Friday, January 10

Geek

Daily News Stuff 9 January 2020

Let Me Out Of Here Edition

Tech News

  • Samsung showed off their 4th generation external SSD - the T7 - now with a fingerprint sensor.  (AnandTech)

    That's a very useful feature for mobile storage.  There's also a slightly cheaper model without the sensor.


  • Viewsonic has a 55" 4K OLED monitor too.  (AnandTech)

    No price, of course.


  • The HP Envy 32 looks like a pretty damn nice all-in-one system.  (AnandTech)

    32" 4K HDR 600 DCI-P3 display, up to a Core i7 9700S (the 65W version) and RTX 2080, up to 32GB RAM and 1TB of SSD, and an integrated Bang and Olufsen sound bar.  Exact selection of ports not listed but includes Thunderbolt 3.

    I would prefer a Ryzen 3900, which is also a 65W part, but AMD systems with Thunderbolt are pretty rare.


  • Asus' Dual RTX 2070 Mini is something of a disappointment.  (PC Perspective)

    The only thing dual about it are the fans.  It doesn't even have dual DisplayPort ports.  Though there might be a reason for that.


  • Intel announced their NUC 9 Pro and NUC 9 Extreme, which are...  ITX systems.  (ZDNet)

    Or rather, ITX-sized but not actually ITX systems to guarantee vendor lock-in.  They're a lot bigger than existing NUCs, but are still about as small as any ITX case you can find and can fit a 500W power supply and an 8" video card.

    They also have built-in Thunderbolt support, which I suspect is where the other video outputs of the Asus Dual RTX 2070 Mini went, since it was shown off specifically with a NUC 9.

    The 9 Pro supports Xeon E CPUs, up to 64GB of ECC RAM, two M.2 slots, the aforementioned dual Thunderbolt 3 ports, four USB 3.1 ports, one HDMI 2.0, WiFi 6, and dual Ethernet ports - but gigabit only, which is disappointing.

    Of slightly more interest is that these have a passive PCIe backplane: The entire guts of the system are packed into a dual-width 8" PCIe card, the same size as the 2070 Mini.  So you could yank out the entire working part of your computer and....  Yeah, not sure what you're supposed to do with it after that.

    If you could use the second slot for a second Compute Unit that would be interesting.  You can't.


  • Did AMD just confirm Big Navi is coming?  Yes.  (Tom's Hardware)


  • Phison showed off an 8TB M.2 NVMe SSD.  (Tom's Hardware)

    It's a QLC device to pack that much storage into such a small space, but still delivers 3.5GB per second reads and 3.0GB per second writes.  This is a reference design, since Phison make the controllers and don't sell SSDs themselves, so no pricing or availability dates.


  • Twitter is testing a new mode that prevents anyone replying to your tweets.  (Tech Crunch)

    This has been hailed as a breakthrough by the usual idiots.  Tech Crunch are at least smart enough to ask What if Trump uses this? but not smart enough to realise the answer is So what if Trump uses this?

    Despite Twitter's best efforts, you can still quote-tweet someone who's blocked you.  Just takes an extra 30 seconds.


  • Seagate showed off its HAMR and dual-actuator disk drives.  (AnandTech)

    I didn't see the point of the return of dual actuators in an age of RAID and cheap SSDs, but this tidbit enlightened me: These drives have a peak transfer rate of 480MB per second.  That's basically the same as a SATA SSD and is easily a new record for spinning rust.

    As usual, no pricing or availability dates.


  • AnandTech apparently has a scoop on the upcoming Threadripper TRX80 systems but it hasn't been posted yet.  It was mentioned earlier today on YouTube but without any details.


  • A Circuit judge has ordered Google to hand over a year's worth of Jussie Smollett's data to investigators, including emails.  (Chicago Tribune)

    The ramifications of this are huge, and I expect TechDirt will set themselves on fire pretty shortly.  Not without reason.


  • You can no longer write an indie web browser.

    At least, not a competitive one, not since W3C approved DRM as part of the web standards.  I posted about this previously but this new article includes more up-to-date details.


  • ACSOTGSFM.  (Serve the Home)

    (Another cheap SFP-only 10Gb switch from Microtik.)


  • Thunderbolt 4 is one louder.  (CNet)

    Seriously, that seems to be about the size of it.


  • You glow in the dark.  Yes, you.  (PLOS)

    Just...  Not very much.


  • YouTube's vaunted algorithm has reportedly flagged Happy Tree Friends as suitable for children.

    Good.  Let the little bastards learn that they can't trust anyone.  We'll get an entire generation of libertarians.



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Posted by: Pixy Misa at 01:40 AM | Comments (3) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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1 Nuc 9:  the Thunderbolt ports are on the I/O area by the regular USB, probably so the iGPU can output to them.  The way I understand it from a few other motherboard reviews, though, to have a discrete GPU drive them, you'd need to run a cable from an output on the GPU to an input-only HDMI/DP socket on the motherboard.  I could be wrong about that.
Also, the stated reason, I believe, for the compute element being a PCIe card instead of a motherboard is so you can swap it out for upgrades.  The CPUs are all soldered down, and not replaceable as such.

Posted by: Rick C at Friday, January 10 2020 04:24 AM (Iwkd4)

2 I was wondering if they had an internal DP connector from the video card to the compute module, but I haven't found any mention of that.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Friday, January 10 2020 11:59 AM (PiXy!)

3 I was wondering the same thing but the few screenshots I've seen don't seem to have one, and I would think someone would've mentioned it if it were there--IIRC Gamers Nexus has already had a heatsink-off video talking about it.

Posted by: Rick C at Friday, January 10 2020 12:20 PM (Iwkd4)

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




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