• Intel's 7nm process is a year behind schedule.  (AnandTech)
  
  Desktop 7nm is now expected by the end of 2022, with server parts in 2023 - more than three years behind AMD.
  
  This is a driving factor behind Intel's "Foveros" die stacking technology.  If you're tightly constrained on your leading-edge process, breaking out I/O functions to a second chiplet produced on an older process in plentiful supply has a multitude of benefits.
  
  It's probably possible to build a 64-core Zen processor on a single die, but shipping it in volume is an entirely different question.
  
  And despite these problems, Intel just posted another record quarterly profit.
  
  
  
• Putting the new Ryzen 4000 desktop APUs through their paces.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  They're not slow.  CPU side competes with Intel's brand new 10700K, and graphics side can play League of Legends - admittedly not the most GPU intensive game - at over 100FPS on max settings at 4K.
  
  
  
• Prices for the 4000 Pro desktop APUs have also leaked.  (WCCFTech)
  
  It's a shame you can't buy them because they're pretty good value.  The 6 core / 7 CU 4650G Pro comes in at $209, just $10 more than the 3600 Pro without GPU.
  
  
  
• The reason I'm so hyped for the Ryzen APUs is that this is just the beginning.  At 5nm, with DDR5 RAM, AMD will be able to double everything - 16 cores and 16 CUs - while keeping the die size the same and still keeping TDP under control.
  
  The 15W Zen 2 laptop chips are already faster than my 65W Zen 1 desktop CPU, and when AMD starts shipping 5nm parts they'll be Zen 3 if not Zen 4.
  
  A 16 CU Navi IGP would still be slower than my current RX 580, but would certainly not be slow.
  
  Going much beyond that would require either a large graphics cache or more memory channels - which is what we see in the Xbox Series X and Playstation 5.  Both of those are really just Ryzen APUs with large IGPs.
  
  A Ryzen APU with quad-channel DDR5 would deliver gaming performance not far behind those consoles, but I'm not sure if the market is ready for it.
  
  
  

Posted by: normal at Saturday, July 25 2020 11:32 PM (obo9H)

Hide Comments | Add Comment

• The Xiaomi Mi 10 Pro provides near flagship specs for just €999.  (AnandTech)
  
  Yay, I guess.
  
  
  
• Shoulda bought AMD stock back in 2016.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Of course, had no money back in 2016.
  
  AMD has its earnings call next week, and will likely give us hints of future goodies to fuel uninformed speculation by tech bloggers.  Cough cough.
  
  
  
• TechDirt is not partisan.  (TechDirt)
  
  Whenever you see a publication insist that it is not partisan, you know you have at most three paragraphs before they accuse Trump of putting children in cages.
  
  
  
• Why Google needs a $99 tablet.  (ZDNet)
  
  I'd settle for $199 if it's any good.  (The article gives a reasonable list of requirements and says $150, despite the headline.)
  
  
  
• Every problem I have with PyPy is due to its garbage collection.
  
  Case in point: If you use partials inside a loop in a Mustache template and process it through Pystache under PyPy, it can be an order of magnitude slower than CPython, despite the fact that PyPy averages 4.4x faster than CPython across a broad suite of benchmarks.  (And indeed outside of this specific case, Pystache is 4.5x faster under PyPy than CPython.)
  
  Another case in point: PyPy uses far more memory than Python.  Simple tasks that work fine under Python can leak gigabytes of memory and get the attention of the OOMK if you're not paying attention.
  
  I'm not sure how central to PyPy's performance that choice of garbage collection algorithm is to PyPy's performance, but it's annoying since it really has no other major flaws.  (Startup time for the JIT aside.)
  
  On the other hand, I was able to shave 1.5 seconds off the load time of a web application at my day job this afternoon.  We migrated servers a couple of months ago, from aging physical servers to the cloud, and in the process replaced EOL'd CPython 2.7 with still-supported PyPy 7.2.  This one app had been slow ever since, and today I finally got time to go down that rabbit hole.
  
  
  
• In the fuck this shit department:
  
  
  
  
  We have Ethereum integrations into several of our apps at my day job.  Those integrations start to have problems when the gas price is above 4, and stop working when it's above 10 unless someone manually intervenes.
  
  Fortunately, at a gas price of 100 nobody's Ethereum integrations are working.  It's like using Amazon or Cloudflare - if they go down, so does half the internet, so no-one blames you for it.
  
  

Posted by: normal at Friday, July 24 2020 11:20 AM (obo9H)

Posted by: normal at Friday, July 24 2020 11:26 AM (obo9H)

Posted by: Rick C at Friday, July 24 2020 02:32 PM (Iwkd4)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Friday, July 24 2020 02:38 PM (PiXy!)

