• All of AMD's desktop plans for 2019 may have just leaked.  (WCCFTech)
  
  Yes, WCCFTech, but also at Reddit and AdoredTV, so two independent sources that agree on most of the details.  And none of it is prima facie implausible.
  
  Summary of the leaked CPUs:
  
  

  Part	Cores	Clock	TDP	Price
  3300	6	3.2 / 4.0	50W	$99
  3300X	6	3.5 / 4.3	65W	$129
  3300G	6 + 15 CU	3.0 / 3.8	65W	$129
  3600	8	3.6 / 4.4	65W	$179
  3600X	8	4.0 / 4.8	95W	$229
  3600G	8 + 20 CU	3.2 / 4.0	95W	$199
  3700	12	3.8 / 4.6	95W	$299
  3700X	12	4.2 / 5.0	105W	$329
  3800X	16	3.9 / 4.7	125W	$449
  3850X	16	4.3 / 5.1	135W	$499

  
  All the parts have SMT, so 6 cores means 12 threads, and so on.  The G series parts are APUs with built-in graphics, so the 3300G has 6 CPU cores + 15 GPU cores (called CU, for compute units).  The current 2400G has 4 CPU cores and 11 CU, and the Radeon 560 card has 16 CU, so that's a significant upgrade.
  
  The low-end 6 and 8 core parts (low-end!) have one of the new CPU chiplets. The APU parts have a CPU chiplet and a GPU chiplet, and the high-end parts have two CPU chiplets.  The new design lets AMD mix and match without having to design and test new dies.
  
  The CPUs are expected to be announced at CES in January (where AMD CEO Lisa Su has the keynote), except the 3850X which is believed to be a special 50th Anniversary limited edition and will arrive in May.  The APUs will be along in the second half of next year.
  
  The 3800X and 3850X may need updated motherboards as they exceed the power specs for the AM4 socket.  There will be a new X570 chipset as well.
  
  There are new graphics cards coming as well, but information on those is scant.  If you want all the details, watch this video.
  
  
  
  
• Nvidia's Titan RTX is a bigger and more expensive RTX 2080 Ti.  (AnandTech)
  
  Not a lot faster except for the AI performance which is clearly artificially limited on the consumer graphics cards.  But double the memory - 24GB vs 11GB - which could be a big win for heavy processing tasks.
  
  
• Razer has updated the Razer Blade Stealth with crappy dedicated graphics to replace the crappy integrated graphics.  (AnandTech)
  
  Really, it's intended to use an external GPU over Thunderbolt.  The Nvidia MX150 just makes it suck a little less when being used on the go.
  
  
• Qualcomm announced the Snapdragon 855.  (Fudzilla)
  
  Details: It's designed by Qualcomm and is called the Snapdragon 855.  Yeah, not much of an announcement really.
  
  

Social Media News

• Facebook now allows developers to build apps that include features that Facebook already provides.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  Given all the features buried in the Great Dismal Swamp that is Facebook, it would be rather hard not to, so this is just giving a tacit nod to reality.
  
  
• Apple CEO Tim Cook says free speech and fundamental human rights have no place in Apple's walled ghetto garden.  (Ars Technica)

Posted by: Rick C at Wednesday, December 05 2018 03:02 PM (Iwkd4)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Wednesday, December 05 2018 07:14 PM (PiXy!)

Posted by: Rick C at Thursday, December 06 2018 01:31 AM (Q/JG2)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Thursday, December 06 2018 09:22 AM (PiXy!)

Posted by: Rick C at Thursday, December 06 2018 10:45 AM (Iwkd4)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Thursday, December 06 2018 11:27 AM (PiXy!)

Posted by: Rick C at Thursday, December 06 2018 12:04 PM (Iwkd4)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Thursday, December 06 2018 12:16 PM (PiXy!)

Posted by: Rick C at Thursday, December 06 2018 03:27 PM (Iwkd4)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Thursday, December 06 2018 04:45 PM (PiXy!)

11 Sure, and I did--it's just a bit different from the usual way (long-press and choose "remove" from the popup instead of long-press and drag to a "delete" area of the screen).  I was just griping a bit about having to put all the icons I used back on the home screen.

Posted by: Rick C at Thursday, December 06 2018 11:31 PM (Iwkd4)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Thursday, December 06 2018 11:42 PM (PiXy!)

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• Intel's i9-9900K (and other members of the "9th generation") have hardware updates to patch Spectre and Meltdown.  Do they improve performance over the earlier software patches?  No.  (AnandTech)
  
  
• LG's Gram 17 is a 17" notebook that weighs less than 3 pounds.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  It has a 2560x1600 display, which is not bad.  4k would be better, but 2560x1600 at 17" is about the same as 1920x1080 at 13".  I have a notebook that size with that resolution (a few years old now) and it's fine.  You can tell it's not "retina" but only if you stop and look.  And the return of 16:10 is welcome.
  
  
• Quora, the question-and-answer site that demanded you register with an email and password to use it, got hacked and leaked all those emails and passwords.  For 100 million people.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  The passwords were encrypted, so there's that.  And your email address leaked years ago.
  
