Here we get a big problem with the Intel and AMD business model. Their business models are based on selling general-purp

Now you got a big problem, because neither Intel, AMD, or Nvidia are going to license their intellectual property to Dell or HP for them to make an SoC for their machines.,An infection is a foreign body that has entered our body and reproduced itself. This is a familiar narrative, similar to possession by spirits. Now we are possessed by bacteria, viruses, fungi, and our own rogue cells (cancer, autoimmune disorders).,But we are quickly moving away from that world. In the new SoC world, you don’t assemble physical components from different vendors. Instead, you assemble IP (intellectual property) from different vendors. You buy the design for graphics cards, CPUs, modems, IO controllers, and other things from different vendors and use that to design an SoC in-house. Then you get a foundry to manufacture this.,Pain is the constant because we work at it day and night. It is only when we exceed our pain space, when we can no longer work to reproduce the pain of others by creating pain-saturated objects that are consumed by workers who must work more to buy them, that we are worthless to the pain economy.,There are two approaches to this. One is to add more CPU cores. From the point of view of a software developer, it is like adding threads. Every CPU core is like a hardware thread. If you don’t know what a thread is, then you can think of it as the process of carrying out a task. With two cores, a CPU can carry out two separate tasks concurrently: two threads. The tasks could be described as two separate programs stores in memory or it could actually be the same program performed twice. Each thread needs some bookkeeping, such as where in a sequence of program instructions the thread is currently at. Each thread may store temporary results which should be kept separate.,So heterogeneous computing is part of the reason but not the sole reason. The fast general-purpose CPU cores on the M1, called Firestorm, are genuinely fast. This is a major deviation from ARM CPU cores in the past which tended to be very weak compared to AMD and Intel cores.,Back in the ’80s, it was easy. Just increase the clock frequency and the instructions would finish faster. Every clock cycle is when the computer does something. But this something can be quite little. Thus an instruction may require multiple clock cycles to finish because it is made up of several smaller tasks.,Sure Intel and AMD may simply begin to sell whole finished SoCs. But what are these to contain? PC-makers may have different ideas of what they should contain. You potentially get a conflict between Intel, AMD, Microsoft, and PC-makers about what sort of specialized chips should be included because these will need software support.,Narcotics, sex, alcohol, prescription opiates, religion, and heroin are some of the only paths out of pain and into some place like pleasure. We live in a pain economy where we make pain all day long then pay to have it distanced, delayed. Pain is demonized, minimized, then normalized. It’s medicalized so that we can be told we are drug-seeking when we seek the condoned, licensed, capitalist-approved paths to pain-free space. But we need to be diagnosed, so we hope to make our pain visible, to make our pain worth something so that we can pay to enter the mythical pain-free space. We exchange our lives and hours for pain, hoping to redeem it for painlessness or maybe just pleasure which, despite what ads tell us, is never the opposite of pain.,We no longer make products at work; we make pain. Maybe we have always made nothing but pain — for ourselves and others. In hours of sitting or standing in debilitating positions, in mind-numbing boredom, and forced cheer. In textile mills and household drudgery, in hospital scrubs. We produce pain, and the pain capitalists profit from painkillers we produce and consume. They limit our access to pain-free space and pleasure while forcing us to reproduce pain.,The narrative, the metaphor for autoimmune disease, is that the body, for some reason, turns on or “attacks” itself. Which is a strange metaphor because every time the body fights off infection, it turns on itself. Cells of the body that have been infected are destroyed. Autoimmune disorders are really just the immune system doing its job too well. In my case, it sees infection everywhere and reacts accordingly, appropriately. Maybe we need to expand our ideas about what can “infect” us beyond viruses and bacteria. Why do we trust what our own bodies are telling us less than we trust a medical system that sees us as products, as clients who lie?,And the Soviets covered it up because this easily ‘preventable’ accident would be a massive PR disaster for them as their national hero died in a freak crash caused by human error. It was the era of the space race and the Soviets just did not want this embarrassment to be surfaced to the world.,If I had been homozygous, I would probably have not survived infancy, and if I had, I would have been deaf by my teens and dead from amyloidosis in my twenties. Instead, I have the less destructive version, which means that my flares, which can be caused by cold or almost any stress, including illness, feel like I’m getting the flu. I can have fevers or just an elevated temp, extreme muscular and joint pain (if you’ve had the flu, you know what I mean), terrible headaches that aren’t migraines but are nearly as painful and debilitating, a weird rash. But doctors really don’t know much about the disorder or how it is expressed in people who are heterozygous. In fact, it’s so rare that I can’t find a physician who will treat it. I now have a diagnosis — but that diagnosis has left me even farther from treatment.,For Apple this is simple. They control the whole widget. They give you, for example, the Core ML library for developers to write machine learning stuff. Whether Core ML runs on Apple’s CPU or the Neural Engine is an implementation detail developers don’t have to care about.,When my wife was in medical school, we took another look at my records and discovered that I had been diagnosed, but because of the way diagnoses are created, no one had noticed. For some reason, a rheumatologist at Cleveland Clinic had tested me for a rare genetic disorder called Muckle-Wells. It’s caused by a defect on a gene responsible for the inflammatory response, the same set of genes involved in disorders like familial Mediterranean fever. I tested heterozygous, which means that I have only one bad copy of the gene, one error. At that time, a diagnosis of Muckle-Wells required a homozygous result — both copies must be defective. But the diagnostic criteria changed about a year after I left the clinic.