• Iran has struck lithium - an estimated 8.5 million tons of it.  (The Register)
  
  That sounds like a lot - and it is.  Global lithium production in 2021 was estimated at 100,000 tons, half of it from Australia.  But there's an estimated 6 million tons just sitting in the Salton Sea stinking up the place.  Lithium is not particularly rare, and not all that valuable, so not a lot of effort has been put into finding more of it when we already have enough for 300 years.
  
  You'll sometimes see figures that by 2030 we'll be using 3 million tons of lithium per year, but that's actually lithium carbonate - Li2CO3 - which is only 10% 20% lithium by mass.  Even at that rate known reserves will last more than a century sixty years.
  
  
  

• So I woke up this morning and for the first time this year I didn't feel an overpowering urge to go right back to sleep.  I didn't get as much done today as I had planned but I did actually get something done.   I washed the floor in the laundry, for example.  I had intended to wash some clothes, but that's not quite how things worked out. 
  
  
  
• Also accidentally bought a couple more computer cases, even though I just bought two expensive Hololive limited edition computer cases that I haven't put anything in yet.
  
  Before I accidentally bought a house last year I was rebuilding my home office, and one of the things I had planned was to build a couple of custom NAS boxes using Silverstone's CS01-HS.  It's an aluminium mini-ITX case with six 2.5" hot swap drive bays plugging into a SAS/SATA backplane, which is not something you normally find in mini-ITX cases, plus room for another two 2.5" drives inside, which is a little more common.
  
  Anyway, fast forward a year and I'm looking at cheap options to get a computer in every room of the new house (which has too many rooms) and I tripped over the CS01S-HS on Amazon.  That's the silver version; I had planned to get one each in silver and black, but apparently the entire range has been discontinued in the past year and Amazon only had a couple of remnant silver models in stock.  I said to myself that I would have bought them if they still had both, but since they don't, I moved on.
  
  And then found the black version under a separate listing, even though the silver version showed the black version as sold out.  And they only had one of the black version, so if I missed out now that was it.
  
  So I bought both.
  
  And now I have to figure out what to do with them.  It's a mini-ITX case so you only have one PCIe slot, and the case itself only provides room for a half-height, half-length card.  And there are very few mini-ITX motherboards with eight SATA ports (even this one only has six and it ain't cheap) so that slot is pretty much dedicated to a SATA controller.  Only pretty much, because you can now get five and six port SATA controllers that fit in an M.2 slot.  I'm not sure why those exist when the one case that would require such a thing has been discontinued, but they do.
  
  My first thought was to use the Ryzen 5700G, which still has the fastest integrated graphics of any readily available desktop CPU.  But that's Socket AM4, and a quick search found exactly one Socket AM4 mini-ITX motherboard in stock in Australia, and that only has gigabit Ethernet, so I'd need to use the sole M.2 slot for a SATA controller and the PCIe slot for 10GbE, which wouldn't leave me with a boot drive separate from storage.
  
  Probably best to use a current model motherboard with at least 2.5Gb Ethernet and not worry about the graphics.  If I want to do media transcoding an Intel CPU is probably the way to go, even though it's worse for gaming.
  
  Why a 2.5" NAS?  As I mentioned yesterday, SSDs have already fallen in price by 30% this year.  I'm going to stuff it full of cheap SATA SSDs and run ZFS.  It won't be cheap, but good dedicated NASes aren't cheap either, unless your employer happens to be throwing them out...  Which is why all my Synology boxes date back to 2013 and really need replacing.
  
  
  
• The importance of being ECC.  (Robert Felder)
  
  At least DDR5 has on-die ECC, and some really weird systems with nominally non-ECC RAM have block ECC as well.  I wonder if any regular motherboards have support for that, since it seems you can do it with regular Intel CPUs.
  
  
  
• Lemon-derived extracellular vesicle-like nanoparticles block the progression of kidney stones by antagonizing endoplasmic reticulum stress in renal tubular cells.  (ACS)
  
  Shut up and take my money.
  
  In rats.
  
  Squeak.
  
