Ambient Irony

Sunday, December 22

Daily News Stuff 22 December 2019

Allegedly Edition

Tech News

The RX 5600 XT may fit right between the 5500 and the 5700. (Tom's Hardware)

The leaks suggest that the 5600 is not a fully-enabled 5500, but a partly disabled 5700. The latter approach gives AMD a lot more room to manoeuvre, including giving it 6GB RAM on a 192-bit bus to go directly against Nvidia.
Speaking of which. there are reports that the 5500 XT might not perform so well on PCIe 3.0 systems. (Tom's Hardware)

That is, if:

1. You have the 4GB model (this does not affect the 8GB model at all), and
2. You are playing a game that uses more than 4GB of VRAM.

Apparently it only has 8 PCIe lanes enabled, which works just fine on a PCIe 4.0 motherboard even if you run out of memory, but is a limiting factor if you run out of memory on PCIe 3.0.

So if that happens, turn down the graphics details a notch.
Does SMT still make sense? (Code Blueprint)

One of the things I've had to deal with for a long time is that a server that shows itself as 50% busy has at best 20% of headroom. That's because (a) the remaning 50% consists of the second thread on each core, and (b) pushing work onto those threads is likely to push your clock speeds down a step or two.

But at the end of the day, 20% free performance is 20% free performance.
If you have a Ring camera and haven't yet burned down your house, it might not be too late. (Motherboard)
At no point did Ring trigger any sort of alert, such as an email notification, to check that the IP address the system had never seen did indeed belong to the legitimate camera owner.
The US Navy has banned TikTok from government-issued phones. (Reuters)

Good.
Vox has fired hundreds of freelancers thanks to California's new law that would deem them employees. (MSN)

Unexpectedly.
You can get Prison Architect and Cities in Motion 1 and 2 for $1 for the next couple of days. (Humble Bundle)

Music Video of the Day

The film Johnny Dangerously came out 35 years ago today.

Disclaimer: You can tell I'm a living legend, not some ordinary creep.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 10:14 PM | Comments (3) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
Post contains 382 words, total size 4 kb.

1 SMT: there's a couple of current games out that are running more poorly than one would expect on the SMT-less 9th-gen i5s and i7s. Nobody seems to know why yet, except from the observation that it's only happening on CPUs without hyperthreads. (I'm not sure if anyone's tried disabling SMT on a 9900 for comparison.)

Posted by: Rick C at Monday, December 23 2019 05:35 AM (Iwkd4)

2 Vox, AB5, etc: I noticed last week that that the commenters on an article on some site, probably The Takeout but I'm not sure, were going full-on Hillary Clinton ("I can't worry about every undercapitalized business out there") and displaying pretty close to "I have no sympathy at all" for restaurants closing due to minimum wage hikes ("if you can't afford a $40K increase in your payroll maybe you weren't such a good business owner anyway"). The juxtaposition of that with all the freelancers watching their careers end due to AB5 and saying they don't blame Vox at all for canning them is a bit jarring.

Posted by: Rick C at Monday, December 23 2019 05:39 AM (Iwkd4)

3 A coworker of mine, who had a good gig going contracting with our company (he wanted to work nights, and we were able to let him), is now seeking full-time employment elsewhere because of the CA law.

Posted by: Jay at Monday, December 23 2019 12:56 PM (vuQH5)

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