prompt_front: Now, answer the following question based on the text below, only give me the answer and do not output any other words.

Question: What is the future direction mentioned in the conclusion?

Read the following text and answer briefly.

Context 1: Paper Info

Title: Is In-hospital Meta-information Useful for Abstractive Discharge Summary Generation?
Publish Date: 10 Mar 2023
Author List: Mamoru Komachi (from Tokyo Metropolitan University), Takashi Okumura (from Kitami Institute of Technology), Hiromasa Horiguchi (from National Hospital Organization), Yuji Matsumoto

Figure

Fig  1 Example of part of a discharge summary which is a dummy we created 
Fig  2  Overview of our proposed method A new feature embedding layer encoding hospital, physician, disease, and length of stay is added to the standard transformer architecture The figure shows an example of hospital embedding 
Statistics of our data for experiment 
of summarization models with different meta-information The best results are highlighted in bold Each score is the average of three models with different seeds The BS and BR indicate BERTScore and BLEURT, respectively 
Statistics on the number of cases handled by physicians C/P denotes Cases/Physician, which indicates how many cases an individual physician has Method of Grouping Physician IDs A most naive method of mapping physician IDs to features is without any grouping process The data contains 4,846 physicians, so |M | was set to 4,846 However it caused our model's training to be unstable This might be due to the many physician IDs appearing for the first time in the test time Table

abstract

During the patient's hospitalization, the physician must record daily observations of the patient and summarize them into a brief document called "discharge summary" when the patient is discharged  Automated generation of discharge summary can greatly relieve the physicians' burden, and has been addressed recently in the research community 
Most previous studies of discharge summary generation using the sequenceto-sequence architecture focus on only inpatient notes for input  However, electric health records (EHR) also have rich structured metadata (e g , hospital, physician, disease, length of stay, etc ) that might be useful  This paper investigates the effectiveness of medical meta-information for summarization tasks 
We obtain four types of meta-information from the EHR systems and encode each meta-information into a sequence-to-sequence model  Using Japanese EHRs, meta-information encoded models increased ROUGE-1 by up to 4 45 points and BERTScore by 3 77 points over the vanilla Longformer  Also, we found that the encoded meta-information improves the precisions of its related terms in the outputs 
Our results showed the benefit of the use of medical meta-information 

INTRODUCTION

Clinical notes are written daily by physicians from their consults and are used for their own decision-making or coordination of treatment  They contain a large amount of important data for machine learning, such as conditions, laboratory tests, diagnoses, procedures, and treatments  While invaluable to physicians and researchers, the paperwork is burdensome for physicians ,  
Discharge summaries, a subset of these, also play a crucial role in patient care, and are used to share information between hospitals and physicians (see an example in Figure )  It is created by the physician as a summary of notes during hospitalization at the time of the patient's discharge, which is known to be very time-consuming 
Researchers have begun to apply automatic summarization techniques to address this problem -   Previous studies used extractive or abstractive summarization methods, but most of them focused on only progress notes for inputs  Properly summarizing an admission of a patient is a quite complex task, and requires various meta-information such as the patient's age, gender, vital signs, laboratory values and background to specific diseases 
Therefore, discharge summary generation needs more medical meta-information, than similar but narrower tasks such as radiology report generation  However, what kind of meta-information is important for summarization has not been investigated, even though it is critical not only for future research on medical summarization but also for the policy of data collection infrastructure 
In this paper, we first reveal the effects of meta-information on neural abstractive summarization on admissions  Our model is based on an encoder-decoder transformer with an additional feature embedding layer in the encoder (Figure )  Hospital, physician, disease, and length of stay are used as meta-information, and each feature is embedded in the vector space 
For experiments, we collect progress notes, discharge summaries and coded information from the electronic health record system, which are managed by a largest multi-hospital organization in Japan  Our main contributions are as follows: • We found that a transformer encoding meta-information generates higher quality summaries than the vanilla one, and clarified the benefit of using meta-information for medical summarization tasks 
• We found that a model encoding disease information can produce proper disease and symptom words following the source  In addition, we found that the model using physician and hospital information can generate symbols that are commonly written in the summary  • We are the first to apply the abstractive summarization method to generate Japanese discharge summaries 
In the studies of summarization of medical documents, it is common to retrieve key information such as disease, examination result, or medication from EHRs -   Other researchs more similar to our study targeted to help physicians get the point of medical documents quickly by generating a few key sentences -  
Studies generating contextualized summaries can be categorized by the type of model inputs and architectures  Some studies produced a whole discharge summary using structured data for input - The sensitivity of the gram stain for bacterial meningitis is about 60%, and the sensitivity of the culture is not high either 
Also, the glucose in the cerebrospinal fluid would have been slightly lower  Although no definitive diagnosis could be made, bacterial meningitis was the most suspicious disease  The causative organism was assumed to be MRSA, and vancomycin and meropenem (meningitis dose) were used to cover a wide range of enteric bacteria 
a whole discharge summary from free-form inpatient records -   The free-form data is more challenging since it is noisier than structured data  In inputting of the free-form data, extractive summarization methods, which extract sentences from the source, are commonly used , -   On the other hands, an encoder-decoder model was used for abstractive summarization , , with a limited number of studies 
The various issues in the abstractive generation of discharge summary would be studied in the future  Studies using medical meta-information have long been conducted on a lot of tasks -   In abstractive summarization on discharge summary,  developed a model incorporating similarity of progress notes and information of the record author 
They presented an idea of integrating meta-information into the abstractive summarization model on medical documents, but did not reveal how meta-information would affect the quality of the summaries  Our method is based on the encoder-decoder transformer model  The transformer model is known for its high performance and has been widely used in recent studies, thus it is suitable for our purpose 
As shown in Figure , the standard input to a transformer's encoder is created by a token sequence T = [t 0 , t 1 ,    , t i ] and position sequence P = [p 0 , p 1 ,    , p i ], where i is the maximum input length  The token and position sequences are converted into token embeddings E T and positional embeddings E P by looking up the vocabulary tables 
The sum of E T and E P is input into the model  In this paper, we attempt to encode meta-information to feature embeddings  We follow the segment embeddings of BERT and the language embeddings of XLM , which provide additional information to the model  It is not a new idea but is suitable for our validation 
Our method is formulated as follows: Let M be feature type, M ∈ {Vanilla, Hospital, Physician, Disease, Length of stay}, since we set five types of features  Feature embeddings E M is created by looking up the feature table where m j is featue value (e g , pysician ID, disease code, etc ) and |M | is the maximum number of differences in a feature 
In our study, |M | is set to four different values depending on features  Specifically, they are as follows  a) Hospital: As shown in Table , the data includes five hospital records  They were obtained mechanically from the EHR system  b) Physician: Physicians are also managed by IDs in the EHR systems  We hashed the physician IDs into 485 groups containing 10 people each 
Specifically, as a naive strategy, we shuffled and listed the cases within each hospital, and hashed them into groups in the order of appearance of the physician IDs  So each group has the information about the relevance of the hospitals  The reason for employing a grouping strategy is described in Appendix A 
c) Disease: Two types of disease information exist in our EHRs: disease names and disease codes called ICD-10   We did not use any disease names in the inputs for our experiment  Instead, we encoded diseases with the first three letters of the ICD-10 code, because they represent well the higher level concept 
The initial three letters of the ICD-10 codes are arranged in the order of an alphabetic letter, a digit, and a digit, so there are a total of 2,600 ways to encode a disease  In our data, some ICD-10 codes were missing, although all disease names were systematically obtained from the EHR system  For such cases, we converted the disease names into ICD-10 codes using MeCab with the J-MeDic (MANBYO 201905) dictionary 
Also, diseases can be divided into primary and secondary diseases, but we only deal with the primary diseases  d) Length of stay: The length of stay can be obtained mechanically from the EHR system and the maximum value was set to 1,000 days  We set |M | for vanilla, hospital, physician, disease, and length of stay to 1, 5, 485, 2,600, and 1,000, respectively  
The vanilla embedding is prepared for the baseline in our experiment and to equalize the total number of parameters with the other models  The input to our model is the sum of E T , E P and E M   We also prepare an extra model with all features for our experiments  This takes all four feature embeddings (hospital, physician, disease, and length of stay) added to the encoder 

