• NASA is sending a solar-powered helicopter to Mars.  ETA 2021.  It's only small - 1.8kg with a 1.2m rotor span - and only capable of short flights, but this is amazingly cool.  It will act as a scout drone for the new Mars rover.
  
             
  
  
• Micron enters production with GDDR6.  That's like GDDR5 only one better.  Top speeds are currently 14Gbps per pin, with 16Gbps coming, and the possibility of 20Gbps in the future.
  
  And yes, it comes in black.
  
  
• Asus releases the ROG Swift PG27UQ, a $2000 gaming monitor - 4K 144Hz G-Sync HDR.
  
  Why so expensive?  It contains a $2600 FPGA to handle the G-Sync functions.
  
  Yes, that single chip lists for more than the retail price of the monitor.  I would guess that Asus and Nvidia are getting a better deal than retail list price, but still.
  
  
• Firefox will soon automatically notify you if your logins have been included in a known data breach.
  
  The answer is of course yes, but it should give you some more specific details so you can do something about it.
  
  
• Semiwiki has a scoreboard for future process technologies.  Spoiler: Intel's 7nm (which doesn't exist yet) is roughly equivalent to what TSMC are calling 3nm (which doesn't exist yet).
  
  So, if you're wondering how the foundries are suddenly planning to scale all the way down to 3nm, the answer is, they're not.  It's all marketing.  But fictional 3nm is still far better than the existing fictional 14nm.

• Everything is awful.

Posted by: Mauser at Tuesday, June 26 2018 12:13 PM (Ix1l6)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Tuesday, June 26 2018 03:39 PM (PiXy!)

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• Qualcomm's Snapdragon 1000 is aiming to take on low-end and mid-range laptop chips.  Windows on ARM is already a thing (and ChromeOS and Android and other flavours of Linux, of course).
  
  Apple are already playing in this performance space, but their chips are not available to other manufacturers, or running anything but iOS, so the point is moot.
  
  
• Not a bird cage from Versailles, but IBM's 50Q quantum computer.
  
  
  
  
• Gigabyte has you covered if you want to get ready for ThreadRipper 2's 32 cores later this year.  The board has everything you could want except for 10Gb ethernet.
  
  
• Motherboard (part of Vice, but less worse than the rest of that site) has two updates on the EU's terrible horrible no good very bad copyright bill by Cory Doctorow and Karl Bode respectively.
  
  The one bright point is that the proposed law is so poorly designed that if passed it will be repealed in weeks as the internet grinds to a complete halt across Europe.  Because while having penalties for copyright infringement, legally obligating sites to establish automated filters, and broadening the scope of what constitutes infringement almost to infinity, there are no penalties for false reports.
  
  The EU Parliament have collectively painted a target on their butts and screamed "Kick me, 4chan!" with this one.

Posted by: Rick C at Monday, June 25 2018 07:43 AM (ITnFO)

Posted by: Ed Hering at Monday, June 25 2018 10:09 AM (kublq)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Monday, June 25 2018 12:40 PM (PiXy!)

Posted by: Rick C at Monday, June 25 2018 11:42 PM (Q/JG2)

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• Shadowrun Returns WAS FREE ON HUMBLY BUNDLY TODAY ONLY ACT NOW ACT NOW TOO LATE!  Still 75% off though.
  
  
• TSMC are ramping up 7nm to full production including orders from AMD for both GPUs and CPUs, with more than 50 chips taped.  An enhanced 7nm process using EUV fairy dust is set to enter risk production in 2019, and 5nm starting in 2020.
  
  AMD normally uses Global Foundries for CPUs, but this time are spreading production across two suppliers.  7nm is very new so likely a wise move despite the increased costs.
  
  
• Gluon is a new embedded scripting language written in Rust, statically but not explicitly typed.  It's designed to inherit Rust's strict guarantees of thread safety, though exactly how fast this will be in practice is a question to be examined.  Versions of Python without the global interpreter lock are quite noticeably slower than the regular release.
  
  
• STH has one of those days.  I get to deal with lots of those days, only they are a fifteen minute drive from their datacenter, and I'm a fifteen hour flight from mine.
  
  I'm seriously considering migrating everything over to DigitalOcean and forgetting about running my own servers.

