• First time as tragedy, second time as farce, third time as an episode of Seinfeld: There's a Chinese spy balloon drifting over Montana.  (ABC News - no, the other one)
  
  The Pentagon is tracking it but not taking any action due to the risks involved.
  
  Of a balloon.
  
  Over Montana.

• AMD's 128 core Bergamo CPUs have been confirmed for launch in the first half of this year.  (WCCFTech)
  
  That's one of three expected server CPU launches from AMD this year: Bergamo with 128 cores,  Genoa-X with 96 cores but over 1GB of cache, and Siena, a smaller, cheaper version of Epyc that will nonetheless still offer more cores than not only Intel's latest Sapphire Rapids chips but also Intel's next-generation Emerald Rapids.
  
  
  
• Twitter is cancelling free access to its API and replacing it with a "basic paid tier".  (The Verge)
  
  Details are somewhere between sketchy and non-existent at the moment except for the date - February 9th.
  
  I suspect the focus here is not so much on revenue as on bots.  Twitter is just awash in bots, and has been for years.
  
  I'm not saying the stupid posts you see coming from Twitter are all fake though.  Sorry if I got your hopes up.  No, people really are that stupid and the world will end in flames pretty soon.
  
  

Posted by: Tim Turner at Friday, February 03 2023 06:58 PM (VZYxJ)

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• AMD's Ryzen 7000X3D lineup has prices and schedules, with the top-of-the-line 7950X3D due on February 28th at a price of $699.  (AnandTech)
  
  If you've been following along, you might notice that this is exactly the same MSRP as the regular 7950X, making the X3D version something of a bargain.  But if you've been following along, you might notice that Micro Center will sell you a 7950X and 32GB of DDR5-6000 RAM for under $600.  Assuming you live somewhere with a Micro Center because that's an offer designed to get you into the store, and not available for delivery.
  
  Still, it's basically a stealth price cut - AMD trying to avoid sabotaging its perceived value while tacitly acknowledging that the market ain't what it was and won't be for a while.
  
  And it's likely to be the fastest desktop CPU around for a couple of years.  Intel's Meteor Lake range should be out this year but may be only for laptops, and AMD isn't expecting Zen 5 to be ready until next year.
  
  
  
• Mission accomplished.  (BBC)
  
  That tiny deadly radioactive thingy - a quarter inch wide lost in a state encompassing a million square miles - has been found.  120 miles from its starting point it fell out of the truck and rolled off the road.
  
  Fortunately with suitably sensitive detectors it glows like a furnace and it had not in fact lodged in the tyres of a passing car and disappeared to parts unknown, so a few days scouring the highway waiting for the clicks to turn into a scream was enough to hunt it down.

• Intel may be planning to cut prices on its Alder Lake chips by 20%.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Well, that's good news, particularly after they raised the...  Wait, Alder Lake?  The one that launched in 2021?
  
  Never mind.
  
  
  
• On the other hand Intel actually did cut the price of the Arc A750 graphics card to $249.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  And released new drivers that offer improved gaming performance, particularly on older titles.
  
  Intel does seem to be committed to its graphics card range - something I doubted at launch time - and at $249 this card is not a bad deal.
  
  
  
• Loading a game from a good PCIe 3 SSD takes 3 seconds longer than the not-even-released-yet PCIe 5 models.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  PCIe 5 - even PCIe 4 - is not worth a huge price increase for most users.  If the difference between two similar models is 20%, sure, go for PCIe 4 and enjoy your three seconds; the drive will likely have smarter software and might last longer, all else being equal.
  
  But if you have a perfectly good PCIe 3 drive there's no reason to replace it.
  
  (The new servers that I was going to deploy last month before I decided to spend the whole month being sick instead have PCIe 3 drives.)
  
  
  

• AMD posted financial results for its Q4 and the 2022 financial year and as you would expect from an industry racked by component shortages during a global recession (but you're not allowed to call it that) the numbers are...  Mostly pretty good?  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Desktop and laptop CPU sales for the quarter fell off a cliff, not because AMD lost market share particularly (Intel's results in that sector were also dreadful) but because nobody is buying.
  
  But the gaming sector held up well (both the Xbox and PlayStation run AMD chips), server CPUs saw record sales, and AMD's embedded division, boosted by the acquisition of FPGA designer Xilinx, saw profits grow by 3783% and no there isn't supposed to be a decimal point in there.
  
  Overall profit for the quarter was tiny - apparently due to expenses relating to that same acquisition - but much healthier when looking at the full year.
  
