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Putting out the hardware dumpster fire

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Re: Putting out the hardware dumpster fire

#41

Post by orbital-decay »

jpleger wrote: post #14

I think one of the primary reasons that it is such a dumpster fire is there traditionally hasn't been an "open" ecosystem in the hardware world, though now they are being forced towards that direction kicking and screaming. Every part of the hardware ecosystem has traditionally been done in closed, NDA ridden environments and only over the last 5-10 years has that even started to change. Designing chips has required…

> I think one of the primary reasons that it is such a dumpster fire is there traditionally hasn't been an "open" ecosystem in the hardware world

Is it, though? Software thrives because it has an open ecosystem. But it's no less of a dumpster fire of complexity, being slowly buried under the technical debt. We literally have decades-old system designs wrapped into multiple layers of progressively newer systems, and openness doesn't help here. Most software is write-only.

The overarching reason might be the lack of refactoring and feedback loops. It's more related to the production cycles and incentives than to the second-order effects of openness.

Re: Putting out the hardware dumpster fire

#42

Post by feoren »

dclowd9901 wrote: post #15
nightowl_games wrote: post #9

I like the boldness of the title and the simple clarity of the writing. Academic papers are frustrating to me in that they seem to use esoteric language in order to create a veneer of importance, sometimes above trivial real content. This stands against that trend and harkens back to papers of old.

I know it’s probably asking too much but I wonder what the world would look like if academic papers were actually fun to read. Brian Greene is probably considered a pariah around here but I really enjoyed reading his book The Elegant Universe.

I'm not sure. Imagine if life-critical safety documents were "fun to read". Or material safety data sheets. Or assembly instructions for heavy machinery. Or even code.

All of this stuff needs to be extremely clear, precise, and readable by professionals. That's not the same as being "fun to read", and certainly not by laypeople. You can't really know whether an academic paper is clear, precise, and readable unless you're a professional in the sub-discipline the paper was written for.

Re: Putting out the hardware dumpster fire

#43

Post by jrockway »

CrazyStat wrote: post #31
jrockway wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If I'm ever going to get on the conspiracy theory bandwagon, it will be on two topics: 1) Return to office. 2) Why we need a dedicated CPU and DRAM attached to flash memory. You can garbage collect and wear level in your OS if you want to. Manufacturers say "no, we have a super secret secret sauce that nobody else could possibly improve upon". Uh huh, sure.

> 1) Return to office. In the spirit of unbridled conspiracy theory (i.e. I have no evidence for this and don't believe it is generally true): Landlords are paying CxOs kickbacks to push return to office in order to prop up commercial real estate.

Maybe. The most compelling reason I have heard is it's an easy way to get attrition. You don't have to do layoffs, which are expensive emotionally and financially.

Re: Putting out the hardware dumpster fire

#44

Post by samtho »

LoganDark wrote: post #21
colineartheta wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Does the Talos II not fit this already?

Who wants to spend tens of thousands of dollars for that ?

Right, I’m not quite sure where it fits within the market. It’s quite pricey for pro-sumer and not enterprise-y enough for larger companies to buy into it.

Re: Putting out the hardware dumpster fire

#45

Post by derefr »

topspin wrote: post #26
derefr wrote: post #16

Are vertically-integrated SoCs (Apple Silicon, NVIDIA Tegra, etc.) subject to the “OS only controls part of the hardware” problem? I always figured that in these systems, there would be power-efficiency and BOM-cost pressure to “de-vendor” the SoC by replicating IP-core functionality with logic merged into firmware or a few larger service cores — or even kernel daemons run on the efficiency cores of the application p…

> or even kernel daemons run on the efficiency cores When (not if) the kernel scheduler locks up while the fans are slow/stopped at the same moment some scheduled user process begins driving 250W+ through a CPU the isolated fan controller (not to mention isolated thermal throttling logic, also independent of the OS) has great value. > If this doesn’t happen—why doesn’t it? Hardware evolves faster than operating syste…

You don’t seem to be paying attention to the words “vertically integrated” in my question — which were the whole point of my question.

Apple creates both the OS and the hardware for their phones. So why shouldn’t the hardware microcontroller firmware for the hardware they create (or commission and constrain the design of), run as one or several RTOS blobs that ship as part of the OS on one or several shared MCUs?

