• Gigabyte announced two new EPYC motherboards. (AnandTech)
  
  What's different about these is they are standard ATX boards.
  
  With the EPYC 2 update, they'll support 64 cores, 2TB of RAM, 16 disk drives, four full PCIe x16 slots, and dual 10Gb Ethernet - all in a regular desktop PC. For the price of a low-end BMW.
  
  
• Apple's 2018 iPad Pro is the company's most powerful tablet ever. Is it finally ready to replace your laptop?
  
  No. (Ars Technica)

• A prominent YouTube channel with nearly half a million subscribers was deleted after shocking video surfaced of a women's rights activist being violently assaulted...
  
  ...Tied behind a horse, dragged across country, and fed to an alligator. The game is Red Dead Redemption 2, which is basically doing this stuff to men, but doesn't actually prevent you doing it to female NPCs.
  
  

  YouTube closed by channel because I killed a female NPC in #RDR2
  They said It promoted violence.
  
  You spend the entire games murdering men and no one cares, punch a woman and you get banned, are you out of your mind @YouTube@TeamYouTube@YTCreators@YongYea@JimSterling

  — Shirrako (@ShirrakoGaming) November 7, 2018

  
  It looks like there are still people who are not entirely insane working at Google, because his channel has been reinstated.

More analysis of AMD's Next Horizons event and their new chiplet-oriented architecture and what it means for servers.  I'm  hoping to find some analysis of the implications for desktops and laptops, but not yet.

Just heading off the Point Nemo.   [Video continues.]  Wait.  Strike that.  Reverse it.

The wizard rolled a natural 20 that day.

Posted by: Rick C at Friday, November 09 2018 01:53 AM (Q/JG2)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Friday, November 09 2018 03:06 AM (PiXy!)

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But let's try another scenario: You're Intel, and your brand new CPU turns out to crash apparently randomly.  You call in your entire test team and they can reproduce the crash, about once per chip per week on average.

And some bright spark figures out that it happens seventeen cycles after you do an integer add, then an integer divide, then issue an AVX256 MADD, then a relative conditional branch, because if you do that exact sequence a register file port gets left in a stuck state and when the branch prediction finally gets resolved, BANG.

Only...  What about other sequences?  Is this the only problem?  If you patch it with a microcode update and systems keep right on crashing, you're not going to set sales records this quarter.

You want to test all possible sequences of instructions, one by one, as quickly as possible.  This theorem lets you do it an order of magnitude faster than a naive approach, and provides rules for generating the optimal sequence of instructions.

Posted by: StargazerA5 at Thursday, November 08 2018 01:01 AM (Q7Wqc)

Posted by: kurt duncan at Thursday, November 08 2018 02:30 AM (noh54)

Posted by: Kayle at Thursday, November 08 2018 02:53 AM (TtvMc)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Thursday, November 08 2018 10:53 AM (PiXy!)

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• AMD had their big Next Horizon party, and it looks like the leaks had things pretty much correct.   (AnandTech)
  
  
• Zen 2 has twice the floating point performance of Zen 1 (2 x 256-bit vector units, the same as Intel).
  
  
• Updated from PCIe 3.0 to 4.0 for double the I/O bandwidth.
  
  
• Infinity Fabric has been given a boost too, though not clear exactly how much.  If the Zen 2 chips have PCIe 4.0 then they already support at least 16 Gbps serdes where Zen 1 only goes up to 12 Gbps.
  
  
• EPYC 2 (a.k.a Rome) has 8 CPU chiplets surrounding a memory and I/O controller core.  64 cores total.
  
  EPYC 1 (a.k.a Naples) has 4 Ryzen chips with Infinity Fabric links between them, but that would have gotten complex with 8 chiplets on the package.  Naples has 12 IF links on board to cross-connect everything; Rome needs only 8 links for twice the number of cores.
  
  
  Naples (left) and Rome (right).  Fingers on the right hand side probably belong to AMD CEO Lisa Su.
  
  The big chips on the left each contain 8 cores, 16MB cache, and Infinity Fabric, DDR4, and PCIe controllers.
  
  The little chips on the right each contain 8 cores, 32MB of cache, and Infinity Fabric, but all the DDR4 and PCIe channels have been moved to the big chip in the middle.
  
  [Had some stuff on die sizes here before, but the information I have is unofficial and contradictory, so I snipped it.]
  
  
• Single-socket Rome server can outperform a top-of-the-line dual-socket Intel Xeon Platinum system.
  
  
• No announcement yet of how this affects the Ryzen 3000 series, but this is a clear upgrade for third-generation Threadripper.
  
  
• Zen 2 is sampling now and will be available next year.  Zen 3 is on track for delivery in 2020, and design for Zen 4 is under way. 
  
  
  
• AMD also announced their new Radeon Instinct server GPUs.  (Anandtech)
  
  
• AWS now offers AMD-based instances.  (AnandTech)
  
  Another significant win for AMD.
  
