But yeah, it does sound that way, but certainly not clear cut to me what the situation is. I.e. does the agreement involve clauses about what to do if this is abused? Do we have a way to detect if theyre using this on non-travellers? Etc.

This isnt some novel thing in Germany, selling excess heat from some energy intensive commercial proccess is pretty standard. The local district heating operator probably took care of almost all the infrastructure for them.

The SPD has rolled over for the CDU in the past on things, but they've also blocked things they thought were important enough to block, so it's really anyone's guess if this go through (I personally wouldn't bet on it, but I'm sure a bunch of dour pessimists will come explain to me that it's a foregone conclusion and I'm naive).

Nvidia's chips lose very little performance when they're severely power limited. In fact, that's why Nvidia's Professional versions of their GPUs are typically running at under two-thirds of their consumer equivalent's power draw.

Nvidia's cards are primarily designed for their professional applications where the power consumption is lower, and then they just juice up the consumer cards deep into the territory of diminishing returns just so they win some benchmarks.

On a performance-per-watt basis, Apple is still behind an Nvidia card with the juiced up power consumption, and when you dial back the power draw, Nvidia cards are miles ahead of Apple's silicon for performance-per-watt.

Another user though pointed out that they didn't actually design the GPU until the A11, so perhaps it really is just a lack of in house experience.

Blackwell came out in 2024 on n4p. This article is claiming that Apple hopes to get into the same ballpark of performance as a Blackwell GPU with an M7 Ultra, which at the absolute earliest would release in 2027, but more likely 2028 or 2029, and would consist of two absolutely massive M7 Max GPUs stapled together, for a total die area bigger than a 5090, but on a smaller more advanced node.

Honestly, if they can't release something that big by 2028 that's at least competitive with a 5080, it'd be extremely embarrassing for them.

Whether or not this thing is commercially available though, they basically have no choice but to at least keep up the R&D spend, or they'll be even further behind once RAM availability eventually eases up.

Similar story with Qualcomm but to a lesser degree (both on the CPU and GPU side). I wonder why that is.

Lack of priority? Legitimately harder problem to solve? Experience from mobile scaling to desktop differently than CPU experience?