  
• The return of the return of 24 cores and I can't move my mouse.
  
  That can't-move-my-mouse thing happens to me sometimes, though I only have 8 cores.  I use Chrome very heavily, so I should go back to the previous articles and check if this has something to do with it.
  
  
• Sigh.  It's Sir Tony.  You use the given name, not the surname.
  
  
• AMD's EPYC 7371 is the fastest 16 core server CPU.  (Serve the Home)
  
  Basically they gave the 16 core model the same power budget as the 32 core model, and used that to crank up the clock speeds. 
  
  Rome will do much better at this game.  Firstly because of the 7nm process, which is faster and uses less power.  But also because with Naples - current generation EPYC - every chip needs 12 active Infinity Fabric links, which use up a lot of that power budget.  (AnandTech)  A 16 core Rome chip only needs two - one for each 8 core chiplet.
  
  
• Spam comes to your printer.  (Bleeping Computer)
  
  
• Australia's garbage internet insecurity legislation now has bipartisan support.  (ZDNet)
  
  We had one senator who understood computer security, and he was a Green, and anyway he's gone following that foreign citizenship kerfuffle that eventually embroiled half our federal government.

• Tumblr has banned the majority of their user base, women and minorities hardest hit.  (Sydney Morning Herald)
  
  It's a three-egg lolmelette, this one.

• Want to do something ridiculous with a MicroATX motherboard but POWER9 just ain't your style?  ASRock have just the thing with their X399M Threadripper motherboard.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Downside: The VRM's don't offer a lot of overclocking potential if you're planning on running one of the 32 core parts.  Only four memory slots so you're limited to 64GB right now, 128GB shortly.
  
  Upside: Three full x16 PCIe slots and three full x4 M.2 slots.  No conflicts, no waiting.  8 SATA ports, 8 USB 3.0 ports, two USB 3.1, WiFi, the usual audio, and dual gigabit Ethernet.
  
  
• iTunes downloads aren't HTTPS.  (Wired)
  
  To allow caching, Apple says.  Surprises me all the same.
  
  
• A portmanteau of every word in a given language is called a portmantout.
  
  
• Australia's NBN is running trial deployments of gigabit-class G.fast equipment.  (Computerworld)
  
  This will be great if I ever actually get connected.  G.fast can achieve 600Mbps at 200m and 900Mbps at 100m.  The nearest NBN FTTC point is currently about 100m from my house, and they'll likely install a closer one when they finally wake up from their nap and complete the promised rollout.  Reportedly the average distance for FTTC deployments is 40m.
  
  NBNCo wrote about this last year but they are so slow moving and have such a history of missing their targets that I'd either forgotten or ignored it, or both.

• A couple of the reasons why Twitter in particular is so terrible.  (USA Today)
  
  Twitter and Facebook seem very badly designed until you realise that the point was never to allow people to have meaningful conversations.

Posted by: Rick C at Wednesday, December 05 2018 12:00 AM (Q/JG2)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Wednesday, December 05 2018 11:17 AM (PiXy!)

Posted by: Rick C at Thursday, December 06 2018 01:23 AM (Q/JG2)

4 I've seen a lot of speculation on discussion boards about MS throwing in the towel and doing an OS X with Windows: ie dropping the windows kernel and laying a Windows UI and backwards compatibility on top of the Linux kernel.  This seems to be mainly based on WSL and the amount of stuff they've been opensourcing lately.  It would make some sense from a cost reduction and overall headache reduction point of view as maintaining the Windows kernel isn't where they are making their money these days.
I don't know if it will happen, but imagining Steve Ballmer's reaction if Windows went Linux is certainly amusing

Posted by: StargazerA5 at Thursday, December 06 2018 05:49 AM (Q7Wqc)

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• Ryzen 3000 and the X570 chipset look set to deliver PCIe 4.0 to the desktop.  (WCCFTech)
  
  On the one hand, yeah, WCCFTech.  On the other hand, AMD themselves have said that Zen 2 includes PCIe 4.0 support, so this is the least unlikely rumour they've ever published.
  
  This is still on the AM4 socket, though you won't get PCIe 4.0 support on existing motherboards.  It just means that new CPUs will work on older motherboards (with a BIOS update) and old CPUs will work on new motherboards (but only provide PCIe 3.0 speeds).
  
  A new socket is likely to appear in 2020 with the arrival of DDR5 RAM.
  
  One of the few real constraints with Ryzen desktop CPUs is they only have 24 PCIe lanes.  PCIe 4.0 will effectively double that, at least once PCIe 4.0 video cards roll out.
  
  
• Florida-based hosting provider Hivelocity has acquired Texas-based Incero.  This adds Dallas and Seattle locations to their existing network in Miami and Tampa, Los Angeles, New York, and Atlanta.
  
  All my servers are hosted with Incero, except for a couple of Sydney-based VPSes at Vultr.  Hivelocity seems to have a pretty good reputation, so I'm hoping for the best.
  
