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[bloop_bleep]

x86 is sitting on intellectual property from the 70s lol. It stuck around this long because of backwards compatibility and prior baggage and experience working with it. ARM is a RISC architecture as opposed to x86 which is a CISC architecture so it's better suited for modern times' compiler and high-level-language-mostly world.

Also ARM doesn't make CPUs, it makes architectures. Other companies build CPUs for the architectures.

[dragdeler]

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[Maximum Spin]

To be clear, x86-64 isn't going away any time soon, nor should it.

[bloop_bleep]

Hey does anyone know where you could get a Xilinx-compatible USB-to-JTAG (6-pin JTAG) cable for cheap? The cheapest I've seen are like 30 dollars, whereas the Altera-compatible cable can be found for 5 dollars.

[wierd]

Ebay?

[methylatedspirit]

Are there animals that have (2+) color vision, but lack dedicated luminance receptors analogous to our rods?

[Yellow Pixel]

Probably no vertebrates, since lampreys have rods and they are the most primitive. For their part, most invertebrates with color vision have an equivalent in the form of a rhabdom, but maybe some of them have a different optical system.

I'm making a search and don't have the answer for now.

[dragdeler]

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[methylatedspirit]

You know how if you implement a design on a physical semiconductor chip, you can call it "in silicon"? What's the equivalent if the medium is biological cells? "In flesh" just sounds horrifying.

I'll put it this way: "I just implemented my CPU in silicon" is a pretty cool phrase, I think. "I just implemented my neural processing unit in flesh" is not a sentence I want to hear from anyone.

[Rolan7]

Probably find a way to use the adjective "organic", IE carbon-based, right?  I guess you could just say the CPU was implemented in carbon (or "in biology", or "in tissue"), but "organic" is probably less confusing.

Which, huh.  I guess silicon-based life forms specifically aren't organic, but are biological.  There's a tendency to think of silicon entities as necessarily being artificial like our silicon computers, but I think naturally-evolving silicon biology is still theoretically possible pending further investigation.

[Arx]

I suppose you could co-opt the existing use of the term in vivo for that. It's not completely dissimilar.

[wierd]

The term you are looking for is "In vivo"

and it literally means "In the living" or "in the flesh".  This is compared to "in vitro" which means "In the glass". (such as a petri dish)

[dragdeler]

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[wierd]

Perhaps, perhaps not.

Silicone oils are totally things.  It is possible other room-temp, flexible polymers with silicon-oxygen backbone structures (like silicone rubbers) could exist without carbon attaches in the mix.

The issue is getting a suitable polar solvent involved.

[McTraveller]

I think you could only have a silicon-based metabolism if there was a lack of carbon given the lighter elements form stronger bonds than the heavier ones.

For example, a surprisingly difficult search resulted in: C=O bond energy in CO₂ is estimated around 800kJ/mol and Si=O bond in SiO₂ is estimated at 620 kJ/mol;  that means that C is going to eventually win any battle with Si for the affections of O.