• Remembering Gordon Moore and the iAPX432 debacle.  (The Chip Letter)
  
  Intel's planned followup to the wildly successful 8080 was not the 8086 or even the Z80-like 8085, but the iAPX432, an object oriented mainframe-on-a-chip (well, mainframe-on-a-board since it was a multiple chip implementation) that actually eventually worked but was so slow that nobody ever used it for anything.
  
  It took a diametrically opposite approach to RISC: Instead of relying on clever compilers to make simple hardware work, it tried to bring the hardware up to the level of advanced programming languages like Ada.  
  
  In 1975.
  
  It was 30 times as complicated as the 8080 but worse by almost every measure, and was completely abandoned.
  
  The only other company I know of that has attempted this is hi-fi maker Linn, whose Rekursiv CPU suffered a similar fate when it turned out that commodity Sun 3 workstations ran the same code cheaper and faster.

• AMD's 7800X3D is the new AMD 5800X3D.  (WCCFTech)
  
  That is, not necessarily the fastest gaming CPU in every single case, but mostly faster than more expensive chips that use much more power.
  
  It's priced the same as the 7900X which is about 50% faster for many non-gaming workloads, so if you only spend part of your time gaming it might not be the best choice.
  
  It does avoid the issue with the 7900X3D and 7950X3D which have two slightly different CPU chiplets, because it only has one CPU chiplet.
  
  
  
• The RTX 4070 might be a good graphics card.  (WCCFTech)
  
  Due this month (probably) for around $600 (we think), it should use the same power as the 3060 (more or less) but deliver the performance of the 3080 (ish).
  
  It will (likely) come with 12GB of VRAM, which is the minimum you should buy these days.  The 3060 Ti, 3070, and 3070 Ti all have 8GB of RAM, and are starting to suffer on some new releases.
  
  The Xbox Series X and Playstation 5 both have 16GB of RAM, most of which can be used for graphics, so titles designed for consoles can play poorly on even some fairly recent graphics cards.
  
  The 3060, curiously enough, has 12GB of RAM and sometimes runs better than more expensive cards with less RAM.
  
  
  
• The Framework laptop is very exciting and I'd love to buy one but I'm sticking with my MacBook Air because I have the intelligence of a potato and am happy paying 16x the market price for storage in laptop that can never be upgraded or repaired.  (The Verge)
  
  Ijits gonna ij.

Posted by: normal at Tuesday, April 04 2023 12:40 AM (LADmw)

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• If you're looking for a big and decently fast SSD with no major flaws for under $200, you're in luck.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  TeamGroup's MP34 is currently on sale at Amazon for $199.  For the 4TB model.
  
  It's not a new drive - this range first appeared in 2019 - and it's not PCIe 5 or even PCIe 4.  It "only" delivers read speeds of 3.5GB per second.
  
  But it's also not QLC - it's TLC, so generally faster and with a longer lifespan - and it's not DRAMless - it has a proper DRAM cache on board.
  
  At launch the 1TB model cost $160 so prices have come down a lot in the past four years.
  
  The Crucial P3 also offers 4TB for $199 right now, but that is QLC and DRAMless, so the only thing it has going for it is the reputation of the manufacturer: Crucial is the consumer brand of Micron, one of the biggest makers of flash and DRAM chips in the world.
  
  As a secondary drive either one should be fine, but the MP34 should also deliver the goods as a primary drive if you don't need bleeding edge performance.
  
  A year ago 4TB drives like these would have set you back at least $400 even on sale.  These are now cheaper than SATA SSDs, and five or six times faster.

• Meanwhile in Flashland Kioxia (formerly Toshiba's flash memory division) and Western Digital have announced 218 layer 3.2GHz 1Tb TLC flash chips.  (AnandTech)
  
  That means that a cheaper 4 channel controller on a PCIe 5 SSD will be able to hit 12.8GBps - or for PCIe 3 you'd only need one channel to basically max up the bus.
  
  This is particularly good for smaller drives.  Apple customers buying recent 256GB laptops have noticed that the performance has been cut in half over the previous year's model.  Of course Apple massively overcharges for storage and you can never, ever upgrade so you'd have to be an idiot to buy a 256GB Apple laptop anyway.
  
  They have other nasty habits that make it questionable buying any of their products at all.  More on that below. 
  
  
  
• Don't buy one of AMD's new budget A620 motherboards if you want to run an X or X3D CPU.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  It should at least run, but it will run at 65W economy mode, turning (for example) a 7900X into a 7900, and a 7900X3D into, um, a 7900X3D running at 65W because there isn't a specific model like that.  
  