Datasets and Metrics

We evaluated our proposed method on a subset of data from National Hospital Organization (NHO), the largest multiinstitutional organization in Japan  The statistics of our data are shown in Table  , which includes 24,630 cases collected from five hospitals  Each case includes a discharge summary and progress notes for the days of stay 
The data are randomly split into 22,630, 1,000, and 1,000 for train, validation, and test, respectively  Summarization performances are reported in ROUGE-1, ROUGE-2, ROUGE-L and BERTScore in terms of F1  In addition, we also employed BLEURT , which models human judgment 

Architectures and Hyperparameters

Due to our hardware constraints we need a model that is computationally efficient, so we employed the Longformer instead of the conventional transformer  Longformer can    In our model, number of layers, window size, dilation, input sequence length, output sequence length, batch size, learning rate and number of warmup steps are 8, 256, 1, 1024, 256, 4, 3e-5 and 1K, respectively 
Other hyperparameters are the same as in the original Longformer, except for the maximum number of epochs is not fixed and the best epoch  It is selected for each training using the validation data based on ROUGE-1  Also, the original Longformer imports pretrained-BART parameters to initial values, but we do not use pre-trained Japanese BART in this study 
We used three GeForce RTX 2080 TI for our experiments  Our vocabulary for preparing input to Longformer is taken from UTH-BERT , which is pre-trained on the Japanese clinical records  Since the vocabulary of UTH-BERT is trained by WordPiece , we also tokenize our data with WordPiece  However, the vocabulary does not include white space and line breaks, which cannot be handled, so we add those two tokens to the vocabulary, resulting in a total size of 25,002 
The vocabulary has all tokens in full characters, so we normalized full-wdith characters by converting all alphanumeric and symbolic characters to half-width for byte fallback  , we found that all the models with encoded medical meta-information perform better in ROUGE-1, ROUGE-L and BLEURT than the vanilla Longformer 
However, in BERTScore, only hospital and disease models outperform the vanilla  Specifically, disease information is most effective, improving ROUGE-1, ROUGE-2, ROUGE-L, BERTScore and BLEURT by 4 45, 0 73, 3 12, 3 77 and 0 21 points over the vanilla model, respectively  This seems to be because disease information and the ICD-10 ontology efficiently cluster groups with similar representations 
In contrast, in ROUGE-2 and ROUGE-L, the model with physician embedding is inferior to the vanilla model  This seems to be a negative effect of grouping physicians without any consideration of their relevance  It would be better to cluster them by department, physician attributes, similarity of progress notes, etc  Regarding low ROUGE-2 scores in all models, a previous study using the English data set also reported a low ROUGE-2 score of about 5%, which may indicate an inherent difficulty in discharge summary generation 
In BERTScore, the models with the physician and the length of stay did not reach the performance of the vanilla model, suggesting that the system's outputs are semantically inferior  The model with all features performed the lowest of all models in BERTScore  The reason for the low score of the model with all features seems to be that its number of parameters in feature embedding was four times larger than that of the model with the individual feature, and the amount of training data was insufficient 
In BLEURT, all models with meta-information outperform vanilla, which suggests that they are more natural to humans  To analyze the influence of encoded meta-information on the outputs, we evaluate the precisions of the generated text  Specifically, we measure the probability that the generated words are included in the gold summary to investigate if the proper words are generated 
Some previous studies on faithfulness, which also analyze the output of summarization, have employed words or entities -   In this study, we focused on words, not entities, because we wanted to visualize expressions that are not only nouns  The words were segmented by MeCab with the J-MeDic  For each segmented word, the numeral and symbol labels were assigned as parts of speech by MeCab, the morphological analyzer, while the disease and symptom were assigned by the J-Medic dictionary 
The results, shown in Figure , indicate that the encoded disease information leads to generate more proper disease and symptom words  This indicates that the meta-information successfully learns disease-related expressions  The encoded hospital or physician information also improved the precision of symbols generation 
This suggests that different hospitals and physicians have different description habits (e g , bullet points such as "•", "*" and "-", punctuation such as "。" and " ", etc ), which can be grouped by meta-information  In this paper, we conducted a discharge summary generation experiment by adding four types of information to Longformer and verified the impact of the meta-information 
The results showed that all four types of information exceeded the performance of the vanilla Longformer model, with the highest performance achieved by encoding disease information  We found that meta-information is useful for abstractive summarization on discharge summaries  Our limitations are that we used Japanese EHR, the limited number of tested features and not performing human evaluations 
As for the efficacy of the meta-information, we believe that our results are applicable to non-Japanese, but it is left as Fig    The precisions of words in the generated summaries  The vertical axis shows the probability that the words exist in the gold summary  a future work  Other meta-information may be worth verifying such as the patient's gender, age, race, religion and used EHR system, etc 
It is hard to collect a large amount of medical information and process it into meta-information, so we may need to develop a robust and flexible research infrastructure to conduct a more large scale cross-sectional study in the future  In the discharge summary generation task, which demands a high level of expertise, the human evaluation requires a lot of physicians' efforts and it is a very high cost which is unrealistic 
This is a general issue in tasks dealing with medical documents, and this study also could not perform human evaluations  On this research, informed consent and patient privacy are ensured in the following manner  Notices about their policy and the EHR data usage are posted at the hospitals  The patients who disagree with the policies can request opt-out and are excluded from the archive 
In case of minors and their parents, followed the same manner  In the case of minors and their parents are same  To conduct a research on the archive, researchers must submit their research proposals to the institutional review board  After the proposal is approved, the data is anonymized to build a dataset for analysis 
The data is accessible only in a secured room at the NHO headquarters, and only statistics are brought out of the secured room, for protection of patients' privacy  In the present research, the analysis was conducted under the IRB approval (IRB Approval No : Wako3 2019-22) of the Institute of Physical and Chemical Research (RIKEN), Japan, which has a collaboration agreement with the National Hospital Organization 
This data is not publicly available due to privacy restrictions  shows the detailed number of cases handled by physicians  In all hospitals, there is a large difference between the median and the maximum of cases/physician  This indicates that a few physicians handle a large number of cases and many physicians handle fewer cases 
It is impossible to avoid physician IDs first seen at test time without some process that averages the number of cases a physician holds 
Context 2: The future of mobile CPUs, part 1: Today’s fork in the road | Ars Technica
2013 may be a big year for the evolution of smartphones and tablets 
Mobile computing's rise from niche market to the mainstream is among the most significant technological trends in our lifetimes  And to a large extent, it's been driven by the bounty of Moore’s Law—the rule that transistor density doubles every 24 months  Initially, most mobile devices relied on highly specialized hardware to meet stringent power and size budgets  But with so many transistors available, devices inevitably grew general-purpose capabilities  Most likely, that wasn't even the real motivation  The initial desire was probably to reduce costs by creating a more flexible software ecosystem with better re-use and faster time to market  As such, the first smartphones were very much a novelty, and it took many years before the world realized the potential of such devices  Apple played a major role by creating innovative smartphones that consumers craved and quickly adopted 
