Ambient Irony

Tuesday, August 14

Daily News Stuff 14 August 2018

Tech News

Chuwi announced their Lapbook SE, a $299 Gemini Lake Atom laptop. 4GB RAM, 32GB + 128GB storage (eMMC and SSD), 13" 1080p IPS screen, and it has separate PgUp, PgDn, Home, and End keys. (AnandTech)

Intel doesn't use the Atom name any more - this is publicly a Celeron N4100 - because the first seven generations of Atom chips sucked. This one is a lot better, at least for single-threaded workloads, about twice the performance of the previous generation. On multi-threaded workloads this specific chip underperforms because it's limited to 6W of power.

Unfortunately, comments on AnandTech say that Chuwi's customer support and product consistency are iffy at best.

But you can't say it doesn't come with a decent selection of ports.
AMD's Threadripper 2950X and 2990WX are out and the benchmarks are coming in and they're... A bit all over the place. The $899 2950X is a consistently solid performer, but the $1799 2990WX appears to suffer from architectural or software limitations, with many benchmarks coming in slower than the cheaper version. This is specifically a chip for people doing 3D rendering and a few other tasks. If you want to run lots of virtual machines for development, the 2950X or an EPYC 7401P is a better bet. (AnandTech)

Next year with the introduction of 7nm parts, we'll likely see 24 or 32 core Threadrippers without the limitations of the current generation.

Update: Thanks to StargazerA5 for pointing me to Phoronix, who compared performance between Windows 10 and four flavours of Linux.

A notable case of poor performance in the benchmarks on other sites was 7zip compression. Phoronix ran the same test on Linux, with, well, see for yourself.

Yes, it's 140% faster.
NVIDIA announced their new Turing architecture, which adds AI and ray-tracing to a conventional graphics core. Due out in Q4 2018. Priced about the level of a good used car. (PCPer)

But mainstream versions will follow and prices will come down. A lot, with the cryptocurrency mining bubble well and truly popped at this point.
If you're using Dropbox on Linux, time to reformat your computer. They're dropping support for any filesystem but Ext4. (Bleeping Computer)
IBM has you covered if you need PCIe 4.0 support today. You also get up to 192 CPU cores and 64TB of RAM. Which is a lot. (The Next Platform)
A group of mathematicians seeking to prove that the was no general solution to the "nearest neighbour" problem instead found a general solution for the "nearest neighbour" problem which I suppose is almost as good. (Quanta)

I'm going to need to read up on this one, because this is something that I might actually be able to apply in my day job. Unlike, say, a proof that dark energy is incompatible with string theory, which only really applies to my side projects.
Get your Humble Data Science Bundle today!

If you like that sort of thing...

Social Media News

The Unblocker is a Twitter bot that will tell you what blocklists you are on.

It's been silenced by Twitter.

I have 211 blocklists, 14m blocks, in my DB. Tweet "what blocklists" to me to find out what ones you are on. The current "record" is 69 lists that a goobergate Trumpist is on ðŸ˜³

(Will need to follow / check my replies for the response, Twitter are hiding them!)
â€” The Unblocker (@unblock_list) June 22, 2018

Video of the Day

K-On! for penguins.

Meta Video of the Day

Deconstructing K-on! for penguins.

Picture of the Day

https://ai.mee.nu/icons/Pandant.jpg?size=720x&q=95

Panda Ant, Panda Ant, friendly neighbourhood Panda Ant...

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 10:31 AM | Comments (15) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
Post contains 602 words, total size 6 kb.

1 "2990WX appears to suffer from architectural or software limitations, with many benchmarks coming in slower than the cheaper version."
I bet that's going to be because of latency bring RAM through the dies with I/O to the other ones. It's too bad they couldn't have done something like disable one RAM channel on each die instead of running 2-0-2-0.
BTW, why is it when I paste text into the comment box, it acts weird depending in the browser? Firefox just jumps to the top of the page. IIRC Chrome and Edge will leave the pasted text highlighted.

Posted by: Rick C at Tuesday, August 14 2018 11:38 AM (ITnFO)

2 Yes, it's some combination of that and operating system schedulers. Whatever percentage is the scheduler will improve significantly in coming months, but it's hard to say what that percentage is.

On the other thing... The browsers keep changing how the editor behaves. It's very annoying. I'm trying out new editors since this one isn't really maintained any longer.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Tuesday, August 14 2018 11:42 AM (PiXy!)

3 RE: Threadripper, Phronix, a Linux blogger, did a bunch of benchmarks including Windows vs Linux on the chips and saw some consistent big gaps in performance. There is some speculation that the issues may be in Windows NUMA scaling rather than the chip itself.

Posted by: StargazerA5 at Tuesday, August 14 2018 11:52 AM (06P2d)

4 Thanks, I meant to check on Phoronix but hadn't had time yet.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Tuesday, August 14 2018 12:17 PM (PiXy!)

5 Wait, Intel actually thinks calling the chip a Celeron is an improvement over calling it an Atom?
Just how badly did Atoms suck if putting the Celeron tag on it is better???

Posted by: Wonderduck at Wednesday, August 15 2018 08:18 AM (XTr69)

6 They sucked a lot.

Lenovo still sells cheap laptops with older generation Atom chips - I have one as a spare laptop because it's small and light and well-constructed and only cost around US$150.

That older Atom gets a Passmark benchmark score of around 900. This new one scores 1800. Your new Dell system gets about 17000.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Wednesday, August 15 2018 10:19 AM (PiXy!)

7 Wish I had know about that blocklist thing, because I'm really curious about which lists I'm on. Sad Puppies is obvious, but i'm sure there's more than that.

Posted by: Mauser at Wednesday, August 15 2018 11:08 AM (Ix1l6)

8 Actually, it's working, and I'm on 12 active and 3 deleted block lists. Most of them seem to be artificially inflated anti-trump lists. One person proudly announced (When I looked them up in a non-logged-in browser) that if you snark on anything they say, they'll block you and all your followers. That one was closing in on a million blocked. It's almost like a contest to see who cane block the most people who have no idea who you are.

Posted by: Mauser at Wednesday, August 15 2018 11:30 AM (Ix1l6)

9 I think I scored 19 active and 5 deleted. And Wil Wheaton.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Wednesday, August 15 2018 02:39 PM (PiXy!)

10 As I tweeted in another conversation, I EARNED my Will Wheaton block.

Posted by: Mauser at Thursday, August 16 2018 10:36 AM (Ix1l6)

11 For some reason, this post is getting cut off after "Social Media News" on the first page.

Posted by: muon at Tuesday, August 21 2018 12:03 PM (vMYTH)

12 Firefox? Working fine for me in Chrome, but I just tried Firefox and it does do that. Sigh.

WHACKS BROWSER WITH ENORMOUS MALLET

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Tuesday, August 21 2018 12:24 PM (PiXy!)

13 Yes, it was Firefox. It looks like more is being cut off.

Posted by: muon at Tuesday, August 21 2018 04:45 PM (vMYTH)

14 Firefox has the munchies. I'll see what I can do, though really the answer at this point is to move everything to Bootstrap. Browsers are stupid things and I'll let someone else handle their vagaries.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Tuesday, August 21 2018 05:03 PM (PiXy!)

15 If it helps any, I'm not seeing any part of the page cut off with Firefox 61. (Actually, I'm not seeing that, even if it doesn't help.)
Mauser, how'd you earn your block? I don't think anyone's blocked me yet but I barely use Twitter.

Posted by: Rick C at Tuesday, August 21 2018 11:11 PM (Q/JG2)

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