  
  
• Although that Gigabyte Aero 14 OLED laptop I mentioned yesterday is very tempting, the truth is now that I've settled in in New House City I only expect to travel any real distance about once a year.
  
  And for the same price as that laptop (13700H, 16GB of RAM, 1TB SSD, RTX 4050) I can get a desktop system with a 13500 (almost exactly the same as the 13700H laptop chip), 128GB of RAM, 2TB of SSD, and a Radeon 6700...  And 24TB of hard disk storage as well, just because.
  
  So I think that's what I'll do.

Posted by: The Brickmuppet at Monday, March 06 2023 02:57 AM (rjbMB)

Posted by: Pat Buckman at Monday, March 06 2023 12:01 PM (r9O5h)

Posted by: Otaquanii at Monday, March 06 2023 07:55 PM (8K2RZ)

Hide Comments | Add Comment

• Prices of SSDs are in free fall because (a) nobody is buying anything and (b) there isn't a cartel propping prices up.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Western Digital's 1TB SN770 - a basic but generally decent drive - has dropped from $90 at the beginning of January (and since it is still February that's less than two months ago) to $60 today.  The 2TB model is also great value at $120.
  
  Prices are expected to continue falling at a slower pace during the year.  Manufacturers are cutting production but since it takes months for wafers to go through the pipeline and turn into chips that get put into SSDs, that's going to take a while to have any effect.
  
  
  
• The 2TB Samsung 980 Pro is currently available for $154.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  I'd suggest spending another five bucks and getting the Western Digital SN850X, because Samsung's drives have had some...  Problems, lately.

• The US government has blacklisted Inspur, Loongson, and 33 other Chinese tech companies.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Loongson makes crappy CPUs in China, for China.  Nobody wants them, not even China, except Russia.  China is stuck making chips at 14nm while Taiwan and South Korea are ramping up production on 3nm, but Russia is stuck at 65nm, which is 18 years out of date as far as the rest of the world is concerned.
  
  Inspur however is the largest server manufacturer you've never heard of, producing about 10% of the servers in the world.  That is going to cause some ripples.
  
  
  
• The Radeon 780M - the integrated graphics in, um...  The 7940HS, that's the one - is as fast as a GTX 1650 Ti or something.  (WCCFTech)
  
  That's what the headline says, but the scores given in the article do not include the 1650 Ti, so take it with a pinch of pepper.  It's only 25% faster than the previous generation 680M, and for that it requires fast new 7500MHz LPDDR5X RAM, but it still it is 150% faster than Intel's best integrated graphics solution.
  
  
  
• Gigabyte's AERO 14 OLED BMF is a 14" laptop weighing 1.49kg (22,994 grains) with a 2880x1800 OLED display (you might have guessed that), an Intel 13700H CPU with 6 P cores and 8 E cores, a 1TB SSD, two Thunderbolt 4 ports, one regular USB, HDMI 2.1, a microSD slot, a 1/8" audio jack, a separate power connector if you don't want to charge via Thunderbolt, Nvidia RTX 4050 graphics with 6GB of dedicated VRAM, the Four Essential Keys in their proper location....  And 16GB of soldered LPDDR5 RAM that is impossible to ever upgrade because fuck you that's why.  (Gigabyte)
  
  If they had a 32GB option, it would be the perfect small laptop.
  
  They do not have a 32GB option.
  
  There is a larger 16" model with a 3840x2400 OLED display, RTX 4060 or 4070 graphics options, and actual DIMM slots so that it's not instant e-waste.  But that's also 40% heavier.
  
  And 30% to 50% more expensive.

Posted by: Rick C at Sunday, March 05 2023 08:38 AM (BMUHC)

Hide Comments | Add Comment

• The 7950X3D is not four times faster than the regular 7950X when using the integrated graphics.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  The original story from PC Magazine has been updated to reflect the fact that the figures for the 7950X were originally taken with an outdated driver that gave radically lower than normal performance.
  
