• Intel has announced its 13th generation Raptor Lake CPUs, available October 20.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Just three models initially: 
  
  13600K (6P+8E cores) at $319
  13700K (8P+8E cores) at $409
  13900K (8P+16E cores) at $589
  
  Intel is boasting of improvements over its own previous generation and in comparison to AMD's previous generation, which is just slightly awkward since AMD's new generation chips are available in shops today and make the comparison just a little less favourable.  (CPUBenchmark)
  
  These are not bad chips, and there are some cases where I'd recommend them over AMD right now, but the 13900K is roughly comparable to the 7900X, not the 7950X.
  
  
  
• Meanwhile Intel's high-end (for Intel) Arc A770 graphics card will be available October 12 for $329.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  The viability of this one depends entirely on driver support.  Reviews so far of lower-end Arc GPUs say that games run just fine, but the drivers to enable the advanced features of the cards are a disaster.
  
  The A770 has 16GB of RAM, more than any other card in its price range (double Nvidia's 3060 Ti or AMD's 6600 XT), so if Intel keeps improving the drivers it may become a worthwhile option in the next year.
  
  
  
• The Bae case has landed.  Bae has been informed and hopes I'll have fun building my new system.  No, really.
  
  

Tech News

• Intel also showed off a new 34 core workstation CPU.  (WCCFTech)
  
  Not intentionally.  They showed off a wafer of CPUs, and the internet being what it is, people had figured out that this was a previously unannounced product with 34 Raptor Lake cores in a mesh arrangement connected to eight channels of DDR5 RAM within thirty seconds of the photo being made public.
  
  
  
• A new power is arising.  Its victory is at hand.  (Nature)
  
  I speak of course of mice, which were pretty much immortal and indestructible already, and now have nanobots:

  Bioinspired microrobots capable of actively moving in biological fluids have attracted considerable attention for biomedical applications because of their unique dynamic features that are otherwise difficult to achieve by their static counterparts. Here we use click chemistry to attach antibiotic-loaded neutrophil membrane-coated polymeric nanoparticles to natural microalgae, thus creating hybrid microrobots for the active delivery of antibiotics in the lungs in vivo. The microrobots show fast speed (>110 µm s−1) in simulated lung fluid and uniform distribution into deep lung tissues, low clearance by alveolar macrophages and superb tissue retention time (>2 days) after intratracheal administration to test animals. In a mouse model of acute Pseudomonas aeruginosa pneumonia, the microrobots effectively reduce bacterial burden and substantially lessen animal mortality, with negligible toxicity. Overall, these findings highlight the attractive functions of algae–nanoparticle hybrid microrobots for the active in vivo delivery of therapeutics to the lungs in intensive care unit settings.

  Are you pondering what I'm pondering?
  
  
  
• AMD has announced a new range of embedded processors - Epyc V3000.  (Serve the Home)
  
  These are based on Zen 3 - up to eight cores, support DDR5 RAM, and have two USB 4 ports and two 10Gb Ethernet ports built in.  Integrated graphics are not mentioned.
  
  Which is odd because this seems to be a truly separate product line and not a repurposed laptop part, and I wouldn't have thought the market justified the expense of that.
  
  
  
• The hacker who infiltrated Australia's second largest phone company and stole data on 11 million customers says oops.  (Bleeping Computer)
  
  And has withdrawn their extortion demands.
  
  
  
• Found the catch.  (Liliputing)
  
  The Star Labs StarFighter is a 16" laptop with a 4K 16:10 screen, a choice of Intel or AMD CPUs (up to 12900H and 6800H respectively), up to 64GB of DDR5 RAM, two M.2 slots, two Thunderbolt / USB-C ports, two USB-A ports, HDMI, an SD card slot, an audio jack, and a removable webcam module so you don't have to worry about privacy because you can just leave it in the laptop bag.
  
  And the Four Essential Keys.
  
  And it weighs just 1.4kg (3.1lb), which is the same as my 14" Dell laptop.
  
  The catch?  The RAM is soldered in place.
  
