The IBM POWER8 Review: Challenging the Intel Xeon - <AUTHOR> http://www.anandtech.com/show/9567/the-power-8-review-challenging-the-intel-xeon- <comment><USER2> I use POWER8 hardware at Red Hat (supplied by IBM[1]) and it certainly does rock. It helps that I don't have to pay the electricity bills.

I just wish the hardware was more available. There is precisely one, barely affordable, non-IBM POWER8 system available to buy[2] (if you have $3-4k burning a hole in your pocket). Where are the development boards?

[1] [http://research.redhat.com/powerlinux-openpower- development-...](http://research.redhat.com/powerlinux-openpower-development- hosting/)

[2] [http://www.tyan.com/campaign/openpower/](http://www.tyan.com/campaign/openpower/)

<comment><USER3> What are some of the easy benefits of using the POWER series of processors/architecture?

My company runs an IBM POWER7 series system as our ERP/WMS, but that's really only because our vendor sold it as part of a package.

From a user standpoint, POWER architecture just means it will cost me more (on all fronts, from acquisition, to maintenance, to power consumption, etc...). Come upgrade time, it makes it very unlikely I'll be able to unload this system on someone else and recoup anything but a few hundred bucks, sold to someone as a testbench.

When compared to a run-of-the-mill x86 system, POWER doesn't seem to have any real tangible benefits.

<comment><USER2> I agree with all your points. The benefit is per-core performance is very very fast indeed. If you need that, and price is no object, then you should use POWER.

<comment><USER4> Hmm. Everything we have in our basement is slower than my desktop i7 if you run exactly one core.

Running all cores at full tilt is another story.

On the other hand,IBM have just tried to book three 3-hour long pitching sessions with me so it does not sell itself...

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Benchmarks sound like their fighting hardware frequency throttling more then actually benchmarking the chips.

One big issue to point out:

>Floating Point: NAMD

GCC sucks at automatic hardware vectorization. So does the LLVM. Really the only time you can count on getting automatic hardware vectorization is if you shell out for the ICC __AND __write your code in Fortran. I 'm gonna bet they didn't vectorized a goddamn thing, but we can't inspect anand's binary so we'll never know. The results are still _likely_ correct, but IBM should have lost by a smaller margin.

 __TL;DR __

POWER8 is fun but costs 5k more then Xeon per rack mount and uses about 2x the power usage for 10% less performance on generalized work loads. But can pull off 10-15% more performance on _some specialized_ workloads. So meh?

<comment><USER6> My experience has been that icc (the C compiler) does a very good job of auto- vectorization. xlc does as well, provided you avoid the horribly misdesigned POWER6 architecture.

I agree that gcc sucks for this; we didn't have LLVM last time I was doing this kind of work, so I can't comment on that.

<comment><USER7> If you want to really use SIMD units (on x86) check out ISPC. I recommend writing small functions in it that work over large chunks of memory so that SIMD can run at full speed with good cache locality.

This ends up being -very- fast.

<comment><USER5> Link for the lazy: [https://github.com/ispc/ispc/](https://github.com/ispc/ispc/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> IBM really needs to hire a professional designer for their slides. That deck is straight out of a 6th grade science fair.

<comment><USER9> Did they really used Comic Sans?.. With that yellow discount star sign?.. What. the. hell.

<comment><USER8> It's ok guys. It's just our high-power server CPU architecture. Totally cool to slap a yellow star sticker with misaligned text on it. I'm not sure if that's comic sans or a knockoff. Also I just love the teal bevel and big bank bag of cash. And the stock icons for checkmark, arrow, and question mark. And the complete and total misalignment of all the text.

Goodness grief.

<comment><USER10> No No No - you are totally missing the point.

The design language used in those slides has been iteratively refined over decades and exhaustively A/B tested. It has many years of psychometric analysis applied to make it one of the most powerful sales tools in the world.

To win over enterprise PHBs, you need to make them think that you are one of them. That you understand and empathise with them deeply. That you speak their language, and that you are part of their culture.

What better way to do that than to give them a powerpoint presentation that looks just like the ones they give each other. That shows that you are already part of their world, and that you are worthy of the key to the executive washroom.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> single-page link: [http://www.anandtech.com/print/9567/the-power-8-review- chall...](http://www.anandtech.com/print/9567/the-power-8-review-challenging- the-intel-xeon-)

</comment><comment><USER12> I'd be a lot more excited about this if they were more accessible. I can barely justify an upgrade to whitebox Intel Xeon servers and there's just no way I could rationalize the prices that IBM demands.

</comment><comment><USER13> POWER, OS/2, and The Thinkpad has convinced me that IBM just doesn't make the most of what they create.

<comment><USER14> > POWER, OS/2, and The Thinkpad has convinced me that IBM just doesn't make > the most of what they create.

They are all kind of different.

I used to use Thinkpads and I hated IBM for selling it. But from their point of view it was the absolute right thing to do. High end consumer laptops are dominated by Apple (heck IBM is buying Apple and giving them to all their workers, something like 300K Mac Book Pro's). Everything else is racing to the bottom with thinner and thinner margins. Windows running laptops have to compete with Asus and friends and the money just wasn't there.

Not sure about OS/2 much, don't remember the history. But with POWER, IBM has kind of started to turn around in the last few years.

At some point in the past they have made an explicit choice to not play in the consumer market. Heck, there used to be IBM stores, you'd walk in and buy IBM products like you go to an Apple store now. But they decided they don't want to play in that market (or better or for worse). We'll still see how it ends up working out.

So far it still stays in business after hundreds of years, maybe it just luck or there is something to its business approach. (Fun fact, it used to sell cheese slicers and time tracking devices as well at some point).

<comment><USER15> OS/2: decent OS, ahead of Windows for awhile, but IBM was never going to go to the mattresses enough to get it the install base it would need to compete with Windows. IBM's dysfunctional PC division didn't help. It would have been nice if IBM kept OS/2 up as a specialty operating system, but I think the overhead costs were too much and Gerstner was, by 1996-1997, very much in a kill- anything-that-isn't profitable mode.

Prior to Gerstner, IBM had a variety of esoteric products which were solely designed as loss leaders, never earned a profit, and relied on subsidies by other parts of the company to stay alive. Post 1993, really starting in 1994-1995 these got killed off or sold off, rapidly.

It wasn't enough to break even, one number I recall being thrown around was that we had to get to a 12% Expense-to-Revenue ratio, ignoring SG&A which was a corporate-wide number. Growth products, products in new markets were exempted entirely or given better targets, but old-line products were held to this magical 12% ratio (I was in the mainframe division at the time, which was grotesquely profitable and even today subsidizes much of the rest of IBM).

<comment><USER14> Interesting stuff. Thanks for explaining.

I was surprised that IBM even had physical stores at some point and today average consumer probably has absolutely no idea what IBM does.

<comment><USER15> I don't think the physical stores lasted long, they eventually were sold off to ComputerLand, possibly as part of a consent decree (before my time). A lot of bad business decisions at IBM start with the various consent decrees it operated under as a result of various antitrust cases, and the utter fear of yet another antitrust case developing.

<comment><USER14> Yeah it didn't seem like they were really big and would have lasted, but it was kind of a contrast with today where a young person on the street would probably have not idea what IBM does.

<comment><USER16> IBM was big, really big. At one time, it had more than 70% of the computer business, so it was twice as big as every other computer company added together.

In fact, IBM was really big before computers even arrived. It dominated data processing based on punch cards and was sued for monopoly abuse in the 1930s. It was the original Evil Empire.

Microsoft -- founded in 1975 -- has been spectacularly successful, and IBM's performance has been mediocre for the past 15 years. Even so, Microsoft has only just overtaken IBM in revenues. (Both are now around $93 billion. On any reasonable growth path, IBM would be well over $200 billion.)

See the graph at [http://www.zdnet.com/article/tiny-microsoft-overtakes-the- mi...](http://www.zdnet.com/article/tiny-microsoft-overtakes-the-mighty-ibm/)

Indeed, Microsoft would probably be nowhere without IBM. It was IBM that set the PC standard with the IBM Personal Computer in 1981, and Microsoft was lucky to be part of it. In IBM terms, Microsoft stole a small part of IBM's rightful monopoly. IBM's response was to try to kill it with OS/2 EE and the MCA bus in PS/2 computers, as part of SAA.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> I've wondered something: MIPS and ARM have both made inroads in the low-power market, supposedly because RISC supports power-efficiency (x86 microcodes notwithstanding), but POWER has always been described as less power-efficient than x86 or other architectures. What makes POWER need so much... uh, power?

<comment><USER18> At the high-end, the power-costs of ISA are negligible. Even at laptop levels of power consumption it's barely noticeable. Once an Intel chip has decoded the instructions to uOps, it is mostly on an even playing-field with RISC chips.

Also, to be pedantic, POWER is very much not RISC; the only thing it really has in common with RISC is fixed-length instruction encoding (though simpler instruction decoding is an advantage at really low powers).

<comment><USER17> >At the high-end, the power-costs of ISA are negligible. Even at laptop levels of power consumption it's barely noticeable. Once an Intel chip has decoded the instructions to uOps, it is mostly on an even playing-field with RISC chips.

This doesn't actually answer my question at all, it's just a canned response to something I alluded to in my question (CISC vs. RISC) and a debate which I don't fully understand and would rather avoid. The question was _why does POWER consume so much power_ , not _why doesn 't POWER being RISC matter_? The only reason I compared it to MIPS and ARM was that I thought it was similar to those architectures and they're considered to be low-power.

The impetus is that POWER is actually _worse_ than other architectures, _including_ x86, for unexplained reasons, w.r.t. power consumption.

<comment><USER18> POWER consumes more power because IBM has not optimized for that to the degree that Intel has. The PA6T was _extremely_ power efficient (and was designed by a team headed by the same person who designed StrongARM (became X-scale) and SiByte's (now purchaesed by Broadcom) MIPS chips).

