• Cultist of the Ebon Moon working at CERN are not opening up a portal to Hell.  (USA Today)
  
  "There is no truth to the claim that cul- er, scientists at CERN are communicating with demonic entities and using the collider to open up a portal to Hell," spokesthing Ba'al Demonovic told USA Today in an eerie dream.  "We're going to need a much larger accelerator to accomplish that."
  
  
  

Tech News

• The all-new Dell XPS 13 Plus sucks.  (The Verge)
  
  They tried to combine the worst features of the MacBook Air and the trackbar models of the MacBook Pro, and succeeded too well.  And then they added a battery-draining OLED display.
  
  
  
• TSMC has completed primary construction of their new 5nm fab (chip factory) in Arizona.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  It will take about 18 months to fit out the building with services and equipment before production begins in early 2024.
  
  
  

Posted by: cxt217 at Monday, August 01 2022 11:54 AM (2tHvf)

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• Intel is absolutely definitely positively not cancelling its Arc graphics cards before they're even properly launched says Intel.  (WCCFTech)
  
  "Graphics cards are core to our business and always have been," said an unnamed Intel employee speaking from an undisclosed location.  "Just like Optane."
  
  There's been some weirdness all along with Intel denying it ever had plans for a high-end card in the first generation, and chips apparently sitting in a warehouse for months waiting for drivers to be vaguely workable.  As this blog noted, Intel cited performance numbers for a total of five games.
  
  
  
• AMD cards meanwhile are now almost twice as fast with the latest driver update - in Minecraft.  (Hot Hardware)
  
  Yes, it's just one game, and it's not all that graphics intensive, but if it's the only game you play and you play it on an older AMD graphics card like the RX 580 - which I do - this is welcome.
  
  The update provides a small boost for recent games, but a much bigger one for some older titles.  On a Radeon 6800 XT, the 2011 game RAGE now achieves an average of 120 fps - at 8k.
  
  

Tech News

• If you were expecting to receive your Steam Deck early in 2023, Valve has news: Shipping dates have been moved to late 2022.  (Liliputing)
  
  Yes, that's two items of good news in one day.  No, I don't know what's going on either.
  
  
  
• If you were looking for a small but capable Android phone the Asus Zenfone 9 might be it.  (Liliputing)
  
  It has a 5.9" screen, but it's almost all screen so it's almost exactly the same size as Google's 5" Pixel 2 from five years ago.
  
  
  
• AMD's upcoming Ryzen 7600X beats Intel's 12900K by 22% on one obviously broken benchmark.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  The number might be real, because apart from the general design improvements and increased clock speeds, Zen 4 has twice as much L2 cache as Zen 3.  Looking at just one benchmark you might find that it suddenly fits in cache and runs dramatically faster.
  
  Realistically, the 7600X could have about the same single-threaded performance as the 12900K, and probably a little less.  It will be much cheaper and use a fraction of the power, though; it's not intended at all to compete with Intel's high end chips.
  
  
  
• Micron has announced plans to expand its US-based memory manufacturing.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  I question the timing.  Well, no, I don't; they said quite openly that this is because of the CHIPS handout passed yesterday.
  
  
  
• In another gift to AMD Intel is planning to raise prices by up to 20% across the board.  (WCCFTech)
  
  "Up to" being the operative term, they probably have a hundred people doing nothing but modelling how much they can get away with.  Intel knows that AMD can't supply the entire market, but on the other hand customers can just choose to wait, particularly with a RECESSION going on right now.
  
  
  
• Gaming in a cold climate: Intel's fastest, hottest, most expensive desktop CPU mostly loses to AMD's much cheaper 5800X3D.  (AnandTech)
  
  The 12900KS peaks at 270W where the 5800X3D uses just 112W, so unless you also need to keep your igloo toasty warm, AMD is the better bet.
  
  On productivity tasks the 8+8 core 12900KS does handily beat the 8 core 5800X3D, but there you'd probably look to the 5950X on the AMD side - which is also much cheaper than the 12900KS, and also uses much less power, peaking at 142W.

