I'm too small brain to understand the whole monopoly in my own business aspect. Because they are not arguing about game exclusivity, you can buy the same game most of the time on Xbox, Switch, PC (and if not that's an entirely different story) but the fact they want to buy on that platform (Playstation) but from a different store (not Sony). Can't wrap my head around that logic.
Taking Switch as an example, I can buy digital games at Walmart or Amazon. For instance, Amazon might have a sale where their price for a given digital game is ~10% lower than Nintendo's eShop.
I use Klarna all the time
but I always felt that it’s more suited for fast fashion, Shein, Aliexpress etc kind of like sites. Apple giving them a huge business here selling millions of iPhones.
I'd group the Dutch with the Scandinavians as the "other Germanic branches", possibly also including the UK. As a taxonomy it makes far more sense to me. Western Europe is too broad. You have the French and the Portugese and the Spanish which are all quite different.
Southern Europeans, Italians, Spanish, Greeks also call Germany Northern Europe. It's anything where the weather is generally not as hot (well, this is changing) people are more reserved, more work-focused, or individual, less prominent communal eating, big families etc. It's a real thing that I often hear from Southern Europeans. You could also relate it to Catholic / Protestant split perhaps.
It depends. Quite often, Germanic countries are grouped with Northern Europe because many of them are located around the North Sea, Latin countries with Western Europe, Slavic countries with Eastern Europe, and Balkan countries with Southern Europe.
that's what I get for relying on Google, apparently also Audi and BMW sell diesel hybrids in Europe, other brands seem to be max 1 model of private cars
I live in a town in Hungary and would never consider an EV. It is slow and costs about the same to charge as petrol, there is no infrastructure, way more expensive, value degrades more compared a simple (and clean, euro 6) diesel or petrol engine here. If I had a house with solar panels on the roof (thank you govt subsidiaries), maaaybe. I can buy a few years old compact car for 6-10k euros and use it for years with none of the infrastructure cost or battery degradation.
Same here. This situation is so mind-bogglingly ridiculous that I don't know how anybody takes GrapheneOS seriously. I mean, let's say I wanted to buy a big airplane but I don't like Boeing. Airbus looks pretty good and they invite me to their factory to pick out a plane. But then they insist I fly to their factory on a Boeing plane. I'd assume they were joking, and then they say "Really, we're serious."
You can always buy an used Pixel. GOS only supports phones with hardware that they deem secure enough, and Google is currently the only manufacturer that makes phones that match their requirements[1], with upcoming Motorola phones that also support or even come with GOS installed coming out next year. I find this point so obvious that I can't understand people making comments like "can't take them seriously": you make security/privacy OS, having insecure hardware that compromises the whole project would simply not make any sense. Ask other manufacturers to do better.
This. I bought an open box Pixel for a mild discount. I have a friend that used to work at Best Buy. He said so many people would try to switch from iPhone to Pixel, but decide they didn't like it and return the phone.
The goal is that you want a privacy-focused phone. Whether Google makes money or not doesn't matter to the goal. Has nothing to do with you liking or not liking Google...Google is a "don't care".
Never really liked Geekbench. Synthetic benchmarks are easy to use and easy to understand but borderline useless. 1000 is better than 990 but it literally doesn't mean anything at all. Just an example: the 2017 Intel Xeon gets more points than an Apple M1 on multicore but everyone knows that they are incomparable. And no one should get a 2017 Intel Xeon because it's scoring higher yet that's the whole point of Geekbench, higher score is better.
Benchmarks like 7Zip compression/decompression, LAME encoding, Blackmagic RAW video encoding, Cinebench, x265 encoding, Blender encoding, Y Cruncher, and any of the built-in video game benchmarks make much more sense than Geekbench.
> the 2017 Intel Xeon gets more points than an Apple M1 on multicore but everyone knows that they are incomparable
Why are they incomparable? If I want to run a highly parallel task surely this tells me which one to use?
> Benchmarks like 7Zip compression/decompression, LAME encoding, Blackmagic RAW video encoding, Cinebench, x265 encoding, Blender encoding, Y Cruncher, and any of the built-in video game benchmarks make much more sense than Geekbench.
