• Nvidia has announced their Ampere A100 accelerator card thingy.  (AnandTech)
  
  This is a 54 billion transistor, 400W, 826mm2 chip built on TSMC's 7nm process, with 40GB of HBM2 memory which is odd becuase the photo shows six HBM2 stacks.
  
  For compute, it offers 50% more single and double precision throughput than the Radeon Pro VII.  It's a custom NVLink module, though, not a PCIe card.
  
  
  
• So if you want something you can buy and put straight into your workstation or server, AMD's new Radeon Pro VII that I just mentioned is probably a better bet.  (AnandTech)
  
  This is a dual-precision-unlocked Radeon VII, offering nearly twice the DP compute performance at 20% less power....  For 150% more money than the consumer card.
  
  It does have six mini DisplayPort outputs so if you need to run a lot of monitors and a lot of compute and have access to the corporate credit card, maybe not a bad choice.
  
  
  
• Intel has launched their Xeon W-1200 series.  (AnandTech)
  
  These are the exact same Comet Lake CPUs with the exact same chipset only the names have been changed and they're not cross-compatible.
  
  I think I said before that these were server processors, but they're actually workstation processors, though some dedicated hosting companies do put them in servers.  That means the same 235W power consumption on ten cores.  The server models usually try to tame that a little.
  
  
  
• Nvidia also announced their new DGX A100 supercomputer module.  (WCCFTech)
  
  This incorporates eight of the A100 compute modules, 320GB total GPU memory, 1TB system memory, eight 200Gb/s InfiniBand/Ethernet ports, six NVMe drives, and dual 64 core AMD Epyc CPUs into a 6U 123kg rack-mount unit.
  
  I'm guessing they needed PCIe 4.0 bandwidth and Intel was late to the party.
  
  Oh, and it uses 6.5kW of power at full load, though I'm not sure how since the GPUs only account for half of that.
  
  
  
• Your laptop may be faster than your server.
  
  If you're deploying to the cloud - whether that's Google, Amazon, Microsoft, or IBM - you're probably getting power-optimised CPUs running at around 2GHz and with very limited turbo boost.  Disks are network-attached and bandwidth and IOPS limited.
  
  Your laptop - if it's a recent model - can probably boost to 4GHz or faster and has an NVMe drive capable of a couple of gigabytes per second and hundreds of thousands of IOPS.
  
  So performance on test can be significantly better than in production.
  
  We solved this at my day job by building our own cloud on Threadripper-based servers.  Zoom zoom.  Three times faster than our old cloud servers at one fifth the cost.
  
  A whole lot of work though.
  
  
  
• Proxmox VE 6.2 is out.  (Serve the Home)
  
  I tried out Proxmox VE back when I was trying to deploy Mari.  It worked, but didn't solve my networking problems with LXD (which I have now figured out).
  
  I'm minded to create a simple, open-source, LXD management panel that applies everything I've learned.
  
  
  
• Every Wordpress plugin contains critical security flaws.  (Bleeping Computer)
  
  If Google can't get it right...  Wait, Google is run by idiots these days.  I guess this doesn't really prove anything.
  
  
  
• Amazon's new Fire HD 8 is the iPad for the under-$100 crowd.  (ZDNet)
  
  It bumps memory from 1.5GB to 2GB - or 3GB on the HD 8 Plus.  But it keeps the same old 1280x800 display, which simply isn't enough for reading books.
  
  Also, the Kindle Fire is not only not available from Amazon Australia, Amazon US refuses to ship it to an Australian address.
  
  Why they persist with this fuckery I have no idea.  Regular Kindles, Fire TV, Echo, and Ring devices - all the other Amazon electronic devices - are available here.  Just not the one worth buying.
  
  
  
• The TCL 10 Pro costs $450.  (ZDNet)
  
  6.47" 2340x1080 AMOLED display, 6GB RAM, 128GB storage, 64MP main camera plus untra-wide, macro, and low-light cameras, plus a 24MP selfie camera in a teardrop notch.  Headphone jack and microSD slot, and an in-display fingerprint scanner.  Oh, and NFC, an FM radio, and an IR port.
  
  All powered by a Snapdragon 675, which is not a high-end part, but is better than Qualcomm's specifications make it sound.  They list it as an eight-core Kryo 460, which sounds like one of those cheap eight-core A53 Mediatek parts.
  
  But in fact two of cores are A76 and will deliver fairly solid performance, though still a good 30% slower than a current A77.  (And worse on multi-threaded loads, since it only has two fast cores, not four.)
  
  Still, it ticks all the feature boxes and the price isn't bad.
  
  
  
• Deno is node only TypeScript.  (ZDNet)
  
  Built in Rust.
  
  Which makes my head hurt.
  
  It does sound better engineered than Node, but since Node is a train wreck where the train is made of burning garbage, that is not hard.
  
  
  
• Google's Pixel 4 is not selling.  (Thurrott.com)
  
  This is because the Pixel 4 is not a good device, which is because Google is run by idiots.
  
  
  
• PrintDemon considered harmful.  (ZDNet)
  
  It contains a local privilege escalation flaw - in every version of Windows dating back to NT 4.0.
  
  It can't be exploited remotely, so it's not a disaster.  If you download and run something nasty on your Windows computer you're in deep trouble even without it stealing admin access.
  
  A patch is available now.
  
  
  

Posted by: Rick C at Friday, May 15 2020 02:55 AM (Iwkd4)

Posted by: Rick C at Friday, May 15 2020 03:00 AM (Iwkd4)

Posted by: Rick C at Friday, May 15 2020 03:03 AM (Iwkd4)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Friday, May 15 2020 10:54 AM (PiXy!)

Posted by: Rick C at Saturday, May 16 2020 12:11 AM (Iwkd4)

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