To some extent, this is where we still stand today  Smartphones are still (relatively) expensive and primarily interesting to the developed world  But over the next 10 years, this too will change  As Moore’s Law rolls on, the cost of a low-end smartphone will decline  At some point, the incremental cost will be quite minimal and many feature phones of today will be supplanted by smartphones  A $650 unsubsidized phone is well beyond the reach of most of the world compared to a $20 feature phone, but a $30 to $40 smartphone would naturally be very popular 
In this grand progression, 2013 will certainly be a significant milestone for mobile devices, smartphones and beyond  It's likely to be the first year in which tablets out-ship notebooks in the US  And in the coming years, this will lead to a confluence of high-end tablets and ultra-mobile notebooks as the world figures out how these devices co-exist, blend, hybridize, and/or merge 
Against this backdrop, in this two-part series, we'll explore the major trends and evolution for mobile SoCs  More importantly, we'll look to where the major vendors are likely going in the next several years 
Tablet and phone divergence
While phones and tablets are mobile devices that often share a great deal of software, it's becoming increasingly clear the two are very different products  These two markets have started to diverge and will continue doing so over time 
From a technical perspective, smartphones are far more compact and power constrained  Smartphone SoCs are limited to around 1W, both by batteries and by thermal dissipation  The raison d’etre of a smartphone is connectivity, so a cellular modem is an absolute necessity  For the cost sensitive-models that make up the vast majority of the market, the modem is integrated into the SoC itself  High-end designs favor discrete modems with a greater power budget instead  The main smartphone OSes today are iOS and Android, though Windows is beginning to make an appearance (perhaps with Linux or BlackBerry on the horizon)  Just as importantly, phone vendors like HTC must pass government certification and win the approval of carriers  There is very much a walled-garden aspect, where carriers control which devices can be attached to their networks, and in some cases devices can only be sold through a certain carrier  The business model places consumers quite far removed from the actual hardware 
In contrast, tablets are far more akin to the PC both technically and economically  The power budget for tablet SoCs is much greater, up to 4W for a passively cooled device and as high as 7-8W for systems with fans  This alone means there is a much wider range of tablet designs than smartphones  Moreover, the default connectivity for tablets is Wi-Fi rather than a cellular modem  The vast majority of tablets do not have cellular modems, and even fewer customers actually purchase a wireless data plan  As a result, cellular modems are almost always optional discrete components of the platform  The software ecosystem is relatively similar, with Microsoft, Apple, and Google OSes available  Because tablets eschew cellular modems, the time to market is faster, and they are much more commonly sold directly to consumers rather than through carriers  In terms of usage models, tablets are much more PC-like, with reasonable-sized screens that make games and media more attractive 
Looking forward, these distinctions will likely become more pronounced  Many tablets today use high-end smartphone SoCs, but the difference in power targets and expected performance is quite large  As the markets grow in volume, SoCs will inevitably bifurcate to focus on one market or the other  Even today, Apple is doing so, with the A6 for phones and the larger A6X for tablets  Other vendors may need to wait a few years to have the requisite volume, but eventually the two markets will be clearly separate 
Horizontal business model evolution
Another aspect of the mobile device market that is currently in flux and likely to change in the coming years is the business model for the chip and system vendors  Currently, Apple is the only company truly pursuing a vertically integrated model, where all phones and tablets are based on Apple’s own SoC designs and iOS  The tight integration between hardware and software has been a huge boon for Apple, and it has yielded superb products 
Samsung is one of the few others companies that takes a vertically integrated approach to phones and tablets, although in truth its strategy seems to be ambivalent on that point  Unlike Apple, Samsung’s SoCs are readily available to third parties, and some Samsung devices, such as the S7562 Galaxy S Duos, use SoCs from competitors  More recently though, there has been a trend of Samsung devices using Samsung SoCs, at least for the premier products  For the moment, Samsung’s approach is best characterized as a hybrid, particularly as the company lacks a bespoke OS 
The rest of the major SoC vendors (e g , Intel, Qualcomm, Nvidia, TI, Mediatek, etc ) have stayed pretty far away from actual mobile devices  These companies tend to focus on horizontal business models that avoid competing with customers or suppliers 
In the long term, mobile devices are likely to evolve similarly to the PC and favor a horizontal business model  The real advantage is one of flexibility; as costs drop and the market expands, it will be increasingly necessary for vendors like HTC to offer a wide range of phones based on radically different SoCs  While a vertically integrated company like Apple can focus and maintain leadership in a specific (and highly lucrative) niche, it would be very difficult to expand in many growing areas of the market  The differences between an iPhone 6 and a $20 feature phone are tremendous and would be very difficult for a single company to bridge 
However, SoC vendors will attempt to reap the benefits of vertical integration by providing complete reference platforms to OEMs  Conceptually, this is a form of "optional" system integration, where the phone vendor or carrier can get the entire platform from the SoC supplier  This has the principal advantages of reducing time to market while also providing a baseline quality and experience for consumers  Currently, this approach has mostly been tested in emerging markets, but it's likely to become more common over time  There is a crucial distinction between reference platforms and vertical integration  Namely, OEMs can always choose to customize a platform to differentiate, and the SoC vendor avoids dealing with consumers directly  Typically, most of the customization is in terms of software on top of a base operating system 
Quote:Moreover, that will make the transition to a 10nm node even more difficult, as the foundries will have to move from 20nm interconnects to 10nm interconnects and skip a generation The advances in technology lately allowing components on such a small scale to even be envisioned, much less planned for, are truly amazing 
Off topic: show
I present the first generation 'non-technical' rock:
I don't think your horizontal market development theory is supported by facts  Samsung and Apple are more vertically oriented than their competition, for starters  I know this article is narrowly focused on the hardware, but MS and Intel getting into hardware, Amazon getting into hardware, Google buying Moto, this is all vertical integration  How can you support the idea that this trend will be reversed with no real justification? I'm sure mobile chips will continue to specialize, but I don't think this means what you think it means  Automobile companies started making their own engines and with rare exceptions, never went back to being more horizontal  Same with retail and their store brands  Same with cloud companies and their servers  Same with mobile companies and their OSs  The horizontal market of PCs created by long-lasting standards and loose hegemony is the exception, not the norm 
Why wouldn't the foundries be able close the process gap with Intel? Is it a matter of money? Scale?
I'm not so sure about several things:1- Moore's law's relevance  Moore's Law is about ICs  ICs are not as big a part of mobile computers as they are of desktops, even of laptops: screens, batteries, radios are a huge part of tablets' and phones' costs, as opposed to the bare SoC + RAM 2- The tablet vs phone dichotomy  For some reason (probably price insensitivity due to subsidies), Phones have a tendency to be more powerful than Tablets, ie phone SoCs are more than good enough for tablets  Since the OS and peripherals are the same, it makes more sense to design and build just one type of SoC, and just disable the phone-modem part of it (even the other radios are still required: BT, Wifi, GPS   ), same as Intel disable cache and cores for their entry-level CPUs  Once you're fabbing a SoC, it makes more sense to make more of the same than to setup a separate run of a cut-down SoC on an older process, unless volumes are huge  We might still be getting previous-generation, well amortized SoCs in cheaper tablets, though 3- On the contrary, I see a tablet and phone convergence (the ugly phablet)  I'm patiently waiting for the new 6"+ phones to replace my Nook Color and Galaxy Note 1 with a single device 4- The advantage of diversity ? Software is becoming ever more important than hardware  Multiplying SoCs means multiplying product development costs, making support and updates more difficult    Again, unless volumes are huge, OEMs are probaly better off going the way of the car industry and using modular "platforms" housed in different chassis with various screen sizes, keyboards, radios, digitizers   I'm wondering why the "single device" trend does not figure in your analysis  Is it stillborn ? Does it have no impact nor dependency on/with SoCs ?
