That company's GPU was used in a few of Intel's early Atom SoCs, and infamously lacked documentation and source code, unlike other Intel GPUs of the time. It was also dismal in performance and efficiency, lacking a blitter and other acceleration for 2D unlike nearly all PC GPUs since the original 8514.
Ironically the source and docs were leaked many years ago, causing a lot of commotion in the OSS community; and more relevantly to this article, a Chinese underground forums community managed to make a decent usable driver for Windows XP, something neither Intel nor Imagination had.
Imagination IP was also the core of apple's initial mobile GPU, which apple initially modified slightly for their products, before eventually replacing them after years of access. They were not terrible designs.
Imagination technologies reminds me of Luc Verhaegen's attempt at creating opensource drivers for PowerVR GPUs... If it weren't for the official effort by imagination technologies to create an opensource driver for Vulkan I would have considered imagination technologies to be one of the worst GPU companies.
It's been quite a few years now, I tried looking for it again with no success (Google's increasingly worse results don't help either) and I'd have to dig out the Atom box to check what the files were called...
There were plenty of these tiny Atom PCs sold cheaply and they ended up in lots of semi-embedded applications, which might be why the community was so motivated to make a driver, and possibly even the initial source leak was because of that.
It was a design intended for 3D acceleration, and they probably thought the additional hardware blitter wasn't necessary in a space and power-constrained mobile application where these cores mostly ended up.
Supposedly because at the time of the acquisition, "Canyon Bridge was licensed and regulated by US law." but "Since then it has moved its headquarters to the Cayman Islands and as such is no longer a US-controlled entity." [1]. Although that sounds pretty flimsy. I suspect, given it happened in 2017, it was judged politically unwise to block a Chinese state investor when the UK was looking to increase global trade post-Brexit.
Eventually it seems the UK gov woke up and blocked a Chinese attempt to take over the board and move the company to China[2]. Now it seems there's a plan to IPO again in London or Nasdaq[3] so the Chinese owners can exit.
IMG wasn't considered important enough to be a strategic asset unlike ARM. Remember IMG was on the verge of bankruptcy or collapse. Apple, representing 70% of their revenue will somehow no longer be paying them a single penny. They had lots of baggage that were not part of Graphics IP from Wireless, MIPS, to IoT.
ARM had Mali. So on the surface UK isn't really losing any strategic asset.
And you have to remember, this was in 2016 / 2017. The world still doesn't know a damn thing about China. ( or may be they do but they turned a blind eye to it )
Even if relies on TSMC and IP-blocks purchased from other companies - it is still cool that a 2-year old startup can create graphics card that appears to compete with what giants like NVDIA and AMD are offering.
If available and priced attractively I would very much buy this card. I never buy top of the line graphics cards but the equivalent of 1060-1070 works just fine for my needs. And I bet that there are enough people all over the world in the same position. I think it is a competition assuming they do not fold.
Also it is a startup. If they do not go down for one or another reason nothing precludes them from going higher end given a time and favorable market.
My guess from this press release is it'll be heavily focused on the China domestic market, since there are a lot of MIC 2025 related subsidies/incentives for that. Note the list of compatibility with various domestic architectures and software.
i'm thinking the same. the game that i play now is either wow or hearthstone which isn't very graphic intensive. i think this card if price cheaply can be use for casual gaming and workstation (maybe?)
Something people forget is that it is a dedicated graphics card. Unless someone is going to implement high bandwidth system memory like Apple did, that Chinese graphics card will run circles around most integrated GPUs. The competition is horrendously expensive because of the high demand for GPUs. There is enough room for a niche GPU manufacturer nowadays.
It would run most of the games just fine. Sure heavy games would not be able to run at the highest settings but then again not that many people would care. And the ones who do can always splurge some megabucks on high end nVidia / AMD.
It doesn't matter. You could always still buy everything in Iran regardless of what's sanctioned. Engineering firms were actually a bit upset because even though they wanted to buy licenses for e.g. STAAD Pro, they were forced to use pirated copies.
At the end of the day the sanctions will do nothing but increases prices. The goods themselves won't stop flowing.
The entire GPU IP is licensed from Imagination. This is like Google making their Tensor phone chip and claiming it's novel when in reality everything is licensed from someone else and all they had to do was integrate it together.
When the vast majority of people use a 1060, then a new card with roughly that performance, at an attractive price point, will sell. The reason is simply that, apparently, a 1060 is enough.
