• It's definitely a loose connection.  Spare Laptop charged to 57% after being left alone for a while.  I used it for half an hour, then switched the settings so that closing the lid would put it into sleep mode, and left to do other things.
  
  Came back and it was dead as a doornail.
  
  Three hours later I poked it again, and it booted up and showed that it was at 86%, but not charging.  Fiddled with the power connecter and it started charging again.
  
  Okay.  Still replacing you, though, Spare Laptop.
  
  
  
• My 1.2TB of microSD cards arrived, so I can populate my mobile devices, for when I go out, which I don't do, or into the office, which I also don't do.
  
  Update: Old Spare Laptop and New Spare Laptop both already have 200GB cards as it turns out.  So one of these goes in Index, one in Railgun, and the other one I'll keep for my next phone - I'll probably get an Oppo A52 or A91.
  
  
  
• The New York Post's Twitter account is still locked.  (Fox Business)
  
  Twitter is apparently insisting that the Post delete several tweets.  The Post is, understandingly, telling Twitter to go fuck itself with a piledriver and twelve feet of curare-tipped wrought-iron fence and no lubricant.
  
  
  
• I am shocked, shocked, to find partisan corruption going on in this social network.
  
  
  
  
  
  
• Nobody knows what this is.  (AliExpress)
  
  Well, everyone knows what it says it is - a small motherboard with an embedded AMD A9-9820 CPU.  Only problem is that AMD never produced an A9-9820.  (ExtremeTech)
  
  Speculation is that these are failed Xbox One S dies.  At $125 just for the board, most people would be better off getting the new and far more powerful Xbox Series S, but it is a curiosity.  Other Linus mentioned that he had already ordered one for testing.
  
  
  
• The Argon One M.2 gets more out of your Raspberry Pi 4.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  It's a bit larger than the average Raspberry Pi case, but it does add a fan, full size HDMI ports, and a (SATA) M.2 slot.
  
  
  
• Building a new PC and want something faster than Gigabit Ethernet?  The Inventec SmartNIC C5020X has dual 50GbE ports.  (Serve the Home)
  
  And an FPGA, 32GB of DDR4 RAM, and a Xeon-D processor.
  
  That should do the trick.
  
  
  
• There are no signs at all that this will become a gigantic clusterfuck.  (Politico.eu)
  
  Twenty-five European governments have pledged a total of €10 billion to build an alternative to AWS.
  
  I'll get the popcorn.
  
  
  
• Friends don't let friends use Node.  (ZDNet)
  
  Just the latest list of malware that had been sitting in NPM undetected for (checks notes) two years.
  
  
  
• Bay Area politicians are panicking over a recent suggestion that tech workers be required to work from home three days a week.  (MSN)
  
  The problem, they suggest, is that if required to work from home, the workers could just as easily work from home somewhere that isn't an overpriced overtaxed socialist shithole.
  
  They are right.
  
  
  

Posted by: Rick C at Monday, October 19 2020 01:19 AM (eqaFC)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Monday, October 19 2020 03:15 AM (PiXy!)

Posted by: normal at Monday, October 19 2020 05:36 AM (obo9H)

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• The new Ryzen 5950X scores pretty well on benchmarks, particularly when overclocked to 6GHz.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Someone seems to have an advance sample and a flask of liquid nitrogen.
  
  
  
• Atlassian has an announcement for small to medium customers running their software on-premises: Drop dead.  (Atlassian)
  
  They did have a program where you could get licenses for small teams for as little as $10 per year.  Now they're cancelling everything short of enterprise-scale licenses.  And doubling prices for those.
  
  
  
• GitLab 13.4 is out.  (GitLab)
  
  It's increasing an Atlassian replacement and not just a Git server.  It does require a lot more resources than it once did.  GitLab suggests a minimum of 4GB of RAM for up to 500 users, but in my experience you need just a wee bit more than that.
  
  
  

• Twitter fell down.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  
  
  
  
  
• So did Slack.  (Slack)
  
  Slack is still a thing, right?
  
  
  
• Twitter and Facebook crossed a line.  (The Intercept)
  
  Glenn Greenwald - yes, that Glenn Greenwald - writes a thorough, incisive, and scathing analysis of the Orwellian events of the last 48 hours.
  
  Also this:
  
  
  
  
  
  
• Matt Taibbi - another lefty journalist who can actually report straight news some of the time - shuts down a Huntergate Truther:
  
  
  
  
  
  
• Twitter announced changes to its "hacked materials" policy after realising they'd just banned journalism.
  
