• Android Pie is out.  Pie?  Just pie?  Yes, just Pie.  (Android Central, hat tip Rick C.)
  
  I don't have it.  My Nexus 7s and my Sony tablet are stuck on 6; my Moto G4 Play and my Huawei Mediapad are still on 7, though at least they're getting the monthly patches.
  
  
• AMD's Threadripper 2 previews are out.  Full reviews turn out to be embargoed for another week, though, so this is just the tech details (which had already leaked) and pricing (which had already leaked) and AMD's own performance tests (which had already leaked).  (AnandTech)
  
  
• AMD's semi-custom console APU is ready for its closeup, Mr DeMille.
  
  Looks like a 256-bit bus delivering 256GB/s of bandwidth, and we can see that the APU is indeed a single chip, not a multi-chip module like Intel's Kaby Lake G.  (AnandTech)
  
  
• IBM shows off a 19.2TB SSD with an MRAM cache.  Magnetoresistive RAM is fast and durable and non-volatile, but expensive, so using it as a cache makes a lot of sense.  (AnandTech)
  
  Also, the drives support PCIe 4.0.
  
  
• Lenovo has leaked AMD's rumoured 2300X and 2500X CPUs.   (Tom's Hardware)
  
  These are just updates to the 1300X and 1500X.  It looks like they're built on the Ryzen 2 CPU die, and not on the APU die with the graphics disabled.  (The CPU die has more cache, so if the leaked details are correct these can't be using the APU die.)
  
  Update: Come to think of it, the APU die has fewer PCIe lanes available, so they would have to use the CPU die for these models or lose functionality over last year's versions.
  
  
• BBC blocked in China.  This is not, remarkably, the fault of any stupidity on the part of the BBC.  They did everything right.  It's just nominally communist fascists fighting with nominally capitalist socialists over the marketing rights to the censorship Olympics.  (TechDirt)
  
  
• Apple, Facebook, Spotify, and YouTube have booted professional crazy man Alex Jones.  (TechCrunch)
  
  Which would be less alarming if (a) I wasn't on a week's suspension from Twitter for insulting goldfish and (b) hadn't been banned from YouTube for eight years before they relaxed their multiple-account restrictions for paying customers.  (I have Google Play Music, which includes YouTube premium.)
  
  VermillionAMV got banned from YouTube a couple of days ago, and all they do is post other people's AMVs.  I linked that nice Wakfu AMV and the next day it was gone.  Fortunately they got reinstated, but there was no indication of what happened or why, just BOOM, everything gone.  And YouTube URLs have zero descriptive value, so when they go you're left with nothing.
  
  
• Intel is expected to quote launch unquote their quote ninth generation unquote chips this month.  You'll be able to get the chips in maybe October.  Also, this is still Skylake.  Nothing has changed except the name.  Oh, and the core count.  That's actually changed a lot.
  
  Eight cores.  Let's see AMD answer that oh wait they already did.  (Fudzilla)
  
  
• Samsung is getting into the QLC game too.  Unless these are a lot cheaper than existing TLC drives I'd hold off for the first generation or two.  (TweakTown)
  
  
• Inko is a dynamic gradually-typed object oriented language written in Rust and producing portable bytecode.  I think the syntax needs a bit of poking - curly brackets and :: and @ everywhere - but the functionality looks nice.

Posted by: Rick C at Tuesday, August 07 2018 10:42 AM (ITnFO)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Tuesday, August 07 2018 10:55 AM (PiXy!)

Posted by: Rick C at Tuesday, August 07 2018 11:16 AM (ITnFO)

Posted by: Mauser at Tuesday, August 07 2018 11:26 AM (Ix1l6)

Posted by: Rick C at Tuesday, August 07 2018 02:21 PM (ITnFO)

6  Oh, silly me.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Tuesday, August 07 2018 02:41 PM (PiXy!)

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