This article gives the wrong impression. High Bandwidth Memory (HBM) is a specific term where DRAM and main chip is packaged on a silicon interposer. This allows for a 1024-bit bus to be routed within the silicon interposer. This is not possible with a regular substrate. The DRAM on the M1 are just LPDDR4X-4266.
As an FPGA dev, I tend to think of HDLs akin to HTML than “code”. It’s just a DSL to describe a graph. Actually pretty similar to how tensorflow is designed.
Don't get me wrong, I love Linux, I've had it on my machines in many different flavors, ever since 2010. However for at least the past 3 desktops I've had, there were always some issues during installation or fiddling to do after installation to get things running smoothly.
For example, my current home PC has a Intel i9-9900ks on a nice gigabyte motherboard and a NVIDIA 2070 Super. When I try to boot into Ubuntu 20.04, the display driver always fails (black screen / a mess of pixels). I had to boot with some grub flags in order to get to a stage where I could install the proprietary drivers. This is because of the open source drivers for NVIDIA GPUs being terrible, it's not the fault of Linux but that's not the point, it's a bad user experience for at least half of the users with a fairly modern discrete GPU.
A few months ago my girlfriend (who has a degree in computer science and is currently getting her Phd in mathematics) tried to install Ubuntu on her Razer Blade 15 (2018). Initially the she had some trouble with getting the NVME drive to show up (it was an issue with UEFI settings), we eventually fixed that but after installation, the wifi didn't work. At that point she gave up and ended up going with WSL, she was up and running 30 mins later.
Maybe if you buy a dell developer edition or thinkpad, you will have no troubles.
The average user is not going to want to hear that they have to either return their NVIDIA card and get a AMD one (a nonquestion for people who need CUDA / tensorflow) or go read some wiki about how to resolve the issue. They will just go back to windows/mac.
If my workflow didn’t depend on proprietary tools from stubborn companies I would be looking to buy high end ARM like ampere for my workstation. But I’m stuck on x86 for now :/
I have a feeling we will see a bunch of AMD vulnerabilities revealed in the coming years. Researchers haven’t really had time to study AMD’s micro architecture yet and it was not really a priority because of low penetration in the server market. In theory intel should have less bugs since they have massive design verification teams.
Honestly I think it’s simpler than that. The Linux desktop experience is just terrible... I have never successfully installed a Linux distro without having to fiddle with some boot flag or some config file. Every major Linux desktop environment has been unreliable at best. Software support is fragmented across dozens of distros.
I think WSL has been the biggest win for Linux on the desktop, but ironically it’s on windows.
That assumes you are dealing with a trustworthy government / corporation. Look at Lebanon their entire government just resigned overnight, can the people really trust “proper access controls and maintenance” in such chaos? Would it not be better to have essential records be kept track of by the public? Even if you don’t need it now, think of it has a insurance policy.