• Friday:

  AMD are getting 7nm parts from both TSMC and Global Foundries, which will give them a full year with a solid fabrication lead on Intel, as well as the advantages of the Zen design.

  Today: Global Foundries stops all 7nm development.  (AnandTech)
  
  AMD likely knew of GloFo's uncertainty well in advance, hence the hedging of their 7nm bets with TSMC.  This probably doesn't affect AMD much, except that lower-tier parts are likely to continue to be produced at 12nm for a while.  The second generation server chips and professional graphics chips were already planned to be fabbed at TSMC.
  
  It might mean a delay - or higher prices - for 12 and 16 core mainstream desktop parts, though, depending on the volume TSMC can produce and how quickly AMD makes inroads into Intel's server market share.  Four Zen dies sold as a 32 core server CPU make AMD a lot more money than if they are sold individually as four desktop CPUs.
  
  So we might just have to struggle onwards with a mere 8 cores until 2020.  Or in my case, two computers with 8 cores each, thanks to Dell's clearance sale on 2017 models.  And the price cut to $399 for the Threadripper 1920X means that those who really need 12 cores can get them.
  
  
• Freesync with an Nvidia graphics card?  Sure, if you have an AMD APU.  (PCPer)
  
  It does add some latency to the frames, but not so much as to make the idea worthless.
  
  
• In line with new emission laws from the EPA, Toyota just set $500 million on fire.  (TechCrunch)
  
  
• Qualcomm either is, or is not, shutting down its server division which doesn't make any servers.  (Fudzilla)
  
  Arm servers are not a thing.  Stop trying to make them a thing.
  
  
• VMware announces Arm support in ESXi (pronounced "esxi").  (ServeTheHome)
  
  Arm servers are the next big thing.
  
  
• Microsoft are pushing Intel CPU updates to AMD systems.  This seems to be harmless on AMD systems, since the patches are ignored, but some Intel users are reporting problems booting after the update.  (Bleeping Computer)
  
  On the other hand, that's true after every Windows 10 update.  Guess what I was doing last night?  Well, yes, swearing a lot, but apart from that.
  
  
• I now have a script that syncs the entire mee.nu production environment to my dev environment every day.  Finally!  This is why I bought Rally Vincent, and she's doing a great job.  The trick to getting it working smoothly was rsync --inplace, which allows me to quickly update my database snapshots even though I STILL DON'T HAVE NBN.
  
  

Social Media News

• Facebook and Google want to draft new federal privacy regulations.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  HahahaNO.
  
  
• Mike Masnick reports that internet content moderation isn't politically biased, just hard to do well.  (Techdirt) 
  
  Mike is great.  He's also wrong.  (PJ Media)  
  
  
• Wouldn't it be great if the military had all the money they needed and BuzzFeed had to hold a bake sale?  (WSJ)

Posted by: Rick C at Tuesday, August 28 2018 11:52 AM (ITnFO)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Tuesday, August 28 2018 01:01 PM (PiXy!)

Posted by: cxt217 at Tuesday, August 28 2018 01:19 PM (BcQU4)

Posted by: benzeen at Tuesday, August 28 2018 01:19 PM (bwzPa)

Posted by: benzeen at Tuesday, August 28 2018 01:22 PM (JpDcM)

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• Like AMD video cards but 4096 shaders just not doing it for you? The new Radeon Pro V340 has 7128 shaders and 32GB of video RAM.  And I think it has a mini DisplayPort output, hard to tell.  (ServeTheHome)
  
  It's not for you, though, it's for datacenters, to deliver virtual GPUs to up to 32 virtual servers at once.  I kind of need one of these, or rather, 1/32 of one.

Video of the Day

Posted by: GreyDuck at Monday, August 27 2018 12:56 AM (rKFiU)

Posted by: Mauser at Monday, August 27 2018 03:18 AM (Ix1l6)

Posted by: Mauser at Monday, August 27 2018 03:22 AM (Ix1l6)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Tuesday, August 28 2018 01:03 PM (PiXy!)

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• Fortnite bypassed Google's play store to avoid paying the 30% fee.
  