Hide Comments | Add Comment

• Metacritic sees its new role as defending terrible games that no-one likes.  (Engadget)
  
  Mere mortals who actually paid for the game will be required to wait 36 hours before submitting their reviews.  The useful idiots of the gaming press are under no such restrictions, of course.
  
  
  
• You can't get the Ryzen 4000 desktop APUs just yet, but that hasn't stopped people overclocking them.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  In this case the victim was a 4750G Pro and the target was the memory bus, which got cranked all the way up to 6234 MHz.  That's quite a lot.
  
  The 4000 series APUs are designed to work in laptops with soldered LPDDR4X memory at 4266MHz, so evidently the memory controller has been significantly upgraded.  Another 3% and it will be at DDR5 speeds.
  
  
  
• Meanwhile ASRock looks set to release an updated embedded computer board based on Ryzen 4000 laptop parts.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Their existing embedded boards are based on Ryzen Embedded processors, which are first-generation 14nm parts.  Not bad, but both significantly slower and more power-hungry than the latest chips.
  
  
  
• 10.16 == 11 if you're Apple.  (Eclectic Light)
  
  Apps running the latest version of MacOS will return the OS version as either 10.16 or 11 depending on how they are compiled.  That's not going to cause any problems.
  
  
  
• Sabrent has a 4TB PCIe 4.0 M.2 SSD available for just...  US$750?  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  I mean, the price isn't terrible, but - wait, QLC?  Hell no.

• AMD launched 12 4000-series desktop APUs and 6 new 3000-series APUs and you can't buy any of them.  (AnandTech)
  
  All of them - 3000 and 4000, Pro and non-pro, are OEM-only.
  
  That sucks.
  
  Up to 8 cores / 16 threads, top clock speeds of 4.4GHz, and over 2 TFLOPs single-precision on the GPU side.
  
  
  
• Meanwhile the 4000U range has started showing up in all-in-one desktops.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  The only real flaw with my Inspiron 27 is that it needs to cool a 65W CPU and a 150W CPU.  It's never silent and can get annoying when playing games.  My iMac is silent most of the time, but when it really gets cranking it's even louder than the Dell.
  
  A 15W APU in a 24" or 27" monitor housing can probably just rely on passive cooling.  We've already seen that they don't go into thermal shutdown no matter how you abuse them.
  
  
  
• Benchmarking every CPU.  (AnandTech)
  
  Well, every CPU from Intel and AMD since 2010, anyway.
  
  Though a project to benchmark every CPU would be far more interesting.  Find a working IAPX 432 and a Linn Rekursiv and...
  
  
  
• Samsung's bad XML day.  (.clue)
  
  I saw this story before but didn't realise how widespread or intractably it was.  Samsung accidentally remotely bricked a huge number of their Blu-Ray players, every single one that picked up the latest update.  And you can't factory-reset them to get out of it.

• Says everything that needs to be said, really.
  
  

Posted by: Jay at Wednesday, July 22 2020 03:35 AM (0jVI9)

Posted by: Rick C at Wednesday, July 22 2020 05:15 AM (Iwkd4)

Posted by: J Greely at Wednesday, July 22 2020 05:28 AM (ZlYZd)

Hide Comments | Add Comment

• At last an inexpensive >1Gb Ethernet switch.  (AnandTech)
  
  This only took seven forevers.  Good fucking work, entire tech industry.
  
  
  
• How to install Windows 10 on your Raspberry Pi.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Step 1: Don't.
  
  Though to be fair, at least the Raspberry Pi can used for something else after you get tired of watching a hamster ride a bicycle.
  
  
  
• How to run Steam games on a Raspberry Pi.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Fun game: How many computers have you owned that collectively were less powerful than a Raspberry Pi?  I have four Macs, a Silicon Graphics O2 and a Sun Ultra 5 that combined wouldn't put a dent in it.
  
  
  
• Loren Chariot Addy the Titbit of Cholame questioned Cele Garth Alda and 16 windy frogs.  (GitHub)
  
  This makes some slight sense.  I once had difficulty tracing a bug in a large customer-service app because users weren't reporting it consistently, so I changed it to show up as Fruitcake Error.  I got 100% of instances reported and was able to fix the problem.
  
  What?  Oh.  It turnes UUIDs into vaguely Shakespearean and grammatically correct nonsense.
  
  
  
• Well, if your entire lab disappears, that would be a sign.  (Quanta)
  
  Kind of like the old question, How do you tell when there's an elephant in your refrigerator?
  
  
  
• The UAE has launched a Mars probe, from Japan.
  
  
  
  
  I think this is a good development.  Probably.

Not At All Tech News

• H.R. 6666 - the Testing, Reaching, And Contacting Everyone (TRACE) Act - has 66 sponsors.  (Congress.gov)
  
  The writers for 2020 are getting lazy.
  
