Friday, August 17

Geek

Daily News Stuff 17 August 2018

Tech News

  • RetroManCave reviews the Sharp X68000 Pro.



    The original X68000 with its distinctive dual vertical slices pops up in manga from time to time.

    https://ai.mee.nu/images/X68000Art.jpg?size=640x&q=95

    Art by @xiao_woo.  Frequently NSFW.


  • Google says "We don't collect your location if you turn location tracking off.  We don't do that.  We don't.  Okay, we collect a little bit.  Rather a lot, really."  (Tom's Hardware)

  • Microsoft's Cortana exposed as double-agent.  (Tom's Hardware)

    If you had certain "skills" enabled, locking your computer didn't really do much, because Cortana is still active.  This is fixed in the most recent Windows 10 update, which is why it's being publicly announced now.

  • As any D&D player knows, you need to use fire to properly kill a troll.  Works on patent trolls too.  (TechDirt)

  • NVIDIA's 2080 Ti might have 4352 shaders and 14Gbps GDDR6 RAM up from 3584 shaders and 11Gbps GDDR5X RAM on the 1080 Ti.  (WCCFTech)

    Normally I suggest taking anything from WCCFTech with a pound of salt, but this is so unexciting that it's probably entirely accurate.

  • TinyWL is a Wayland compositor in 500 lines of C.  That's more than 39 lines of Python, but these things are commonly enormous masses of unreadable code, so it's nice to see.

  • If you need a 56 core dual Xeon workstation with 768GB RAM and 7.1 audio the Supermicro X11DAC might be the motherboard for you.  (ServeTheHome)

    One caveat: It has 16 DIMM slots.  It has 12 memory channels.  16 is not divisible by 12.  (Apple shipped a Mac Pro with a similar arrangement, years ago.)

  • After noting that AMD's 32 core 2990WX runs dramatically faster on Linux than on Windows 10, Phoronix went back and ran those tests under Windows Server as well, both 2016 and the 2019 preview.

    Windows Server was generally no better and sometimes significantly worse.  (Phoronix)

    Linux has the benefit here of having been ported to hundreds of weird architectures over the years.  The unbalanced memory paths of the 2990WX are nothing compared to some of the crazy shit out there.

  • Mozilla has stomped on another 23 nosy browser extensions.  Which means they will be automatically disabled in your browser, so no particular need to worry.  (Bleeping Computer)


Social Media News


Chip Diagram of the Day

AMD's Zeppelin die has 32 lanes of PCIe, but only 24 are available in Ryzen CPUs.  Where did the rest go?  This diagram from Wikichip explains it.

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

If you look at this diagram, the chip doesn't just have 8 cores, 20MB cache, and 32 PCIe lanes.  It also has four ethernet ports, four USB 3 ports, and eight SATA ports.  All of those - a total of 48 potential connectors - go into a switch and then are routed out to 32 multi-function I/O lanes.  

AMD offers chipsetless chipsets for Ryzen - the A300, B300, and X300.  These low-cost parts have no I/O features at all, and instead rely on the USB and SATA ports built in to the CPU.  That ties up pins that would otherwise be available for PCIe, leaving a maximum of 24 total PCIe lanes available.  All the functionality is there, but you run out of CPU pins trying to connect to it all at the same time.

(Those 12G PHYs are just what you think - they run at up to 12Gbps, 50% faster than PCIe 3.0 and twice as fast as SATA.  This speed is used for socket interconnect on dual CPU EPYC servers, but not on desktop Ryzen parts.)


Picture of the Day

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

Bake-o-Mat, the better bread boffins!  Fresh baked in 9 seconds using ATOMIC ENERGY!

More Chippy Stuff

Also from that Wikichip entry on the Zen architecture, here's a list of all the products sold using the two first generation zen dies - the CPU die and the APU die.

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

Two chips go in, 60 different products come out.  (The table says 61, but there's a ringer in there, the recently announced semi-custom Z+ SoC.  That doesn't count.)

Plus there's another 15 products so far from the second-generation CPU die.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 11:39 AM | Comments (7) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
Post contains 740 words, total size 7 kb.

1 TIL from clicking one of those links that my company isn't filtering porn sites.

Posted by: Rick C at Saturday, August 18 2018 12:02 AM (Q/JG2)

2 Pretty sure I included warnings on all the porn links in today's tech news...  😋

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Saturday, August 18 2018 12:21 AM (PiXy!)

3 Also, HEY, EMOJIS WORK!
🤗😛😵😸👰👯🗯👑🐆🐇🐠🏵🍓🍚🍵🏖💒🎪🚂🚙🚀🕞🌘🌈🎏🎮🃏🎶🖱📗📧📆🔨🛋🛄🔛♉⏫☑#⃣🆓🈳🔴🇦🇴🇧🇾🇩🇲🇬🇳🇯🇲🇱🇾🇳🇫🇷🇴🇹🇭🇻🇺

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Saturday, August 18 2018 12:26 AM (PiXy!)

4 Mostly.  Cross platform is still garbage.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Saturday, August 18 2018 01:42 AM (PiXy!)

5 I mean, I *did* read "yes, that Penthouse", but it didn't click.
I wasn't actually all that concerned as I was already pretty sure they didn't filter.

Posted by: Rick C at Saturday, August 18 2018 06:02 AM (Q/JG2)

6 Yeah, I just wanted to write the sentence "Pretty sure I included warnings on all the porn links in today's tech news..."

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Saturday, August 18 2018 06:44 AM (PiXy!)

7 Well, who wouldn't?

Posted by: Rick C at Saturday, August 18 2018 10:06 AM (ITnFO)

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




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