• Crypto-friendly Signature Bank, with $88 billion in deposits, has gone splut and been taken over by the feds, the third bank failure in a week.  (The Verge)
  
  But there's no risk of contagion and if anyone tries to tell you otherwise they are Nazis.
  
  
  
• Depositors with both Signature and Silicon Valley Banks will be made whole.  (CNN)
  
  Both banks have sufficient assets that this is not expected to cost anything; the FDIC is acting as a receiver.  But the $250,000 limit on insured deposits is effectively dead at this point.  What the fallout of that will be is more complicated.

• The Apex Storage X21 is a PCIe 4.0 x16 card that supports up to 21 M.2 SSDs.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  That gives you up to 168TB of storage in a single slot, or 84TB with much cheaper 4TB SSDs.
  
  Pricing has not been announced but it won't be cheap.
  
  
  

Posted by: normal at Tuesday, March 14 2023 01:13 AM (LADmw)

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• This just in: Silicon Valley Bank is still splut.
  
  
  
• No, Apple's A17 Bionic mobile CPU is not going to be 59% faster in single-threaded performance than the A16.  (WCCFTech)
  
  As a rule of thumb, CPU performance rises with the square root of the issue width, and complexity and transistor count (and also power consumption) rises with the square of the issue width, so to increase performance by 59% without increasing the clock speed Apple would need to make a chip more than six times larger using six times the power.
  
  Increasing the clock speed by the same amount would have similar effects on power consumption.
  
  And both approaches have limits where requirements zoom off the charts for minimal gains.  You can see this in existing chips, where the 170W Ryzen 7900X is only 7% faster than the 65W 7900 non-X model.
  
  This supposed leak is garbage.

• Pimoroni's DV Stick will use two RP2040 chips to provide a retro-gaming tinkerer's delight.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  The RP2040 is the chip in the Raspberry Pi Pico.  It has no video circuitry at all, but it is flexible enough nonetheless to generate and encode an HDMI signal.
  
  That keeps the chip pretty busy, so Pimoroni has added a second RP2040 to act as the CPU while the first is being the the video chip.
  
  Each chip has 256k of RAM, more than enough for old-school games, though the included language of choice is MicroPython rather than Basic.
  
  
  
• At the higher end of the gaming scale, AMD's 7800X3D is almost here.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  AMD launched the more expensive 16 core 7950X3D first, knowing that everyone would buy the cheaper 8 core 7800X3D if it were available.  At $449 it averages 20% faster in AMD's admittedly selective benchmarks than Intel's $589 13900K, while also using much less power.
  
  It's slower for heavily multi-threaded tasks - if you want to game and also run particle accelerator data analysis you should go for the 7950X3D.  Unless you live above the Arctic Circle where the 13900K's furnace-like qualities would be a net win.
  
  
  
• Google hired thousands of employees it didn't want or need just to make the company look bigger - and to make them unavailable to competitors.  (Yahoo)
  
  And they just sat there doing nothing while drawing huge salaries.
  
  Allegedly, but it certainly fits the results we've seen from Google in recent years: Nothing.

• Silicon Valley Bank, with $175 billion in deposits, went splut and has been taken over by the FDIC.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  This doesn't appear to be the usual Ponzi scheme or outright theft that we have become familiar with in recent years, but instead a good old-fashioned bank run.  SVB apparently held 97% of its $209 billion in assets in long-term mortgage-backed securities.
  
  Which is fine unless rumours start circulating of trouble at your bank and more than 3% of your customers want to withdraw their money at the same time.
  
  Which is exactly what happened.
  
  
  
• SBV is - was - a proper, regulated bank so if you had less than $250k in your account it's insured and you'll have access to it on Monday.  If you had half a billion in there - like Roku - you're not going to be seeing your money any time soon.  (CNBC)
  
  You probably will see your money, since assets significantly exceeded deposits, but now that the government is involved it won't be quick.
  
  
  
• If you were holding funds in the USDC stablecoin you should also start panicking.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  Circle - the company running USDC - says it held $3.3 billion in liquid reserves at SBV.  The whole point of a stablecoin is that it is backed 1:1 with cash equivalents at banks, and apparently that was the case, right up until the bank ceased to exist.
  
