On 09/10/2018 11:13 PM, tide wrote:
> On Monday, 10 September 2018 at 13:43:46 UTC, Joakim wrote:
>> That's why PC sales keep dropping while mobile sales are now 6-7X that per year:
> 
> This shouldn't be misunderstood as such, which I think you as misunderstanding it. The reason mobile sales are so high is because of planned obsolescence and the walled garden that these devices are built around. I've gone through maybe 3-4 phones in the time that I've had my Desktop, and I use my desktop every single day. I don't need to buy a new one cause it runs perfectly fine, there aren't operating system updates that purposely cause the CPU to run slower to "save battery life" when a new device and OS come out. That's not to say it isn't insignificant but the sales numbers are exacerbated.

Right. Basically, "sales stats" should never be misconstrued as "usage stats".

On Thursday, 13 September 2018 at 22:41:08 UTC, Nick Sabalausky (Abscissa) wrote:
> On 09/10/2018 11:13 PM, tide wrote:
>> On Monday, 10 September 2018 at 13:43:46 UTC, Joakim wrote:
>>> That's why PC sales keep dropping while mobile sales are now 6-7X that per year:
>> 
>> This shouldn't be misunderstood as such, which I think you as misunderstanding it. The reason mobile sales are so high is because of planned obsolescence and the walled garden that these devices are built around. I've gone through maybe 3-4 phones in the time that I've had my Desktop, and I use my desktop every single day. I don't need to buy a new one cause it runs perfectly fine, there aren't operating system updates that purposely cause the CPU to run slower to "save battery life" when a new device and OS come out. That's not to say it isn't insignificant but the sales numbers are exacerbated.
>
> Right. Basically, "sales stats" should never be misconstrued as "usage stats".

The usage stats are similarly overwhelming, two-thirds of digital time is spent on mobile, more for the young:

https://www.searchforce.com/blog/the-comscore-u-s-mobile-app-report-2017/

I went all-mobile three years ago, haven't looked back.

On Wednesday, 12 September 2018 at 22:41:31 UTC, Iain Buclaw wrote:
> On 12 September 2018 at 10:09, Joakim via Digitalmars-d <digitalmars-d@puremagic.com> wrote:
>> I think their model of having an open ISA with proprietary extensions will inevitably win out for hardware, just as a similar model has basically won already for software, but that doesn't mean that RISC-V will be the one to do it. Someone else might execute that model better.
>>
>
> POWER9 has been making some headway, for instance finally they have a sensible real type (IEEE Quadruple).  Though the developers working on glibc support seem to be making a shambles of it, where they want to support both new and old long double types at the same time at run-time!  It seems that no one thought about Fortran, Ada, or D when it came to long double support in the C runtime library *sigh*.
>
> For us, I think we can choose to ignore the old IBM 128-bit float, and so remove any supporting code from our library, focusing instead only on completing IEEE 128-bit float support (LDC, upstream your local patches before i start naming and shaming you).

All the pulls linked from that AArch64 tracker issue above were submitted upstream first before merging into the ldc repo. Only one patch that I know of hasn't been merged upstream yet: my commit to add IEEE Quadruple support to core.internal.convert, only because I want to add another Android commit to that pull soon, but the patch is available in the open druntime pulls.

If you know of some other patches that need to be upstreamed, let us know, AFAIK they were all upstreamed first.

> ARM seems to be taking RISC-V seriously at least (this site was taken down after a couple days if I understand right: http://archive.fo/SkiH0).  There is currently a lot of investment going into ARM64 in the server space right now, but signals I'm getting from people working on those projects are that it just doesn't hold water.  With one comparison being a high end ARM64 server is no better than a cheap laptop bought 5 years ago.

As Kagamin says, it depends on how many cores you're using and what benchmark you run, but most of the time, that's not true at all:

https://blog.cloudflare.com/arm-takes-wing/

And ARM does it with much less electric power used, as shown in that last graph, which you have to take into account when looking at the total costs. The ARM blog post I linked earlier in this thread shows they've gone ahead with using ARM too.

> RISC-V got accepted into gcc-7, and runtime made it into glibc 2.27, there's certainly a lot effort being pushed for it.  They have excellent simulator support on qemu, porting druntime only took two days.  Patches for RISCV64 will come soon, probably with some de-duplication of large blocks.

Great, but it's still in very nascent stages, with linux only running on it this year. I thought about using Qemu but figured the slowness and possible hardware compatibility issues weren't worth it.