  
• Amazon has announced Glacier Deep Archive, a long-term archival storage solution that costs just 0.1¢ per GB per month - $1 per TB.
  
  The real cost comes if you want to retrieve that data.  It starts out at $2.50 per TB and goes up from there.  Local requests for regular S3 storage are much cheaper.  So this is great if you're an enterprise that needs to reliably store petabytes of data for compliance and disaster recovery reasons.  In that case you'd be silly not to use it.
  
  Backblaze offers regular disk storage with access times in the tens of milliseconds at 0.5¢ per GB per month.  But they don't offer virtual servers, so you will always incur a bandwidth charge. Which is relatively cheap at $10 per TB, but still substantially more than the cheapest Glacier tier.
  
  
• Portal for the Commodore 64.
  
  
• A digital media advertising story that isn't "everything sucks and I hate it".
  
  I listen to a ton of podcasts, and I tune out of most irrelevant advertising, but if I'm listening to a tech podcast and they're advertising a tech thing that they actually use and personally recommend, I will pay attention.
  
  
• Microsoft is dead, a post from April 2007. 
  
  
• YouTube Premium is dead, a post from November 2018.  (The Hollywood Reporter)
  
  
• This Panasonic Let's Note has a quad-core eighth generation Intel CPU, 8GB RAM, a 512GB SSD, 1920x1200 display, WiFi 5 (802.11ac), Bluetooth, LTE, Thunderbolt 3, USB 3.0, HDMI, VGA, and wired Ethernet, even if it looks like it was made 15 years ago.
  
  
  
  Also, that's a Thunderbolt external SSD on the left. (AnandTech)
  
  
• Can a $180 4k IPS monitor possibly be any good?
  
  Maybe.
  
  
  
  Downside is they're using Samsung reject panels, so you will have some dead pixels.  At 4k that's much less of a problem than at lower resolutions -  a dead pixel at 4k is equivalent to a 75% working pixel at 1080p.  If your budget is tight and you're willing to return it if you get a particularly bad unit, might be worth considering.

Picture of the Day

Posted by: Mauser at Sunday, December 02 2018 03:34 PM (Ix1l6)

Posted by: Kayle at Sunday, December 02 2018 05:42 PM (magRz)

Posted by: DougO at Sunday, December 02 2018 06:08 PM (QFF/9)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Sunday, December 02 2018 09:15 PM (PiXy!)

Posted by: StargazerA5 at Monday, December 03 2018 02:28 AM (Q7Wqc)

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• A hack on the Marriott Starwood Hotels reservation system has exposed the details of 500 million customers.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Or so the reports are saying.  Marriott Starwood had 500 million customers?  That seems like rather a lot.
  
  
• Trainz is 93% off for the next two days.  (TechDirt)
  
  $20 for a $327 bundle.
  
  
• Intel might be planning to launch a 10 core mainstream desktop processor.  (Fudzilla)
  
  This is plausible because they already have a 10 core CPU.  The only problem right now is that it costs twice as much as an AMD 12 core CPU.
  
  If this is real then it suggests that AMD really is going to launch a mainstream 16 core part next year and Intel is again scrambling for relevance.  Intel's high-end chips are arranged as 3x4, 4x5, and 5x6 core grids, with two of the spots in the grid used for memory and I/O controllers rather than cores.
  
  So the parts actually have 10, 18, and 28 cores, codenamed LCC, HCC, and XCC respectively.  HCC and XCC are big and expensive - so large that they wouldn't fit in a Socket 1151 package - but LCC should be manageable.
  
  The one hitch in that is that the high-end cores don't have on-board graphics, and all of Intel's low-end and mainstream parts do except for the 10nm Ice Lake parts where the IGP kind of doesn't actually work.  So this might instead be an entirely new die.  Or might not happen.  But -
  
  From the Rome preview we know that with TSMC's 7nm process and their new chiplet design, AMD is entirely capable of shipping 16 cores in a mainstream part. And they have nothing to lose and everything to gain from blowing up Intel's market segmentation.  Intel has been very careful for the past decade not to let its low-end parts compete with its high-margin high-end parts.  Intel's $2000 high-end desktop CPUs don't support ECC, for example.  But every single Ryzen chip does.
  
  A little under two years ago, AMD blew up the market by offering eight competitive cores against Intel's four.  In 2019 they have the chance to do the same thing again.  I think they will.
  
  
• LG has filed a patent for a phone with 16 cameras.  If the idea makes it to a real product, it might be the first phone with 16 cameras, but there is already a camera with 16 cameras.  I mean...  Never mind. 
  
  The Light L16.
  
  
  
  This is a real thing.  I don't know if there's a rational story behind the sensor placement, or if they just did that to annoy people.

Posted by: Rick C at Saturday, December 01 2018 04:32 PM (Iwkd4)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Saturday, December 01 2018 04:40 PM (PiXy!)

Posted by: J Greely at Sunday, December 02 2018 02:24 AM (tgyIO)

Posted by: cxt217 at Sunday, December 02 2018 05:15 AM (LMsTt)

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