  The result has been billions of dollars in transfers of USDC and congestion and soaring gas prices on the Ethereum blockchain, which to be fair is what happens any time a gnat farts in the crypto world.

• The EU, being run by retards, effectively banned 8k TVs.  (Tom's Guide)
  
  8k TVs use more power than lower resolution models, and the EU set power consumption limits that would require 8k TVs to run at miserably low brightness settings.
  
  So Samsung, not being run by retards, set its 8k TVs in Europe to run at miserably low brightness settings out of the box, with a button to turn off the crippling eco mode, which since it's an action by the individual and not the company does not violate the regulations.
  
  
  
• G.Skill has announced 8GHz 24GB DDR5 memory modules.  (WCCFTech)
  
  Pricing was not announced.  It will be interesting to see what it costs - and what voltage it runs at - because that is faster than LPDDR5X laptop memory.

• Need a workstation with 120 cores, four high-end Nvidia graphics cards, 2TB if RAM, and 28TB of SSD, but you also want it to look cool?  Lenovo has you covered.  (AnandTech)
  
  As long as someone else is paying, because that configuration will cost over $100k.
  
  They do have smaller, cheaper models, but none of them are actually small or cheap.

• If you want to build a small, cheap workstation/server - for example in a discontinued Silverstone case that arrived at your door yesterday - here are a couple of tips.
  
  Gigabyte's B650I is a solid motherboard with three M.2 slots, four SATA ports, and 2.5Gb Ethernet.  It can drive three displays over DisplayPort, HDMI, and USB-C (one of each).
  
  That's an AMD motherboard, but AMD CPUs use less power than Intel, even when they have the same 65W power rating.  The 7900 for example peaks at 89W, and is 50% faster than the 13500 which peaks at 151W.  Not a drama in a desktop system but these cases are quite small and will be packed full of drives, so I want something relatively low power.
  
  Silverstone, the same company that made the case, also makes an M.2 SATA controller.  The case can hold eight drives, and the motherboard only has four SATA ports, so this is handy.  There are other models, but this one comes with a chunky heatsink, which is apparently a necessity if you want these little controllers to work consistently.
  
  And if you want something faster than the built-in 2.5Gb Ethernet, since the PCIe slot is still free you can add a dual 25Gb Ethernet card for about $80.  Which is crazy overkill for a small server like this but the price can't be beat.  25Gb switches aren't cheap but it will work fine with 10Gb SFP+ switches or RJ45 transceivers.  (25Gb Ethernet uses SFP28, which is not the same as SFP+, but is backwards compatible.)
  
  
  
• The Solidigm P44 Pro seems like a decent SSD if you can find one for a decent price.  (Hot Hardware)
  
  Who the hell is Solidigm?  Well, a while ago Intel sold its consumer SSD division to Korean group SK Hynix.  This is them.
  
  Also, Nextorage is Sony.  Why they don't just call it Sony I don't know.
  
  
  

Posted by: Mauser at Saturday, March 11 2023 06:02 PM (BzEjn)

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• A team at the University of Rochester has discovered the Holy Grail of physics - one of the Holy Grails of physics, for there are many - a substance that acts as a room temperature superconductor.  (Science)
  
  Or so they say.  Nobody trusts them because they're not releasing the details, and Nature retracted a paper from the same group last year after nobody could replicate the results and they refused to release any more data.
  
  It looks like this one is just warmed-over cold fusion.
  
  Quanta also has a writeup of the story that may be more accessible.

• ASRock Rack has a new server motherboard for Ryzen 7000, with dual built-in 10Gb Ethernet ports and 8 SATA ports.  (Serve the Home)
  
  It's microATX, but if they release a mini-ITX version - and they did for Ryzen 5000 - I'll buy two of them.
  
  
  
• AMD's 7745HX appears to be as fast as Intel's 13700HX.  (WCCFTech)
  
  The 7745HX is the low end of the high-end Dragon Range family of laptop chips, with 8 cores; the 13700HX has 16 cores (8P + 8E).
  
