10 ms·

The Tech Monopolies Go Vertical

280 points by DenverCode 6y ago

arvinsim 6y ago
Ruminating about the possibility that mainstream general computing is now coming to an end. I guess as long as we have Unix we will still have that. But it looks like for the average consumer, they wouldn't really care as long as their needs are met, even if those machines are becoming more and more like appliances.
- netram88 6y ago
  Isn't that exactly what the average person has wanted out of a computer for a long time though? Most people never change anything in their system, and know little more than exactly what they need to do the specific tasks they want to do (writing documents, photo storage, e.t.c) An appliance like system where "it just works" and you never need to understand any of the structure or fiddle with the computer in any way is probably exactly what a lot of people want.
  - oblio 6y ago
    And even in that regard, these systems are still failing them. See this meme on Reddit: https://i.redd.it/piq0jq56fa261.jpg https://i.redd.it/piq0jq56fa261.jpg Even the systems that should most "just work" still leak abstractions like sieves.
  - this_was_posted 6y ago
    What you want isn't always what you need. Things just working is nice, but I'm not sure how much people are aware of the value of actually owning things and being able to move to a competitor without loosing everything. As these monopolists tighten their grip on these devices you see them limiting functionality and use cases AFTER you've purchased them, just because they can.
    - deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
    - epicureanideal 6y ago
      That sounds like a once-in-several-lifetimes business opportunity that they won't get a chance to repeat. After tens of millions of people are harmed by this, laws will be passed, or knowledge will be passed down never to do this again.
      - marcosdumay 6y ago
        Tell me when Microsoft is bankrupt. They were one of the first to do that, and have been doing for more than a decade, while profits only increase. Then Google, Apple and Amazon.
        epicureanideal 6y ago
        It hasn't become enough of a pain yet. People haven't been sufficiently burned.
  - romanovcode 6y ago
    I think this is exactly what average computer user wants. Also, even if I like to tweak linux to my liking, I really appreciate how MacOS just works out of the box where I don't have to configure anything (because nothing is configurable). Windows, on the other hand is worse of both worlds - Nothing works from the start, and it's not easily configurable. (Before you bring your pitch-forks I use Windows on daily basis)
    - ChuckNorris89 6y ago
      Can you detail exactly what "nothing works" on Windows for you? I know it's still a fashionable meme on HN to hate Windows and Microsoft for telemetry and Candy Crush, but saying nothing works is a bit of an exaggeration at this point. Using both Windows 10 and Linux at home and work I can say that while linux is the de facto OS for the server/cloud/embedded system, Windows 10 is the rock solid go-to for the laptop/gaming station, especially on laptops with nvidia cards where very few linux distros and desktop environments would not shit the bed on, especially with thunderbolt docks, with multiple displays and various scaling. Authentication via fingerprint readers or IR-cameras on Linux? Good luck with that. Granted, that's not linux's fault that driver support from hardware vendors is absolute dog shit, but as a user/employee/consumer I'm gonna use whatever just-works™ to get my work/entertainment needs fulfilled with minimal friction, and at this point, outside the Apple ecosystem, Windows 10 has the best driver support by hardware vendors by a long shot with linux sadly still relying on reverse engineered drivers by the community or binary blobs which are ignored by the FLOSS community, which turns linux into this dumpster fire on the more "fancy" laptops that use anything more than an intel chip with integrated graphics that are nothing more than ssh terminals.
      - romanovcode 6y ago
        Mail app is unintuitive and has advertisement in it. Paint is barely usable, even after 20 years you still cannot resize the image normally. Screenshot app has is much less easy to use compared to Mac. Default browser is crap. I could go on and on about what's wrong with Windows.
        6y ago
  - fauigerzigerk 6y ago
    I think that's a bit of an illusion. Yes, the average person wants tech to "just work", but what that usually means is "just work the way I need it to work for my specific purposes in my specific circumstances". It's true that the average person doesn't want to spend time tinkering with tech and take the risk of breaking things. But that's not the same thing as being happy with how things work, and it's not the same thing as using tech as productively as possible. When I write software or talk to people about how they use software, they always want it to work somewhat differently. They do want customisation for entirely sensible and very specific reasons. They just don't want to do it themselves. That's why consulting and support is a huge global industry. The problem with "just works" is that it only has meaning where the requirements are specified in great detail with very little variability. That's always trivially the case for single purpose household appliances. It's also the case for things like making phone calls or for device drivers. No one wants to "customise" a device driver to stop it from draining the battery. But computers are not single purpose devices. They are used for a million different things in a million different situations. "Just works" is largely undefined outside of core OS functionality. And that's why the appliance metaphor just doesn't work.
    - goatinaboat 6y ago
      But that's not the same thing as being happy with how things work, and it's not the same thing as using tech as productively as possible. If productivity of end-users was the goal then we wouldn't see random changes to interfaces that people had learnt, for no other reason than some graphic designer thinks it doesn't look "fresh". The truth is for most of what most people do, computing was solved around 2010-ish and all anyone wants now is for things to be more reliable, faster and cheaper. But that's much harder work for companies that a new flat interface style, or some animated emojis.
      - chungus_khan 6y ago
        That, and their goal isn't actually to make a better product. A better product can be a means to an end, but the real goal is to increase the rate of growth, and more often than not that flat interface style convinces some manager or consumer that they need the latest one. Make the number go up. All hail the number.
  - spacemanmatt 6y ago
    To be 100% certain, most people in my generation (GenX) did not want a computer at all.
- oblio 6y ago
  They're even worse than old appliances. You'd usually own those appliances, be able to repair them, patch them up and use them for a long, long time. Tech companies are turning everything that you can put software on into something you rent. And you can put software on everything. Software companies are becoming the ultimate rent seekers. The endgame of anyone/any company, it seems :-)
  - warent 6y ago
    I can tell you as someone sells SaaS that I prefer rent because it allows me to serve my customers more effectively, meaning they get more value and Iget more money. This isn't glib doublespeak. There's probably a better way to articulate this for people who were formally educated in business (not me). Basically customer lifetime value is variable on a monthly fee, meaning you can always add upgrades and provide support. But if you just sell it one-and-done then depending on the price it can be difficult to find the motivation to provide any meaningful long-term support.
    - nnq 6y ago
      ...but you can find the motivation to offer a product that just works (mostly) perfectly and doesn't need support! Rarer updates, because you just need to test your things perfectly and ensure 99.9% of user will not need any "support". And shipping things that are "done" - they don't need upgrades. If I find I actually need any kind of support with any service/product and I can't "just use it" then I start looking for an alternative product/service. There's something rotten at the core of everything-as-a-service and continuous-improvement and growth-hacking and everything that comes with it... Most people actually like things that are done and stay done, most stuff doesn't need to need to be fixed, and it doesn't need to evolve or improve beyond the glacial pace needed to keep up working on the infrastructure it uses...