You're being misled by all the voices who only ever talk about the fastest and most modern stuff. Reality is that the vast majority of people aren't anywhere near the high-end. That's the market.
MTT S60 has a 6-pin power connector so it's safe to assume that power consumption is under 150W (75W PCI + 75W connector). That would be on par with GTX 1070 but hopefully it's lower due to 12nm vs 16nm process.
Ya know, my first thought was Chuck Moore, inventor of Forth, and I wondered whether the GPU used Forth cores (stack oriented) somehow. It wasn't THAT crazy a thought, given the GreenArrays GA144 chip from Chuck Moore's company, with 144 tiny Forth cores running asynchronously. Moore threads, if you will.
You cannot use the progress in manufactoring technology if you insists on creating a single (or few) threaded computer like an x86-machine. To really progress computing your have to go massively parallel.
In other words. Moore needs to quit his job at Intel, and go and make GPUs or AI-co processors, if he still wants to see computing power double every 18 months.
Yes it is, the name is a stereotypical western name, which alone is preferred choice for Chinese brands hoping for the most hype and recognition, and the phrase Moore's law is pretty wellknown in China for geopolitial reasons, tho most of the people don't know and don't care about it's backstory.
Even when he was working, the majority of his output was as a naturalized American Citizen, on American soil. Tesla is as classicly an American name as Edison, Eisenhower, Truman or Monroe - It's an immigrant name from a country of immigrants.
In case anyone reading this is interested in specific historical information the origins of the listed last names in order are English, German, English, and Gaelic
Here's a census of immigrants roughly around the time Tesla was working in the U.S. (1910's), showing the relative percentages from each region (a point of comparison which is not even accounting for the ones who came from the above regions before this time): https://www2.census.gov/library/publications/decennial/1910/...
It's good to read the facts of history rather than hear trite historical narratives. In this case, it seems inbound immigrants from the Balkans made up just 1.6% in the 1910's.
I'm pretty sure the intention of saying a last name is "all-American" is to comment on the relative statistical frequency of it in a population at any given time, since that is a name people in another country (like China) would associate and know because of their likelihood of seeing it. But again, a lot of people discuss historical narratives rather than historical facts, so the above poster is not uncommon in continuing that tradition of pushing a trendy idea rather than discussing facts and information.
That document (that you've poorly linked[1]) puts the percentage of British immigrants at 9%, Irish at 10%, of German at 18%, and of French at 0.9%. All those numbers are totally meaningless. The population of the US as a whole that was foreign born was 14.7%. That too, is meaningless. In the 1890 census, closest to when Tesla was naturalized, it was also around 15% [2].
I don't know what narrative you're trying to debunk, because 15% year by year for years and years is high. The UK, which is a top destination for immigration, has never been close to that number until very recently. [3] But really, what I actually find weird is that you're trying to debunk some narrative.
What do you think is the relative statistical frequency of Balkan last names of American citizens relative to one's of English, Germanic, and Gaelic origin, and why?
And how do you think that ties in with the idea of a name being inherently more likely to be known by foreign groups and associated with that country?
I guess I understand your point though, that Tesla himself is very much an "American" and therefore Tesla is a household American name. Seems we've derailed very far though from the original discussion.
If it performs similar to a 1060 or 1070 gpu from MVIDIA and has an appropriate price point people who want to create a budget gaming computer would be an appropriate target market.
Who would buy an Nvidia alternative with same price and same specs if it is known that Nvidia has decades of more experience in writing drivers targeting specific games.
Your argument is nonsense. Of all the possible ones, you had to pick this one?
"Who would buy [new thing from new people], when there's [thing] from old people with experience?"
If everyone thought that way, there'd be no progress. Why did people buy IBM-PC clones? Why did people buy AMD chips, instead of intel? Why did Microsoft release the xbox, when there's Nintendo and Sony?
But sure, it's about "same price and same specs". That's obviously not going to happen, though!
So what if they sell a low-end GPU at an actually reasonable price? The market's ripe for the taking! Low-end cards are utter trash and a rip-off, because there's no incentive for the big ones to produce any good ones!
And what does it matter anyway, that they have experience writing drivers for specific games? The vast majority of games out there do not fall into this category ... and that's hundreds of millions of games.