Posted by: Rick C at Sunday, July 31 2022 03:26 AM (BMUHC)

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• The CHIPS act - delivering $52 billion in subsidies to the massively profitable semiconductor industry - has passed Congress after being bloated out to $280 billion.  (The Verge)
  
  Your tax dollars at work.
  
  Won't stop Intel raising chip prices.
  
  
  
• You might ask why Intel was pushing so hard for its cut of the mud pie when it's been having one record quarter after another and the answer is the gravy train just fell off a bridge.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  The company posted a $500 million quarterly loss on a year-on-year revenue drop of 17% and an accompanying drop in gross margins, which is not a pleasant combination.
  
  
  

Tech News

• A big part of that Intel loss was an inventory write-down as they close their Optane storage business.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Optane is faster and more robust than flash and cheaper and denser than RAM, but at the same time it's more expensive and less dense than flash and slower and less robust than RAM, putting it in an awkward place.
  
  It never got the volume in sales to drive the price down, so now it's gone for good.  It was an attractive option - at least on paper - for enterprise databases, but I'm not sure if it made much difference in reality.
  
  
  
• Back on the CHIPS act recipients will be banned from building new fabs in China.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  That provision is probably aimed at companies like Samsung, which is considering a $200 billion investment in US-based fabs.  Samsung already operates fabs in China for older, lower-tech processes - as does TSMC.
  
  
  
• Nirvana Finance - one of those bullshit blockchain "stablecoins" - just got wiped out.  (Coindesk)
  
  Someone borrowed $10 million - unsecured, anonymous, and online - and created a fake transaction to drain funds from Nirvana before paying the loan back and running off with the stolen funds.  Like paying with a cheque and closing your bank account before it can be cashed.
  
  
  
• Instagram says, "Apparently we are not the phone company after all.  Who knew?"  (The Verge)
  
  Oh.
  
  
  
• Twitter is raising prices.  (The Verge)
  
  Even The Verge is skeptical of this one.

• Facebook - well, the parent company, Meta - saw a 1% decline in revenue compared with the same quarter a year ago.  (Engadget)
  
  And more significantly, a 36% decline in profits.
  
  
  
• Facebook's answer to this seems to be to power into the dive.  In response to user complaints about them turning Instagram into a cheap TikTok clone, they said: We don't care.  We don't have to.  We're the phone company.  (The Guardian)
  
  
  

Tech News

• TikTok itself meanwhile says China?  Never heard of it.  (Gizmodo)
  
  Leaked PR documents say:

  Downplay the parent company ByteDance, downplay the China association, downplay AI.

  Accompanied by a set of "proof points" to let you know they're lying.
  
  
  
• Intel's 56-core Sapphire Rapids CPU is 35% faster than the previous high-end Ice Lake chips.  (WCCFTech)
  
  It has 40% more cores, so this is not a huge win.

Posted by: normal at Friday, July 29 2022 09:56 AM (obo9H)

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• Sales of Xbox consoles, software, and online services were all down in the quarter ending June 30.  (WCCFTech)
  
  Does that mean I can finally get an Xbox series X?
  
  No, don't be silly.  And don't even bother looking for a PS5.
  
  
  
• Trees don't exist.  (Eukaryote Writes)
  
  Not that there aren't things called trees, but rather phylogenetically it is impossible to draw a line around the things we call trees.  It's hard enough with crabs - king crabs, for example, aren't crabs, and nor are coconut crabs or hermit crabs.  Crabbiness has evolved at least five times independently.
  
  But treeness has evolved independently at least thirty-eight times in the Canary Islands alone.  Herbaceous plants freely evolve into trees and back again, completely destroying any hope of a neat evolutionary tree of trees.
  
  
  

Tech News

• Social networks are dead.  (Axios)
  
  Facebook is TikToking itself and Twitter's staff is 100% committed to the circular firing squad business model.  They won't be missed.
  
  
  
• Micron has announced new 232-layer TLC flash chips with up to 2TB in a single 11.5x13.5mn package.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  That's dense enough to make a 16TB M.2 drive.  That would be kind of expensive though.
  
  It's a little too large for a 2TB microSD card, but they would use cheaper, denser, slower QLC flash for those anyway.
  
