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Comment Re:Pretty doomsday to me (Score 3, Insightful) 306

It's never been about doomsday for the whole planet. It's about poverty, war, and general misery for billions. But Slashdot Libertarians are still stuck in their echo chamber where anything less than a massive asteroid strike is preferably to a tax increase. Didn't you know that the suffering of poor people is really just a plot to take away your money?

Some new arid areas are expected to appear in the south of N. America, South Africa and Mediterranean countries. Overall, hardly a doomsday scenario.

Oh, just some "new arid areas". No big deal. If you have no idea what the fuck you are talking about. Maybe you should read a bit about the massive drought that hit Texas last year. Or the many, many wildfires due to our entire state being a tinderbox. August in Houston was extra fun, with 29 out of 31 days reaching highs over 100 degrees F, with all-time highs of 109 F being reached on four separate days. Maybe you'd rather see some pictures, if that's your thing -- look, I Googled it for you! You know it's bad when people are hoping for a hurricane to bring drought relief.

Let me make this simple for you: no water = no agriculture, no cities, few people, lots of fires. Texas has 25 million people. That's a lot of misery you can spread around. A lot of potential refugees moving to your neighborhoods. But clearly letting my state be destroyed is preferable to allowing TEH EVIL (nonexistent) MARXISTS enact their EVIL (nonexistent) SOCIALIST AGENDA! (Which everyone in the world except Slashdot Libertarians is in on, of course.) Those evil socialists just hate the obvious solution of having billions of people and most of our agriculture pack up and move. But not Slashdot Libertarians! In addition to being IT administrators, they're *also* the worldwide experts in the economics of relocating entire populations, and can tell you with 100% certainty that it's super-cheap and mostly painless as long as we let the free market work its magic! Unlike carbon taxes which will instantly destroy the world economy! Because Cambodia!

(I really heard someone here compare fighting climate change to Cambodian communism once. Incidentally, Cambodian communism was all about forcibly relocating large populations, but if you want to be a good Slashdot Libertarian, you don't sweat the details.)

Comment Re:Those performance numbers are BS (Score 1) 258

Seems like the GP is a believer of the "I don't understand what that guy does, so it must be easy" crowd.

It's a pretty common blind spot. I'd be willing to cut him some slack for it if he hadn't jumped straight from "cool idea bro" to "give me all your money". Or at least if he weren't so willfully ignorant about his own project.

Comment Re:Those performance numbers are BS (Score 2) 258

Thanks for the info! I had a feeling EOMA-68 was nonsense too, but I stopped reading after discovering that A) his first big hardware project was developing an "industry standard", and B) they had to change the name from EOMA/PCMCIA because it wasn't actually compatible with PCMCIA.

The only thing I might be inclined to worry about is the possibility that he might sucker gullible people into donating to his obviously doomed project. (I'm not quite cynical enough to believe he's a scammer, but intent doesn't matter when the money's been flushed and donors can't ever get it back.)

Yeah, that was why I commented in the first place. There are too many overly optimistic software people here to let this sort of thing slide.

p.s. I also work for a fabless semi company. HATE YOU if you work for a direct competitor. (okay, not really ;)

Fabless, heck, I work for TI! We have plenty of fabs. Although we like foundries too. Everyone likes foundries these days since process development is insanely expensive. I spent the last five years doing product engineering and embedded flash process development/testing, and recently moved on to applications engineering. I am intimately familiar with how much work it takes to do the stuff that these proposals gloss over, and become very annoyed when it is not taken seriously. :-)

Comment Re:Komatsu? (Score 2, Informative) 184

Why Caterpiller and not coca-cola?

Your link answers that question: Caterpillar sells equipment that helps Israel illegally build settlements in Palestinian territory. Coca-Cola does not. The Palestinians' interests are pretty clear -- they want their own state. There's nothing abstract or symbolic about it.

Comment Re:Those performance numbers are BS (Score 1) 258

As I said above: I have no problem with a project to build an "open" chip for education & hobbyists

Me either. For the record, while I'm happy to trash people who come here looking for money for pie-in-the-sky projects, I think it's great that people are becoming interested in building custom chips. Particularly with more and more functionality moving into SoCs, it's important that hobbyists and amateurs be able to learn and create their own work in the semiconductor world. I just never seem to hear about that kind of stuff on Slashdot...

Comment Re:Those performance numbers are BS (Score 5, Insightful) 258

pay attention 007: we're aiming for mid-2013

Yes, that's what I said:

* The proposal is dated December 2, 2012 for an advanced kitchen sink SoC with silicon in July 2013? Really?

Perhaps my phrasing was unclear. I am skeptical of a six-month development process.

also, bear in mind: the core design's already proven.

By who? To what specs (temperature, voltage, operating life)? Using what methodology?

mid-2013, whilst pretty aggressive, is doable *SO LONG AS* we *DO NOT* do any "design" work. just building-blocks, stack them together, run the verification tools, run it in FPGAs to check it works, run the verification tools again... etc. etc.

You know you can't go straight from RTL to silicon, right? You need timing sims and physical layout. Those are not trivial and they cannot be totally automated.

the teams we're working with know what they're doing. me? i have no clue, and am quite happy not knowing: this is waaay beyond my expertise level and time to learn.