  Also no USB 4 on the AMD model because they couldn't get the interface chips.  The component shortage is ongoing.
  
  
  
  

Posted by: Starry Knight at Thursday, September 29 2022 05:27 AM (gXw+B)

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• The reviews of AMD's Ryzen 7000 are in and it looks pretty darn good.  (AnandTech)
  
  The first PassMark scores are in too.
  
  The 7950X is 25% faster than the 5950X single-threaded, and 44% faster multi-threaded.  (CPUBenchmark.net)
  
  The 7900X is 35% faster than the 5900X on multi-threaded tests, confirming that the 5950X was indeed limited by power / thermals, and the increase to 170W has fixed that.
  
  And finally, while Intel's upcoming 13900K has a small advantage on single-threaded tasks - around 8% - the 7950X beats it by 21% on multi-threaded work.
  
  Which means - if you read through all 20 pages of that AnandTech review and get to the experiment at the end - that if you turn the power down on the 7950X all the way from 170W to 65W, it is still slightly faster than the 13900K, because that only reduced multi-threaded performance by 18%.
  
  And that means two things: First, AMD's upcoming Dragon Range laptop chip will deliver true desktop-class performance to high-end laptops.  And second, if they could jam in the chiplets somehow, AMD could deliver 32 cores in Socket AM5 without any real bottlenecks.
  
  
  
• Bae case quite notably has not moved from the depot.  I called again and they put in a redelivery request again.  And this time gave me a case number to refer to when I call again tomorrow.
  
  Their web site is still broken.
  
  
  

Tech News

• The Banana Pi PicoW is an ESP32-S3 board in the same form factor as the Raspberry Pi Pico.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  It appears to have a faster CPU - twice the clock speed plus vector operations for DSP, but lacks the programmable I/O controller of the Raspberry flavour.  That Raspberry Pi Pico's I/O controller is so powerful that it can generate an HDMI signal entirely in software.
  
  
  
• Venus before Mars?  (The Guardian)
  
  There's an argument being presented for making a manned mission to Venus before Mars.  There's one major upside: Venus at closest approach is much easier to reach, and a flyby and return mission could be done in a year, against three years for Mars.
  
  There's one major downside: If you land, you die.  It's actually quite pleasant a few miles up, but visiting a planet and never touching the ground because it's instant death does seem to defeat the purpose just a tiny bit.
  
  
  
• If the iPhone app you developed is working fine and doesn't need to be updated, Apple will delete it from the App Store.  (Simulated Annealing)
  
  Because fuck you, that's why.

Posted by: furball321 at Tuesday, September 27 2022 10:28 PM (VZYxJ)

Posted by: David Eastman at Wednesday, September 28 2022 02:19 AM (D6Mju)

Posted by: normal at Wednesday, September 28 2022 02:47 AM (LADmw)

Posted by: Rick C at Wednesday, September 28 2022 09:51 AM (BMUHC)

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• Intel's high-end Arc A770 graphics card is coming October 5.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  On the one hand, any competition for Nvidia and AMD in this space is welcome.
  
  On the other hand, Intel's high-end card is expected to compete with the RTX 3060 or possibly the 3060 Ti, which are low to mid-range cards.
  
  And on the third hand, Intel's dedication to dedicated graphics is dubious, and the entire venture could be dead in two years.
  
  We'll see how they go in the benchmarks, and if the drivers have improved in the past few weeks, because last time the tech sites took a look the driver situation was a disaster.
  
  
  
• Bae case arrives tomorrow.  It actually arrived last Friday but I was otherwise occupied at that precise moment and it went away again.  Time to camp out in the living room all day where I can see the courier van approaching.
  
  Also, StarTrack?  Fix your website.  It's one thing to not be able to schedule a redelivery because there's a glitch somewhere, but that took me to the contact form, and that also glitched out...  And took me to the contact form.
  
  At least your call center is reasonably efficient.