[edit]

To clarify, the difference between ISAs for power efficiency is negligible at all but the lowest powers, which is what I was trying to say in my original response. The Pentium 4 was far less power efficient than the contemporary G4 PowerPC, as a counterexample. If the power difference between two chips is more than 1 watt per instruction decode unit, you can probably safely assume it's not due to the ISA.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Why are they using MIPS as a metric for comparing integer CPU performance? When you're looking at two different compiler backends targeting two (very) different ISAs, it seems pretty thoroughly uninformative.

<comment><USER20> In benchmarks MIPS usually means "we arbitrarily say that reference machine X runs this benchmark at Y MIPS". Then, for a different machine Z, Z_MIPS = Y * (X_TIME / Z_TIME).

For example, the 7zip benchmark used in this article is "normalized with results of Intel Core 2 CPU" [1], or the famous Dhrystone integer benchmark's "VAX MIPS" [2].

Still I agree it's weird terminology. It would make more sense to use the true units of the benchmark, or just say "performance relative to reference machine".

[1] [http://www.7-cpu.com/](http://www.7-cpu.com/)

[2] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dhrystone](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dhrystone)

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> POWER/PowerPC is the same architecture that Apple once used in the Macintosh, so if you want to play with Linux on a PowerPC machine they can be had for almost nothing on the used market.

There are really only two models worth having, at opposite ends of the spectrum: The PowerMac G5 (64-bit, based on POWER4) was the fastest available but they're enormous and power hungry. At the other end, the G4 mini is much smaller and more efficient but 32-bit and not as fast.

<comment><USER22> 32 bit is not worth having, nothing modern supports it.

The G5 was supported with Fedora until recently but alas support was dropped. Also the newer Power distros are the new ppc64le flavour, which is a slightly different ABI and little endian but the G5 is not alas dual endian so does not support it. But they are cheap and quiet and mine has been running reliably, although I might install FreeBSD on it next as that has ongoing support.

<comment><USER23> I have a 2.3GHz dual core PowerMac11,2 running FreeBSD 10.2 PPC64 on a ZFS root. My machine has 8GB of RAM and works brilliantly.

I tried all flavours of PPC linux and none of them worked particularly well. FreeBSD 10.x had the advantage of 64 bit support and the nvidia 6600LE works acceptably with the open source drivers.

I highly recommend FreeBSD 10.x PPC64 to anyone with a G5 PowerMac who wants to run a modern OS.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Now if only they ran the same benchmarks on a 64-core 4.3ghz POWER8... If your workload scales better on larger boxes, it can be pretty attractive.

<comment><USER25> Nobody's workload scales better on bigger core boxes without some serious attention to contention and lock avoidance.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> Damn IBM, just cut your price in half (including those CDIMMs), and destroy these Xeon monkeys. Why are you being so coy?

<comment><USER27> I don't think IBM wants customers that would buy Power 8 were it not for the price premium over roughly equivalent Xeons. The customers they want will be writing much, much larger checks for services and support.</comment></comment>


Apple's Review team cuts and pastes useless canned responses.What do I do? - <AUTHOR>

We've submitted an iPhone app: LiveLockscreen (http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/live-lockscreen-video-live/id510241197?mt=8)
The app allows you to play videos in the background together with your music. The first version of the app was approved, but since then, Apple has not allowed us to do any updates. We've had 6 rejections over the past 2 months, the last 3 with the canned response of "no audible content is played".
This is clearly not true, the app allows you to select a song from your playlist and watch a video together with it:
<p>http://youtu.be/yDdTBvXfMGs<p>
Apple's cut and paste rejection (3 rejects with same response):
"We found that your app uses a background mode but does not include functionality that requires that mode to run persistently. This behavior is not in compliance with the App Store Review Guidelines.<p>We noticed your app declares support for audio in the UIBackgroundModes key in your Info.plist, but no audible content is played when the application is in the background. While your intention may have been to provide this functionality, at the time of review, we were not able to play background audio for your app.<p>As indicated in the iOS Application Programming Guide:<p>"This key is intended for use by applications that provide audible content to the user while in the background, such as music-player or streaming-audio applications."<p>Therefore, it would be appropriate to provide audible content to the user while the app is in the background or remove the "audio" setting from the UIBackgroundModes key." <comment><AUTHOR> Update: We just got a call from Apple developer relations explaining that all apps which makes use of animation on the lockscreen are not allowed. Well, at least a definite no saves us development time in trying to iterate further on this.

</comment><comment><USER2> So, I'd like to give a helpful response, so don't get mad when I say this but it seems to me that Apple's response isn't canned here. It looks like they've identified that you've declared the use of certain features, such as UIBackgroundModes, but when they tested it, the app did not work. What seems likely is that although you probably thoroughly tested your app, whatever configuration it is being tested in has exhibited a bug where the audio is not playing correctly. I have had many bugs before where only a certain tester was able to reproduce the problem. I'm also aware that Apple doesn't like it when problems like this are taken public so be careful. Good luck and I hope you get your updates approved soon.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you for your comments and suggestion. I'm aware that Apple doesn't like this too, and am only asking for help because of 6 rejections in 2.5 months. It's hard when all you get is a cryptic message that hasn't changed in 3 rejections regardless of what you do. And because some crap app that is a horrendous copy of ours is sitting pretty at number 2.

It does make sense that it is possible that Apple's configuration is having problems. I'll try to test it with more devices over the weekend. Thanks!

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> When you submit your app, have you provided any tutorials or instructions on how to enable music in the background for your app? There's a place on the submission form for submitting special instructions or usernames/passwords for the testers to use.

If you're getting repeated failures and all you're doing is resubmitting without addressing any of their concerns, of course you're going to get rejected again.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes, we've put in detailed information, including a demo video.

More on the background of the app. When we submitted our first update, we had no background music, and Apple's comment was true. We then made the change to incorporate background music and have a music selector to play music from the playlist.

However, no matter what we did afterwards, Apple has always been posting the same response "copy and paste". There's no engagement or changes despite us fixing the problem and posting demo videos with the sound and such.

<comment><USER4> How about appealing to the App Review Board? [https://developer.apple.com/appstore/contact/appreviewboard/...](https://developer.apple.com/appstore/contact/appreviewboard/index.html)

<comment><AUTHOR> We've tried this too. But beyond the standard "We'll contact you shortly", nothing has happened after weeks (3-4 weeks).

<comment><USER4> Sorry, that's rough.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


New for AWS Lambda – Environment Variables and Serverless Application Model - <AUTHOR> https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/new-for-aws-lambda-environment-variables-and-serverless-application-model/ <comment><USER2> The environment variables thing was desperately needed, I raised this as a Feature Request with AWS over a year ago (my work has enterprise support)

I remember them telling us a way to make a lambda function distinguish whether it is in a DEV/TEST or PROD environment was to do some sort of regex on the function name, which was suboptimal, especially if you have Lambda's created via CloudFormation.

We "got around" this problem by creating tables in DynamoDB as our DEV/PROD environments are in separate AWS accounts, so the dynamo tables contained simple key/value pairs that you would read once when the lambda container started up. Another option would be to have a file in S3 or something, but you still have to write code to manage the retrieval of those resources.

Looking forward to dropping all that infrastructure and using this feature instead.

<comment><USER3> Did you happen to raise a feature request for Python 3 as well? With any luck, we'll get that before Python 4 is released... :)

<comment><USER2> We primarily use Java 8, but I'd imagine a lot of people have raised it

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> My team has been using Lambda/Dynamo/API Gateway/Cognito for a couple of web services this year and really loving it. The addition of CloudWatch Events to the mix was really the final piece of the puzzle for us, because now we can launch lambda functions on a schedule to perform asynchronous background tasks (think data crunching, email notifications, etc).

Lambda is maturing so fast that I almost feel bad complaining about it, but of course we have run into our fair share of issues, too. One thing that's making our life more difficult right now is the fact that when you launch a Lambda function in a VPC via CloudFormation, the function's ENI doesn't get attached until the function runs the first time, so CloudFormation doesn't know anything about the ENI. Thus, when you tear down the CF stack, the ENI gets orphaned and hangs around in a detached state. Throw some automation into the mix and you can start eating up IP addresses in your subnet really fast. I have no doubt they will fix this soon.

<comment><USER5> Interesting. I want to see how Terraform fares in this aspect.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Do you use / know of any services like AWS Lambda that supports Ruby out of the box?

I've been playing with AWS Lambda using travelling Ruby and Mruby, but have hit issues (with native gems etc).

I have used Iron Worker previously, but they seem to be going up market and don't even display pricing on their site.

Thanks in advance for your input!

<comment><USER7> I wonder if you could use opal?

<comment><USER6> yeah that was one of my very early thoughts...

<comment><USER7> I'm not normally interested in Opal per se, but it would be great for this. I'd much rather write Ruby for simple call/response APIs than JS.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Can anyone share their experiences using AWS Lambda in Production?

<comment><USER9> I wrote the apex(1) tool and created [https://apex.sh/ping/](https://apex.sh/ping/) with Lambda, in general it has been great, has scaled flawlessly since launch (granted I'm only doing ~8M requests / day).

Conceptually I think it's great for pipelines or use-cases like this, VMs are generally a terrible level of abstraction for a lot of problems, and the Lambda style promotes better architecture because of this.

The connectivity between Kinesis/SNS and friends is great. I'd agree that Lambda is not currently a good fit for "regular" apps, APIs should be fine now that the proxy stuff is in there, though there's slight latency.

No need to worry about gracefully stopping or restarting daemons, just push new code and the old stuff goes away, it really is a great abstraction that way. Basically replace anything you'd use a Go channel for, with more Lambda or SNS->Lambda if you need retries and backoff, it'll spare you a lot of code.

I find the workflow great as well, the slowest part for me is compiling the Go binaries, the rest is virtually instant. Especially now with all this needlessly complex Docker stuff it's refreshing to use something simple.

Cost is prohibitive for sustained use, so make sure you price things out properly, it sounds very cheap until you look at say a constant 100 requests/s behind API Gateway. It's easily 300-400% what you'd pay on EC2.