  And AMD's server CPU division made as much gross profit in the quarter as Intel's.
  
  
  
• Meanwhile Intel just surprised its employees with pay cuts.  (Neowin)
  
  Ranging from 25% for CEO Pat Gelsinger through 10-15% for management down to 5% for engineers and administrative staff.
  
  Which is the right way to scale things and possibly less damaging for a company like Intel than layoffs - chip designers are much harder to replace than programmers - still has to hurt.

• Oracle just changed the license fee for Java from user-based to employee-based.  (The Register)
  
  Which is to say, companies now need to pay Oracle not only for each member of their staff using Java, but also for each member not using Java.
  
  OpenJDK.  Just saying.
  
  
  
• QNAP.  (Bleeping Computer)
  
  Again.
  
  
  
• The creators of Instagram are back with Artifact, a "steaming pile of shit" that is "no, seriously, this is probably a war crime".  (The Verge)
  
  One victim went so far as to describe the new service as "TikTok for text" but that's just rude.
  
  
  
• Intel's upcoming Sierra Forest CPUs for cloud providers, which will provide only the slower "Efficiency" cores but lots of them, will have 7529 pins.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Which use to be a lot.
  
  
  
• We started to suspect we had a problem when we found thylacine footprints in the dodo habitat.  (Gizmodo)
  
  Genetic engineering company Colossal plans to de-extinct the two aforementioned beasties and mammoths as well.  Which it can't do, so it's going to fake it.
  
  There aren't many animals that are good subjects for de-extinction, though the quagga might be, since it was a subspecies of the surviving plains zebra rather than an entirely distinct species, so the genes remain in the broader population.  There's been a selective breeding program underway since the 80s to recreate the quagga as a distinct gene pool.
  
  That won't work for any of these, unless you take a very broad view of hairy elephants.

• Three months ago he was fired from Twitter.  Now he's making his own Twitter, with censorship, and racial grievances.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  On the one hand, this is obviously going to burn through its funding in no time and disappear without a trace.
  
  On the other hand...  Good.  I'm happy to see these idiots lose their money.
  
  
  
• No migraine today.  No kidney stones.  It's raining, but I don't think that counts for anything.

• Netflix's live-action adaptation of mega anime series One Piece will air this year to abysmal ratings and then disappear and be forgotten.  (The Verge)
  
  On the other hand... Good. I'm happy to see these idiots lose their money.
  
  
  
• Western Digital's new dual-actuator hard drives have a peak transfer rate of 582MBps.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Either buy an SSD or two regular hard drives.  I don't know anyone who actually needs these things.  They just don't fit anywhere on the price/performance map.
  
  
  
• Cheaper Ryzen 7000 motherboards are on the way with the A620 chipset.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  I'm not certain but this might be a non-chipset.  The Ryzen 7000 chips (like earlier Ryzen models) include SATA and USB and video and all that stuff, so you barely need a chipset unless you want to run multiple M.2 drives or lots of SATA devices.

• Salesforce - yes, that Salesforce - is using AI to develop enzymes that can digest plastic and bacteria and has published the source code on GitHub so that anyone else can do the same.  (Neowin)
  
  Grey goo anyone?
  
  Enzymes don't reproduce themselves - or at least I don't know of any enzymes that can reproduce themselves, though given the existence of prion diseases (enzymes and prions are both proteins) I would be reluctant to state that it is impossible - so you have to keep producing the enzyme somehow and the reaction can't just take over and melt the world.
  
  Unless you genetically engineer a microbe to produce the enzyme.
  
  Which nobody is crazy enough to attempt.  The world is peaceful and stable and not at all run entirely by a coterie of imbeciles and lunatics.
  
  Well, it's been a good run.  See you all in the next simulation.
  
  
  
• No major kidney stones today or over the weekend - though a smaller one did make a brief appearance and then pass without comment.
  
  So I have a migraine instead.
  
  Which is fine.  My migraines pass of their own accord so long as I sit in a dark room for three hours or so and don't, uh, use a computer.
  
  
  
  

Tech News

• The ASRock NUCS BOX-1360P/D4 is as the name would suggest a NUCS - definitely not a NUC, that doesn't appear to be trademarked by Intel but best to play it safe - with a 1360P, a 13th generation laptop CPU (or maybe a 12th generation laptop CPU rebranded, I'm not sure yet since this is the first such device to appear), and ECC.  (AnandTech)
  
  All DDR5 memory has internal ECC, which protects (somewhat) against data errors within the memory chip, but not against data errors that happen on the bus between the CPU and the RAM.  You can get DDR5 ECC modules for servers, and there are probable unbuffered DDR5 ECC module for desktop CPUs though since Intel doesn't support ECC on desktops and AMD doesn't officially support ECC on desktops the market for those is not huge and good luck finding any.
  
