OK, now what does this all shake out to mean?

All PCs are fairly insecure spaghetti strainers, they all leak badly because of construction choices made way back at the dawn of the Wintel/IBM era that are all still around to haunt us.

Yes, there are multiple backdoors and various ways inside the physical construction of a modern PC machine's boot cycle, most egregious are the secret pathways that Microsoft had built into it to be used to update your machine at night even though the machine was turned off (and yes, if they want to they can cause your machine to boot up secretly showing no activity lights just as long as it is connected to the web through a internet service and a router and both have power to them).  

You are now being set up by the Wintel boys to make you want to go buy an expensive new PC just so you can get some small sense of security and some small part of your old operating speed back.

Do not go buy another PC !!!    ---  spend your money on the next wave of tech which is defining itself as you watch.

https://www.anandtech.com/show/12509/xilinx-announces-project-everest-fpga-so...




OK, so what is this ???

It is a signal that the buy-out wounding of Qualcomm and the complete non-starter recent performance of Intel has prompted some of the AUTOMOTIVE people to step up and offer their automotive standards based product to both the rackspace data center people and to the PC people as a replacement tech for Intel.

Xilinx is offering a set of automotive based stuff that does all the modern items, AI, etc. etc. etc. and this new Everest system supposedly can make up a PC competitor right out of the gate.   Or a rack processor.   Or whatever the heck you need it to be ...... (it can be reprogrammed on the fly after all).

Somewhat similar to ARM DynamIQ, actually, except it has a larger host of support chipsets available including heavy use of large FPGAs and larger AI blocks in addition to CPU cores and GPU sets.    But different enough not to be prone to Spectre, Meltdown and the current list of specious stuff from CTS ......

Well, so now you got multiple people actually offering new 7nm hardware setups now and Google offering a cross system OS under development now too --- both that do all the modern things (including concurrent self-maintenance) so I suspect that before too awful long somebody will put out an actual product that will likely fail to make Joe and Rita Six Pack happy for the first couple of times simply because it isn't Windows but may indeed eventually mature into a real replacement technology.    

Joe and Rita's kids and grandkids will understand it and "get with it" right away.

More likely ARM Holdings will look at the Xilinx offering and thoughtfully tune their DynamIQ stuff up a bit -- and vice versa as any new standard replacement technology needs agreed upon cross industry standards and a cross-pollinated system is stronger than the ideas of just one company.  

Your modern operating system must work across systems seamlessly if it wants to play in the phone/PC/Automotive/IoT world we are headed towards.

Google is actively seeking participating companies as they go about building Fuchsia, with the intent that it be a cooperative group-built standard from the very beginning.

Change she comes ......

https://liliputing.com/2018/03/samsung-unveils-exynos-9610-chip-for-high-end-...




The Samsung Exynos 9610 features:

Four 2.3 GHz ARM Cortex-A73 CPU cores
Four 1.6 GHz ARM Cortex-A53 CPU cores
ARM Mali-G72 graphics
High Speed 4G LTE (support for speeds up to 600Mbps down and 150 Mbps up)
802.11ac WiFi
Bluetooth 5.0

The chip also features an embedded ARM Cortex-M4F sensor hub to enable gesture recognition, context awareness, and always-on sensor features without waking the more power-hungry primary CPU cores.

Other features include support for 480 frames per second slow-motion video at 1080p resolution, 4K video encoding and decoding at up to 120 frames per second, and a neural network engine for face detection and other camera effects.


So, Samsung also lands on the "bump up the old cores with a modern AI boosted Mali G72 GPU plus various other adder blocks to do whatever else you want" bandwagon.    

This makes both Qualcomm and Samsung designing a "backed down" last generation big / little set up swinging a Mali G72 or other modern AI block graphics processor plus adder blocks to satisfy those customers who are simply not going to buy new 7nm lithography based cores for another year or more, but who still want to participate in the power increases that are coming from the new AI usage.

This "retooling the old stuff methodology" apparently is indeed a speedy, low cost fairly efficient way to make up a pretty good phone SoC these days.    The background idea is that last year's winner chipset is STILL A LOT MORE POWERFUL than what you really need, and when you bump it up with AI functions it really gets on up the power curve up towards the current crop of full on primo chipsets.

Understanding the cost/performance magic this trick can do, then understand that this trick is also going to be functionally slowing down the adoption of the latest styles of ARM DynamIQ processors (the Cortex A-75 bigs and the Cortex A-55 littles) to some degree.  

Until TSMC's 7nm lithography production is really truly up to full cost effective full on production rates the newest ARM cores will really struggle to price justify themselves against the current trick of adding AI blocks from the most modern Mali G72 set on to the two year older 10nm natural core designs that chip producers already own the licenses for.

Look to see ARM Holdings to do an interim re-design and a license cost downshift of the A75 & A55 cores if the Asian folks simply won't buy these newest designs simply because of lithography adoption issues and the relative high license cost issues that are involved .....  

ARM has had to do this before when lithography availability issues stalled them out for a year or so.    And this stall out is always aggravated by Apple's habit of locking up all the initial production lines on that critical first year out of the gate of each big lithography shift ......