I hope some open arch like these takes off sometime soon, as I don't like an ARM monopoly much better than the previous Intel one, but it's going to take awhile for POWER/RISC-V to get anywhere close.

On Thursday, 13 September 2018 at 22:56:31 UTC, Joakim wrote:
> On Thursday, 13 September 2018 at 22:41:08 UTC, Nick Sabalausky (Abscissa) wrote:
>> On 09/10/2018 11:13 PM, tide wrote:
>>> On Monday, 10 September 2018 at 13:43:46 UTC, Joakim wrote:
>>>> That's why PC sales keep dropping while mobile sales are now 6-7X that per year:
>>> 
>>> This shouldn't be misunderstood as such, which I think you as misunderstanding it. The reason mobile sales are so high is because of planned obsolescence and the walled garden that these devices are built around. I've gone through maybe 3-4 phones in the time that I've had my Desktop, and I use my desktop every single day. I don't need to buy a new one cause it runs perfectly fine, there aren't operating system updates that purposely cause the CPU to run slower to "save battery life" when a new device and OS come out. That's not to say it isn't insignificant but the sales numbers are exacerbated.
>>
>> Right. Basically, "sales stats" should never be misconstrued as "usage stats".
>
> The usage stats are similarly overwhelming, two-thirds of digital time is spent on mobile, more for the young:

Yeah but 90% of the time people spend on mobile is just dicking about. Sending IMs, facebook, point and click games. And thats a huge part of the usage stats, people can now spend more time online wasting time in more situations than ever before.

PCs are generally seen a tool to accomplish tasks, for word processing or a high end gaming thing, audio / video editing, mobile is more entertainment. Not many people are doing what you are by using your mobile as a desktop.

I'm not saying that makes mobile worthless, what I'm saying is that your hypothesis is like saying TV has taken over from typewriters.

On 14 September 2018 at 09:51, Joakim via Digitalmars-d <digitalmars-d@puremagic.com> wrote:
> On Wednesday, 12 September 2018 at 22:41:31 UTC, Iain Buclaw wrote:
>>
>> On 12 September 2018 at 10:09, Joakim via Digitalmars-d <digitalmars-d@puremagic.com> wrote:
>>>
>>> I think their model of having an open ISA with proprietary extensions
>>> will inevitably win out for hardware, just as a similar model has basically
>>> won already for software, but that doesn't mean that RISC-V will be the one
>>> to do it. Someone else might execute that model better.
>>>
>>
>> POWER9 has been making some headway, for instance finally they have a sensible real type (IEEE Quadruple).  Though the developers working on glibc support seem to be making a shambles of it, where they want to support both new and old long double types at the same time at run-time!  It seems that no one thought about Fortran, Ada, or D when it came to long double support in the C runtime library *sigh*.
>>
>> For us, I think we can choose to ignore the old IBM 128-bit float, and so remove any supporting code from our library, focusing instead only on completing IEEE 128-bit float support (LDC, upstream your local patches before i start naming and shaming you).
>
>
> All the pulls linked from that AArch64 tracker issue above were submitted upstream first before merging into the ldc repo. Only one patch that I know of hasn't been merged upstream yet: my commit to add IEEE Quadruple support to core.internal.convert, only because I want to add another Android commit to that pull soon, but the patch is available in the open druntime pulls.
>
> If you know of some other patches that need to be upstreamed, let us know, AFAIK they were all upstreamed first.
>

Can you send me links to any open PR you have?  These should not be sitting around for months without merge.

The 128-bit float support was particularly annoying as I nearly wasted a day implementing it myself without knowing someone already had done the work.

On Friday, 14 September 2018 at 16:53:16 UTC, Iain Buclaw wrote:
> On 14 September 2018 at 09:51, Joakim via Digitalmars-d <digitalmars-d@puremagic.com> wrote:
>> On Wednesday, 12 September 2018 at 22:41:31 UTC, Iain Buclaw wrote:
>>>
>>> On 12 September 2018 at 10:09, Joakim via Digitalmars-d <digitalmars-d@puremagic.com> wrote:
>>>>
>>>> I think their model of having an open ISA with proprietary extensions
>>>> will inevitably win out for hardware, just as a similar model has basically
>>>> won already for software, but that doesn't mean that RISC-V will be the one
>>>> to do it. Someone else might execute that model better.
>>>>
>>>
>>> POWER9 has been making some headway, for instance finally they have a sensible real type (IEEE Quadruple).  Though the developers working on glibc support seem to be making a shambles of it, where they want to support both new and old long double types at the same time at run-time!  It seems that no one thought about Fortran, Ada, or D when it came to long double support in the C runtime library *sigh*.
>>>
>>> For us, I think we can choose to ignore the old IBM 128-bit float, and so remove any supporting code from our library, focusing instead only on completing IEEE 128-bit float support (LDC, upstream your local patches before i start naming and shaming you).
>>
>>
>> All the pulls linked from that AArch64 tracker issue above were submitted upstream first before merging into the ldc repo. Only one patch that I know of hasn't been merged upstream yet: my commit to add IEEE Quadruple support to core.internal.convert, only because I want to add another Android commit to that pull soon, but the patch is available in the open druntime pulls.
>>
>> If you know of some other patches that need to be upstreamed, let us know, AFAIK they were all upstreamed first.
>>
>
> Can you send me links to any open PR you have?  These should not be sitting around for months without merge.