The vast majority of people don't play the latest and greatest, also not on "the best possible graphics settings". They don't need that. It's a niche for those customers who are willing to pay the price for hardware that offers nothing beyond "nicer visuals".
That's not a majority, at all. There is no majority of people requiring drivers adapted for specific games. There is no majority of games benefitting from such drivers, either, but there's a huge market for reasonably fast, reasonably priced lower-end cards!
There is or was shortage of Video Cards to the point that getting a video card at MSRP was impossible due to people just selling them on eBay. As more and more players such as Moore and Intel release cards it will help in the availability of video cards .
If they're available at anything near MSRP I'd be interested. I've been using the same GPU since 2015. I've been interested in upgrading for several years now, but prices have been consistently insane all that time.
If you've been paying any attention, denying access to cutting-edge chips to China is a key part of the US's plan for competition and/or conflict with China right now. Even if China has no intent to make any major moves anytime soon they'd be complete fools to not be trying to secure their own supply.
I must say, I partially agree with you. Just except one thing - I lived in USSR and I know too much about soviet (communists) outlook, and about non-fair play.
So what important - unfortunately, China is not fair player. - All soviet/communists spent significant resources for espionage, etc.
- Espionage is totally different from fair playing gathering information from open sources. For people with really good knowledge, these things are easy distinguishable.
And US sanctions against China where exactly because espionage, and because other non-fair play, not because competition.
I partially agree, sure all countries use some sort of espionage and non-fair game, but difference in share of these activities from all.
- For soviet/communists, espionage and non-fair game are primary activities, because they absolutely avoid very normal for human exchange relations, more known as trade, which are primary for democracy countries.
While I'm wary for Taiwan what does that have to do at all with this story??? This sort of sentiment reminds me of those Americans who want to stop drinking Vodka over the invasion of Ukraine.
If you're reading a tech news coming out of China, and aren't thinking about politics, you're doing something wrong.
Every tech company in China is in part owned or supported by the chinese government. Hard to talk about "independent tech". They're more like "national tech".
Today and the next 50 years in tech is being defined by the competition between the two superpowers. Their national objectives differ vastly. China: aiming to invade Taiwan; proving everyone that their totalitarian system is competitive with democracy; proving that they can lead the world. US aiming to stay a leader; maintaining the global stability; maintaining the economic & military supremacy. Both economies are trying to slowly decouple from each other, gain independence, and prove their superiority. This is the story of our ages.
China exuberates when private sector exuberates. It is equally naive on both the West (like your comment) and the CCP side to think that being supported by the government and government-sponsored industrial espionage is / was the why of China's economic miracle.
In the past 3 decades, it was repeatedly shown in China that government subsidies was only useful to a extent and created incredible amount of waste. The state-owned enterprises never hired or supported the most vibrant part of the community (middle classes in urban areas).
The success of companies in China, like in the rest of the world, can be attributed to the wits and lucks of their founders.
TBH, that is why the future of China looks grim to me. The current leadership seems unable to properly recognize the contribution of the private sector.
OTOH, people in the West looked at China, and imagined all the private enterprises are secretly owned by the government and the government picked winners / losers. That was simply not the winning formula in the past 30 years.
I can have a longer essay to establish this with data and examples, but it is too late. Probably save it for another day.
Ha! I live in Kiev, Ukraine, and just 46 days ago I thought absolutely same about possible Russian invasion to Ukraine.
Now I few days per week spend on finding products to eat, because we have real war and we have some problems with supply (I will not ask you to talk here about military needs, but they are also exists and they are very significant).
Now I thank to Gods, for my friends decisions, who where not agree with me and evacuated their families, before I change my mind.
Well, telling the future is always a hard business, but that situation has not really changed my thinking on Taiwan. The situations are too different. The US is not just going to sit back and watch one of their key waystations in Asia get bled out the way they have with Ukraine.
I believe, we will both agree, that best for all world, if Ukraine will survive invasion, and Taiwan will also survive.
Or if China will decide to not invade at all, considering what US sanctions are doing to Russia.
- For me one possible explanation of all these crazy things, that Russian officials in reality are puppets of Chinese, and this way China tests, what will happen if...
And now Chinese have received dataset, an will decide, are possible consequences acceptable for them.
This is the track record for Metaculus (the chart at the end) showing historically a 10% swing in predictions of 50% historically by aggregated forecasters on the site: https://www.metaculus.com/questions/track-record/
Granted this tells us nothing about the accuracy of any one particular question, but on aggregate Metaculus is pretty well calibrated.