  
  

Posted by: Jay at Tuesday, July 21 2020 09:52 AM (0jVI9)

Posted by: Rick C at Tuesday, July 21 2020 01:48 PM (Iwkd4)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Tuesday, July 21 2020 11:05 PM (PiXy!)

Hide Comments | Add Comment

• Citrine is a localised programming language.  (Citrine-lang.org)
  
  That is, the code is automatically translated into your preferred natural language - English, Danish, Swahili, whatever.  All of it.  Keywords, variables, comments, everything.
  
  This is a gloriously terrible idea.
  
  
  
• Things unexpectedly named after people.
  
  Also bloom filters and currying, a term used in functional programming purely to annoy people new to functional programming.
  
  Some more in the comments at Hacker News.  Including the Children's python, named after John George Children.
  
  
  
• How remote work could destroy Silicon Valley.  (Medium)
  
  That or a well-aimed comet.  I'm up for whatever it takes.

Tech News

• A further look at the Twitter hack. (Krebs on Security)
  
  
  
• And what Twitter themselves are saying. (Twitter)
  
  
• Attackers were not able to view previous account passwords, as those are not stored in plain text or available through the tools used in the attack.
  

I should bloody hope not.


• Attackers were able to view personal information including email addresses and phone numbers, which are displayed to some users of our internal support tools.
  
  
And let's pause a moment to reflect that Twitter will lock your account for the most trivial of reasons - or none at all - and force you to provide a phone number to unlock it again.


• In cases where an account was taken over by the attacker, they may have been able to view additional information. Our forensic investigation of these activities is still ongoing.
  
  
Safest to assume that everything on Twitter is now in the hands of the hackers.

Speculation is swirling that the Bitcoin scam was a smokescreen to divert attention from the actual target. Twitter have confirmed that full data for certain accounts was downloaded during the hack - but that those were not verified accounts.




Curiouser - as Alice would say - and curiouser.




• Cloudflare fell over. (Cloudflare)
  
  Well, sort of.

  The affected locations were San Jose, Dallas, Seattle, Los Angeles, Chicago, Washington, DC, Richmond, Newark, Atlanta, London, Amsterdam, Frankfurt, Paris, Stockholm, Moscow, St. Petersburg, São Paulo, Curitiba, and Porto Alegre. Other locations continued to operate normally.

  That sounds like a lot of locations but Cloudflare has a lot of locations.

The event sounds like a replay of the Northeast blackout of 1965. An issue with one network link caused traffic to be re-routed, which overloaded that link causing the combined traffic to be re-routed, and so on until large parts of the core network collapsed.

The major difference being that it took less than two hours to fix everything.

The other side of this is that a lot of sites use resources - JavaScript, CSS, fonts - from CDNs that are actually provided via Cloudflare.  So it doesn't really matter if you host your own site unless you host everything yourself.

And by everything I mean everything.  Hetzner (a major German hosting company) uses Cloudflare's DNS, so the failure cascaded to them as well.



• Among the sites affected were GitLab, Patreon, Authy, Downdetector, and BleepingComputer.  (BleepingComputer)
  
  I use some of those.
  
  
  
  
  


• Apple Watch is apparently your mother.  (9to5Mac)
  
  
  
• The Asus PN50 contains the Ryzen 7 4800U, making it by far the most powerful NUC available unless...  No, pretty sure this one is real.  (WCCFTech)
  
  That's the full 8-core/16-thread version.  It's about 30% faster single-threaded and 20% faster multi-threaded than my current Ryzen 7 1700.
  
  The PN50 has HDMI, Ethernet, three USB-A ports (5Gbit), two USB-C ports (10Gbit) with DisplayPort support, dual built-in microphones, an IR receiver, WiFi 6, a headphone jack and a microSD slot.  Room inside for two SO-DIMMs, an M.2 SSD and a 2.5" disk drive, and a tiny option slot that supports a choice of VGA, serial, a full-size DisplayPort, or a second Ethernet port.
  
  4.5x4.5x2".
  
  
  
• You're not shadowbanned.  It's just a coincidence that every single search and activity listing on our site accidentally excludes your content.
  
  
  
  Also please ignore the leaked screenshots showing the huge SHADOWBAN button on our internal management software.  That's simply a spelling error.
  
  
  
• Smalltalk has been ported to the Raspberry Pi.  (GitHub)
  
  By which I don't mean that the Smalltalk language is running on Linux which in turn runs on the Raspberry Pi, because that was already available.
  
  Smalltalk 80 was effectively a complete operating system, and that is now running directly on the Raspberry Pi, with nothing between you and the bare metal.
  
  
  
• Oh, and one other thing: Fuck this shit.
  
