Intel wants to be a foundry\u2014again. Will this time be different?

Well, there's this:

ISTR when intel took over Altera, there was talk of internal FPGAs being used to customise server products, but that never convinced me. Hence my "unknown" comment.

Jan Panteltje snipped-for-privacy@yahoo.com wrote in news:skrg2p$567$ snipped-for-privacy@dont-email.me:

And neither one of those was "$35 or $45".

Jan Panteltje snipped-for-privacy@yahoo.com wrote in news:skpp2k$3kd$ snipped-for-privacy@dont-email.me:

Is that some s*it base model? Because you can't get an 8GB RAM B model for that.

It's a super nice processor for its age. I used it in my first embedded design, about 1995. It has all sorts of whizzy timing functions that made it easy to interleave control and data acq with good timing.

(That's the perennial hassle with controlling instruments using PCs or SBCs running some heavyweight OS like Linux or Windows.)

Cheers

Phil Hobbs

I think servers were a big chunk of Intel revenue, kilobucks per chip. The trend lately is for using SOCs or full custom chips in giant data centers.

We have lots of older products that use 68332. I programmed them in assembly and can still run the tool chain.

Some newer products use three generations of ARM that are EOL or NRND.

There are now *two* sources for the 68332.

It's a partnership with U.S. DoD, not really a business initiative: Intel Wins US Government Project to Develop Leading-Edge Foundry Ecosystem

I bought a RasPi 4 with 8Gbyte of ram and WiFi etc two days ago for GBP49.99 including postage. I thought that was a good price. I already have several of these. They make really good remote test devices for various office networks that I manage around the world. They can support download speeds of around 800 - 900Mbit/s for Apache http downloads.

John

John Walliker snipped-for-privacy@gmail.com wrote in news: snipped-for-privacy@googlegroups.com:

I have one controlling my hdtv tank "toy". It has color recog and ultrasonic feedback. Pretty cool for a small scale tracked vehicle experimental platform.

Why was the ARM better than the 68K ignoring tool issues. Years ago when ARMs were still new I posited that the ARM was destined to dominate the MCU market. It was argued by someone (probably in c.a.e) that changing CPUs was not as much work as peripherals when switching MCU lines, so having a common CPU was not of much consequence. I can't say just why ARMs have dominated, but it is clear they have. I'm curious why you say the ARM is better than the 68K.

I've been hearing about how the Pi is ready for the desktop world since the Pi2. I'll believe it when Pi powered laptops show up at Best Buy.

I don't know a lot about the Zynq other than the posts by Larkin of how terrible the FPGA/CPU interface and software were. So what is so warty about this device?

Now that AMD is buying Xilinx, I suppose we will see similar devices from them.

Your prior comments were about general customers using the combined FPGA/CPU devices. I am not aware there was/is any intent to market these devices generally. I expect they will require specialized training and potentially a lot of hand holding as is often done for large customers, but not for anyone small, like Larkin's company. So you are not likely to hear anything about the success of this effort unless it is through a public announcement as is done for quarterly reports. The info I've read is that this is strictly targeted to the server market as it is huge with a capital HUGE. It's very possible there will be some portion of the code written by the FPGA company to the users' specs.

That may well be true for the current generation. Add the FPGA accelerator and the balance will likely tip the other way.

On a sunny day (Sat, 23 Oct 2021 19:15:16 -0700 (PDT)) it happened Rick C snipped-for-privacy@gmail.com wrote in snipped-for-privacy@googlegroups.com:

You are confusing ARM processors and raspberries. Google: "ARM based laptop"

Yeah, CPUs would be so much nicer if they had an FPGA to shove all the hard real time stuff into. Then the software could be written like PC code, focused on the logic of the application rather than jumping through hoops to make a sequential processor look like many parallel processors.

Ah, yes, I think I've seen those. They have 13 inch screens and virtually no ram and literally no hard drive depending on the Internet to act as the data store. I've no use for such machines. I bought a netbook once for a friend who was in the hospital. Her husband gave it back when she passed. I have used it a couple of times when my main computer died, but I made the mistake of updating the browser and it just won't run anything worth a damn anymore.

I'll stick with real laptops that use real processors. Besides, they simply won't run much of the software I've used over the years. How about LTspice? I suppose it could be run in emulation, but that would make it even slower than it already is.

On a sunny day (Sat, 23 Oct 2021 22:00:34 -0700 (PDT)) it happened Rick C snipped-for-privacy@gmail.com wrote in snipped-for-privacy@googlegroups.com:

No wait a minute and really google "ARM based laptop"

finds for example

Your new laptop does have google ;-)?

I have no idea what the f*ck you are talking about...

PineBook Pro · 14", 4GB LPDDR4 RAM

MNT Reform · 12.5", 4 GB LPDDR4 memory

MacBook Air ARM 2020 · 13.3‑inch, 16GB of RAM and 1TB of storage for $1,649 (you can’t upgrade anything later on if you need to)

HP Envy x2 (- 12-e011nr) · 12.3", 4 GB LPDDR4-3733 SDRAM

Pinebook - 11.6", Up to 2GB of DDR3 RAM

I buy laptops with 17" screens and none of these even have 15" screens. Only one accepts a reasonable amount of RAM and is very expensive for the configuration... of course, it's a Mac.

I'm wondering if yours does. Can you provide links to laptops that aren't toys? I'm tired of searching for you.

On a sunny day (Sun, 24 Oct 2021 02:01:39 -0700 (PDT)) it happened Rick C snipped-for-privacy@gmail.com wrote in snipped-for-privacy@googlegroups.com:

Well my Samsung laptop screen is 39 cm diagonal say 15 inch. Anything bigger on your lap makes little sense to me. But of course I do not drive a what's that almost auto pilot thing called teslala?

What do you use your laptop for then that it has to be so big? Or do you have a vision problem?

My old eeepc 701, first one out, is much more easy to tranport... Much smaller screen, Linux. But I have even used it as webserver, it is still working, that was x86.

Search on auto-pilot?