Let me put it this way: in x86, the motherboard has a power controller, but the CPU also has its own power controller. But on a vertically-integrated SoC system, I would expect there to be only one power controller, that controls power for the CPU, the other cores on the SoC die, and the various other components on the logic board. And I would expect that power controller, whether standalone or integrated into the CPU, to be running first-party code written by the system integrator (who is also the designer of the logic board, the SoC, the CPU in the SoC, and the power controller itself) rather than running code written by some vendor who was writing it in a “this chip could be used in many different builds, so it must be designed defensively for badly-integrated systems” manner.

Re: Putting out the hardware dumpster fire

#46

Post by mfuzzey »

jrockway wrote: post #27
kevin_thibedeau wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most electrical components have traditionally had open datasheets. It is only a relatively recent phenomenon that mass market ICs are locked behind NDAs.

It really depends on the complexity. Sure, 555 timers and even microcontrollers have datasheets. CPUs that run Linux, Wifi chips supporting recent standards, etc.? Rare. This is why Linux in the 90s was a big pain; you get some random Ethernet chip and there is no documentation on how to talk to it, so you're just dead in the water. (I think Android was the turning point. From then on, stuff had to support Linux, bec…

It seems to depend on the market.

For example CPUs that run Linux open reference manuals are still the norm in the industrial range (chips like the NXP i.MX series, the TI SAMA ones or the fairly new STM32MP1) whereas in the mobile market (Qualcomm, Exynos etc) you can't get any information without a NDA and they'll only sign one with you if you're going to be buying millions.

The first category also tend to have good mainline support, the second stuck on ancient vendor kernels.

Re: Putting out the hardware dumpster fire

#47

Post by srcreigh »

CrazyStat wrote: post #31
jrockway wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If I'm ever going to get on the conspiracy theory bandwagon, it will be on two topics: 1) Return to office. 2) Why we need a dedicated CPU and DRAM attached to flash memory. You can garbage collect and wear level in your OS if you want to. Manufacturers say "no, we have a super secret secret sauce that nobody else could possibly improve upon". Uh huh, sure.

> 1) Return to office. In the spirit of unbridled conspiracy theory (i.e. I have no evidence for this and don't believe it is generally true): Landlords are paying CxOs kickbacks to push return to office in order to prop up commercial real estate.

In my city office buildings are being converted to residential housing. 3 buildings recently in an area of population size 250k.

Re: Putting out the hardware dumpster fire

#48

Post by interroboink »

fluoridation wrote: post #37
zackmorris wrote: post #22

I've noticed the trend of ever-increasingly complex hardware with little or no change in performance since the 90s, and ranted about it extensively since I joined HN. I think we're past considering the problem from a technical perspective and need to look at the conspiratorial forces involved. To me, the problem is one of monopoly and corporate thinking. When Intel and AMD make most of the chips, we end up with a Cok…

What do you mean "little or no change in performance since the 90s"? Computers now are hundreds if not thousands of times faster than in the 90s. Also, if anything, modern desktop hardware is so complex not because of centralization, but because of de centralization. If your computer was made by a single manufacturer, that manufacturer could optimize the final product as much as it wanted, because it'd have control n…

They might be referring to the fact that, eg, opening Microsoft Word today can take significantly longer than Word 2003 on Windows XP (or similar). See also Wirth's Law[1] and such.

EDIT: though they focus on the hardware-could-be-better side, rather than the software-could-be-less-awful side (:

There have been some good outspoken critics of how software bloat has canceled out (or more) modern hardware gains. Casey Muratori, Jonathan Blow, and Mike Acton come to mind — they have some good material on the subject [2][3][4]. Some of the issues you mention, w.r.t. the hardware being discombobulated, are addressed in that first blog/video. No big surprise these people come from a video games background; video game hardware is traditionally much more tightly-bound-together.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wirth%27s_law

[2] https://caseymuratori.com/blog_0031

[3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pW-SOdj4Kkk

[4] https://youtu.be/rX0ItVEVjHc?t=4211 (timestamp, but the whole talk is good)

Re: Putting out the hardware dumpster fire

#50

Post by hoosieree »

srcreigh wrote: post #47
CrazyStat wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 1) Return to office. In the spirit of unbridled conspiracy theory (i.e. I have no evidence for this and don't believe it is generally true): Landlords are paying CxOs kickbacks to push return to office in order to prop up commercial real estate.

In my city office buildings are being converted to residential housing. 3 buildings recently in an area of population size 250k.

What part of the world? I've heard that the cost of converting office spaces to residential is more than building new.
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