Cold-start is really a non-issue in most cases, it seems to take very little to keep a function warmed, so unless you get zero traffic (which would be dirt cheap on a t2.micro anyway) you'll be fine.

<comment><USER10> Had never heard of apex. Looks really nice and giving it a try now!

Edit: Feedback: Really like it. One feature that would be _very nice_ would be the ability to trigger a ping on demand, e.g., for testing auth set up on a request. Runscope implements a similar feature. Otherwise great so far!

<comment><USER9> Thanks! Agreed, I have that on the list, quick sanity check is always good. Taking a bit of a break to work on other products but I'll keep adding to it.

<comment><USER11> I've looked at Apex a few times. I was going to ask you for a hacker plan but it sounds like you're already doing such numbers it might not be justified. It would be really nice for me to be able to have a master subscription for my contracting work for client projects.

<comment><USER9> I've thought about adding a smaller plan, I still might at some point but it certainly reaches a level where it's not really worth it, especially since I want to provide equal support to everyone. I'll have to experiment with that.

I had limited free plans originally but that went horribly wrong haha, free users only attract other free users, a few days later I had like 4000 free people. Maybe that works for startups, but not "real" companies.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Interesting. Slowly carving away at the reasons that serverless.com was created.

<comment><USER13> Very slowly, Serverless had this a year ago. By the time AWS gets something like a 'sls function deploy' it's pretty likely that serverless will have support multiple cloud providers, in which case they should be pretty safe.

<comment><USER14> With cloudformation you can deploy full stack serverless apps. IMHO You don't need serverless any more.

<comment><USER15> I beg to differ. CloudFormation is great, but crafting CF templates for non- trivial backends is not for the faint of heart. Also iterating on them while tweaking things in CF templates and corresponding logic in micro-services running on Lambda is not the shortest/fastest feedback loop with the current AWS tooling. Also things are pretty hard to test. After over a year of struggling with the current tooling, I've started working on a framework [0] that would allow writing serverless infrastructures at a higher abstraction level.

[0]: [http://qmu.li](http://qmu.li)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Has anyone been able to get Chalice to work?

[https://github.com/awslabs/chalice](https://github.com/awslabs/chalice)

Basically, I'm interested to know how the Swagger template file will look a like. It'd be nice if you could use Swagger to quickly create REST api on Lambda stack.

Being able to quickly generate scaffold CRUD REST api on Lambda behind Authentication + DynamoDB would be an absolute killer app.

I'd imagine that Azure is not far behind. But one thing that's killing it for Azure is the Visual Studio IDE. Edit my ASP web app, one click deploy to Azure from inside VS is a killer app as well.

I really wish AWS came up with their own IDE where it would be tightly integrated with AWS. Imagine if you could write code and deploy it instantly without setting things up yourself through the AWS console (not that it's bad or anything).

<comment><USER17> I'm biased saying this, but Chalice is a half-baked rip-off of Zappa[0], deliberately nerfed by Amazon to lock you into the AWS stack.

If you want to see an example of how easy it is to use Zappa + Lambda + DyanamoDB, you can check out Zappa BitTorrent Tracker, which can use S3 or DynamoDB as a back-end.[1]

As a bonus, Zappa has had both local and remote environment variables as a feature for months - although it's pretty cool that this new announcement can use KMS, although that will of course mean more vendor-lock in if you choose to go that route.

[0] [https://github.com/Miserlou/Zappa](https://github.com/Miserlou/Zappa) [1] [https://github.com/Miserlou/zappa-bittorrent- tracker](https://github.com/Miserlou/zappa-bittorrent-tracker)

<comment><USER18> (I work for AWS) I've been livestreaming building a zappa app on twitch.tv/aws ! daysuntilreinvent.com is powered by zappa!

I will say that chalice wasn't meant to copy zappa. Chalice and Zappa both started in Jan of 2016. Zappa has way more features and is a wonderful piece of software.

One thing Chalice does well that I'd love to see in Zappa is automatically figuring out what kind of IAM policy/permissions you need by analyzing the code.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Nice, This could be useful also if you could have "secret" variables as well, similar to [1].

[1] [https://www.visualstudio.com/en- us/docs/build/define/variabl...](https://www.visualstudio.com/en- us/docs/build/define/variables#secret-variables)

</comment><comment><USER20> Does anyone know if the 256 character limit for the value is in place like in ECS? Super annoying.

<comment><USER21> You could probably split longer data into multiple variables and concatenate them, but maybe having such large environment variables is a sign that you might be better served with a different mechanism.

For example, instead of passing in a big JSON blob, one could split the JSON keys into separate environment variables.

<comment><USER20> I wanted to add a 2K public key, could be split up but annoying solution. Used a IAM role with rights to an S3 object in the end.

<comment><USER22> If you can, you should switch to elliptic curve keys – they are less than 256 bytes.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> This is a _very_ welcome improvement to an awesome service that I use daily. Now if we could just get a smoother bundling / deployment workflow or a way to edit uploaded bundles on the AWS Lambda dashboard.

</comment><comment><USER23> Has anyone been able to use Lambda for relatively high-memory load applications? (~2GB+ RAM)

That's our biggest restraint at the moment, so far I haven't seen any good options.

<comment><USER2> Lambda only supports up to a maximum of 1536mb of RAM right now.

I've been involved with developing lambda functions that consume roughly 1.2gb of ram each time, but the memory usage is easy to predict as the function is triggered by files in S3 that are about the same size.

They say to break your problem down into smaller chunks to fit into the memory - is that possible in your case?

<comment><USER23> Not easily! I'm doing speech recognition; I might be able to run a segment through two separate models, with half the lexicon available in each run, then just combine the results. However I don't think the overall savings will be enough to justify running it twice. It's getting close though, once they get the RAM up more, I'll try it out.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Environments (dev, prod etc) support would be great, currently need to use apex to simulate.

</comment><comment><USER25> my current annoyance with Lambda is the lack of support for timezones in the scheduler. we use it for spinning up/down EC2 instances at particular times, and having to manually work around DST is a pain.</comment>


Google Threw A Punch, Microsoft Fires Back With A Missile - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2011/08/03/microsoft-just-kicked-google-in-the-nuts/ <comment><USER3> That does not mean anything. Yes MS may have asked Google to partner with them to buy the patents but no-one knows what the terms were. A good attorney can make an agreement that allows Google to be sued on the patents even if they are co-owners. Or the agreement may say that any Android phone manufacturer can be sued on the patents by Microsoft, and Google does not have the power to give those manufacturers licenses.

So an undisclosed offer made in private does not mean much. If Microsoft had made their offer public they may use it to make a point, but as things stand now this supposed offer is best ignored.

PS: I should also note that this "we made them a generous offer and they refused" statement is a trick often used by PR people and politicians to muddy the water.

<comment><USER4> You're in error.

This was MSFT offering for google to talk about joining in the bidding. Google turned them down without knowing what the terms were, because the terms hadn't even been discussed. This was an offer to talk, not an offer of terms.

Google has been caught with its senior counsel telling a blatant lie, in public. I guess I shouldn't be surprised to see people trying to spin it so hard...

<comment><USER5> You've asserted this like four times. Is there actually more information on this story available than what was in the tweets and email?

<comment><USER4> The email makes it pretty clear: [http://www.electronista.com/articles/11/08/03/microsoft.says...](http://www.electronista.com/articles/11/08/03/microsoft.says.google.could.have.joined.patent.bid/)

<comment><USER5> The entire relevant text from the email is "After talking with people here, it sounds as though for various reasons a joint bid wouldn't be advisable for us on this one. But I appreciate your flagging it, and we're open to discussing other similar opportunities in the future."

That does not back up your claims. Humorously, the article you linked to, though confusing Novell and Nortel, clearly points out that no context is given for any prior communication (which would be necessary for evaluating your claims of "this was an offer to talk, not an offer of terms"), and gives yet another reasonable argument for why google wouldn't want to agree to a joint bid:

"The search firm might have felt bound by the terms of its "stalking horse" bid, which would let it break up any existing patent licensing terms if it won; it would never have had that option in the winning group as companies with Nortel patent licenses, like Microsoft, would have insisted on keeping them intact."

<comment><USER6> I agree. There are many reasons why Google may have rejected the offer to bid jointly – and the offer's terms aren't clear at all. Also, posting private intercompany emails is unprofessional, even in response to a misleading tweet from your competitor. Even less professional is the "divide and conquer" positioning that characterizes Google's lawyers as lacking internal communication/coordination. Frankly, I get a bad smell from either side in this latest Twitter slapfight between MSFT and GOOG.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Ex-MSFT employee here, enjoying the fact that I can comment on HN on MSFT legal affairs for once :).

I love Frank.X.Shaw's move here (hiring him from Waggner Edstorm was one of MSFT's best moves). Google is essentially trying to spin a situation where they were invited to be a part of a bid as a anti-competitive move. I'm slightly surprised that Google didn't see this coming - Drummond must have known that any public spat would lead to MSFT digging up any email threads between the two companies, especially those which make it seem like MSFT is trying to reach out to Google.

<comment><USER8> No matter what PR spin anyone puts on it Microsoft is a destructive parasite in the smartphone marketplace. Extorting money out of android manufacturers after it failed to compete is one of the most disgusting spectacles I've seen in the industry.

<comment><USER9> When you put emotion into the analysis it seems disgusting. This is business. Purely from a business standpoint do you think MS (or Google) would take it lying down when a competitor undercuts their product with a free product? Don't for a minute think Google made Android open source for philanthropic reasons. It did it purely because it wanted to use the open source as a strategic weapon to get a foothold in the field. I do believe Google strongly believes in their "Do not evil" mantra but this particular one is all business. This is NOT the linux-ms battle again. Linux/GNU was more like a movement without a business/monetary aspirations behind it. Redhat and others sprung around the ecosystem as service providers later on. Android is started/released by a business to make money. So MS is dealing with a different beast here. Google cannot think it would get away by giving their software for free. Nothing is free. It just takes time for things to settle down. The mobile world is still in its infancy.