Samsung has its own bespoke OS: Bada and it is used on an extensive line of devices  I think there are numbers somewhere that it outsold Windows Phone 7 for a time 
gypsumfantastic wrote:Why wouldn't the foundries be able close the process gap with Intel? Is it a matter of money? Scale?First mover advantage 
SoC? System on a Chip I guess?
You're way off on the Moore's Law/cost of smartphones point  The processors used in today's high-end smartphones are already cheap, around $25  And there are less expensive options if you want a lower end product  In fact, the hardware in the whole smartphone is relatively cheap  Analyst's estimate the Z10's materials cost around $160, the iPhone 5 around $140  They're using expensive glass and metals, then there's the battery, memory, etc  which means the processor is a small factor of the cost And then there's the jump from $140 in materials to the unsubsidized costs  The reason these phones cost $650 is because of the high margins these companies are able to get and the high cost of hardware design and/or software development  But the point is that making the processors 4 times better/cheaper isn't going to change the economics of the smartphone  What will change the economics is commoditized designs and software and cheaper materials all around  Then you'll have a $50 smartphone that's decent 
Last edited by ggeezz on Wed Feb 13, 2013 9:17 am
bigterp wrote:SoC? System on a Chip I guess?Yup 
gypsumfantastic wrote:Why wouldn't the foundries be able close the process gap with Intel? Is it a matter of money? Scale?Money and momentum, the x86 market is a huge money maker for Intel so it is able to recoup its huge investments for advanced foundries 
Quote:Currently, the only products using 3D integration are FPGAs from Xilinx,Doesn't Sony use it in the PS Vita? I thought I read somewhere that they had the CPU, main memory (2 dies) and video memory, so 4 dies in total, sitting on top of each other all on the same chip 
renoX wrote:gypsumfantastic wrote:Why wouldn't the foundries be able close the process gap with Intel? Is it a matter of money? Scale?Money and momentum, the x86 market is a huge money maker for Intel so it is able to recoup its huge investments for advanced foundries Exactly and I would clarify that it's all about margins, the difference between what it costs to make a chip and what it sells for  The margins for desktop and server processors is huge because a) the whole product is expensive so $200 to $1000 for the chip is acceptable, and b) Intel has huge advantages in that space and little competition So Intel can afford to do the R&D to stay ahead of the curve and keep their position  When your smartphone chip sells for $25 you can't do the R&D to leapfrog a company that sells Xeons for $1000 and Core i5's for $200 
I am happy to see Kanter here at Ars, I like his writing and he maintains Real World Tech, where Linus Torvalds often shows up to comment on CPU arch and other interesting topics 
ggeezz wrote:renoX wrote:gypsumfantastic wrote:Why wouldn't the foundries be able close the process gap with Intel? Is it a matter of money? Scale?Money and momentum, the x86 market is a huge money maker for Intel so it is able to recoup its huge investments for advanced foundries Exactly and I would clarify that it's all about margins, the difference between what it costs to make a chip and what it sells for  The margins for desktop and server processors is huge because a) the whole product is expensive so $200 to $1000 for the chip is acceptable, and b) Intel has huge advantages in that space and little competition So Intel can afford to do the R&D to stay ahead of the curve and keep their position  When your smartphone chip sells for $25 you can't do the R&D to leapfrog a company that sells Xeons for $1000 and Core i5's for $200 Spot on Intel are able to piggyback other development efforts off the highly lucrative mainstream x86 market which generates the huge sums of money to fund their amazing fab technology The question for the future is how the economics will stack up when overall device costs fall significantly and there is a big downward pressure on SoC prices  In that situation, can Intel still justify bringing their A-game to a market where products are essentially commoditised and you have processors selling for a only a few dollars each?The lesson from their previous involvement in the DRAM market is that they probably won't want to be involved because there isn't enough money to be made to justify manufacturing phone SoCs on a cutting edge, or near cutting edge process  In that scenario, Intel may not totally abandon the market but they might just stick to manufacturing SoCs on nodes that are a step or two behind the state of the art 
solomonrex wrote:I don't think your horizontal market development theory is supported by facts  Samsung and Apple are more vertically oriented than their competition, for starters  I know this article is narrowly focused on the hardware, but MS and Intel getting into hardware, Amazon getting into hardware, Google buying Moto, this is all vertical integration  How can you support the idea that this trend will be reversed with no real justification? I'm sure mobile chips will continue to specialize, but I don't think this means what you think it means  Automobile companies started making their own engines and with rare exceptions, never went back to being more horizontal  Same with retail and their store brands  Same with cloud companies and their servers  Same with mobile companies and their OSs  The horizontal market of PCs created by long-lasting standards and loose hegemony is the exception, not the norm Yea, each year Amazon, MS, Apple and Google look more and more the same 
Intel cannot abandon the phone/tablet market  Desktop/laptop sales are stagnating/decreasing and phones/tablets are on the rise  This trend is only going to increase going forward But you're right, they're going to have use their fabs that are a step or two behind the cutting the edge  But they're going to have to up their game in the tablet space to even be able to do that 
gypsumfantastic wrote:Why wouldn't the foundries be able close the process gap with Intel? Is it a matter of money? Scale?Intel's called Chipzilla for a reason up
Lagrange wrote:The question for the future is how the economics will stack up when overall device costs fall significantly and there is a big downward pressure on SoC prices  In that situation, can Intel still justify bringing their A-game to a market where products are essentially commoditised and you have processors selling for a only a few dollars each?The lesson from their previous involvement in the DRAM market is that they probably won't want to be involved because there isn't enough money to be made to justify manufacturing phone SoCs on a cutting edge, or near cutting edge process  In that scenario, Intel may not totally abandon the market but they might just stick to manufacturing SoCs on nodes that are a step or two behind the state of the art I think the processing is a bigger advantage than many realize  If Intel can stay ahead in process design - which this article seems to indicate - they should have a major advantage  All else being equal a 14nm chip should be significantly faster and more efficient than the same chip at 22nm  Add in the fact that yields increase geometrically - you can fit a lot more 14nm chips on a given wafer size vs 22nm (or 32nm for the other manufacturers ) and you have a very appealing proposition  And then add in the fact that Intel actually has a pretty good graphics stack and IP  It's not a sure thing by any means, but I suspect ARM may have just prodded a sleeping giant edit: Also worth noting, Intel, TSMC, and Samsung are the only manufacturers who are building out 450nm wafers  This will increase yields dramatically  Of course Samsung and TSMC will build ARM out, but it definitely puts quite a bit of pressure on all other manufacturers  As the article mentions Intel and Samsung are the only ones who control production top to bottom, and Samsung must share some of the benefits with ARM 
As someone who has worked in the semiconductor industry for longer than contemporary fanboys have existed, I'm getting a bit fed-up seeing many of these articles which rewrite history with analyses distorted by the lens of the contemporary Apple or Samsung fanboy The mobile industry moved to horizontal integration a long time ago  Better indicators than these odd contemporary obsessions with the relatively non-innovative Samsung and Apple where when Motorola spun out its semiconductor division as Freescale, Nokia stopped making it's own custom designs with TI and ST, and Ericsson spun out it's Ericsson Mobile Platforms division and formed ST-Ericsson with ST The true innovation in the mobile market was done a decade or more ago mainly by Moto/Nokia/Ericsson/TI/Qualcomm, and Samsung and Apple had little to do with it  Under the hood most stuff has been on a simple linear evolutionary path by the SoC providers since then  The phone manufacturers have then mainly been simply sticking these off-the-shelf SoCs (and their included low-level software stacks) in a box, a job made all the easier with the SoC manufacturer collaboration providing the bulk of the work for the AOSP 
