Sunday, July 12

Geek

Daily News Stuff 11 July 2020

Slytherin' Along Edition

Tech News

  • The crowdfunding campaign for the Chuwi Larkbox has succeeded.  (Indiegogo)

    And by succeeded, I mean passed the 2000% mark.  Though the target was pretty low, since Chuwi already manufactures devices like this and was really just using this for marketing.

    The CPU is the quad-core Atom Celeron J4115 which should be acceptably fast for basic tasks.  It has 6GB RAM and 128GB of eMMC storage, an M.2 2242 slot for a SATA SSD such as this, HDMI, two USB ports, micro-SD, WiFi 5, and a headphone jack.  It also has a USB-C port but that seems to be just for power input.

    The main selling point is that it is seriously tiny - just 61x61x43mm and weighing 127g, a fraction of the size of a NUC.  And pretty cheap at $155 without operating system.


  • Milan has broken cover unless it hasn't.  (WCCFTech)

    Three engineering samples of AMD's Zen 3 Epyc range have been spotted.  On the surface they look a lot like the current generation - still maxing out at 64 cores and 256MB of cache.  The difference is that instead of two 4-core CCXes per chiplet, a chiplet now contains eight cores and a 32MB L3 cache in a single unified design.  We've already seen from the low-end Ryzen parts that having all the cores unified this way produces significantly better performance - but there's a limit to how many cores you can connect to a single bus.

    Zen 3 is also expected to bring major IPC gains, though I don't think AMD has mentioned any numbers.

    Of course, the exact same chiplets will be going into the next generation of Ryzen desktop parts, also expected before the end of the year.


  • 1TBVPS is your one-stop shop for 1TB VPSes.  (1TBVPS)

    In fact, that's the only thing they offer.  One configuration, one price.  It's not a bad configuration or a bad price - VPSes with large storage capacities aren't easy to find.  The storage is disk-based with an SSD cache, so great for file storage and probably adequate for light database use.

    For $25 per month you get 8GB RAM, 8 threads, the aforementioned 1TB of storage, and 20TB of bandwidth.  For comparison, a $20 DigitalOcean VPS has 2 threads, 4GB of RAM, 80GB of storage, and 4TB of bandwidth.

    It's run by IOFlood who I've looked at before for dedicated servers.  They actually have a nice offer right now - older 20-core Xeon systems with up to 256GB of RAM and brand new NVMe SSDs - but I need to finish retiring the old servers first.


  • Ooh, they've even done a custom keyboard.  (CommanderX16)

    Well, custom key labels, at least.

    This is the next-generation Commodore 64 that the 8-bit Guy is involved with.  It uses an 8MHz 6502 (actually the W65C02S) and has 512K flash and up to 2MB of RAM, plus another 128K of graphics RAM.  And four expansion slots, all in a mini-ITX form factor.

    I still think they should have used the W65C265S, which has an unmultiplexed  24-bit address bus and wouldn't need bank switching or external logic, but they didn't listen to me.

    PS/2 keyboard and mouse ports and VGA video.




    I like that keyboard.  It's the layout I was looking for when playing with my own design, but never managed to find.  Full set of function keys and the essential PgUp/PgDn/Home/End.

Disclaimer: Blup.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 01:13 AM | Comments (2) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
Post contains 571 words, total size 5 kb.

1 "USB is tremendously more difficult to implement than PS/2."
A cheap Arduino Pro Micro knockoff will do it for you.  It turns out that seems to be what most custom keyboards these days actually do, like my OLKB Planck.

Posted by: Rick C at Sunday, July 12 2020 12:56 PM (Iwkd4)

2 Yes, but they're trying to design this with original 1980s parts, which makes even USB 1.0 difficult.  They have one FPGA because there just aren't any suitable graphics chips in production, but apart from that it's all reall classic hardware.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Sunday, July 12 2020 01:39 PM (PiXy!)

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Apple pies are delicious. But never mind apple pies. What colour is a green orange?




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