TL;DR -- Do not put emotions into a business analysis.

<comment><USER8> It's funny hearing someone defending Microsoft claiming that the mobile world is in its infancy when Microsoft had a huge lead in the mobile world 6-7 years ago and had created a great ecosystem with tons of innovation. Then they inexplicably decided to stop developing their OS after Windows Mobile 6. Probably some moronic executive figured they could extract more rents that way and squandered the massive opportunity. How those executives all the way up to Ballmer haven't been fired is a mystery of Microsoft's dysfunction. Now those same morons, who run one of the great tech companies of our times, have decided that they will compete via the legal system and conniving business deals, instead of using technology. It should be criminal. I have no respect for them or anyone that works for those assholes.

<comment><USER10> The mobile world is still in its infancy, regardless of how many years ago Microsoft was working on it. No offense, but you come off as far too emotional to take seriously in a discussion. You start with some valid points about management, but then you act like they personally spit on your car.

There's a very valid point you didn't address, which is that Google is relying on its search monopoly profits to pump a free product into a new market in order to destroy existing competitors there. Regardless of how you feel about Google or Android, that is a behavior Microsoft was once criticized for when it made Internet Explorer free in order to destroy Netscape. Just something to think about.

It's important to maintain an objective perspective on all mega-corporations with monopoly power to make sure that your emotions aren't preventing you from recognizing a villain. Is Google a villain? In my opinion, they're on their way based on their behavior of the last couple of years.

<comment><USER11> Except last time I checked Android isn't bundled with existence as a human. The handsets aren't free the the public unless subsidized by contract, which is the same deal as competitors.

The only "free" part is licensing to OEMS, and they still need to pay for R&D for making physical devices. So that part has no bearing on OS-creators who also happen to manufacture their own devices like Apple and RIM.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I am confused. Why would Google want to jointly bid on patents in a way they could not be used to protect itself and its partners from Microsoft?

Microsoft's council can't be so naïve.

Edit: by refusing to participate, Google indicated that either they wanted the patents in order to be able to defend against Microsoft or that they didn't find them worth the effort. The proposal could pretty much be the way Microsoft used to measure Google's interest and intentions

<comment><USER13> While you are almost certainly correct you are missing the point about Google's blog post. The lawyer who wrote is demonstrably lying about the situation.

"They're doing this by banding together to acquire Novell's old patents (the "CPTN" group including Microsoft and Apple) and Nortel's old patents (the "Rockstar" group including Microsoft and Apple), to make sure Google didn't get them;"

If Google was offered a chance to bid along with Microsoft, how is Microsoft trying to make sure Google didn't get them? While it may not have been in Google's best interest to partner with Microsoft, they can hardly argue in good faith that Microsoft is trying to withhold those patents from Google in some sort of conspiracy.

<comment><USER14> Microsoft et al. don't want Google to have the patents _usuable against them_. Either outbidding or co-owning works.

Microsoft had enough patents that it was more important Google did _not_ have the patents for itself than for Microsoft to add to its own arsenal.

Google might have instead accused Microsoft of denying it _leverage_ , in the face of Microsoft et al.'s mountain of existing patents, but at the time that probably seemed a verbose way of making the same point: that Android's competitors would like to kill it with patents.

(We haven't list sight of the fact that B&N, HTC, and others have been targeted for using Android, while the same can't be said for WP7 licensees, have we?)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> The Microsoft tweets seem to (probably intentionally) ignore the obvious reason why Google would want the patents — to create a mutually-assured destruction scenario that convinces Apple and Microsoft to get off its back. Sharing the patents with Apple and Microsoft would keep Google at a disadvantage just like not having them would.

<comment><USER16> Indeed, the patents used for defense have to be different from the patents you are attacked with. Sharing patents means they can't attack you with _those_ , but if they have a lot more other patents, you still aren't protected.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> Google seems to have one foot in the water and the other out. They lose their credibility either way. They bid a high amount ($3.14bil) in the Nortel bid and went alone by their choosing in the Novell bid. Their press is just spinning the story AND their strategy based on unforeseen outcomes. I get it that they are using patents just as leverage to keep Android free or as cheap as possible. In the end however, they are competing with other mobile platforms for market share based on the best combination of price, quality, and user experience. It's anyone's game and as long as it's legal, there are no rules.

Edited the Nortel and Novell discrepancy.

<comment><USER18> I don't remember exactly if at their last bid they were alone, but one thing I recall to have read is that at least at one point they did bid teaming along with Intel.

<comment><USER17> I apologize but I was referring to the OP's article about Google getting the offer to team up with MS but choosing to go alone at it, for the Novell deal. I combined the $3.14bil Nortel bid with the info in the article about the Novell bid. My mistake. Will update my previous post. Novell and Nortel, this patent stuff is already confusing and these names don't help! jk

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Mobile companies such as HTC, Motorla and Samsung are being forced to pay Microsoft licensing fees for their Android phones because of patents Microsoft owns. Google needs its own arsenal of patents in order to prevent the situation from getting worse. How is Android supposed to prosper if mobile companies are being forced to pay Microsoft to use it? Owning the patents jointly with Microsoft gives Google nothing to use against Microsoft, therefore defeating the whole purpose of owning the patents.

</comment><comment><USER20> Rebuttal: [http://fury.com/2011/08/twitter-is-the-new-soundbyte-and- tha...](http://fury.com/2011/08/twitter-is-the-new-soundbyte-and-thats-not- good)

<comment><USER7> His post doesn't address this - Google bidding alongside MSFT and winning on these patents would have taken these patents off the table as far as any future litigation goes, basically making these one less set of patents for either Google or MSFT to worry about.

Does he expect MSFT to somehow help Google build a defensive portfolio against it?

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> I think the take home message of all of this, more than ever, is that software patents are damaging to innovation and an overall detriment to the industry.

These companies should be competing on performance and features, not with lawyers over whether a linked list is an innovation (example taken out of context, but some of these patents are no better than the multiply linked list patent covered a year ago).

<comment><USER4> I posit that android would not be on the market in the touch-screen form it is now, if Apple hadn't made its inventions public due to the patent process.

If you consider android innovative, then the patent process saved google the 7+ years Apple spent developing the iPhone and allowed them to get to the market much quicker with a touch screen phone (they'd been previously working on a blackberry style OS for android.)

I am the inventor of two software patents. One of which involved solving the visual glitches that appear in online games due to the high latency of playing over a modem. This patent involved a lot of timing issues, and was pretty narrow.

However it was claimed on slashdot that we "patented the idea of online gaming!!!!"

Later, in a discussion list, they claimed we'd patented the idea of IRC!

People seem to presume that patents are on ideas, and that people are patenting really obvious ideas.

In the case of the patents I've been involved in, that is not what has happened. In fact, the portrayal of what was covered by the patent didn't match the patent at all, and it is clear that the people putting forward those patents as examples of bad patents were, frankly misrepresenting them.

Every time I've seen a bogus patent claim and actually read the patent, I've found this to be the case as well. (I don't remember the linked-list example, so haven't read that particular one.)

I'm not saying that bogus patents don't exist. I'm sure you can get things by the examiner.

But the system has a solution for this-- if your patent is bogus then it won't stand up in court. If prior art exists, then you run the risk of spending a lot of money, only to have the patent nullified when someone presents prior art. (And I mean real prior art, not the kind of stuff that people claim is prior art, like the claim that IRC is prior art for solving clock jitter in 3D online games)

The patent system, as with anything else that relies on the meager US court system, is expensive... but there is no need for reform, that I can see, as all these allegedly bogus patents would be quickly thrown out if they really were as obvious as is claimed and if there really was the abundance of prior art, as is claimed.

Google is certainly capable, both financially and intellectually, of getting a bogus patent thrown out. There's no reason they should be calling on the federal government to intervene with a political "solution" on their behalf... unless they know that there isn't actually prior art and the patents are, in fact, legitimate.

In fact, I think googles call for reform is an admission that the patents aren't bogus after all.

Edit: I didn't change the text above, but want to clarify- I'm responsible for some claims on one of these patents, though not named as an inventor (I didn't realize the significance at the time.) For the other I am the sole inventor, but it hasn't been brought forth as "bogus" in a public forum yet, though, for those who don't read it carefully, they could easily make the claim. This is why I'm being vague about the specific patents. Previous experience on Hacker News tells me that if I wasn't vague the topic would turn to how those patents are so obviously "bogus" (to people who haven't read more than the headline)... and well, frankly my name is on them. I really don't to be discriminated against in business for having a pr-intellectual property position. The current climate makes that fear seem pretty legitimate.

<comment><USER22> I haven't looked at the patents that you mention, so I can't comment on your patent(s) specifically. I can comment on patents generally, though.

I am a patent lawyer specializing in patent reexamination - i.e., my day-to- day job is evaluating and invalidating patents.

There is a lot of truth to what you say that what a patent "covers" is grossly misrepresented in the technical press. There is some justification for the popular misinterpretation of claim scope, though; I can't tell you how many people discover, years later, that they have "invented" wifi - or VPNs - <USER2> any other successful standard you might care to name.

One good example of this is the RIM v. NTP case. The NTP patents were about pagers. It was later that they realized that they had "invented" email (i.e. sending electronic messages to a hand-held device). When you read the original disclosure, though, it is obvious they had no such thing in mind.

Further, you are right that most patents have more complexity than the high level summary would indicate. Does that mean that the patents are valid? No way. I personally have seen 30-40 patents that I would consider to have _any_ valid claims after a full prior art search is done-and that is after having looked at many thousand patents. My personal kill rate on patents that I have dealt with is in the high 90th percentile.

Bonus tip: as an uncredited inventor, you have a very valuable asset- particularly if that patent is being asserted.

<comment><USER23> _My personal kill rate on patents that I have dealt with is in the high 90th percentile._

Perhaps add contact info to your HN profile? The community here includes people who might eventually need your services.

A question: how prominent, really, is that region of East Texas where we hear that most of these suits get filed? Does it make it significantly more difficult to do your work? I'm always shocked when I hear about that. It seems an outright corruption of the system, like the hanging judges of the past.

