Now? You want to do this now?
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Tuesday, September 27

Geek

Daily News Stuff 27 September 2022

Tomorrow Edition

Top Story

  • 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



Disclaimer: And the little dog you rode in on.

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Monday, September 26

Geek

Daily News Stuff 26 September 2022

Earthworms Alfredo Edition

Top Story

  • 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.


Tech News

  • 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.


Disclaimer: 200 bytes of CSS should be enough for everybody.

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Sunday, September 25

Geek

Daily News Stuff 25 September 2022

Redeliverance Edition

Top Story

  • 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.

Tech News

  • 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.


Disclaimer: Or perhaps merely dismembered and dropped into a magma pool wrong.

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Saturday, September 24

Geek

Daily News Stuff 24 September 2022

Kumo Kumo Kumo Spider Edition

Top Story


Tech News


Disclaimer: So I'm a tech blogger, so what?

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Anime

That Time A Slime Was Reincarnated

Possibly the best anime of last year, now that I'm catching up, at least in terms of art and animation, music (starting and ending themes and incidental music), directing, and voice acting, is Mushoku Tensei.

The story, on the other hand, is a mess.

As for the main character, well, see the title of this post.  It's still worth watching if you can get past that while he grows out of it.  Slowly.

A second season has been announced for next year.  Which is a bit confusing because the first season was split in half, so there is both a part 2 and a season 2.


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Friday, September 23

Geek

Daily News Stuff 23 September 2022

Two To Four Feral Hogs Edition

Top Story

  • 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.

Tech News

Disclaimer: Or does brain damage cause green hydrogen?

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Thursday, September 22

Geek

Daily News Stuff 22 September 2022

One For One Edition

Top Story


Tech News

Disclaimer: Before you ask, yes, Uranus also has rings.

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Wednesday, September 21

Geek

Daily News Stuff 21 September 2022

Petaflopmobiles R Us Edition

Top Story

  • Nvidia had its big announcement.  (AnandTech)

    Lots of stuff, but the most immediately interesting are the RTX 4080 and 4090.  (Tom's Hardware)

    The 4090, launching October 12, has twice the performance of the 3090 Ti - from 40 TFLOPs to over 80 TFLOPs - while being 20% cheaper.  Which would be more impressive if the 3090 Ti hadn't been priced at $2000.

    The 4080 will arrive in November in two models, with 12GB of RAM and 40 TFLOPs at $900, and 16GB of RAM and 48 TFLOPs at $1200.  That's a significant difference; either the 16GB model should be called the 4080 Ti or the 12GB model should be the 4070 Ti.

    While the base 4080 has the same compute power as the 3090 Ti at less than half the price, it also has half the memory and half the memory bandwidth.  Nvidia is making up for that by increasing the on-chip cache from 6MB to 48MB (and 96MB on the 4090).

    AMD did that with the Radeon RX 6000 range, and it worked pretty well.  The options for doubling bandwidth over the 3090 Ti are pretty much restricted to HBM, which isn't exactly cheap.  On the other hand, moving from Samsung's 8nm process to TSMC's 4nm meant Nvidia had a huge number of transistors to play with - up from 28 billion on the 3090 Ti to 76 billion on the 4090 - so using five billion or so on cache was not a hard call to make.

    While $900 for the smaller RTX 4080 looks good compared to the $2000 3090 Ti, it doesn't look nearly so good when compared with the $700 RTX 3080, and gamers don't seem to be happy.  It's about 30% more expensive and offers about 30% more performance.

    Oh, an interesting point: They're PCIe 4.0.  Which means they'll work fine with my Bae case, though the standard 4090 might not fit.

Tech News



RTX 4000 Roundup Video of the Day




Disclaimer: 16 is the new 12.

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Tuesday, September 20

Geek

Daily News Stuff 20 September 2022

Duck Tape Edition

Top Story

  • I managed to snag an Xbox Series X. The local electronics store - local to my old place in Sydney, that is - had it in stock a week after I handed in the keys, but only for in-store purchases. But the "notify me" button on the Microsoft store had changed to a "buy now" button when I checked today. The buy now button didn't work, but when I logged in and went back through the Xbox page I was able to add it to my cart and checked out.

    Since I am now moderately far from the madding crowd, I should have it in two weeks.


  • I also managed to snag the cord for my new electric mower, something I somehow avoided for 15 years with the previous one. So into town I went for some pliers and electrical tape. I have pliers and electrical tape... Somewhere.  Easier to go into town.


  • I've been hearing what sounded like ducks out the back of the house the past couple of weeks, but never caught sight of anything duck-like. Until today, walking back from the shops (which is quite a hike - there's a 400 foot elevation difference) I came across a herd of wild ducks crossing the street a couple of blocks from my house.

    So, yes. Ducks.


  • Australian mining company Fortescue Metals Group plans to spend $6 billion on "Net Zero" investments by 2030 - including hydrogen. (Financial Times)

    Hydrogen is useless as a mainstream fuel. The energy density is terrible and it leaks through everything. Anyone pushing it as a fuel is trying to sell you something.

Tech News



Gura Gaiden the Animation Video of the Day



The Making of Gura Gaiden the Animation Video of the Day


Where is our Hololive anime? If they need money, all they have to do is open a Kickstarter and they'll be buried in cash in the first twenty minutes. And it's not like the rest of the anime industry is doing anything that impressive right now.


Disclaimer: A.

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Monday, September 19

Geek

Daily News Stuff 19 September 2022

Rats Edition

Top Story

  • The case for my new computer - the limited edition Hololive one - has shipped.

    I don't have any parts to go in it, but I'll sort that out in coming months.

    One thing: The case is laid out such that the graphics card is vertical, using a right-angle PCIe adaptor.  This is common in the kind of flashy show-off cases I don't usually buy, and by usually I mean ever.

    The PCIe adaptor is PCIe 4.  The CPU, motherboard, and graphics card I'll be buying will all support PCIe 5.  I think it will automatically fall back to PCIe 4.  If not I will be quite irked.


  • Google and Facebook now control only 80% of all online advertising.  (The Economist via Archive.org)

    Down from 85% previously.  The main new competitor is TikTok, which is not an improvement.


Tech News



Disclaimer: Ideally the distance between engineering and marketing should be less than three thousand miles.

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