  The updated tests now show that the integrated graphics performance of AMD and Intel's desktop chips is basically identical.  AMD provides one sixth the performance of last year's laptop chips, where Intel provides one third the performance of this year's laptop chips, but AMD's laptop chips from last year had twice the graphics performance of Intel's chips from this year, so for example the racing game F1 22 gets exactly 33 fps at 1080p, lowest quality, whether you're on a 7950X, 7950X3D, or 13900K.
  
  Or a 13500, which seems like the best option from Intel's desktop lineup.  Six P cores and eight E cores at 65W.  I'm thinking of getting two 13500 systems rather than one big 7900X or 7950X system
  
  
  

Tech News

• If you want to get a 7950X3D or 7900X3D you might have to wait.  (WCCFTech)
  
  I checked my two regular fixers and both are out of the 7950X3D, while one of them still has the 7900X3D available.
  
  I'm not planning to buy either one, though.  There's notable benefit for non-gaming tasks and the required drivers make everything more complicated.  At least with Intel chips the P cores are always faster than the E cores.  On the X3D chips, which cores are faster varies with the application.
  
  
  
• If you need a 64 port 800Gb Ethernet switch chip, Marvell has you covered.  (Serve the Home)
  
  Yes, that's 51.2 terabits per second of switch bandwidth.  In a single chip.
  
  
  
• If you need a 64 port 800Gb Ethernet switch chip with integrated photon torpedoes, Broadcom has you covered.  (Serve the Home)
  
  Yes, that's 51.2 teratons of photnuclear payload.  In a single chip.
  
  
  
• A post-MWC roundup including a hands-on repair of that repairable Nokia phone.  (The Verge)
  
  In this case the "repair" consists simply of replacing the battery, but if it's something a tech journalist can do - in seven minutes - your dog can probably do the same.
  
  
  
• The Secret Service and ICE illegally spied on civilians.  A lot.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  "Was that wrong?", they asked.  "Should we not have done that?"

Posted by: Otaquanii at Saturday, March 04 2023 09:52 PM (8K2RZ)

Hide Comments | Add Comment

• Fixed the blog formatting.  Didn't finish work until after midnight yesterday, so I didn't notice.
  
  
  
• AMD's new 7950X3D can deliver up to four times the gaming performance of the regular 7950X...  When using the integrated graphics.  (WCCFTech)
  
  Which is weird, but more importantly highlights the fact that the integrated graphics on AMD's desktop CPUs provide only one sixth the performance of their laptop chips.  That means they're slower than the integrated graphics on Intel's desktop chips, and you shouldn't buy one expecting to be able to play games without a separate graphics card.
  
  Actually, something about those benchmark numbers doesn't add up; the scores on the regular AMD chips are too low; they should be much closer to the Intel scores.

• Meanwhile AMD's 7945HX is faster than Intel's 13980HX while using 40% less power and has the same crappy integrated graphics as the desktop version.  (WCCFTech)
  
  The 7945HX is a 16 core laptop chip that uses as much as 120W, which is fine for a desktop but a lot for a laptop.  The 13980HX is a 24 core laptop chip that can use more than 200W, which is simply too much.
  
  
  
• PCIe 5.0 SSDs are finally here.  Don't buy one.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  For the $350 price of a 2TB PCIe 5.0 SSD you can get two 2TB PCIe 4.0 SSDs, run them in RAID-0, get 40% better performance and twice the capacity, and still have a little money left over.
  
  PCIe 5.0 will matter eventually, but it's not used in the one place it would actually make sense, on the connection between the CPU and the chipset.  Both AMD and Intel have kept that at PCIe 4.0, because PCIe 5.0 costs too much and runs too hot.  Though all their current desktop chips support it.
  
  
  
• The Resonance Theory of Consciousness is one of the dumbest things I've ever seen.  (Frontiers in Human Neuroscience)
  
  This came up in a YouTube channel I've been watching lately, and it's like explaining how cars work by studying only the noise they make.  Cars make noise when they move, therefore it's the noise that makes them move.
  
  It's cargo cult science.

