rough standard even for desktop, over the next 10 years.

    There are similar architectures to ARM that are even more efficient, and open source (cheaper for manufacturers) such as RISC-V, that offer even more promise in the very long term, but they are much much much earlier in development. The first RISC-V chips that are actually for users are just now hitting the market.




  • Apple. Not the most evil, for certain, but they have the highest percentage of high level business choices that piss me off. Just so antithetical to my philosophy and consumer preferences. All closed, all hyper controlled, low customization, anti-repairable.

    Do it their way or go fuck yourself. Something break? Fuck you, it’s your fault, buy another one. Want to play games on their very capable hardware? Grow up, no compatibility. Want to make their OS work on other machines? How dare you. Thief.


  • The only thing happening in the industry is the same thing happening in every industry and most of the first world:

    The wealthy owners and executive leader roles have learned that COVID, COVID supply lines, interest rates, ‘consumer sentiment’, and inflation, are all very easy scapegoats that both the public and investors will easily buy as reasons for lowering product quality and availability, while also firing employees, squeezing the non-fired ones to death, and raising prices. This has lead to almost 2 straight years of corporations showing record profits (even adjusting for the inflation that they are largely responsible for in the first place).

    This downward spiral will continue until some force with nearly as much power pushes back.

    This is typically and ideally a representative government in the form of regulation or taxation. But the US government has suffered decades of regulatory capture and congressional gridlock.

    So the only other potential option is a large amount of highly populated unions. Which have to fight against nearly 100 years of media and political demonization and nearly 150 years of ‘american independent attitude’.

    The perfect modern system has all 3 parties; unions, government, and corporations, equally strong and antagonistic. Just as the perfect modern government would have the executive, legislative, and judicial branches equally strong and antagonistic. Neither could be much farther from the case here.

    Stronger bigger unions. Weaker smaller corporations. And a government that actually functions. All are necessary to fix our current shit show.