      - cercatrova 6y ago
        You need to make all your money up front with one time sales, whereas you can spread it out with a subscription. The former is much harder to make a living off of, which is why you see the proliferation of SaaS these days.
- pjmlp 6y ago
  Anyone that has ported UNIX software across all big iron vendors knows that POSIX is only half of the equation. I want my Amiga appliance back, computers that have a soul of how hardware and software are designed together.
  - user-the-name 6y ago
    So get a Mac. That's what they are.
    - pjmlp 6y ago
      I already have it, alongside Windows laptops, Android phones, Windows phones and set top boxes, thank you very much.
- rimliu 6y ago
  Maybe "mainstream general computing" was never the thing? Gaming is mainstream, social media is mainstream, many thing, but general computing is not.
  - marcodave 6y ago
    what is "mainstream general computing" in your understanding?
- user-the-name 6y ago
  What is "general computing"? The IBM PC lineage of putting unrelated components together by yourself is an anomaly in the history of home computers, or computers in general. Selling computers as a whole, with set hardware and software, is what used to be the norm, and it worked well for everyone involved. We are to some extent returning to what things used to be.
  - TeMPOraL 6y ago
    It didn't work that well for everyone (except the established vendors), otherwise it wouldn't have taken the market by storm. Modularity is a good thing to have for innovation. If we're returning to "fixed sets", that probably signals the exploratory period is dying. Anyway, "general computing" doesn't necessarily mean mixing and mashing hardware. But it definitely means executing arbitrary software with full control over installed hardware. The trend line here is definitely from "more" to "less" of "general computing". We've started with raw metal and hardware diagrams being included in the instruction manuals; then diagrams disappeared, CPUs gained abstraction layers - but it was still fine, computing-wise. But now we're in era of OSes and even CPUs limiting what users can do with them, and multiple parties owning various pieces of a computer, with nothing left to own for the user who actually buys the machine.
    - user-the-name 6y ago
      > Modularity is a good thing to have for innovation Is it though? Apple has innovated a whole lot more with the non-modular Macs and iPads than any generic x86 vendor has managed in years and years. Modularity means software has to be designed for the lowest common denominator. And that in turn means that there is nothing to gain by innovating in hardware, because the software won't support it anyway. Somebody who controls every part of both hardware and software can innovate much more freely than you can in a modular market. x86 PCs have been stagnant for decades now.
    - pjmlp 6y ago
      It failed more due to mismanagement than anything else.
    - 6y ago
deleted 6y ago
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viktorcode 6y ago
"No company better exhibits vertical integration than Apple." Tesla.
- tonyedgecombe 6y ago
  It's interesting how this goes in cycles. Car companies used to be integrated. VW had a factory where they poured melts in one end and pooped out completed cars at the other. The trouble is that sort of vast and sprawling enterprise breeds inefficiencies. The response to that was to start outsourcing more and more work and lean on their suppliers for innovation. Then they suddenly find they can't differentiate themselves in the market and start bring things back in-house again. VW are bringing software development back in house now because it is a key part of the product. Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose.
  - flyinghamster 6y ago
    I guess the key is figuring out what's best done in-house and what works best farming out to suppliers. SpaceX found it cheaper to do many things themselves than go out to the established aerospace suppliers. Whether that remains the case ten years from now is open to question.
    - tonyedgecombe 6y ago
      I wouldn't be surprised if aerospace suppliers got rather fat and lazy sucking on the NASA and DoD teats.
- marticode 6y ago
  This might be a mistake though. There's a reason all car makers moved to a heavily subcontracted, complex supply chain.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
bsaul 6y ago
on the other end of the spectrum, i can definitely see a trend in DIY : 3d printing, knowledge sharing through social media, mooc and e-learning, risc-v , arduino, rasperry-pi, etc. One could also see a future where computers become home-built, both software and hardware.
- mhh__ 6y ago
  You ain't ever building your CPU at home if that's what you mean.
  - mondoshawan 6y ago
    I beg to differ, given the propensity of FPGA tools and the Google opensilicon job thing where yoi can tape out a corner of a chip for free.
vishnugupta 6y ago
I'm reminded of how retailers once they cross a certain threshold of popularity and distribution penetration begin rolling out their own branded products. Amazon Basics is an example of that but is true of almost any medium/large retailer. I often wondered when will that happen with Apple/Google/Amazon. It does seem inevitable, in the hindsight. Beyond a certain scale middle men's costs become non-trivial and hard to ignore. In case of Apple, though it is more than costs alone because they want end-to-end control of UX. By the looks of it processor had become a limiting factor in achieving that control. Makes me wonder, processor is the lower layer in the stack. What about upper layers? Apple have already rolled out their credit card. Maybe their own cellular network? A new WiFi standard, perhaps?
- mtgx 6y ago
  Platforms/marketplaces should never be allowed to promote and sell their own products and compete with their own customers. Period. It invites way too much conflict of interest to ever be a long-term net positive for either the platform itself or the end-consumers. This is a matter of law, it's never going to be fixed by the "free market."
- unishark 6y ago
  > I'm reminded of how retailers once they cross a certain threshold of popularity and distribution penetration begin rolling out their own branded products. Amazon Basics is an example of that but is true of almost any medium/large retailer. Conversely if brands become popular they open their own retail stores. The point is not not give your profits away to others if your business is the one bringing in the customers and margins, not them.
  - vishnugupta 6y ago
    Absolutely! Apple stores!!
- chungus_khan 6y ago
  Those who do not remember the Bell System are doomed to see it repeat in varying permutations.
pdimitar 6y ago
As a counter-point, all these companies might eventually lose the goodwill of the programmers by exercising too tight a control -- and having very specific tooling where knowledge can't be transferred to other jobs -- and they could find themselves starved for quality hires. Imagine if the average programmer needs 5 highly specialized laptops to improve their job prospects -- not many will do that even when they have the money. I mean, until it gets to that point the big companies might not care anymore, sure. But general-purpose computing is very far from dead or even dying. What we seem to be heading towards is more like a huge divide and a segmentation that might last decades.
- rimliu 6y ago
  Programmers may lose the goodwill of the users, if they ignore them for too long.
  - flyinghamster 6y ago
    IMO, you and the parent are both right. Unfortunately, all too many programmers are implementing something that management came up with.
  - pdimitar 6y ago
    What we both said is not mutually exclusive. Both are correct IMO. Sadly the users don't have much choice nowadays, and I am not saying this to gloat (being a programmer) but more like a lament -- in some areas there are far too few choices (either very expensive or just not that good) and in many others the choice is so big that it might as well not exist because you can't make an informed decision in a reasonable time frame.