Changelog

Posted by: cxt217 at Sunday, June 24 2018 08:03 AM (btoEr)

Posted by: Rick C at Sunday, June 24 2018 08:49 AM (ITnFO)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Sunday, June 24 2018 12:13 PM (PiXy!)

Posted by: Rick C at Sunday, June 24 2018 01:56 PM (ITnFO)

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• Samsung announces an 8TB PCIe 4.0 M.3 SSD.  Yes, those numbers are correct.  Although it's not clear why it uses PCIe 4.0 since nothing else does and its peak transfer rate could be handled easily by PCIe 3.0.  Still, nice to see that this is a real thing.
  
  
• The 3nm node apparently has major cost problems.  3nm?  7nm should be moving into full production next year, with 5nm in 2021 or 2022, followed by 4nm, so possibly not your primary concern unless you happen to be named Nvidia.
  
  The article actually covers a lot more ground than its own headline suggests, going into all the thorny problems and clever solutions swirling around the next five to ten years of semiconductor technology, not least that everyone is now talking about 3nm as a straightforward matter of fact when not that long ago it was fairy dust.  For comparison, until last year AMD was still manufacturing their CPUs at 28nm.
  
  
• MSI has you covered if you need 10GB per second of I/O bandwidth and a cute little fan to keep it cool.  I have to wonder how many people are asking for this, because it seems everyone and their sea monkey has an NVMe RAID solution all of a sudden.
  
  
• Anandtech's CPU roundup is out and the Ryzen 2200G wins best potato.  Not a putdown; if you want a decent computer without spending a ton of money, it beats the hell out of the competition.
  
  
• The EU is still run by idiots.  European Court of Human Rights says "surveillance, shmurvaillance".
  
  
• California is also run by idiots...  Which we knew, sure.  While I was against the heavy-handed net neutrality rules handed down by the former FCC under Title II of the Quills and Parchment Act of 1534, I was more sanguine about legislation passed at the state level.  Looks like lobbyists successfully white-anted the California legislation because, as we noted, the state is run by idiots, and all the right people are upset which makes me happy even though I'm not actually against the idea.
  
  
• Twitter has bought a company called - I shit you not - Smyte in order to more efficiently fuck up relationships with their users.  And also with Smyte's users, as Twitter's first action was to shut down the API without warning and leave everyone in the lurch.  They apparently think they're Google or something.
  
  
• If you have an iPhone and are an EU citizen living in Britain, learn to swim.
  
  
• Chuwi has a NUC that looks like an old-style Mac Pro that shrank in the wash but it's on Indienogo and costs a bundle.  Chuwi's whole raison d'etre is sticking one high-end component in an otherwise low-end system, like the Hi13 with it's gorgeous 3K display stapled to a sluglike Atom processor...  And that's exactly what they've done, again, only they usuall manage to come in a lot cheaper.
  
  
• Google is full of idiots and children and idiot children and the management have no idea what to do about it.  This worries me.  I don't care at all if Facebook and Twitter and all the other Bay Area garbage companies dry up and blow away, but Google actually serves a useful function.
  
  
• Micron announces 1Y nm DRAM.  Yeah, that's a real thing; they're not even pretending to provide real numbers any more.
  

Posted by: Rick C at Saturday, June 23 2018 05:34 AM (Q/JG2)

Posted by: Rick C at Saturday, June 23 2018 05:39 AM (Q/JG2)

Posted by: Rick C at Saturday, June 23 2018 06:06 AM (Q/JG2)

Posted by: Rick C at Saturday, June 23 2018 06:08 AM (Q/JG2)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Saturday, June 23 2018 02:07 PM (PiXy!)

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• AMD and Cooler Master show off their giant air cooler for the upcoming 32 core ThreadRipper.  Water cooling is clearly a more practical choice here, but not actually required.
  
  
• AMD and ASRock show off a workstation motherboard for the existing 32 core EPYC CPUs, taking advantage of the chip's 128 PCIe lanes for 4 x16 and 3 x8 slots.
  
  
• AMD's Forrest Norrod says "We are going to crush Intel like a bug!  A bug!  Mwahahahaha!"*   Update: Bug-in-chief flees in terror.

• Europe's kill-the-internet copyright bill passes out of committee heading for a full vote in the Diet of Worms next month.
  
  
• Samsung showed off its 7nm EUV process at this year's XVLSI Symposium.  EUV is the big new thing in lithography; it saves multiple steps in production compared to older methods, but is apparently something of a bitch to work with, since you can't, for example, focus the beam with a lens of any known material.
  
