Now? You want to do this now? I have a right to know! I'm getting married in four hundred and thirty years!
Friday, March 09
Glitch In The Matrix
We had a server hiccup just now; something happened to the SSD and it got pinned at 100% utilisation for several minutes. I had to flush some things, stop a backup, and restart the database to get it back to normal.
Getting away from politics to happier subjects for a moment, AMD have released their desktop Ryzen APUs - that is, processors with embedded graphics. The first batch of Ryzen chips (like the R7 1700 I'm using now) had up to 8 cores but no graphics; these have only 4 cores but use the other half of the space to provide the best integrated graphics of any PC CPU ever.*
There are two models, the $99 R3 2200G, and the $169 R5 2400G. The R5 is up to 30% faster on multi-threaded workloads and up to 50% faster on graphics, but there's a big factor of "it depends". If you only have 4 active threads the R3 will perform within about 5% of the R5, and depending on the game you want to play, memory speed might be a more significant factor in frame rates than the APU itself.
The question really is, though, can I play games on this thing without having to buy a discrete graphics card which currently thanks to goddamn Blipcoin miners range upwards of eleventy billion dollars?
And the answer seems to be, hell yes.
You're not going to be playing at 4k 60Hz, but GTA5 is quite playable even on the $99 model, with stock cooler, slow memory, at 1080p and with quality settings mostly on high. Some other games need you to turn the quality or resolution settings down a little to retain good frame rates, but it's still running at an integer multiple of Intel's integrated graphics.
* The best integrated graphics ever belong to the Xbox One X, the chip for which is also made by AMD. Second place goes to Sony's Playstation 4 Pro, which uses a chip made by... AMD.
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I understand why they only look at games from a AAA/enthusiast viewpoint, because that's the audience, but I wish they'd deign to look at less-graphically-intensive games.
Minecraft, ever since they redid the graphical engine in 1.8, will do 80FPS on an i7-6770HQ (thet's the one with 128MB of what is effectively "L4" CPU cache/video memory) with a moderate load of mods. IOW "very playable". I would expect the Ryzen don't-call-them-APUs to blow Intel's iGPU out of the water.
Posted by: Rick C at Thursday, February 22 2018 06:51 AM (h8yX6)
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Its around 50% faster than the 6770HQ generally, and much cheaper. About 200% faster than Intel's mainstream iGPUs. Haven't seen a specific Minecraft benchmark though.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at Thursday, February 22 2018 09:31 AM (PiXy!)
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I've been seeing some interesting followup articles, discussing overclocking the CPU cores and the GPU cores, which has a noticeable-if-not-huge increase in FPS. What's more interesting is RAM speed and single vs dual-channel operation. RAM speed can give a pretty decent boost, but for gaming, making sure to use two DIMMs instead of one will provide pretty hefty boosts.
on the 2400G, Civ VI @720p DX12 medium settings goes from 1866 to 3200 memory @ CL14 boosts FPS from 22.6 to 33.9. But the same test with dual-channel RAM sees a boost from 42.9 to 57.6 FPS!
And these numbers are, as far as I can tell, without overclocking.
The nice thing was seeing the 2400g stable at 3200 with dual-channel single-rank memory, considering how much trouble the first-gen processors had with higher-speed memory.
Aside: My motherboard came out with a BIOS update to support Raven Ridge, and after applying it, I can run my memory at rated speeds again! I got a 16GB kit of ddr4-3000 that ran fine at 2933 on a Gigabyte motherboard, but would not be stable over 2133 on the Asrock mini-itx I replaced it with. With the newest bios, it runs at 2933 fine, and I can ALSO overclock the CPU to 3.95GHz on water, with temps that barely reach 70C with a Prime95 small FFT, and only around 1.37V. It might go faster but I'm not sure how much I want to push Vcore.
(Hilariously, the latest version of HWInfo64 seems to overreport my FSB speed as 108-110MHz, leading to reports of all-core speeds of 4300MHz.)
Posted by: Rick C at Wednesday, February 28 2018 03:22 AM (h8yX6)
1
Phoronix reported some nasty slowdowns, around 20%, with MySQL, but closer to 0% slowdowns with a few games.
Ryzen CPUs (and maybe AMD processors in general) appear to not be affected.
This one looks nasty--it looks like speculatively-executed instructions don't get security checks. Someone on Twitter claims to have an exploit that lets them read kernel memory.
Posted by: Rick C at Thursday, January 04 2018 11:21 AM (h8yX6)
2
It's what's known as a side-channel attack; you can't directly read kernel memory, but with a lot of trickery you can deduce some of the contents.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at Thursday, January 04 2018 11:30 AM (PiXy!)
3
Is this why I can't reach my blog www.rishon-rishon.com ?
Posted by: David Boxenhorn at Thursday, January 04 2018 08:17 PM (h8yX6)
4
Seemed to work fine for me, so I'm guessing the answer is "no".
Posted by: Rick C at Friday, January 05 2018 05:34 AM (h8yX6)
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David got in touch with me yesterday and I hit it with a wrench couple of times.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at Friday, January 05 2018 08:40 AM (PiXy!)
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So is there any talk about what sort of "universal effects" this has had on PCs in general?
Posted by: Wonderduck at Friday, January 12 2018 11:03 AM (h8yX6)
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The effects for most users will be minimal, but it can be pretty bad if you:
(a) Make heavy use of virtual machines
(b) Do heavy random I/O - databases are about the only thing that really does this.