  
  
  
  
  
• Nim 1.4 is out.  (Nim-lang)
  
  Looks like mostly improvements to the standard library, plus a new garbage collector that handles circular references properly.
  
  
  
• A look a the Crucial P5 SSD.  (Serve the Home)
  
  This is a mid-range TLC PCIe 3.0 device, which in 2020 means that it can transfer 3.4GB per second.  That puts it about 40% ahead of the WD Blue SN550, but on the other hand it's 50% more expensive.
  
  
  
• Looks like Spare Laptop has a loose connection somewhere in the power circuit; it charges about 1% per hour if I'm lucky.
  
  Everything is backed up now, since it has soldered-in storage and if it stops charging completely there is no way for me to recover it.  Not that it had much on it - it has just 64GB of internal storage and I have a 64TB Synology farm in the spare bedroom.
  
  Looks like it will be getting an upgrade this weekend - from an old-model Atom with 4GB RAM, 64GB of storage, and a 1366x768 TN display, to a Core i5, dedicated Radeon graphics, 16GB RAM, 4GB VRAM, 1TB of SSD, and a 4k IPS touchscreen.
  
  Which just happen to be the precise specs of my work laptop.  Since I work entirely from home now, and I have the HP Spectre for when we do start having in-person sessions again, I might as well use the hardware I already have.
  
  I did have other laptops still working, and with better specs than Spare Laptop, but I handed them down to my nephews.
  
  Only catch - Spare Laptop had the Four Essential keys.  Work Laptop, which cost me roughly six times as much, does not.
  
  
  
• Networking is the one odd corner of computing where you can simply plunk down cash and buy speed.  (Serve the Home)
  
  Gigabit Ethernet is still the standard for end users, but if you want a four port 100GbE card, they are readily available.
  
  This Silcom SnartNIC is probably not the cheapest option, since it also includes a high-end Stratix 10 DX FPGA, 8GB of HBM RAM, and 32GB of DDR4.
  
  
  
• Amazon Women With iPhones on the Moon.  (UPI)
  
  NASA has awarded Nokia a contract to provide cell phone service on the Moon.
  
  
  
• It is, after all, the 21st century.  (BBC News)
  
  This is the second time recently that a person has been spotted flying a jetpack at an altitude of a mile over Los Angeles.
  
  
  
  

• I mostly try to steer Daily News Stuff clear of politics - except when I'm suspended on Twitter and have no primary outlet for such stuff.  But in the last twenty-four hours, politics and tech news have collided like a runaway sewage truck ploughing through a special-needs kindergarten.
  
  It was not pretty.
  
  
  
• The original story was this: Hunter Biden, son of Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden, left a computer containing damaging videos and incriminating emails with a laptop repair store and then forgot to go back and pick it up.  (New York Post)
  
  After a period of some months the store owner checked the contents of the laptop and notified the FBI, who subpoenaed the owner and seized the device, and are now refusing to speak as to whether or not there is an investigation. 
  
  However, the store owner first copied the data; whether that was as a legitimate part of the repair procedure or for more prurient than prudent reasons is unspecified.
  
  In any case, the data eventually passed to Rudy Giuliani, and thence the the New York Post, which acted like a newspaper and reported on the story.
  
  And then all hell broke loose.
  
  
  
• Twitter locked the Post's account.  (New York Post)
  
  Twitter blocked users from tweeting the article.  Twitter blocked users from retweeting tweets about the article.  Twitter suspended accounts of journalists discussing the story.  (Twitter)  Twitter suspended the account of White House Presss Secretary Kayleigh McEnany.  (New York Post)  Twitter blocked the House Judiciary Committee.  (Twitchy)
  
  Hours later, Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey apologised for doing this without providing an explanation.  He did not apologise in any way for the actions themselves - and the Post's Twitter account is still locked at time of writing.  He only apologised for not providing a reason why all this censorship was taking place.
  
  And then a reason was provided: Twitter will not permit the circulation of news stories using information provided without authorisation.
  
  
  
• Which is a flaming pile of bullshit because that excludes everything but press releases and the weather.
  
  
  
• The Biden campaign is now claiming that Twitter's censorship of the story is evidence that it is false, which is even more lame than their earlier assertion that there was no meeting between Joe Biden and the named Burisma executive recorded in the VP's official schedule.
  