  
  
  
  A significant percentage of my day job involves integrations with Ethereum. Ethereum is hopelessly broken right now, and has been for weeks, with no end in sight.  Basically any time that chart goes above, say, 4, Ethereum-based apps run into problems.  At 40 they're deader than a doornail.
  
  Centralised solutions suffer from single points of failure, but distributed solutions suffer from infinitely many points of failure.
  

• Andrew Cuomo killed so many people that he's lost Vox.
  
  
  
  
  

Video of the Day

Posted by: normal at Sunday, July 19 2020 06:29 AM (obo9H)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Tuesday, July 21 2020 12:43 AM (PiXy!)

Hide Comments | Add Comment

• The 2020 Dell XPS 13 is not entirely awful.  (AnandTech)
  
  The 3840x2400 screen is particularly nice.  But it has neither the four essential keys nor an AMD CPU, so I'm not interested.
  
  
  
• So that's a yes?  (Tech Crunch)
  
  An interesting statement from Twitter:
  
  
  
  
  So first of all, user accounts weren't hacked.  Twitter itself was hacked - with inside help.  (Vice)
  
  Secondly....  Why does this need to be said?  It should be impossible for passwords to be accessed.
  
  Thirdly, this event makes those MariaDB temporal tables even more intriguing.  Even if the application goes horribly wrong, the database will continue right on logging every change for you.
  
  
  
• I have a perpetual professional license for FontAwesome 5.0.
  
  They just announced 6.0.
  
  Doh!
  
  Well, $49 per year is not terrible.
  
  
  
• Edge 84 is out.  (Thurrott.com)
  
  And so is Thunderbird 78.  (Thunderbird.net)
  
  Is there any point to version numbers any more?
  
  
  
• Patreon probably shouldn't oughta have done that.
  
  
  
  After being sued by a bunch of patrons of an account they suspended (and by suspended I mean killed deader than a doornail), Patreon changed their terms of services, and then countersued under the new terms of service claiming that they applied at the time of the original suit.
  
  Which they weren't.
  
  
  
• Apparently the difference between Window Blinds and Curtains is that Window Blinds works across multiple versions of Windows but is hacky and sometimes does weird stuff, where Curtains is Windows 10 only but is a much cleaner implementation because of that.  They both do the same thing, essentially - make Windows look like something else.
  
  Probably best not to run both at the same time.
  
  
  
• I figured out what Microsoft are doing with the RAM in the Xbox Series X.  
  
  It has a 320-bit memory bus - so 10 32-bit chips or 5 64-bit chips - but 16GB of total RAM.  10GB is for video and is 320 bits wide and 6 GB is for the OS and applications and is 192 bits wide.
  
  I originally thought they had two banks of RAM, which I didn't know was possible with GDDR6.  But no, they have one bank, it's just that 6 of the chips are 2GB and are used for both graphics and applications, and the other 4 are 1GB and are used for graphics only.
  
  It would have been simpler to just have 20GB of RAM; this is purely a cost-saving move.

Anime Opening Theme of the Day

Posted by: Karl Drexler at Saturday, July 18 2020 10:49 AM (4+8eU)

Posted by: cxt217 at Saturday, July 18 2020 11:36 AM (4i7w0)

Posted by: The Brickmuppet at Saturday, July 18 2020 07:26 PM (5iiQK)

Hide Comments | Add Comment

• 1TBVPS.com actually also sells 2TB VPSes.  (1TBVPS.com)
  
  They don't both to draw attention to the fact though.
  
  
  
• So, yeah, Twitter had a bad day.  (Ars Technica)
  
  It appears that the hackers either had inside help or Twitter are even more incompetent than you'd expect, because they had access to Twitter's internal account admin systems.
  
  Screenshots of those admin systems have been floating about on Twitter and elsewhere.  Which screenshots, people are noting, show the shadowban status of accounts.
  
  Wich @Jack swore before Congress that Twitter doesn't do.
  
  
  
• Lenovo has announced more AMD systems, both laptops and desktops.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  They look reasonable except for some of the configuration restrictions.  Why on Earth would you only offer up to 2TB disk drives?  They do that in the P620 workstation too - most powerful CPU in existence, maximum drive size only 4TB.
  
  
  
• What's coming with Zen 3:
  
  10-15% better IPC, 5% better clock speeds, 8 cores per cluster, and...  DDR5?  Maybe.
  
  
  
  It will be launching this year, that much has been announced publicly.

Posted by: Rick C at Friday, July 17 2020 04:23 AM (Iwkd4)

Posted by: Rick C at Friday, July 17 2020 04:25 AM (Iwkd4)

Hide Comments | Add Comment

Posted by: normal at Thursday, July 16 2020 12:45 PM (obo9H)

Hide Comments | Add Comment