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Lanai, the mystery CPU architecture in LLVM

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Re: Lanai, the mystery CPU architecture in LLVM

#111

Post by toast0 »

edgyquant wrote: post #107
kelseyfrog wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Why not just force benefits for all employees? Public perception. Small business owners occupy a different perceptual space than large businesses. Lawmakers don't want to be perceived as hurting small businesses and craft laws to avoid it. It's more about maintaining political power as much as anything else.

I thought of this too, and it’s actually good system. Those small businesses should be exempt I think. It’s only the large corporations that should be forced to pay (I wouldn’t even be opposed to subsidizing health care for those businesses by taxing larger ones more.) I think a system where we go by revenue is a lot of logical than going by number of employees. If a business makes 1Bpy but only has two employees, wo…

Revenue isn't always a great way to measure the size of a business, because different businesses add different amount of value. And you can't use profit, because that's easy to game. For something like people benefits, predicating the requirement on the number of people employed makes a lot of sense. It's about as much work to setup a health plan for a two person firm as a 50 person firm, but many fewer people benefit.

Re: Lanai, the mystery CPU architecture in LLVM

#112

Post by kelseyfrog »

edgyquant wrote: post #107
kelseyfrog wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Why not just force benefits for all employees? Public perception. Small business owners occupy a different perceptual space than large businesses. Lawmakers don't want to be perceived as hurting small businesses and craft laws to avoid it. It's more about maintaining political power as much as anything else.

I thought of this too, and it’s actually good system. Those small businesses should be exempt I think. It’s only the large corporations that should be forced to pay (I wouldn’t even be opposed to subsidizing health care for those businesses by taxing larger ones more.) I think a system where we go by revenue is a lot of logical than going by number of employees. If a business makes 1Bpy but only has two employees, wo…

It works out great for everyone except the 47.5% of Americans who are employed by small businesses.

Re: Lanai, the mystery CPU architecture in LLVM

#113

Post by voldacar »

jandrese wrote: post #35
drewg123 wrote: post #4

I worked for Myricom 2001->2013, and Google 2013->2015. And, wow, I wish I could comment on this thread.. :) EDIT: Scott's Medium blog post linked from this article is fascinating: https://medium.com/swlh/myricom-an-hpc-story-and-lessons-lea...

> The CEO capped the full time headcount at 49 people so he wouldn’t be subject to California law requiring him to provide his employees with a health plan. Can you imagine being this stingy and short sighted? The employees are largely PhDs and he is willing to cripple his company to avoid paying benefits.

When you create a sharp discontinuity in the marginal cost of hiring someone, expect companies to act accordingly. It would be irrational not to. Blame the system of shitty incentives

Re: Lanai, the mystery CPU architecture in LLVM

#114

Post by jeffbee »

throwawag wrote: post #101

Probably shouldn't reveal this but, Google are using it internally for their accelerated networking in their cloud, pretty much all Lanai hardware is deployed in GCP infrastructure.

What explains why Amazon has been relatively open about Nitro but Google has never said anything about how their NICs and SSDs work? It can't be because it's secret sauce; Amazon beats them on latency etc.

Re: Lanai, the mystery CPU architecture in LLVM

#115

Post by acdha »

djbusby wrote: post #98
acdha wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How much revenue are those people generating? Don't you think being able to hire and retain more highly-skilled people might be worth more than the $5/hour “saved”? (For example, how much does it cost to hire someone — most places spend many thousands doing that)

IDK, I'm just show a concrete value. The person I replied to said it was "not hard". S I mentioned a minimum dollar amount that I've observed at many places seemed reasonable (it can be much much more, like if you cover 100% health for employees and family) Seems it wasn't helpful.

My point was just that this seems more like an issue for a business with low profit margins and low wage employees — not engineers, especially for a profitable company (i.e. not some early-stage startup relying mostly on equity). In this case, if they were making $20M/year with on the order of 50 employees it seems very short-sighted.

Re: Lanai, the mystery CPU architecture in LLVM

#117

Post by otterley »

_tom_ wrote: post #61
drewg123 wrote: post #4

I worked for Myricom 2001->2013, and Google 2013->2015. And, wow, I wish I could comment on this thread.. :) EDIT: Scott's Medium blog post linked from this article is fascinating: https://medium.com/swlh/myricom-an-hpc-story-and-lessons-lea...

When does the NDA expire? 7 years is a long time.

Most NDAs are perpetual.

Re: Lanai, the mystery CPU architecture in LLVM

#118

Post by speed_spread »

_tom_ wrote: post #61
drewg123 wrote: post #4

I worked for Myricom 2001->2013, and Google 2013->2015. And, wow, I wish I could comment on this thread.. :) EDIT: Scott's Medium blog post linked from this article is fascinating: https://medium.com/swlh/myricom-an-hpc-story-and-lessons-lea...

When does the NDA expire? 7 years is a long time.

I just want the PUNT instruction to become a standard RISC-V extension.

Re: Lanai, the mystery CPU architecture in LLVM

#119

Post by mjevans »

GuB-42 wrote: post #105
edgyquant wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why 50? Isn’t that arbitrary? Why not just force benefits for all employees? At least target revenue, if a company makes X revenue it has to provide Y benefits per employee. CEOs definitely won’t be able to easily make the decision to take in less money, as that will piss off share holders.

It is arbitrary, but we have to draw the line somewhere. It is not about money, tax is about money. This is about the extra work needed to accommodate for said obligations, it can involve several full time jobs, and the state considers that it is too much for a company of less than 50 employees. Really, it is a lot of paperwork, and the more a company spends on paperwork, the less there is to pay employees.

Could this be improved by a government agency where they do this paperwork for you at a per-employee cost if your company is under X employees (say 3x the limit at which the paperwork kicks in)?

Re: Lanai, the mystery CPU architecture in LLVM

#120

Post by speed_spread »

Someone wrote: post #55
wheybags wrote: post #16

I gotta say, if I was the BDFL of llvm, I would kick this out of tree without a second thought. Why on earth should a foss project support a private architecture? How many man-hours have been wasted waiting for the Lanai backend to compile? Not to mention applying project-wide refactoring to the Lanai code.

Removing architectures because they’re obsolete/maintainers can’t be found, I can see (and the llvm maintainers agree. They removed Alpha at some time, for example), but because they’re proprietary? That would mean kicking out x86, x64, ARM, AMD Terascale, IBM’s z/architecture, etc. I’m sure clang would be very happy with that.

Lanai is more than just proprietary, it's an entirely private architecture.
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