• Intel announced its 10th generation Comet Lake H processors - their answer to AMD's Ryzen 4000 APUs.  (AnandTech)
  
  The top of the line is the i9-10980HK, an 8-core/16-thread part part with a base clock of 2.4GHz and a maximum boost clock in theory of 5.3GHz.  But that boost clock actually draws 135W of power for two cores, so it's complete nonsense for a laptop chip.
  
  AMD's 4900HS only boosts to 4.3GHz, but the base clock is 3.0GHz, and it's a 35W part.
  
  And the Intel part is still 14nm.
  
  More details in this video, but none of it is interesting.  It's a very minor update to their 9th generation H series, and AMD just demolished those chips.
  
  
  
  That video also discusses Nvidia's new mobile RTX 2070 Super, which has 11% more cores than the current 2070 but runs about 5% slower, so effective performance gains are going to be pretty small.
  
  
  
• Razer announced their new Blade 15 with these Comet Lake H chips.  (Tom's Hardware)
  Not with the i9, but with a 6 or 8 core i7, accompanied by an RTX 2070 or 2080.
  
  
  
• The FCC is proposing to open up 1200MHz of bandwidth in the 6GHz range.  (FCC)  (PDF)
  
  That will make for really fast WiFi, though it won't go through walls worth a damn.
  
  Also, wouldn't, technically, some of it have to be in the 5GHz range, or the 7GHz range, or possibly, both?
  
  
  
• You can now buy Amazon video on Apple products using your Amazon account.  (Six Colors)
  
  A true breakthrough in these trying times.
  
  
  
• Cloudflare has launched 1.1.1.1 for Families.  (Cloudflare)
  
  It's at 1.1.1.2 and 1.1.1.3.  Which actually kind of makes sense.
  
  
  
• My Bluetooth mouse is causing my Bluetooth keyboard to freeze up.  Or something.  Rather annoying.
  
  
  

Music Video of the Day

Musical Video of the Day

Anime Music Video of the Day

Posted by: Rick C at Friday, April 03 2020 12:55 AM (Iwkd4)

Posted by: Rick C at Friday, April 03 2020 12:59 AM (Iwkd4)

Posted by: Jay at Friday, April 03 2020 01:08 AM (vuQH5)

Hide Comments | Add Comment

Posted by: Rick C at Friday, April 03 2020 01:11 AM (Iwkd4)

Posted by: J Greely at Friday, April 03 2020 04:57 AM (ZlYZd)

Posted by: Rick C at Friday, April 03 2020 06:38 AM (Iwkd4)

Posted by: Rick C at Friday, April 03 2020 06:39 AM (Iwkd4)

Hide Comments | Add Comment

• The Atlantic embraces fascism.  (The Atlantic)
  
  This would have made a great April Fool's piece if they'd just held onto it for one more day.  Well, in Australia it already was.
  
  Adrian Vermeule argues that the actual meaning of the Constitution has become an obstacle to conservative goals, and so we must now make it mean whatever we want it to mean.
  
  This demented fuckwit is a professor of constitutional law at Harvard Law School, but we've already seen that professors of constitutional law often have very little regard for the actual Constitution.
  
  Similar to the way ethicists are some of the worst monsters in history.
  
  
  

Tech News

• Samsung is ceasing production of LCDs - including their own QLED designs.  (AnandTech)
  
  From now on it's just OLED.  I believe that small OLED screens have already passed price parity with LCD, but that's certainly not true for larger ones.
  
  
  
• Xerox has decided it will hang on to it's $34 billion and forget about HP for now.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  Probably wise.
  
  
  
• On second thought let's not go there.  It is a silly place.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  Interest in Zoom has spiked with the advent of our Global Lockdown, though I don't know why.  The company has a terrible track record.  I'd sooner use almost anything else.
  
  Others have come to the same conclusion. (Six Colors)
  
  Indeed, things at Zoom seem to be a bit of a mess.  (Vice)
  
  
  
• Need a bit more power in your laptop than the Ryzen 4900HS can deliver?  The XMG APEX 15 is what you need unless it isn't.  (WCCFTech)
  
  I noted a while back - I think - that while the 12 core 65W Ryzen 3900 non-X is only available to OEMs, it doesn't matter because the standard 3900X, and indeed the 3800X and 3950X as well, can be configured to run at 65W.  Which is better because if you don't like the results you can configure it straight back to 105W.
  
