Thursday, December 13

Geek

Daily News Stuff 13 December 2018

Tech News

  • Intel had their 2018 architecture day where they discussed their new lineup of cornices and finials.  (AnandTech)

    Highlights

    • They have finally run out of lakes, so the next architecture on the roadmap is called Sunny Cove - or maybe not, since Ice Lake will have Sunny Coves in it, though apparently a bit chilly this late in the year.

    • A major focus of Intel's CPU designers going forward is cheating on benchmarks (though the term they use is special purpose performance increases).  To be fair, when you have billions of transistors to play with, and you find a common workload that you can speed up 10x at the cost of 50 million transistors, it would be foolish not to consider it.

    • Integrated graphics will suck less.

    • There will be chips with both Core and Atom CPUs in them, similar to what Arm has been doing with their mobile chips for approximately three hundred years now.

  • How does Battlefield V run on integrated graphics?  (Tom's Hardware)

    Trick question.  No-one is playing Battlefield V.  On Intel integrated graphics it doesn't run at all, but no-one cares, so Intel has that going for them.

  • Shady torrent sites are using fake DMCA notices to shut down competing, slightly less shady torrent sites.  (TechDirt)

    The problem with DMCA - one of the problems with DMCA - is that while filing a false takedown notice is technically perjury, the Act defines no penalties.  One of our servers got shut down twice last month due to false DMCA notices by a company which was getting penalised for comment spam that they themselves posted.

  • I haven't been following Nvidia lately, but ouch.  (Tech Crunch)

    They've lost half their market valuation in the last six weeks, despite largely having a lock on high-end laptop, desktop, and workstation graphics cards and a major share of server AI accelerators.  I think they were overvalued before and this is just reality catching up with overheated investors; the company's technical fundamentals are solid, and no-one else even has a competitor to the RTX 2080 on their roadmap.

  • Water may not have memory - well, water does have memory, but it only lasts for about a femtosecond, like when you go into the kitchen late at night - but ant colonies do.  (Smithsonian Magazine)

  • MacOS Mojave poops on Nvidia.  (Forbes)

    I updated to Mojave without major breakage, but my Mac has AMD graphics.  I don't know what the last Mac model was that came with Nvidia graphics.  One of the Macbook Pro models, probably, the one where half the graphics chips failed and Apple swore off Nvidia for all of this eternity and half of the next.

  • Grafana Loki is like Prometheus, but for logs.

    If your reaction is Well, I know what logs are, rest assured that you are not alone.

    Apparently it is particularly well suited for storing Kubernetes Pod logs, just in case you happen to have those cluttering up your living room.

  • It is illegal in the United States to trade futures in onions.

  • The tax numbers of 120 million bajillion people were exposed online due to an oops.  (Bleeping Computer)

    Wait, that's 120 million Brazilian people.  Still rather a lot.

  • Smart fish or dumb test?  (Quanta)

    Is the cleaner wrasse a red herring, or is it truly smarter than an Ivy League sociology major?

  • MediaTek's Helio P90 features two A75 and six A55 cores, a PowerVR GM 9446 graphics thing, a dual-core AI coprocessor, and a three-core image coprocessor.  (Android Central)

    MediaTek is well-known for producing cheap, low-end mobile chips, like all those eight-core 1.3GHz A53 parts, but this is a very capable midrange part.

  • Google CEO Sundar Pichai argues that Google could fail at any moment.  (Axios)

    Because Google is finally getting the anti-trust attention they've been begging for all year.

    Also, Google Chrome marks Google's CEO's name as a spelling error.

Video of the Day



Picture of the Day

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

First the birds, now the bees.  Educational poster by Bangzheng Du.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 05:44 PM | Comments (11) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
Post contains 671 words, total size 7 kb.

1 "Google Chrome marks Google's CEO's name as a spelling error."

But it knows the names of all the Pokemon and will even correct you if you don't properly name-case them.  (On Android, swyping even works.)

Posted by: Rick C at Friday, December 14 2018 01:05 AM (Q/JG2)

2 Two of the bees appear to be making out, and one is puking into a toilet.

Posted by: Rick C at Friday, December 14 2018 01:08 AM (Q/JG2)

3 Nvidia:  The drop in stock price likely has a lot to do with 1,. the collapse of the cryptocurrency markets and the resulting removal of the need to mortgage your grandkids' future living quarters just to buy a graphics card and 2. the Turing features (raytracing/AI) leaving people scratching their heads when it was launched as nothing supported it, and 3. AMD starting to push back on the lower end for the first time in years creating some competition risk on their commodity parts.  Add in that all Nvidia has is graphics, unlike AMD, and the crytpocurrency drop has the potential to hugely impact them in coming quarters once the backlogged demand is flushed.

Posted by: StargazerA5 at Friday, December 14 2018 04:02 AM (Q7Wqc)

4 Google's (and other Big Tech, Big Finance, etc.) size:   Any company Too Big To Fail (TM) is Too Big To Survive.  Break 'em up.

Posted by: StargazerA5 at Friday, December 14 2018 04:47 AM (Q7Wqc)

5
Two of the bees appear to be making out, and one is puking into a toilet.
Ladies' night.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Friday, December 14 2018 08:48 AM (PiXy!)

6 StargazerA5 - Nvidia also has some interesting products in the AI space, for servers, mobile apps, self-driving cars and so on.  Not sure what percentage of revenue that is.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Friday, December 14 2018 08:50 AM (PiXy!)

7 one is puking into a toilet.
It's making honey.

Posted by: Wonderduck at Friday, December 14 2018 01:41 PM (PzbzM)

8 Bee vomit.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Friday, December 14 2018 03:12 PM (PiXy!)

9 If you read Lois McMaster Bujold's Vorkosigan saga (highly, highly recommended), bee vomit becomes a key plot point in one of the later books, and also in the latest standalone short story.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Friday, December 14 2018 03:14 PM (PiXy!)

10 "vomit becomes a key plot point" -> well, sure, look at the onomatopoeia in the title.
Wow, I spelled that right the first time.

Posted by: Rick C at Friday, December 14 2018 03:39 PM (Iwkd4)

11 Well, but the book in question is called A Civil Campaign.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Friday, December 14 2018 07:39 PM (PiXy!)

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Apple pies are delicious. But never mind apple pies. What colour is a green orange?




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