- inglor_cz 6y ago
  "Imagine if the average programmer needs 5 highly specialized laptops to improve their job prospects -- not many will do that even when they have the money." This may also mean that the average programmer will be stuck with a concrete platform, because the cost of migration would be too high. There is a similar situation in a different highly qualified field - airline pilots. If you are a pilot and want to change to another airline, you lose all your seniority and begin at the bottom of the ladder, even if you are an experienced captain with a lot of miles under your belt. [0] [0] https://askthepilot.com/questionanswers/seniority/ https://askthepilot.com/questionanswers/seniority/
bjarneh 6y ago
> Everyone loves to talk about tech monopolies. No monopoly loves to talk about how it is a monopoly though, most claim to have fierce competitors. Monopolies usually pretend to be part of much larger markets; where they are just "a small fish in a big pond".
- flyinghamster 6y ago
  A good example of that is the eyeglass "market" that has many seeming "players" that are all owned by Luxottica.
  - bjarneh 6y ago
    That example is certainly extreme; but these fake "competitors/adversaries" are normal i business. It is not unusual that one competitor becomes so large that it can basically buy up all of its rivals. But it never renames them or shuts them down. They just chug along - looking like competition.
headmelted 6y ago
As an example of this I do wonder if the PC industry realises the bind they’re now in with the Apple and the M1. We don’t know the unit cost of those parts, but we know from past statements they are a very small proportion of what Intel is charging OEMs for their processors. Given that the perception has always been that MacBooks are the best built laptops available, but priced at a substantial premium, it’s been fine for a Dell or HP to coast by on lower prices and thinner margins (as long as Apple wanted 30% or so in profit on each unit sold it was easy to compete on price and still make a living). With the M1, Apple now has the option of competing directly on price while preserving their margin, with a substantially faster machine, that still has the other premium elements (e.g. the aluminium body, the massive trackpad). I don’t know how any one of their competitors can compete with a similarly-priced device that is faster, better built, and commands much higher residual value down the road. Maybe I’m being naive but I’d be very worried right now if I were Dell/Lenovo/HP, especially given that Intel doesn’t have a working 5nm process. It’s even worse for companies like Hynix, given the performance gains from the on-package memory architecture in the M1. AMD are going to have to go down that route now to compete, and that doesn’t leave much room for direct-to-consumer DRAM vendors (although given the questionable histories in that market it may not be the worst thing for the consumer).
- sliken 6y ago
  After looking at Apple's bandwidth (68GB/sec or so) and latency (random latency 32ns or so, if TLB friendly) I think it's time to consider ditching dimms. Half the latency, higher bandwidth, and lower costs sounds good to me. Just hope that future motherboard makers with LPDDR4x-4266 have motherboard options with 32GB ram instead of today's rather low limit of 16GB on the M1.
  - headmelted 6y ago
    I don’t know that there’s an architecture limit that means that higher than 16GB is infeasible. I suspect we’ll see 32gb in the new iMacs and presumably a lot more than that in the next Mac Pro (which I’m really excited about in terms of how they scale the architecture).
  - 6y ago
supernova87a 6y ago
For some reason the article's explanation about "software ate everything" and jumping between each company isn't resonating intuitively with me, so I offer my own take on the situation: For a long time, the hardware/data center offerings of Intel, AWS, etc. were close enough to what other companies needed to not make it worth their while to invest in inventing their own solutions to low % compute problems. However, as: -- compute loads and costs grew -- types of compute became more specialized -- design and build of one's own silicon became more accessible/differentiable -- companies' needs and tolerances for paying a premium diverged enough from what Intel/AWS was offering, it then became worthwhile for large companies (who can sustain such hardware development efforts) to design and build their own chips, either for cost reduction or functionality-enhancing reasons. Maybe they just saw the margins being achieved by sit-on-your-hands incumbents and decided, "we could do this too, and better".
- knowledgemule 6y ago
  This is a great summary. Sorry if it didn’t make sense. I think whats also interesting is it has become on one hand more accessible but on another less. Even with ARM cores the cost to get to 5nm is staggering and can really only be done by a few companies. It’s very obvious who has the scale. Heck even semiconductor companies themselves are worried if they can make it to the 5nm node alone - the XLNX/AMD and especially the IPHI/MRVL merger can be viewed from this light. What is most interesting is the timing. Software did eat everything, hardware used to keep up. Moore’s law died a quiet death and the solution is everyone makes custom chips for everything. Well then the people who have to most compute are going to make the most chips, but also at a time where the actual entry to do leading edge is the highest. It’s just a very cool time for them to have done it. I’m excited and will be following. Thanks for the feedback, the writing is hard sometimes.
tannhaeuser 6y ago
There are tools though through which we can mitigate verticals and have in the past: - regulated markets (eg limiting service bundling such as free email financed by targeted ads, tying devices to social logins, predatory social network effects, mandating availability of profile data for ad targeting to third parties, stopping ad platform Ponzi schemes eg without objective third-party efficacy measurement, create strong consumer laws against entertainment devices wanting to track and send ads to you, rethink 5G networking) - mandate standard formats for your data/text providers to export at your request for you to move to another provider - stop hw/sw bundling and/or tax closed hw/sw platforms different from general-purpose computers (such as has been done with Playstation) - net neutrality - return to public sponsorship of development for standards in information processing and demand alignment to such standards in at least public tenders or beyond (such as in the construction industry) - mandate E-commerce transactions be represented through standard, signed order and billing manifests (rather than allowing proprietary ad-hoc/pseudo currencies which would also be problematic for tax authorities) or create/mandate digital currencies The challenges we're facing as civilization due to digitalisation aren't entirely new and have been addressed for eg the telco and financial industry. It's only in the last decade that we're being brainwashed to become slaves to "the Cloud".
- op03 6y ago
  The new challenge is both parties, thanks to social media/news media reward mechanisms, cant agree to anything without loosing their behaviour conditioning like counts. Until underlying reward mechanisms change political will won't have a chance to build.
- einpoklum 6y ago
  The thing is that governments are generally influenced more by the commercial interests of large corporations and capital-owners, than by popular interests. There needs to be a very strong "pull", with a lot of organizing and pressure on politicians and agencies, to counteract corporate influence - and it's not enough that the reality is obvious. Also, in most world states, large corporations are able to threaten leaving - stopping activity in the country - which can be quite a hit to the local economy for smaller states and larger corporations. Another point which hinders your suggestions is the imbalance between world powers, especially the US (and to some extent the EU and China) - so that if one or several of those are beholden to corporate interests, then the others, or world-wide bodies, will find it very difficult to mandate things, apply taxation etc.
turbinerneiter 6y ago
