Tuesday, March 16

Geek

Daily News Stuff 15 March 2021

Distributed IBM 701 Edition

Tech News

  • Epyc Milan is here.  (AnandTech)

    In a nutshell, at the largest core counts it's 17% faster than Rome, which is a very good generational improvement but not quite the groundbreaking stuff we've seen from AMD recently.

    From the impressive benchmarks of the smaller 32-core variants, it seems clear that at 64 cores it's running into thermal limits even with a 280W TDP.  The article discusses the reasons why, indicating that it's more the I/O die and all the communications links than the CPU dies themselves.

    A huge single die would drastically reduce that power draw - but would be too large to manufacture economically.  I'd say too large to manufacture but we've seen a recent return of wafer-scale integration so nothing is entirely of the table.

    The 24-core 4GHz model looks like it might be a good replacement for the Threadrippers at my day job at some point.


  • Nvidia's RTX 3060 comes with firmware and drivers designed to reduce its efficiency at mining cryptocurrencies so that video cards might remain available for video.  Nvidia claimed that the combination of firmware locks and custom drivers would not be hackable.  It has been hacked.  (Tom's Hardware)

    By Nvidia.

    Oops.


  • WeLeakInfo did just that.  (Krebs on Security)

    Oops.


  • GitLab cloud was having problems - now apparently resolved.  (GitLab)

    At my day job we run our own GitLab instance so this didn't affect us.

    What did affect us was a bug in the switch firmware for the storage in the cloud server pod at our hosting provider, which killed it dead as a doornail.  I was able to migrate it to a different pod and get it working again once I found the notification, which did not get forwarded to me even though they were helpful enough to inform me of upcoming maintenance windows in France.


  • The new LG Gram 17 doesn't exactly not have the Four Essential Keys.  (ZDNet)

    It has PgUp and PgDn which double as Home and End, and a numeric keypad which doubles as a cursor key pad.  I don't like numeric keypads on laptops, because it moves the main typing area off-centre, but on a 17" model that might not be such an issue.

    Screen is a 2560x1600 IPS panel covering 99% of DCI-P3, which is very good.  CPU is a quad-core 11th gen Intel part, with 8GB or 16GB RAM and up to 1TB of SSD.

    The standout feature though is its weight - just 1.35kg.


  • First Rule of Memphis Club is don't tweet about Memphis.  (Bleeping Computer)

    Twitter tech support, my account has just been banned.
    Wrote a tweet about a city, didn't go quite how I'd planned.


Disclaimer: Second Rule of Memphis Club is fuck Twitter anyway.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 02:35 AM | Comments (6) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
Post contains 463 words, total size 4 kb.

1 nVidia's driver--based on a forum post on HardForum by someone who has one--will throttle the card, if it's mining Ethereum, unless that card is the primary display card and is outputting to a monitor, based on testing so far.  That means it's not going to be useful for someone with a mining rig full of 3060s.

Posted by: Rick C at Tuesday, March 16 2021 03:31 AM (eqaFC)

2 Here's the forum post.  Also, apparently the driver's been pulled.

Posted by: Rick C at Tuesday, March 16 2021 03:33 AM (eqaFC)

3 I wonder how long before someone does a BIOS hack that identifies every video card as the primary display...

For now it's only the 3060, not any of the others in the range, so it might not be worth it.  If this spreads, though, it will get hacked.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Tuesday, March 16 2021 09:17 AM (PiXy!)

4 It looks like it isn't "primary display" after all, but that the slot has to be x16 or x8.

Posted by: Rick C at Tuesday, March 16 2021 02:38 PM (eqaFC)

5 Uh-oh.  Epyc motherboards hardest hit.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Tuesday, March 16 2021 03:02 PM (PiXy!)

6 I assume you mean "people who wanted to purchase an Epyc motherboard hardest hit"?
Apparently x1 riser cables don't work.  Not clear if x16 cables would.  I'm sure clever people will try to game this, possibly with pcie multiplexers.  There are already external boards that will take an x1 cable and split it to four x16 slots, and they're pretty cheap (under $100).

Posted by: Rick C at Wednesday, March 17 2021 04:12 AM (eqaFC)

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




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