WOULD YOU CARE FOR SOME TEA?

Friday, August 09

Geek

Daily News Stuff 8 August 2019

It's An AMD AMD AMD AMD World Edition

Tech News

  • AMD has launched its eagerly awaited second-generation Epyc server CPU, codenamed "Rome".  (AnandTech)

    Does it deliver on all the heady promises?

    Basically, yes.

    A pair of the top of the line 64-core parts will set you back $13,900 ($6950 each), but will not just compete evenly with, but actually outperform four of Intel's $10,009 Xeon Platinum 8260 processors.  (Serve the Home)

    Faster and 65% cheaper.

    If you don't need 128 cores in one server, the single-socket 64-core model is only $4000 and is still faster than a pair of $10,000 Intel CPUs.

    The pick of the litter from my perspective is the 24-core 7402P at $1250.  The base clock of 2.8GHz sounds low, but with the 15% IPC boost in Zen 2 it's actually faster than the 3.0GHz base clock of my Ryzen 1700.

    For a long time dual-socket servers have made up 80% of the market, with 10% one socket and 10% four or more.  That might change now that the fastest dual-socket servers from Intel can be replaced with a single socket from AMD.

  • Samsung announced the battery-life-at-any-price Galaxy Book S.  (AnandTech)

    It's based on the Qualcomm 8cx CPU, which has four A76 cores running at 2.8GHz.  That would be blazingly fast for Android, but how it copes with Windows is something we'll have to wait and see.

  • Samsung also announced the Note 10 and Note 10+.  (AnandTech)

    Highlights of the Note 10 are a smaller, lower-resolution screen, no headphone jack, and no microSD slot.

    Samsung clearly has Apple envy.

  • Oh my God, it's full of idiots.  (TechDirt)

    Classic correction from the referenced New York Times article:
    An earlier version of this article incorrectly described the law that protects hate speech on the internet. The First Amendment, not Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, protects it.
  • Liz Warren publicly threatened to reduce US internet access speeds to Australian levels.  (Tech Crunch)

  • Hobo and human shit detection startups in 3... 2... 1...  (Tech Crunch)

  • Fascist activists posing as journalists got Amazon to shut down Gab's investor website.  (One Angry Gamer)

    I had Amazon marked as one of the few big tech companies still run by adults.  Maybe they are - they haven't shown the internal chaos demonstrated by Google - but they are at best spineless adults and I would not by choice host anything with them, ever.

    Don't read the comments.  99% sure it's just trolling, but still.

  • Disqus is shutting down its channels service at the end of the month.  (One Angry Gamer)

    Channels are - were - a feature that let you set up your own forums within the Disqus platform, alongside blog comments or whatever.

    So, how do you save your channel?

    The answer appears to be ha ha fuck you.

    Disqus does support exporting site comments.  In a format it cannot, itself, read.

  • Slytherine has acquired the rights to Master of Magic so maybe we'll finally see a sequel after (mumble) years.  (One Angry Gamer)


Disclaimer: No, seriously, don't read the comments.

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Wednesday, August 07

Geek

Daily News Stuff 7 August 2019

Imagine A Croc Stamping On A Human Face Edition

Tech News


Retrocomputing Journal

Well there's a thought: 960x540 is kind of a standard video mode.  Televisions interpret it as 1080i, and monitors interpret it as 960x540.  The pixel clock would be 37.125 MHz - manageable - and in "high resolution" mode it wouldn't require any internal line or pixel doubling.

Pixels have a 1:1 aspect ratio, and it's an integer fraction of 1080p or higher so there's no scaling artifacts.  Sub-resolutions of 480x270 and 320x180 would work, and with a little fiddling, a 640x270 text mode where the pixels weren't square.  My originally planned 640x360 high-res mode would not work, but you'd have something better.

Text mode would offer up to 120 columns by 45 lines (8x12 character cell).

I should be able to do that without needing an FPGA at all, and all I need to test it is the developer kit (which I have), a handful of resistors, a VGA cable that no-one wants anymore (I'm sure I have a few of those), and a soldering iron.  And solder.  And maybe a little breadboard or something.  And some breadboard wires.  And at least a multimeter with frequency measurement so I can check the output voltage and HSYNC.

