Friday, November 09

Geek

Daily News Stuff 9 November 2018

Tech News
  • Sony has released the first 128GB writable Blu-Ray disks.  (AnandTech)

    These have been largely bypassed in favour of flash storage and direct downloads; the cost per byte isn't much better than SSDs and markedly worse than hard drives.  Still, that's 200x as much as a CD, which is no small feat.

  • Why Intel processors draw more power than expected.  (AnandTech)

    Intel's power numbers are lies.

  • Samsung pre-announced their upcoming 7.3" tablet.  (Wired)

    This one folds.  Not with two screens and a hinge, but it doesn't look like the whole thing is a bendy banana either.  We shall see.  This is potentially awesome but hard to pull off.

  • Brython is a dumb name but a great idea: Python for your browser.

    Currently it's a bit fiddly to use because HTML is still bound to JavaScript, but anything that hastens JavaScript's demise is welcome.

  • How does IBM's Power9 stack up against Intel and AMD?  (Phoronix)

    Meh.  Looking at the benchmarks, I thought, wow, that's pretty good for a 22 core CPU...  Dual 22 core?  Well, that's rather less inspiring then.

  • HP's Elite x2 1013 G3 is a successor to their 2017 Envy x2.  (ZDNet)

    It has the same detachable design, a slightly larger 13.3" screen still with the 3000x2000 resolution, and two Thunderbolt ports as well as a regular USB-C.  (The Envy x2  that I have does not have Thunderbolt.)

    It has a quad core 8th generation Intel CPU, a nice upgrade, but not the high-end Iris Plus or Iris Pro graphics of last year's models, because Intel don't yet have a chip that combines those two features.

    Elite is HP's high-end business line; there will likely be a consumer-oriented Envy model of this along shortly.



Video of the Day


Kitty!



Picture of the Day

https://ai.mee.nu/images/TreeFort.jpg?size=720x&q=95

Tree fort!  Click to embiggen.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 11:32 PM | Comments (8) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
Post contains 306 words, total size 3 kb.

1 "HTML is still bound to JavaScript"
I guess we can thank Netscape for this.  In contrast, for all the crap stuff Microsoft's done over the years, this was one thing they did worlds better:  the scripting engine wasn't part of the browser per se, the interfaces were publicly documented.  That's how they were able to support VBScript, and a script engine that could run outside of a browser and also hook into anything that was a COM (later .Net) object.  There were even a small handful of third-party scripting languages.  In the browser you'd just go script language="whatever" and the engine would pick it up.

Posted by: Rick C at Saturday, November 10 2018 05:00 AM (Q/JG2)

2 " Dual 22 core?"
It's worse than that.  The Power9s have *quad*-threaded cores, not dual-threaded like x86:  that's a 176-thread box.  One place the Talos did better than a TR2990WX was LLVM compilation...but when you consider it has nearly three times as many threads as the 2990WX, it doesn't seem all that great.

Posted by: Rick C at Saturday, November 10 2018 05:06 AM (Q/JG2)

3 Re: the 9000-series power thing:  Techspot had an article yesterday saying they were thinking of re-running their 9900K testing while capping the chip to 95W.  They did a series of Blender tests, both at unlimited and 95W, with various cores turned off in the BIOS.  As soon as you get to 3 cores loaded (+HT), you start seeing it run slower (only 100MHz there) and at 8 cores, it ran at 4GHz instead of 4.7.  At stock speeds and without a power cap, it uses 153W with all 8 cores in Blender.  (It turns out all the big four motherboard makers ship their motherboards with the capability to limit the CPU to its specified TDP, but everyone but Asus turns that off so the chip isn't gimped.)

Posted by: Rick C at Saturday, November 10 2018 05:12 AM (Q/JG2)

4 "but anything that hastens JavaScript's demise is welcome."
*Shudder* Please don't give me PTSD like that.  As the owner of a Learning Management System for 20,000 users in a regulated space, I'm not looking forward to that.  Up until HTML5 really took hold, every single eLearning course built by anyone anywhere was individually built on Flash and Javascript, which admittedly was a vast improvement on the bad old days when they were all built on Flash and JAVA.  Now I've long had a hate/dread relationship with Flash: hate the technology with a passion but dreading the EoL.  Dealing with that EoL is going to give me heartburn for the next 2 years as it is.  I don't even want to think of somebody getting the bright idea of doing the same to Javascript.

Posted by: StargazerA5 at Saturday, November 10 2018 11:17 AM (Q7Wqc)

5 Rick C - About the threads: I got to benchmark a Power8 server. At one thread per core it was decidedly slower than the Intel system I was comparing against. It only really showed an advantage once you exceeded two threads per core. It's just how they're designed. In their primary environment there's never a shortage of threads to chew on.

StargazerA5 - What I really want is for thenecessityof JavaScript to go away. Right now you have to use it; there's no choice. I expect even once other choices are available JavaScript will hang on for many, many years, because people are dumb.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Saturday, November 10 2018 01:12 PM (PiXy!)

6 Techspot re-tested the 9900K with a 95W limit.  Result: it runs about 14% slower, but uses a lot less power (95W vs 140-160W when unlimited).
If PL1 TDP is enforced, it's about as fast as a Ryzen 2700X, within a few percent either way, depending on the test.

Posted by: Rick C at Sunday, November 11 2018 06:07 AM (Iwkd4)

7 Yeah, power consumption really shoots up when you go for that last 10% or 15% of performance.  AMD has that problem with their Radeon cards.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Sunday, November 11 2018 09:23 AM (PiXy!)

8 It turns out that TDP can bite you more than on the 9900K.  My office desktop is a Dell i7-8700, a 65W TDP chip with a 3.2GHz base, 4.6GHz single-core turbo, and 4.3GHz all-core.
Normal day-to-day stuff will generally let the CPU run at top speeds, but if I run benchmarking tests, the limitations become clear.  Dell doesn't use optimistic settings like DIY mobos do; the 65W TDP is strictly enforced.  Prime95 blend settings will cause the CPU to settle in around 3.7-3.8GHz.  Using the Small FFT torture test will cause it to drop to the base speed.  Actually it can just barely maintain that.

Posted by: Rick C at Thursday, November 15 2018 02:05 AM (Q/JG2)

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Apple pies are delicious. But never mind apple pies. What colour is a green orange?




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