Last edited by paul5ra on Wed Feb 13, 2013 11:06 am
introiboad wrote:I am happy to see Kanter here at Ars, I like his writing and he maintains Real World Tech, where Linus Torvalds often shows up to comment on CPU arch and other interesting topics Indeed  Most tech writing in this area is atrocious  This piece is one of the few well informed articles I've read in a long time 
ggeezz wrote:Intel cannot abandon the phone/tablet market  Desktop/laptop sales are stagnating/decreasing and phones/tablets are on the rise  This trend is only going to increase going forward But you're right, they're going to have use their fabs that are a step or two behind the cutting the edge  But they're going to have to up their game in the tablet space to even be able to do that The word you're looking for is Haswell, as far as I know 
Mabsark
ggeezz wrote:Intel cannot abandon the phone/tablet market  Desktop/laptop sales are stagnating/decreasing and phones/tablets are on the rise  This trend is only going to increase going forward But you're right, they're going to have use their fabs that are a step or two behind the cutting the edge  But they're going to have to up their game in the tablet space to even be able to do that Actually, that trend will not simply keep increasing going forward  The reason desktop/laptop sales are stagnating/decreasing is due to the fact that most people already have one and therefore don't need to buy another one  The exact same thing will happen with tablets as well  Sales are increasing now because people without tablets are buying them  When most people already own a tablet, they won't be buying a new one every year and therefore sales will stagnate/decrease The PC market is saturated and in a couple of years, the tablet market will be saturated too  Basically, in order to increase sales in a saturated market, you need to increase the population growth or decrease the longevity of the product 
gypsumfantastic wrote:Why wouldn't the foundries be able close the process gap with Intel? Is it a matter of money? Scale?Probably a mix of a lot of things  One big thing was during this recession, Intel was the ONLY fab company that didn't scale back their R&D  That alone gave Intel a large advantage Intel has almost always been ahead  One of the reasons could be that Intel works with much higher margins than many of the commodity companies like Samsung and TSMC Outside of the P4 flop and some of the monopolistic abuses, Intel has typically been selling to high end customers that are willing to pay a premium for "the best" Intel has a large benefit of having a relatively "good name" when it comes to CPUs, so they can effectively charge a brand-name premium I'm sure there are other reasons, and probably better reasons, but these are the main ones that I think of 
Mabsark wrote:Actually, that trend will not simply keep increasing going forward  The reason desktop/laptop sales are stagnating/decreasing is due to the fact that most people already have one and therefore don't need to buy another one  The exact same thing will happen with tablets as well
Context 3: '用户指南 * User Guide 02 CN 11 EN * 包装内含 使用前注意事项 快速引导 产品部件详情说明 操作说明 02 02 03 06 08 01 
•本产品支持在系统设置中进行瞳距调节 , 调节时请务必注意，最小瞳距可能会碰触鼻梁。当您佩戴头盔后，您 “显示”中进行手动调节，请注意设置使用不合适的瞳距，可能会引起视觉重影或者眼睛疲劳。 可在“设置” ► •本产品“护眼模式”经德国 TÜV Rheinland 低蓝光认证，通过软件算法降低三色通道中的蓝光量，来达到保护 “护眼” “色彩调节” 眼睛的作用，该模式下画面颜色偏黄，您可根据个人喜好在“设置” 中激活或关闭此功能。 ““显示” ► ► ► 包装内含： VR 头盔 / 手柄 × 2 / 1 5V AA 碱性干电池 × 4/ 眼镜支架 / 遮光鼻托 / 手柄挂绳 × 2 / USB-C 电源适配器 / USB-Cto C 2 0 数据线 / 快速指南 / 用户指南 / 安全与质保指南使用前注意事项 •本产品在开阔的室內环境使用体验最佳，建议至少预留 2×2 米 的空间。使用前请确认身体没有不适且周围环 境安全，特别是佩戴头盔在室内行走移动时，要尽量避免发生意外。 •不建议 12 岁及以下儿童使用本产品，建议将头盔、手柄和配件置于儿童够不到的位置，13 岁以上青少年须在 成人监护下使用，以免发生意外。 •本产品无近视调节功能，近视用户请佩戴眼镜使用并尽量避免近视眼镜被头盔的光学镜片磨伤或刮伤。建议在 使用和收纳时注意防护光学镜片，避免尖锐物体划伤镜片，擦拭清洁时请使用柔软的眼镜布，否则可能划伤镜片， 影响视觉效果。 •长时间使用可能引发轻微的昡晕或者眼疲劳，建议使用 30 分钟后适当休息，可通过眼保健操或观看远处物体缓 解眼疲劳。如果您的身体感到任何不适，请立即停止使用。如果不适持续，请咨询医生。 •当头盔镜片被阳光或紫外线照射时（尤其在户外、阳台、窗台及汽车内存放时），可能导致屏幕出现永久性黄斑。 请尽量避免该情况发生，此种屏幕损坏不在产品的质保范围内。 *本产品最终外观及功能以实物为准，部分地区包装内含物品有所差异，本说明仅供参考。 02 CN
六自由度 VR 体验 本产品可以追踪头盔和手柄前、后、左、右、上、下和旋转的运动状态，您在现实中的肢体运动会实时反映在虚 拟世界中。 由于没有任何线缆的束缚，您在虚拟世界自由探索时请确保游玩区域的安全。 1  建议准备一个整洁安全的体验空间：至少 2×2 米；保持房间明亮，避免在只有单色的墙或大面积玻璃、镜子类 反射物以及许多移动画面和物体的空间中使用。 2  撕下 VR 头盔前端摄像头上的保护膜，并佩戴手柄挂绳。 3  根据开机后的画面提示进行游玩区域的设定。 ❶ 安装电池 按箭头方向拔出电池盖侧边的绝缘纸 快速引导 提示：本产品虚拟的安全区提醒功能，不能完全保证您在设定好的游戏区域中的安全，请时刻注意周围的安全情况。 提示：建议使用 1 5V AA 碱性电池。 按照图示拨动电池盖拨钮打开电池盖更换电池。 03 CN
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❺ 微调顶绑带 微调顶绑带使其受力以减少额头压力 ❻ 瞳 距 调 节 在系统设置：“设置” ► “显示”界面中进行瞳距调节，点击“+”或“-”按钮可微调瞳距直至画面清晰 64mm 请勿 强行 掰动镜 筒，以 免造 成损坏 ！ 请注 意设 置使用 不合适 的瞳 距，可 能 会引起 视 觉重影 或 者眼睛 疲 劳。准 确 的瞳距 设 置有助 于 获得清 晰 的图像 并 减少眼睛 疲劳。 05 CN
产品部件详情说明 头盔状态指示灯 蓝灯常亮：开机进行中或工作状态 黄灯常亮：充电中，电量低于 98% 红灯常亮：充电中，电量低于 20% 绿灯常亮：充电完毕，电量大于 98% 或 充满 蓝灯闪烁：关机进行中 红灯闪烁：电量低于 20% 指示灯熄灭：休眠或关机 06 ① 电源键 开机：长按 2 秒 关机：长按 5 秒 复位：长按 10 秒 开机时，短按休眠 ② ③ ④ ⑤ 状态指示灯 贴脸泡棉 音量键 彩色透视摄像头 使用时请勿遮挡 ⑥ ⑦ ⑧ 顶部绑带 可拆卸 绑带旋钮 环境追踪摄像头 使用时请勿遮挡 ⑨ ⑩ ⑪ USB-C 接口 左 / 右喇叭 距离传感器 佩戴头盔后，系统自动唤醒 摘下头盔后，系统自动休眠 ⑫ ⑬ 眼球追踪摄像头 此功能仅 Pro 版支持 使用时请勿遮挡 面部追踪摄像头 此功能仅 Pro 版支持 使用时请勿遮挡 CN
手柄状态指示灯 熄灭：已连接或者关机 蓝灯常亮：固件升级模式 蓝灯闪烁：连接中 红蓝灯交替慢速闪烁：等待配对 ① ② 摇杆 菜单键 ③ Home 键 开机 : 短按关机 : 长按 6 秒退出应用 : 短按屏幕中心校正 : 长按 1 秒④ ⑤ ⑥ ⑦ 状态指示灯 抓握键 截屏键 扳机键 ⑧ ⑨ 电池盒 打开：拨动拨钮，电池盒弹出 安装：按压直至自动锁紧 追踪光环 使用时请勿遮挡 注：手柄挂绳可按图示将粗绳穿过细绳并锁紧在手柄尾端 07 CN
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安装眼镜支架 安装遮光鼻托 如您存在眼镜摩擦光学镜片或者压迫鼻梁的问题，请按照图示安装眼镜支架以增加间隔空间。 您可根据佩戴的舒适度选择是否安装。 如您感觉鼻子处漏光影响体验，请按照图示安装遮光鼻托配件。 由于眼睛空间密闭可能加剧起雾及出汗问题，您可根据喜好选择是否安装。 ❶ 摘下贴脸泡棉 ❷ 将眼镜支架按照图示安装在产品上 ❸ 将贴脸泡棉按照图示安装眼镜支架上 ❶ 摘下贴脸泡棉 ❸ 安装贴脸泡棉❷ 将遮光鼻托按照图示方式安装在贴脸泡棉上 注：按照图示拆卸眼镜支架 09 CN
更换贴脸泡棉 贴脸泡棉多次清洁和长时间使用后会变色和质地变软，您可酌情更换新泡棉。 更换顶绑带 摘下贴脸泡棉 ❸ 安装贴脸泡棉 按照图示捏住顶绑带金属扣，往下压到底然后抽出 ❷ •购买优质热门应用 •畅 聊 社 区， 与 众 多 PICO 玩 家 一起探索 VR 世界 •管理设备更便捷 •参与丰富互动活动 •更多精彩内容等你来发现 ❶ 微 信公 众 号：PICO VR抖音：PICO官 方 旗 舰 店哔 哩 哔 哩：PICO-VR官 方微 博：PICO-VR ❶ ❷ 10 CN
In The Box: VR Headset / 2 Controllers / 4 1 5V AA Alkaline Batteries / Glasses Spacer / Nose Pad / 2 Controller Lan- yards / USB-C Power Adapter / USB-C to C 2 0 Data Cable / Quick Guide / User Guide / Safety and WarrantyGuide Important Health & Safety Notes • This product is designed and intended to be used in an open and safe indoor area, free of anytripping or slipping hazards  To avoid accidents, remain conscious to the potential confines ofyour physical area and respect the boundary of your virtual area whenever you see it  Be sure towear the lanyards when using the Controllers  Make sure that there is enough space around yourhead and body (at least 2 meters by 2 meters) to stretch your arms to avoid damage or injury toyourself, others, and your surroundings  • This product is not recommended for children aged 12 and under  It is recommended to keep headsets,controllers and accessories out of the reach of children  Teenagers aged 13 and over must use it underadult supervision to avoid accidents  • This product is designed to accommodate most prescription glasses  Make sure to wear the VR Headsetin a manner in which the VR Headset lenses do not rub or impair your prescription lenses  • Prolonged use may cause dizziness or eye fatigue  It is recommended to take a break every 30 minutes Try relieving your eyestrain by looking at distant objects  If you feel any discomfort, stop using the prod- uct immediately  If the discomfort persists, seek medical advice • Do not expose the optical lenses to direct sunlight or other strong light sources  Exposure to directsunlight may cause permanent yellow spot damage on the screen  Screen damage caused by sunlightexposure or other strong sources of light is not covered by the warranty  • This product supports interpupillary distance (IPD) adjustment in system settings  When adjusting,please be aware that with the minimum IPD, it may touch the bridge of the nose  You can adjust the IPDaccording to your actual interpupillary distance in "Settings"►"Display"  Please note that using inap- propriate IPD may increase the risk of discomfort  • This product has an “Eye Protection Mode”, certified by TÜV Rheinland (Germany), which can protectyour eyes by reducing blue light in the three color channels using software algorithms  The screen ap- pears yellowish in this mode and you can turn this feature on/off in "Settings"►"Display"►"Color"►“- Eye Protection”  • Protect optical lenses during use and storage to prevent damage, such as scratches or exposure tostrong light or direct sunlight  * Product and packaging are updated regularly, and the functions and contents of the standalone headset may be upgraded in the future Therefore, the content, appearance and functionality listed in this manual and product packaging are subject to change and may notreflect the final product