  This laptop has done just that - well, the first part - with anything up to a Ryzen 9 3950X configured to 65W, an RTX 2060 or 2070, and up to 64GB of RAM.
  
  The result is not exactly svelte, but on the other hand it should be more than twice as fast as my current desktop.  Almost every option is configurable except the display, which is only 1080p.  Maxed out with a 3950X, RTX 2070, 64GB RAM and 8TB of SSD it comes to €4299.
  
  
  
• Astrophysicists.  (The Guardian)
  
  
  
• Speaking of AMD, we got our  first Threadripper 3960X server at my day job today.  Looks great, exactly as we specified.  Except for the tiny problem that I know how to verify if Linux is seeing ECC RAM...  And it isn't.
  
  Well, it's seeing an ECC-enabled CPU, an ECC-enabled motherboard, and 8 x 16GB ECC RAM modules, but it is not actually running with ECC enabled.
  
  The techs updated to the latest firmware, to no avail, and are going to try swapping to a different brand of memory.  If that fails we'll try Ubuntu 19.10 to see if we need a newer kernel to cope with the latest Threadripper CPU and chipset.
  
  And if that doesn't work, we'll swap it for an Epyc, which will be a bit slower but runs on a standard server motherboard that's been around for a couple of years now.

Posted by: The Brickmuppet at Thursday, April 02 2020 01:14 AM (5iiQK)

Posted by: Rick C at Thursday, April 02 2020 04:53 AM (Iwkd4)

Posted by: J Greely at Thursday, April 02 2020 03:23 PM (ZlYZd)

Posted by: ReallyBored at Saturday, April 04 2020 07:51 AM (ijRNj)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Saturday, April 04 2020 10:35 AM (PiXy!)

Hide Comments | Add Comment

• Gas has hit $1 per gallon for the first time since the last time that happened.  (Bloomberg)
  
  In London.  
  
  London, Kentucky.
  
  Unlikely to happen in, say, California.  Or London London.  Where the gallons, back when they had gallons, were 25% larger.
  
  
  
• Want a 64GB microSD card with a 140TB write endurance rating?  (AnandTech)
  
  Yes?
  
  Why?
  
  I mean, just curious.
  
  Anyway, Transcend has a new range of microSD cards with SLC caching, just like recent SSDs.  They don't have remarkable performance but you can overwrite the entire drive a couple of thousand times worst case.
  
  
  
• AMD's 35W Ryzen 4900HS laptop APU delivers 96% of the single-threaded performance and 90% of the multi-threaded performance of Intel's 127W i9-9900KS desktop part.  (Reddit)
  
  Admittedly that's on one benchmark - Cinebench R20 - but most benchmarks show similar results.  There are a couple where the 4900HS does fall behind a little, possibly because it has half the cache of the Intel chip (and one quarter the cache of a desktop 3700X).
  
  This is the most detailed review I've seen so far, including a look at integrated graphics performance.  But this particular laptop might not be the best showcase for that - to really shine the chip needs LPDDR4X memory, and the Asus Zephyrus uses standard DDR4.
  
  
  
  
  
• More Ryzen Mobile 4000 stuff from Hardware Unboxed.  Like, an hour more.
  
  
  
  
  
  
• Other Linus is in on the action too.
  
  
  
  He had to drag out a huge overclocked laptop with a 120W CPU TDP to compete with the 35W 4900HS.
  
  
  
• If you'd rather read words than listen to them, PCWorld's review is quite good  (PCWorld)
  
  Money quote:

  It takes a desktop Core i9 and 10-pound chassis to beat a 3.5-pound laptop with AMD’s Ryzen 9 4900HS in it.

  The article also notes that the Ryzen 4000 APUs have a total of 20 PCIe 3.0 lanes, which wasn't clear from the original AMD presentation.  8 lanes are available for a dedicated graphics chip, two 4-lane ports for NVMe SSDs (which can alternately be configured to 4 SATA ports), and 4 lanes to be assigned as the vendor sees fit.
  