Hah, I really like that I was right, having written this (https://medium.com/@turbinenreiter/on-google-apple-and-the-computer-industrys-struggle-for-innovation-a9b4ad6e4212 https://medium.com/@turbinenreiter/on-google-apple-and-the-c...) a while ago, making a similar point, although written way worse :D I think that we (non-FANG, open-source, university) have to make sure we don't lose the ability to innovate, due to not being able to buy the hardware we need. I.e. if we can't buy an M1 class processor, we can't invent new products that would be enabled by it.
torginus 6y ago
I'm not buying the argument. Firstly I don't think that designing competitive AI accelerators requires the resources that would restrict the market to a few high-end competitors. From what I understand, they are a sea of low precision DSPs specialized for convolution, connected by a high-speed interconnect. While I would hesitate to claim that they are simple to design, they don't necessarily have the staggering amount of design complexity of a modern CPU or GPU. Second, for CPUs I don't think that a complete clean-sheet design makes sense for a lot of companies. Yes, I get it, Apple has taken the world by storm - but let's not forget, that Apple gets a lot of mileage from very few designs, probably the same CPU core ends up in the iPhone, iPad, Apple TV and now the MacBook - with slight modifications. This is the same, for Samsung, ARM,h Qualcomm, Intel, etc. - most of their CPU designs can be aimed at the market for servers, game consoles, smart devices, PCs, Notebooks, etc. If AWS designs a server core, their entire market is AWS instances probably - not a small one by any means, but smaller than a dedicated CPU manufacturer's, thus the sensible amount of investment they can make into CPU design is lower than that of a dedicated CPU manufacturer. I'm not saying it doesn't make sense for them - it probably does - but it's far too early to predict the demise of CPU companies.
spacemanmatt 6y ago
With nary an antitrust enforcement in sight, who can be surprised?
sradman 6y ago
I think AWS Inferentia [1], Amazon’s AI silicon, is much further along than the article suggests. The Alexa backend is mostly run on these chips now [2]. Other than this nitpick, the article is a great summary of how Google, Amazon, and Apple are vertically integrating silicon into their platforms. [1] https://aws.amazon.com/machine-learning/inferentia/ https://aws.amazon.com/machine-learning/inferentia/ [2] https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/majority-of-alexa-now-running-on-faster-more-cost-effective-amazon-ec2-inf1-instances/ https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/majority-of-alexa-now-runni...
- knowledgemule 6y ago
  Thank you!!!! I have been looking for information about this. I knew about their Alexa inference chip but this is new to me. Thanks :)
bullen 6y ago
The difference between 28, 16 and 5nm is much less than the sales people would like you to think. The costs are exploding, not only are revenues going to drop because there is no reason to buy anything new, but combined with more "subscription" plans where you don't own your wares and the shorter lifespan of planned obsolecence, you end up in the eye of the perfect storm. Combine that with global peak energy + debt and covid is just another margin call. Get out now or suffer the consequenses for the rest of eternity! Linux on Raspberry 4 and Jetson Nano is the only exit and it will close sooner than you think. Edit: PCIe NVMe and linux driver/OS bugs on these are the last bottleneck, hopefully solved soon!
SergeAx 6y ago
That makes me wonder which widely adopted software will first have optimization for new generation non-standard hardware, for example Optane storage? Postgres? MongoDB? Redis? Any of competing time-series DBs?
Proven 6y ago
Quite insightful, except that hyperscalers aren't monopolies. Monopolies are created by governments.
baybal2 6y ago
Sometimes I hear that "hardware providers are holding dotcoms in a chokehold." That's utterly wrong. Silicon makers themselves are under intense pressure of dotcoms massive negotiating weights. Chasing the Facebook, Amazon, Google trio is not a pleasant experience as many OEMs found out. Unlike hardware makers themselves, and OEMs, there is no way any component manufacturer can simply "turn the switch off" on a dotcom client. Such clients can simply wait out few hardware generations, and buy older products just fine. Now, imagine yourself an OEM, and that a top chipmaker declined to ship him his latest, and greatest chip/part. This becomes instantly less funny. Imagine a graphic card vendor having to ship cards with 3 years old GPUs, or a laptop vendor having to do the same.
amelius 6y ago
> We are going back to the old patterns of integration of both Software and Hardware. Can we have some regulation against this, please?
mabbo 6y ago
> This is a barrier to entry that few companies can really climb over anymore, with 500 million in R&D only possible by a few companies I wonder what could be done to reduce that barrier. It sounds as though there is a lot of value that could be unlocked by making it easier (cheaper) to get over it. I imagine a company that could drop the Verification or Software costs down by an order of magnitude would suddenly find itself with a long lineup of customers. After all, if only 270 companies can currently get over that barrier, reducing the barrier by even $50m or $100m would open up the market to a large number of companies, all with fairly large pockets and a strong incentive to be customers. And of course, I say this having never worked in the hardware design industry, so all are welcome to explain in excruciating detail how naïve I am.
deleted 6y ago
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1MachineElf 6y ago
Neither of these points are relevant to the purpose of this article, however: The table showing Google's suppliers left out IBM and their POWER9-based datacenter systems. These include but are not limited to GCP offerings: https://www.datacenterknowledge.com/google-alphabet/google-launches-ibm-power-systems-cloud-service https://www.datacenterknowledge.com/google-alphabet/google-l... In the same vein, I must admit that I was impressed by the work these monopolies poured into the Open Compute Project. AFAIK, OCP datacenters are rare outside of these companies, but they are one of the net goods that have come out of tech monopoly vertical integration.
fxtentacle 6y ago
My prediction on how this will play out is that it will become impossible to exceed the FAANG based on compute price, as the article also points out, but I predict that it won't matter as much. If Amazon has a 50% cost advantage on AI by producing their own chips, then an algorithm working 2x as effective but inaccessible to Amazon would be enough to catch up. So my prediction is that as chip designs get more exclusive, algorithmic research will become more important again. Everyone is using interpreted languages because CPU time is still considered cheap. So if you want to prepare for this future as a coder, learn C++ or Rust.
paulpan 6y ago
Good read and I didn't know about the rumors of Facebook's ARM chips (for what though?), Microsoft's Project Catapult, nor the imminent custom chips for Waymo. I think the next frontier will likely be on network bandwidth, in particular user-facing production ones beyond the internal backbones. Currently it's a finite resource that all network providers have to negotiate for and involves more than just the big tech companies. But as workloads continue shifting to the cloud (leveraging the cost efficiencies such as AWS Graviton chips), I'm expecting companies to vying for greater ownership of this external network bandwidth. I'd be curious of any behind the scenes negotiations being made with Starlink, to leverage its growing satellite constellations to address this.
- hammock 6y ago
  >Facebook's ARM chips (for what though?) Datacenters?
- detaro 6y ago
  > (for what though?) Facebook does a lot of custom datacenter stuff, that could be a place
Abishek_Muthian 6y ago
>Google - In-House Opportunity - TPU chip, Custom ARM chip for phone Google will put their custom chip on their Chromebooks for sure, there were couple of Chromebooks already with some weird SoC earlier which was supposedly purpose built for Chromebooks, couldn't remember the name I think it was from Spreadtrum.
OnlyRepliesToBS 6y ago
this must be studied, heavily