Edit: I see you already mentioned this (<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2845398>) but I would like to hear anything more that you have to say. Oh, and please keep posting here. You clearly know what you're talking about..

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> "Sorry Google but we offered to collude _with_ you and you turned us down, so we had to collude _against_ you"

Is this how rotten Microsoft has become? They don't even grasp what they are being accused of.

EDIT: I really wish people would reply with their opinion rather than just downvoting. Or at least do both. I thought it was an interesting observation that I haven't seen anyone make: Google complains about Microsoft's ethics and they respond with a point about strategy. Do they even understand the difference?

<comment><USER25> More like, joint bidders had a greater chance of getting the bounty, Google chose to ignore Microsoft's proposal. Apple took them up on the offer. That's how childish Google has become (or rather their legal and PR teams).

<comment><USER24> I don't understand why Google not wanting to team up with MS weakens their argument. If anything, it's quite consistent with it. But one way or another, what ultimately happened is that MS teamed up with Google's competitors to bully them with bullshit patents. That Google may have had a chance to avoid it doesn't make it any less wrong.

<comment><USER4> The only reason to not team up with Microsoft, et. al, is if google wanted to use the patents against them. If google simply wanted to be immune to claims from the Novell patents, they could have joined the group and saved money (vs. bidding by themselves against the group.)

Further, you make two assertions here: "MS teamed up with Google's competitors to bully them with bullshit patents. "

You haven't shown that MSFT has bullied google, nor that the patents are "bullshit".

If the patents are bogus, they would be easy to dispatch in court with prior art.

<comment><USER22> You say "If the patents are bogus, they would be easy to dispatch in court with prior art."

this is false. Nothing is ever easy in court, and invalidating patents is especially so-by design. There is a presumption of validity that attaches by law to every issued patent. In layman's terms, that means that the deck is stacked against anyone who tries to invalidate a patent in court.

Further, validity in court is decided in two parts. The first part is when the judge - a 50 year old who did history or poli sci undergrad - "construes" the claims by deciding what they mean. This frequently leads to some marvelous interpretations of terms. At least the judge has a college education and _tries_ to get it right.

Next, the "facts" about how the patent claims apply to the accused technology are determined by a jury. Distressingly often, this jury is in East Texas, where there are two undergraduate degrees and ten people who _have ever used the Internet_ in the 100-person jury pool.

You think I'm kidding. Or exaggerating. I'm not.

I have often thought that I could write a legal thriller with a helping of Dan Brown-style "all the facts and cases discussed in this book are real." people are astounded when it is explained to them.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> Microsoft attacked Android Phone producers, Google needs to defend them "against" Microsoft.

A bidding with Microsoft wouldn't make sense at all.

</comment><comment><USER27> Well-crafted tweets by MS execs. Pass the popcorn!

<comment><USER28> Not really. Google needs these patents to protect themselves from suits by MS and Apple, how could they make a cross-licensing deal if they co-owned these patents with the very companies they are trying to protect themselves against?

<comment><USER4> Two points: 1) Apple has never sued google, to my knowledge, and there are no active lawsuits currently. I'm not aware of any suits from Microsoft either. 2) IF Apple were to sue google, it would be over Patents resulting from Apple developed technology, not patents Apple bought defensively.

I'm unaware of any case of Apple suing a company for violating a patent that Apple bought. However, Apple does sue companies for violating patents on Apple's inventions. Apple is not a patent troll, they are simply protecting their inventions.

If Google had chosen to enter the bidding, the terms of the agreement could easily have included a cross-licensing deal, as these are how these things are often done.

In fact, entering the bidding with these companies would have been the cheapest and most effective way to neutralize any claim they might have had on Google over these patents.

If Google had entered the group they would have gotten a license on them (why else would google contribute to the bid?) and the cost of that would have been less than bidding for the whole thing by itself, by definition.

I think google wanted the whole thing for itself, in the case of Nortel, and lost, and is now crying foul because it didn't get its way in an auction it didn't take very seriously in the first place.

<comment><USER29> _Apple is not a patent troll, they are simply protecting their inventions._

Apple's patents, like many software patents, tend to involve obvious techniques and algorithms that have been carefully obfuscated by patent lawyers.

Using such patents offensively is not so much about protecting Apple's innovations; it's more about preventing competition. This is beneficial for Apple, but bad for consumers and the overall health of the market.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> Google says the group of major players colluding together in a joint bid for patents is anti-competitive. Google did not want to join this anti-competitive collusion. How is this inconsistent, shocking, or bad?

Couldn't the simple explanation be "If we join forces with Microsoft and Apple to jointly buy these patents, the DoJ is going to come down on all of us for illegal anti-competitive behavior"? Why are people acting like Google did something wrong by not wanting to join the cartel that they are now publicly saying is anti-competitive and that the DoJ should impose limits on?

</comment><comment><USER31> One interesting possibility: Google planned to only use the patents defensively but the joint bid would have required them participating in offensive action, which they refuse to do.

<comment><USER32> That is obviously not the case as Microsoft immediately sold back the Novell patents to Attachmate and so cannot participate in any offensive action.

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> Google's punch was related to Nortel Patents, Microsoft's misfired missile carried _Novell_ patents as the warhead.

"Google says we bought Novell patents to keep them from Google. Really? We asked them to bid jointly with us. They said no."

So Google may still have a point that Nortel patents were gobbled up by Apple and MSFT to strangle Android just as the Novell ones are.

</comment><comment><USER34> Doesn't this suggest that MS tried to organize a cartel to put a lock on the wireless industry? The major players all coming together to purchase patent portfolios and agreeing not to sue _each other_ over it sure smells like an anti-trust violation.

</comment><comment><USER35> "Bid with us or it's a shame that you didn't join the club.."

Or am I misunderstanding this article?

<comment><USER36> Google is saying Microsoft et al bought the Novell patents to keep Google from having access to them. Google is trying to imply that this is so the patents can be used against Google.

Microsoft is pointing out that Google was offered a chance to be part of the buying group. That would have given Google access to them and precluded them being used against Google. This makes it very likely that the buying group was in fact buying the patents for defensive purposes, rather than to go after Google.

<comment><USER28> Not really. It's smooth PR by Microsoft which is apparently working, but the reality is Google is looking for these patents to create cross-licensing deals to protect themselves from current and future patent suits from companies like Microsoft and Apple - cross-licensing deals that Google could not do if they co-owned these patents with said companies.

<comment><USER37> A sage once said "You can't always get what you want."

If Google refused to pony up 4.5+B and refused to share with Microsoft/Apple etc. Then it do not get those patents. That's far from the conspiracy theory its recent blog post is painting.

<comment><USER28> You're talking about a different set of patents than the ones Microsoft is tweeting about.

<comment><USER4> Google is talking about both, and google refused to even TALK to microsoft about joining one of the groups bidding on patents that google is now complaining about.

The claim that this is MSFT PR spin is based on the presumption that MSFT offered google bad terms, but the email makes it clear they were proposing talking about joining the group-- there were no terms yet.

Plus its pretty much impossible for there to have been bad terms. This is why competitors like Apple and RIMM can join the same group. If google wasn't going to get what they want out of the deal there would be no incentive to contribute.

Joining a group and paying a fraction of the bid is always cheaper than bidding against that same group and having to pay the whole bid.

The only reason you wouldn't want to join such a group is if you wanted to use the patents offensively.

<comment><USER38> There absolutely _can_ be bad terms, from Google's point of view (and not from the point of view of Apple and RIM). For example, restrictions on who or how you can sub-license your rights to the patents to third parties...

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> In two large organizations A and B, how likely is it that someone at B can find an email from a person at A to a person at B that appears to contradict some assertion by some other person at A?

</comment><comment><USER40> These behind the scenes emails raise a question in my mind. On what other issues these companies are covertly colluding with each other which we don't know. One obvious thing could be some kind of silent agreement on not competing with each other on employee salaries etc. to keep them in check. There could be more like trying not to increase valuations of startups they are trying to acquire.

<comment><USER4> Is it really covert? In the case of the Nortel bids, the bidders were getting government approval before bidding, and it was made public after the fact who was in the groups.

I'm not sure that removing anonymity from bidders is a good thing or not. I mean, if you know who the other bidders are, that would affect your strategy, removing some purity from the auction process, wouldn't it?

But, maybe you feel I'm sidestepping your real issue, so let me make another point: In any situation where companies might collude like this, they're effectively creating a cartel. Say, in the case of the employee salaries that you mention.

The problem with a cartel is that there is always an incentive for a member of the cartel to violate the agreement. For instance, if MSFT, Apple, Facebook and Google agreed to cap software developer salaries, then Google (or one of the others) has an incentive to secretly violate that agreement to get the best employees, right?

Pretty soon the cartel falls apart, or the agreement has no effect. The stronger the agreement, the more incentive there is to violate it.

Further, imagine if they were successful and kept salaries below a market rate-- this would give a huge boost to any of their competitors who were willing to pay market rates, right?

They'd only be shooting themselves in the foot by doing so, driving the best employees to other companies.

This is why cartels don't really work, or at least aren't sustainable for very long.

</comment></comment><comment><USER41> > Instead of competing by building new features or devices, they are fighting > through litigation.

I think that 'instead of' should be a 'As well as'.

</comment><comment><USER42> Google is going to need to hire a lot more lawyers these days... anti-trust inquiries against themselves, weak patent portfolio... Gonna be really interesting to watch.

</comment><comment><USER43> anyone remember when AAPL claimed "we just wish to protect our innovation" (i think it was about the HTC suit).

well, how does buying novel/nortel patents protect your innovation? how does joining with MSFT to keep patents away from GOOG protect your innovation?

</comment><comment><USER44> can someone throw light on what these patents hold?

</comment><comment><USER45> Google: Bidding pi x 10^9 no longer looks so adorably wonky...

</comment><comment><USER46> I asked about this on Twitter to deaf ears. Isn't Microsoft mixing up Novell and Nortel? Even if Microsoft did offer to partner on the Novell patents, the accusations are being levied more directly at the Nortel buy by Microsoft, Apple, etc.

