Ambient Irony

Friday, November 02

Daily News Stuff 2 November 2018

Tech News

iPhones are allergic to helium. (iFixit)

This is bad. If you live somewhere with a helium atmosphere. Which you probably don't.
Llamas are allergic to the flu. (RealClearScience)

The article discusses a universal flu vaccine, but that's not what's happening here. The llama antibodies provide broad but temporary immunity; you'd need to take them each year. But they would make your resistant to all strains of the flu for a year, rather than being an all-or-nothing shot at a single strain, and camelid antibodies can readily be mass-produced in bacterial cultures.
1500 Google employees helpfully identified themselves as dead weight that can be dumped without affecting operations. (TechCrunch)

That's probably not what they thought they were doing, but they're not very bright.
AMD is holding a Next Horizon investor event next Tuesday. (AnandTech)

The New Horizon event in 2016 announced details of the first-generation Zen processors (that became Ryzen, Threadripper, and Epyc), so this is almost certainly an announcement of Zen 2.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 02:23 PM | Comments (6) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
Post contains 170 words, total size 2 kb.

1 While AMD announcing a Zen2 would be welcome, they'd do better to have a plan for a Zen-like reinvention of their graphics to challenge NVIDIA

Posted by: StargazerA5 at Friday, November 02 2018 09:43 PM (Q7Wqc)

2 If you believe the rumours they are doing exactly that. The alleged reason Vega was late and underwhelming is that two thirds of their graphics engineers were working with Sony on the next generation after Vega - named Navi - which will power the PS5 and AMD's future desktop and laptop graphics. Vega was a stopgap.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Saturday, November 03 2018 03:32 AM (PiXy!)

3 I've been reading more stuff saying that Vega (and to a lesser extent the older CPU and GPUs) were built on a low-power process--that is, the 16nm node is optimized for low-power processors, and that's a big part of the problem. Apparently Vega runs great, but to make it competitive with the higher-end nVidia chips of the time, they had to bump up the clock speed past the node's sweet spot, which put them on the part of the curve where voltage goes up drastically. Apparently if you run a Vega chip a little slower than stock you can undervolt it a lot and it performs really well.
I gather the TSMC 7nm node doesn't have this issue.

Posted by: Rick C at Saturday, November 03 2018 04:24 AM (Q/JG2)

4 Yeah, that is also true. They really needed to make Vega a bigger chip so they could clock it lower and still get the performance. But that would have made it more expensive...

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Saturday, November 03 2018 04:49 AM (PiXy!)

5 So waitaminnit here! This is big news! WINAMP IS THE FLU!

Posted by: Wonderduck at Saturday, November 03 2018 01:32 PM (9gv+L)

6 Either that or Winamp cures the flu.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Saturday, November 03 2018 02:48 PM (PiXy!)

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