Pretty sure the internal tests it uses are similar to these
In the past, they have provided information on which workloads they use.
For instance, the file compression workload on version 6:
This workload compresses and decompresses the Ruby 3.1.2 source archive (a 75 MB archive with 9,841 files) using different compression codecs (such as LZ4 and ZSTD). It also verifies the files using the SHA1 (Secure Hash Algorithm 1) function.
If memory serves, it has been since version 4 or 5 that they started including real workloads. I agree that it shouldn’t be considered synthetic any more.
Benchmarks like 7Zip compression/decompression, LAME encoding, Blackmagic RAW video encoding, Cinebench, x265 encoding, Blender encoding, Y Cruncher, and any of the built-in video game benchmarks make much more sense than Geekbench.
I don't think so. First, Geekbench already shows sub scores for different types of applications.[0] Second, nearly no one uses CPU rendering for Cinebench and Blender. They're mostly GPU work. Video encoding/decoding work is mostly done by the media engine or GPU on Apple Silicon. Third, CPU benchmarks tend to correlate. If a CPU is faster in one thing, it's more likely to be faster in another. Therefore, a comprehensive score like what Geekbench and SPEC provide is valuable.
Geekbench is extremely good at showing general CPU performance, especially ST. It's also highly correlated with SPEC at nearly 1:1 in terms of scores as shown by Nuvia before they were purchased by Qualcomm.[1]
While I definitely agree about video decoding, encoding still is a valuable measure.
With inter-frame delivery codecs the hw encoder always focuses on speed, with a lean towards file size as well. It makes sense for most consumer use cases. 15x faster perhaps sure, but you might end up with a file almost 10x larger while still lower quality than a decent CPU encoding.
Also the more off the beaten path of rec709 and rec2020 you go the less certain you can be that the hw encoder supports things.
Benchmarks are like the SP500 index or IQ measurements: They distil multiple variables into one number. In doing so you lose details, but do get a useful measure.
Yes, they are imperfect, but they do broadly measure how fast a processor is, and can be used for comparison.
As other have stated and perhaps worth pointing out clearly incase people don't get it. If you dislike Geekbench for those reasons, it is highly likely you don't know what Geekbench is testing in the first place.
Personally I think Geekbench is a pretty damn good consumer testing benchmarks. I just wish there is something similar for Server testing PHP, Ruby, JVM, MySQL and Postrges etc.
Can't wait to see all the M1 to M6 results. Along with AMD Zen 6.
Borderline useless? Is it just that the numbers are unit-less?
You can extract meaning from them! Find your current computer, find the target computer, calculate the percentage difference. 1000 is 1% better than 990, so it indeed doesn't mean anything at all.
Geekbench 5 and 6 both correlated with SPEC scores at nearly 1:1. SPEC is the industry standard for CPU benchmarks. So in a way, Geekbench does what OP suggests which is a general measurement of performance. If you want to see specific areas, Geekbench shows sub scores.
What compiler is used by GB? Why can't I change it? Imagine an ICC-like scandal. Trusting binary-only benchmarks to compare hardware simply is foolish.
I don't think you've put forth a coherent argument here.
SPEC CPU is distributed in source form, to be compiled by the end user. There are restrictions on what kind of compiler options and other games you can play when making an official submission to SPEC, which Intel (and others) get around by publishing "estimated" SPEC scores and using those for marketing claims. In practice, the amount of bullshit in Intel's claimed SPEC scores is constrained only by what Intel's legal department is willing to risk getting sued over.
Geekbench is distributed in binary-only form with all binaries for all platforms originating from the author of Geekbench. All the major chip designers pay to see the source code and participate in the development, but the final decisions about what code goes in and how it's compiled are made by the author of Geekbench, not by the chip vendors. They just get to lobby, and AMD has every opportunity to call out Intel and Geekbench should the compiler options for the x86 builds be unfair.
Intel has a long history of cheating on SPEC, but cheating on Geekbench is more difficult because of the necessity of runtime binary patching and they didn't publicly try until this year, with limited success and lots of negative press: https://www.geekbench.com/blog/2026/03/geekbench-6-and-intel...