  On the other hand, the 7745HX uses 50W when playing games, which is a lot for a laptop chip, where the 13700HX uses 80W.
  
  Oh.  That's the same hand.
  
  
  
• GDDR7 uses PAM3.  (AnandTech)
  
  GDDR7 is the next generation of memory for video cards, and will be about 50% faster than the latest current GDDR6X (and twice as fast as typical GDDR6).
  
  PAM3 is more interesting: It's trinary.  It runs at three voltages, -1, 0, and 1.  This allows three bits to be encoded as two signals - there are nine possible values and 0, 0 is treated as an error.
  
  The upcoming USB 4 v2 (which will hopefully become USB 5 before it arrives) also uses PAM3 to reach speeds of 80Gbps, twice as fast as regular USB 4.

Posted by: normal at Friday, March 10 2023 12:36 AM (LADmw)

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• ChatGPT cannot think, only speak.  (foobuzz)
  
  This is quite a good examination of how ChatGPT works and why it can look very smart sometimes only to immediately fall on its face a moment later.
  
  It is literally incapable of thinking if it's not talking.
  
  On the other hand, we all know people like that.
  
  
  

Tech News

• Why would I need an RTX 4090?  It's a $1600 card and the most complicated game I play is Cities: Skylines...
  
  
  
  Oh.
  
  Well, it remains to be seen if the game actually looks like that.
  
  
  
• Corsair has announced 192GB DDR5-5200 memory kits starting at $725.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Which isn't cheap, but that's a lot of memory.
  
  They also have 48GB DDR5-7000 RAM starting at $275, which isn't cheap but that's very fast.
  
  
  
• But if you try these new memory kits - all based on Micron's 24Gbit RAM chips - on an AMD motherboard, you're in for a bad time.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  As in, your operating system won't boot.  There should be BIOS updates out before too long, but right now these kits only work on Intel boards.
  
  
  
• React is holding me hostage.  (A blog for ants)
  
  JavaScript UI frameworks need to burn.  All of them.
  
  
  

• Quick one today because aargh.
  
  
  
• Gresham always wins: All streaming boxes suck.  (The Verge)
  
  Bad X drives out Good X for all values of X.
  
  
  
• There might be a new iMac this year, based on the new M3 chip.  (9to5Mac)
  
  And it might not be crippled by being limited to 16GB of RAM.
  
  
  
• Intel has a solution for intermittent failures on its 2.5Gb network chips: Turn up the power.  (AnandTech)
  
  Disabling efficiency mode reduces but doesn't quite eliminate the random network dropouts.  Though people are saying in the comments that the problems are relatively rare and you shouldn't worry unless you are rolling out 10,000 systems to a corporate environment in which case you have other things to worry about, like users.

Posted by: normal at Tuesday, March 07 2023 10:17 PM (obo9H)

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• ChatGPT broke the EU's plan to regulate AI.  (Politico)
  
  Faced with regulating the thing they are trying to regulate, Europe's plans have fallen into chaos.
  
  I just want to say that this article is dumb, Politico is dumb, the EU is dumb, and ChatGPT is particularly dumb.
  
  This quote is spot on, though:

  "These systems have no ethical understanding of the world, have no sense of truth, and they're not reliable,” said Gary Marcus, an AI expert and vocal critic.

• Build your own database from scratch.  (Build Your Own)
  
  Because, uh, I don't know why.  Even I wouldn't do this.
  
  
  
• The Arm Cortex X4 in the Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 could be clocked at 3.7GHz.  (WCCFTech)
  
  I didn't even know there was a Cortex X3
  
• Which might explain why phone makers are flailing about looking for the next big thing.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  Phones are basically good enough.  You can keep using them until they break, and then buy a new one.  And there's not much difference between a midrange phone and a flagship model, except that the flagships tend to be missing things like headphone jacks and micro SD slots.
  
  Speaking of which, the Galaxy Z Fold 3 seems to be selling at half price, which makes it only a horribly expensive small Android table rather than a psychotically expensive small Android tablet.  Apparently the Fold 4 is out, which again, I didn't notice because honestly who cares?
  