  Except...  It turns out that Intel does support ECC on desktops (except that it doesn't, more on that in a moment); it just doesn't support ECC memory.  What it does instead is take regular memory, encode the ECC separately, and write that ECC data to a reserved area in the same RAM rather than to an additional RAM chip added for the purpose (or in the case of DDR5, two chips).
  
  And...  It works.  It does slow down the system a bit and use about 3% of your RAM to store the extra ECC data, but it corrects single bit errors and detects double-bit errors...  At which point your computer crashes because Windows has no idea what to do with any of this nonsense.
  
  
  
• Build your own Redis.  (Build Your Own)
  
  Here's one I built* earlier.
  
  It's a book explaining how to rather than a sensible suggestion, rather like a detailed guide to constructing Chartres Cathedral when that building rather notably already exists and has done so for eight centuries.
  
  Though if you were going to build your own Redis, it might not be the worst possible idea to replace the hash table as the primary data structure with, say, an AVL tree, so that you can fucking find the data after you have stored it.
  
  Also it might be handy if Chartres Cathedral had wheels so that it could be moved to a more sensible location during winters.
  
  * That is, downloaded and compiled.

Posted by: Frank at Monday, January 30 2023 07:30 PM (rglbH)

Posted by: normal at Tuesday, January 31 2023 01:18 AM (LADmw)

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• Now that AMD's low-power Ryzen 7900 (non-X) is out there's never been a better time to build a high-end PC except what's that Lassie the 7900X is faster, cheaper, and comes bundled with 32GB of DDR5 RAM if you buy it from Microcenter?  (WCCFTech)
  
  Oh.
  
  The 7900X runs at 170W while the 7900 (without the X) runs at 65W.  Despite using 60% less power, it's only 6% slower on multi-threaded tasks and 3% slower single-threaded.
  
  On the other hand you can configure the 7900X to a 65W TDP, which turns it into a 7900.
  
  On the seventeenth hand you can configure the 7900 to run in PBO mode which turns it into a 7900X.
  
  On the forty-eighth hand, the 7900X comes with 32GB of free RAM.  On the seventy-second hand, the 7900 comes with a fairly good CPU cooler, which is an extra cost on the 7900X.  On the three-hundred and twenty-eighth hand, that cooler is only fairly good and won't suffice if you enable PBO to turn your 7900 into a 7900X anyway.
  
  Just buy whatever.  It's a good chip.

• Inside a very, very early Dungeons and Dragons computer game.  (Old VCR)
  
  The Mattel D&D game from 1980 had two kilobytes of ROM, a whole 64 bytes of RAM, and a 4-bit CPU running at 475kHz.
  
  
  
• Ordering numbers can't be that hard, can it?  I mean, that's what computers do.  (orlp.net)
  
  Oh sweet summer child.
  
  
  
• How to use Intel Optane PMem DIMMs.  (Serve the Home)
  
  You can't.  Forget it.  They've cancelled the entire Optane division and these modules only ever worked on a small subset of high-end Xeon CPUs that you don't have anyway.
  
  It's like they wanted this to fail.
  
  
  
• Is this the rumoured Nvidia Titan RTX Ada (or RTX Ada Titan, or whatever)?  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  It looks absolutely stupid, fills four slots, and uses 800W, so yeah, probably.

Posted by: otaquanii22 at Thursday, February 02 2023 07:35 PM (oqPDu)

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• You can't play Forspoken on a Radeon 580.  (WCCFTech)
  
  The 580 is a few years old now but it was a pretty good graphics card - it was my primary GPU until it got packed in a box in May, and it's still a very popular card in Steam hardware surveys.  But it doesn't support DirectX 12_1 and Forspoken requires that as a minimum feature set.  Nvdia's GTX 1060 from the same era does support DirectX 12_1.
  
  On the other hand, neither card is fast enough to handle the game; it's very demanding and the recommended hardware - AMD's Radeon 6700 XT and Nvidia's RTX 3070 - is not only much newer but significantly more powerful (and more expensive, of course).
  
  On the third hand, current generation consoles - the PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X - are also much newer and more powerful than the Radeon 580.
  