Yes, for single-threaded benchmarks Geekbench 5 and 6 are very well correlated with the SPEC scores and with other single-threaded CPU benchmarks.
On the other hand, whether the Geebench multi-threaded benchmarks are meaningful is questionable. Especially Geekbench 6 has a very poor scaling to many threads, which shows results that are quite uncorrelated with many practical workloads.
Moreover, the multi-threaded benchmarks are too short to reach a steady-state, so they show extremely optimistic throughputs for CPUs with poor cooling, like those from smartphones and laptops. Thus with Geekbench many smartphones and laptops appear to be competitive in multi-threaded performance with desktops or servers, while in real workloads their performance would be pathetic (because as soon as they would overheat, their performance would drop drastically).
Like any benchmarks, Geekbench can be gamed by CPU vendors.
For example, because already the older versions of Geekbench included secure hash computations, the Arm Aarch64 CPUs obtained good scores, because since 2012 they had special instructions and hardware for computing SHA-1 and SHA-256.
The x86-64 CPUs did not have such instructions, so they had bad scores. This prompted Intel to add a SHA ISA extension, but they added it only to the Atom CPUs, because only those competed with Arm CPUs and people compared their Geekbench scores.
For many years, among the Intel CPUs only the small and cheap Atom CPUs had SHA instructions, while their big and expensive desktop/laptop/server CPUs did not have SHA instructions, because at that time nobody compared their Geekbench scores.
This has changed only after the launch of AMD Zen, which included the SHA extension. Then, eventually, after the years during which Intel failed to progress beyond the Skylake derivatives, Intel finally added the SHA extension to all its CPU series, starting with Ice Lake, and since then all the x86-64 CPUs have it.
a 2017 Xeon can absolutely smoke an M1.. (double the FP64 units, AVX-512; huge per core caches, boatloads of I/O lanes and RAM...)
.. but it chugs power like it's not even funny.
I do like synthetic benchmarks as one input signal when evaluating a CPU; otherwise we go back to stupid numbers like frequency... which also never made sense because they had 1.8GHz AMD Athlon CPUs outperforming 2.4GHz Pentium 4's in 2002-3...
Doing a lot of real-world application testing is good, but there's always some you miss, and the worst part about it is that people start to lose patience when assessing.. How is a cinebench comparing to doing gamedev in UE5?
How is doing gamedev in UE5 comparing to doing gamedev in Snowdrop?
How does doing gamedev in Snowdrop compare to doing virtualisation (different CPUs handling that particular task better than others).
there's so many dimensions that it will always be true that there's not enough testing.
I'm not saying we shouldn't have rigorous testing like you say, in fact, what I'm actually saying is that "single number→would you like to go deeper" is a better pipeline than an excel spreadsheet that goes on for 10 pages (which still skips a bunch of nuance) and still better than one that goes on for 500 pages with a broad spectrum of topics.
The reason I'm so bitter about this is because outlets like LTT and Gamers Nexus seem to choose their games randomly (based on popularity I guess?) and so all the titles I worked on kinda got smeared by my "company"- but our games used hugely different game engines that work differently (Dunia vs Snowdrop handle CPUs... VERY differently. Snowdrop is built for multi-core. Anvil works best on a single core, and Dunia has trouble going passed 4 cores- so on large systems with multiple NUMA zones the performance is.. worse.
So the "battery of tests" always gave us a shitty score and reviewers just moved on believing themselves to be comprehensive arbiters of truth regarding performance and giving verdicts regarding the performance of games as a broad topic (which people take and don’t dig deeper themselves) and without regard to the utility of what they’re saying (500+ fps on CSGO isn't even renderable for example).
People might have been better served by looking broadly at how powerful the CPUs actually are and then digging in for their use case once they whittle a few down, because then also: developers will actually make software that tries to use the features on offer instead of assuming people will just buy CPUs that work better on their workloads.
It's a kind of "to big to fail" mentality where incumbents start being able to direct CPU sales based on those CPUs being optimised for their workloads. It's self-reinforcing.
Except that ARM is pretty much theirs, or at least they have complete control over it, which they never did for any previous arch. They also handle chip production directly. Nothing in RISC-V could be worth more than what they can already wring out of ARM without having to migrate.
