My understanding is that electric motors are generally more reliable than piston engines. I'm not sure how that compares to jets (which are also considered generally more reliable than piston engines). Nearly all modern helicopters are jet powered.
Going overseas also carries risk. It could be something as irritating as just cultural or language friction or as bad as a civil disturbance or war breaking out.
Never mind just the quality of workers available for the price you have set as the threshold.
IIRC Motorola couldn't keep up in terms of producing competitive performant designs and lost out to competitors. ARM hasn't fallen into that trap. Then again, empires rise & fall, and the end of something is usually just a matter of time. But in the tech world the "end" is also some after-life embedded in another organization or pivoted to a different direction. For now, ARM is rock solid on a foundation made from shifting sands of eternal tech change.
> For now, ARM is rock solid on a foundation made from shifting sands of eternal tech change.
ARM as an architecture may be on solid ground, but their future as a company may be uncertain given that their IP seems to have been appropriated by the CCP.
ARM and ARM China are separate companies. In software terms, while ARM China may have forked the ARM IP, they're not going to get any commits from upstream and it'll wither on the vine.
On the other hand, there's a global supply chain appetite for cheap products including CPU's. Upstream commits aren't required to dump cheap CPU's on the market or to develop compute intensive businesses around them that undercut the competition on price.
High-end CPUs, hardly. That would require significant design efforts to keep up with ARM's development.
Not that it'd be impossible for China to develop their own strong processor-designing forces, driven commercially or by the state. But so far it seems far from a trivial task.
High end isn't needed. Simply a marginal improvement and CCP comes out ahead. In the performance per watt per cost calculation, the cost factor has no lower bound. Cost can be subsidized to near zero like many other industries under their control.
We're talking about instruction sets with ARM, correct? It's not anywhere near the level of investment as next generation litho tech for a chip foundry?
I don't underestimate the ability to innovate. Stolen tech can be improved just as well as in-house R&D'd tech.
The good news is that intellectual "property" isn't truly rivalrous. If ARM china "steals" ARM ip, ARM is still capable of licensing to it's western clients; as it's unlikely any of them will be licensing from ARM china.
> If ARM china "steals" ARM ip, ARM is still capable of licensing to it's western clients;
If the smartphone market is an indicator, too bad that this will just mean that the majority of OEMs will just buy their chips from ARM china and thus demand for ARM IP will expectedly drop, and meanwhile this IP appropriation will just be used to develop independent design capabilities.
ARM China is independent from ARM, which just happens to have whatever IP it was able to run away with. To compete they're going to have to match ARM, given that nobody is going to write software for their custom fork.
The domestic Chinese market was not able to support homegrown TD-SCDMA without the silicon manufacturing restrictions that now exist for Chinese companies, what makes you think that a company with rapidly outdating chip designs and access only to domestic silicon fabs which are trapped on older 14nm+ processes is going to be able to compete outside of the low end of the budget segment?
Even Intel had trouble surviving on 14nm, hence all the contra-revenue spent to directly subsidize Intel tablets (whether they were $100 HP Stream Windows tablets, or $50 Walmart special Android tablets) to try and not get locked out of that space.
> (...) what makes you think that a company with rapidly outdating chip designs and access only to domestic silicon fabs (...)
Well, maybe the fact that not so long ago it had none of that and it clearly looks like both the company and the political regime aren't having many problems getting their hands on all the missing pieces.
Plenty of people do (they're some of the most beloved chips of all time), but their peak was pre-1990, so most people don't bring them up in discussions like this.
The 68K line was the Itanium of it's time. It overpromised and underdelivered and was crushed by the 286 and 386. Many vendors made machines based on it (Atari ST, Amiga, Mac, Sun Microsystems, Sinclair QL, ...) and all of those vendors either went out of business or transitioned to RISC architectures in a hurry. It was one of the many near death experiences the Mac platform had.
It was more successful than the beautiful losers such as the TMS9900, iAPX 432, i860, NS32000, but it hit the end of track and left everyone in the lurch.
Performance per clock cycle was much better on 68k. I understood that they lost out because the world adopted DOS and DOS run only on x86. Then... consequences. The only surviving platform that used to run on 68k is the Mac, which was a minor player even at the time.
68k were extremely expensive at the time, that's why they lost desktop market to their 80x86 killer. An additional factor was what XT and then AT became an open architecture.
From what I remember, 68k processors were used by PalmPilot starting from the US Robotics days. I wonder if they had any particular power efficiency to make it better for Palm. Either that or I am remembering it wrong.
They are also used in automotive as part of the Coldfire CPU series.
But I think a lot of this usage goes back to the days where embedded CPU families had been a lot more fragmented, and companies usually picked one family of their favorite supplier (based on pricing, fulfilling the use-case, etc) and then just sticked to it due to code not being particularly portable.
Since that time the amount of CPU families that are actually used shrank drastically, and it's a lot more likely that all of those use-cases just pick ARM.
It is easy to stand at a distance and claim that it would be immoral to give booster shots when many countries don't have enough first shots. However, they (WHO) are ignoring the realities of the logistics problems that these countries have in distributing and shipping these vaccines that have stringent storage and utilization requirements. Those countries need to fix their medical distribution systems first to handle the volumes that are really needed for the vaccines that they have access to.
This is well understood and as like the rich and powerful in many places do, thought that the rules and laws do not apply to them and their maid (Parti) was too afraid to report them to the government.
In this case, they thought incorrectly and have been caught, exposed and worse.
However, I doubt that true justice (as in legal punishment of some sort) will ever be meted out to the rich and powerful family.
The key to lawyers and doctors losing their licenses to practice is that they have professional bodies that will police/enforce the rules. However, they also have a monopoly to provide those services.
I suspect corporations don't want limit software engineers to those with licenses only as there would be less of them available and costs of said licensed software engineers would increase.
> I suspect corporations don't want limit software engineers to those with licenses
It comes down to money, which includes liability. I suspect licensing won't ever happen in software unless law suits increase and licensing becomes a deterrent, at which point licensed developers will cost less after factoring for risk assessments. There are all kinds of unintended benefits for everybody that come from limiting negligence, which pays for itself. As a counter argument who benefits most from allowing the hiring and practicing of negligent developers?