  On the fourth hand, Forspoken is hot garbage and nobody wants to play it anyway.
  
  This kind of thing rarely happens with CPUs - you have to be using a truly ancient CPU for code to no longer run on it.  (Unless you have a Mac in which case you're fucked the moment they decide you're not worth their time anymore.)  GPUs are fixed-function devices designed to run, well, pretty much DirectX these days, and if they don't keep up with that specification their days are numbered.
  
  
  

Tech News

• Pioneering English-language Vtuber agency Tsunderia has closed its doors.  (DotESports)
  
  They've done the right thing by their talents, at least, releasing them from their contracts, leaving all the existing content up, and handing over rights to continue independently using the same designs.
  
  The smaller agencies seem to be in a tight spot.  Vshojo and Phase Connect might be doing okay, but Prism was bought by Sony (which has two in-house vtuber agencies as well as investments elsewhere), and Aetheria (formerly Cyberlive) went the same route as Tsunderia last year.
  
  Vtubing exploded in 2020 when everyone was welded into their homes and Hololive launched its own English-language division (a few months after Tsunderia), but now that people are permitted once more to stumble blinking into the sunlight - and that the global economy has been wrecked by the same people who locked everyone up in the first place - it's much tougher going.
  
  
  
• Speaking of much tougher going toy company Hasbro has laid off 15% of its staff after announcing declining sales and profitability in the last quarter.  (The Hollywood Reporter)
  
  The only division of Hasbro that improved sales last quarter was Wizards of the Coast - creator of Magic the Gathering and owner of Dungeons and Dragons - which under the steady hand of Hasbro just burned down, fell over, and sank into the swamp, handing the market to direct competitor Paizo.
  
  The most recent D&D game I played wasn't D&D at all, but Paizo's Pathfinder.
  
  
  
• The Lenovo Thinkstation P620 is a beast but.  (PC Perspective)
  
  This system is based on the 64 core Threadripper 5995WX, but is otherwise nothing special in terms of features.  It's fast for heavily multi-threaded tasks, but it's a Zen 3 chip and the Zen 4 7950X is not that far behind while being much, much cheaper.  It's only really aimed at industries where time is money, where saving an hour on a 3D or video production task means you can bill another client for that hour.
  
  Also, Lenovo has the nasty habit of locking CPUs to Lenovo motherboards and nobody should buy their workstations.
  
  
  

You're Never Lost When You Have AZKi (TM) Video of the Day

• Intel posted one of its worst quarters on record, losing $661 million or 1/16th of a single blockchain scam.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Desktop, mobile, and server CPUs were all profitable, though all were sharply down from last year.  Most of the loss came from Intel's ongoing push into the GPU market, which the company fully expected to bleed cash for the first few years.
  
  The company has shut down it's network switch unit.  Intel will still produce a range of networking chips, just not the switches themselves.  In recent years the company has also cancelled its Optane storage project and sold off its SSD division as it focuses engineering on improving its CPUs.
  
  
  

Tech News

• AMD meanwhile has told customers not to buy its Radeon 7000 graphics cards.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Recent advertising material showed the performance per dollar of all currently available Radeon cards - and highlighted the fact that all Radeon 7000 cards deliver worse value than all Radeon 6000 cards.
  
  They're faster, yes, but worse value.
  
  Nvidia has the same problem.  Intel doesn't, but that's only because they don't really have any previous graphics cards to compare against.
  
  
  
• Why are so many tech companies laying people off right now?  (The Verge)
  
  They hired a bunch of communists and are now dying from within.

Posted by: Rick C at Saturday, January 28 2023 03:18 AM (BMUHC)

Posted by: Pat Buckman at Saturday, January 28 2023 06:56 AM (r9O5h)

Posted by: Aliya at Monday, January 30 2023 05:42 PM (w+6m8)

Posted by: Aliya at Monday, January 30 2023 05:43 PM (w+6m8)

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• The new M2 Mac Mini is twice as fast as the Mac Pro for a fraction of the price...  In single-threaded benchmarks.  (WCCFTech)
  
  Which means nothing because even when the Mac Pro was new - back in 2019, shortly after the Laurentide Ice Sheet receded - the Intel Xeon chips had unimpressive single-threaded performance and were easily beaten by much cheaper desktop chips and even some laptop chips.
  
  Actually, those Intel Xeon chips kind of sucked and Apple would have been much better off with AMD Threadrippers, but they probably couldn't get the production guarantees that Intel could provide.
  
