• AnandTech reviews Intel's Xeon W.  Spoiler, the final page is titled "Conclusion: Is Intel Serious About Xeon W?"  (AnandTech)
  
  
• New York has kicked out Charter Communications for failing to meet agreements and this writer at Tom's Hardware is terrified that he may need to use Verizon Fios or [shudder] DSL.  Because he has so few choices.  And the government should do something about that.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Listen, bub: I live somewhere where the government did something about that.  Result: I have been waiting nine years for them to upgrade my connection from DSL.  I can't get cable, because they're going to run fiber - eventually.  I can't get fixed 4G, because they're going to run fiber - eventually.  My options are DSL or [cough] satellite - in a city of five million people. 
  
  And the DSL infrastructure hasn't been upgraded at all during that time.  Because they're going to run fiber - eventually.
  
  The only worse thing than a monopoly is a government-run monopoly.
  
  
• It's just a scratch.
  
  

Posted by: Rick C at Tuesday, July 31 2018 12:54 PM (ITnFO)

Posted by: Rick C at Tuesday, July 31 2018 12:55 PM (ITnFO)

Posted by: StargazerA5 at Tuesday, July 31 2018 01:20 PM (0oc59)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Wednesday, August 01 2018 12:47 AM (PiXy!)

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Posted by: Pixy Misa at Tuesday, July 31 2018 01:21 AM (PiXy!)

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• Intel announces record second quarter earnings, a 78% increase in profits, and expects 10% year-on-year growth - and gets hammered on the stock market.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  The last part is because AMD's second generation EPYC server chips will be out early next year, offering 48 or 64 cores where Intel's largest chips have 28 cores.  Intel won't have a response ready until 2020.
  
  
• Do I have NBN?  No, I do not.
  
  
• Vibora is a very fast Python web framework with out-of-the-box support for async and Redis caching.  Critical parts are written in Cython for speed.  Which means that you can't use PyPy for speed for your own code, because the PyPy / Cython interface suuuuucks.
  
  Which means that you'd likely be better off using PyPy and something simple like CherryPy, ignoring the horrors of async entirely and letting uWSGI manage your workers.  Which is, as it happens, also faster than the major Swift web frameworks like Vapor and Kitura.

Posted by: Rick C at Monday, July 30 2018 02:56 AM (ITnFO)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Monday, July 30 2018 11:12 AM (PiXy!)

Posted by: cxt217 at Monday, July 30 2018 01:08 PM (BcQU4)

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• Asus announces a Xeon E workstation motherboard, the WS C246 Pro.
  
  A notable point is the presence of four PCIe x16 slots and two M.2 SSD slots.  That's a theoretical 72 PCIe lanes, where the Xeon E provides a total of 16 (plus four dedicated to the chipset).
  
  Ryzen is only slightly better (16 + 4 chipset + 4 M.2), but AMD's EPYC offers 128 lanes.  Go EPYC or go home.  (AnandTech)
  
  
• RPG Maker MV is coming to the Xbox, PS4, and Switch.  It already supports Windows, Mac, Android, iOS, and web.  (I've tinkered with it a little, and the web player seems to work pretty well.)  Release date November in Japan, 2019 for the rest of the world.  (Nintendo Life)
  
  Here's a launch video that shows you absolutely nothing about the application or the games it can produce.
  
  
  
  The original trailer gives you a slightly more realistic view.
  
  
  
  It's 73% off at Humble Bundle right now.
  
  
• Google accidentally removed the (extremely popular) Metamask Ethereum wallet app from their Play Store - while leaving a fake app in place.  (Bleeping Computer)
  
  
• Xeon Phi is officially dead now, rather than just dying, as it has been since launch.  This is not Intel's Xeon server CPUs, which are raking in cash hand-over-chip, but a separate line of failed GPGPUCPUs that no-one ever wanted.  (The Next Platform)
  
  
• Twitter's stock tumbles 21% as investors begin to notice that the company is run by idiots.  (MarketWatch)

• Intel's 10nm parts will be on the shelves for the holiday season...  Of 2019.  (AnandTech)
  
  
• Amazon Rekognition may know something we don't  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  
• Slack is buying and exterminating competing platform HipChat.  (TechCrunch)
  
  
• A new version of the Spectre CPU vulnerability can leak data over the network from any server...  At a top speed of three bytes per day.  (Ars Technica)
  
  
• Twitter explains that they do not shadow ban users.  Their platform is just so terrible that everyone thinks they're shadow banned.  (Twitter)

• So I was setting up our new servers at Digital Ocean and I thought to myself, it would be really nice if they had projects similar to Google Cloud and I didn't even say it out loud so apparently they can read minds and also code really really fast.
  
