Ambient Irony

Friday, July 26

Daily News Stuff 25 July 2019

That'll Slow The Fish Down Edition

Tech News

Terasic's DE10-Nano is a developer board with a dual-core 800MHz Arm Cortex A9 and a 110,000 LE Intel (Altera) FPGA, plus 1GB DDR3 SDRAM on a 32-bit bus.

The FPGA actually includes the Arm processors, so it's almost a single chip solution. Only problem is it costs A$342, so I didn't even consider it in my design efforts. (That's about six times as much as the most expensive chip I've looked at to maybe use in some future project.)

The entire board with the FPGA and 1GB RAM and from a quick visual inspection 18 other chips including HDMI, USB, and Ethernet interfaces costs A$194, because that's how things work in EmbeddedLand. (And possibly IntelSubsidyLand.)

The MiSTer project adds a daughter board with... Some stuff on it... Gets a bit vague here, because it's a hobby design rather than a retail product... And turns it into one-stop retrocomputing heaven.

It can emulate a the 4MHz Arm-1 processor in the Acorn Archimedes at 91% of the original hardware speed.

Yes, it has two of its own Arm cores each running 200 times faster than that. Shut up.
FreeBasic is a free Basic compiler written in FreeBasic. (FreeBasic.net)

It supports x86 and Arm. If you want to write a self-hosting Basic compiler for Arm, well, (a) here is one you might be able to use and (b) if you can't use it for whatever reason, there is no possible better starting point for building a self-hosting Basic compiler for the Arm architecture than a self-hosting Basic compiler for the Arm architecture.
Phison has announced support for STT-MRAM in its new SSD controllers. (AnandTech)

STT-MRAM is fast RAM that is inherently non-volatile, making it perfect for an SSD cache. No need for power fail capacitors.
Samsung's Galaxy Fold will be back in September. (AnandTech)

If journalists can be persuaded not to peel the entire screen off.
Apple is rumoured to be planning a 16-inch Macbook Pro so Huawei announced their own 16-inch "MagicBook Pro". (AnandTech)

Specs are: Well, they're not actually specified. But it looks like a 1080p screen, and it doesn't have the critical PgUp/PgDn/Home/End keys, so it earns a big fat meh from me for all that it looks pretty.
A possible Threadripper 3 has peeked out from behind the curtains on everyone's favourite CPU-leak site, Userbenchmark. (Tom's Hardware)

It's a 16-core part which is not that exciting in a brave new world of 16-core desktop processors. We'll have to wait to see if they go above 32 cores, which they probably will, if only to stick it to Intel some more.
Speaking of Userbenchmark and sticking it, they just changed their ranking algorithm to put less weight on multi-core performance and more on single-core performance. (Reddit)

Basically Intel was getting clobbered and we can't have that. Now performance for benchmarks using more than 4 cores counts for only 2% of the final score, making the whole site useless for people who use their computers for pretty much any serious application of any kind.
YouTube is playing whack-a-mole with the stream rippers. (TechDirt)

And may they have much joy of it.
LightSail 2 has successfully deployed its solar sail. (Tech Crunch)

Occasionally we are reminded that this is the 21st century, and not just some retarded repeat of the 20th.
Facebook has indeed been hit with a $5 billion fine by the FTC. (The Verge)

The DOJ still has to sign off on it, but that's rarely a problem.
That's the largest fine the FTC has ever levied by a factor of 220.

The usual suspects are complaining that it's not enough. (Tech Crunch)
PHP 7.4 Beta 1 is out. (Phoronix)

And if that interests you, you probably need to seek medical advice.
VLC is not affected by a critical security vulnerability. (Bleeping Computer)

Unless you are running a version that's more than 16 months old, in which case maybe you have a problem.

Disclaimer: It's okay to reinvent the wheel if you want to emulate a 30-year-old wheel rather than have one that actually, I don't know, works, or something.

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