That said, there is a longstanding academic debate between "forecasting can tell us useful things" (Telock) and "black swans will ruin your life" (Taleb).
>Granted this tells us nothing about the accuracy of any one particular question
I think this is where my skepticism comes from.
Just because one can make certain predictions with reasonable accuracy (e.g. Scott Morrison will lose the upcoming Australian election, Joe Biden will die in office, Elon Musk will be the richest man in the world by 2030), it says nothing about their ability to predict other questions with far less information (such as if and when the CCP will invade Taiwan).
That's a fair take. In research about forecasting, they do indeed find that timeline greatly impacts forecasting accuracy.
Even if we were to fix this particular bucketing issue with a large enough dataset of foreign policy predictions X months into the future... one could still say this tells us nothing about this specific question because... maybe even among the geopolitical questions, this question is somehow different in some way which makes it noncomparable.
Or by analogy it would be like we were flipping what we think are coins and someone snuck a dice roll on one of the tries. Maybe the Taiwan question is the dice roll and therefore not subject to comparison with other geopolitical questions X years out.
This is of course afaik an unknowable problem, and Taleb would agree that we should just assume these predictions are tea-leaves.
At the same time it may be a valuable source of info (certainly imo more empirical than pundits and the news)
"An executive at a Chinese search engine recently summed up the new dynamic: We're entering an era in which we'll be fused together. It might be that there will be a request to establish a Party committee within your company, or that you should let state investors take a stake, you know, as a form of mixed ownership. If you think clearly about this, you really can resonate together with the state."
Us government spending and support compared to these effort is miniscule. Yes, they have some green energy initiatives (e.g. Tesla, Solar City benefited from those). But in the big scheme of things, us public investment in tech is about zero.
Learn some capitalism, my friend :) Remember Chinese (state owned and controlled) capitalism isn't what we call capitalism around here. Chinese capitalism is a bit like "chinese democracy". Not quite the real thing :)
>> China: aiming to invade Taiwan
> China hasn’t invaded anyone for decades. US had.
Not every invasion is wrong. The world needs a police, otherwise bad guys create chaos. China? They think Taiwan belongs to them. Which is crazy if you ask 26M Taiwanese.
Do you know history?
There where at least two big open struggles - against USSR and against India.
Also there where lot of hidden interventions - to Vietnam, to Korea, to Afghanistan, where China don't look as main hero, but without their intervention, world will be totally different.
For example, without China intervention, we wouldn't have North Korea; probably capitalist South Vietnam would have survived and would be very strong player on world markets; we wouldn't have Taliban, which destroyed civilization level historical monuments; etc.
I don’t have a problem with “struggles”; every country has those. What I do have a problem with is wars. As in, when actual people die.
Without US we wouldn’t have North Korea either - the only reason it exists is that this prevents US from placing military bases there. Taliban was literally funded and trained by CIA; not sure what Chinese involvement was?
North Korea appears because of Russian intervention, lead by Joseph Stalin.
Taliban was toy movement, nothing serious, before Russian intervention to Afghanistan in 1978.
You should understand one thing - US, Britain, France, even modern Germany are really strong players, but Russia after 1917 becomes small player with inadequate ambitions, so Russia could not play solo.
And because of this, Russia constantly tried to break games of strong players, or as it named now - they try to break world game.
US after WWII becomes something what Russian named world gendarme (this is direct translation), so US have to spend resources and send military to other parts of world, to keep peace there.
BTW answer question (yes, this is test) - why do you think, mostly US military was in Yugoslavia (center of Europe), not European?
Have you read Sir Arthur Conan Doyle? I mean Sherlock Holmes.
I become fan of these books unfortunately after phenomenal Russian series (unfortunately, because Vasily Livanov, who played Holmes, in last years become involved in Russian politics, and was supporter of Putin course, even when all respectable intelligent people began to criticize).
So, Sir Arthur, said by mouth of his heroes - if you see something, which could not explain by common sense, that is - you just have opportunity, to see another or NEW reality.
In this new reality, Russia is small country, which have not enough resources to compete with big players, but Russia have huge ambitions.
So what it have to do? - It switches to espionage, to propaganda, to support terrorists.
What it got with such activities? - It make active interference for Western policies, and like child, happy that so small, but have success breaking activities of adults.