That's on me: I had another commit in the works for Android that's mostly working, but put it aside for the ldc 1.11 release, updating the docs on the wiki, and now reworking the Android emulated TLS patch for the upcoming LLVM 7 release. Feel free to use the commit I submitted here a couple months ago or to review it, but I'd like to get that second Android commit in before that pull's merged:

https://github.com/dlang/druntime/pull/2257

On Friday, 14 September 2018 at 09:23:24 UTC, Dave Jones wrote:
> On Thursday, 13 September 2018 at 22:56:31 UTC, Joakim wrote:
>> On Thursday, 13 September 2018 at 22:41:08 UTC, Nick Sabalausky (Abscissa) wrote:
>>> On 09/10/2018 11:13 PM, tide wrote:
>>>> On Monday, 10 September 2018 at 13:43:46 UTC, Joakim wrote:
>>>>> That's why PC sales keep dropping while mobile sales are now 6-7X that per year:
>>>> 
>>>> This shouldn't be misunderstood as such, which I think you as misunderstanding it. The reason mobile sales are so high is because of planned obsolescence and the walled garden that these devices are built around. I've gone through maybe 3-4 phones in the time that I've had my Desktop, and I use my desktop every single day. I don't need to buy a new one cause it runs perfectly fine, there aren't operating system updates that purposely cause the CPU to run slower to "save battery life" when a new device and OS come out. That's not to say it isn't insignificant but the sales numbers are exacerbated.
>>>
>>> Right. Basically, "sales stats" should never be misconstrued as "usage stats".
>>
>> The usage stats are similarly overwhelming, two-thirds of digital time is spent on mobile, more for the young:
>
> Yeah but 90% of the time people spend on mobile is just dicking about. Sending IMs, facebook, point and click games. And thats a huge part of the usage stats, people can now spend more time online wasting time in more situations than ever before.

And people don't use PCs for such things? ;) I know a lot of people who did, which explains the 28% drop in PC sales since they peaked in 2011, the year after the iPad came out. Many of those people who used to buy PCs have switched to tablets and other mobile devices.

> PCs are generally seen a tool to accomplish tasks, for word processing or a high end gaming thing, audio / video editing, mobile is more entertainment. Not many people are doing what you are by using your mobile as a desktop.
>
> I'm not saying that makes mobile worthless, what I'm saying is that your hypothesis is like saying TV has taken over from typewriters.

More like when computers first started replacing typewriters, I'm sure many laughed at that possibility back then too. :)

You've probably heard of the possibly apocryphal story of how Blackberry and Nokia engineers disassembled the first iPhone and dismissed it because it only got a day of battery life, while their devices lasted much longer. They thought the mainstream market would care about such battery life as much as their early adopters, but they were wrong.

But here's a better story for this occasion, Ken Olsen, the head of DEC who built the minicomputers on which Walter got his start, is supposed to have disassembled the first IBM PC and this was his reaction:

"Ken Olsen bought one of the first IBM PCs and disassembled it on a table in Olsen’s office.

'He was amazed at the crappy power supply,' Avram said, 'that it was so puny.  Olsen thought that if IBM used such poor engineering then Digital didn’t have anything to worry about.'

Clearly Olsen was wrong."
https://www.cringely.com/2011/02/09/ken-olsen-and-post-industrial-computing/

You're making the same mistake as him. It _doesn't matter_ what people first use the new tool for, what matters is what it _can_ be used for, particularly over time. That time is now, as top and mid-range smartphone chips now rival mid-to low-end PC CPUs, which is the majority of the market. The x86/x64 PC's days are numbered, just as it once killed off the minicomputer decades ago.

