• Ian Cuttress talks to AMD CTO Mark Papermaster.  (AnandTech)
  
  Couple of points of interest:
  
  
• Naples (Epyc 1) required four functional CPU dies to work.  Rome (Epyc 2) requires a functional I/O die, and any number of CPU dies from 1 to 8.
  
  If yields are good we're likely to see chiplet granularity in Rome's core count - and the same with Threadripper 3.  Threadripper 3 will be a beast; Intel will be dead in the single-socket workstation space.
  
  
• Milan (Epyc 3) will have the same socket as Naples and Rome.  After that (Venice?  Genoa?  Florence?) we're looking towards DDR5 and PCIe 5.0 and "no comment" territory. 
  
  
• Infinity Fabric on 7nm offers 100GB/s bandwidth, more than double the first generation.  This helps mitigate the smaller number of interconnects - Naples has 12 interconnects for 4 dies; Rome has 8 for 8 dies.
  
  
• Chiplets mean you can mix and match - need an application-specific core?  FPGA?  GPU?  As long as it speaks Infinity Fabric and fits on the package, it can be done.
  
  
• Another day, another side channel attack...  On Nvidia graphics cards?!  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Ugh.
  
  
• Epyc clouds get benchmarkeded.  (Phoronix)
  
  AWS vs. Packet vs. SkySilk (who?)
  
  STOP TRYING TO MAKE "retpoline" A WORD.  IT IS NOT A WORD.
  
  A SkySilk "small" node outperforms an EC2 m5a.large node.  That means less than it sounds like, though, because both are dual core 8GB nodes with similar pricing, and the naming conventions mean even less than they do at Starbucks.
  
  
• Cloudflare's 1.1.1.1 app competes with 8.8.8.8 and 9.9.9.9.  (Bleeping Computer)
  
  First, this is good, because your ISP's DNS probably sucks.  Second, IP routing is fucking weird.
  
  
• HTTP/2, based on Google's SPDY, is set to be replaced by HTTP/3, based on Google's QUIC.  (ZDNet)
  
  Not sure how I feel about that.  They're not even using TCP any more.  They've smushed HTTP itself, TLS, and a rewrite of TCP into a protocol that runs over UDP.
  
  It's dead easy to write an HTTP server if you can talk TCP, and everything can talk TCP.  This does not make things simpler.  Very much the opposite.

Other Linus buys weird CPUs on Taobao so you don't have to.

Posted by: J Greely at Tuesday, November 13 2018 06:45 AM (tgyIO)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Tuesday, November 13 2018 11:07 AM (PiXy!)

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• Microsoft, rumoured to be looking at acquiring another independent game studio like InXile or Obsidian, has acquired independent game studios InXile and Obsidian.  (GamesIndustry.biz)
  
  This means that two of few the companies still producing games I like (InXile made Torment and Wasteland 2; Obsidian most recently Tyranny and Pillars of Eternity I and II) now have solid financial backing and distribution and don't have to scrabble around on Kickstarter.
  
  And it's a hell of a lot better than Electronic Arts.  Or Ubisoft.  Or Activision.

• Lenin was a mushroom. (Atlas Obscura)

This is the final episode of series one and the conclusion of a story arc.  It's great, but definitely not the place to start watching.

A story in three parts.

Posted by: cxt217 at Monday, November 12 2018 06:59 AM (LMsTt)

Posted by: kurt duncan at Monday, November 12 2018 11:54 PM (noh54)

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• Speaking of things with 128GB and things that use too much power, Eurocom's Tornado F7W DTR provides an Intel 9900K and up to 128GB RAM and 22TB storage in a svelte 9lb package.  (AnandTech)
  
  That's not entirely terrible.
  
  
• AnandTech has some of those never-mind-the-capacity-feel-the-height 32GB memory modules in the labs for testing.
  
  You can't use these to get 128GB in total, unless you have a four channel CPU.  They look like two DIMMs to the memory controller, so you can only use one per channel.
  
  32GB unbuffered modules that look and act like single modules are available, but are scarce so far.  For servers you can easily find 64GB and even 128GB modules, but those don't work on most desktop systems.
  
  
• OWC have 64GB SO-DIMM kits available today that should work with Tohru and Rally but they cost nearly as much as the computers did.
  
  [64GB is $1080 or about A$1500, and I'd have to pay 10% GST on import since it's over the personal limit.  So A$1650.  Rally cost A$1800 including GST and shipping.  So it sure ain't gonna happen this year.]
  