Maybe I'm missing the point, or it's not fair to think that Nortel vs Novell makes a difference. I really have no idea. I'm just wondering aloud. I don't really get how this is all perceived in a legal sense or in terms of how this affects Google's statement today. I get it's relevancy, but does it make Google's position less tenable? Maybe I'm just naive because they support the position I was already in favor of.

edit: I guess my other post which is more speculative would be the response to "they also mentioned Novell in the post".

<comment><USER47> Read Google's original blog posting by David Drummond again:

 _They're doing this by banding together to acquire Novell's old patents (the "CPTN" group including Microsoft and Apple) and Nortel's old patents (the "Rockstar" group including Microsoft and Apple), to make sure Google didn't get them._

 _We're encouraged that the Department of Justice forced the group I mentioned earlier to license the former Novell patents on fair terms_

They made it about the Novell AND Nortel patents. In some regards they need both to show a pattern of collusion. Rather they have a situation where THEY turned down Microsoft to go it alone. Makes their case a lot weaker.

<comment><USER12> Had Google joined the bidding, they would be unable to use the patents to defend against Microsoft. Microsoft would win.

Since Google refused to bid along and the CPTN and Rockstar groups won, Google isn't able to use those patents to defend against Microsoft. Microsoft won.

Had another group won the auctions, the result would be neutral to both Google and Microsoft. Both would, probably, be bullied.

The only scenario where Google would win would be if they offered the winning bid or joined a winning group with no ties to Microsoft. They would then be able to use those patents against Microsoft.

And don't forget Apple's patent portfolio threatens Google and its partners too.

<comment><USER47> _Had Google joined the bidding, they would be unable to use the patents to defend against Microsoft. Microsoft would win._

Google played this tactically horribly. First, their first goal should have been to get these patents off the table. For example, for the Novell patents, MS wanted them so that Apple and Google couldn't sue them with it. But part of the deal was that MS immediately sold those patents to Attachmate. They own none of the Novell patents now (although they have a perpetual license to their use). So clearly MS wasn't planning on being offensive with the patents. It was purely a defensive play.

Second, by not joining in the bidding Google overplayed how much they are worried about these patents and other patents held by the members of the consortium. Things like that are what drives up prices. And it's like blood in water. Companies can smell when they know you have a weakness.

Google should have just taken these patents off the table, and then continue to fight their current battles.

Now they have their current battles to fight. AND they have 882 Novell patents that they can be hit with. Then 6000 Nortel patents. Whoever is running Google's IP planning I think needs to be replaced.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER46> Again, re-reading, it seems like Google's major complaint was in relation to the Nortel patents because of the ridiculous price that they sold for (multiples of what their expected worth was). Even if Google missed out on joining an effective patent troll consortium, is that really the way innovation and industry should be encouraged?

It seems imminent that Apple will benefit from Android via Samsung, and Microsoft is already from Android via HTC, Motorola. Is it possible that Google did try to buy them to secure Android. If they had such a large set of patents, wouldn't that have given them and their hardware partners significant leverage against Apple and/or Microsoft? It seems like a defensive pattern.

Is it possible that Android's success will feed Google's competitors who've joined together to ensure their ability to leach off of Android via patents? Doesn't that make Google's interests fundamentally juxtaposed from Apple/Microsoft's who will profit simply from patent imbalances?

<comment><USER48> > _Google's major complaint was in relation to the Nortel patents because of > the ridiculous price that they sold for (multiples of what their expected > worth was)_

I found Google's position on this to be especially lame.

"These were worth only 1 billion, and they sold for nearly 5 times that!", omitting that Google bid "nearly" 4 times that. (Where "nearly" is defined as rounding up.) Why is four times "expected worth" okay, but 5 times isn't okay? Because they lost.

</comment></comment><comment><USER49> Obvious lies. Google is the lone white knight who is alone in a forrest full of trolls. Who wants to collect and sell our personal information...

</comment><comment><USER50> whatevar this ain't seeing the front page of HN.

</comment><comment><USER51> I believe reaching to Google from MS was a planned move. And it worked.

<comment><USER52> I have the same sentiment. My guess is that MS offered to team up before all the bidding took place. Google refused, because they wanted to have it all. After the bidding started, Microsoft teamed up with Apple and others. From Microsoft point of view, they win the patents either way. So, bad planning from Google, good planning from Microsoft.

<comment><USER53> I would imagine from Microsoft's point of view Apple is "safe" since they have known behavior and agreements with Microsoft already. I do wonder what Microsoft thinks of HTC these days.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER54> Seriously. Front page news. A few people exchange emails. Then a deal isn't done. pah.

<comment><USER47> Maybe you missed this 300+ point, 260+ comment thread:

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2842683>

When there's a reply this pointed to a story that popular -- I'd expect it to make front page.

</comment></comment><comment><USER55> By the end of this decade Microsoft is going to become the next Yahoo.

Their biggest asset all these years was being the default OS on the majority of PCs sold in the USA and around most of the world.

As other free options catchup and become much, much more robust this decade (and already most portable non-x86 devices ship without the need for ANYTHING from Microsoft) they become irrelevant. Lawsuits and patent royalties will be all they have left by 2020.

<comment><USER55> Do Microsoft employees read HN or are people going to explain their downvotes to this logic?

<comment><USER47> Honestly, reading it the reason for the downvotes seem obvious. And unlike most people who ask "why the downvotes?" in this case they seem justified.

Your original post was almost completely unrelated to the story at hand. It would be more appropriate in the original Google blog post thread, but even there not really appropriate. It's more fitting a story about the future of Microsoft.

I think the downvotes were meant to say, "you're off topic". Post about how MS's response wasn't credible or legit or whatever. But talking about their OS position over the past 2 decades is really kind of left field.

<comment><USER55> Ah okay, thanks for explaining - I didn't get it because instead of the details I was thinking about the overall picture of Microsoft's relevancy - everyone seems interested in this "battle" but I feel the whole point is moot because Microsoft is no longer the "world power" they once were - this strikes me as "last grasps" of power.

(and this comes from someone who has been around before windows and www, and used Microsoft products almost exclusively back then, including compilers)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER56> Googles make a large hue and cry whenever its free enterprise are in danger. Same happened with bing story. All bogus claims.

People who spend large amount of money in creating new technology want to have something in return. Every product can't go by freemium model.

<comment><USER57> You don't understand software patents.</comment></comment>


Intel Gears Up for FPGA Push - <AUTHOR> https://www.nextplatform.com/2017/10/02/intel-gears-fpga-push/ <comment><USER2> Tooling tooling tooling. FPGA hardware is cool but the tooling fucking sucks. Like stepping back into the time where you needed to pay thousands of dollars to get decent compilers and debuggers.

The ability for anyone to develop software for CPUs at zero-cost is an amazing freedom. You literally cannot do that on certain fpgas--not only do they cost thousands, so do the tools to actually create a working design.

Until that changes, FPGAs will always be niche.

<comment><USER3> FPGA's are extremely powerful, but the toolchain is absolute dog shit. Xilinx, shame on you. Intel, will you change anything here?

The compound problem of this in reality is that finding the right people who have the right strain of semi-insanity to do this really well, is very slim. And most of them are tied up with a massive salary from some aerospace company such as Raytheon, GE, Honeywell, or someone like Philips (building medical devices).

Add to that compile times of an hour or a day, and you have a glacial development cycle on your hands.

<comment><USER4> HFT also still pays top dollar for competent FPGA developers. I'd wager they're willing to pay more than the listed industries too, especially if you factor in profit sharing and bonus structures.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> The biggest problem with reconfigurable computing is it's either an afterthought, tools are too narrow/proprietary or an extra add-in card.

Add a million LUTs and several thousand special-purpose blocks (ALUs, CAM, SRAM, DSPs, etc.) on CPU die that can be reconfigured within a few 10k cycles (ie process context), and then future AI-enabled optimizing compilers could incrementally profile and accelerate applications with reconfigurable resources in new, creative and interesting ways. IRAM and similar zillion core approaches are another approach to solve traditional performance locality bottlenecks: distribute processing, interconnect and RAM amongst each other. It makes the most sense to co-evolve such a radical undertaking gradually with compiler vendors and large customers so that support and usability is working from launch, rather than just throwing silicon over the wall and using the "hail mary" method of product (non)design.

PS: Intel could push almost any new on-die CPU technology service/product into the mainstream right now on the server side because of their de-facto monopoly oligopoly dominance. I don't think they will as there is immense organizational pressure to not innovate _too much._

<comment><USER6> I thought FPGAs had a limited number of updates, enough to preclude this level of dynamism?

<comment><USER7> Not really. FPGAs tend to be accompanied by a flash memory storing the firmware, which of course has limited erase cycles, but you can also upload the firmware through other means.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> If they do release something in this space they oughta make a SKU that can plop into a standard desktop socket on a standard motherboard.

Electrical and computer engineering individuals want cheap big FPGAs too! (Speaking for myself of course.)

Or just release a cheap pcie card! Cmon guys! Oh wait you've forgotten how important it is to get a developer community started around your hardware cause it's been so long since the x86 was new!

<comment><USER9> > Oh wait you've forgotten how important it is to get a developer community > started around your hardware cause it's been so long since the x86 was new!

Intel: Huh? Developers? But they don't buy servers full of chips. Why do I have to sell to developers?

<comment><USER10> That is pretty much the ARM and POWER problem too, they think they can grow in new markets with these hugely expensive machines in quantities of ten racks.

Both would have significantly more traction if they offered a reasonable desktop class machine, but they don't seem to be able to do it. For some reason there are dozens of RPi type devices but making a $200-$300 device with a reasonable set of expansion ports (sata+USB3+pcie gen3+m.2+10g ethernet+etc) seems all but impossible. POWER has a similar problem, with the only inexpensive devices being old NXP parts (yah NXP is still selling a core that turns 20 years old this year [https://www.nxp.com/products/microcontrollers- and-processors...](https://www.nxp.com/products/microcontrollers-and- processors/power-architecture-processors/powerquicc-processors/powerquicc- ii:PCPPCMPC82XX) thats great if your still selling car parts from 20 years ago, not so great if your designing a part today.).

