Ambient Irony

Tuesday, October 30

Daily News Stuff 30 October 2018

Tech News

AMD has unleashed their 12 core 2920X and 24 core 2970WX (AnandTech)

The 2970WX is a niche product, but the 2920X at $649 is a solid workstation CPU that costs only a little more than Intel's 8 core mainstream i9 9900K (MSRP $499 but currently selling for closer to $600).

Running rendering tasks puts it ahead of Intel's much more expensive 12 core i9 7920X and close behind Intel's even more expensive 16 core i9 7960X.

For gaming and desktop stuff, software development, that sort of thing, just go with the Ryzen 2700X unless someone else is paying.
The latest copyright ruling that came down on the side of "right to repair" also supports the right to play. (Tom's Hardware)

The ruling will permit breaking DRM protection to continue playing abandoned computer and video games, assuming they were legally bought in the first place.
An Australian MP points out that copyright laws must seek a balance between creators and consumers and not simply enact increasingly draconian rules every year. (Tech Dirt)
Apple owes Qualcomm $7 billion (A$793 quadrillion). (Bloomberg)

According to Qualcomm.
WebAssembly in Chrome 70 has threads.

No indication on whether Chrome 70 otherwise sucks less than Chrome 69.
Apple's APFS apparently uses global kernel locks for read operations

This sort of thing makes it easy to make an operating system reliable, but it also kills scalability. MacOS these days is basically a single-user operating system - you can run server apps on it, but no-one does - so they can get away with this in most cases. On Linux, this would cause an uproar.
An animated bubble chart of Reddit over the past decade.
Why would anyone use a Core i3 as a server CPU?

Some i3 models support ECC. And an 8th generation Core i3 costs just $129 and runs as fast as an older E3 Xeon. (Serve the Home)
The OnePlus 6T is a near flagship phone at a sub-flagship price. (Android Central)

No headphone jack and horrible haptics, so I'm not the target audience. Gotta have them haptics.
There's a new undersea cable linking Sydney and Perth. (ZDNet)

I don't want to be the one to tell them...
AMD's second-generation Epyc server CPUs, codenamed Rome, may be leaping from 4 chips on a module to 9 smaller "chiplets", from 32 cores to 64, and from 64MB of cache to 256MB. While these are rumours, AMD have publicly stated that the chips will be sampling to customers, um, right about now, so people outside AMD actually have these chips and accurate leaks are likely. (AdoredTV)

Worth watching just for the die photomicrographs.