  
  
• If you don't need that much performance, Ryzen 4000U systems are on the way as well.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  The Acer Swift 3 and Aspire 5 are due out in April and June respectively, starting at $629 ad $519 also respectively.  Exact specs and price points are not yet specified, with the phrase "up to" getting a lot of work.
  
  
  
• While everyone else is jumping on the 4900HS some guy in Romania managed to get hold of the 4500U, 4700U, 4600H, 4800H, and 4800HS.  (Reddit)
  
  The Reddit summary links to three reviews covering a total of five different models...  But they're all in Romanian.
  
  
  
• Sudden outbreak of sanity, no film at eleven.  (TechDirt)
  
  The Spanish copyright license collection agency SGAE has formally announced that no, don't be silly, you don't need to license a song to sing it from your balcony while the country is in lockdown due to the depredations of Wuhan Bat Soup Death Plague.
  
  
  
• ACM's digital library is freely accessible until June 30 or we all die from the plague, whichever comes first.  (ACM)
  
  Their website is terrible.
  
  
  
• LG is apparently rebranding itself to just L.  (9to5Google)
  
  L's official statement clarifies the change:

  For eight generations, the LG G Series has introduced bleeding-edge technology to consumers around the world. From super wide-angle cameras to flexible displays to high-fidelity audio and the Quad DAC to 1440p displays, the G Series has consistently been at the forefront of smartphone innovation since 2012. We look forward to sharing more details soon.

  Or maybe not.
  
  
  
• General Electric aviation workers are demanding the company convert manufacturing over to ventilators.  (Vice)
  
  Just what the world needs: A 115,000 foot-pound ventilator.
  
  
  
• No paper towels at the store.  (I'm fine on toilet paper.)  Picked up three boxes of my favourite gluten-free chicken nuggets and a pack of 200 paper napkins, which are really just paper towels with delusions of grandeur.
  
  
  
• Reportedly Australia has reached peak loo paper.  (Sydney Morning Herald)
  
  
  
• And people have turned to panic buying....  Other non-perishable items.  (Sydney Morning Herald)
  
  
  
• A total of 19 people have now died of WBSDP across Australia, and my entire fucking state is in lockdown, with up to six months in jail for people who leave their homes "without a reasonable excuse".  (Sydney Morning Herald)
  
  They haven't started welding people's doors shut, but a government of a nominal democracy should not have this much power.
  
  These rules are being enforced by the same cretins who recently let 3000 passengers disembark from a cruise ship and simply wander off.
  
  It does appear to be working.  (US News & World Report)
  
  But the cure can indeed be worse than the disease.

Posted by: Jay at Wednesday, April 01 2020 04:48 AM (vuQH5)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Wednesday, April 01 2020 07:38 AM (PiXy!)

Hide Comments | Add Comment

• The last Dresden Files book came out in 2014.  But now:
  
  
  
  Peace Talks in July.  Battle Ground in September.
  
  There was the first Cinder Spires book and a bunch of comics in between, but it's been a while otherwise.
  
  Here's a recent interview with Jim Butcher.
  
  
  
  Butcher explains in the interview that he spent three years trying to write this latest volume, and ended up with a 400,000 word first draft, before his editor suggested How about we make this two books?  Which made a light come on, but he had to do a lot of rewriting to make each novel a reasonably self-contained entry in the series.
  
  He noted in another interview that these two books only fill one slot in the series outline - 16 of 20 in the main sequence - so there will be one, possibly two extra volumes before the concluding trilogy.
  
  Also, the Dutch edition of Grave Peril is titled Doods Nood.  (Reddit)
  
  
  
• While we're on books, and fantasy books specifically, I've been rereading Mike McClung's Amra Thetys series.  I had bought but not read The Last God, a collection of side stories not involving Amra herself.  I finally read that and it was good enough to prompt a reread of the other five volumes.
  
  Probably not the best book in the series to read first though.
  
  The first book in the series, The Thief Who Pulled on Trouble's Braids, is either $0.99 or $0.61 on Amazon right now so you can't go far wrong. 
  