  

• Speaking of Intel Xeons that kind of suck, the new W9-3945X has been benchmarked and it does.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  This is Intel's latest and greatest 56 core workstation chip and it's slower on single-threaded tests than AMD's existing Zen 3 Threadrippers, never mind the upcoming Threadripper 4 models.
  
  Meh.
  
  
  
• OpenJourney is an open-source version of AI image generator Midjourney, more or less.  (GitHub)
  
  Instead of paying Midjourney $30 a month for unlimited images you can download it and run it yourself...  On a $5000 computer.
  
  
  
• Welcome to the Podcast Applefornia.  (Substack)
  
  You can never leave, but you also can't check out.  If you host your podcast with Apple, you're basically fucked.
  
  
  
• All the code for Yandex - Russia's version of Google - has been leaked.  (Hacker News)
  
  40GB of it.

Posted by: otaquanii22 at Tuesday, January 31 2023 08:55 PM (IVWm+)

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• If you needed another reason not to buy an M2 MacBook or Mac Mini, the performance of 512GB SSDs has been cut in half compared to the previous generation.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  It's the same thing they did previously to 256GB models: Cut down on the number of flash memory channels on the SSD to save costs, and cut the performance in half in the process.  The entry level 2023 Mac Mini actually has worse disk performance than the 2018 model.
  
  On a real computer this wouldn't be a problem.  For less than $100 you can buy a decent 1TB SSD and just swap it in.  On a Mac, of course, you can't upgrade anything, ever, and the upgrades you pay for at time of purchase cost twice as much as they would anywhere else.  (In the case of RAM, four times as much.)
  
  Also MacBooks lack the Four Essential Keys, but so do most otherwise good laptops so that's something of a moot point.
  
  
  
• Australia Day tomorrow, so I get to sleep in and maybe get a chance to fix some things if I'm not overtaken by kidney stones yet again.

• SK Hynix has announced 9.6GHz laptop RAM, which the company brands as LPDDR5T.  (WCCFTech)
  
  That's fast.  I don't think there's a chip out there that needs memory that fast.  Even AMD's new Ryzen 7040 range with 12 RDNA3 graphics cores probably wouldn't need that much bandwidth.
  
  
  
• Intel is deliberately flooding the PC market with stuff forcing prices down.  (WCCFTech)
  
  This isn't working on graphics cards since Intel's cards aren't hot sellers, and Intel doesn't make SSDs anymore (they sold that division to the same SK Hynix mentioned above), so this report is really talking about CPUs.
  
  This will likely be a good year to buy CPUs.  Might eventually also be a good year to buy a graphics card, but certainly isn't right now.
  
  
  
• The Legion Bulletin of Mad Atomic Scientists has moved the hands of the Doomsday Clock forward by ten seconds, leaving the world trembling on the brink of disaster at just ninety seconds to midnight.  (NBC)
  
  Yeah, could you assholes stop that?  Hard to have a New Year's party if it never strikes midnight.

  The Bulletin of Atomic Scientists was founded in 1945 to examine global security issues related to science and technology. Each year, the group consults with a board of sponsors to analyze the world’s most pressing threats in order to determine where the Doomsday Clock’s hands should be set.

  And somehow the answer is always "time to give us more money".
  
  
  
• This looks like the motherboard being used by that Storaxa NAS.  (Liliputing)
  
  Some people are casting doubt on the Storaxa, pointing out that the N6005 CPU doesn't have enough PCIe lanes to run all the devices listed.  Which, uh, appears to be true.  The only way it could work is to run a PCIe switch off a cable plugged into the M.2 slot on the motherboard, which would leave the four M.2 storage slots running at half speed.  That is, half the speed of one slot, spread over four slots.
  
  That's still faster than all four 2.5Gb Ethernet ports combined, though, so not the end of the world.
  
  And it also raises the question of where the Ryzen 5800U model is coming from.  That has a lot more PCIe lanes, but requires an entirely new motherboard.
  
  So maybe this is a Kickstarter to take a wait-and-see approach on if you can't afford to burn $280.

Posted by: Bob in Houston at Thursday, January 26 2023 02:00 AM (YBLgY)

Posted by: Rick C at Thursday, January 26 2023 03:17 AM (BMUHC)

Posted by: Rick C at Thursday, January 26 2023 03:26 AM (BMUHC)

Posted by: PatBuckman at Thursday, January 26 2023 05:31 AM (r9O5h)

Posted by: freegrantsforfelons at Friday, January 27 2023 03:26 PM (NS5yj)

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