  
  
  
  
  
• Facebook followed Twitter's shining example, refusing to allow users to link to the article until their fact checkers had had their way with it.  (The American Spectator)
  
  
  
  
  This restriction appears to still be in place.
  
  
  
• Don't expect an answer.
  
  
  
  
  
  
• Sums it up nicely.
  
  
  
  
  
  
• More reporting at Victory Girls.
  
  
  
• Webster's altered their online dictionary to support a far-left attack on Supreme Court nominee Amy Coney Barrett.  (The Post Millennial)
  
  A day ago, that was big news.
  
  
  
• Oh, and the New York Times has come out against the First Amendment.
  
  
  
  
  
  
• The first room-temperature superconductor has been discovered.  (Science News)
  
  Room temperature, that is, assuming that it's a bright cold day in April and you've left your windows open and also that you're at the bottom on an ocean fifteen thousand miles deep.
  
  Room temperature, yes, but at over two million atmospheres of pressure.
  
  
  
• Dell has an Epyc server with 160 PCIe 4.0 lanes.  (Serve the Home)
  
  All direct from the two CPUs.  This is achieved by cutting the link between the CPUs from 64 lanes to 48, which is viable because the speed of those lanes has doubled over first generation Epyc.
  
  
  
• My spare laptop must have read this blog because apparently it has forgotten that when plugged in to the charger, the desired result is, well, charging.  It seems to have bottomed out at 20% and it's currently still working, but I've backed up all my files just in case.
  
  
  

Posted by: Rick C at Friday, October 16 2020 06:29 AM (eqaFC)

Posted by: Rick C at Friday, October 16 2020 06:33 AM (eqaFC)

Posted by: Rick C at Friday, October 16 2020 06:44 AM (eqaFC)

Posted by: Wonderduck at Friday, October 16 2020 12:28 PM (vNkOW)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Saturday, October 17 2020 01:32 AM (PiXy!)

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• Well, I guess I have Amazon Prime now.  The only thing I bought was three of those 400GB Sandisk microSD cards.  Come to think of it, that's basically all I ever buy during these big Amazon sales.
  
  I would still like to get some of Sandisk's 1TB microSD cards, to pair with the 1TB SSDs in my two laptops, but they still cost a fortune. The 400GB model at $60 is far better value.
  
  They did have a sale on the Western Digital Blue SN550 1TB model, but it was only about 10% off and shipped from Amazon UK, so I passed on that.
  
  

• I really wanted the 2TB model, but I couldn't find any sales on that one.
  
  Turns out that's because there is no Western Digital Blue SN550 2TB model.  What I was looking at before was the older Western Digital Blue, which was an M.2 SATA drive.  Which would probably work fine but I'm going to pass on that too.
  
  
  
• I looked at some phones as well, but there weren't any amazing specials to be had.  The Oppo A52 looked good, but when I checked it was basically at retail price.
  
  
  
• Apple announced the iPhone 12, now available in sizes.  (AnandTech)
  
  All four of the new models now has at least a 1080p screen.  Since Apple has been retinising everything for years, it surprised me that this was supposed to be new, but I checked and the regular iPhone 11 had a display resolution of 1792x828.
  
  
  
• A full review of the Surface Laptop Go.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Quick precis: Meh.
  
  
  
• Krita 4.4 is out.  (Krita)
  
  I saw the announcement and realised that I once knew what Krita was but that knowledge had gone to Tumbolia.  So I checked and it's an open source paint program for Windows, Mac, and Linux.
  
  
  
• PC sales rose 8% in Q3.  (Thurrott.com)
  
  People keep saying that you can do everything you need on an iPad or even a phone, but those people don't have jobs.  When work-from-home kicked in and people needed to work from home, they bought PCs.
  
  
  
• Speaking of imaginary early 80's computers, I previously said that there was no way to feed pixel data from the cartridge port to the video processor fast enough to put a graphics upgrade into a cartridge.
  
  I was wrong.
  
  I was looking at this because some NES and SNES cartridges had hardware on them - not just ROM chips - to provide new game features, and wanted to make that possible in the emulator.
  
  Now, the hardware as specified can't write a video stream to RAM in real time, but if we allow for the shared memory bus to be configured as a streaming pixel input, it can work as just another playfield that appears out of nowhere, and the graphics from the regular video controller can be an overlay or a backdrop to whatever the cartridge is doing.
  
  That would even (in theory) extend to a second-generation graphics card with faster nibble-mode memory.
  