ground_truth: Verifying other meta-information such as patient's gender, age, race, etc.

prompt_front: Now, answer the following question based on the text below, only give me the answer and do not output any other words.

Question: What is the main advantage of a horizontal business model for mobile devices?

Read the following text and answer briefly.

Context 2:  Sales are increasing now because people without tablets are buying them  When most people already own a tablet, they won't be buying a new one every year and therefore sales will stagnate/decrease The PC market is saturated and in a couple of years, the tablet market will be saturated too  Basically, in order to increase sales in a saturated market, you need to increase the population growth or decrease the longevity of the product That's true as long as most people are still buying both a tablet and a laptop when each needs to be replaced  I think the assumption is that, as you say, the tablet market will saturate, with people just replacing existing ones, but the desktop/laptop market could decrease much farther than that, if most people stop replacing them at all  I'm not sure of the likelihood of that, but I think that's where this idea comes from 
ggeezz wrote:Intel cannot abandon the phone/tablet market  Desktop/laptop sales are stagnating/decreasing and phones/tablets are on the rise  This trend is only going to increase going forward But you're right, they're going to have use their fabs that are a step or two behind the cutting the edge  But they're going to have to up their game in the tablet space to even be able to do that The upcoming Haswell chip is showing to consume 1/3 the power of IvyBridge at peak, consumes 1/20th the power at idle, all the while maintaining Identical or better performance This chip should actually compete with ARM CPUs on both power/performance and idle I am expecting a large war 
Apple once again is dictating the performance in the mobile industry  Nice to see others being able to keep the pace, as well 
paul5ra wrote:As someone who has worked in the semiconductor industry for longer than contemporary fanboys have existed, I'm getting a bit fed-up seeing many of these articles which rewrite history with analyses distorted by the lens of the contemporary Apple or Samsung fanboy The mobile industry moved to horizontal integration a long time ago  Better indicators than these odd contemporary obsessions with the relatively non-innovative Samsung and Apple where when Motorola spun out its semiconductor division as Freescale, Nokia stopped making it's own custom designs with TI and ST, and Ericsson spun out it's Ericsson Mobile Platforms division and formed ST-Ericsson with ST The true innovation in the mobile market was done a decade or more ago mainly by Moto/Nokia/Ericsson/TI/Qualcomm, and Samsung and Apple had little to do with it  Under the hood most stuff has been on a simple evolutionary path by the SoC providers since then Yeah, and most of the innovation in the automobile industry came about before Henry Ford came into the business  Doesn't change the fact that cars would probably have been an asterisk in the history books under "toys for rich people" if it weren't for him The same applies to to mobile computing for Apple, Samsung, et al 
SheldonRoss wrote:Lagrange wrote:The question for the future is how the economics will stack up when overall device costs fall significantly and there is a big downward pressure on SoC prices  In that situation, can Intel still justify bringing their A-game to a market where products are essentially commoditised and you have processors selling for a only a few dollars each?The lesson from their previous involvement in the DRAM market is that they probably won't want to be involved because there isn't enough money to be made to justify manufacturing phone SoCs on a cutting edge, or near cutting edge process  In that scenario, Intel may not totally abandon the market but they might just stick to manufacturing SoCs on nodes that are a step or two behind the state of the art I think the processing is a bigger advantage than many realize  If Intel can stay ahead in process design - which this article seems to indicate - they should have a major advantage  All else being equal a 14nm chip should be significantly faster and more efficient than the same chip at 22nm  Add in the fact that yields increase geometrically - you can fit a lot more 14nm chips on a given wafer size vs 22nm (or 32nm for the other manufacturers ) and you have a very appealing proposition  And then add in the fact that Intel actually has a pretty good graphics stack and IP  My point was that Intel might have a one or two process advantage over the rest of the industry at the cutting edge but that doesn't mean that they can afford to manufacture on those processes for very low margin parts  If the SoC market becomes increasingly commoditised, there isn't going to be the money to justify making them in a state of the art fab Remember that one of the big selling points of Itanium was that it would make use of process advantages that were effectively paid for by the mainstream x86 market  That didn't quite work out in practice and Itanium processors were often well behind Xeons in process technology 
paul5ra wrote:As someone who has worked in the semiconductor industry for longer than contemporary fanboys have existed, I'm getting a bit fed-up seeing many of these articles which rewrite history with analyses distorted by the lens of the contemporary Apple or Samsung fanboy The mobile industry moved to horizontal integration a long time ago  Better indicators than these odd contemporary obsessions with the relatively non-innovative Samsung and Apple where when Motorola spun out its semiconductor division as Freescale, Nokia stopped making it's own custom designs with TI and ST, and Ericsson spun out it's Ericsson Mobile Platforms division and formed ST-Ericsson with ST The true innovation in the mobile market was done a decade or more ago mainly by Moto/Nokia/Ericsson/TI/Qualcomm, and Samsung and Apple had little to do with it  Under the hood most stuff has been on a simple linear evolutionary path by the SoC providers since then  The phone manufacturers have then mainly been simply sticking these off-the-shelf SoCs (and their included low-level software stacks) in a box, a job made all the easier with the SoC manufacturer collaboration providing the bulk of the work for the AOSP Just goes to show that people who have worked in an industry for a long time don't always understand what that industry is doing You haven't been working in it long enough to seem to know that it was Acorn and Apple that invented the mobile ARM CPU in the first place  All those companies you've mentioned have just been working off Acorn and Apple's pioneering work  Now, Apple is back at it again, very successfully, and all the companies you mentioned that produce chips with ARM IP in them are licensing them from the company Acorn and Apple formed—ARM 
Last edited by melgross on Wed Feb 13, 2013 11:13 am
Mark Havel wrote:ggeezz wrote:Intel cannot abandon the phone/tablet market  Desktop/laptop sales are stagnating/decreasing and phones/tablets are on the rise  This trend is only going to increase going forward But you're right, they're going to have use their fabs that are a step or two behind the cutting the edge  But they're going to have to up their game in the tablet space to even be able to do that The word you're looking for is Haswell, as far as I know If tablets move into the $100-200 range, is there going to be room for Haswell?So long as there is a higher-end tablet market, then Haswell will be able to shine, but it's going to be a much more powerful and costly part than the sort of ARM based hardware that often runs tablets  If we see a race to the bottom where price is the dominant motivator behind purchases, then a high performance SoC will struggle to make its mark 
melgross wrote:paul5ra wrote:As someone who has worked in the semiconductor industry for longer than contemporary fanboys have existed, I'm getting a bit fed-up seeing many of these articles which rewrite history with analyses distorted by the lens of the contemporary Apple or Samsung fanboy The mobile industry moved to horizontal integration a long time ago  Better indicators than these odd contemporary obsessions with the relatively non-innovative Samsung and Apple where when Motorola spun out its semiconductor division as Freescale, Nokia stopped making it's own custom designs with TI and ST, and Ericsson spun out it's Ericsson Mobile Platforms division and formed ST-Ericsson with ST The true innovation in the mobile market was done a decade or more ago mainly by Moto/Nokia/Ericsson/TI/Qualcomm, and Samsung and Apple had little to do with it  Under the hood most stuff has been on a simple linear evolutionary path by the SoC providers since then  The phone manufacturers have then mainly been simply sticking these off-the-shelf SoCs (and their included low-level software stacks) in a box, a job made all the easier with the SoC manufacturer collaboration providing the bulk of the work for the AOSP Just goes to show that people who have worked in an industry for a long time don't always understand what that industry is doing You haven't been working in it long enough to seem to know that it was Acorn and Apple that invented the mobile ARM CPU in the first place  All those companies you've mentioned have just been working off Acorn and Apple's pioneering work  Now, Apple is back at it again, very successfully, and all the companies you mentioned that produce chips with ARM IP in them are licensing them from the company Acorn and Apple formed—ARM Of course I realise ARM IP has indeed been a major driving factor too (though only one if several architectures before ARM became dominant), though I see ARM's influence on the mobile industry as having nothing to do with modern day Apple and only one small piece of the puzzle  My point is that the hard electrical engineering, mathematics, DSP, semiconductor physics/chemistry, RF engineering, analogue design, CAD etc  that make modern telecommunications possible has very little to do with the fashion companies who consumers (and unfortunately much of the tech media) associate with it and give the credit (though in this respect Samsung does deserve a bit more credit for their work on NAND flash and displays)  The industry simply would not exist TODAY without the overwhelming horizontal integration that already dominates 
Quote:In the long term, mobile devices are likely to evolve similarly to the PC and favor a horizontal business model  The real advantage is one of flexibility; as costs drop and the market expands, it will be increasingly necessary for vendors like HTC to offer a wide range of phones based on radically different SoCs  You don't mention in the article that each SoC necessarily requires a bit of parallel dev work unlike the PC  In the PC world there is a standard BIOS and HW architecture that allows for pluggable designs  On a highly integrated SoC this is untrue  HTC suffers because it has to support radically different SoCs, their drivers and boot loaders, etc  Quote:While a vertically integrated company like Apple can focus and maintain leadership in a specific (and highly lucrative) niche, it would be very difficult to expand in many growing areas of the market  The differences between an iPhone 6 and a $20 feature phone are tremendous and would be very difficult for a single company to bridge It's only difficult because Apple chooses to ignore that market, not because they can't  If they can release a $99 Apple TV, they can surely cobble together a $20 feature phone if they chose to eschew 8GB of NAND, BT, WiFi, a specialized dock connector, LTE, and their specialized processors  In other words, build the equivalent of an iPod shuffle with a horrible screen and no OS to speak of 