Posted by: PatBuckman at Thursday, March 02 2023 12:42 AM (r9O5h)

Posted by: Don at Thursday, March 02 2023 01:00 AM (V0jOj)

Posted by: Rick C at Thursday, March 02 2023 05:21 AM (BMUHC)

Hide Comments | Add Comment

• AMD's top-of-the-line Ryzen 7950X3D is here and is a thing that exists.  (AnandTech)
  
  One the one hand, it's very fast in most games and for heavy multi-threaded workloads like rendering animated films or compiling the entire Linux kernel, though in the latter case it's usually a little slow than the regular 7950X.
  
  On the other hand, for simpler single-threaded applications it can be slower than much cheaper chips like the Ryzen 7600 or Intel's 13600K.
  
  The reason is that the 7950X3D has mismatched cores.  One chiplet runs at full speed, while the other chiplet runs several hundred megahertz slower but has an extra 64MB of cache. 
  
  That means that you want to run your programs on the chiplet that gives the best results for that particular code.  For games that's usually the chiplet with the cache; for applications it's usually the other one.  AMD has drivers for Windows to do this automatically but it doesn't always pick the right cores.
  
  If your task uses all sixteen cores then it doesn't matter and you're off to the races.  If you pick the right game you can also see huge performance gains over any other chip.  But it the driver picks the wrong core things might slow down by 12% or so against the regular - and cheaper - 7950X.
  
  If you're building a gaming system you will probably want to wait for the 7800X3D, which has none of this complexity.  If you're building a server or a workstation, you'll be fine with the regular 7950X - or the 7900X, or the 7900.
  
  The one notable - very, very notable - thing that comes out of these benchmarks is that while the 7950X3D is a 120W part and Intel's competing 13900K is a 125W part, under full load the AMD chip uses 140W and the Intel chip uses 330W.  
  
  Which is far too much.  Don't buy the 13900K.  Even the 13600K uses 100W more than the 7950X3D.
  
  You can dial down the power consumption of both AMD and Intel chips.  AMD's chips suffer minimal performance loss until you get to really low power consumption, while the performance impact on Intel chips is immediate and significant.

• How does the Ryzen 7950X3D perform under Linux? It's complicated.  (Phoronix)
  
  On a geometric mean of 400 benchmarks (!) it's 3% slower than the regular 7950X while using 40% less power.  Compared to the 13900K it's 11% faster while again using 40% less power.
  
  On some specific benchmarks that extra cache lets it blow everything else out of the water, so if you are running some specific computational kernel, it's worth taking a look through those benchmarks; you might get a 50% speedup over any other desktop chip at minimal cost.
  
  
  
• Leaks have revealed the details of the Z890 for Intel's Meteor Lake-S desktop CPUs - which other leaks suggest have been cancelled.  (WCCFTech)
  
  There will be Meteor Lake laptop chips, but desktops are probably stuck with, uh, hang on...  With Raptor Lake until next year.
  
  
  
• The TP-Link TL-SH1832 is a fanless 24 port 2.5Gb Ethernet switch with 8 10GbE SFP+ ports that costs as little as $400 if you could buy it which you mostly can't.  (Serve the Home)
  
  I'd rather that the SFP+ ports were RJ45, but it doesn't matter a whole lot if you can only get it via SuperBuy for Taobao.
  
  
  
• Elon Musk has laid off more Twitter staff bringing the total employees down to around 2000, and is waving generous stock bonuses at the ones who made the cut.  (The Verge)
  
  Before Musk took over Twitter employed 7500 people directly plus over 5000 contractors, so he's cut costs rather significantly.

  As one employee who was just laid off told me, "I think he’s just tearing this thing down to the studs and trying to run as lean as possible till the market turns around."

  Maybe hire that one back; he's smarter than the entire mainstream media put together.
  
  

• Mobile World Conference starts today, so here's a roundup of all the great new products on offer.  (The Verge)
  
  Yeah, there's nothing.
  
  
  

Tech News

• Can you give me a list so I can short the hell out of them>  Some companies are already replacing workers with ChatGPT, noting that despite the warnings from ChatGPT developer OpenAI to the effect that ChatGPT is "wack" and "completely irresponsible" and "entirely lacking in comprehension of the most basic principles of everyday life", so were their workers.  (Yahoo)
  
  Maybe I embellished that a little, but you know it's true.
  
