You’re using performance on consumer HW to conclude about abilities to build data center stuff?
You realize they already have their own ARM CPUs and run their own NVME drives with their own controllers right? And these generally outperform others in the same class.
And all this ignoring that kindle and Alexa are both market-defining products that either dominated (kindle) or created a new market that didn’t really exist before (Alexa).
There’s valid criticisms to levy, but try to be dispassionate and analytical as emotional comments don’t raise the bar for discussion. For example, I don’t really see how Alexa is really all that different from the design of any other smart speaker. They all appear to be fungible with different ecosystems accessible to them. Not sure about TV and phone products, but I’m not aware of any competitive ebook readers that offer a competitive mix of ease of use, price, etc (haven’t looked in a long time so my perception here may be dated).
And it’s important to note that they’re focus on training acceleration with these chips which is the path Google took with their chips. No reason to believe that they won’t be successful here for similar reasons in that a purpose built accelerator can outperform a general purpose design like a GPU.
In their defense it’s rare for a company that has sloppy quality in some products to be knocking it out of the park with another product. The same company culture that allowed the sloppy products in one area tends to prevent other teams from doing their amazing quality work. I’ve used various AWS services and found the ones they designed, or standard services they customized to have more bugs and problematic limitations than one would hope. I was especially angry at Aurora Postgres when it came out because their hacked up customizations introduced memory leaks. Their work made a DB I’ve used for 20 years for its reliability suddenly unreliable. I now work for a company that pays them a lot, so at least I see them fix bugs quickly now, but at startups that only paid them a few million they would ignore problems we reported. Their culture focuses on doing more at lower cost to the breaking point(they’re 21st century WalMart) and they have one of the worst reputations in the industry for burning out developers so it doesn’t surprise me when I run into bugs, silly limitations, or poorly thought out tooling.
Their consumer products are absolutely infuriating OCD triggers. For years in the Kindle app if you went back a page it would often start on a different paragraph than the first time you were on the page. The book reader didn’t implement the concept of a _page_ correctly for goodness sakes. And they clearly intended to emulate physical pages because they did implement a fancy page turn animation.
> You realize they already have their own ARM CPUs and run their own NVME drives with their own controllers right? And these generally outperform others in the same class.
But they are resourceful in utilizing their existing products and integrating them elsewhere, eg: snowballs with both fire and kindle tablets as part of it's UX.
vlovich123|1 year ago
You realize they already have their own ARM CPUs and run their own NVME drives with their own controllers right? And these generally outperform others in the same class.
And all this ignoring that kindle and Alexa are both market-defining products that either dominated (kindle) or created a new market that didn’t really exist before (Alexa).
There’s valid criticisms to levy, but try to be dispassionate and analytical as emotional comments don’t raise the bar for discussion. For example, I don’t really see how Alexa is really all that different from the design of any other smart speaker. They all appear to be fungible with different ecosystems accessible to them. Not sure about TV and phone products, but I’m not aware of any competitive ebook readers that offer a competitive mix of ease of use, price, etc (haven’t looked in a long time so my perception here may be dated).
And it’s important to note that they’re focus on training acceleration with these chips which is the path Google took with their chips. No reason to believe that they won’t be successful here for similar reasons in that a purpose built accelerator can outperform a general purpose design like a GPU.
TexanFeller|1 year ago
Their consumer products are absolutely infuriating OCD triggers. For years in the Kindle app if you went back a page it would often start on a different paragraph than the first time you were on the page. The book reader didn’t implement the concept of a _page_ correctly for goodness sakes. And they clearly intended to emulate physical pages because they did implement a fancy page turn animation.
hulitu|1 year ago
Some links will be nice.
iszomer|1 year ago