  
• Those new Arm-based Windows laptops run a version of Windows that is not officially supported - and does not, technically, exist.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  That's just one more reason not to buy them.
  
  
• Sony's PlayStation Classic is based on an open source PlayStation emulator.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  
• Cloudflare's workers are fast, cheap, flexible, don't need containerisation for security, and require you to use fucking JavaScript.
  
  Brython might help with that.
  
  
• Why do all websites look the same?  A professor teaching interactive design in Germany got his students to reimagine some popular websites.  The results were godawful unusable crap.
  
  That's why.
  
  
• Microsoft did not have a great October  (ZDNet)
  
  Oh, their hardware side is doing fine.  Software less so.
  
  
• There's a vaccine for celiac disease entering clinical trial right now.
  
  They are looking for trial subjects in Australia.
  
  It involves twice-weekly injections.  Also, you need to have had your diagnosis confirmed by biopsy, which I never did, because ugh.
  
  On the other hand, gluten-free chicken tenders are half price at Woolworths this week.
  
  

• When bad supranational law and bad national governments collide: Romania's socialist goverment is using the EU's awful GDPR to force investigative journalists to reveal their sources.  (OCCRP)
  
  
• Pennsylvania AG subpoenas Epik, Gab's new domain registrar, for no stated reason.  (Ars Technica)
  
  The useful idiots are unsure what to think about this one.

What?  It's just someone in noisy shoes walking through some kind of plaza in China.

Click on the video and drag it around.

This is the camera Naomi (the young lady in the video) is using.  It doesn't look that impressive, but it contains two super wide angle - 190° field of view - cameras back to back.  Some clever software stitches the two images together and removes most of the distortion.

I have a cat that sits by my front door as well.  I'll take a photo of it one day.

• Sony has released the first 128GB writable Blu-Ray disks.  (AnandTech)
  
  These have been largely bypassed in favour of flash storage and direct downloads; the cost per byte isn't much better than SSDs and markedly worse than hard drives.  Still, that's 200x as much as a CD, which is no small feat.
  
  
• Why Intel processors draw more power than expected.  (AnandTech)
  
  Intel's power numbers are lies.
  
  
• Samsung pre-announced their upcoming 7.3" tablet.  (Wired)
  
  This one folds.  Not with two screens and a hinge, but it doesn't look like the whole thing is a bendy banana either.  We shall see.  This is potentially awesome but hard to pull off.
  
  
• Brython is a dumb name but a great idea: Python for your browser.
  
  Currently it's a bit fiddly to use because HTML is still bound to JavaScript, but anything that hastens JavaScript's demise is welcome.
  
  
• How does IBM's Power9 stack up against Intel and AMD?  (Phoronix)
  
  Meh.  Looking at the benchmarks, I thought, wow, that's pretty good for a 22 core CPU...  Dual 22 core?  Well, that's rather less inspiring then.
  
  
• HP's Elite x2 1013 G3 is a successor to their 2017 Envy x2.  (ZDNet)
  
  It has the same detachable design, a slightly larger 13.3" screen still with the 3000x2000 resolution, and two Thunderbolt ports as well as a regular USB-C.  (The Envy x2  that I have does not have Thunderbolt.)
  
  It has a quad core 8th generation Intel CPU, a nice upgrade, but not the high-end Iris Plus or Iris Pro graphics of last year's models, because Intel don't yet have a chip that combines those two features.
  
  Elite is HP's high-end business line; there will likely be a consumer-oriented Envy model of this along shortly.

Kitty!

Tree fort!  Click to embiggen.

Posted by: Rick C at Saturday, November 10 2018 05:00 AM (Q/JG2)

Posted by: Rick C at Saturday, November 10 2018 05:06 AM (Q/JG2)

Posted by: Rick C at Saturday, November 10 2018 05:12 AM (Q/JG2)

Posted by: StargazerA5 at Saturday, November 10 2018 11:17 AM (Q7Wqc)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Saturday, November 10 2018 01:12 PM (PiXy!)

Posted by: Rick C at Sunday, November 11 2018 06:07 AM (Iwkd4)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Sunday, November 11 2018 09:23 AM (PiXy!)

Posted by: Rick C at Thursday, November 15 2018 02:05 AM (Q/JG2)

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• Gigabyte announced two new EPYC motherboards. (AnandTech)
  
  What's different about these is they are standard ATX boards.
  