Sure, my version is not accurate, but reality is cruel - just cup days after US left Afghanistan, Russian authorities said on official channels, that they will try to find common language to speak with Taliban leaders.
You may ask, where is China in this equation?
Ok, are you really sure, that Russian have not speak about this with Chinese authorities before such statement?
- Look on map, where is China, where is Afghanistan.
- Look in wikipedia, compare sizes of economy and military of Russia and China.
- Look for Russia-China economy relations in news, look who pay and how much.
Are you still sure, Russia could make independent from China statements in such circumstances?
Re: Chinese real estate bubble. It's been almost 10 years since news outlets and finance people have claimed a RE bubble in China. Nothing happened. Buyer (of RE and the bubble hype) beware.
It’s been almost ten years since the same people first starting claiming that Evergrande was insolvent. The government is just able to prop things up for amazing amount of time, but $1 million dollar 2 bedroom apartments in third tier or worse cities aren’t sustainable.
By report their economy is facing imminent collapse as a real estate bubble pops. I don't know whether this makes invasion of Taiwan soon more or less likely.
"experts" have been seeing this imminent collapse for 20 years now. It will eventually be true, but that's true for a lot of things if you keep claiming them for long enough.
Sure, slowing of China economy will make invasion to Taiwan more likely, for same reasons for which Hitler and Putin invades neighbors - all empires need to constantly show their people wins, or they will collapse.
It’s mostly Americans, because this opinion has no basis in facts. China hasn’t invaded anyone in decades, repeatedly says it won’t, and even written this down in their constitution.
I don't like to copy-paste my comments, but here is right place.
I live in Kiev, Ukraine, and just 46 days ago I thought nearly same about possible Russian invasion to Ukraine. Now I few days per week spend on finding products to eat, because we have real war and we have some problems with supply (I will not ask you to talk here about military needs, but they are also exists and they are very significant).
Now I thank to Gods, for my friends decisions, who where not agree with me and evacuated their families, before I change my mind.
And also I'm very enjoyed by decisions of NATO countries in Europe, to enhance their defense, because this is not the end.
- Predator will not calm down, when/if he capture Ukraine or Taiwan - he will continue looking for other capture opportunities - next could be Kazakhstan, or Vietnam, or South Korea, or even Japan.
Just read history of Second World War - it have begin in Africa, and than where millions victims in Europe.
Before Russian annexation, Crimea where part of Ukraine, but they have large level of autonomy, they could make their regulations on languages, on culture.
Sure, Crimea authorities have to consider, that unlike Nazi Russia, Ukraine is really multinational country, so Crimea have to build Ukrainian language schools, and Crimean Tatar language schools, not only Russian language schools.
Very similar thing could happen with Taiwan. - Now it have autonomy, but China authorities want to assimilate Taiwan, to make it much more Chinese and much less Western.
Before China assimilated Tibet, and also China make bad things in Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region, and adequate people don't want for these things to spread to Taiwan.
I think what he's trying to say is that China wants to have GPU production ready before it happens, so that they are not left without technology once the sanctions kick in
While they likely are subject to government scrutiny and probably will have to heel to the government in case they want them to put in backdoors or something, one small fresh company (from 2020) does not signal CCCP policy, although they probably should if they were smart start some level of manufacturing separate from Taiwan. If it were part of a push directly from the government I'd understand that but it sounds like this is unique because they are the first and currently, only, company trying to make gpus. Otherwise this is a bad reading of things, that every single Chinese company is somehow the arm of the CCCP which is way too simplistic.
But is this getting ready for that? Until China can produce its own fab equipment (taking Taiwan intact won’t help here), they will simply have fancy designs that they can’t produce. It doesn’t make sense unless they are betting on continued business relationship with the west.
And their government constantly spend huge resources for propaganda, to keep people minds in this perverted world.
So Russians believe on some esoteric things. For example they believe, that Russia grows, when isolates from world (this is not true).
This is totally typical way of totalitarian societies - they create their own closed mythology and once isolate from truth so much, so they do weird things, and then fatal things, like Russian invasion to Ukraine, which for my believe have started countdown for disintegration of Russia.
I'm not too much philanthropist, I just know too much about Israel, which suffer from constant visits of terrorists from the poorest countries around it.
I prefer to have something like North Korea - mostly harmless country-museum.
A couple of countries (USA and Germany) basically have a monopoly fab equipment production, and keep the secrets of such production closely guarded.
