• Micron has announced GDDR6X.  (AnandTech)
  
  The new memory will be showing up very soon on Nvidia's RTX 3090.  It achieves effective speeds of 21Gbits per second per pin using PAM4 encoding - four signalling levels rather than binary.  Since it's also DDR, the actual clock speed is 5.25GHz.
  
  PCIe 6.0 will also use PAM4 encoding.  It's more complex and expensive to implement, but routing 32GHz signals across a motherboard wouldn't exactly be a walk in the park either.  I wouldn't be surprised if this approach ends up in DDR6 in a few years.
  
  The same announcement from Micron also mentioned HBMNext, but gave no details other than an expected delivery date of late 2022.
  
  
  
• The A520 is not a chipset.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  All Ryzen CPUs and APUs - including Threadripper and Epyc - have built-in USB and SATA controllers and can be run without a chipset.  That's what the A520 (and A320) designation really means.
  
  These boards from ASRock do seem to at least have an extra USB controller though.
  
  
  
• $99 gas fees are crippling DeFi.  (CoinTelegraph)
  
  DeFi is decentralised finance, and it mostly runs as Ethereum, which is the only major, stable, completely decentralised blockchain that is smart enough to execute arbitrary contracts completely on-chain.
  
  You can define the contract code, publish it so that anyone can verify it, and execute it automatically, publicly, between any two (or even more) parties.  Really neat.
  
  Only problem is, Ethereum is fucked.
  
  
  
  
  Not only has the gas price spiked to over 300 in the last 48 hours, it has varied by a factor of 40x in the space of just two hours.  You can't plan anything.
  
  Ethereum contract coding is one of my roles at my day job.  Switching back an forth between the strange world of Ethereum and more conventional applications drives me crazy, but it's good to still have work to do when Ethereum is basically dead.
  
  
  
• The first regular mission for SpaceX's Crew Dragon is set for October 23.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  After a safe and successful flight test, it will take its full complement of four astronauts up to the ISS.
  
  The internal photos of this thing are so weird.  It looks like a spaceship, not like the traditional tin can held together by stubbornness.
  
  
  
• Intel has confirmed it will ship server CPUs with DDR5 and PCIe 5.0 next year.  (WCCFTech)
  
  PCIe 4.0 will come to Intel's laptop and desktop parts later this year with Tiger Lake.
  
  Ice Lake server parts will also ship this year with PCIe 4.0 (Serve the Home) even though that would imply a server generation lasting only 12 months.  That would not make vendors happy, but little Intel has done lately has made vendors happy, so it might well be real.
  
  
  
• A second run of the ZX Spectrum Next has been funded on Kickstarter - four times over - in just 48 hours.  (BBC News)
  
  It's a nice looking unit, with a custom injection-molded case.
  
  This version features a few improvements over the original.  (Kickstarter)
  
  A 28MHz Z80n CPU (implemented on an FPGA, though you can buy real Z80 chips at 20MHz), 1MB RAM, HDMI, WiFi, and three AY-3-8912 sound chips.
  
  
  
• Beta testers of SpaceX's Starlink network are reporting speeds that don't suck.  (Ars Technica)
  
  60Mb down and 18Mb up is a lot better than I had at the start of the year, and in fact not that much worse than what I have now.  31ms local latency is worse, but most of my pings are to the US and take more than 180ms anyway.
  
  
  
• Web browsers need to stop.  (Drew DeVault)
  
  The one bright spot was Firefox, and Mozilla just fired 250 people.  (Ars Technica)
  
  Including a lot of the people needed to keep Firefox a robust alternative to the depredations of Google.  (Android Police)
  
  And this even though Mozilla will be receiving at least $2 billion from Google over the next five years.  (Thurrott.com)
  
  
  
• Speaking of Mozilla, someone put a lifeboat together for fired Mozilla staff literally overnight.  (Mozilla Lifeboat)
  
  Including the animated red panda in a little boat.  Impressive work.  It's not a hugely complicated site but everything about it looks great.
  
  
  
• Filed under Things No-one Asked For: Gmail now supports video conferencing.  (ZDNet)
  
  Yes, Hangouts is a pile of crap, but why not fix that rather than shoe-horn the crap into something that mostly works?
  
  
  
• Google has stopped regarding the Hong Kong police as a legitimate law enforcement authority.  (CNet)
  
  Nice to see they still have some limits.
  
  
  
• YouTube has banned videos discussing information relevant to the 2020 election that was obtained by hacking.  (CNet)
  
  This will be enforced with the same degree of impartiality as all of YouTube's rules, which is to say, fuck anyone to the right of Friedrich Engels.
  
  
  
• YAM is baked.  (The Register)
  
  The new cryptocurrency has effectively declared itself autonomous from human control due to a tiny bug.  Because of how all this nonsense works, that bug cannot ever be fixed and all the money put into it has simply evaporated.
  
  One of the things I sweated blood over in the last Ethereum contract I built was a secure mechanism for regaining control if things went wrong.  There is a mechanism to do that generally - upgradeable contracts - but they basically don't work.
  
  

Posted by: normal at Saturday, August 15 2020 06:52 AM (obo9H)

Posted by: Rick C at Saturday, August 15 2020 08:20 AM (Iwkd4)

Posted by: normal at Saturday, August 15 2020 11:46 PM (obo9H)

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