  
  
• Google reported "disappointing" financial results, with profits of just $16 billion on $70 billion in sales for the last quarter.  (Thurrott.com)
  
  Someone please disappoint me like that.
  
  
  
• Hololive's Tokino Sora - their first vtuber back in 2017 when they were just a VR technology company called Cover Corp - has reached one million subscribers, becoming the (counts) thirty-first Hololive member to reach that mark.  (Reddit)
  
  Is that a lot?  Because that seems like a lot.

Posted by: Karl at Thursday, July 28 2022 04:35 AM (e8dSa)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Thursday, July 28 2022 08:32 AM (PiXy!)

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• Nvidia's flagship 4000-series graphics card could feature 18,176 cores and 48GB of RAM, and use as much as 800W.  (WCCFTech)
  
  Or not.
  
  That would make it about 75% larger than the 3090 Ti, and it's also expected to clock about 60% higher, for three times the overall performance.
  
  The card should hit about 100TFLOPs.  My Radeon 4850 - this was a while ago, back when Mass Effect and Dragon Age were fresh and I still had time to play computer games - ran at exactly 1TFLOPs.  I played Mass Effect at 720p and I remember the game tended to chug when I got into large battles with the Reapers.
  
  So the 4090 Ultra (or whatever it might be called) should handle 12k resolution with some slowdowns, or 8k gaming at a steady 60Hz.  Very approximately.
  
  AMD meanwhile is also set to announce new cards, and their high end next-gen cards are also expected to be three times as fast as anything available today.
  
  Likely to be three times as expensive as well.
  
  
  

Tech News

• You can't custom build a Lego minifig of yourself for $12.  (Jay's Brick Blog)
  
  Which is to say there's a new online tool to let you do this, and that is in fact the price, but it's almost universally inaccessible.  Certainly in Australia.
  
  I can create semi-custom minifigs here downunder with their previous tool, which is much, much cheaper (three for A$10) but has less variety in hairstyles and clothing.
  
  I actually started making my own set of Lego HoloEN, but there aren't any redheads available, or green hair either.  At least there's blue.
  
  
  
• Instagram desperately wants to be the new TikTok.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  TikTok is of course a screaming, burning sewer, but it's a screaming, burning sewer that makes money, or doesn't make money but at least that gets lots of clicks, or doesn't get lots of clicks but does gather up endless amounts of personal information that is basically useless but which advertisers are willing to pay for...  Or were.
  
  
  
• Intel has picked up Mediatek as its first* significant foundry customer.  (The Register)
  
  * Sort of.  Altera was Intel's first foundry customer, but then Intel bought them shortly after so it turned into just Intel making more Intel chips at Intel fabs for Intel.
  
  
  

• The new seasonal Pepsi flavour here in Australia is lemon.  It gets a thumbs up from me, except that if you want to buy it in bottles instead of the more expensive cans, it seems to be in stock in exactly one store in the entire state.
  
  I have cherry Coke in the fridge - the good stuff made with cane sugar - but I'm drinking the lemon Pepsi instead.
  
  
  
• Is AMD's Epyc Genoa a fast fast CPU after all?  (WCCFTech)
  
  This article says that the top clock speed for the upcoming 96-core Epyc 9664 is 3.8GHz.  That's pretty good for a server CPU - they are clocked far more conservatively than desktop chips.
  
  It doesn't run all 96 cores at once at that speed though, and the actual speeds achieved in production remain to be seen.
  
  
  

Tech News

• The Western Digital Black SN770 is a pretty good SSD.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Unless you want to do lots of sequential writes in which case it is half the speed of the cheaper Inland Performance drive from Microcenter.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Why?  No idea.  These things are actually very complicated and as well as the usual price/performance/power tradeoffs there are also configuration tradeoffs, where two drives with the same hardware can perform differently in different benchmarks - each walking away with some tests and losing badly in others - due to different optimisation choices.
  
  And then there's Apple, who tune their SSDs to run fast but simply lose recent data if the power goes out.
  
  
  
• Speaking of which, Apple fanboys are whining again - still - about not being taken seriously.  (Daring Fireball)
  
  Yeah.  I listened to you idiots.  I bought a Mac.  It cost a small fortune and I barely used it, because Apple deliberately makes getting work done on their computers a living hell.
  