  Their alternative installer left your phone open to attack.  (Bleeping Computer)
  
  They've fixed it now, but expect similar flaws whenever anyone else does this.  Of course, with iPhones you can't do this at all - which is not an improvement.
  

Social Media News

Music Video of the Day

Posted by: Rick C at Sunday, August 26 2018 02:53 PM (ITnFO)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Sunday, August 26 2018 04:15 PM (PiXy!)

Posted by: Rick C at Monday, August 27 2018 10:23 AM (ITnFO)

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• If you missed that $249 fire sale on 12 core AMD Threadripper at Amazon the 1920X is now officially $399. That's a nice discount over the $649 2920X. (PCGamer)
  
  Intel's 12 core i9-7920X is $999.99 on NewEgg.
  
  
• The strange case of Nickelodeon vs. the Slime Princess. (Techdirt)
  
  
• OpenBSD disabled Intel's hyperthreading by default some time ago. It's looking more and more like this should be widely adopted. Sucks for Intel. But if you're wondering why Intel has been able to deliver better performance than AMD all these years, it is clearly at least partly because they have been cutting corners on the security of their architecture. (Tom's Hardware)
  
  
• The catch with Amazon Lightsail: Sustained performance is terrible. About 1/3 of Digital Ocean if you're lucky. If your code is busy, you'll be throttled to 1/20th of a core.
  
  So to get the sustained performance of Rally Vincent (a Ryzen 1700) would cost me $800 per month. And if I need that in one VM, well, tough.

Almost as good as dragon tail pic.twitter.com/lbLenaZSbH

— Arby's (@Arbys) September 20, 2017

It’s almost done

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) August 25, 2018

Posted by: Mauser at Saturday, August 25 2018 06:01 PM (Ix1l6)

Posted by: Mauser at Saturday, August 25 2018 06:06 PM (Ix1l6)

Posted by: Kayle at Sunday, August 26 2018 02:31 AM (u9t9j)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Sunday, August 26 2018 10:30 AM (PiXy!)

Posted by: muon at Tuesday, August 28 2018 01:18 PM (vMYTH)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Tuesday, August 28 2018 01:22 PM (PiXy!)

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• Never Fear, a new protector is here... pic.twitter.com/ttgfMbJYXS

  — Clive Palmer (@CliveFPalmer) August 24, 2018

  
  

• California is close to passing its own net neutrality legislation. Approved 9-3 by the committee [Even numbers? Idiots.] and on its way to the Assembly. (Ars Technica)
  
  I'm sure the bill is garbage - this is California we're talking about - but voting in garbage legislation and suffering the consequences is what states are for.
  
  
• Intel tried to prevent people benchmarking microcode changes, got yelled at, immediately fixed it. (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Dumb move, smart response.
  
  
• Steam's policy on adult-oriented games is a mess. (Techdirt)
  
  Remarkably, Kotaku seems to be on the right side of this debacle. (Kotaku)
  
  
• Apple has booted Facebook's VPN app from their store because it's spyware. (Techdirt)
  
  Yes, it's an official Facebook app. Yes, it's spyware. Don't use it.
  
  
• The DNC was not attacked. The story is wrong. They set up their own phishing page to see if their staff were still falling for it. (Fudzilla)
  
  
• Amazon appears to have deployed their drones to deliver good news to Twitter. (TechCrunch)
  
  This is just weird. Amazon, what are you doing? Don't do that.
  
  
• TSMC is reportedly happy with 7nm and ramping up production - and preparing for 5nm next year. (Guru3d)
  
  Intel expects to release 10nm parts by the end of 2019. Intel's original launch date for 10nm was 2015, so that's a pretty big step backwards. Also, unconfirmed reports are that they've had to also take a step back on the process itself, so it's both late and less technically advanced than Intel had hoped.
  
  Intel's originally planned 10nm process was roughly in line with 7nm from everyone else (the numbers are 83.6% marketing) but now everyone else has 7nm and Intel still doesn't have 10nm, so the point is extremely moot.
  
  AMD are getting 7nm parts from both TSMC and Global Foundries, which will give them a full year with a solid fabrication lead on Intel, as well as the advantages of the Zen design.
  