• The low-end Ryzen 7000 chips - the six core 7600X and the eight core 7700X - are also a big improvement over their respective predecessors.  (WCCFTech)
  
  Across multiple benchmarks - including tasks that take advantage of AVX512 - the 7600X averages 48% faster than the 5600X.  Meanwhile the 7700X averages 39% faster than the 5800X.  And there will likely be a faster 7800X eight core model in the near future.
  
  AMD's implementation of AVX512 is halved but not half-baked.  It works by using the existing 256-bit hardware twice, but supports the more advanced AVX512 instruction set.  The result is 85% better average performance on code that can take advantage of the new instructions, without the cost in die size and power consumption that comes from a full 512-bit floating point unit.
  
  
  
• JMAP is IMAP but sane.  (Unencumbered By Facts)
  
  Which is probably a death sentence on the internet.
  
  IMAP is one of the three main email protocols (SMTP for sending, and POP and IMAP for receiving.)  JMAP modernises it by running over HTTPS and using JSON as the data format.
  
  While JSON isn't perfect, the early internet protocols (including HTTP itself) are all text based and each needs its own dedicated parser, and there's a long history of subtle bugs in those parsers leading to disaster.
  
  Every programming language in the world can read JSON data, and the format is simple enough and universal enough that most of the horrible bugs have already happened to someone else.
  
  This makes it much easier to built a reliable email client, just leaving the problem that the big email providers make it almost impossible to deliver email to anyone anymore.
  
  
  
• 58 bytes of CSS to make your web pages look great everywhere, or at least not terrible in most places, probably.  (GitHub)
  
  A few variations are provided taking the total payload as high as 200 bytes.

Posted by: J Greely at Monday, September 26 2022 10:21 PM (oJgNG)

Posted by: Rick C at Tuesday, September 27 2022 04:44 AM (BMUHC)

Posted by: Pat Buckman at Tuesday, September 27 2022 10:23 AM (r9O5h)

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• Intel's 13900K has a PassMark score.  (WCCFTech)
  
  PassMark - the benchmark used on CPUBenchmark.net - isn't a perfect benchmark, since there's no perfect benchmark except running your own application on the target hardware.  But I've found it to map very closely to the stuff I run, so it's the one I pay attention to.
  
  Score is 4833 single-threaded and 54,433 multi-threaded.  That's around the same multi-threaded score as the 24 core Threadripper 3960X, which uses 280W.
  
  On the other hand, the 3960X came out nearly three years ago, the 13900K uses up to 350W itself if you take off the limits, and the 13900K is also a 24 core CPU.
  
  On the third hand, the 13900K is 80% faster on single-threaded tasks on its Performance cores; it's the Efficiency cores that drag the overall score down.
  
  Still, if the difference between the cores doesn't matter to you, you're getting a workstation-class CPU from a couple of years ago in a standard desktop.

• Meanwhile the 7950X has been pushed to 6.5GHz on all cores.  (WCCFTech)
  
  On liquid nitrogen, yes, so this is probably not something you'll be doing yourself.  And it set some benchmark records, but again, not something you'll see direct benefits from.
  
  What is interesting though is that it only used 270W to do it - something that high-end Intel desktop chips can do without overclocking at all.
  
  I mean, that's still a lot, but it suggests that a good water cooler should be able to  support a respectable all-core overclock on this beastie.
  
  
  
• Get3D generates 3D models from images.  (GitHub)
  
  It's another of the recent wave of AI-based image generation tools, though it takes a slightly different tack, analysing sets of images and trying to build a consistent 3D model from them.  The 2D tools - like Midjourney, which I've been playing with - don't actually have that kind of model of the shape of things, and will simply forget that a person's arms should be roughly the same length, for example, and end with hands.
  
  Since Midjourney (and similar tools) can take an image as reference, you could run the training data through Get3D, generate meshes, render them out into a scene, and then play that scene into the 2D generator to get a final product with consistent geometry, in that people don't suddenly have two heads.
  
  
  
• The new wave of JavaScript web frameworks and why they should all burn.  (Front End Mastery)
  
  "Inspired by PHP" is a label very much akin to "LD 50 1ng/kg".
  