Still, if I can do this without an FPGA it's at least twice as likely that something will actually happen with this project.



Disclaimer: Rule One: Don't read the comments.

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Tuesday, August 06

Geek

Daily News Stuff 6 August 2019

Ooflets Everywhere Edition

Tech News


Retrocomputing and Makery Stuff Journal


Looking for an Arm single-board computer to run Linux?  Unfortunately there's not really all that much on the market right now, with only twenty or thirty new boards coming out each week.



Want to screen capture your little SBC?  Well, you could loop the digital video output back into the microcontroller's camera interface.  Or if you have HDMI out, you can just shove it into an Orange Pi.


Or...  Maybe not.  That board looks pretty annoying actually.  It does have a lot of different ports, the problem is getting them to work reliably.  But if you want to record HDMI, the alternative is a full-scale PC with a separate HDMI capture card.


Video of the Day



Irresistible life with monster girls.


Picture of the Day

http://ai.mee.nu/images/CureFrootloop.jpg?size=720x&q=95

Via Brickmuppet, it's Cure White, Cure Black, and Cure Frootloop.



Disclaimer: There's no telling where the money went.

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Geek

Daily News Stuff 5 August 2019

Two Chips And Gravy Edition

Tech News


Retrocomputing Journal

If Pascal and Modula-2 were too baroque for your tastes, there was always Oberon.  Actually, I kind of like it.  Better than the plague of curly bracket languages.

Meanwhile I've stripped the design for the A750 prototype down to two chips and a voltage regulator.  And a bunch of resistors.  And some bypass capacitors even though as we all saw yesterday it will work fine without them.  And probably one or two other little items once I finish reading the design guide for the two chips.  And connectors for USB in, USB out, audio out, VGA, and a cough MMC card cough.

The real board will have two external flash chips, a USB hub, Ethernet, two CPLDs, internal and external expansion buses, a console port, audio in, and a board at least four times the size and still be cheaper.  The parts I'm using for the prototype are standalone but significantly more expensive because of that.

Also, I was trying to figure out a way to video-capture the board so I can post YouTube videos.  Without running the VGA into an actual video capture board.

Then I realised that the H750 chip has a camera input right next to the video output, a hardware JPEG codec, and dual SDMMC controllers, all fast enough to keep up with my (relatively) low resolution video.  So I simply feed the digital video signals back into the camera port, turn them into a series of JPEG files at 30 FPS, and write them to a FAT-formatted card.  Which I can then plug into my PC, or read off over USB at a speedy 12 Mbits per second.  And then convert to some real video format.  There must already be code to do that.  Yep.


Disclaimer: The video output connected to the FPGA.  The FPGA connected to the camera port.  The camera port connected to the JPEG codec.  The JPEG codec connected to the SDMMC controller.  The SDMMC controller connected to the USB upstream port.  The USB upstream port connected to the JPG-to-AVI conversion software.  Dem screenshots dem screenshots gonna animate...

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Sunday, August 04

Geek

Daily News Stuff 4 August 2019

It Was Still Behind The Painting Edition

Tech News



Retrocomputing Journal

Had lunch with my brother today (found a very nice and reasonably priced local Thai restaurant with gluten free dishes), picked up my developer kit for the A750, and took a tour of his new workshop / office, which I think I did visit briefly once before but had forgotten.  (I'd dropped by his previous space plenty of times.)

He showed me his test equipment and current customer projects and tools and bins of parts. 

And he has a pick-and-place machine.

That's the device PCB assemblers use to assemble PCBs.

It's second hand and only a 25-reel baby unit with minimal intelligence, but it's a few minutes drive from my house rather than being in China.  And it should do fine for assembling a small pre-production run of A750 boards.

I'll still need to outsource getting the boards printed - no-one sane does that by hand anymore - but that's relatively cheap and straightforward.