  
• By pure coincidence AMD's stock is up another 6.65% making it one of the top performers in the S&P 500. (MarketWatch)
  
  
• Netflix tells Apple to go fuck itself and its 30% cut of everything. (Engadget)
  
  Good.
  
  
• Amazon have cut the prices for their Lightsail cloud VMs by 50% in most cases. Prices for Windows servers have been cut by about 30%, and new high-end plans added with 16GB and 32GB of RAM respectively. (ZDNet)
  
  This is a big deal. The mid-tier cloud providers - Digital Ocean, Linode, and Vultr - cut prices last year one after another and left Amazon in the dust, even though Lightsail was much cheaper than Amazon's enterprise-oriented EC2 servers. Now Amazon is competitive again. There are differences in the exact configuration levels - at a given price point, Digital Ocean might offer more CPUs but less bandwidth, or vice-versa - but the basic price tiers all line up.
  
  Amazon offers a much broader range of services than the mid-tier competition, but as a result their platform is painfully complicated. But $5 now gets you a virtual server on Amazon with 1GB RAM and 1 CPU (standard across all the providers), and 40GB of SSD and 2TB bandwidth. Digital Ocean offers 25GB SSD and 1TB bandwidth at $5.
  
  Nodes in India and Australia only get half the bandwidth provided in North America, Europe, and east Asia (Japan, Korea, Singapore), but (a) that's still damn good value, and (b) Digital Ocean doesn't have a datacenter in Australia at all, nor does Linode. Vultr does, but doesn't offer virtual disks outside of their New Jersey location, so it's much less useful.
  
  ...
  
  WAIT. I JUST BOUGHT A NEW COMPUTER SPECIFICALLY TO RUN VIRTUAL MACHINES AND NOW EVERYTHING I NEED IS AVAILABLE FOR A REASONABLE PRICE WITH 15MS PING?!
  
  Really, though, I wanted a second one of these the moment I got the first up and running. And with Lightsail, there's always the chance of something like this:
  
  

  @TheRegister Billshock for some AWS Lightsail users today. Apparently I owe $46 billion!! 😳 pic.twitter.com/K8hK4P0SbS

  — Alec (@alechendry) November 7, 2017
  
  

• Portland is run by idiots.

Posted by: Rick C at Saturday, August 25 2018 08:57 AM (ITnFO)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Saturday, August 25 2018 11:19 AM (PiXy!)

Posted by: cxt217 at Saturday, August 25 2018 12:36 PM (BcQU4)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Saturday, August 25 2018 01:53 PM (PiXy!)

Posted by: The Brickmuppet at Saturday, August 25 2018 02:21 PM (3bBAK)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Saturday, August 25 2018 02:42 PM (PiXy!)

Posted by: GreyDuck at Sunday, August 26 2018 12:45 AM (rKFiU)

Posted by: صيانة سيمنس at Thursday, September 06 2018 08:35 PM (m2gaw)

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• Bunch of stuff happened.

• There's a vulnerability in OpenSSH, which is used on, basically, every server in the world and most networking equipment.  (Bleeping Computer)
  
  It lets you check if a user name exists on the server.
  
  That's it.
  
  It's been fixed.
  
  
• Just in case you were wondering why no-one listens to "experts" any more.  (Axios)
  
  
• The return of 24 cores and I can't type an email.
  
  Yeah.  Try rendering SVG to transparent PNGs some time.

• Everything is stupid.

Posted by: J Greely at Friday, August 24 2018 01:40 AM (tgyIO)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Friday, August 24 2018 12:18 PM (PiXy!)

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• Hot Chips!  Get yer Hot Chips!  Fresh from AnandTech.
  
  
• NEC's new vector processor for supercomputers is also available in a handy PCIe card.
  
  
• IBM's Power9 "scale up" edition supports up to 16 sockets and 128TB of RAM.
  
  
• Fujitsu's A64FX Arm processor is probably not coming to your phone since it kind of has 48 cores and is also aimed at supercomputers.
  