  
• Want to run Linux on your shiny new Mac?  Haha fuck you.  (Phoronix)
  
  
• VirtualBox turns out not to be leakproof.  (Bleeping Computer)
  
  It's not used much in server environments, but if you use it for testing untrusted code in secure sandboxes, you might want to not do that for a little while.  Like, knowing Oracle, eighteen months or so.
  
  
  
  

Click to embiggen.

• What do the original Japanese broadcast of Haruhi Suzumiya, Australian science fiction author Greg Egan, troll haven 4chan, and travelling salesmen have in common?
  
  More than you might think.  (Quanta)

  If a television series has just three episodes, there are six possible orders in which to view them: 123, 132, 213, 231, 312 and 321. You could string these six sequences together to give a list of 18 episodes that includes every ordering, but there’s a much more efficient way to do it: 123121321. A sequence like this one that contains every possible rearrangement (or permutation) of a collection of n symbols is called a "superpermutation.”
  
  ...
  
  For Haruhi fans, Egan’s construction gives explicit instructions for how to watch all possible orderings of season one in just 93,924,230,411 episodes.

  It's Endless Eight all over again.
  
  
• Intel's eight core desktop processors are out so they finally decided to release the six core Xeon E family.  (AnandTech)
  
  Good work, Intel.
  
  
• Full-disk encryption on SSDs from Crucial and Samsung may be basically useless.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Bypass techniques have been confirmed on several older models and some current ones.
  
  
• Leading advertising company Google announced that Chrome 71 will block ads on sites with "abusive experiences" - as determined by Google.  (Ars Technica)
  
  Blocking problem ads is good.  An ad company determining which ads present a problem, maybe not so good.
  
  

• Gab is back online and the useful idiots are unhappy.  (Ars Technica)
  
  Gab's aggressively inept PR makes it hard to support them, but the insanity of their opponents makes it necessary.
  
  
• Researchers studying Twitter discover memes, assume vast shadowy conspiracy.  (TechDirt)

Posted by: Rick C at Tuesday, November 06 2018 11:52 AM (Iwkd4)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Tuesday, November 06 2018 12:14 PM (PiXy!)

Posted by: Mauser at Wednesday, November 07 2018 02:00 PM (Ix1l6)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Wednesday, November 07 2018 03:40 PM (PiXy!)

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Tech News

Social Media News

• Here's a look at the ZTE Nubia X, the phone with the 1.6:1 screen:body ratio.
  
  
  
  The rear screen seems to be invisible when not turned on, which is impressive.  And a point I didn't consider is that it's a touchscreen, so it can be used as a touch-sensitive control surface even if you're looking at the front screen.
  
  

• Twitter shows how balanced and even-handed they are by suspending any Republican who suggests that Democrats vote on November 7th regardless of which party said Republican belongs to.
  
  
• YouTube has been quiet recently, but decided they hadn't made enough users angry with them and wiped the Ralph Retort's Killstream from the internet - and, to rub methylmercury into the wound, forcibly reversed $26,000 in donations made by viewers of the stream to St. Jude's Children's Hospital.  (The Daily Caller)
  
  This all relates to the "superchat" feature, which allows viewers to pay to make a live chat comment sticky.  It's not that the Ralph Retort did anything wrong, its that their viewers decided to be edgy.  Which is to say, jerks.
  
  And the Wall Street Journal, apparently not having any news to report on, decided to stick their oar in and get it all shut down because who wants to help sick kids anyway?
  
  
• Reddit solves these problems by dividing the site into subsections moderated by private individuals.  Leading to situations like where the moderator of an anti-capitalist forum threatened to kill a Venezuelan citizen for being insufficiently appreciative of his workers' paradise.

This week in Cody Eats Isotopes: Deuterium Oxide.

When he changes shirts...  Yeah, you can pause it right there and watch this instead.

So is the plural Cutie Honeys (like, say, field marshals) or Cuties Honey (as in inspectors general)?  Inquiring minds, etc, etc.

Posted by: Kayle at Monday, November 05 2018 06:20 AM (TtvMc)

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• Another day another hyperthreading side-channel attack.  (Ars Technica)
  
  Hyperthreading: Just say argh.   Also speculative execution.
  
  
• Google's Pixel 3: Is it the phone for you?  (AnandTech)
  
  No.
  
  
• Need to capture 4K HDMI?  Here's a thing.  (PC Perspective)
  
  
• Ron Wyden (D-HippieLand) has introduced draft privacy legislation that is only mostly garbage unlike previous attempts that were entirely garbage.  (TechDirt)
  
  On the one hand, there are few things private enterprise does that are so bad that government intervention won't make them worse.  On the other hand, customer privacy might be one of those things.
  
  
• In Australia?  Need a pretty good gaming PC?  Or assuming you're willing to shell out a couple of hundred bucks for extra memory, a good all-round PC?
  