Until China can re-invent semiconductors on their own (an inevitable event, but probably not anytime soon), they are reliant on the west to product any semiconductors at all.
This is case of extreme complexity, which could not handled by one country, even by so big country.
In reality, all G7 economies involved in semiconductor produce, and they also use lot of resources of other countries - this is how reality look.
When somebody will create General AI, capable to substitute scientist, but to be strict, when this somebody will have thousands or maybe 100s thousands of such artificial scientists, this somebody will have opportunity to make his own semiconductor monopoly, but not earlier.
I tried to say, China plan to do things, which will provoke sanctions.
And to avoid complications, China prepare to live under sanctions. I must admit, this is smart behavior, even when I don't support, what China plan to do with Taiwan.
Ending the consumption of Russian vodka is an excellent economic protest move in fact, along with all of their other exports (many of which Biden has already begun neutering).
Of course that's not what your comment was reaching for.
I don't get why they would be sanctioned while the US were not sanctioned for their invasion of Iraq, and Saudi Arabia isn't sanctioned for the war on Yemen
Considering, I'm Ukrainian, just now in Kiev, and China avoiding to implement sanctions against Russia, I believe, I will not see anything from China in 2025.
Because all those "Made in China", now look for me, as made from Ukrainian blood.
For those of us who don't follow closely, whats the ranking for deployment of these kinds of cards? I assume it is like this:
1) bitcoin class Proof-of-Work time and power wasting in giant DC racks
2) TPU class ML in giant DC racks
3) gaming
4) @home ML and bitcoin
If the supply chain dynamics for gamers puts them as low as I think they're fighting with @home bitcoin rig owners, when the real enemy is the number #1 slot.
good nit. The principle being the same: its compute at scale in DC which is consuming these cards, it has almost nothing to do with painting pretty 3D in consumers eyeballs.
Hope so. IP is rent seeking and should be abolished. Or china might as well demand everyone pay IP for firecrackers or paper.
India, middle east, ASENA, africa, etc should steal as much IP as they can and develop. Just like china did. Just like the US did. Just like everyone did.
Time limited "rent seeking" that feeds the technologists necessary to develop the technology. In the absence of IP businesses just rely on obfuscation to try to get the same effect, except now you don't have a patent application to read and can't take someone to court for stealing your years of research.
Except that it is used now to drive companies out of business. I honestly think that it has done more damage than benefit.
IMO If the funds used to prevent people from applying technology would be used to fund research instead, the gains would net at least zero.
Right now the benefits are localized to jurisdictions that don't care about IP. It is impossible to measure how much could have been gained from businesses that never existed due to uncertainty arising in the jungle of IPs.
> I honestly think that it has done more damage than benefit.
Then you will wind up with the Chitu/Chitubox issue where everybody puts encryption chips into their stuff to lock it down.
Moving everything to the cloud wasn't just about developer convenience. It had the side benefit for companies that their software couldn't be pirated anymore.
>Hope so. IP is rent seeking and should be abolished.
In my opinion exclusive rights shouldn't be abolished, they should be time limited (up to a quarter of the human lifespan) and extensions should be gated behind very high taxes.
Humans capture water from the environment for their personal use (e.g. drinking), however, eventually they release that very same water. What modern corporations are doing is akin to sucking a pond dry and swelling up to an absurd size while never intending to release that water back to the environment.
It uses GPU IP from IMG commonly known as PowerVR, the same technology powering current Apple's GPU and some Mediatek SoC. And IMG the company is now wholly owned by Chinese Private Equity Fund. The fund acquired IMG when Apple claimed to no longer be using any of their IP and caused their market valuation to drop by more than 70%.
Apple GPUs have little to no IMG technology left. You can tell there is some remaining influence in the design, but Apple's is much better and cleaner and what IMG's GPUs should have been.
They still uses PVRTC and are still licensing and paying IMG royalty. Surely if there were little to no IMG tech left Apple could have simply stopped paying them and dont renew the contract. They are not paying substantially less royalty than they were previously either.
What the lawyers do and how the technology actually works are not necessarily related.
The shaders are completely different, the controller is completely different, the command submission structures are different. Sure, it's still a tiled architecture and they probably have to keep PVRTC for compatibility and pay the royalty for that, and you can see some remaining PVR influence in the design. But it's not PVR, and quite possibly has zero actual PVR technology left (as in silicon IP from IMG). They're probably only paying patent royalties.
