I am surprised they shut down this initiative. I would assume it would offer more revenue and more predictability. It definitely wouldn’t work everywhere (lower income countries have longer refresh cycles and people tend to avoid subscriptions), but I could see this working in US market.

Seems the main drivers for shutting down this program were carrier relationships (a critical piece in the US from my understanding) and regulatory concerns. I am assuming regulatory concerns would not be relevant anymore with the new US administration, so perhaps Apple thought it was too risky to disrupt carrier relationships.

Google has its own long running series of TPU’s , so I think their overall investment relative in AI hardware may be larger than the chart in the article would imply.

Can’t speak for the legal nuances inherent to the case, it may well be that Qualcomm/Nuvia’s contracts with ARM allowed for such actions, but from a layman’s perspective it does seem that Qualcomm wanted to undercut payments to ARM.

Although the discrepancy between the $1.4 billion internal Qualcomm figure and ARM’s internal $50 M impact estimate is rather strange.

Sounds like a corruption scheme for a local thug.

That’s a good point, I recognize he has a job to do. I do think he could have been a bit more aloof and measured in his praise.

Yeah, that’s a big issue with gaming on ultrawide. Even many graphics-focused games have middling support for ultrawide formats.

From my limited consumer-level perspective, Intel/AMD platforms aren’t mature enough. Try looking into any open-source/commercial ML software aimed at consumers, Nvidia is guaranteed and first class.

The situation is arguably different in gaming.

I can’t speak for the nitty-gritty details and enterprise-scale technology, but from a consumer perspective (for local ML upscale and LLM using both proprietary and free tools), Nvidia clearly has the upper hand in terms of software support.

Turning to policy, there’s a few things I want to get into, starting with the news from yesterday. Do you have any reaction to David Sacks being Trump’s AI “czar?” I don’t know if you know him, but do you have any reaction to that?

I do know him a little bit. Kudos to him. I think that’s a pretty good thing. It’s quite fascinating that if you go back eight years to the December ahead of Trump 1.0 as he was starting to fill out his cabinet choices and appointees, it was a bit chaotic. At the time there wasn’t a lot of representation from the tech world. This time around, whether it’s Elon [Musk], David [Sacks], Vivek [Ramaswamy] — I know Larry Ellison has also been very involved in discussions with the administration — I think it’s a good thing, to be honest with you. Having a seat at the table and having access to policy is really good.

I wonder if Haas is being genuine or just bowing to the king. I could see Haas having a level of respect for Musk and Sacks (they are all on the same team after all), but Ramaswamy?

I wonder how much of this was driven by actual lack of capacity for TSMC’s “CoWoS” packaging verses the merits of UMC’s packaging process.

Some interesting points at the attempts to overcome Nvidia’s CUDA dominance (and the significant challenges to doing so), but the real answer to this question will be market share (if the AI hype doesn’t die down by the point AMD and Intel make signiciant improvements to their software stack).

I am honestly surprised we haven’t seen a rump-up in Gallium mining in Europe/Canada several years ago.

If you use Kodi for HTPC you can use the Kodi app. We use it on our living room tablet, but you can install it on a smartphone too.

You should be able to set up a universal remote as well, but you’ll need to do some research on how best to implement it.

They are starting to add junk to monitors too.

Just speculation on my part, AMD does tend to offer higher VRAM capacities than Nvidia.

I could be wrong if course.

The VRAM size is tied to the memory interface. Basically you can’t just pick a random VRAM amount (short of literally disabling part of it).

I use a spin of Debian for ARM called DietPi. It’s not HTPC focused, but it makes it easy to install and manage all sorts of applications (including HTPC solutions).

Has a solid community as well and they’ve been around for a long time (a decade or so).

They will definitely have high VRAM options, but I suspect they will offer a $50 discount (at most) relative to an equivalent Nvidia SKU.

It looks like the only option these days is to connect your HTPC (doesn’t have to be super fancy, a Raspberry Pi based solution works just fine) and never connect the TV to the internet (and keep PiHole running on your local network just in case).

Don’t think they will be dropping 4060ti prices and inventory for the 4000 series seems to be running out.