  
  
• In a similar vein if you're gaming at 2560x1440, the 65W $249 Ryzen 7600 delivers 90% of the performance of the 320W $589 6GHz Intel 13900KS.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Because games rarely need more than six cores.  If you're doing 3D rendering or computational fluid dynamics, different story.  But you're probably not.
  
  (I had a simple task to do today that totally wedged my laptop for an hour and a half.  I really do need something better, but again a 7600X would probably do.)

Posted by: Rick C at Tuesday, March 07 2023 06:00 AM (BMUHC)

Posted by: normal at Tuesday, March 07 2023 11:51 AM (obo9H)

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• Iran has struck lithium - an estimated 8.5 million tons of it.  (The Register)
  
  That sounds like a lot - and it is.  Global lithium production in 2021 was estimated at 100,000 tons, half of it from Australia.  But there's an estimated 6 million tons just sitting in the Salton Sea stinking up the place.  Lithium is not particularly rare, and not all that valuable, so not a lot of effort has been put into finding more of it when we already have enough for 300 years.
  
  You'll sometimes see figures that by 2030 we'll be using 3 million tons of lithium per year, but that's actually lithium carbonate - Li2CO3 - which is only 10% 20% lithium by mass.  Even at that rate known reserves will last more than a century sixty years.
  
  
  

• So I woke up this morning and for the first time this year I didn't feel an overpowering urge to go right back to sleep.  I didn't get as much done today as I had planned but I did actually get something done.   I washed the floor in the laundry, for example.  I had intended to wash some clothes, but that's not quite how things worked out. 
  
  
  
• Also accidentally bought a couple more computer cases, even though I just bought two expensive Hololive limited edition computer cases that I haven't put anything in yet.
  
  Before I accidentally bought a house last year I was rebuilding my home office, and one of the things I had planned was to build a couple of custom NAS boxes using Silverstone's CS01-HS.  It's an aluminium mini-ITX case with six 2.5" hot swap drive bays plugging into a SAS/SATA backplane, which is not something you normally find in mini-ITX cases, plus room for another two 2.5" drives inside, which is a little more common.
  
  Anyway, fast forward a year and I'm looking at cheap options to get a computer in every room of the new house (which has too many rooms) and I tripped over the CS01S-HS on Amazon.  That's the silver version; I had planned to get one each in silver and black, but apparently the entire range has been discontinued in the past year and Amazon only had a couple of remnant silver models in stock.  I said to myself that I would have bought them if they still had both, but since they don't, I moved on.
  
  And then found the black version under a separate listing, even though the silver version showed the black version as sold out.  And they only had one of the black version, so if I missed out now that was it.
  
  So I bought both.
  
  And now I have to figure out what to do with them.  It's a mini-ITX case so you only have one PCIe slot, and the case itself only provides room for a half-height, half-length card.  And there are very few mini-ITX motherboards with eight SATA ports (even this one only has six and it ain't cheap) so that slot is pretty much dedicated to a SATA controller.  Only pretty much, because you can now get five and six port SATA controllers that fit in an M.2 slot.  I'm not sure why those exist when the one case that would require such a thing has been discontinued, but they do.
  
  My first thought was to use the Ryzen 5700G, which still has the fastest integrated graphics of any readily available desktop CPU.  But that's Socket AM4, and a quick search found exactly one Socket AM4 mini-ITX motherboard in stock in Australia, and that only has gigabit Ethernet, so I'd need to use the sole M.2 slot for a SATA controller and the PCIe slot for 10GbE, which wouldn't leave me with a boot drive separate from storage.
  
  Probably best to use a current model motherboard with at least 2.5Gb Ethernet and not worry about the graphics.  If I want to do media transcoding an Intel CPU is probably the way to go, even though it's worse for gaming.
  
  Why a 2.5" NAS?  As I mentioned yesterday, SSDs have already fallen in price by 30% this year.  I'm going to stuff it full of cheap SATA SSDs and run ZFS.  It won't be cheap, but good dedicated NASes aren't cheap either, unless your employer happens to be throwing them out...  Which is why all my Synology boxes date back to 2013 and really need replacing.
  