280 points by DenverCode 6y ago

Ruminating about the possibility that mainstream general computing is now coming to an end. I guess as long as we have Unix we will still have that. But it looks like for the average consumer, they wouldn't really care as long as their needs are met, even if those machines are becoming more and more like appliances.

netram88 6y ago
Isn't that exactly what the average person has wanted out of a computer for a long time though? Most people never change anything in their system, and know little more than exactly what they need to do the specific tasks they want to do (writing documents, photo storage, e.t.c) An appliance like system where "it just works" and you never need to understand any of the structure or fiddle with the computer in any way is probably exactly what a lot of people want.
- oblio 6y ago
  And even in that regard, these systems are still failing them. See this meme on Reddit: https://i.redd.it/piq0jq56fa261.jpg https://i.redd.it/piq0jq56fa261.jpg Even the systems that should most "just work" still leak abstractions like sieves.
- this_was_posted 6y ago
  What you want isn't always what you need. Things just working is nice, but I'm not sure how much people are aware of the value of actually owning things and being able to move to a competitor without loosing everything. As these monopolists tighten their grip on these devices you see them limiting functionality and use cases AFTER you've purchased them, just because they can.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  - epicureanideal 6y ago
    That sounds like a once-in-several-lifetimes business opportunity that they won't get a chance to repeat. After tens of millions of people are harmed by this, laws will be passed, or knowledge will be passed down never to do this again.
    - marcosdumay 6y ago
      Tell me when Microsoft is bankrupt. They were one of the first to do that, and have been doing for more than a decade, while profits only increase. Then Google, Apple and Amazon.
      - epicureanideal 6y ago
        It hasn't become enough of a pain yet. People haven't been sufficiently burned.
- romanovcode 6y ago
  I think this is exactly what average computer user wants. Also, even if I like to tweak linux to my liking, I really appreciate how MacOS just works out of the box where I don't have to configure anything (because nothing is configurable). Windows, on the other hand is worse of both worlds - Nothing works from the start, and it's not easily configurable. (Before you bring your pitch-forks I use Windows on daily basis)
  - ChuckNorris89 6y ago
    Can you detail exactly what "nothing works" on Windows for you? I know it's still a fashionable meme on HN to hate Windows and Microsoft for telemetry and Candy Crush, but saying nothing works is a bit of an exaggeration at this point. Using both Windows 10 and Linux at home and work I can say that while linux is the de facto OS for the server/cloud/embedded system, Windows 10 is the rock solid go-to for the laptop/gaming station, especially on laptops with nvidia cards where very few linux distros and desktop environments would not shit the bed on, especially with thunderbolt docks, with multiple displays and various scaling. Authentication via fingerprint readers or IR-cameras on Linux? Good luck with that. Granted, that's not linux's fault that driver support from hardware vendors is absolute dog shit, but as a user/employee/consumer I'm gonna use whatever just-works™ to get my work/entertainment needs fulfilled with minimal friction, and at this point, outside the Apple ecosystem, Windows 10 has the best driver support by hardware vendors by a long shot with linux sadly still relying on reverse engineered drivers by the community or binary blobs which are ignored by the FLOSS community, which turns linux into this dumpster fire on the more "fancy" laptops that use anything more than an intel chip with integrated graphics that are nothing more than ssh terminals.
    - romanovcode 6y ago
      Mail app is unintuitive and has advertisement in it. Paint is barely usable, even after 20 years you still cannot resize the image normally. Screenshot app has is much less easy to use compared to Mac. Default browser is crap. I could go on and on about what's wrong with Windows.
      - 6y ago
- fauigerzigerk 6y ago
  I think that's a bit of an illusion. Yes, the average person wants tech to "just work", but what that usually means is "just work the way I need it to work for my specific purposes in my specific circumstances". It's true that the average person doesn't want to spend time tinkering with tech and take the risk of breaking things. But that's not the same thing as being happy with how things work, and it's not the same thing as using tech as productively as possible. When I write software or talk to people about how they use software, they always want it to work somewhat differently. They do want customisation for entirely sensible and very specific reasons. They just don't want to do it themselves. That's why consulting and support is a huge global industry. The problem with "just works" is that it only has meaning where the requirements are specified in great detail with very little variability. That's always trivially the case for single purpose household appliances. It's also the case for things like making phone calls or for device drivers. No one wants to "customise" a device driver to stop it from draining the battery. But computers are not single purpose devices. They are used for a million different things in a million different situations. "Just works" is largely undefined outside of core OS functionality. And that's why the appliance metaphor just doesn't work.
  - goatinaboat 6y ago
    But that's not the same thing as being happy with how things work, and it's not the same thing as using tech as productively as possible. If productivity of end-users was the goal then we wouldn't see random changes to interfaces that people had learnt, for no other reason than some graphic designer thinks it doesn't look "fresh". The truth is for most of what most people do, computing was solved around 2010-ish and all anyone wants now is for things to be more reliable, faster and cheaper. But that's much harder work for companies that a new flat interface style, or some animated emojis.
    - chungus_khan 6y ago
      That, and their goal isn't actually to make a better product. A better product can be a means to an end, but the real goal is to increase the rate of growth, and more often than not that flat interface style convinces some manager or consumer that they need the latest one. Make the number go up. All hail the number.
- spacemanmatt 6y ago
  To be 100% certain, most people in my generation (GenX) did not want a computer at all.
oblio 6y ago
They're even worse than old appliances. You'd usually own those appliances, be able to repair them, patch them up and use them for a long, long time. Tech companies are turning everything that you can put software on into something you rent. And you can put software on everything. Software companies are becoming the ultimate rent seekers. The endgame of anyone/any company, it seems :-)
- warent 6y ago
  I can tell you as someone sells SaaS that I prefer rent because it allows me to serve my customers more effectively, meaning they get more value and Iget more money. This isn't glib doublespeak. There's probably a better way to articulate this for people who were formally educated in business (not me). Basically customer lifetime value is variable on a monthly fee, meaning you can always add upgrades and provide support. But if you just sell it one-and-done then depending on the price it can be difficult to find the motivation to provide any meaningful long-term support.
  - nnq 6y ago
    ...but you can find the motivation to offer a product that just works (mostly) perfectly and doesn't need support! Rarer updates, because you just need to test your things perfectly and ensure 99.9% of user will not need any "support". And shipping things that are "done" - they don't need upgrades. If I find I actually need any kind of support with any service/product and I can't "just use it" then I start looking for an alternative product/service. There's something rotten at the core of everything-as-a-service and continuous-improvement and growth-hacking and everything that comes with it... Most people actually like things that are done and stay done, most stuff doesn't need to need to be fixed, and it doesn't need to evolve or improve beyond the glacial pace needed to keep up working on the infrastructure it uses...
    - cercatrova 6y ago
      You need to make all your money up front with one time sales, whereas you can spread it out with a subscription. The former is much harder to make a living off of, which is why you see the proliferation of SaaS these days.
pjmlp 6y ago
Anyone that has ported UNIX software across all big iron vendors knows that POSIX is only half of the equation. I want my Amiga appliance back, computers that have a soul of how hardware and software are designed together.
- user-the-name 6y ago
  So get a Mac. That's what they are.
  - pjmlp 6y ago
    I already have it, alongside Windows laptops, Android phones, Windows phones and set top boxes, thank you very much.
rimliu 6y ago
Maybe "mainstream general computing" was never the thing? Gaming is mainstream, social media is mainstream, many thing, but general computing is not.
- marcodave 6y ago
  what is "mainstream general computing" in your understanding?
user-the-name 6y ago
What is "general computing"? The IBM PC lineage of putting unrelated components together by yourself is an anomaly in the history of home computers, or computers in general. Selling computers as a whole, with set hardware and software, is what used to be the norm, and it worked well for everyone involved. We are to some extent returning to what things used to be.
- TeMPOraL 6y ago
  It didn't work that well for everyone (except the established vendors), otherwise it wouldn't have taken the market by storm. Modularity is a good thing to have for innovation. If we're returning to "fixed sets", that probably signals the exploratory period is dying. Anyway, "general computing" doesn't necessarily mean mixing and mashing hardware. But it definitely means executing arbitrary software with full control over installed hardware. The trend line here is definitely from "more" to "less" of "general computing". We've started with raw metal and hardware diagrams being included in the instruction manuals; then diagrams disappeared, CPUs gained abstraction layers - but it was still fine, computing-wise. But now we're in era of OSes and even CPUs limiting what users can do with them, and multiple parties owning various pieces of a computer, with nothing left to own for the user who actually buys the machine.
  - user-the-name 6y ago
    > Modularity is a good thing to have for innovation Is it though? Apple has innovated a whole lot more with the non-modular Macs and iPads than any generic x86 vendor has managed in years and years. Modularity means software has to be designed for the lowest common denominator. And that in turn means that there is nothing to gain by innovating in hardware, because the software won't support it anyway. Somebody who controls every part of both hardware and software can innovate much more freely than you can in a modular market. x86 PCs have been stagnant for decades now.
  - pjmlp 6y ago
    It failed more due to mismanagement than anything else.
  - 6y ago