  
  
• Nobody wants plant-based meat.  (The Guardian)
  
  A vegan friend mentioned that she tried these products a couple of times and couldn't stand the taste.  If you you're not vegan or vegetarian, traditionally plant-based meat - the kind where you have a cow eat the grass for you - is just as healthy and a lot cheaper.
  
  
  
• NASA's test launch for the Artemis Moon rocket has been scrubbed for the third time in a row.  (CNN)
  
  Unexpectedly.
  
  
  
• People can't even be bothered to steal Amazon's Rings of Power series.  (TorrentFreak)
  
  I might check it out at some point.  They actually did a pretty good job on Good Omens, and I have a Prime subscription for the free delivery (a big deal now that I'm 300 miles by road from the nearest warehouse).
  
  
  
• Meanwhile I'm watching Kumo Desu Ga, Nani Ka? a.k.a So I'm a Spider, So What?
  
  It's the usual power-trip wish-fulfilment story of a teenage shut-in transported to a world that works like a computer game where they get untold power, except that first, the main character is a girl - common in early "isekai" stories, less so now - and second, in the fantasy world, she's a spider.
  
  It works because being a spider, even a magical spider in a magical world, is pretty awful, and because she survives through intelligence and determination, not through luck or being handed the world on a plate.
  
  I hesitated to watch this one because I'd already read a thousand pages of the manga and I knew the anime took a different approach to the story.  But not to worry, while the approach is different, the story itself is intact.
  
  Some things that take a long time to surface in the manga are apparent right away in the anime, but that turns out not to spoil things because even then you still don't know everything that's going on.  My guess based on those thousand pages turned out to be dead wrong.

Posted by: licaki at Wednesday, February 01 2023 11:05 PM (jV/yJ)

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• The US wants to become a hydrogen production powerhouse.  (The Verge)
  
  Yeah, right.
  
  
  
• Why this won't work.  (Robert Zubrin)
  
  Repost, because people keep falling for this shit.
  
  It's solar freaking roadways except about a thousand times more expensive.

• Sundar Pichai to Google employees: Quit whining and get to work, you useless wankers.  (Thurrott.com)
  
  You've spent most of the past decade hiring and promoting useless wankers.  No sympathy.  Go down in flames.
  
  
  
• Well, fuck: The US government, not satisfied with wasting money on "clean hydrogen", wants to ruin open source software.  (Senate.Gov)
  
  Yes, the Log4j debacle could have been fixed at any time and saved the world billions of dollars if someone had just provided a few thousand dollars in funding, but the US government is one of the worst groups to get involved, and defining open source software as infrastructure is one of the worst ways to do it.
  
  
  
• Physisicsts have finally figured out how high-temperature superconductors work.  (Quanta)
  
  High temperature here means around -140C (-220F).  The original superconductors, which are well understood, functioned only at temperatures close to absolute zero - -273C / -459F - a temperature difficult and expensive to approach.  You really need liquid helium for that.  High temperature superconductors work in cheap and plentiful liquid nitrogen.
  
  Oh, the answer?  Super glue.
  
  

Posted by: EdH at Sunday, September 25 2022 01:29 AM (eAtU4)

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• Nvidia's new graphics cards are two to four times faster than the previous generation - if you are using ray tracing and upscaling.  (PC Magazine)
  
  If you're not using ray tracing and upscaling, they're not.
  
  Except somehow in the case of Microsoft Flight Simulator, where they are - and somehow the RTX 4080 is the same speed as the much more expensive RTX 4090.
  
  
  
• Nvidia also explained why the new cards are so much more expensive than the previous generation: Because.  (PC Magazine)
  
  
  
• And to gamers who are saying that the 4080 is really just a renamed 4070 to justify the high pricing, Nvidia had this response: Nuh-uh.  (PC Magazine)
  
  Nvidia is handing a golden opportunity to AMD and Intel here.  Intel simply isn't in a position to take advantage of it, but AMD might be.
  
  We'll see what they have up their sleeves on November 3.