On Friday, 14 September 2018 at 09:23:24 UTC, Dave Jones wrote:
> On Thursday, 13 September 2018 at 22:56:31 UTC, Joakim wrote:
>> On Thursday, 13 September 2018 at 22:41:08 UTC, Nick Sabalausky (Abscissa) wrote:
>>> On 09/10/2018 11:13 PM, tide wrote:
>>>> On Monday, 10 September 2018 at 13:43:46 UTC, Joakim wrote:
>>>>> That's why PC sales keep dropping while mobile sales are now 6-7X that per year:
>>>> 
>>>> This shouldn't be misunderstood as such, which I think you as misunderstanding it. The reason mobile sales are so high is because of planned obsolescence and the walled garden that these devices are built around. I've gone through maybe 3-4 phones in the time that I've had my Desktop, and I use my desktop every single day. I don't need to buy a new one cause it runs perfectly fine, there aren't operating system updates that purposely cause the CPU to run slower to "save battery life" when a new device and OS come out. That's not to say it isn't insignificant but the sales numbers are exacerbated.
>>>
>>> Right. Basically, "sales stats" should never be misconstrued as "usage stats".
>>
>> The usage stats are similarly overwhelming, two-thirds of digital time is spent on mobile, more for the young:
>
> Yeah but 90% of the time people spend on mobile is just dicking about. Sending IMs, facebook, point and click games. And thats a huge part of the usage stats, people can now spend more time online wasting time in more situations than ever before.
>
> PCs are generally seen a tool to accomplish tasks, for word processing or a high end gaming thing, audio / video editing, mobile is more entertainment. Not many people are doing what you are by using your mobile as a desktop.
>
> I'm not saying that makes mobile worthless, what I'm saying is that your hypothesis is like saying TV has taken over from typewriters.

Do you realize most Chromebooks use ARM and have recently recorded more sales/usage that Windows in some cases? I several enterprises are adopting use of tablet for on-the-go tasks and administrative work (especially when combined with the mini-keyboards). Things are really shifting to ARM.


Another is some that looks exactly like tablets and either run android or chrome OS. See this slick Pixelbook from Google: https://store.google.com/us/product/google_pixelbook

On Saturday, 15 September 2018 at 15:25:55 UTC, Joakim wrote:
> On Friday, 14 September 2018 at 09:23:24 UTC, Dave Jones wrote:
>> On Thursday, 13 September 2018 at 22:56:31 UTC, Joakim wrote:
>>> On Thursday, 13 September 2018 at 22:41:08 UTC, Nick
>
> And people don't use PCs for such things? ;)

Sure, but they use them for a bunch of other stuff too. My point was that mobile growth has been in the "such things" but barely made a dent in the other stuff. So when you see 30% pc screen time and 70% mobile, its not a 70% drop in actual time spent in front of a PC. It's more a massive growth in time on mobile doing mostly banal pointless crap.


> I know a lot of people who did, which explains the 28% drop in PC sales since they peaked in 2011, the year after the iPad came out. Many of those people who used to buy PCs have switched to tablets and other mobile devices.

Yet PC sales are up this year, mobile is down, and tablet sales have fallen for 3 years in a row.


> More like when computers first started replacing typewriters, I'm sure many laughed at that possibility back then too. :)

Im not laughing at the idea of mobile eating into desktop PC share. What Im saying is that it hasnt done so as much as you think. And just because there's been a trend for 5 or 6 years doesnt mean it will continue so inevitably. I actually think most people would prefer a separate desktop and mobile device, whether that desktop is just the size of pack of cigarettes, or a big box with 5 fans in it.


> You've probably heard of the possibly apocryphal story of how Blackberry and Nokia engineers disassembled the first iPhone and dismissed it because it only got a day of battery life, while their devices lasted much longer. They thought the mainstream market would care about such battery life as much as their early adopters, but they were wrong.
>
> But here's a better story for this occasion, Ken Olsen, the head of DEC who built the minicomputers on which Walter got his start, is supposed to have disassembled the first IBM PC and this was his reaction:
>
> "Ken Olsen bought one of the first IBM PCs and disassembled it on a table in Olsen’s office.
>
> 'He was amazed at the crappy power supply,' Avram said, 'that it was so puny.  Olsen thought that if IBM used such poor engineering then Digital didn’t have anything to worry about.'
>
> Clearly Olsen was wrong."
> https://www.cringely.com/2011/02/09/ken-olsen-and-post-industrial-computing/
>
> You're making the same mistake as him. It _doesn't matter_ what people first use the new tool for, what matters is what it _can_ be used for, particularly over time. That time is now, as top and mid-range smartphone chips now rival mid-to low-end PC CPUs, which is the majority of the market. The x86/x64 PC's days are numbered, just as it once killed off the minicomputer decades ago.