Games are about 1% slower. Most desktop apps will be affected even less than that.
Cloud servers are badly affected. One multi-user game went offline when Amazon patch their servers because the load basically doubled for the same number of players.
I do know one developer who returned his brand new Intel 8700K system and replaced it with a cheaper AMD Ryzen 1700 machine (which is what I have) and got much better performance. (AMD isn't affected by Meltdown, and is partly safe from the other bug, Spectre.)
Posted by: Pixy Misa at Saturday, January 13 2018 08:35 PM (PiXy!)
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"databases are about the only thing that really does this."
Yeah, since that's my day job, I'm looking forward to that.
Posted by: Rick C at Sunday, January 14 2018 04:07 AM (h8yX6)
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Not only is the Recent Comments widget broken, but the Edit Comments screen comes up blank.
Posted by: Mauser at Monday, January 15 2018 01:52 PM (h8yX6)
If you have any interest in video editing, this is a really good deal. The current Humble Bundle offers Vegas Pro (normally $399 by itself) and a bunch of other applications for visual and audio effects, graphics, and music, for a total of $20.
Update: Small catch, it's Vegas 14 and they just released Vegas 15. Still, 95% off not counting all the other bits in the bundle.
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Monday, December 04
Tohru Gets Reviewed
The first 13 minutes are mostly about toilets, so I've set it to skip that part.
1
That looks like it'd almost be a pretty good next work machine for me, as I'm due to get a new one in March or so. But thanks to Dell's cutting back on customization a couple of years ago they don't really have it in the options I'd like: I want a bigger SSD, less (or no spinning disk), and don't need a 580 GPU. Something like a 1600, 256-512GB SSD, 16GB of RAM, and maybe an RX 550 would be perfect.
Posted by: Rick C at Tuesday, December 05 2017 04:44 AM (ECH2/)
2
Yeah, a build-to-order version of this would be great. All the parts except the video card (which is built in to the motherboard) are user-replaceable, so there's no fundamental reason why they couldn't have an option for a Ryzen 1600, Radeon 560, 512GB SSD and 4K screen.
I went for it because I can swap the SSD myself if I need to, and Dell offer a cheap four-year on-site extended warranty, so if it breaks I can just call them and have them come out and fix it. Also because at the time (July / August) Radeon graphics cards were impossible to find because they'd all been bought by Ethereum miners.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at Tuesday, December 05 2017 09:32 AM (PiXy!)
3
Makes sense, and for home I could see getting one of the RX 580 versions, except for the mini-ITX rig I built this summer. For $1100 or so, I think, (I already had a 22" and 24" monitor) the final specs are a 1600X with 16GB of RAM, a 480GB M.2 PCIe SSD and 1TB 3.5" HDD, a GTX 950, and CPU watercooling. Plus it overclocks to 4.0GHz on 1.38V.
Posted by: Rick C at Wednesday, December 06 2017 03:46 AM (ECH2/)
1
Interesting, New 64 bit Firefox has some annoying interactions with the editor here. Seems to insist on having SOME text in all text boxes or something. Took a half a dozen tries to NOT have a "more" at the end of my first post using it.
Posted by: Mauser at Monday, November 20 2017 05:03 AM (Ix1l6)
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Argh, seriously. No matter what I do, I get an extra blank line on the first part of a post, and a "More..." line even if there IS no second half. (I have to click the button that eliminates the content, backspacing alone does not clear it.)
Posted by: Mauser at Friday, November 24 2017 03:25 PM (Ix1l6)
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I think there's something I can do on the server side, to automatically eliminate text if it's just spaces. I'll give that a try.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at Monday, November 27 2017 09:50 AM (PiXy!)
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Yeah, it's only on the post editing screen so far. Comments are unaffected. But it appears the text boxes all are initiated with
Posted by: Mauser at Monday, November 27 2017 01:32 PM (Ix1l6)
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Crud, that was supposed to be <div> &nbsp; <div>
Can see that in the html editor on a fresh edit window. (HTML-izing in comments seems to be hit or miss, especially after you hit preview, the edit box is filled with converted code)
Posted by: Mauser at Monday, November 27 2017 01:35 PM (Ix1l6)
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Problems with AoS blog today? It's intermittently disappearing.
Posted by: Rick C at Wednesday, November 29 2017 07:42 AM (ECH2/)
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We got taken out by Skynet. Should be back now, though.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at Wednesday, November 29 2017 03:04 PM (PiXy!)
Sorry about any site glitches, we're getting hit by a 7.4Gbit DDOS attack. That's not big in the overall scale of things, but is enough that some of the sites on the server are still down and I need to migrate things elsewhere.
1
All I ask is the chance to prove that millions of dollars will not make me happier.
Posted by: Mauser at Friday, November 03 2017 11:50 AM (TYvUn)
2
It worked for me, right up until it all evaporated in the dotCom crash.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at Saturday, November 04 2017 09:07 AM (PiXy!)
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Cats are very independent so they're fine being alone for hours at a time.
You probably
wont want to get one younger than 9 months to a year. Kittens need more time and attention (both playing and training)
If you're worried (and if you can) you could get two. Then they have each other to entertain through the day feline leukemia tests.
Posted by: shehbazg9 at Saturday, February 10 2018 02:17 AM (h8yX6)
4
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Posted by: cristinajamesfernendes at Thursday, March 01 2018 01:46 AM (h8yX6)