Okay, here's the part that confuses me. You came up with an idea, talked to other people with expertise about doing it, and it sounds like you know who's working on it. All of that is fine. What I don't understand is why you are acting as the leader/spokesman for a project you know almost nothing about. Who are these other groups? The link at the bottom of your proposal is to a no-name Chinese semiconductor company that formed last year and has no products listed. Are they doing the RTL, layout, and verification? Who's doing the silicon testing? What foundry will you use?

The reason I'm being so harsh here is because you're asking for a lot of money with very little credibility. There is nothing in your proposal, your CV, or your comments to suggest that you are competent to work on a project like this. So who's doing the work? Why aren't their names on the proposal? Who has the experience and leadership to make sure the project actually gets done? Why are you "quite happy not knowing" what they're doing when you're the one trying to secure funding?

If you come back here in 2013 with a working chip I'll be the first to apologize, but right now I see very little reason to take this seriously.

Comment Re:Those performance numbers are BS (Score 5, Interesting) 258

Forget the performance numbers, the whole thing is bullshit:

* The proposal is dated December 2, 2012 for an advanced kitchen sink SoC with silicon in July 2013? Really?

* Their never released to market CPU design that beats an ARM on one video decoding benchmark is ready to go, except they need to move it to a new process, double the number of cores, and speed it up by 30%. Trivial, I'm sure.

* This bit here:

What's the next step?

Find investors! We need to move quickly: there's an opportunity to hit
Christmas sales if the processor is ready by July 2013. This should be
possible to achieve if the engineers start NOW (because the design's
already done and proven: it's a matter of bolting on the modern interfaces,
compiling for FPGA to make sure it works, then running verification etc.
No actual "design" work is needed).

The design is done! They just have to, you know, grab their perfectly-working peripheral IPs from unstated sources, "bolt them on" to their heavily-modified CPU, and then compile for FPGA. And maybe some timing simulations for their new 40nm process, but I'm sure that won't turn up any problems. And "verification, etc." (aka the part where you actually make it work). And fixing any problems found in silicon. But no *actual* design work is needed.

I have spent the last three months in my day job on a team of a dozen people writing design verification test cases for a new SoC. Fuck you for talking like that's nothing.

* They're going to hit "Christmas sales"? So despite being a real honest for-profit multi-million-selling product, we swear, they're still targeting a consumer shopping season. Hint: you want your chip to go into other products. Products sold at Christmas time are designed long before Christmas. Probably more than six months before, i.e. July 2013. Oops.

* No mention of post-silicon testing, reliability studies, or even whether they've got a test facility lined up, or what kind of resources they need for long-term support. I said it when OpenCores pulled this crap, and I'll say it again. Hardware is not software. You have to think about this stuff. Yield and reliability are what determine whether other companies buy your stuff and whether you make money from it.

Let me offer some advice to anyone who wants to change the semiconductor world overnight with the magic of open source: start small. Really small. Even Linus Torvalds didn't start out planning to conquer the world. Maybe you could start by trying to get open source IP blocks into commercial products. Once there's a bench of solid, field-tested designs, *then* we can talk about funding an attempt to put it all together. But coming out of nowhere and asking for $10 million is not the way to start. Just ask OpenCores -- their big donation drive got them a grand total of $20 thousand.

Comment Re:Thoughts from my great uncles and aunts... (Score 4, Informative) 567

Why do you think it worked for so many thousands of years and yet we will somehow sustain a population with nobody having kids anymore.

It didn't work very well, though. Infant mortality was very high. Lifespans were shorter. *People* were shorter due to not getting enough food as kids. That is not a better world than what we have today.

Furthermore, why do we need to sustain a population of 7+ billion, as opposed to some lower number? A century ago there were fewer than 2 billion, and it certainly wasn't the end of the world.

Comment Re:What I Know About 0x10c (Score 1) 94

Notch talks about 'launching all nukes at space stations' when he's leading and so it sounds like you'll interact with things outside your ship (probably through your DCPU-16).

That was the part I was missing. From what you're saying, it sounds like they're going to start off with the ship building/programming stuff and then add on to that based on what players do. This makes more sense now. Thanks for the clarification.

Comment What exactly is the game? (Score 1) 94

I read the interview, the older Slashdot story, visited the 0x10^c web site, and skimmed through the DCPU-16 documentation, and I still have no idea what the actual game is. All of the details are about simulating embedded programming in assembly. I guess you can build onto your ship and add DCPU code to run it? Can anyone clarify this?

Comment Re:Soldering Machine (Score 1) 1009

Sorry, misread your question -- I thought you were asking whether soldering would damage the CPU. Lead-free solder melts at over 200C. I don't think there are off-the-shelf ICs that work at that temperature. In the semiconductor world, 125C is high temp and 155C is extreme. 85C is the typical max for consumer products.

Comment Re:AMD (Score 2) 1009

Seriously is there anything worth shopping for in a mobo?

Yes. Obviously it doesn't matter for a fileserver, but there are differences in terms of peripherals (does it have USB3? SATA3? how many of each?), chipsets, on-board graphics/sound performance, and aesthetics. You also get ATX vs. micro-ATX. Different brands and boards may be more prone to failure. For gamers, the number and arrangement of PCIx16 2.0/3.0 slots can be important. Manufacturers like to add their own power and performance tweaking into the BIOS, so that can be a factor. Some BIOSes are better for overclocking. The number and location of on-board fan headers needs to be appropriate for you case.

That's off the top of my head. There may be other things I've forgotten.

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