Sunday, November 09
Daily News Stuff 9 November 2025
Mars Or Bust Edition
Mars Or Bust Edition
Top Story
- The latest US Mars mission will launch from Cape Canaveral today at around 2:45 PM EST. (Space)
The mission - dubbed ESCAPADE - involved two orbiters that will map the magnetic fields and upper atmosphere of the planet, providing data essential to human landings and settlement.
The two orbiters, named Blue and Gold respectively, were built by Rocket Labs and will be operated by the University of California. They will launch on Blue Origin's New Glenn rocket - only the second flight for that design.
They'll fly out to the Earth-Sun L2 point around a million miles away to make observations there and say hello to the James Webb telescope, before heading back to Earth for a gravity slingshot this time next year and finally arriving in Mars rendezvous September of 2027.
New Glenn is designed to have a reusable booster and they'll be attempting to land it on a ship at sea, so that will also be fun to watch for.
Tech News
- OpenAI has asked the government to expand coverage of tax credits created for integrated circuit manufacturers to also cover incontinent wastrels AI companies even though it is explicitly a manufacturing credit and rent-seeking man-whores AI companies do not actually manufacture anything. (Tom's Hardware)
How about no, Sam?
- AMD has posted patches to the GCC compiler suite to support new features in next year's Zen 6 architecture. (WCCFTech)
Nothing groundbreaking, but the new chips will add support for FP16 (16 bit floating point) and VNNI-INT8 (8 bit integer instructions aimed at neural networks) to AVX-512.
AMD introduced AVX-512 support in Zen 4 in 2022 with an implementation that performed 256 bits of calculation per cycle, and then updated it in Zen 5 last year to perform the full 512 bits in a single cycle.
With the new instructions AMD will offer the most complete implementation of AVX-512, despite the instruction set being Intel's baby.
- Intel also released GCC patches last month for its upcoming Nova Lake processors. (Hot Hardware)
Intel's recent desktop (and laptop) chips do have AVX-512 support built in - in theory - but it was never officially supported in 12th generation chips (2021) and since the 13th generation (2022) has been fused off permanently during manufacturing and cannot be used at all.
With next year's Nova Lake, so far as we can tell from the patches, there will be no support for AVX-512 at all, nor for its nominal successor, AVX10. That makes it a datacenter-only technology if you're an Intel customer, but built in to everything from handheld gaming consoles to supercomputers that use AMD hardware.
- How a ransomware gang encrypted Nevada's government computer systems (Spoiler: DON'T CLICK ON RANDOM LINKS WHEN DOWNLOADING CRITICAL SECURITY SOFTWARE YOU IDIOT) and how they got everything working again without paying ransom. (Bleeping Computer)
Backups.
- Lego has announced a model of the USS Enterprise... 1701-D. (The Independent)
$399.
I'd much rather have the large Millennium Falcon model, though. It's big enough that it's in scale for regular Lego mini-figs, which this 1701-D is very much not.
Musical Interlude
Disclaimer: Swim, fishy, swim!
Posted by: Pixy Misa at
05:52 PM
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Blue Origin needs to land and recover that New Glenn booster. Unlike SpaceX, which has 4 starships in parallel production, and if they lose one, no big deal, the design is still evolving and it was already obsolete anyways, and it's just welded steel, New Glenn is an old-school rocket body with carbon fiber windings aluminum-magnesium alloys and lots of gee-whiz high tech/high cost parts on it. And it takes about a year to build one, and a lot of the construction and assembly stages, they only have a single station, so at best, they have two under construction, and at very different stages of the process. If they lose this booster, they lose the only one they have, and the next one is several months from being complete, with the one after that having barely begun construction.
Posted by: David Eastman at Monday, November 10 2025 04:17 AM (OZKzj)
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Launch was scrubbed because - apparently - there was a cloud. They'll try again at some point.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at Monday, November 10 2025 08:24 AM (PiXy!)
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Knowing your interest in things chip fab....
Posted by: Mauser at Monday, November 10 2025 11:30 AM (XWgGM)
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Was catching up on some of your posts and saw the articles on the explosion in RAM prices, checked NewEgg for an easy price check and yep, my thoughts of upgrading my 6 year old AM4 system to AM5 just went poof for the forseeable future.
Posted by: stargazera5 at Monday, November 10 2025 11:55 AM (7nzlg)
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More about ASML And China trashing one of their machines trying to reverse engineer it. Then having the nerve to call in factory support.
Posted by: Mauser at Monday, November 10 2025 02:58 PM (XWgGM)
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stargazera5 - I built my system just after 128GB kits came out, just before AMD's new graphics cards came out. I got 128GB of RAM at what is now a steal and a 7800 XT at well under MSRP, so it worked out pretty well.
Mauser - yeah, ASML has a serious lock on high-end chipmaking. People who think China will make up their lead quickly are dreaming. They're the only company in the world producing those machines because it's hard.
Mauser - yeah, ASML has a serious lock on high-end chipmaking. People who think China will make up their lead quickly are dreaming. They're the only company in the world producing those machines because it's hard.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at Monday, November 10 2025 07:19 PM (PiXy!)
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No, no, no. PRC has a ton of people, they will totally for sure have a great leap forward. (Which is to say that some of the PRC simps are idjits because they are also misunderstanding their own destructive role in the societies that they identify as helping. Leaving aside Chicom track records, a polity that commits internal mass murders is one that has elites who can fuck up all portions of the economy. The university elites in most countries a) have nothing to do with the immediate economy, the part of the economy they fucked over in 2020, b) have a lot of continued ability to fuck up economies.)
Posted by: PatBuckman at Tuesday, November 11 2025 01:03 AM (rcPLc)
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