  
  

• Here come the Ryzen 4000 laptops, finally.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  This one is the Asus ROG Zephyrus G14, a 4800HS model with an RTX 2060, so they haven't tested integrated graphics just yet (they're working on additional benchmarks though) but on the CPU side of things it is unequivocally the fastest laptop in their roundup, even against the Dell XPS 15 with Intel's top of the line Core i9-9980HK.
  
  And it has an 11 hour battery life.  On a 3.5 pound gaming laptop.
  
  The model seen here has a 1080p display but there will also be a 2560x1440 version, which is effectively "retina" level at 14".
  
  
  
  In that review Leo mentions that a couple of years ago he reviewed an Asus GL702ZC - a 6.6 pound 17" laptop with a desktop Ryzen 1700 and Radeon RX 580 - the same configuration as my current desktops.
  
  The G14 is 30 to 50% faster, and half the size, and has vastly better battery life.
  
  It comes with a power brick, but will happily charge off USB C if you don't need it in its top turbo mode.
  
  Except for those missing keys the 2560x1440 model would make a great go anywhere / do anything laptop.
  
  
  
• Intel's Rocket Lake is coming unless it isn't.  (WCCFTech)
  
  This is Intel's 11th gen part with the new Xe graphics, and power ratings from 15W to 125W.
  
  
  
• The cloud is full, part two.  (ZDNet)
  
  Azure reports that demand in certain locations has jumped by 775%, and overall demand for certain telecommuting products has jumped over 200% worldwide.
  
  
  
• The Standard Model, like Ramans, does everything in threes.  (Quanta)
  
  We just don't know why.  People have been working on this for decades and we still don't know, but an interesting suggestion is that it's the the particles that seem unusual to us - not the electron but the corresponding tau particle - that are the ones that are actually fundamental.
  
  
  
• Yes, the Galaxy S20 has 100X zoom.  (Thurrott.com)
  
  No, it's not any good.  The 10X zoom looks great in the sample photos though.
  
  
  
• Is Uranus leaking gas?  (Digital Trends)
  
  Sorry, I had to.  You know I had to.
  
  
  
• Zoom has stopped sending all your data to Facebook.  (Vice)
  
  Says Zoom.  We'll see.
  
  
  
• I spend a lot of time calling out the US news media.  The Australian news media can be just as bad at times, but the difference is they don't operate in lockstep the same way, and on any story one of the mainstream outlets will actually report the facts in some recognisable form.
  
  Case in point:
  
  
  
  
  Directly calling out China for not just lying but for rewriting history and disappearing inconvenient whistleblowers - when the US media are busy repeating the lies.
  
  Stop the video when it gets to the interview clip though.  The interviewee is a moron.

Posted by: J Greely at Tuesday, March 31 2020 01:09 AM (ZlYZd)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Tuesday, March 31 2020 01:13 AM (PiXy!)

Posted by: The Brickmuppet at Tuesday, March 31 2020 06:10 AM (5iiQK)

Hide Comments | Add Comment

• Seriously, it's been compiling for like an hour.
  
  Oh, there we go, it failed.
  
  
  
• Peaky oil.  (Bloomberg)
  
  In some markets the price of a barrel of oil has apparently gone negative.
  
  
  
• And seven times never trust a...  Teddy bear?  (Bleeping Computer)
  
  Beware of teddy bears bearing USB drives.  And don't take any wooden horses either.
  
  
  
• The most expensive click of all.
  
  With this AWS server as a baseline, the author tried to find the most expensive single Azure instance - something that can be ordered with a single click.  It came to $9,481,824.
  
  

Posted by: Rick C at Tuesday, March 31 2020 12:02 AM (Iwkd4)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Tuesday, March 31 2020 09:04 AM (PiXy!)

Posted by: Rick C at Tuesday, March 31 2020 12:44 PM (Iwkd4)

Hide Comments | Add Comment

• The American news media have gone from merely venal, vapid, and inomparably lazy to completely insane.
  
  

• DDR5 is on its way.  (AnandTech)
  
  I was expecting it to appear this year - in something, if not in mainstream products - but it looks like it will be 2021.
  
