Tech News

• The rumoured Ryzen 3900 looks to be on its way.  (AnandTech)
  
  This is a 65W 12 core Zen 2, with expected base and boost clocks of 3.1 and 4.2 GHz.  Which would make it the perfect processor of a new Inspiron 27 if Dell hadn't sabotaged that product range beyond redemption.
  
  No ETA, but a launch at the same time as the 3950X would make sense.
  
  
• Good news for chip makers is bad news for you.  (PC Perspective)
  
  DRAM and flash prices are low, video cards are readily available, so of course now there's a CPU shortage.
  
  
• Global Foundries announced an updated version of its 12nm process node.  (AnandTech)
  
  With up to 40% lower power than their existing 12nm process.
  
  AMD produces its I/O dies and chipsets at Global Foundries, so this is good news for future Ryzen and Epyc systems.
  
  
• Intel announced the 665p, an update to the 660p family of QLC SSDs.  (AnandTec)
  
  It promises to be up to 40% faster, though the figures Intel used for the 660p are lower than those from independent reviewers, so pinch of salt time.
  
  Still a PCIe 3.0 x2 device, so it has a hard cap at 2GB per second.  Not that that is slow.
  
  
• Can't deal with TechDirt today.  It's a mish-mash of important news and complete nonsense.
  
  
• Amazon had a Telescreen event today.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  It was behind the painting.
  
  
• Zen 3 will come with four threads per core unless it doesn't.  (WCCFTech)
  
  IBM's Power architecture has four or eight threads per core, as do some Sparc processors, so this isn't entirely novel.  It could be attractive to cloud hosting providers, particularly given all the bugs in Intel's hardware threading.  I believe that Amazon don't use hardware threads at all, but Digital Ocean do.
  
  
• At least 70 countries have had disinformation campaigns, study finds.  (New York Times)
  
  Does the name Walter Fucking Duranty mean anything to you, you assholes?
  
  
• Prehistoric porcelain baby bottles.  (NPR)
  
  Is that a kangaroo?  It looks like a kangaroo, but can't be, because in 7000 BC there weren't any domesticated animals in Australia to provide milk, except for the dingo, which seems rather unlikely.
  
  
• The recent plague of unbootable Macs has been traced to Chrome.  (Bleeping Computer)
  
  Which apparently was deleting /var.  Which is a symbolic link on MacOS, so this is like renaming C:\Windows just for the hell of it.
  
  Nice work, Google.
  
  This didn't happen to everyone because with the default security settings MacOS would refuse to do something so obviously stupid.
  
  
• Alex Jones is suing Brianna Wu for libel.  (One Angry Gamer)
  
  There is not enough popcorn in the world.
  
  
• Twitter got something right for once?  (One Angry Gamer)
  
  They had to get it wrong first, of course, since this is still Twitter.
  
  
• In a shocking finding that is bound to cause panic among the terminally innumerate, table salt contains 0.005 micrograms per gram of plastic.  (New Scienist)
  
  That's five parts per billion.  The concentration of uranium in seawater is three parts per billion.
  
  
• /e/ is a Google-free Android fork with a dumb name.  (ZDnet)
  
  In fact, it's a fork of LineageOS, which is a fork of CyanogenMod, which is a fork of Android. 
  
  Which is Linux.
  
  It's forks all the way down.
  
  
• Dapper Labs, the CryptoKitties people, have announced their own blockchain, called Flow.
  
  I say announced advisedly, because while the technical papers they've published look sound, there is no code or documentation for the actual implementation yet.
  
  The launch of CryptoKitties basically trashed the Ethereum network for weeks, so these guys are as familiar with the limitations of that platform as anyone, and probably well-placed to produce something better.

Posted by: Rick C at Friday, September 27 2019 12:36 AM (Iwkd4)

Posted by: Rick C at Friday, September 27 2019 12:42 AM (Iwkd4)

Posted by: J Greely at Friday, September 27 2019 02:59 AM (ZlYZd)

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