  Dell's 2017 AMD Inspiron Gaming system is on clearance for A$1099.  (Including tax and delivery.)  That's 45% off.
  
  8 core Ryzen 1700X, 8GB RAM, 8GB Radeon RX580 graphics, 256GB SSD, 1TB HDD, DVD burner.
  
  I haven't checked the service manual, but it's likely this only has two DIMM slots, so you'd need to remove the existing RAM to upgrade it to a more reasonable 16GB.  Still a good price even so.
  
  
• Bruce Schneier, author of the classic text Applied Cryptography (a must-read for any programmer serious about computer security) has a new book out.
  
  It's called Click Here to Kill Everybody.
  
  I think maybe not enough people read his earlier book.
  
  
  

Bee and PuppyCats of the Day

If you haven't watched the earlier episodes, this is not the best place to start.  Through episode six it's largely, um, episodic, but at this point we're in the middle of an ongoing story.

Start with the pilot:

Then move on with the regular episodes:

This is why the TSA requires you to consume any open containers of mercury you may be carrying before boarding your flight.

Posted by: Kayle at Saturday, November 03 2018 04:14 PM (TtvMc)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Saturday, November 03 2018 04:30 PM (PiXy!)

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• iPhones are allergic to helium.  (iFixit)
  
  This is bad.  If you live somewhere with a helium atmosphere.  Which you probably don't.
  
  
• Llamas are allergic to the flu. (RealClearScience)
  
  The article discusses a universal flu vaccine, but that's not what's happening here.  The llama antibodies provide broad but temporary immunity; you'd need to take them each year.  But they would make your resistant to all strains of the flu for a year, rather than being an all-or-nothing shot at a single strain, and camelid antibodies can readily be mass-produced in bacterial cultures.
  
  
• 1500 Google employees helpfully identified themselves as dead weight that can be dumped without affecting operations.  (TechCrunch)
  
  That's probably not what they thought they were doing, but they're not very bright.
  
  
• AMD is holding a Next Horizon investor event next Tuesday.  (AnandTech)
  
  The New Horizon event in 2016 announced details of the first-generation Zen processors (that became Ryzen, Threadripper, and Epyc), so this is almost certainly an announcement of Zen 2.

Posted by: StargazerA5 at Friday, November 02 2018 09:43 PM (Q7Wqc)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Saturday, November 03 2018 03:32 AM (PiXy!)

Posted by: Rick C at Saturday, November 03 2018 04:24 AM (Q/JG2)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Saturday, November 03 2018 04:49 AM (PiXy!)

Posted by: Wonderduck at Saturday, November 03 2018 01:32 PM (9gv+L)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Saturday, November 03 2018 02:48 PM (PiXy!)

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• ZTE's Nubia X is a phone phone.  It does phone phone stuff.  (AnandTech)
  
  It has a 6.2" inch 2280x1080 OLED display, and a 5.1" inch 1520x720 OLED display.
  
  That is not a typo.
  
  It doesn't have a notch for the front-facing camera, because it doesn't have a front facing camera.  Or it does, but it's on the other front.  If you want to take a selfie, you turn the phone around the other way.
  
  I'm not sure if that is brilliant or insane or a bit of both.
  
  Dual cameras (24MP and 16MP), Snapdragon 845 CPU, and an option of 6/64GB or 8/128GB.
  
  
• While Qualcomm's latest Snapdragon CPUs are great for phones they're still crap for notebooks.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  
• AMD's EPYC 7261 has 8 cores and 64MB of cache.  (Serve the Home)
  
  That puts it in a weird spot:  Only one core from each cluster of four is active, but all the L3 cache is enabled.  Only a quarter of the L2 cache, though, since that is connected directly to each core.
  
  
• If you need a six core Xeon workstation with Nvidia Quadro graphics and a 4K HDR display and live in a shoebox the ThinkPad P1 might be just the thing.  (Serve the Home)
  
  

• Facebook had a bug allowing hackers to work around security measures and potentially take over any business account.
  
  Here's how the exploit worked:
  
  
• The hacker issues an API request to the /admins/import endpoint providing the business ID and specifying their own account as the administrator.
  
  
• That's it.

I notice nobody ever bothers to rebuild New Jersey on a distant alien world.

Posted by: Rick C at Friday, November 02 2018 02:30 AM (Q/JG2)

Posted by: Rick C at Friday, November 02 2018 02:41 AM (Q/JG2)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Friday, November 02 2018 10:08 AM (PiXy!)

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Anyway!

• Vice applied to buy Facebook ads on behalf of every single sitting US senator.
  
  All of their requests were approved.
  
  They previously applied to buy ads for Mike Pence, the DNC, and ISIS.  Those were approved too.  Only a request to buy ads for Hillary Clinton was turned down.
  
  I don't have much time for Vice, but this is good reporting.  Credit where it's due.
  
  
  

Dandelion Picture of the Day

Posted by: Rick C at Thursday, November 01 2018 07:00 AM (Q/JG2)

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