We know this because we're reverse engineering AGX and IMG just dumped an upstream submission to Mesa and now anyone can compare them. PVR's architecture is, for starters, a lot more insane than Apple's.
The bigger question is, does it violate any patents? Not necessarily intentionally, but because there's only so many ways you can build a GPU and (almost) all of them are patented already. Apple themselves failed to build a GPU from the ground up, so it's actually difficult.
Even with 20 year old design, you'd be using modern process which in itself should make room for significant improvements in scaling, frequency and power usage.
Yeah, but it would still be stuck at supporting something like DirectX 8 and OpenGL 1.3 (like the GeForce4). It would certainly be faster and more efficient but modern games and other software wouldn't run on it.
The hardware seems separate from the software interface. Projects like WINE can convert DirectX calls to OpenGL or Vulkan calls, so it seems like a driver update could support a newer interface if needed.
For something that isn't supported at all like raytracing, those API calls would have to be dropped so you'd get a blank screen or only a UI. But something polygon-based, maybe you could drop the resolution and polygon count and that could be translated to the newer API.
This isn’t entirely true. The software that a GPU supports (DX version, etc) is directly tied to certain specifics about the hardware. Have a look at the “Shader model comparisons” to see an example of this. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-Level_Shader_Language
Probably not as long as you don't trample any implementation specific patents. But the point was more about how it is much harder than just porting an old design to a newer process node to get good performance in modern games, modern hardware is fundamentally different than hardware of even the Geforce 7000 series.
> The bigger question is, does it violate any patents?
The former implies the latter.
On the other hand if the IP isn't stolen but would still fall afoul of the patent then I would argue that the patent is wrongly provided. Patents don't exist to protect obvious implementations.
I'm not a lawyer but we all know patent law is all kinds of fucked up.
Licenses are intellectual property too so I am a bit confused why the difference? Was the first statement just over broad? Not trying to be argumentative, just trying to understand your position when I am a bit tired.
> Intellectual property frankly makes no sense if you don’t worship money.
Patents incentivize inventors to publicly disclose how their inventions work. They publicly disclose how their invention works and in exchange are given exclusive rights to it for a limited period of time.
This is predicated on the idea that in the absence of such a system, inventors have strong incentives to not disclose how their inventions work, which ultimately slows the spread of knowledge and puts a damper on innovation.
What parts of this do not make sense? How else would you solve the problem of incentives around disclosing how technologies work?
Open source licensing incentivizes inventors to release their creations to the world to benefit humanity. Their copyright is protected and depending on the license that picked can control redistribution. Their work is protected against people passing their work off as their own, which is the intention of the patent idea.
Patents do nothing like this, in fact, they cause inventors to invent around “protected ideas”. Technology history is littered with examples of inefficient implementations become standard to avoid patent infringement. We end up with negative-incentives with patented ideas. In technology, a patent is a sure way to ensure that an idea is never implemented.
Nothing about patents, or the idea that an idea is exclusive and protection worth is worth salvaging. Patents do not achieve their stated goal.
Closed source software is inherently untrustworthy. The incentive to disclose ideas protected against plagiarism can be achieved through both public trust in our free and open source ecosystem without the need to enforce state violence because some dude dreamed an idea once and wrote a paper.
Can you point to any modern technologically advanced civilizations / nations that do not have something like a patent system? How did those without well developed legal frameworks for intellectual property perform over time relative to others in measures of scientific output and economic development?
What is the alternative? Wouldn’t open source have been the default prior to the invention of patent law?
I am sorry, but if you are arguing for the abolition of the patent system, then you need to provide some alternative solution for the problem the patent system addresses along with some sort of data / evidence that your solution is not vastly inferior. Otherwise the argument is just not very persuasive.
The USA is a great counter example. In the 19th century it took all kinds of european inventions, did very bad IP enforcement, and built out based on rampant IP theft. The IP relation between China and USA today is basically the relation between the USA and Europe then.
There is also Hollywood, the place where Edison could not get his film patents enforced, so every film maker ran to there. Rampant patent infringement made it great.
Or inside Europe, there were cities complaining how the guild IP rules were not enforced on farms. People bought e.g. cheap low quality pots and pans on the farms, with no frivolities or no correct marks, and no money was paid to the guilds. For shame! This was without patents, with guilds being very protective of their knowledge, and inventions still spread without much trouble.