Yes you can bring up examples of people who made mistakes predicting the future but that works both ways. You're just as guilty of seeing a two points and drawing a straight line though them.

On Sunday, 16 September 2018 at 01:03:27 UTC, Dave Jones wrote:
> On Saturday, 15 September 2018 at 15:25:55 UTC, Joakim wrote:
>> On Friday, 14 September 2018 at 09:23:24 UTC, Dave Jones wrote:
>>> On Thursday, 13 September 2018 at 22:56:31 UTC, Joakim wrote:
>>>> On Thursday, 13 September 2018 at 22:41:08 UTC, Nick
>>
>> And people don't use PCs for such things? ;)
>
> Sure, but they use them for a bunch of other stuff too. My point was that mobile growth has been in the "such things" but barely made a dent in the other stuff. So when you see 30% pc screen time and 70% mobile, its not a 70% drop in actual time spent in front of a PC. It's more a massive growth in time on mobile doing mostly banal pointless crap.

Sure, mobile has grown the market for digital entertainment and communication much more than taking away the time spent doing work on a PC, at least so far.

>> I know a lot of people who did, which explains the 28% drop in PC sales since they peaked in 2011, the year after the iPad came out. Many of those people who used to buy PCs have switched to tablets and other mobile devices.
>
> Yet PC sales are up this year, mobile is down, and tablet sales have fallen for 3 years in a row.

Eh, these are all mostly mature markets now, so slight quarterly dips or gains don't matter much anymore. What does it matter that PC sales were up 2-3% last quarter when 7 times as many smartphones and mobile devices were sold in that same quarter?

>> More like when computers first started replacing typewriters, I'm sure many laughed at that possibility back then too. :)
>
> Im not laughing at the idea of mobile eating into desktop PC share. What Im saying is that it hasnt done so as much as you think.

I say that almost 30% drop in PC sales over the last 7 years is mostly due to the rise of mobile. Not sure what you mean by "it hasnt done so as much as you think." You may argue that most using PCs aren't using them for entertainment, but this drop suggests that at least 30% of them were and have now moved to mobile.

> And just because there's been a trend for 5 or 6 years doesnt mean it will continue so inevitably.

Sure, but these trends almost never reverse. ;)

> I actually think most people would prefer a separate desktop and mobile device, whether that desktop is just the size of pack of cigarettes, or a big box with 5 fans in it.

Why? Given how price-sensitive the vast majority of the computing-buying public is- that excludes the Apple sheeple who actually seem to get a hard-on from rising iPhone prices, all the better for them to show how much money they've lucked into by brandishing their "gold" iPhone ;) - I don't see most willing to spend twice on two devices, that could be replaced by just one. Until recently, they didn't have a choice, as you couldn't use your mobile device as a desktop, but the just-released devices I linked in the first post in this thread are starting to change that.

>> You've probably heard of the possibly apocryphal story of how Blackberry and Nokia engineers disassembled the first iPhone and dismissed it because it only got a day of battery life, while their devices lasted much longer. They thought the mainstream market would care about such battery life as much as their early adopters, but they were wrong.
>>
>> But here's a better story for this occasion, Ken Olsen, the head of DEC who built the minicomputers on which Walter got his start, is supposed to have disassembled the first IBM PC and this was his reaction:
>>
>> "Ken Olsen bought one of the first IBM PCs and disassembled it on a table in Olsen’s office.
>>
>> 'He was amazed at the crappy power supply,' Avram said, 'that it was so puny.  Olsen thought that if IBM used such poor engineering then Digital didn’t have anything to worry about.'
>>
>> Clearly Olsen was wrong."
>> https://www.cringely.com/2011/02/09/ken-olsen-and-post-industrial-computing/
>>
>> You're making the same mistake as him. It _doesn't matter_ what people first use the new tool for, what matters is what it _can_ be used for, particularly over time. That time is now, as top and mid-range smartphone chips now rival mid-to low-end PC CPUs, which is the majority of the market. The x86/x64 PC's days are numbered, just as it once killed off the minicomputer decades ago.
>
> Yes you can bring up examples of people who made mistakes predicting the future but that works both ways. You're just as guilty of seeing a two points and drawing a straight line though them.

Except none of these examples or my own prediction are based on simple extrapolation between data points. Rather, we're analyzing the underlying technical details and capabilities and coming to different conclusions about whether the status quo is likely to remain. So I don't think any of us are "guilty" of your charge.