  
  
• Sony is flagging its own websites for copyright infringement.  (TorrentFreak)
  
  Good.  More of this.  
  
  According to the article, Disney and Warner Bros. are doing the same thing.
  
  At my day job we routinely get these notices from the IP lawyers of big companies who have paid us to set up websites for them.  It's always a drama because (a) the datacenter's first response is to pull the plug on that server to avoid any contributory liability and (b) it is impossible to find the right person to talk to to get it sorted out.
  
  
  
• Actual note from me to ops team: Please remove server xyz from the cluster.  It is shit.

1 "it isimpossibleto find the right person to talk to to get it sorted out."

Seems to me that the solution here is to adjust the SLA to state "this is a you problem."

Posted by: Rick C at Tuesday, July 26 2022 12:04 AM (BMUHC)

Posted by: normal at Tuesday, July 26 2022 12:57 AM (LADmw)

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• Key images in a number of influential papers that have directed 15 years and hundreds of millions of dollars of Alzheimer's research appear to have been algorithmically enhanced.  (Science)
  
  By which I mean they're as fake as a Confederate $3 bill, to the point that the chemical they are supposed to be showing evidence of may not even exist.
  
  There's an effect called publication bias in science, where if you don't find what you're looking for , your paper is considered uninteresting and doesn't get accepted by the major journals, even though the failure to find something that every expects to exist can be as much of a breakthrough as finding something no-one expected.
  
  Still, one research did publish two papers back in 2008 noting that he followed all the required protocols and ended up with precisely nothing.  But those seem to have been largely ignored.
  
  
  

Tech New

• A quasicrystal with two time dimensions could be the answer to creating robust memory circuits for quantum computers.  (Phys.org)
  
  Or, on the other hand, not.
  
  
  
• The Monkeypox outbreak - just classified as a "mega catastrophe" by the WorldWide Freak-Out Organisation - is exactly what you thought it was.  (NBC News)

  [O]f the 699 monkeypox cases for which there was available information, 97% were in gay, bisexual or other men who have sex with men. New York City, the U.S. epicenter, has seen only one woman diagnosed with the virus out of 639 cases confirmed through July 19.

  But you'll likely be banned from Twitter if you point this out.
  
  
  
• More on Intel's upcoming Sapphire Rapids workstation chips.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  They'll be available with anything from 12 to 56 cores, with the smaller models offering higher clock speeds.  They'll support 8 memory channels and up to 112 lanes of PCIe 5.0.
  
  No information yet as to dates or prices, so if you're waiting to build a high-end workstation system you can go right on waiting.
  
  
  

• Yet another outage with this damn server.  The automated restart almost worked.  It silenced the alarm but didn't actually bring the blogs back to life.
  
  Ugh.
  
  
  
• We're gonna need billions of solar panels to extract carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and combine it with hydrogen extracted from water to turn it into fuel.  (Casey Handmer)
  
  Or trees.  Because that's what trees do.
  
  
  
  

Tech News

• SpaceX has broken the launch record it set in 2021.  (Space.com)
  
  With five months left in the year.
  
  
  
• That idiot who thought a Google chat bot was sentient has been fired.  (Big Technology)
  
  For breaching a confidentiality agreement, not for being an idiot.  Unfortunately.  Because we had a teachable moment here.
  
  
  
• Intel's 13700k is basically a 12900k.  (WCCFTech)
  
  Which is good if you mostly care about getting eight fast CPU cores, not about the slower efficiency cores, because you should get 12900k performance for a lot less money.
  
  Unless Intel suddenly decided to increase CPU prices.  (The Verge)
  
  
  
• Intel's W9-3495 will offer a 56 core workstation CPU running at...  Oh.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Running at 1.8GHz.
  
  Though that might be (a) an engineering sample, (b) the minimum clock speed when running all cores with AVX512, or (c) both.

Posted by: Rick C at Sunday, July 24 2022 12:50 AM (BMUHC)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Sunday, July 24 2022 12:51 AM (PiXy!)

Posted by: normal at Sunday, July 24 2022 10:09 AM (obo9H)

Posted by: normal at Sunday, July 24 2022 10:15 AM (obo9H)

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