<comment><USER11> The underlying problem here is that the cost of making an SoC is enormous. So to make, say, an ARM desktop class machine you have only a few choices:

1) Make your own SoC designed for the purpose. You can tailor it to meet your requirements precisely, but given the low volumes you'll be selling, your system will be at least $10,000 a box, likely more.

2) Use a designed-for-mobile SoC. This will hit your $200-$300 price point pretty easily (perhaps even sailing under it by a big margin), but the IO options will be bad, because mobile SoCs don't neeed SATA or PCIe. CPU performance is likely to be underwhelming because mobile SoCs are designed to hit a power consumption level that won't drain mobile batteries or make mobile devices overheat. Almost all the cheap devboards you can get today are in this category.

3) More recently we're starting to see server or networking SoCs, which gives you an option a bit like 2 but with different cost and expansion tradeoffs. Generally a bit more expensive than 2 because networking won't hit mobile volumes, but better I/O capability. CPU power may still be less than you might like. Examples here are the Macchiatobin board and the dev box that Socionext announced last week.

I don't think anybody disagrees that a proper desktop class machine for these architectures would be great; but there are huge economic barriers to getting there. Personally if I was looking at getting a new ARM setup I'd try something in class 2, likely the Socionext box when it becomes available (end of the year, I think they said).

<comment><USER12> Raptor Computing Systems will sell you a 4 core POWER9 CPU for $340 each [1]. A desktop mobo with the kinds of features discussed shouldn't be more than a few hundred dollars if slimmed down to one socket and a reasonable but limited set of peripherals (the Talos mobos go a bit over the top with features and hence are >$1k). Someone just has to design one, which is not easy or inexpensive, then hope that developers actually buy them.

[1]:[https://secure.raptorcs.com/content/CP9M01/purchase.html](https://secure.raptorcs.com/content/CP9M01/purchase.html)

<comment><USER11> It's a few hundred dollars _if_ you have the market volume to sell it at that price. IBM have the volume (presumably mostly for servers) so they can do it. You can't spend the amount it costs to make a new SoC based only on the "hope" that people buy it; you need a business plan that says where the volume will come from, and there aren't enough customers for a developer box alone to provide that volume, so the dev box uses will always be a sideline from something else.

<comment><USER13> I think you're the only one in this thread asking for a new SoC. Other people are asking for affordable developer boards for existing SoCs.

<comment><USER11> You can get lots of dev boards for existing SoCs. They have the problems of no PCIe, no SATA, etc that the n^parent was complaining about. If you want those features you first have to identify an SoC that has those; my claim is essentially that such pre-existing SoCs with the kind of features you want in a "developer box" are so thin on the ground as to be pretty nearly nonexistent. "Use a preexisting SoC" is what my classes 2 and 3 are.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> The whole things smells like monopoly dragging its heels. It bought the competition to slow adoption, claiming that CPU-FPGA hybrids were just around the corner. What we need is a new FPGA based fabric that has the major building blocks to create any number of RISCV cores. Tiles that can be RISCV, or if "sacrificed" turn into clusters of LABs for general purpose use. And the chip company with the software vision for this is AMD with HSAIL.

</comment><comment><USER15> FPGA's are the shit but the software is the key. To make them really fly we need some really brilliant software to configure them. Someone is going to disrupt this space soon and whoever does I think will make a unicorn. Just my guess.

<comment><USER16> They bought one of the best hardware makers with one of the worst software platforms. I hope to all that is holy that they replaced the software entirely. What a nightmare those classes were...

<comment><USER17> Yes Quartus is complete crap! I wrote some of it.

<comment><USER18> To be fair, Quartus was way ahead of Xilinx' offering until they leap-frogged it with Vivado.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> What I am interested in is a programmable vector fabric that I can reconfigure fast (in say L2/L3 access times). right now there are 100s of AVX2 instructions & as the number of HPC applications grow it is only going to explode. My problem is that when you are using one vector instruction the silicon for the rest is just sitting around when it could be perhaps used to make a much wider SIMD unit for just the instructions I'll be using. If they can get just that right IMO it'll be a huge success.

IMO the problem with FPGA or even silicon dev is mostly tooling. I often say this, the biggest contribution to Open SOurce movement is not of linus/linux ..its gcc. just imagine if 'they' could tangle up every bit of open source code in IP litigation emerging from proprietary compilers.

</comment><comment><USER20> I think Intel or somebody else should put more effort in whetting our appetite for possible applications.

What long list of applications can CPU+FPGA bring us that a CPU or GPU can't?

<comment><USER21> The applications are the same, but an FPGA allows extremely narrow optimization. Got something that doesn't parallelize all that well, but can be pipelined, or benefits from a wide datapath? Design that. Got something that parallelizes well and only needs a tiny datapath? Make it a 1000 wide vector machine. It needs difficult control flow? No problem, we're flexible as we're not a GPU, etc.

The optimization needs to beat out the inefficiency of the FPGA compared to an ASIC though (not to speak of development time). But sometimes, you can do just that.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> In the case of Lisp and Smalltalk and other highly dynamic languages, would these on-die FPGAs open new compiler optimisation opportunities?

<comment><USER23> The problem is that tailor-made FPGA designs won't run nearly as fast as a modern ASIC CPU. That's why for instance FPGA emulators are not more common, for older hardware software implementations are accurate enough and manage to run in realtime so the additional cost and complexity of FPGAs is not warranted.

For more modern hardware software implementations can't reach absolute accuracy in real time but FPGAs big and fast enough to handle these designs are prohibitively expensive (if they even exist in the first place). That's why FPGA GameBoy emulators are not popular and you probably won't see a FPGA PS3 emulator any time soon (unless the pricing changes dramatically in the near future).

FPGAs shine when you need to process very high throughput data with low (or at least constant) latency or for special-purpose algorithm with no hardware acceleration available on CPU or GPU (video codecs, crypto, computer vision etc...). But in general when an algorithm becomes popular enough (AES, SHA-256, H264...) hardware support is backed into the ASIC eventually with much better performance and power consumption than a FPGA.

I see a potential for FPGAs in CPUs for professional applications if you want to process big datastream without having to rely on external hardware. For instance I work in broadcast video transmission where we routinely handle uncompressed HD or even 4K streams, being able to prototype directly on my workstation's CPU would be pretty cool.

As for general purpose programing language optimization I have a hard time imagining what it would look like. The problem is that you don't code for a FPGA the way you code for a CPU. To put it very simply on the CPU serial is cheap while forking and synchronizing threads is expensive. On an FPGA it's basically the other way around. Automatically transforming one form into the other automatically in a compiler or JIT sounds very much non-trivial. Maybe I just don't have enough imagination.

<comment><USER22> I remember a talk by Alan Kay where he mentioned a number of problems commonly solved serially, such as 2D layout and typesetting, and then he demonstrated a parallel algorithm for each problem. If I remember and understand correctly (I may not), one of his points was that such algorithms can become trivially implementable in a dynamic language and would run fast too, if the hardware supported some of the primitives of that dynamic language natively. He expressed hope that FPGAs may create such an opportunity.

<comment><USER24> Do you remember the title or have a link?

<comment><USER25> Alan Kay gave a talk at Qualcomm in San Diego, on October 30, 2013. "Is it really complex or did we just make it complicated?" [https://vimeo.com/82301919](https://vimeo.com/82301919)

<comment><USER22> Was just going to post that link. It's a very nice talk. Highly recommended!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> tim-- What's new here anyway? Intel bought Altera, and Altera have had development kits similar to this for a long time.

What is the price of the new FPGA add-on cards? That is what will make the difference here for a 'new push'.

<comment><USER26> The new thing is that the embedded hard CPU core is some flavour of Xeon rather than ARM or MIPS.

</comment></comment><comment> murph-almighty Does this mean we can develop using some not-Xilinx proprietary crapware?

<comment><USER17> You can always use third-party EDA tools if you have the money rather than the vendor bundled free software. Eg Cadence, Mentor Graphics, etc.

<comment><USER21> Don't you need the vendor-specific backend for the physical P&R?

<comment><USER27> Yes, you do need the vendor's place-and-route. PAR performance is as good as you could expect though.

Most complaints about vendor software are closer to the front of the flow. Examples...

* Poor language support (applies for both SystemVerilog and VHDL)

* Not enough transparency and access to primitives and IP blocks, resulting in poor ability to automate

* Generally buggy elaboration and synthesis results, sometimes even causing the tool to crash

My opinion is that the FPGA companies spend too much money improving the HLS (c-to-gates) and IP wizard experience, in an attempt to make their devices more accessible to the mythical software engineer who wants to use an FPGA.

They should have spent that time and money supporting language standards, and improving the RTL experience, which is how most engineers use their products.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> I can't help to think that FPGA would marry well with highly dynamic meta- loving languages like CL (or similar).

</comment><comment><USER29> Can JIT run on FPGA? Use the JIT info to reconfigure the chip on the fly. Would there be enough speedup to justify the effort?

<comment><USER30> It sounds like it would be little different from a CPU implemented on an FPGA. True, you want to use run-time info to optimize on the fly, but my guess is that modern branch predictors, caches etc, already do as much of this stuff as we know how to do.

In the unforseeable future, then who knows, maybe the predictors will become so flexible that even conventional CPUs evolve into something like basically FPGAs.

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> I've honestly been waiting for this since for YEARS.

I've had a vision for "the future of computing". FPGAs that reconfigure themselves (<-these exist) to become whatever macro-level hardware assets your computer needs. Running tons of SHA-256 encryptions per second? The CPU/OS/OpenSSL (or whatever) detects this condition and switches from hand- coded ones, to an IP core that comes with the CPU. The CPU flashes the FPGA's to become SHA-256 "CoreS" and now you're running 4096x the output with less heat. (As CPUs are designed for one thing "few, large, complex cases" while FPGAs are perfect for many, parallel simple cases" even more than a GPU.) Now, you shutdown your encoding and switch to video encoding, or Doom 2019 and your CPU reflashes (Alteria specialized in PARTIALLY flashable FPGAs so you don't have to nuke the entire FPGA, only sections) and adds cores for video, or physics, or "shader units".

