It's the modern gold rush. Around the world, the most sought-after mineral isn't a precious metal, nor is it oil and gas…it's lithium.
Lithium, or "white petroleum" as some call it, has become a crucial element in today's high-tech economy.
For the last five years, the commodities world has focused on the epic showdown between OPEC and U.S. shale drillers for oil market share. But it's the war over "white petroleum" that will dominate the next decade.
China, which produces most of the world's lithium batteries, has moved aggressively to secure steady supply. Chinese companies now own major shares in many South American lithium mines, where the bulk of the world's lithium is produced, in order to feed Chinese battery factories.
Europe uses 25 percent of the world's lithium, while European auto-makers are anticipating a surge in EV production as the continent shifts away from gasoline-powered cars.
A trade war has broken out between China and the United States. While that's bad news for some industries that rely on Chinese imports, its good news for North American lithium miners like Power Metals and Nemaska.
Power Metals has announced a 15000m drilling program for 2018. "The explorational upside is immense," according to Dr. Julie Selway, the company's hard-rock lithium expert, "and each drill target can substantially increase the overall resource size."
Canadian lithium deposit, according to Selway, represent a "sleeping giant:" once tapped, it could provide enough lithium to satisfy North American demand.
FMC's involvement in the lithium industry is particularly notable. The company is one of the top three in lithium and associated technologies. It is one of the largest suppliers into electric vehicle applications using lithium hydroxide.
Strong growth in lithium is expected to drive margins for FMC and major expansion, leading analysts to give it an outperform rating. The company's full year 2016 results were impressive, with lithium segment earnings of $21 million—up an amazing 90 percent from Q4 2015.
Magna International (TSX:MG) (NYSE:MGA) is based in Aurora, Ontario. The global automotive supplier is gutsy and innovative--and definitely tuned to the obvious future--clean transportation. A great catalyst is its development of a combo electric/hydrogen vehicle--a fuel cell range-extended EV (FCREEV). It's not going to produce them (for now, at least) but plans to use the model to show off its engineering and design prowess and produce elements of the electric drivetrain and contract manufacturing.
The company's auto parts are distributed to heavyweights such as General Motors, Ford, Tesla, BMW, Toyota, Volkswagen and Chrysler. These huge deals provide a safe and steady profit stream for the company. It's insightful, forward-thinking and smart value/low cost for shareholders.
Tesla's electric cars will eventually be more profitable than traditional cars, and easier to produce. Costs will keep coming down, especially now that Tesla's has launched its battery gigafactory in Nevada, and when it gets battery (and lithium) prices down.
General Motors (NYSE:GM) is a household name. GM was born at the turn of the 20thcentury and has been a leading innovator in the automotive industry ever since. Even though it's been surpassed in market cap by Tesla (of all companies), it is still the furthest ahead of the Big 3 car makers from Detroit in terms of EVs and self-driving cars.
Oh, and self-driving cars … definitely a huge part of the innovation in energy and artificial intelligence. As an early entry into the self-driving car world, Alphabet's innovations have paved the way for a transportation revolution
Alphabet is set to continue to bring value to its investors and even as one of the largest companies in the S&P 500, Google's parent company continues to reach new heights.
Why does Pike emphasize the performance of Go's goroutine creation and channel communication when it seems to be slower than Stackless and definitely is not an order of magnitude faster?
Just for fun, I ran the benchmarks myself, and added a benchmark for Fibra, because I wrote it, and I know that it is pretty slow. :-)
This is the Fibra benchmark code. It's almost the same as the Stackless example, except for the ugly "yield" statements.
"Can hope to" can very well be true. For that reason, Stackless can hope to as well. It's just a distant hope. But my point was that Pike seemed to emphasize current Go performance, which is about 1/2 that of current Stackless, with the timing test going against Stackless.
You're comparing apples to oranges: Message passing in a single-threaded program (Stackless) vs. message passing in a multi-threaded one (Go). Since the execution time of the test case is dominated by message passing, it's entirely unsurprising that Go is slower.