• Does green hydrogen cause brain damage?  (Robert Zubrin)
  
  A great takedown on just how stupid the green hydrogen idea is from an actual rocket scientist.
  
  
  
• Google is working on royalty-free high-end digital audio and video software to replace Dolby Atmos and Dolby Vision.  (Protocol)
  
  Not because they want to benefit anyone, but because it's cheaper for them.
  
  Which is a far more trustworthy motivation.
  
  
  
• China has claimed without evidence that at least one US government agency is actually doing its job.  (CNBC)
  
  In this case they allege that the NSA hacked China's telecommunications networks, which is kind of the point, so probably isn't true.
  
  
  
• Another thing Nvidia announced during its big launch event is the Jetson Orin Nano.  (Serve the Home)
  
  This is a robotics module with a six core Arm A78 CPU, up to 1024 GPU shaders, and a peak AI throughput of 40 trillion operations per second.  It's not quite the same as a Raspberry Pi because it's a module that needs to plug in to a carrier board; you can't use it directly by itself.  But it is a lot more powerful than the Raspberry Pi.
  
  Prices start as $199.
  
  
  
• Krea.ai is a directly of AI-generated art and the text prompts used to generate it.  (Krea.ai)
  
  A lot of it is awful because that's just the nature of AI-generated art - you have to fiddle with things a lot to get something good.This haunted playground is suitably and subtly creepy though.
  
  
  

Posted by: Pat Buckman at Saturday, September 24 2022 01:30 AM (r9O5h)

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Posted by: Pixy Misa at Saturday, September 24 2022 05:39 AM (PiXy!)

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• PayPal appears to be going on a banning spree in the UK.  (The Telegraph)
  
  Groups targeted include UsForThem, which advocates for keeping schools open, and the Daily Skeptic and the Free Speech Union, which advocate for, well, skepticism and free speech.
  
  The Daily Skeptic is asking for any donors in Texas to contact them.  (Daily Skeptic)
  
  Because with the recent Fifth Circuit decision, PayPal just lit up the Sue Me signal.

• Alongside three very expensive new consumer graphics cards, Nvidia just announced its extremely expensive new professional graphics card.  (Serve the Home)
  
  The RTX 6000 replaces the RTX A6000, which rather confusingly replaced the RTX 6000.  Someone might need to explain to Nvidia how numbers work.
  
  This is very similar to the new RTX 4090, but with 48GB of ECC RAM instead of 24GB of non-ECC, a 300W TDP down from 450W, and a conventional two-slot design instead of the massive four-slot boards being produced for the 4090.
  
  Unfortunately it's likely to cost around four times as much.
  
  
  
• An unpatched bug in a Python library has led to vulnerabilities in an estimated 350,000 projects.  (Bleeping Computer)
  
  The bug is in the tarfile library, which has an explicit warning about extracting tarfiles from untrusted sources, but doesn't prevent the risk.
  
  Researchers found that there are nearly 600,000 Python projects out there that use the tarfile module, which, I mean, why?  And only 40% of them have safety checks.
  
  
  
• Amazon's 2022 model of the Fire HD8 replaces the old, slow A53 cores with the new, slow A55 core.  (Thurrott.com)
  
  It starts at $100 so you can't expect that much, and a 6 core 2GHz A55 is quite reasonable for light use - email, web browsing, reading ebooks, that sort of thing.
  
  The problem is that it still has a 2012-quality 1280x800 screen, and there's no better model available, the HDX range having been long since discontinued.
  
  If you want a small device with a good screen for reading books, the choice right now is either the Kindle Paperwhite, which is quite small and can't do anything but read books, or the iPad Mini, which is a decent device except that it's Apple and costs about four times as much as a small Android tablet.
  
  Lenovo's Legion Y700 exists, but is only sold officially in China, so it might as well not.
  
  
  
• The James Webb space telescope has captured a remarkably clear view of the rings of Neptune.  (NASA)
  
  It looks a bit weird because the Webb is an infrared telescope, not visible light.
  
  
  

Posted by: normal at Thursday, September 22 2022 10:54 PM (LADmw)

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