  All it needs is one or two more of those 74LS861 bus transceivers to isolate the CPU with shared memory, where before I had only specified them to isolate the CPU from shared memory.  (One or two depending on whether we need the cartridge hardware to be able to drive the address bus as well.)
  
  I originally considered adding a dedicated pixel port to the imaginary video chip, but that felt like I was adding too much stuff in.  This version has appropriate tradeoffs; while the video controller is receiving the pixel stream from the cartridge, it is unable to access shared memory at all.
  
  
  
• Let's see what's on Prime Video.  Movies we think you'll like....  Those are all garbage, Amazon.  TV....  Well, you have all twelve seasons of Bones.  That might be worth a look.  And all one season of The Dresden Files.
  
  How about anime?  Uh.  Okay, that's clearly a question I should not have asked.  The list is short and mostly third-rate, though they have The Great Passage which I rather like and no-one watched.
  
  
  
  
  
• Netflix is run by morons.  (Wired)
  
  "Second-order effects?  What are those?"
  
  It's the Google Graveyard of television.
  
  
  
• There are basically no good laptops under A$1000.  There are plenty of laptops under A$1000, but they all have major issues - either they're crippled with Atom processors and soldered-in memory and storage, or they have 720p TN displays.
  
  My current spare laptop ticks all those boxes with regards to flaws, but I paid about A$230 for it so I don't care too much.  Except when I want to run Idle Champions on it and it gets overloaded to a point that the trackpad stops working.  (It's an Atom, and not one of the good Atoms.  Technetium or something problematic like that.)
  
  This Acer Aspire A5 appears to be an exception.  (AmazonAU)
  
  It's not all that cheap, and it's last year's Ryzen and the low-end model at that, but it is still a Ryzen.  1080p IPS display, check.  Upgradeable memory and storage, check.  It includes 128GB of NVMe storage and an empty 2.5" bay, and one 4GB DIMM installed, meaning you can upgrade it without throwing anything away, which is great when you already have spare memory modules and 2.5" drives just lying around.
  
  HDMI, USB 3, wired Ethernet, micro....  No microSD?  Poo.
  
  The current model is better in almost every way - it has a Ryzen 4700U, close to the top of the line, 8GB RAM, 512GB of NVMe SSD - but it also costs twice as much.  Which isn't ideal when your list of requirements is basically "1080p and can run Idle Champions without freezing up".
  
  
  
• Apropos of nothing, Idle Champions of the Forgotten Realms is really, really badly optimised.  The gameplay shouldn't overstress a C64.

Torchlight 3 Trailer Videos of the Day

Posted by: Rick C at Wednesday, October 14 2020 11:24 PM (eqaFC)

2 I got almost all the pieces of my prototype together--a 48MHz ARM M0 with 32K flash and 4K SRAM, and it's on a breadboard with a crystal and all the capacitors necessary to power it on.  Still waiting on a USB port breakout board--I tried cutting up a cable yesterday and soldering jumper wires on the end of it, but when I plugged it in, Windows wouldn't recognize it.  On the other hand, when I used an ARM Arduino to program the bootloader, that seemed to work properly.  Oh, also, I forgot to get an LED, so running the standard "Hello, world!" LED blink won't work.  On the other hand I have a 128x32 pixel display I can use.

I've got several higher-end copies of the MCU--more pins and more flash & RAM, mainly--and breakout boards, but TQPF-64 is tough to hand-solder, so I ordered some solder paste and I'm going to try reflowing it with a heat gun.  That should be interesting.  (I wanted more pins, because the Arduino Pro Mini most people use for custom keyboards have a relatively limited number of IO pins and don't have as many as I want.)

Posted by: Rick C at Thursday, October 15 2020 12:15 AM (eqaFC)

Posted by: J Greely at Thursday, October 15 2020 01:43 AM (ZlYZd)

Posted by: normal at Thursday, October 15 2020 03:18 AM (LADmw)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Thursday, October 15 2020 10:29 AM (PiXy!)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Thursday, October 15 2020 01:05 PM (PiXy!)

Posted by: normal at Thursday, October 15 2020 02:29 PM (obo9H)

Posted by: normal at Thursday, October 15 2020 02:37 PM (obo9H)

Posted by: Rick C at Friday, October 16 2020 06:24 AM (eqaFC)

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• Clarke's Corollary to Hanlon's Razor: Any sufficiently profound stupidity is indistinguishable from malice.
  