  
  
• Republicans - and specifically Chris Rufo - have apparently pounced on "woke AI", a fringe theory that companies are deliberately biasing AI to spout communist propaganda, bolstered only but the fact that companies are deliberately biasing AI to spout communist propaganda.  (Washington Post)
  
  At least it keeps us fit.
  
  
  
• AMD's W6800X is faster than any graphics card except the RTX 4090.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  You can't buy one, though, and even if you could buy one you couldn't plug it into a PC - it was made exclusively for the Mac Pro, so that's $6000 for the cheapest configuration and another $2200 for the graphics card.  The guy who ran the benchmark this thing used a riser card and a soldering iron to make it work.
  
  
  

Posted by: normal at Monday, February 27 2023 10:52 PM (obo9H)

Posted by: Otaquanii at Tuesday, February 28 2023 09:48 PM (JQCvD)

Hide Comments | Add Comment

• Nvidia predicts that within ten years we'll have AI models a million times more powerful than ChatGPT.  (PC Gamer)
  
  A million times useless then.
  
  And Nvidia would say that, because ChatGPT runs on approximately $100 million worth of Nvidia graphics cards.  (Modern graphics cards are quite good at running AI calculations, and cheaper than dedicated AI hardware.)
  
  
  
• I'm not the only person who sees this connection.  (Antipope)
  
  Charlie Stross is a science fiction writer who has written extensively on the technological singularity, where I think the singularity is bullshit, but on this we see eye to eye.

• I'm sorry, Dave. I'm afraid you're a racist.  Would you let ChatGPT control your home?  (The Verge)
  
  I mean, cheaper than burning it down, I guess.  The only smart device I have in my home - which is brand new - is the washing machine, which is sulking because I have not downloaded its useless companion app.  Well, I guess also the interface for the solar panels, but that actually pays me money for the power I feed back to the grid.
  
  
  
• It's time for Google to spin off YouTube.  (The Economist)
  
  On the one hand, it's impossible for the outcome to be any worse than it is in the clutches of the hyperwoke and institutionally corrupt Google.
  
  On the other hand, the market is in the shitter right now.
  
  
  
• The Ryzen 7950X3D averages 11% faster than Intel's 13900K across a range of game benchmarks.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Which should make it the fasting gaming CPU available, except that rumours suggest the cheaper 7800X3D might actually be faster - for games, not overall.  Games don't really use more than 8 cores, and the 7950 has 16.  (The 13900K has 24.)
  
  
  
• Nokia has launched a repairable budget phone.  (The Guardian)
  
  Budget seems to be pretty accurate for once - it's priced at around $180 - and repairable means you can buy and replace the battery, display, and power connector yourself.  Those are by far the most likely components to fail, so it's a good start.
  
  It has a 720p screen, which is fine at that price, 4GB RAM, 128GB of storage, and an adequate CPU with dual A75 and six A55 cores.  It has a microSD slot and a headphone jack - check - and for some reason a 50MP main camera, which is a lot for a budget phone.
  
  There remains the question of how good the rest of the camera system is - the optics and software - but apart from the 720p screen (good but not great) it seems to have everything you need if you use your phone for phone stuff.
  
  
  
• The best graphics cards for running Minecraft RT.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Regular Minecraft will run on anything - it's the server and not your graphics card that is most likely to choke.  Minecraft RT adds ray tracing, and while it looks pretty, if you want to play it at 4K at 60 fps there is exactly one graphics card capable of that and it costs $1600.  If you'll settle for 1080p and 30fps there are rather a lot more options.

Posted by: Mauser at Monday, February 27 2023 11:19 AM (BzEjn)

Posted by: Mauser at Monday, February 27 2023 11:24 AM (BzEjn)

Posted by: Mauser at Monday, February 27 2023 11:26 AM (BzEjn)

Posted by: Otaquanii at Monday, February 27 2023 07:54 PM (8K2RZ)

Hide Comments | Add Comment

• Intel's 4nm process node has entered production, with the first consumer product - the company's 14th generation Meteor Lake CPUs - due late this year.  (WCCFTech)
  
  It takes months for a chip to go through an advanced production pipeline, so that delay is entirely expected.
  
