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Yes really.

Molten salt reactors are not significantly cheaper to build own or operate, on the contrary. I’m making an economic argument here.

Both however are so much cheaper than Nuclear and especially than oil/drilling fuels that its hard to see much real investment in those older technologies.

I keep telling people that the economics of nuclear - especially new plants - just doesn’t work, but here and on Reddit it seems to be a very bitter pill that many are not ready to swallow.

The time of nuclear energy has come and gone. We missed it.

I’m not some anti-nuclear energy hippie. I took nuclear reactor design courses at uni. But you just can’t make money that way anymore.

With high efficiency DCDC converters now cheap and good, we totally could do it.

I agree on the time line.

RISCV has to completely slaughter ARM in the uC and SBC arenas before it can be a serious contender for the desktop market.

Basically, RISCV’s selling point is that it’s royalty free. Anyone can implement it without paying anything to anyone, no NDA’s nothing. In the uC market, where chips cost a fraction of a dollar in quantity and margins are practically non existent, not paying the ARM tax makes a HUGE difference.

Once they take over the uC market, it can move up, leveraging the experience the experience of being the world most popular core into more beefy SoCs. This is your raspberry pi equivalents and your budget phones.

From there, you can add performance features and move up to tablets, flagship phones and low power laptops. And then, eventually, performance laptops, desktop machines and servers.

This will take at least a decade.

Is it me or is this even worse news for Intel?

The new guys have better engineering that the guys they have been doing it since the dawn of the semiconductor age.

Pack it in.

Apples advantage is that it controls the whole stack from silicon to App Store. That’s a problem for all sorts of reasons, but here they can use that power to implement the shift in a way that minimally impact the users.

Keep in mind that M1 it’s not just an ARM CPU. It’s an ARM CPU that has specially designed features that make Intel compatibility fast. Rosetta 2 is a marvel of technology, but it would run like crap on anything that does not have Intel memory model emulation in hardware.

If you are in a position where

1. Old binaries have to keep running indefinitely (ie the entire windows market) and
2. You have to buy regular ARM chips from a regular supplier without special x86 emulation support features

things are looking quite a bit less rosy for you.

RISCV is going to be huge, but it will take at least another decade for performance version to catch up with Intel and ARM. Hopefully by that time we know how to deal with architecture changes in consumer gear because of the ARM switch and can just painlessly move over.

Spend money they don’t have in a last ditch attempt to hit the right buzz words and turn things around for real this time? Yes. That’s exactly what they do.

But then again, so do companies that have just hit a minor slump.

Let’s hope they manage to fix things. I don’t like TSMCs monopoly position right now.

So you agree that it's mainly Apple stans buy in whenever a new Mac drops, and hasn't been able to really influence non Apple stans.

No, I very much do not. M1 laptops have drawn in a lot of new users, simply because of the battery life and performance.

Apple stans buy in because they're a cult, so of course their sales will increase once a new mac drops.

I’m not sure what you’re trying to say here. There are a lot of factors that influence purchasing decisions. It’s expensive equipment and people try to decide whether it’s worth spending cash on. Apple users are not made of money.

The same was true for every other manufacturers

Yes. So?

Market share of ARM laptops skyrocketed from 0% to almost 10% overnight regardless. That’s the topic right?

NT launched on a bunch of chips, many of them what we would call RISC today. As far as I can tell it was not intended to displace x86, merely to take advantage of the hardware of the 386+ chips and complement the Intel offering with other OEMs.

Windows NT 3.1 was released for Intel x86 PC compatible, PC-98, DEC Alpha, and ARC-compliant MIPS platforms. Windows NT 3.51 added support for the PowerPC processor in 1995

Alpha (also RISC) was a hot item back in the day, which is why I mentioned it explicitly.

Arm was not part of the deal at the time, but was added later starting with the surface tablets. I have not been counting, but I have no trouble believing it’s the third attempt since surface RT.

Apple's laptops sales are decreasing.

Right now. But that’s because the M1 and M2 Mac sold like hot cakes and we’re at a quiet stop in the product timeline. They pick right back up when the new models drop.

And most Mac users can't tell the differences between Intel, the M chips, AMD or whatever.

This is silly. The M1 models were leaps and bounds better than the Intel predecessors. That’s not all due to the ARM chip, but list a “MacBook Air 2020” for sale and watch the Mac heads stumble over each other to ask “intel or m1”.

They just know that there's a pretty apple on the back of their laptop and that's why they buy it.

People generally tend to stick to one ecosystem because of lock in effects, such as investment in apps etc, but that’s equally true in the windows world. I’m not sure I would classify Mac users on the whole as tech illiterate though. Most know exactly what they are getting and why.

And they are also A LOT of Mac users that just want a decent Unix machine and sturdy, capable hardware.