  
  
• Affordable faster-than-1Gb-networking.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  And by faster than 1Gb I mean a five-port 2.5Gb switch from Qnap for $109.
  
  10GBASE-T came out in 2006 and we're still waiting for it to become afordable.
  
  
  
• There's a Ryzen 5600 on its way unless there isn't but I think this one's a pretty safe bet.  (WCCFTech)
  
  The Ryzen 5000 launch focused on the mid-range and high end, from the 5600X at $299 to the 5950X at $799.    The six-core 5600 non-X is expected early next year at around $220.
  
  
  
• Benchmarking the Xeon W-1290P.  (Serve the Home)
  
  This is the exact one I was looking at, that turned out not much faster - at least on multi-threaded workloads - than a 3700X.
  
  
  
• A new Amiga for 2021?  (Vintage is the New Old)
  
  If it supports the AGA chipset an HDMI, I'll buy one.
  
  
  
• The serverless revolution has stalled.  (InfoQ)
  
  Because it was only ever a niche platform, marketed mostly by complete bullshit.
  
  "I don't need a server!  I can just run functions on demand and store data in a managed database."
  
  (Checks managed database pricing.)
  
  "Fuck."

Posted by: Rick C at Wednesday, October 14 2020 01:02 AM (eqaFC)

Posted by: normal at Wednesday, October 14 2020 04:33 AM (LADmw)

Posted by: normal at Wednesday, October 14 2020 04:36 AM (LADmw)

Posted by: Rick C at Wednesday, October 14 2020 11:22 AM (eqaFC)

Posted by: Mauser at Wednesday, October 14 2020 02:26 PM (Ix1l6)

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• Gawr Gura refers to her membership list as membershrimps.  Does Pekora refer to her followers as pekopons?
  
  
  
  On the downside her voice is not exactly, um, melodic.  On the upside she's a lunatic.
  
  
  
• The Seeed Grove Beginners Kit contains everything you need to get started with Arduino.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  An Arduino Uno with (counts) seventeen headers, plus six I/O devices including a 1" OLED display.  
  
  The article doesn't mention pricing but it's $19.90 on the Seeed store which seems very reasonable for what you get.
  
  That board might look fragile and easy to break, but that's because it is.  It's designed so that when you're ready for a real project you can snap off the individual little boards to make them, um, individual little boards.
  
  
  
• Telepath is a new social network designed by people who think 1984 is a cookbook.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  In closed beta they have two full time thought police already.
  
  
  
• JuliaMono is a monospaced font for scientific computing.  (JuliaMono)
  
  Most notably, it has over ten thousand Unicode characters.  Perfect for implementing your next Roguelike.
  
  
  
  Wonder if it has PETSCII.
  
  Update: Probably.  Looks like all the PETSCII characters have a Unicode equivalent.  (Style64)
  
  
  
• The world's smallest office suite.  (Serge)
  
  Four lines of code.  And a current web browser.
  
  
  
• Rocketmail!  (Vice)
  
  The Pentagon is contracting SpaceX to develop a platform capable of delivering cargoes anywhere in the world within an hour.
  
  Finally we're getting the 21st century we deserve.
  
  
  
• A bot posted the best answers on Reddit for a week.  (KMeme)
  
  People suspected it right away, though it did post some cool stuff before unmasking the Illuminati and having its plug pulled.
  
  
  

Yui, Get the Flammenwerfer Video of the Day

Posted by: Rick C at Tuesday, October 13 2020 12:01 AM (eqaFC)

Posted by: normal at Tuesday, October 13 2020 01:49 AM (LADmw)

Posted by: J Greely at Tuesday, October 13 2020 02:02 AM (ZlYZd)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Tuesday, October 13 2020 11:19 AM (PiXy!)

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• lunasvg is a standalone SVG rendering library.  (GitHub)
  
  If you compile the library you also get a command line tool to convert SVG to PNG.
  
  I'm going to have to try this because our current SVG rendering pipeline at my day job is sub-optimal, and by sub-optimal I mean fucked.
  
  
  
• Loading CSV at 2GB per second  (Liuliu.me)
  
  By parallelising the parser.
  
  This presupposes the existence of many gigabytes of CSV, which is not a world I choose to live in.
  
  
  
• NiLang is a DSL for writing reversible code in Julia.  (GitHub)
  
  I sort of understand what's going on here.  Any function you define with this approach automatically generates its inverse.  Don't ask me how, though.
  
  
  
• All memory is the same speed.  (AnandTech)
  
  Whether it's DDR-333 or DDR5-6400, the access time is about 15ns.