That all depends on their current licensing terms, doesn't it?
Besides, ARM-to-RISC-V doesn't require a full redesign. Plenty of components are going to stay more-or-less the same, the big change is the instruction decoder. Chip developers have done far more drastic redesigns while staying with the same ISA - just look at the history of x86.
I think the bigger question is: does Apple want to go through another binary compatibility break?
The license agreement they signed a few years back goes into the 2040s. Long term, you are right obviously. That is just so long term, so much can happen in that time span it's hard to even guess.
Apple has an architecture license agreement that extends "past 2040" (their phrasing), and it requires Apple to pay ARM ~$0.30 per device sold.
Apple can do whatever they want with the cores, but they do have to pay for the privilege and do have a future expiry to worry about, though it's far enough off that it certainly isn't pressing.
ten years is a very long time in technology, RISC-V ecosystem could be so vibrant and advanced that it might prove more cost effective for Apple just to feed off it (assuming Apple is still relevant by then).
It's almost like trying to predict if the smartphone leaders in 2006 (Nokia / RIM) would want to adopt this new mobile operating system that hardly anyone uses (android) in 2016.
The thing is Apple designs its own ARM cores. They don't use the vibrant ecosystem of ARM for all the important parts of the CPU; they compete with it on their own and manage to win. They only pay a small amount per device for an architecture licence that's very generous for Apple, in large part because Apple was an initial seed investor and first customer of ARM.
If all the current investments in ARM don't suffice to beat Apple's own efforts, I don't see how they could ever need to use RiscV's community to achieve their goals.
As long as ARM keeps the architecture up-to-date and the fees minimal, Apple's staying.
10 years is relatively short time in hardware, that is only at best 4 cycles. In today's world it is only 3 cycles. The amount of time, energy and resources required to switch from ARM to RISC-V only to save $100M a year makes very little sense. That is assuming you can get the same performance switching over in the first place. Which right now isn't the case in the next 5 years.
And I wouldn't be surprised ARM gives Apple some other patents protection as well as discount on other IPs.
Well you can see from the original poster's timeline, that 10 years from now will be effectively 16 years into Apple's ARM journey, so you can add two more cycles.
And also from the timeline you can see that the average Apple hardware transition period is 2.75 cycles, so I wouldn't bet too much that their ARM journey will last more than 6 cycles.
>the difficulty of transporting extremely heavy 155-millimeter artillery shells and guided multiple-launch rocket system pods across contested oceans and degraded theater road networks
I found it interesting that not even this article thinks about it that the US mainland ever can be attacked
> I found it interesting that not even this article thinks about it that the US mainland ever can be attacked
It can be, but it would be very, very difficult for anything short of lobbing ICBMs around. You'd have to have a fleet of ships that would be detected as soon as they set sail, and then protect that fleet for the entire voyage, which would also be extremely difficult for any adversary.
Getting boots on US soil would be even tougher.
Drones are an option, but cross-ocean ones are not an easy problem to solve.
Getting them there seems easy, its the keeping them there that seems like a logistical nightmare.
>You'd have to have a fleet of ships that would be detected as soon as they set sail, and then protect that fleet for the entire voyage, which would also be extremely difficult for any adversary.
Or make friends with one of your neighbors that the USA appears to be keen on pissing off constantly. I have never seen more negative sentiment about the USA from Canadians before, who now see the USA as a strategic threat instead of their mentally challenged neighbor.
And dont get me started on Mexico, they can probably be had for pennies.
According to Zelensky, there will be drones capable of traversing tens of thousands of kilometers within a couple of years. The US mainland is definitely at risk of drone attack in the near-medium term, IMO.
> One, two, three years — drones will strike ten, twenty thousand kilometers. With reactive engines, they will be very cheap -- Zelensky
I did some digging, reaction engines are jet engines that can transition into a rocket propelled mode. It could enable a single stage to orbit plane.
Within the atmosphere the jet engine will burn atmospheric oxygen which would theoretically reduce the amount of fuel needed to reach a certain delta-V. Once outside of the atmosphere the engine switches to a rocket propelled mode, usually by injecting stored oxygen into the engine in addition to jet fuel.