  
  
• New benchmark leaks show that the 35W 4900HS is 30% faster than the 15W 4800U.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  That's impressive performance from the low-power part.  Time for a 16 core 30W laptop CPU maybe?
  
  
  
• The whole of TechDirt has been delisted by Google under the EU's abominable "right to be forgotten" law.  (TechDirt)
  
  This only applies within Europe, at least for now.
  
  
  
• Yelp recently unveiled an initiative for businesses to easily join in fundraising efforts to help fight Corona-chan.  (The Verge)
  
  Only they didn't bother to inform those businesses that they were being signed up to promote the fundraising efforts.  They just sort of went ahead and did it.
  
  
  
• Frederik Pohl, call your agent: SpaceX awarded contract to supply cargo to the Gateway space station.  (Space.com)
  
  With no helpful Heechee around, we're going to have to build this one ourselves.  Gateway won't orbit the Earth, but the Moon.
  
  
  
• In the other direction, you can now book a holiday trip to the bottom of the Challenger Deep.  (Bloomberg)
  
  $750,000 per person, but there are currently no reported cases of Wuhan Bat Soup Death Plague in the Marianas Trench.

Posted by: Rick C at Sunday, March 29 2020 03:25 AM (Iwkd4)

Posted by: Rick C at Sunday, March 29 2020 03:28 AM (Iwkd4)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Sunday, March 29 2020 09:05 AM (PiXy!)

Posted by: Rick C at Sunday, March 29 2020 10:33 AM (Iwkd4)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Sunday, March 29 2020 01:46 PM (PiXy!)

Posted by: Rick C at Tuesday, March 31 2020 12:04 AM (Iwkd4)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Tuesday, March 31 2020 09:11 AM (PiXy!)

Hide Comments | Add Comment

• If you're using IBM cloud servers with the standard portable storage and ZFS, do not enable deduplication.
  
  Block compression, fine.  No problem at all.  But deduplication will murder your performance.
  
  Thankfully performance recovers fairly quickly after you turn it off - duplicated blocks that were deduplicated before are still deduplicated, but it stops trying to do it for new data.
  
  
  
• Quarantine Day 4444
  
  
  
  
  
  
• Huawei have announced the P40, P40 Pro, P40 Pro Plus, and P40 Plus Pro.  (AnandTech)
  
  I think that's right.
  
  The standout feature is the camera array, with a huge 0.8" diagonal sensor and up to 10x optical zoom on the telephoto lens.  The Pro+ has two different telephoto cameras for a total of five rear cameras plus a 32MP selfie camera and an unspecified IR camera for face recognition.
  
  Prices from €799 to €1399, no Google services, and you probably can't buy one anyway.
  
  
  
• Intel's 24 core Xeon Gold 6248R comes close to matching the performance of AMD's 24 core Epyc 7402.  (Serve the Home)
  
  Unfortunately it comes close to matching the price of the 32 core Epyc 7502 which beats it easily.  And if you're configuring a single-socket system, you can use the Epyc 7402P, which is half the price, or alternately the Threadripper 3960X, which is half the price and 30-40% faster.  (But only has four channel RAM.)
  
  
  
• Speaking of which, the hardware of my 3960X server is configured and I'm just waiting on the techs to load up Linux and/or give me IPMI access.  This is where cloud servers do win out over dedicated hardware.
  
  
  
• Achievement unlocked: One exabyte of other people's files.  (BackBlaze)
  
  I wonder what the aggregate size of BitTorrent is.
  
  
  
• Zoom is the new hotness in this plague-raddled telecommuting wasteland.  (Thurrott.com)
  
  The new hotness that silently sends user data off to Facebook.  Even if you don't have a Facebook account.
  
  
  
• Thunderbirds are go!  (UPI)
  
  The first official mission of the US Space Force launched successfully today, carrying a new military communications satellite, and not, as originally expected, rescuing a supersonic passenger jet whose landing gear had failed.
  
  

Posted by: Rick C at Saturday, March 28 2020 01:35 AM (Iwkd4)

Posted by: Rick C at Saturday, March 28 2020 01:46 AM (Iwkd4)

Hide Comments | Add Comment