  
• Intel's server roadmap has leaked.  Key details: It's a year behind schedule and is named something Lake.  (AnandTech)
  
  
• AMD's stock is up on surging revenues and profits and the promise of future gains in the serve market.  (MarketWatch)
  
  
• Facebook's stock plummets because they suck.  (MarketWatch)
  
  

Picture of the Day

• Baked Apples? There's a patch for that. (AnandTech)
  
  The thermal throttling problem on the i9 Macbook Pro looks to only happen with certain workloads - though not specific applications - and Apple have released a patch which alleviates the problem.
  
  Apple's statement, via Six Colors:

  Following extensive performance testing under numerous workloads, we’ve identified that there is a missing digital key in the firmware that impacts the thermal management system and could drive clock speeds down under heavy thermal loads on the new MacBook Pro. A bug fix is included in today’s macOS High Sierra 10.13.6 Supplemental Update and is recommended. We apologize to any customer who has experienced less than optimal performance on their new systems. Customers can expect the new 15-inch MacBook Pro to be up to 70% faster, and the 13-inch MacBook Pro with Touch Bar to be up to 2X faster, as shown in the performance results on our website.

  That's a fairly substantial difference.
  
  
• AMD's upcoming Zen 2 will be between 10% and 130% faster than current chips depending on stuff. (Fudzilla)
  
  
• For those of you busy building your very own C256 prototypes but finding supplies of the 6851 SID chips rather constrained, you can now emulate it using a Teensy 3.6.
  
  Which being a 180MHz 32-bit RISC processor is likely more powerful than everything else in your C256 combined. (Hackaday)
  
  
• YouTube loading slow? Might be a case of Invented Here Syndrome.
  
  In case this guy has you blocked too:
  

  YouTube page load is 5x slower in Firefox and Edge than in Chrome because YouTube's Polymer redesign relies on the deprecated Shadow DOM v0 API only implemented in Chrome. You can restore YouTube's faster pre-Polymer design with this Firefox extension: https://t.co/F5uEn3iMLR

  — Chris Peterson (@cpeterso) July 24, 2018

  
  
• It's just gone eight o'clock and time for the battery on your RAID controller to explode. I think that happened to us once. (ServeTheHome)

Picture of the Day

Posted by: Armed and Larry at Saturday, July 28 2018 01:52 PM (rTqn/)

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• I mentioned that my Dell has a fast Toshiba XG5 drive.  They just announced the even faster XG6.  M.2 SSDs are pretty much at the limit of PCIe performance now, so there won't be any significant performance changes until PCIe 4.0 arrives...  Next year.  (AnandTech)
  
  AnandTech also offers their recommendations for the best SSDs for mid-2018.  Interestingly, the M.2 NVMe drive they suggest is not from Samsung or Intel or even Toshiba, but the HP EX920.  Mainly because it's about 30% cheaper without suffering much in performance.
  
  Slight problem in my case is that it's not available in Australia.  At all.  Anywhere.  Not even from NewEgg, who have it in stock.
  
  
• If you have a 2018 MacBook Pro back up your data regularly.  Because if the chip that controls the touchbar fails, you may lose all your data permanently. 
  
  Or just send it back for a refund and buy a real computer.  (MacRumors)
  
  
• Details of Intel's upcoming 8 core desktop chips may or may not have leaked.  If the leaks are correct, hyperthreading will be disabled on all but the new top-end i9 9900K, which means that you'll be comparing a 6-core 12-thread 8700K with an 8-core 8-thread 9700K - performance gains will likely be small.  (WCCFTech)

Posted by: Rick C at Wednesday, July 25 2018 09:13 AM (ITnFO)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Wednesday, July 25 2018 08:18 PM (PiXy!)

Posted by: Rick C at Thursday, July 26 2018 01:01 AM (Q/JG2)

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• Benchspotter reviews Seagate's 2.5" FireCuda SSHD.  The results are meh; the added 8GB solid-state cache is enough to make a 5400 rpm drive run like a 7200 rpm drive, but it is not remotely like a true SSD.  (Benchspotter)
  
  I wish they'd put a useful amount of cache in these drives - 32GB at least; 128GB better.  That would increase the price, sure, but on the other hand it would actually be useful.
  
  
• ServeTheHome have EPYC video of hot-swap NVMe action which is frankly not that exciting because it all just worked.  NVMe drives on EPYC systems are wired directly to the CPU, not the chipset, so this is fairly neat anyway.
  
  
• I still don't have NBN.

Posted by: Kayle at Tuesday, July 24 2018 01:58 PM (TtvMc)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Tuesday, July 24 2018 08:28 PM (PiXy!)

Posted by: Kayle at Wednesday, July 25 2018 12:12 AM (TtvMc)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Wednesday, July 25 2018 01:07 PM (PiXy!)

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