• Friday:

  AMD are getting 7nm parts from both TSMC and Global Foundries, which will give them a full year with a solid fabrication lead on Intel, as well as the advantages of the Zen design.

  Today: Global Foundries stops all 7nm development.  (AnandTech)
  
  AMD likely knew of GloFo's uncertainty well in advance, hence the hedging of their 7nm bets with TSMC.  This probably doesn't affect AMD much, except that lower-tier parts are likely to continue to be produced at 12nm for a while.  The second generation server chips and professional graphics chips were already planned to be fabbed at TSMC.
  
  It might mean a delay - or higher prices - for 12 and 16 core mainstream desktop parts, though, depending on the volume TSMC can produce and how quickly AMD makes inroads into Intel's server market share.  Four Zen dies sold as a 32 core server CPU make AMD a lot more money than if they are sold individually as four desktop CPUs.
  
  So we might just have to struggle onwards with a mere 8 cores until 2020.  Or in my case, two computers with 8 cores each, thanks to Dell's clearance sale on 2017 models.  And the price cut to $399 for the Threadripper 1920X means that those who really need 12 cores can get them.
  
  
• Freesync with an Nvidia graphics card?  Sure, if you have an AMD APU.  (PCPer)
  
  It does add some latency to the frames, but not so much as to make the idea worthless.
  
  
• In line with new emission laws from the EPA, Toyota just set $500 million on fire.  (TechCrunch)
  
  
• Qualcomm either is, or is not, shutting down its server division which doesn't make any servers.  (Fudzilla)
  
  Arm servers are not a thing.  Stop trying to make them a thing.
  
  
• VMware announces Arm support in ESXi (pronounced "esxi").  (ServeTheHome)
  
  Arm servers are the next big thing.
  
  
• Microsoft are pushing Intel CPU updates to AMD systems.  This seems to be harmless on AMD systems, since the patches are ignored, but some Intel users are reporting problems booting after the update.  (Bleeping Computer)
  
  On the other hand, that's true after every Windows 10 update.  Guess what I was doing last night?  Well, yes, swearing a lot, but apart from that.
  
  
• I now have a script that syncs the entire mee.nu production environment to my dev environment every day.  Finally!  This is why I bought Rally Vincent, and she's doing a great job.  The trick to getting it working smoothly was rsync --inplace, which allows me to quickly update my database snapshots even though I STILL DON'T HAVE NBN.
  
  

Social Media News

• Facebook and Google want to draft new federal privacy regulations.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  HahahaNO.
  
  
• Mike Masnick reports that internet content moderation isn't politically biased, just hard to do well.  (Techdirt) 
  
  Mike is great.  He's also wrong.  (PJ Media)  
  
  
• Wouldn't it be great if the military had all the money they needed and BuzzFeed had to hold a bake sale?  (WSJ)

Posted by: Rick C at Tuesday, August 28 2018 11:52 AM (ITnFO)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Tuesday, August 28 2018 01:01 PM (PiXy!)

Posted by: cxt217 at Tuesday, August 28 2018 01:19 PM (BcQU4)

Posted by: benzeen at Tuesday, August 28 2018 01:19 PM (bwzPa)

Posted by: benzeen at Tuesday, August 28 2018 01:22 PM (JpDcM)

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