paul5ra wrote:melgross wrote:paul5ra wrote:As someone who has worked in the semiconductor industry for longer than contemporary fanboys have existed, I'm getting a bit fed-up seeing many of these articles which rewrite history with analyses distorted by the lens of the contemporary Apple or Samsung fanboy The mobile industry moved to horizontal integration a long time ago  Better indicators than these odd contemporary obsessions with the relatively non-innovative Samsung and Apple where when Motorola spun out its semiconductor division as Freescale, Nokia stopped making it's own custom designs with TI and ST, and Ericsson spun out it's Ericsson Mobile Platforms division and formed ST-Ericsson with ST The true innovation in the mobile market was done a decade or more ago mainly by Moto/Nokia/Ericsson/TI/Qualcomm, and Samsung and Apple had little to do with it  Under the hood most stuff has been on a simple linear evolutionary path by the SoC providers since then  The phone manufacturers have then mainly been simply sticking these off-the-shelf SoCs (and their included low-level software stacks) in a box, a job made all the easier with the SoC manufacturer collaboration providing the bulk of the work for the AOSP Just goes to show that people who have worked in an industry for a long time don't always understand what that industry is doing You haven't been working in it long enough to seem to know that it was Acorn and Apple that invented the mobile ARM CPU in the first place  All those companies you've mentioned have just been working off Acorn and Apple's pioneering work  Now, Apple is back at it again, very successfully, and all the companies you mentioned that produce chips with ARM IP in them are licensing them from the company Acorn and Apple formed—ARM Of course I realise ARM IP has indeed been a major driving factor too (though only one if several architectures before ARM became dominant), though I see ARM's influence on the mobile industry as having nothing to do with modern day Apple and only one piece of the puzzle  My point is that the hard electrical engineering, mathematics, DSP, semiconductor physics/chemistry, RF engineering, analogue design,etc  that make modern telecommunications possible has very little to do with the fashion companies who consumers (and unfortunately much of the tech media) associate with it and give the credit (though in this respect Samsung does deserve a bit more credit for their work on NAND flash and displays)  The industry simply would not exist TODAY without the overwhelming horizontal integration that already dominates Yes the efforts of these companies getting cellular communications standardized were immense  And the technology matured  And then they didn't do much with it  It took some youngin's to look at the problem fresh and add the UI that make today's smartphones work  As we have all seen, the moment your technology has matured is the moment you are screwed because someone else now has the opportunity to look at it as a black box and make something new  Each of those manufacturers knew that smartphones would eventually be awesome, but none of them had the UI and software design to make a truly breakout product  Imagine if Motorola would have been smart enough to buy the Android guys instead of Google  Instead, Google bought a bunch of patents on that cellular black box to try to defend it's platform And when you think about it, which consumes more man years of engineering effort per year at this point     iterating that cellular black box or developing the OS, services and apps that power today's smartphones?
Intel had better decide that they are competing in this space "for real", or they are screwed  They've already let the Atom languish for five years, during which ARM has completely caught up in performance Just like Tim Cook said, if you don't cannibalize your own markets someone else will do it for you Whether Intel will embrace that concept in time remains to be seen  Personally, I hope they don't; if Intel transforms into a chipless Fab company (like TSMC) everyone benefits 
I still think Samsung has the advantage long term because they have both the SOC and the memory products  As mentioned in the article, TSV's (Through Silicon Via's) are going to be quite a disruption  Today, people normally stack an LPDDR2 package on top of their SOC package (POP or Package On Package)  Within the LPDDR2 package, you could have a stack of DRAM die typically with wire bonding connecting the die within the package Once you more to TSV's, you can have a LOT more connections between the SOC and its DRAM's  While this is being standardized through JEDEC (http://www jedec org/category/technolog     a/3d-ics-0), Samsung has all the pieces in house to do whatever they want  You could see a 512 bit or higher bus from the SOC to the memory  The trick is that the memory and the SOC need to line up with each other when you stack them  This gives Samsung an inherent advantage This isn't just going to impact mobile either  Take a look at that JEDEC link  It also lists High Bandwidth Memory (HBM)  This is a 1024 bit bus that provides 128GBytes/s to 256GBytes/s of bandwidth to a stack of up to 8 DRAM's  Here is your processor that includes 8-16 cores and 4GBytes of really, really, fast DRAM    No DIMMs required  How many of them do you want in your server rack?If I was Intel or Apple, I would be thinking seriously about making some investments in Micron to guarantee they make some compelling DRAM's to integrate with their SOC's and processors    otherwise Samsung is going to blow them out of the water on bandwidth 
Great_Scott wrote:Intel had better decide that they are competing in this space "for real", or they are screwed  They've already let the Atom languish for five years, during which ARM has completely caught up in performance Just like Tim Cook said, if you don't cannibalize your own markets someone else will do it for you Whether Intel will embrace that concept in time remains to be seen  Personally, I hope they don't; if Intel transforms into a chipless Fab company (like TSMC) everyone benefits It's true that Atom has stood still for too long, but honestly it's pretty amazing how Atom is still competitive with current ARM chips  The Z2760 is even 32nm vs 28nm of the latest Krait and A15 chips But that's all changing with Atom moving to the tick tock schedule this year  It wouldn't even surprise me to see Apple move to Intel chips for IOS And I don't see how Intel moving to a chipless Fab company would help everyone  It certainly wouldn't help Intel 
Mabsark wrote:ggeezz wrote:Intel cannot abandon the phone/tablet market  Desktop/laptop sales are stagnating/decreasing and phones/tablets are on the rise  This trend is only going to increase going forward But you're right, they're going to have use their fabs that are a step or two behind the cutting the edge  But they're going to have to up their game in the tablet space to even be able to do that Actually, that trend will not simply keep increasing going forward  The reason desktop/laptop sales are stagnating/decreasing is due to the fact that most people already have one and therefore don't need to buy another one  The exact same thing will happen with tablets as well  Sales are increasing now because people without tablets are buying them  When most people already own a tablet, they won't be buying a new one every year and therefore sales will stagnate/decrease The PC market is saturated and in a couple of years, the tablet market will be saturated too  Basically, in order to increase sales in a saturated market, you need to increase the population growth or decrease the longevity of the product Yes and no  I'm not sure the tablet market will saturate in a "couple of years " It may be more like 5 years  But that's a quibble Here's the real issue  Right now Apple wants you to own an iPhone AND iPad AND Macbook AND iWatch AND Apple TV  Microsoft, OTOH, is making the Surface so that you could ditch your laptop and just use a Surface  Not everyone, but some people If 5 years from now, we're in a world where a significant number of people use a Surface-type device instead of a laptop, then the PC market is going to contract significantly  Maybe some of the tablet-like devices will use moderately expensive Intel chips, but some of them are going to use cheaper chips 
GravyGraphics wrote:I still think Samsung has the advantage long term because they have both the SOC and the memory products  As mentioned in the article, TSV's (Through Silicon Via's) are going to be quite a disruption  Today, people normally stack an LPDDR2 package on top of their SOC package (POP or Package On Package)  Within the LPDDR2 package, you could have a stack of DRAM die typically with wire bonding connecting the die within the package Once you more to TSV's, you can have a LOT more connections between the SOC and its DRAM's  While this is being standardized through JEDEC (http://www jedec org/category/technolog     a/3d-ics-0), Samsung has all the pieces in house to do whatever they want  You could see a 512 bit or higher bus from the SOC to the memory  The trick is that the memory and the SOC need to line up with each other when you stack them  This gives Samsung an inherent advantage This isn't just going to impact mobile either  Take a look at that JEDEC link  It also lists High Bandwidth Memory (HBM)  This is a 1024 bit bus that provides 128GBytes/s to 256GBytes/s of bandwidth to a stack of up to 8 DRAM's  Here is your processor that includes 8-16 cores and 4GBytes of really, really, fast DRAM    No DIMMs required  How many of them do you want in your server rack?If I was Intel or Apple, I would be thinking seriously about making some investments in Micron to guarantee they make some compelling DRAM's to integrate with their SOC's and processors    otherwise Samsung is going to blow them out of the water on bandwidth Why not AMD? Last I checked they still made memory   and processors/GPUs 
Context 3:  These instructions are for reference only  * Carefully read this user guide before using the product and share this information with any other users, as it contains important safetyinformation  Keep the user guide as reference for the future  11 EN
6 Degrees of Freedom VR The device can track your translational and rotational movements in all directions (up/down, left/right,forward/backward, pitch, roll, and yaw)  Your movements in the real world will be captured and translatedto what you see in the virtual world when using the appropriate content  Ensure a safe environment before you start your VR experience  1  Clear a safe indoor area of at least 2 meters by 2 meters  Keep the room bright, avoid spaces with main- ly single-colored walls, glass, mirrors, moving pictures or other similar objects  2  Remove the protective film that covers the headset front cameras  Wear the lanyards connected to theControllers  3  Set up your environment by following instructions on the VR Headset screen  Install Batteries ❶Pull the tab to remove the insulating paper  Quick Guide 2 m 2m This product can not guarantee your safety with guardian system, you will need to always pay attention to the surrounding safety  * Note: 1 5V AA alkaline batteries should be used Slide the toggle according to arrow direction toopen the battery case  12 EN
Power on the Controller ❷ First Start: The Controller will start automaticallyafter removing the insulating paper  Others: Short press the Home button for 1second until the status indicator flashes blue Power on the VR Headset ❸ Long press the Power button for 2 seconds untilthe status indicator turns blue Wear Your Headset for a Comfortable Fit and View ❹ Adjust the strap dial to turn the strap so that the back of your head rests on the padding  Fine-tune thelength and position of the strap to give a clear view  * Note: You can use this product with prescription glasses or lenses insert  13 EN
Fine-tune the Top Strap ❺ Fine-tune the head strap to reduce pressure on the forehead  Interpupillary Distance (IPD) Adjustment ❻ In System Setting, go to “Setting” ► “Display” to adjust IPD, tap “+” or “-” button to slightly adjust IPDuntil the picture is clear  14 64mm Please note that inappropriate IPD setting may cause ghosting or eyestrain Accurate IPD setting helps you get a clear imaging and ease eyestrain  EN
Product Details VR Headset Status Indicator Legend Blue: Powered on with battery over 20% Yellow: Charging: Battery is less than 98% Red: Charging: Battery is less than 20% Green: Charging: Battery is more than 98% or charge complete Blue flashing: Shutting down Red flashing: Battery is less than 20% Off: Sleeping or Powered off Power Power on: Long press for 2 seconds Power off: Long press for 5 seconds Hardware reset: Long press for 10 seconds Short press to enter sleep or wake up Status Indicator Face Cushion Volume ① ② ③ ④ ⑤ ⑥ ⑦ ⑧ RGB See Through Camera Do not block during use  Top Strap Removable Strap Dial Tracking Cameras Do not block during use  ⑨ ⑩ ⑪ USB-C Interface Left/Right Speaker Proximity Sensor The system wakes upwhen the VR headset isput on, sleeps when VRheadset is taken off  ⑫ ⑬ Eye Tracking Cameras Pro version only  Do not block during use