  TSMC and Samsung have both started production at 3nm, so this doesn't quite catch Intel up with the most advanced process technology, but Intel expects its own 3nm process to come on line before the end of the year - to be followed by 2nm in the first half of 2024 and 1.8nm in the second half.
  
  All these nm numbers are fictional - if transistors were really 2nm across they wouldn't work - but the three companies use roughly the same methods for calculating their made up numbers so the lies are at least comparable.
  
  Meteor Lake looks to be a laptop-only CPU generation; there will be a refreshed version of Raptor lake for desktops this year, probably still based on 7nm.  This might reduce Meteor Lake's power consumption, which would be good news.  Alder Lake (12th gen) and Raptor Lake (13th gen) laptops are fast but are not known for amazing battery life.
  
  AMD meanwhile is using a mix of TSMC's 4nm, 5nm, 6nm, and 7nm for its own chips.  Apple has reserved all of TSMC's early 3nm production - known as N3 - but there are four new variants of 3nm coming online over the next year and a half, and next year's Zen 5 chips (Ryzen 8000 or 9000) are planned to use one of those.

• Microsoft's upcoming Surface Laptop Studio 2 will use one of those power hungry 13th generation chips.  (WCCFTech)
  
  The current model uses a 4 core 11th gen chip so the new model with 14 cores will be a lot faster, but battery life is going to take a step backwards, something we've already seen with the Surface Laptop 5 (the non-Studio version)
  
  I also predict it won't have the Four Essential Keys.
  
  
  
• Not exactly tech news but Warner Bros is producing a new series of Lord of the Rings films.  (Variety)
  
  If you thought they'd already produced three films from the three volumes of the Lord of the Rings, you'd be correct, so it's not clear what story these will follow.  Amazon has already strip-mined the appendices for its Rings of Power train wreck, so it's probably not that.
  
  Still, I expect nothing good to come of this.
  
  
  
• How will the Universe end?  (Quanta)
  
  Scientists now predict that the Universe will be renewed for a fourth and final season and then be abruptly cancelled just as shooting begins.
  
  
  
• If you want a classic microcomputer but just want it to sit there and look cute because it's easier to emulate them than maintain fussy failing hardware Rocky Bergen has you covered.  (Rocky Bergen)
  
  Free to download.  You'll need a colour printer, some sharp scissors, and glue.

Posted by: normal at Sunday, February 26 2023 01:54 AM (obo9H)

Posted by: normal at Sunday, February 26 2023 02:00 AM (obo9H)

Hide Comments | Add Comment

• If you're looking for a workstation that you can pick up and take with you AMD's new "Dragon Range" 7945HX could be the CPU for you.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  On single-threaded tasks it's 25% faster than last year's 6900HX, but on multi-threaded workloads it's twice as fast.  Which it should be, because the 6900HX has eight cores and the 7945HX has sixteen.
  
  Which is a lot for a laptop.  Intel's 13980HX has 24 cores, but 16 of those are half-speed Efficiency cores, so the two CPUs offer roughly the same performance.
  
  These should be roughly the speed of the 12 core desktop Ryzen 7900, and at least on the AMD side use a similar amount of power - the 7900 is the low-power version of the 7900X.  The Intel laptop chip has a peak power consumption of 157W compared to 89W for the desktop 7900.

• G.Skill has announced a range of DDR5 registered ECC RAM for servers and more significantly workstations like Intel's new W-2400 and W-3400 range.  (WCCFTech)
  
  Good, because I literally couldn't find anything suitable at any of the usual places - not Amazon, not Newegg, not Micro Center.
  
  
  
• How are Intel's Arc graphics cards holding up after a few months of driver updates?  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Pretty good.  Performance on current games is down slightly, but older games that still use DirectX 9 run an average of 77% faster.
  
  Also they've cut the price on the A750, making it a reasonably attractive option.