Biped Video of the Day

Don't Try to Learn English From Anime Either Video of the Day

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• Had a stomach bug Friday and then fell asleep before posting the update Saturday, so it's two short updates today.
  
  
  
• You can't run Star Citizen on a Pentium anymore.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Also, the game still isn't out.
  
  
  
• Razer's Blade Stealth 13 is getting a tiger in the tank.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Base price of the new model is $1799 for a quad-core Tiger Lake, 1650 Ti, 16GB RAM, 512GB SSD, and a 13" 1080p 120Hz display.
  
  Yesterday's Acer Nitro 5 tops out at $1099 with an eight core Ryzen, 1650 Ti, 16GB RAM, 512GB SSD, and a 15" 1080p 144Hz display.
  
  So that's what you're paying to have your hardware squoze into a smaller form factor.
  
  
  
• Benchmarking the Xeon W-1270.  (Serve the Home)
  
  It looks great as long as you don't compare it with Ryzen.
  
  I was looking at getting a W-1290P server - the workstation edition of the 10900K - but it's not that much faster than our existing 3700X and the current motherboards don't support IPMI.  A 5900X looks to be a much better choice long term.
  
  
  
• Scientists have found a more efficient way to optimise the Travelling Salesman Problem.  (Quanta)
  
  Yes, it's only 0.0000000000000000000000000000000002% better, but they've only been working on this since 1976.
  
  
  
• The assholes at ZDNet just sent up the defamation lawsuit signal.  (ZDNet)
  
  Where the hell are their editors?
  
  
  
• The judge in the Epic/Apple battle awarded a stay on half of Apple's assault on consumers.  (Thurrott.com)
  
  Apple can boot Fortnite, but is blocked from doing the same to Unreal Engine.
  
  
  
• Twitter giveth:
  
  
  
  
  
  
• And Twitter telleth you to get fucked:
  
  
  
  
  
  

• Hololive livestreams are a train wreck here in Australia.  They disable rewind, and that seems to completely ruin YouTube's streaming.
  
  On this laptop I can play regular videos perfectly fine, but Hololive livestreams are a stuttering unwatchable mess even dialed all the way down to 144p.
  
  Given that they make all their money from livestreams, this seems like a problem.
  
  Update: Huh.  Working today.
  
  
  
• The 2020 Acer Nitro 5 brings Renoir and Turing together starting at just $669.  (AnandTech)
  
  I/O is good, with USB-A and C ports, wired Ethernet, and HDMI, and expandability is great with user-upgradeable RAM, two M.2 slots, and a 2.5" drive bay.
  
  CPU performance is great as you'd expect from a 6 Ryzen 4500U, and gaming on the GTX 1650 is pretty solid, though it won't hit 60 FPS on max settings on some games.
  
  Most interesting is that for a cheap gaming laptop the battery life is not at all bad - 4 hours of gameplay or 10 hours watching movies.
  
  Downside is it weighs an old-school 2.4kg.
  
  It does have the Four Essential Keys, but in the form of a full numeric keypad, which I don't like on a laptop.  But YMMV.
  
  
  
• Speaking of Ryzen performance AMD announced the Ryzen 5000 lineup just as they announced they were going to announce.  (AnandTech)
  
  19% higher average IPC measured as the geometric mean across 25 benchmarks.  AMD says it's faster than both the 10900K and the 1185G7 on single-threaded tasks.  The latter is a laptop chip but should still be hitting its rated clock on a single core, so it's a fair test.  It will of course crush Intel on multi-threaded tasks.
  
  Clock speeds increased only marginally, by 100-200MHz, but it's the same TSMC 7nm process and the same TDP, so that's to be expected.
  
  Price got a $50 increase on all chips, so it now ranges from $299 for six cores to $799 for sixteen.
  
  No mention yet of new Threadripper or Epyc parts, though we can be sure they are on the way; they will use the same CPU dies as these Ryzen parts, and the same I/O dies as existing Threadripper and Epyc.
  
  
  
• AMD is reportedly looking to take advantage of it's restored market valuation to buy Xilinx.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  That would be an interesting acquisition.  Xilinx is one of the two main FPGA vendors; the other, Altera, got swallowed by Intel about five years ago.
  
  
  

Posted by: normal at Sunday, October 11 2020 12:03 AM (obo9H)

Posted by: Rick C at Sunday, October 11 2020 04:53 AM (eqaFC)

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