What I find somewhat humorous: AMD originally wanted to acquire Nvidia, but walked away when Jensen apparently insisted on becoming the CEO of the merged company.
I wonder how AMD would have fared against Intel post-Conroe if Jensen was CEO. They were behind but still competitive until the Bulldozer flop, only recovering with Zen (and even then it took a few generations for Zen to mature).
> only recovering with Zen (and even then it took a few generations for Zen to mature).
Zen was a beast from day one. Zen 1 more or less matched Intel on single-core perf and outmatched it on multicore. Zen 1 blew Intel out of water on perf/$, so much so that the morning after booting up my Zen 1 computer, I bought as many AMD shares as I could afford.
Zen1 was further behind in ST perf than Intel is today in it's desktop offerings. They really exploited their strength in MT and price, and showed that the market was already chafing under Intel's reluctance to go beyond 4 cores on their consumer line, presumably to avoid stepping on the toes of HEDT. But that just caused the competition to pretty much invalidate that entire line instead.
And I don't really see the situation being that obviously different if it was Nvidia who they merged with and Jensen was CEO.
The big issue was simply that AMD didn't have the cash at hand to both pay for ATI and maintain investment in R&D, at least without their next few products completely dominating the competition. I don't see a different CEO changing that. Unless Jensen was willing to value Nvidia significantly less than ATI at the time.
> And I don't really see the situation being that obviously different if it was Nvidia who they merged with and Jensen was CEO.
Hindsight is 20/20. I suspect Zen chiplet success was a result of AMD's deliberate strategy of design partnership with other companies (XBox, PlayStation) and re-using IP[1]. Jensen might not have done the same road on partnerships, or may have chosen the Arm (Tegra) over doubling down on x86
1. There's an informative interview with Lisa Hsu from 2 years ago that lays out the strategy. It's not a big leap to imagine Infinity Fabric eas designed to increase design flexibility across disparate workloads. The impression I got from the multistage Apple-Nvida fallout is that Nvidia probably doesn't have a culture of accepting notes on it's products.
Considering that these tools are installed in seismically active areas [0], the last thing a customer would want is for the tool to zeroise itself because of an earthquake.
Acquiring P.A. Semi got them Dan Dobberpuhl and Jim Keller, which laid a good design foundation. However, IMO, I'd lean towards these as the decisive factors today:
1) Apple's financial firepower allowing them to book out SOTA process nodes
2) Apple being less cost-sensitive in their designs vs. Qualcomm or Intel. Since Apple sells devices, they can justify 'expensive' decisions like massive caches that require significantly more die area.
> All new motor vehicles, including cars, vans, trucks, and buses now need to integrate intelligent speed assistance solutions, cameras, or sensors for reversing detection, attention warnings in case of driver drowsiness, as well as emergency stop signals. In addition, cars and vans should now be equipped with lane keeping and automated braking systems and event data recorders. To prevent bus or truck collisions with pedestrians or cyclists, these vehicles now require technologies for better recognising possible blind spots and integrate warning systems, as well as have specific tyre pressure monitoring systems.
> No doubt you have noticed my frequent use of terms "nice" and "excellent" and that sums up the performance of Modi+. At this price point, we don't expect objective perfection but competent engineering and that is what we have. Physically, the unit is solidly built and of course supported by an English speaking US company. For people with such preference, the Modi+ provides an excellent option. That they can stay competitive with far east audio companies is definitely a feather in their cap.
> I am going to recommend the Schiit Modi+ DAC. Great to see Schiit continue the (new) tradition of optimizing objective performance as they cater to their traditional audience.
E.g.: https://www.audiosciencereview.com/forum/index.php?threads/b...
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