This would be hard for a single person, but any large company could handle making this. You can even do it with off-the-shelf FPGAs. The biggest problems are 1) bandwidth. The "macro" function size needs to be bigger than the latency hit you take for asking the FPGA over computing it internally. (Intel's on-CPU FPGA would be insanely fast access.) and the other one is 2) How do you get people to use it! The simplist is of course, only supporting people who actually request it. But, you can take libraries that perform common, encapsulated macro functionality, like OpenGL, a physics library, or OpenSSL, where people don't care about the inner code ("how it gets done") but instead the result. Asking for floats to be multiplied would be bad. But asking for a cross-product would be much faster. Asking for an SHA-512 key would be super.

And the benefit here is, you don't have to hardcode that functionality into a CPU. The FPGA can have NEW or improved IP cores downloaded with Windows Update every week.

Back when I was in college, I actually bought a Lattice dev kit with a PCI Express card, dual-gigabit ethernet, DDR3, and an near top-of-the-line FPGA on the board and it cost a mere $100. Unfortunately, I was a more software guy so I really got in over my head (plus health issues set me back and have never let up since), so I never got a working prototype built.

But it's still there! A huge opportunity waiting to be seized that could really become another tier of "the standard PC." In the same way we think of SSDs as "almost RAM" scratchpads, or GPUs as "CPUs for massive amounts of simple decisions." Well an FPGA is the "GPU of GPUs". Even simpler decisions and insanely fast and parallel even at "low" (by CPU standard) clockrates of 400 MHz.

Here's an older (2009) project/research article that inspired me called the 512 FPGA cube.

[http://cc.doc.ic.ac.uk/projects/prj_cube/Welcome.html](http://cc.doc.ic.ac.uk/projects/prj_cube/Welcome.html)

[http://cc.doc.ic.ac.uk/projects/prj_cube/spl09cube.pdf](http://cc.doc.ic.ac.uk/projects/prj_cube/spl09cube.pdf)

And here's a direct link to the data table results between FPGA, FPGA cube, and Xeon (and cluster of Xeons) trying to do the same work:

[https://i.imgur.com/byjmEDG.png](https://i.imgur.com/byjmEDG.png)

Those are massive differences in numbers in both power efficiency and compute rate. 72,000 Watts of Xeons to get the speed of a single 832 watt cube. That's two orders-of-a-magnitude!

I mean, imagine a world if they bothered to make FPGA's you could plug into Ethernet, and make them configure themselves according to a simple programming tool that was "easy" for normal programmers to exploit instead of requiring intense understanding of logic gates, propagation delay, and so on. A tool that wasn't "as fast as" a dedicated engineer, but 90% (or even 70%) as fast at zero cost and effort. All a sudden you could run tons of programs and macro-sized functions like you had personally stamped them into a printed circuit yourself, but without spending millions on development.

I'm honestly not sure why this hasn't already happened. I can't be the only "smart" person who came up with this idea. And the research (and practice with bitcoin miners) all points to a huge opportunity to be exploited if they could lower the knowledge barrier-to-entry so you can basically "push a button" and unleash an FPGA at a problem. Imagine LAPACK and BLAS with FPGA support.

<comment><USER32> > As CPUs are designed for one thing "few, large, complex cases" while FPGAs > are perfect for many, parallel simple cases" even more than a GPU.

FPGAs are quite good at parallel simple cases, that is correct, but they would lose to GPUs in performance/watt in most cases. Where FPGAs really shine is in parallel complex, non-uniform cases, especially cases that don't map well to the classic CPU instructions, but can easily be performed with small latency on FPGAs.

<comment><USER33> FPGAs own low latency computation (less than 1 microsecond) because GPUs really need 3-20 microseconds to initialize after a kernel launch. This is why they're used instead of GPUs at the front line of high frequency trading. When I was at a hedge fund, I tried in vain to get Nvidia to do something about this based on the unofficial work of another former Nvidia employee implying this could be improved dramatically.

All that said, these are golden years to be a low-level programmer who understands parallel algorithms whether you work in Tech or at a hedge fund because there just aren't that many of us.

But the real problem with FPGAs is that even if they find another lucrative application where they excel relative to GPUs, Nvidia can simply dedicate transistors in their next GPU family to erasing that advantage as they did with 8-bit and 16-bit MAD instructions in Pascal and with the tensor cores in Volta. Too bad they don't care about latency or I believe they could disrupt FPGAs from HFT in a year or two when someone started using them and started winning.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> I wonder if this will receive the Edison treatment.

</comment><comment><USER35> ... and presumably they are also preparing to drop that program in about 3-4 years.

<comment><USER36> If they ever release it in the first place (or if they ever let it get past a point where you need to specifically contract with intel to get access to it).

</comment></comment><comment><USER37> This is so obviously not going to fly unless they either start bundling with Xeons, or offer something Xilinx can't do. Cloud providers aren't stupid, and there are enough eggs in the Intel basket already.

<comment><USER38> One of the key benefits of Intel's solution is that the CPU and FPGA share the same RAM, avoiding the O(N) cost of moving data to/from the devices. This type of a zero-copy transaction can enable very high performance applications compared with dedicated discrete cards.

<comment><USER39> AMD already does "Zero Copy transfers" (the on-chip cache!!) with its "Fusion" APUs (ex: A10-7850K) for CPU <<\---->> GPU.

I'm not really seeing loads of people taking advantage of the feature however. The platform is cheap, the technology is available but its just way too weird an architecture to become mainstream.

There are numerous benefits: the CPU can create a linked list or graph, and the memory will still be valid on the GPU. CPU / GPU atomics are unified, and GPUs can even call CPU functions under AMD's HSA platform.

* [https://images.anandtech.com/doci/7677/20%20-%20HSA%20Use%20...](https://images.anandtech.com/doci/7677/20%20-%20HSA%20Use%20Cases.jpg)

* [http://developer.amd.com/wordpress/media/2012/10/hsa10.pdf](http://developer.amd.com/wordpress/media/2012/10/hsa10.pdf)

* [https://www.anandtech.com/show/7677/amd-kaveri-review-a8-760...](https://www.anandtech.com/show/7677/amd-kaveri-review-a8-7600-a10-7850k/6)

\</comment></comment></comment><comment>---

I think Intel had a similar technology implemented on their "Crystalwell" chips, which were basically an L4 cache which provided a high-bandwidth link between the CPU and GPU (although not quite as flexible).

No, its not an FPGA, but OpenCL / GPGPU compute seems to be a bit more mainstream than FPGA compute at the moment. I haven't seen too much excitement in general for this feature however.

<comment><USER40> >I'm not really seeing loads of people taking advantage of the feature however. The platform is cheap, the technology is available but its just way too weird an architecture to become mainstream.

AMD sells a consumer product. For most consumers even a smartphone offers enough CPU and GPU performance. The content producers who care about performance usually buy the best CPU and GPU. HSA isn't available on AMD's Ryzen or Threadripper processors.

Intel is trying to sell to datacenters where performance or energy efficiency is a major selling point.

<comment><USER39> > The content producers who care about performance usually buy the best CPU > and GPU. HSA isn't available on AMD's Ryzen or Threadripper processors.

Raven Ridge will be based on Zen CPU cores and Vega GPU cores. But naturally, Raven Ridge will be slower than Threadripper because the GPU will take up some space (that otherwise would have been additional CPU cores).

Rumored specs of Raven Ridge APU is 4 CPU cores and 11 GPU Compute Units. In contrast, Threadripper is around 16 CPU Cores and Vega 64 is 64 GPU cores, separated by a PCIe x16.

So basically, its the price you pay for sticking so many things onto a single package. There are thermal limits, as well as manufacturing limits (ie: practical yield sizes) to how large these chips can be.

If you want the best of both worlds, like an EPYC CPU with Vega 64 or a high- end NVidia Pascal / Volta chip, you'll need to buy a dedicated GPU and a dedicated CPU. True, a hybrid chip like Raven Ridge (or any of the AMD HSA stuff) has benefits with regards to communication, but the penalty to CPU speed and/or GPU speed seems to be huge.

\</comment></comment></comment><comment>-----

I personally expect that if any "mainstream" FPGA solutions come out, they'll be connected to the PCIe and not merged into the CPU. There seems to be just too many heat and manufacturing issues to make a merged product compared to the standard PCIe x16, which is quite fast.

Alternatively, certain tasks (like Cryptography) can be accelerated using dedicated instructions, like the Intel AES-NI instruction set. Or Intel's Quicksync H.264 encoding solution. Fully Dedicated chipspace (like AES-NI) is way faster and more power efficient than FPGAs after all.</comment>


Will anyone remember how to use a real camera in ten years? - J-H http://edition.cnn.com/2012/08/10/living/fine-art-photography-manipulation/index.html?iref=storysearch

<comment><AUTHOR> These sort of complaints always make me think of what the printing press snuffed out: "Will anyone remember how to Illuminate a Vellum Manuscript in ten years? Will anyone remember how to scrape a palimpsest clean in ten years?"</comment>


Tell HN: New Google finance sucks - <AUTHOR> Can't tolerate it. Please recommend alternatives <comment><USER2> From an older ShowHN: [https://wallmine.com/google-finance-portfolio- alternative](https://wallmine.com/google-finance-portfolio-alternative)

<comment><USER3> That looks really useful, but there's no way in hell I'm providing information about my portfolio to a site with "Sign in with Facebook" on its front page.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Yahoo finance improved IMO.

I can't use google finance, some stocks I'm interested in have a share price is < 1 cent, but google finance charts have a minimum increment of 1 cent.

</comment><comment><USER5> same here --- the new one is classic overengineering</comment>