Meet you back here in half an hour.
What are you going to do?
What I always do - stay out of trouble... Badly.
What are you going to do?
What I always do - stay out of trouble... Badly.
Wednesday, June 02
Daily News Stuff 2 June 2021
Working Five To Nine Edition
Anime of the day is Pretty Cure from 2004. And I have to be very specific about this: Pretty Cure from 2004.
This show is a multi-media juggernaut, with 18 TV seasons to date - and we're talking 45 to 50 episodes each, not short runs - 29 films, 17 video games, and about half a billion dollars a year in merchandise.
The problem - and we should all have such problems - is that the show's producers achieved this by maintaining a laser-like focus on their target audience: Girls aged 6 to 12 (or thereabouts).
Except for that very first season.
Not that the first season doesn't have cute mascots and frilly outfits, but those two girls are infinitely more likely than the later cohorts to mix it up directly with the baddies and get punched clear through an office building.
Give it a moment or you might be fooled into just thinking she has a nice voice. She's said that she no longer remembers which voice is "really" hers, though the two regular ones are "Risu" and "Ayunda".
Working Five To Nine Edition
Top Story
- TSMC is firing on all cylinders. (AnandTech)
It's still not enough, but they're also building a bunch of new cylinders.
6nm production - what they term N6 since the nanometres are imaginary - will match 7nm (N7) this year. N5 is producing better yields than N7 already, though it is a more complicated process and more expensive to produce. And N4 will be entering initial production later this year. N4 is only slightly smaller than N5 but is cheaper to produce, which is a good combination.
Meanwhile the company outlined its plans for the 3nm and 2nm nodes. (WCCFTech)
Fabs (silicon factories) for these advanced nodes are planned for both Taiwan and Arizon, and the company expects to expand overall production at a compound rate of 30% annually. Though they didn't specify for how long and no-one asked if paperclips were involved.
Logic circuits are expected to be 70% denser on N3 than on N5. (WCCFTech)
But memory circuits will only improve by around 20%. This is similar to the situation moving from N7 to N5, and it's a major reason why AMD and Intel are both looking at die stacking solutions. Their CPU cores are getting smaller but their caches aren't, so if they don't seek out novel solutions their chips are going to be cores lost in a sea of RAM.
This show is a multi-media juggernaut, with 18 TV seasons to date - and we're talking 45 to 50 episodes each, not short runs - 29 films, 17 video games, and about half a billion dollars a year in merchandise.
The problem - and we should all have such problems - is that the show's producers achieved this by maintaining a laser-like focus on their target audience: Girls aged 6 to 12 (or thereabouts).
Except for that very first season.
Not that the first season doesn't have cute mascots and frilly outfits, but those two girls are infinitely more likely than the later cohorts to mix it up directly with the baddies and get punched clear through an office building.
Tech News
- Gas is one thing, but when you hack a country's supply of steak that's a declaration of war. (Bloomberg)
Russian hackers targeted meat processor JBS SA, closing facilities in America, Canada, and Australia, though some facilities are expected back online soon. The company handles about 25% of the US beef supply and around 20% of its pork. The edible kind, not the other one.
They're also the largest processor in Australia for beef, pork, and lamb, including a huge volume of exports.
I'm dubious that this is ordinary criminal activity. And I'm not alone. (Bleeping Computer)
But I'm equally dubious of the ability of our leaders - who are in general some combination of feckless, fascist, and inconsequential - to do anything about it.
- Europe is at least ostracising aspiring failed state Belarus after its airliner hijacking stunt. (BBC)
Though to be fair, Belarus is also banning travel from Belarus.
- Faced with having to pay fees for 75,000 individual arbitration cases, Amazon is scrambling to drop their forced arbitration clause. (Wall Street Journal)
The article is cut off after five paragraphs but you can get the gist. They forced customers into arbitration rather than potentially costly judicial proceedings, only to discover that not all their customers are idiots, and tens of thousands of separate arbitration cases aren't cheap either.
- Turkey reportedly deployed hunter-killer robots in Libya. (CNet)
The drones are designed to track and kill their targets without human guidance or intervention.
This is probably not a good development.
- The space station got hit by space junk. (Science Alert)
It only dinged the Canadarm, which is mounted outside the hull, so there wasn't a pressure breach, but that's kind of close.
- Don't throw away your optical microscopes just yet. (Nature)
A new technique that I don't quite understand... Don't understand in any way whatsoever improves the resolution of regular optical microscopes by a factor of five, to about one tenth the wavelength of blue light.
This is done using metamaterials, or in other words, magic.
- Stp asking difficult questions, you're scientists, not... Wait. (Nature)
Methinks someone doth protest too much.
It's All Just a Silly Misunderstanding Officer Anime Music Video of the Day
You Will Believe a Squirrel Can Sing Hololive Music Video of the Day
Give it a moment or you might be fooled into just thinking she has a nice voice. She's said that she no longer remembers which voice is "really" hers, though the two regular ones are "Risu" and "Ayunda".
Disclaimer: Squirrels, can't trust them, can't build a bridge out of them.