  With the EPYC 2 update, they'll support 64 cores, 2TB of RAM, 16 disk drives, four full PCIe x16 slots, and dual 10Gb Ethernet - all in a regular desktop PC. For the price of a low-end BMW.
  
  
• Apple's 2018 iPad Pro is the company's most powerful tablet ever. Is it finally ready to replace your laptop?
  
  No. (Ars Technica)

• A prominent YouTube channel with nearly half a million subscribers was deleted after shocking video surfaced of a women's rights activist being violently assaulted...
  
  ...Tied behind a horse, dragged across country, and fed to an alligator. The game is Red Dead Redemption 2, which is basically doing this stuff to men, but doesn't actually prevent you doing it to female NPCs.
  
  

  YouTube closed by channel because I killed a female NPC in #RDR2
  They said It promoted violence.
  
  You spend the entire games murdering men and no one cares, punch a woman and you get banned, are you out of your mind @YouTube@TeamYouTube@YTCreators@YongYea@JimSterling

  — Shirrako (@ShirrakoGaming) November 7, 2018

  
  It looks like there are still people who are not entirely insane working at Google, because his channel has been reinstated.

More analysis of AMD's Next Horizons event and their new chiplet-oriented architecture and what it means for servers.  I'm  hoping to find some analysis of the implications for desktops and laptops, but not yet.

Just heading off the Point Nemo.   [Video continues.]  Wait.  Strike that.  Reverse it.

The wizard rolled a natural 20 that day.

Posted by: Rick C at Friday, November 09 2018 01:53 AM (Q/JG2)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Friday, November 09 2018 03:06 AM (PiXy!)

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But let's try another scenario: You're Intel, and your brand new CPU turns out to crash apparently randomly.  You call in your entire test team and they can reproduce the crash, about once per chip per week on average.

And some bright spark figures out that it happens seventeen cycles after you do an integer add, then an integer divide, then issue an AVX256 MADD, then a relative conditional branch, because if you do that exact sequence a register file port gets left in a stuck state and when the branch prediction finally gets resolved, BANG.

Only...  What about other sequences?  Is this the only problem?  If you patch it with a microcode update and systems keep right on crashing, you're not going to set sales records this quarter.

You want to test all possible sequences of instructions, one by one, as quickly as possible.  This theorem lets you do it an order of magnitude faster than a naive approach, and provides rules for generating the optimal sequence of instructions.

Posted by: StargazerA5 at Thursday, November 08 2018 01:01 AM (Q7Wqc)

Posted by: kurt duncan at Thursday, November 08 2018 02:30 AM (noh54)

Posted by: Kayle at Thursday, November 08 2018 02:53 AM (TtvMc)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Thursday, November 08 2018 10:53 AM (PiXy!)

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• AMD had their big Next Horizon party, and it looks like the leaks had things pretty much correct.   (AnandTech)
  
  
• Zen 2 has twice the floating point performance of Zen 1 (2 x 256-bit vector units, the same as Intel).
  
  
• Updated from PCIe 3.0 to 4.0 for double the I/O bandwidth.
  
  
• Infinity Fabric has been given a boost too, though not clear exactly how much.  If the Zen 2 chips have PCIe 4.0 then they already support at least 16 Gbps serdes where Zen 1 only goes up to 12 Gbps.
  
  
• EPYC 2 (a.k.a Rome) has 8 CPU chiplets surrounding a memory and I/O controller core.  64 cores total.
  
  EPYC 1 (a.k.a Naples) has 4 Ryzen chips with Infinity Fabric links between them, but that would have gotten complex with 8 chiplets on the package.  Naples has 12 IF links on board to cross-connect everything; Rome needs only 8 links for twice the number of cores.
  
  
  Naples (left) and Rome (right).  Fingers on the right hand side probably belong to AMD CEO Lisa Su.
  
  The big chips on the left each contain 8 cores, 16MB cache, and Infinity Fabric, DDR4, and PCIe controllers.
  
  The little chips on the right each contain 8 cores, 32MB of cache, and Infinity Fabric, but all the DDR4 and PCIe channels have been moved to the big chip in the middle.
  
  [Had some stuff on die sizes here before, but the information I have is unofficial and contradictory, so I snipped it.]
  
  
• Single-socket Rome server can outperform a top-of-the-line dual-socket Intel Xeon Platinum system.
  
  
• No announcement yet of how this affects the Ryzen 3000 series, but this is a clear upgrade for third-generation Threadripper.
  