deleted 6y ago

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viktorcode 6y ago

"No company better exhibits vertical integration than Apple." Tesla.

tonyedgecombe 6y ago
It's interesting how this goes in cycles. Car companies used to be integrated. VW had a factory where they poured melts in one end and pooped out completed cars at the other. The trouble is that sort of vast and sprawling enterprise breeds inefficiencies. The response to that was to start outsourcing more and more work and lean on their suppliers for innovation. Then they suddenly find they can't differentiate themselves in the market and start bring things back in-house again. VW are bringing software development back in house now because it is a key part of the product. Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose.
- flyinghamster 6y ago
  I guess the key is figuring out what's best done in-house and what works best farming out to suppliers. SpaceX found it cheaper to do many things themselves than go out to the established aerospace suppliers. Whether that remains the case ten years from now is open to question.
  - tonyedgecombe 6y ago
    I wouldn't be surprised if aerospace suppliers got rather fat and lazy sucking on the NASA and DoD teats.
marticode 6y ago
This might be a mistake though. There's a reason all car makers moved to a heavily subcontracted, complex supply chain.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]

bsaul 6y ago

on the other end of the spectrum, i can definitely see a trend in DIY : 3d printing, knowledge sharing through social media, mooc and e-learning, risc-v , arduino, rasperry-pi, etc. One could also see a future where computers become home-built, both software and hardware.

mhh__ 6y ago
You ain't ever building your CPU at home if that's what you mean.
- mondoshawan 6y ago
  I beg to differ, given the propensity of FPGA tools and the Google opensilicon job thing where yoi can tape out a corner of a chip for free.

vishnugupta 6y ago

I'm reminded of how retailers once they cross a certain threshold of popularity and distribution penetration begin rolling out their own branded products. Amazon Basics is an example of that but is true of almost any medium/large retailer. I often wondered when will that happen with Apple/Google/Amazon. It does seem inevitable, in the hindsight. Beyond a certain scale middle men's costs become non-trivial and hard to ignore. In case of Apple, though it is more than costs alone because they want end-to-end control of UX. By the looks of it processor had become a limiting factor in achieving that control. Makes me wonder, processor is the lower layer in the stack. What about upper layers? Apple have already rolled out their credit card. Maybe their own cellular network? A new WiFi standard, perhaps?

mtgx 6y ago
Platforms/marketplaces should never be allowed to promote and sell their own products and compete with their own customers. Period. It invites way too much conflict of interest to ever be a long-term net positive for either the platform itself or the end-consumers. This is a matter of law, it's never going to be fixed by the "free market."
unishark 6y ago
> I'm reminded of how retailers once they cross a certain threshold of popularity and distribution penetration begin rolling out their own branded products. Amazon Basics is an example of that but is true of almost any medium/large retailer. Conversely if brands become popular they open their own retail stores. The point is not not give your profits away to others if your business is the one bringing in the customers and margins, not them.
- vishnugupta 6y ago
  Absolutely! Apple stores!!
chungus_khan 6y ago
Those who do not remember the Bell System are doomed to see it repeat in varying permutations.

pdimitar 6y ago

As a counter-point, all these companies might eventually lose the goodwill of the programmers by exercising too tight a control -- and having very specific tooling where knowledge can't be transferred to other jobs -- and they could find themselves starved for quality hires. Imagine if the average programmer needs 5 highly specialized laptops to improve their job prospects -- not many will do that even when they have the money. I mean, until it gets to that point the big companies might not care anymore, sure. But general-purpose computing is very far from dead or even dying. What we seem to be heading towards is more like a huge divide and a segmentation that might last decades.

rimliu 6y ago
Programmers may lose the goodwill of the users, if they ignore them for too long.
- flyinghamster 6y ago
  IMO, you and the parent are both right. Unfortunately, all too many programmers are implementing something that management came up with.
- pdimitar 6y ago
  What we both said is not mutually exclusive. Both are correct IMO. Sadly the users don't have much choice nowadays, and I am not saying this to gloat (being a programmer) but more like a lament -- in some areas there are far too few choices (either very expensive or just not that good) and in many others the choice is so big that it might as well not exist because you can't make an informed decision in a reasonable time frame.
inglor_cz 6y ago
"Imagine if the average programmer needs 5 highly specialized laptops to improve their job prospects -- not many will do that even when they have the money." This may also mean that the average programmer will be stuck with a concrete platform, because the cost of migration would be too high. There is a similar situation in a different highly qualified field - airline pilots. If you are a pilot and want to change to another airline, you lose all your seniority and begin at the bottom of the ladder, even if you are an experienced captain with a lot of miles under your belt. [0] [0] https://askthepilot.com/questionanswers/seniority/ https://askthepilot.com/questionanswers/seniority/

bjarneh 6y ago

> Everyone loves to talk about tech monopolies. No monopoly loves to talk about how it is a monopoly though, most claim to have fierce competitors. Monopolies usually pretend to be part of much larger markets; where they are just "a small fish in a big pond".