So far there hasn't been a working prototype of a reaction engine. A British company SABRE closed down due to lack of funding but it did prove several pieces of the reactive engine design could work independently.
I have a friend whose dad finished his engineering career at SABRE (he retired some years before it shut down). According to him, the original concept wasn't far-fetched, but that they didn't crack some manufacturing / materials issues. He thought they should have continued to work on those, instead of redesigning to avoid them. He had retired by the time we spoke about it, and I don't know the particular model / design to which he was referring. If that's accurate, then possibly materials technology / manufacturing techniques have matured to the point that the "simpler" design he preferred could be feasible. That's all second-hand speculation, so take it with a dose of salt, but a short timeline might be reasonable.
Balloon-lofted drones seem more likely as a means for even a minor military power to strike deep within a country.
These can be launched in mass, cheaply. They're difficult to detect and/or distinguish (weather balloons are already common), and easy to cloud with dummy balloons, perhaps dangling aluminium paper to enhance radar signatures.
The drones themselves could use optical+inertial guidance, and have either minimal propulsion or be entirely glide-based. Given prevailing high-altitude winds (generally west-to-east in mid-northern latitudes) strikes could be launched many thousands of miles from targets with minimal or no fuel / propulsive storage use.
North Korea and Iran both have orbital launch vehicles. If you can put something in orbit, that's most of the way to putting something in Times Square or DC.
This hasn't happened yet. And much easier, more deniable attacks like car bombings of these places also hasn't happened to any real degree.
The mass shootings in the US are mostly performed by Americans, usually right-wing Americans, and the percentage performed by foreigners is close to zero. Looking forward to some right wing American replying linking to individual examples of foreigners doing mass shootings as though that disproves the point.
It could be attacked easily via an alliance with Mexico or Canada. The premise that such a thing could never happen is not a good one for military planning.
Is there a reason the AI companies usually announce new products so close to each other. Like not just the same day but literally hours apart. GPT Live then an hour later Grok 4.5. As if they try to one up. I expect something new from Anhtropic as well today.
I'm guessing that they already have the model ready and the announcement blogposts locked and loaded, and then release them as soon as they see a competitor make the first move, trying to overshadow the first announcement or at least be swept up in the hype just as people start talking about new models again.
They get to compare their model to the old ones from the competition.
In this case, ChatGPT 5.6 Sol / Ultra releases tomorrow, so today is the last day Grok can compare Grok 4.5 to Codex 5.5. If they did it tomorrow people would point out they're comparing themselves against old models.
Competition. You don't want to lose your customers trying out the competitors updated and better product. Release on the same day and they won't be able to compare their new to your old.
But how do they know what day is that? Unless you have already something ready to be announced (and you just hold it until the very last moment, which doesn’t make sense, since you could just announce it asap)
The joke is that McDonald's spends hundreds of thousands of dollars to identify new locations - traffic studies, visibility, demographics, nearby traffic generators, site characteristics, drive-thru feasibility, etc. They have one of the most rigorous processes in the industry. Burger King's process is to open a location across the street.
> Also known as 'Thing, Japan'. HN eats up articles like this every single week.
And invariably the top comment is a "Thing Also in Europe/US" smugly citing that the commenter knows about something that's vaguely similar which happens to be in their neck of woods rather than Japan; and therefore makes the article irrelevant (this part is never adequately explained).
The most recent one I remember was reacting to something about konbinis by saying "So what, Poland also has lots of convenience stores".
This is such an interesting subtext. I think the original comment was a bit unfair to call it "just pollarding," at the least it's a very specific subtype that has its own culture and clear uniqueness.
Your comment feels somewhat reductive as well, you could basically replace "Japan" with a lot of things that are appreciated by some sizable subset of HN readers.
But, for some reason Japan does seem to inspire a certain fervor in both the otakus and weeaboos and their inverses. I think it's because it's the closest thing to an alien civilization for Westerners.
I remember in the 1990s watching a bit of British TV, where an ad asked, "What do women in Los Angeles know about beauty that British women don't?" (obviously selling some "secret" "American" product).
In LA those are either French or Italian women, selfishly hoarding all the good skin cream. I then wondered who the French and Italian women think are the beauty-secret-holders...
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