  
• IMEC furthers high mobility nanowire FETs for nodes beyond 5nm or possibly makes a breakthrough in X-ray crystallography of living filoviruses, hard to tell.
  
  
• Just say NAML to YAML.
  
  
• Erlang turns 21.  Only problem is, it's still Erlang.  On the plus side, it's not PHP or JavaScript.  Or Java.  Or Go.
  
  
• Mouse devours Fox, creating world's largest ball of failure.

• Programming Ethereum contracts is like writing accounting software in 6502 assembler except that you need to hire an intern to keep turning the crank or the computer crashes and steals all your money and flees to the Bahamas with your cat.
  
  – Me
  
  
• If you need 19GB per second of I/O, Asus has you covered. You'll also need a high-end desktop - ThreadRipper or Core i9 - to have enough PCIe lanes.
  
  
• TechDirt reports on a trademark cockup.
  
  MR. REUBER: Your Honor, if I may?
  
  
  THE COURT: No. You are out of the case.
  
  
  MR. REUBER: I understand, your Honor. But I penned the brief, and there is an error that my client alerted me to this morning in the brief. Specifically, it is first one you just read, Bite Me Cocky, published in 2012. He has learned that that title may have changed as a result of the Cockygate sort of disputes. It might have been originally published as Bite Me and not Bite Me Cocky. I just wanted to point that out.
  
  
• OpenBSD has disabled hyperthreading as a security precaution. This is not a new vulnerability, but rather to preempt the discovery of new vulnerabilities.

Posted by: J Greely at Thursday, June 21 2018 01:24 AM (tgyIO)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Thursday, June 21 2018 02:39 PM (PiXy!)

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• The EU is busy cementing its self-assigned role as internet cancer, with YouTube an opportunistic infection.
  
  
• AMD offers old chips for new.  Swap your 8086 for a 16-core ThreadRipper!  If you have the right version of the 8086, that is.
  
  
• Humble Bundle has some book bundles that might interest my audience
  
  
• Programmable Boards (Arduino, Raspberry Pi and more)
• Manga collections (Battle Angel Alita, Seven Deadly Sins, Ghost in the Shell)
• D&D 5e Adventures  (Third party, not TSR / WotC.)
  
  
• Intel's rumoured 8 core Coffee Lake S has shown up on...  Intel's own website.  I think the rumours are pretty well confirmed at this point.
  
  AMD are widely expected to fire back next year with a 12 core mainstream Ryzen.  And so it goes.
  
  
• The Internet of Idiotic Things (IoIT) strikes again with an electronic padlock that can be unlocked by anyone with a smartphone in two seconds.
  
  Or anyone with a web browser even faster.

• Tonight we're gonna party like it's 1987 or thereabouts.
  
  
• If you're using IBM Bluemix (née SoftLayer) their file storage can automatically keep up to 50 snapshots on any mix of hourly, daily, and weekly schedules...  Until it runs out of snapshot space anyway.  (Maximum snapshot space is the same size as the disk.)
  
  
• My heater died.  My toes are cold.

• Out of news error.  Redo from start.

Posted by: Armed and Larry at Friday, June 22 2018 01:38 PM (rTqn/)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Friday, June 22 2018 03:43 PM (PiXy!)

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• Firefox is working to build a better news feed than Facebook. Possibly using lightly concussed hedgehogs.
  
  
• THT is a new language combines the elegant syntax of JavaScript with the robust semantics of PHP. Or possibly vice-versa. For people you really, really hate.
  
  
• Bird, the scooter-littering startup, has a valuation of $1 billion. Buy gold*
  
  
• Microsoft is not rewriting Office in JavaScript.
  
  Nor Skype, though given the present state of Skype that might be an improvement. As would the aforementioned hedgehogs.
  
  
• The Economist reports on an exciting technological breakthrough that would allow buildings to be constructed out of plant-based matter.
  
  
• If Niue ever gets too crowded be prepared to change your links to mee.bv.

Posted by: J Greely at Sunday, June 17 2018 11:49 PM (tgyIO)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Monday, June 18 2018 01:29 AM (PiXy!)

Posted by: StargazerA5 at Monday, June 18 2018 02:03 AM (FuETf)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Monday, June 18 2018 02:43 AM (PiXy!)

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