flyinghamster 6y ago
A good example of that is the eyeglass "market" that has many seeming "players" that are all owned by Luxottica.
- bjarneh 6y ago
  That example is certainly extreme; but these fake "competitors/adversaries" are normal i business. It is not unusual that one competitor becomes so large that it can basically buy up all of its rivals. But it never renames them or shuts them down. They just chug along - looking like competition.

headmelted 6y ago

As an example of this I do wonder if the PC industry realises the bind they’re now in with the Apple and the M1. We don’t know the unit cost of those parts, but we know from past statements they are a very small proportion of what Intel is charging OEMs for their processors. Given that the perception has always been that MacBooks are the best built laptops available, but priced at a substantial premium, it’s been fine for a Dell or HP to coast by on lower prices and thinner margins (as long as Apple wanted 30% or so in profit on each unit sold it was easy to compete on price and still make a living). With the M1, Apple now has the option of competing directly on price while preserving their margin, with a substantially faster machine, that still has the other premium elements (e.g. the aluminium body, the massive trackpad). I don’t know how any one of their competitors can compete with a similarly-priced device that is faster, better built, and commands much higher residual value down the road. Maybe I’m being naive but I’d be very worried right now if I were Dell/Lenovo/HP, especially given that Intel doesn’t have a working 5nm process. It’s even worse for companies like Hynix, given the performance gains from the on-package memory architecture in the M1. AMD are going to have to go down that route now to compete, and that doesn’t leave much room for direct-to-consumer DRAM vendors (although given the questionable histories in that market it may not be the worst thing for the consumer).

sliken 6y ago
After looking at Apple's bandwidth (68GB/sec or so) and latency (random latency 32ns or so, if TLB friendly) I think it's time to consider ditching dimms. Half the latency, higher bandwidth, and lower costs sounds good to me. Just hope that future motherboard makers with LPDDR4x-4266 have motherboard options with 32GB ram instead of today's rather low limit of 16GB on the M1.
- headmelted 6y ago
  I don’t know that there’s an architecture limit that means that higher than 16GB is infeasible. I suspect we’ll see 32gb in the new iMacs and presumably a lot more than that in the next Mac Pro (which I’m really excited about in terms of how they scale the architecture).
- 6y ago

supernova87a 6y ago

For some reason the article's explanation about "software ate everything" and jumping between each company isn't resonating intuitively with me, so I offer my own take on the situation: For a long time, the hardware/data center offerings of Intel, AWS, etc. were close enough to what other companies needed to not make it worth their while to invest in inventing their own solutions to low % compute problems. However, as: -- compute loads and costs grew -- types of compute became more specialized -- design and build of one's own silicon became more accessible/differentiable -- companies' needs and tolerances for paying a premium diverged enough from what Intel/AWS was offering, it then became worthwhile for large companies (who can sustain such hardware development efforts) to design and build their own chips, either for cost reduction or functionality-enhancing reasons. Maybe they just saw the margins being achieved by sit-on-your-hands incumbents and decided, "we could do this too, and better".

knowledgemule 6y ago
This is a great summary. Sorry if it didn’t make sense. I think whats also interesting is it has become on one hand more accessible but on another less. Even with ARM cores the cost to get to 5nm is staggering and can really only be done by a few companies. It’s very obvious who has the scale. Heck even semiconductor companies themselves are worried if they can make it to the 5nm node alone - the XLNX/AMD and especially the IPHI/MRVL merger can be viewed from this light. What is most interesting is the timing. Software did eat everything, hardware used to keep up. Moore’s law died a quiet death and the solution is everyone makes custom chips for everything. Well then the people who have to most compute are going to make the most chips, but also at a time where the actual entry to do leading edge is the highest. It’s just a very cool time for them to have done it. I’m excited and will be following. Thanks for the feedback, the writing is hard sometimes.

tannhaeuser 6y ago

There are tools though through which we can mitigate verticals and have in the past: - regulated markets (eg limiting service bundling such as free email financed by targeted ads, tying devices to social logins, predatory social network effects, mandating availability of profile data for ad targeting to third parties, stopping ad platform Ponzi schemes eg without objective third-party efficacy measurement, create strong consumer laws against entertainment devices wanting to track and send ads to you, rethink 5G networking) - mandate standard formats for your data/text providers to export at your request for you to move to another provider - stop hw/sw bundling and/or tax closed hw/sw platforms different from general-purpose computers (such as has been done with Playstation) - net neutrality - return to public sponsorship of development for standards in information processing and demand alignment to such standards in at least public tenders or beyond (such as in the construction industry) - mandate E-commerce transactions be represented through standard, signed order and billing manifests (rather than allowing proprietary ad-hoc/pseudo currencies which would also be problematic for tax authorities) or create/mandate digital currencies The challenges we're facing as civilization due to digitalisation aren't entirely new and have been addressed for eg the telco and financial industry. It's only in the last decade that we're being brainwashed to become slaves to "the Cloud".

op03 6y ago
The new challenge is both parties, thanks to social media/news media reward mechanisms, cant agree to anything without loosing their behaviour conditioning like counts. Until underlying reward mechanisms change political will won't have a chance to build.
einpoklum 6y ago
The thing is that governments are generally influenced more by the commercial interests of large corporations and capital-owners, than by popular interests. There needs to be a very strong "pull", with a lot of organizing and pressure on politicians and agencies, to counteract corporate influence - and it's not enough that the reality is obvious. Also, in most world states, large corporations are able to threaten leaving - stopping activity in the country - which can be quite a hit to the local economy for smaller states and larger corporations. Another point which hinders your suggestions is the imbalance between world powers, especially the US (and to some extent the EU and China) - so that if one or several of those are beholden to corporate interests, then the others, or world-wide bodies, will find it very difficult to mandate things, apply taxation etc.

turbinerneiter 6y ago

Hah, I really like that I was right, having written this (https://medium.com/@turbinenreiter/on-google-apple-and-the-computer-industrys-struggle-for-innovation-a9b4ad6e4212 https://medium.com/@turbinenreiter/on-google-apple-and-the-c...) a while ago, making a similar point, although written way worse :D I think that we (non-FANG, open-source, university) have to make sure we don't lose the ability to innovate, due to not being able to buy the hardware we need. I.e. if we can't buy an M1 class processor, we can't invent new products that would be enabled by it.