  
• Zen 2 is sampling now and will be available next year.  Zen 3 is on track for delivery in 2020, and design for Zen 4 is under way. 
  
  
  
• AMD also announced their new Radeon Instinct server GPUs.  (Anandtech)
  
  
• AWS now offers AMD-based instances.  (AnandTech)
  
  Another significant win for AMD.
  
  
• Want to run Linux on your shiny new Mac?  Haha fuck you.  (Phoronix)
  
  
• VirtualBox turns out not to be leakproof.  (Bleeping Computer)
  
  It's not used much in server environments, but if you use it for testing untrusted code in secure sandboxes, you might want to not do that for a little while.  Like, knowing Oracle, eighteen months or so.
  
  
  
  

Click to embiggen.

• What do the original Japanese broadcast of Haruhi Suzumiya, Australian science fiction author Greg Egan, troll haven 4chan, and travelling salesmen have in common?
  
  More than you might think.  (Quanta)

  If a television series has just three episodes, there are six possible orders in which to view them: 123, 132, 213, 231, 312 and 321. You could string these six sequences together to give a list of 18 episodes that includes every ordering, but there’s a much more efficient way to do it: 123121321. A sequence like this one that contains every possible rearrangement (or permutation) of a collection of n symbols is called a "superpermutation.”
  
  ...
  
  For Haruhi fans, Egan’s construction gives explicit instructions for how to watch all possible orderings of season one in just 93,924,230,411 episodes.

  It's Endless Eight all over again.
  
  
• Intel's eight core desktop processors are out so they finally decided to release the six core Xeon E family.  (AnandTech)
  
  Good work, Intel.
  
  
• Full-disk encryption on SSDs from Crucial and Samsung may be basically useless.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Bypass techniques have been confirmed on several older models and some current ones.
  
  
• Leading advertising company Google announced that Chrome 71 will block ads on sites with "abusive experiences" - as determined by Google.  (Ars Technica)
  
  Blocking problem ads is good.  An ad company determining which ads present a problem, maybe not so good.
  
  

• Gab is back online and the useful idiots are unhappy.  (Ars Technica)
  
  Gab's aggressively inept PR makes it hard to support them, but the insanity of their opponents makes it necessary.
  
  
• Researchers studying Twitter discover memes, assume vast shadowy conspiracy.  (TechDirt)

Posted by: Rick C at Tuesday, November 06 2018 11:52 AM (Iwkd4)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Tuesday, November 06 2018 12:14 PM (PiXy!)

Posted by: Mauser at Wednesday, November 07 2018 02:00 PM (Ix1l6)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Wednesday, November 07 2018 03:40 PM (PiXy!)

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Tech News

Social Media News

• Here's a look at the ZTE Nubia X, the phone with the 1.6:1 screen:body ratio.
  
  
  
  The rear screen seems to be invisible when not turned on, which is impressive.  And a point I didn't consider is that it's a touchscreen, so it can be used as a touch-sensitive control surface even if you're looking at the front screen.
  
  

• Twitter shows how balanced and even-handed they are by suspending any Republican who suggests that Democrats vote on November 7th regardless of which party said Republican belongs to.
  
  
• YouTube has been quiet recently, but decided they hadn't made enough users angry with them and wiped the Ralph Retort's Killstream from the internet - and, to rub methylmercury into the wound, forcibly reversed $26,000 in donations made by viewers of the stream to St. Jude's Children's Hospital.  (The Daily Caller)
  
  This all relates to the "superchat" feature, which allows viewers to pay to make a live chat comment sticky.  It's not that the Ralph Retort did anything wrong, its that their viewers decided to be edgy.  Which is to say, jerks.
  
  And the Wall Street Journal, apparently not having any news to report on, decided to stick their oar in and get it all shut down because who wants to help sick kids anyway?
  
  
• Reddit solves these problems by dividing the site into subsections moderated by private individuals.  Leading to situations like where the moderator of an anti-capitalist forum threatened to kill a Venezuelan citizen for being insufficiently appreciative of his workers' paradise.

This week in Cody Eats Isotopes: Deuterium Oxide.

When he changes shirts...  Yeah, you can pause it right there and watch this instead.

So is the plural Cutie Honeys (like, say, field marshals) or Cuties Honey (as in inspectors general)?  Inquiring minds, etc, etc.

Posted by: Kayle at Monday, November 05 2018 06:20 AM (TtvMc)

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