  This doesn't actually lose you much performance though.  The 65W 7900 is only 6% slower than the 170W 7900X.
  
  Which makes you wonder why they bothered to go to 170W in the first place.
  
  
  
• AMD and JEDEC are working on DDR5-17600 memory for servers.  (WCCFTech)
  
  This uses a trick that basically puts two memory modules into one slot and interleaves the data from the two sets of chips, running at double the native rate.
  
  In the six years since Epyc CPUs first appeared they've jumped from four memory channels to eight to twelve, and there's just no room in servers for them to get much bigger. 
  
  So the solution is to make the memory faster, only that takes too long.
  
  So the solution to that solution is to basically RAID-0 the memory chips.
  
  
  
• SpaceX is preparing for a full test launch of Starship, likely this month.  (Ars Technica)
  
  Despite it being Ars the comments are mostly sane.  One comment praising Elon Musk got downvoted to oblivion, but so did one comment denigrating him.
  
  
  
• And it's going to the Moon.  Not this month, though.  In a couple of years.  (Space News)
  
  Carrying a privately developed lunar rover.
  
  
  
• The scammer who got Instagram "influencers" account's banned and then charged them to help get them reinstated may have been found.  (ProPublica)
  
  Of course this scam was only possible in the first place because Instagram is run by evil shitheads.
  
  Instagram declined to comment.  Evil, not stupid.
  
  
  

Posted by: normal at Monday, April 03 2023 01:38 AM (obo9H)

Posted by: cxt217 at Monday, April 03 2023 10:40 AM (2tHvf)

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• Twitter open-sourced its recommendation algorithm, as it said it was going to do.  (Twitter)
  
  I believe it was already leaked by a disgruntled former employee - pretty much all Twitter's former employees fit that category because they're communists - so nothing has really change except that it's official now.
  
  Reportedly this uses something on the order of a trillion CPU seconds per day - five billion iterations, each running across multiple CPU cores.  That would require twelve million cores, at a minimum, or 62,500 dual 96-core Epyc Genoa servers.  Call it 1500 racks stuffed full of the latest server equipment.
  
  The results speak for themselves though: Everybody turns it off and goes straight to the chronological feed because it's full of crap.

• ChatGPT has found a useful purpose: Hunting for security vulnerabilities in code libraries.  (The Register)
  
  I've mentioned before that ChatGPT is a pure language model, and doesn't actually understand anything.  But computer programs are pure language - everything about them is defined in terms of language, with no outside knowledge required.  This is exactly what ChatGPT can do, and it turns out that it does it pretty well.
  
  Given the state of public code libraries it's like dynamiting fish in a barrel, but it actually reports on the specific problems rather than marking everything on NPM as SEO spam.
  
  Even though it is.
  
  
  
• Europol is dumb.  (The Register)
  
  I swear I could hear my brain cells ditching work and getting drunk when I tried to read that article.
  
  
  
• Italy too.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  Dumb.
  
  
  
• The 2023 Chuwi Corebook X has the Four Essential Keys.  (Liliputing)
  
  And a 12th generation U-series CPU (that's last year's model, but last year's Corebook X had a 2020 CPU, so it's progress), a very nice 14" 2160x1440 screen, and up to 16GB of RAM though it's soldered in place and the 16GB model is out of stock.
  
  I'm not sure I'd recommend anyone actually buying it, but if they can put the Four Essential Keys in place on a small notebook why do the major manufacturers have so much trouble with it?
  
  
  
• AMD's low-end A620 motherboards are here for less horribly expensive systems.  (WCCFTech)
  
  They still require more expensive DDR5 RAM, but that cost is going down - it's about 50% more than DDR4 now, rather than 100% - and it does offer better performance.  Sometimes.
  
  
  
• The toy business is surprisingly complex when your CEO is a moron and your executives actively hate their customers.  (The Verge)
  
  Brain cells getting drunk again.  It's about Hasbro, who have systematically destroyed their two money-makers, Money the Gathering and Dingbats & Deviants.
  
  
  
• AI ethicists - some of the most useless people on the face of the Earth - have fired back at that preposterous open letter demanding a six-month pause on AI research saying that yes, AI will kill us all, probably tomorrow if it can fit that into its busy schedule, but research must continue because otherwise the AI ethicists won't get paid.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  Microsoft to its credit recently fired all its AI ethicists.

Posted by: PatBuckman at Saturday, April 01 2023 11:29 PM (r9O5h)

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