torginus 6y ago

I'm not buying the argument. Firstly I don't think that designing competitive AI accelerators requires the resources that would restrict the market to a few high-end competitors. From what I understand, they are a sea of low precision DSPs specialized for convolution, connected by a high-speed interconnect. While I would hesitate to claim that they are simple to design, they don't necessarily have the staggering amount of design complexity of a modern CPU or GPU. Second, for CPUs I don't think that a complete clean-sheet design makes sense for a lot of companies. Yes, I get it, Apple has taken the world by storm - but let's not forget, that Apple gets a lot of mileage from very few designs, probably the same CPU core ends up in the iPhone, iPad, Apple TV and now the MacBook - with slight modifications. This is the same, for Samsung, ARM,h Qualcomm, Intel, etc. - most of their CPU designs can be aimed at the market for servers, game consoles, smart devices, PCs, Notebooks, etc. If AWS designs a server core, their entire market is AWS instances probably - not a small one by any means, but smaller than a dedicated CPU manufacturer's, thus the sensible amount of investment they can make into CPU design is lower than that of a dedicated CPU manufacturer. I'm not saying it doesn't make sense for them - it probably does - but it's far too early to predict the demise of CPU companies.

spacemanmatt 6y ago

With nary an antitrust enforcement in sight, who can be surprised?

sradman 6y ago

I think AWS Inferentia [1], Amazon’s AI silicon, is much further along than the article suggests. The Alexa backend is mostly run on these chips now [2]. Other than this nitpick, the article is a great summary of how Google, Amazon, and Apple are vertically integrating silicon into their platforms. [1] https://aws.amazon.com/machine-learning/inferentia/ https://aws.amazon.com/machine-learning/inferentia/ [2] https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/majority-of-alexa-now-running-on-faster-more-cost-effective-amazon-ec2-inf1-instances/ https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/majority-of-alexa-now-runni...

knowledgemule 6y ago
Thank you!!!! I have been looking for information about this. I knew about their Alexa inference chip but this is new to me. Thanks :)

bullen 6y ago

The difference between 28, 16 and 5nm is much less than the sales people would like you to think. The costs are exploding, not only are revenues going to drop because there is no reason to buy anything new, but combined with more "subscription" plans where you don't own your wares and the shorter lifespan of planned obsolecence, you end up in the eye of the perfect storm. Combine that with global peak energy + debt and covid is just another margin call. Get out now or suffer the consequenses for the rest of eternity! Linux on Raspberry 4 and Jetson Nano is the only exit and it will close sooner than you think. Edit: PCIe NVMe and linux driver/OS bugs on these are the last bottleneck, hopefully solved soon!

SergeAx 6y ago

That makes me wonder which widely adopted software will first have optimization for new generation non-standard hardware, for example Optane storage? Postgres? MongoDB? Redis? Any of competing time-series DBs?

Proven 6y ago

Quite insightful, except that hyperscalers aren't monopolies. Monopolies are created by governments.

baybal2 6y ago

Sometimes I hear that "hardware providers are holding dotcoms in a chokehold." That's utterly wrong. Silicon makers themselves are under intense pressure of dotcoms massive negotiating weights. Chasing the Facebook, Amazon, Google trio is not a pleasant experience as many OEMs found out. Unlike hardware makers themselves, and OEMs, there is no way any component manufacturer can simply "turn the switch off" on a dotcom client. Such clients can simply wait out few hardware generations, and buy older products just fine. Now, imagine yourself an OEM, and that a top chipmaker declined to ship him his latest, and greatest chip/part. This becomes instantly less funny. Imagine a graphic card vendor having to ship cards with 3 years old GPUs, or a laptop vendor having to do the same.

amelius 6y ago

> We are going back to the old patterns of integration of both Software and Hardware. Can we have some regulation against this, please?

mabbo 6y ago

> This is a barrier to entry that few companies can really climb over anymore, with 500 million in R&D only possible by a few companies I wonder what could be done to reduce that barrier. It sounds as though there is a lot of value that could be unlocked by making it easier (cheaper) to get over it. I imagine a company that could drop the Verification or Software costs down by an order of magnitude would suddenly find itself with a long lineup of customers. After all, if only 270 companies can currently get over that barrier, reducing the barrier by even $50m or $100m would open up the market to a large number of companies, all with fairly large pockets and a strong incentive to be customers. And of course, I say this having never worked in the hardware design industry, so all are welcome to explain in excruciating detail how naïve I am.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

1MachineElf 6y ago

Neither of these points are relevant to the purpose of this article, however: The table showing Google's suppliers left out IBM and their POWER9-based datacenter systems. These include but are not limited to GCP offerings: https://www.datacenterknowledge.com/google-alphabet/google-launches-ibm-power-systems-cloud-service https://www.datacenterknowledge.com/google-alphabet/google-l... In the same vein, I must admit that I was impressed by the work these monopolies poured into the Open Compute Project. AFAIK, OCP datacenters are rare outside of these companies, but they are one of the net goods that have come out of tech monopoly vertical integration.

fxtentacle 6y ago

My prediction on how this will play out is that it will become impossible to exceed the FAANG based on compute price, as the article also points out, but I predict that it won't matter as much. If Amazon has a 50% cost advantage on AI by producing their own chips, then an algorithm working 2x as effective but inaccessible to Amazon would be enough to catch up. So my prediction is that as chip designs get more exclusive, algorithmic research will become more important again. Everyone is using interpreted languages because CPU time is still considered cheap. So if you want to prepare for this future as a coder, learn C++ or Rust.

paulpan 6y ago

Good read and I didn't know about the rumors of Facebook's ARM chips (for what though?), Microsoft's Project Catapult, nor the imminent custom chips for Waymo. I think the next frontier will likely be on network bandwidth, in particular user-facing production ones beyond the internal backbones. Currently it's a finite resource that all network providers have to negotiate for and involves more than just the big tech companies. But as workloads continue shifting to the cloud (leveraging the cost efficiencies such as AWS Graviton chips), I'm expecting companies to vying for greater ownership of this external network bandwidth. I'd be curious of any behind the scenes negotiations being made with Starlink, to leverage its growing satellite constellations to address this.

hammock 6y ago
>Facebook's ARM chips (for what though?) Datacenters?
detaro 6y ago
> (for what though?) Facebook does a lot of custom datacenter stuff, that could be a place

Abishek_Muthian 6y ago

>Google - In-House Opportunity - TPU chip, Custom ARM chip for phone Google will put their custom chip on their Chromebooks for sure, there were couple of Chromebooks already with some weird SoC earlier which was supposedly purpose built for Chromebooks, couldn't remember the name I think it was from Spreadtrum.

OnlyRepliesToBS 6y ago

this must be studied, heavily