  
  
• The importance of being ECC.  (Robert Felder)
  
  At least DDR5 has on-die ECC, and some really weird systems with nominally non-ECC RAM have block ECC as well.  I wonder if any regular motherboards have support for that, since it seems you can do it with regular Intel CPUs.
  
  
  
• Lemon-derived extracellular vesicle-like nanoparticles block the progression of kidney stones by antagonizing endoplasmic reticulum stress in renal tubular cells.  (ACS)
  
  Shut up and take my money.
  
  In rats.
  
  Squeak.
  
  
  
• Although that Gigabyte Aero 14 OLED laptop I mentioned yesterday is very tempting, the truth is now that I've settled in in New House City I only expect to travel any real distance about once a year.
  
  And for the same price as that laptop (13700H, 16GB of RAM, 1TB SSD, RTX 4050) I can get a desktop system with a 13500 (almost exactly the same as the 13700H laptop chip), 128GB of RAM, 2TB of SSD, and a Radeon 6700...  And 24TB of hard disk storage as well, just because.
  
  So I think that's what I'll do.

Posted by: The Brickmuppet at Monday, March 06 2023 02:57 AM (rjbMB)

Posted by: Pat Buckman at Monday, March 06 2023 12:01 PM (r9O5h)

Posted by: mirha at Sunday, March 26 2023 08:22 PM (HGbrF)

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• Prices of SSDs are in free fall because (a) nobody is buying anything and (b) there isn't a cartel propping prices up.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Western Digital's 1TB SN770 - a basic but generally decent drive - has dropped from $90 at the beginning of January (and since it is still February that's less than two months ago) to $60 today.  The 2TB model is also great value at $120.
  
  Prices are expected to continue falling at a slower pace during the year.  Manufacturers are cutting production but since it takes months for wafers to go through the pipeline and turn into chips that get put into SSDs, that's going to take a while to have any effect.
  
  
  
• The 2TB Samsung 980 Pro is currently available for $154.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  I'd suggest spending another five bucks and getting the Western Digital SN850X, because Samsung's drives have had some...  Problems, lately.

• The US government has blacklisted Inspur, Loongson, and 33 other Chinese tech companies.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Loongson makes crappy CPUs in China, for China.  Nobody wants them, not even China, except Russia.  China is stuck making chips at 14nm while Taiwan and South Korea are ramping up production on 3nm, but Russia is stuck at 65nm, which is 18 years out of date as far as the rest of the world is concerned.
  
  Inspur however is the largest server manufacturer you've never heard of, producing about 10% of the servers in the world.  That is going to cause some ripples.
  
  
  
• The Radeon 780M - the integrated graphics in, um...  The 7940HS, that's the one - is as fast as a GTX 1650 Ti or something.  (WCCFTech)
  
  That's what the headline says, but the scores given in the article do not include the 1650 Ti, so take it with a pinch of pepper.  It's only 25% faster than the previous generation 680M, and for that it requires fast new 7500MHz LPDDR5X RAM, but it still it is 150% faster than Intel's best integrated graphics solution.
  
  
  
• Gigabyte's AERO 14 OLED BMF is a 14" laptop weighing 1.49kg (22,994 grains) with a 2880x1800 OLED display (you might have guessed that), an Intel 13700H CPU with 6 P cores and 8 E cores, a 1TB SSD, two Thunderbolt 4 ports, one regular USB, HDMI 2.1, a microSD slot, a 1/8" audio jack, a separate power connector if you don't want to charge via Thunderbolt, Nvidia RTX 4050 graphics with 6GB of dedicated VRAM, the Four Essential Keys in their proper location....  And 16GB of soldered LPDDR5 RAM that is impossible to ever upgrade because fuck you that's why.  (Gigabyte)
  
  If they had a 32GB option, it would be the perfect small laptop.
  
  They do not have a 32GB option.
  
  There is a larger 16" model with a 3840x2400 OLED display, RTX 4060 or 4070 graphics options, and actual DIMM slots so that it's not instant e-waste.  But that's also 40% heavier.
  
  And 30% to 50% more expensive.

Posted by: Rick C at Sunday, March 05 2023 08:38 AM (BMUHC)

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