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Apple sues Rivos, former engineers over alleged trade secret theft

6 points by Bud 4y ago

retskrad 4y ago
Damn. The Apple Silicon team must’ve been the best in the world of the last decade. Intel, AMD, Microsoft all looked at those engineers and successfully lured some of them them away. It’s not a coincidence that the M1 was such a revolutionary chip.
- smoldesu 4y ago
  > The Apple Silicon team must’ve been the best in the world of the last decade. For my money, it's Nvidia. They may have no idea how to ship a software product, and are fairly hostile to the open-source community at large, but quite literally nobody can compete with the performance they're shipping. AMD at the top of their game is still years behind what Nvidia is releasing on a regular basis, it's kinda absurd. The M1 is neat, but most of it's neatness comes from being the first mass-market 5nm PC chip rather than it's technical merits (eg. ARM, big.LITTLE, high-speed memory, etc). Had Apple made the exact same device on 7nm or god forbid 10nm, the buzz surrounding it wouldn't be half as intense as it is today.
  - NonEUCitizen 4y ago
    NVidia knows software -- CUDA is a big part of the reason for its success.
    - jbverschoor 4y ago
      Blackberry doesn't...
    - smoldesu 4y ago
      CUDA is great, but it's still another testament to their poor software shipping practices; it's nearly 4gb when unzipped, which is pretty crazy for a HPC library.
  - jcranberry 4y ago
    If that's the case, then we should see the upcoming Zen 4 chips be competitive technically correct? There's also grace hopper chips but I don't know whether they're really comparable to any of the M1 chips.
    - smoldesu 4y ago
      I can imagine them being fairly competitive in iGPU performance and single-threaded CPU performance (especially if they're shipping with 3D Cache), but power efficiency is going to be a bit of a struggle for AMD until they adopt big.LITTLE. I think the big thing to look out for is the integrated graphics stats though, AMD has been shipping iGPUs that stand neck-and-neck with the M1's offerings for a few years now (the 4800u's Vega graphics were pretty close to the 1050ti-tier numbers we saw on the M1). If AMD is iterating meaningfully on that front, I can foresee a new generation of SOC gaming/video editing machines.
jbverschoor 4y ago
Interestingly, Rivos shares the office building with Blackberry. I guess the name stands for Research In V OS. V as in RISC V, RI as in RIM. https://goo.gl/maps/FjvHGAPJpzLJ6HKV8 https://goo.gl/maps/FjvHGAPJpzLJ6HKV8

6 points by Bud 4y ago

Damn. The Apple Silicon team must’ve been the best in the world of the last decade. Intel, AMD, Microsoft all looked at those engineers and successfully lured some of them them away. It’s not a coincidence that the M1 was such a revolutionary chip.

smoldesu 4y ago
> The Apple Silicon team must’ve been the best in the world of the last decade. For my money, it's Nvidia. They may have no idea how to ship a software product, and are fairly hostile to the open-source community at large, but quite literally nobody can compete with the performance they're shipping. AMD at the top of their game is still years behind what Nvidia is releasing on a regular basis, it's kinda absurd. The M1 is neat, but most of it's neatness comes from being the first mass-market 5nm PC chip rather than it's technical merits (eg. ARM, big.LITTLE, high-speed memory, etc). Had Apple made the exact same device on 7nm or god forbid 10nm, the buzz surrounding it wouldn't be half as intense as it is today.
- NonEUCitizen 4y ago
  NVidia knows software -- CUDA is a big part of the reason for its success.
  - jbverschoor 4y ago
    Blackberry doesn't...
  - smoldesu 4y ago
    CUDA is great, but it's still another testament to their poor software shipping practices; it's nearly 4gb when unzipped, which is pretty crazy for a HPC library.
- jcranberry 4y ago
  If that's the case, then we should see the upcoming Zen 4 chips be competitive technically correct? There's also grace hopper chips but I don't know whether they're really comparable to any of the M1 chips.
  - smoldesu 4y ago
    I can imagine them being fairly competitive in iGPU performance and single-threaded CPU performance (especially if they're shipping with 3D Cache), but power efficiency is going to be a bit of a struggle for AMD until they adopt big.LITTLE. I think the big thing to look out for is the integrated graphics stats though, AMD has been shipping iGPUs that stand neck-and-neck with the M1's offerings for a few years now (the 4800u's Vega graphics were pretty close to the 1050ti-tier numbers we saw on the M1). If AMD is iterating meaningfully on that front, I can foresee a new generation of SOC gaming/video editing machines.

jbverschoor 4y ago

Interestingly, Rivos shares the office building with Blackberry. I guess the name stands for Research In V OS. V as in RISC V, RI as in RIM. https://goo.gl/maps/FjvHGAPJpzLJ6HKV8 https://goo.gl/maps/FjvHGAPJpzLJ6HKV8