Of course, first I have to do something useful with the developer board - get some code running and see what happens when I hack the LCD control registers.  The results of that experiment will determine whether I need an FPGA to make the whole thing work.  If I can just do it in software everything becomes cheaper, easier, and more reliable.  I added the idea of a separate monochrome console port to the project precisely because any mistake on the FPGA would mean losing your video output.

But step one is the same as always: Use a 480MHz superscalar RISC processor to make an LED blink.

Speaking of picking and placing, there is an open-source pick-and-place-machine project.



"So apparently this is a ninety-seven step assembly process, and I'm up to step...  Three."


Video of the Day



Episode #1081: How to Kill a Computer.

Actually this method doesn't work very well.  Stick with the tried-and-true approach of teleporting space junk directly into the main memory core.


Disclaimer: I want one, but I don't want to do all that assembly.  I think there's a gap in the market for a pick and place assembly machine that assembles pick and place machines.

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Geek

Daily News Stuff 3 August 2019

One Law Part Two Edition

Tech News


Retrocomputing Journal

I'm picking up my developer board for the A750 project today.  My brother, who does this sort of nonsense for a living, added it to his latest parts order to save me on shipping which was nearly as much as the board.

Speaking of nearly as much as the board, the NuXT is a new XT - IBM PC XT, that is.

It has an NEC V20 CPU, which can run both 8088 and 8080 code (so you can boot regular CP/M) at up to 9.55MHz.  832K main memory, a 256K VGA or 512K SVGA card, optional 8087 coprocessor, serial and floppy controllers, and a Compact Flash slot to substitute for a hard drive.



It is hand-assembled and costs $340, but it does pop into any standard microATX case.

Genuine 8088s are still available today - as are Z80s, 6502s, and with a little searching, 6809s as well - but they're not cheap compared to their modern equivalents.  $10-$15 a piece, where in that same price range you can get something that not only runs at 100 times the clock speed, but has everything on that motherboard built in and also running 100 times faster.

Well, the developer kit was $40, but for just the chip it's $11.  And US$3.30 in volume.

I found another Amiga-on-a-chip too, the Microchip SAMA5 family.  It's cheap. starting at A$9.84 with external memory or A$14.86 with 16MB built in, and it has crazy 2D video capabilities, with overlays within overlays and all sorts of blending modes.  Two problems: No internal flash so it needs a boot ROM (like the RZ/A1 series), and worse, it's only available in BGA so it would be a real pain to prototype.

The developer kit is $150, which slots geometrically in between the little Nucleo board I already bought for the H750 ($40) and the spartan but nonetheless rather expensive kit for the RZ/A1 ($750). 

Compared to the Nucleo board, though, the SAMA5 board has 128 times as much flash and 256 times the RAM, so you can see where some of that money went.  The only problem is that it has too much memory.  I want to keep things simple, and 256MB of RAM is not conducive to simplicity.


Video of the Day



A simple old-school square-wave electronic keyboard, with a quick demo of how PWM changes the sound of the wave.  I'm planning to use wavetables on the A750, so you can have any basic wave shape you want, but then on top of that it will have programmable AM, FM, and PWM effects.  Output will be through the built-in 12-bit DAC, so it won't be CD quality, but it will do.



Disclaimer: One law for left and right alike, that forbids them equally from posting memes that don't suck.

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Friday, August 02

Geek

Daily News Stuff 2 August 2019

As You Wish Edition

Tech News



Disclaimer: The cow is of the bovine ilk: One end is moo, the other milk.

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Thursday, August 01

Geek

Daily News Stuff 1 August 2019

Must Not Lesnerize Edition

Tech News



Disclaimer: Protection begets the need of further protection. That is a universal constant.

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Geek

Daily News Stuff 31 July 2019

Unexpectedly Edition

Tech News



Disclaimer: Unfortunately we have had to drag you out of your home at 3AM and beat you senseless with coal shovels.  We trust this does not affect our ongoing relationship.  Please click anywhere to give this interaction a five star rating.

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Wednesday, July 31

Geek

Daily News Stuff 30 July 2019

Women Minorities Hardest Hit Edition

Tech News



Disclaimer: In the future, every package manager will be a teapot for fifteen minutes.

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