Necessity is generally the mother of invention. Patents just slow things down to protect the established players.
Except that's not how patents are used in the 21st century. Patents are generally written to be as broad in scope as possible while disclosing as little as possible information on how to get said invention to work (if the grantee has actually figured out that part at all). Registering and successfully defending a patent is extremely expensive and patent lawsuits are usually won by the party with the most legal resources, so arguments that it protects small "garden shed" inventors are largely fantasy.
It's like we are fighting an invisible economic war. The question is, why is it worth throwing other people under the bus? Somehow everyone is convinced that it is worth it.
I agree that was the original intention, but these days (and possibly the entire time) it just slows innovation by preventing people from using technologies.
Yes, patents do hamper innovation. But this does not acknowledge or address the counterfactual of whether not having a patent system would hamper innovation to a greater extent.
Without this the argument rests on an unstated assumption / magical thinking, which is not borne out by historical data.
It’s like saying that traffic lights impede the flow of traffic (true), without acknowledging the fact that not having traffic lights would result in much greater congestion (also true).
Patents also choke creativity, and arguably in a worse way.
If you can't remix existing ideas, how are you supposed to create anything useful if you need to come up with an alternative scheme to every component problem that has already been solved but is already patented.
Yeah, it had taken me 10 years of heavy R&D investments to come up with this ingenious idea that the phone can have rounded corners. /s
Sorry but the situation now it that one can not even fart without breaking some patent. It is ridiculous, serves only big corps and keeps smaller companies under constant threat of litigations they can not afford. And most of the patents are plain obvious.
I was once asked to come up with the idea of how to implement some XXX feature. It had taken me about 10 minutes to "invent" the main approach and then couple of days to spec it down to such form that it could be given to subcontractor. Upon checking however we've easily found at least 10 patents covering this exact XXX. And this is everywhere.
From a tool to compensate the inventors the patents system has become a tool to serve fat cats.
Who doesn't worship money? Let's not kid ourselves. We all worship money to a degree where we understand how the concept of intellectual property incentivizes the creation of "intellectual property."
As it is in China you can bet on it. There were no major china tech company that product something and do not steal tech from "west" yet (maybe there are smaller companies but no big tech got it yet).
They scuffed with Autel and initially lost (but then had that patent invalidated), and their currently brewing fight is with Bell Textron for camera control.
(This is just a quick googling. I have no skin in this game either way, but I believe that the assertion that Chinese companies always steal is a bigoted position to take. Perhaps a more accurate description would be that IP is most commonly held by incumbent businesses, and businesses in China in new segments are, necessarily, new to market.)
I think the last point you make is a big one, and partially used to justify the Chinese industry behavior. Basically China is late to the game and if they follow Western rules they will be perpetually behind, partially because such rules are obviously designed to preserve wealth.
That being said, there is still plenty of legit innovation coming from China and Chinese founders/contributors: ant framework for react, vue, tiktok.
I don’t think it’s a coincidence a lot of the innovation is in the software sector, especially ML, which has less incumbent IP protections.
i don't think so. the gpu is based on ip from Imagination Technologies. the company is sold to China. unless MTT didn't licensed the tech from Imagination
Probably, but I would imagine it would be a lower priority compared to NIC or CPU based backdoors.
Considering that China controls most of the NIC supply, I doubt they would be too concerned about implementing a GPU based backdoor.
I’m surprised that we still don’t have a cheap domestic Data Diode option. It is clear that only way to be secure is to never directly connect to internet.
"Debunked" as in no conclusive evidence was confirmed by 3rd parties. It could just as equally mean that investigators might not have found the needle they're looking for in the supply chain haystack.
Part of spy agencies' job is to plant news stories, so I find "just trust me, there's something substantial you don't know about besides the flimsy evidence we did provide" pretty hard to accept.
They'll also gag researchers if they think they might leak state secrets. Perhaps intelligence agencies know about adversaries' backdoors, and exposing them further would risk their current advantageous position in an arms race with those adversaries.
Debunked in the sense that the bloomberg article is a work of fiction. The authors wrote a "fascinating" story that has nothing to do with the real world. They assume backdoored resistors and other nonsense to make it impossible to verify their story akin to Russel's teapot.
Reality is boring. There have been supply chain attacks that installed malicious firmware or replaced pin compatible chips. That's not surprising, that's boring and old news.