  
• Tachyum's Prodigy is a VLIW chip with 64 cores, 8 channel DDR5, 72 lanes of PCIe 5.0, and 2x400Gb Ethernet.  As you might have guessed, it's all on paper right now, expected to tape out next year, delivery some time after that.
  
  VLIW is kind of dead as a general purpose CPU architecture; Intel and HP bet big on it with Itanium and lost billions.  I doubt this version will fare any better.
  
  
• Nantero are making memory out of carbon nanotubes.  Many potential industrial applications of nanotubes are stalled because we can't make them long enough; this uses very, very short tubes so that's a non-issue.  Interesting if it works out.
  
  
• Google's Titan is a security processor for the cloud that with any luck does not ship with 97 known zero-day exploits.
  
  
• NVIDIA have announced a new GPU architecture but that doesn't mean they're about to drop the old architecture.  (PCPer)
  
  The main benefit of the new Turing chips is the dedicated cores for AI and ray tracing; for traditional graphics processing they're not much better than the previous generation, and significantly more expensive.  That goes double for the professional editions - particularly if you need double precision.
  
  

Social Media News

Posted by: cxt217 at Thursday, August 23 2018 01:36 PM (BcQU4)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Thursday, August 23 2018 03:45 PM (PiXy!)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Thursday, August 23 2018 05:24 PM (PiXy!)

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• Paper launch day for Nvidia's RTX 2000 family.  Cards will actually be available following Talk Like a Pirate Day.  (I don't know why either.)  (AnandTech)
  
  Despite WCCFTech being WCCFTech, their leaks on these cards were 100% accurate.  Top of the line 2080 Ti will have 4352 shaders and 11GB of 14Gbps GDDR6 memory.
  
  More interesting (potentially) is that these are the new Turing architecture with Tensor cores for AI processing and a dedicated ray-tracing unit.  When Nvidia talk about huge performance gains, they are talking about these new functions, not about the actual graphics, which look to be only 10-20% faster depending on the card. 
  
  Also, price increases across the board, so you have that to look forward to.  Though to be fair, these are far cheaper than the recently announced professional versions, and I don't think you'll find the same AI or ray-tracing performance cheaper anywhere.
  
  
• The annual Hot Chips conference is on and one of the first presentations is on Samsung's M3 chip, a high-end fully custom ARM design.  Samsung are working to catch up with Apple here, because Qualcomm are dragging their feet in that department.  (AnandTech)
  
  
• Apple may release a new MacBook Air and a replacement for the 97-year-old Mac Mini.  Or not.  (Bloomberg, via Tom's Hardware)
  
  
• Shuttle announced this chunky little nugget.  (WCCFTech)
  
  No, I don't know why either.
  
  
• Template languages always end up Turing complete.  The Minx template language is Turing complete, if you really want to do that.  (Well, mostly.  The template engine solves the Halting Problem by nuking your page if your template code issues too many instructions.)
  
  So either plan for that, or don't implement a template language.
  
  
• There is a new vulnerability that impacts everything.  Unless there isn't or it doesn't.  It gave me a headache and I closed the page, and now I've lost the link.  Just assume you've already been hacked and everything is gone.

• Turkeys of a feather flock together.  Does that chart stack vertically, or overlap?  Either way, it's bad.  Turkey is responsible for something between 40% and 80% of the censored Twitter accounts worldwide, depending.  (Techdirt)

• JavaScript client and server apps are vulnerable to regex attacks.  (Bleeping Computer)
  
  Well, the headline refers to JavaScript, but the real culprit is single-threaded event-driven model for server applications.  We invented multitasking for a reason, you clowns.  All these problems were solved in the early sixties, but nooo, you had to go and reinvent everything.
  
  
• Slow news day, busy work day.  More tomorrow.

Anime News

Pixy is Watching

Videos of the Day

Posted by: J Greely at Tuesday, August 21 2018 01:43 AM (tgyIO)

Posted by: Rick C at Tuesday, August 21 2018 06:40 AM (Q/JG2)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Tuesday, August 21 2018 08:28 AM (PiXy!)

Posted by: J Greely at Tuesday, August 21 2018 10:02 AM (tgyIO)

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