ground_truth: Flexibility.

prompt_front: Now, answer the following question based on the text below, only give me the answer and do not output any other words.

Question: What may happen if the VR headset lenses are exposed to sunlight or strong light?

Read the following text and answer briefly.

Context 3:  Face Tracking Camera Pro version only  Do not block during use  15 EN
Controller Status Indicator Legend Off: Connected or Powered off Blue: Firmware updating in progress Blue flashing: Searching for connection Red and blue flashing alternately: Pairing in progress 16 Joystick Menu ③ ① ② Home Power on: Short pressPower off: Long press for 6 secondsReturn home screen: Short pressScreen recentering: Press for 1 secondStatus Indicator Grip Capture Trigger ④ ⑤ ⑥ ⑦ ⑧ ⑨ Battery Case Open: Slide down the toggle andpop up the battery case  Lock: Push the battery case to lock  Tracking Ring Do not block during use  * Note: Pass the Controller Lanyardthrough the string as shown andlock at the end of the Controller EN
Operating Instructions Headset Control Mode If the Controller is not connected, you can interact with the home screen by moving your head to directthe crosshairs over your intended selection and clicking the Volume Up/Down button on the VR Headset  Switch the pointer of the master Controller In the home screen, short press the Trigger of the corresponding Controller to switch the pointer of themaster Controller  Screen re-centering Wear the VR Headset and look straight ahead, press and hold the Home button of the Controller or VRHeadset ( or the Volume Down button of the VR Headset in head control mode) for more than 1 second tore-center the screen  Disconnect the Controller Press and hold the Home button until the status indicator turns red and the Controller vibrates Controllers will automatically shut down to save power in the following cases:When the VR Headset enters deep sleep (a while after the VR Headset is taken off)When the Controller is unpairedWhen the VR Headset is powered off Add a new Controller If you need to add a new Controller (the VR Headset can only connect one left Controller and one rightController) or reconnect with an unpaired Controller  Go to “Settings” ► “Controller”, click on “Pair” Press and hold the Home button and the Trigger of the Controller at the same time until the red and bluelights of the Controller flashing alternately, and then follow the instructions on the VR Headset screen  Sleep / Wake up Option 1 (Proximity Sensor) Take off VR Headset for automatic sleeping: wear the VR Headset for automat- ic waking up  Option 2 (POWER Button) Press the Power button of the VR Headset for manual sleeping or waking up  Hardware reset VR Headset reset If the visual in the VR Headset freezes, or the VR Headset does not respond after short press the Powerbutton, you can press the Power button of the VR Headset for more than 10 seconds to reboot the VRHeadset  Controller reset If the virtual Controller, the Home button or any buttons of the Controller doesn\'t respond, remove andreinstall the battery case to restart the Controller  The VR Headset Adjustment This device has no myopia adjustment function  The VR Headset allows wearing most standard glasseswith a frame width of less than 150mm  to install Glasses Spacer to increase the space  You can install or not according to your situation  17 EN
Install Glasses Spacer Install Nose Pad If you have glasses collision with headset lens or pressure on the bridge of nose, please follow the pictureto install Glasses Spacer to increase the space  You can install or not according to your situation  If you feel light leaking from your nose, please follow the picture to install Nose Pad to block the light You can consider having it installed at your own discretion  Disassemble the Face Cushion  Install the Glasses Spacer on the Headset  ❸ ❶ ❷ Install the Face Cushion on the Glasses Spacer  Disassemble the Face Cushion  Install the Nose Pad on the Face Cushion  ❶ ❷ Install the Face Cushion on the Headset  ❸ * Note: Disassemble the Glasses Spacer 18 EN
Replace Face Cushion The Face Cushion will have the following phenomena such as color change, surface fluff, soft texture afterlong-term use and repeated cleaning  You can replace a new Face Cushion as needed  Replace Top Strap ❶ ❷ Disassemble the Face Cushion  Pinch the metal buckle of the top strap asshown, press it down and pull it out Install the Face Cushion on  ❸ ❷ ❶ • Purchase high-quality and trending apps • Join PICO Community and explore the VR worldwith other PICO players• Manage your device with ease • Engage in diverse and interactive activities • More exciting features waiting for you 19 EN
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ground_truth: Exposure to sunlight or strong light may cause permanent yellow spot damage on the screen.