The Newsletter You Didn't Subscribe To - Dhole dog

Your daily dose of nonsense - Tuesday, 11 August 2020

If you liked this, consider subscribing and forwarding. If you didn’t like it, consider forwarding it to someone you don’t like.

Source: Davidvraju via Wikipedia

Source: John Kuk via Flickr

Source: Henrieke via Deviantart

Food for thought, literally

The UK’s National Health Service recommends a daily caloric intake between 2,000 to 2,500 calories. So let’s say that the average human being needs 2,250 nutritional calories a day. 

If you convert that to the average amount of energy our bodies use per second, that number is roughly 100 watts (working shown below). That’s the same power requirement as an old timey light bulb.

According to studies, the human brain roughly consumes 20% of our caloric intake. So that means our brains roughly use 20 watts of power. In other words, when we use our heads to think, whether it’s to think of how to save the planet, or something as mundane as what we are going to have for lunch, we are using roughly 20W.

ARM and the future of smartphone processors

Now take a look at your smartphone. How much power do you think your smartphone consumes to calculate all those numbers so that you can like that photo on Instagram or watch that TikTok video? 

Turns out, not much. As an example, the ARM Cortex A9 processor uses about 2 watts. That’s 10 times less energy consuming than our brains. Sure, we are more than 10 times smarter than a smartphone. But all we need is something just about powerful enough for us to use our phones, while still having an acceptable battery life.

You see, what makes smartphones’ existence possible are these low powered but powerful enough chips that are designed by the company called ARM. The iPhone uses ARM chips, and so do Android phones. That’s how impactful ARM’s designs are - every smartphone manufacturer uses ARM’s chips. And it is so good that even Apple has decided to make its new MacBooks with ARM chips.

And now the current owner of ARM, Softbank, has decided that it wants to raise some cash by selling ARM. And the main contender for the sale right now seems to be Nvidia.

So, that might be a good thing right? Consolidation of the processor industry might bring about efficiency gains etc. etc. insert other textbook merger benefits.

But I have a suspicion that ARM’s current customers may not like it if Nvidia does indeed buy ARM. For example, Apple doesn’t necessarily have a good relationship with Nvidia. There’s this unspoken bad blood with regards to hardware compatibility, and even a class-action lawsuit over bad quality hardware that Nvidia settled and had to set up this settlements website.

But there’s also another potential problem, and that lies with the differences between Nvidia and ARM’s business models - Nvidia sells actual physical chips, but ARM sells the designs for their chips to other chip manufacturers. It is this secret sauce that allows ARM to be perceived as neutral by all of its customers. If this sale is done, that means other existing relationships with customers like Samsung, Qualcomm, Broadcom (whose business models are to also sell chips) might be in jeopardy. Even the co-founder of ARM has something to say about this potential conflict of interest.

So, what would happen next? What if:

1. Nvidia does buy ARM; and

2. Nvidia does not manage this conflict properly?

Where are smartphone manufacturers going to get their chips from?

Well, one very interesting space to watch would be the RISC-V space. So unlike the current model where smartphone manufacturers buy a license from ARM to use ARM designs, RISC-V is an open source alternative. That means, you can freely use and modify the design without needing to pay any royalties. And there are many RISC-V based startups already.

So watch this space - when push comes to shove and your supplier is shafting you, you become your own supplier.

What happens when you ban a leader?

So, it’s one thing to ban Huawei due to security concerns about their 5G infrastructure. But it’s also another thing to completely ban a business that is actually a world leader in terms of technical expertise.

Here’s a chart showing the distribution of the number of 5G-related patents filed by company:

Source: Techwire Asia

As you can see in the pie chart above, Huawei holds the most number of 5G related patents - roughly 20% of the world’s 5G patents.

So what happens when your supplier gets banned? Well, I guess you better find another supplier. But what if there are no other suppliers that are as good as your first supplier?

There is a 21st century solution to this problem - taking a page from the RISC-V playbook, industry players like Vodafone, Telefonica and Deutsche Telekom are now going with the open-source approach to 5G infrastructure design - Open RAN. Now, I am no expert in telecommunications, but I know enough that 5G is going to be very important. Any attempt at network providers disentangling themselves from a sanctioned entity is going to be important too.

What’s also interesting is how the open-source model is taking off. It used to be confined to the software space, and now you see its application on chips, and now telecommunications network. Who knows if it would be successful in these domains; who knows what’s next; but the future does look open and exciting.

(On the off chance that you are wondering if there is an open-source Coca-cola-like product out there, here’s one)