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Tuesday, June 01
Daily News Stuff 1 June 2021
Ghost Hands Edition
Anime of the day is Strange Dawn, animated by Hal Film Maker (who also did Princess Tutu) and distributed by Pioneer in 2000. Mostly.
In fact the English language release by Urban Vision only got as far as episode 8 before the series disappeared without a trace, which is why no-one really remembers it today.
It's something of a cross between the classic isekai story where the heroes are transported to a fantasy world, and Gulliver's Travels. Because the heroes - heroines - are indeed transported to a fantasy world, but the inhabitants are about six inches tall.
Which means that two teenage girls are suddenly vast and terrifying engines of destruction, and everyone is plotting to gain their trust and/or kill them.
I can totally see Haruhi doing this.
Thanks Steve. Great roundup.
Disclaimer: Also, free content.
Ghost Hands Edition
Top Stories
- AMD had their Computex keynote, and announced a few things, some expected, and one not.
- Ryzen 5000 desktop APUs will be coming to the retail market August 5th. (AnandTech)
The 5700G is an 8 core / 16 thread part with a 65W TDP and will cost $359. The existing 8 core CPU, the 5800X, costs $449, so that's not a bad price.
It does run 100MHz slower, and it has half the L3 cache and only PCIe 3.0. On the other hand, it uses less power than the 105W 5800X and has built-in graphics.
- The Radeon 6000M family is also here. (AnandTech)
The 6800M is basically a reduced power 6700XT. The 6700M is a cut down and reduced power 6700XT - 10GB of RAM instead of 12GB, and about 90% of the performance. And the 6600M looks like the leaked specs for the upcoming Radeon 6600.
It looks like the 6800M isn't quite as fast as the mobile RTX 3080, but it's not too far behind.
- And finally, AMD CEO Lisa Su put to rest rumours that they were working on 3D chip stacking technology by announcing that 3D chip stacking technology would be going into production this year. (AnandTech)
Su showed off a version of the Ryzen 5000 with 192MB of L3 cache. The existing high-end parts have 64MB across two CPU chiplets, and the new version stacks another 64MB cache chiplet on top of each of those.
They reported performance gains of up to 25%. Admittedly that's in one specific game, Monster Hunter World, but 25% is huge and MonHun is huge.
It also helps with a limitation of newer process nodes. TSMC's 5nm node is about 35% smaller than 7nm, but only for logic circuits. For memory it's basically the same size as 7nm. With die stacking AMD could produce just the CPU chiplets on 5nm and the cache dies on the older and cheaper 7nm process.
In fact the English language release by Urban Vision only got as far as episode 8 before the series disappeared without a trace, which is why no-one really remembers it today.
It's something of a cross between the classic isekai story where the heroes are transported to a fantasy world, and Gulliver's Travels. Because the heroes - heroines - are indeed transported to a fantasy world, but the inhabitants are about six inches tall.
Which means that two teenage girls are suddenly vast and terrifying engines of destruction, and everyone is plotting to gain their trust and/or kill them.
Tech News
- AMD also unveiled their FidelityFX AI upscaling solution. (AnandTech)
This competes directly with Nvidia's DLSS, except that it's open source and also works on Nvidia hardware. This is exactly what AMD did with Freesync - now an industry standard - to Nvidia's proprietary and expensive G-sync.
- Nvidia's 3080 Ti is a 3090 with half the RAM. (Tom's Hardware)
Well, it also has 256 shaders missing, but that's about 2% of the total. That's so they can salvage dies with one or two defects.
It will cost $1199 - in theory. The regular 3080 costs $699 - in theory. So you're paying 70% more for a 15% performance boost. In theory. I have no idea what the real prices will be.
There's also a 3070 Ti which looks to be 7% faster than the 3070.
- Porn film distributor The Score Group file a DMCA takedown request demanding Google remove links to Wikipedia's own Wikipedia page. (TorrentFreak)
Google said no.
- Microsoft has released WinGet, a package manager like RedHat's Yum or Debian's Apt. (Thurrott.com)
It's available right now on GitHub.
Not Technically Tech News
- Matsuri just became the 17th member of Hololive to hit one million subscribers, during her third anniversary stream. (Reddit)
I was watching live when Gura hit one million and Calli half a million at the same time during a Minecraft collab. Gura was the first Hololive member to hit that mark, but she opened the floodgates. There are another four members over the 900k mark so this isn't going to stop any time soon.
- VOMS meanwhile is holding auditions for two new members. (Reddit)
VOMS is currently home to Pikamee and Tomoshika - famous for that Minecraft clip. The third member, Monoe, left earlier this year.
I like them a lot and hope they do well. Pikamee speaks fluent English and has a big overseas following, and is definitely worth checking out if you ever run short of stuff to watch between Hololive EN and the recently launched Nijisanji EN.
A Ship Shipping Ship Shipping Shipping Ships Anime Music Video of the Day
I can totally see Haruhi doing this.
More On That AMD Announcement Video of the Day
Thanks Steve. Great roundup.
Disclaimer: Also, free content.
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