• I recently mentioned a leak that indicated an upcoming 65W low-power 12-core Ryzen.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  As it happens, Ryzen CPUs are already power-configurable, so with the right BIOS you can do this yourself, today.  (Reddit)
  
  In this case, a Ryzen 3700X started at 89W and 4.0GHz, with a Cinebench score of 4653, and scaled down to 43W at 3.55GHz with a score of 4043.
  
  So 87% of the performance for a little under half the power.
  
  TSMC's upcoming 5nm process doesn't reduce power draw by a great amount = around 20% - but it does cut die size by half.  So AMD could produce 32-core desktop processors, cut the all-core clock by 15%, and get 75% more multi-threaded performance in the same size chip and the same power budget.
  
  And that's without changing the Zen core architecture at all, and we know that Zen 3, 4, and 5 are already on the way.
  
  
• 32TB at 24GB/s and 4 million IOPs in case you were wondering what to do with that spare PCIe 4.0 slot.  (AnandTech)
  
  
• Enough with the myth that big tech is censoring conservatives says Mike Masnick.  (TechDirt)
  
  I got my Twitter account locked in five seconds, can anyone beat that? say conservatives.  (Gab)
  
  
  
  
  
• The real tragedy of UCS-2 is that anyone ever considered Unicode and variable-length encoding a good idea.
  
  If your language can't be represented in sixteen bits it's time for you to fix your goddamn language.  UTF-32 can be used for historical documents.
  
  And emojis can die in a fire.
  
  
• A brainfuck interpreter written in Brainfuck.  (GitHub)
  
  
  The complete sourcecode is 170 lines, mostly angle brackets, like a mad Lisp programmer with a drop forging fetish.
  
  
• Gerbil is a meta-dialect of Scheme with post-modern features.
  
  If you feed it declarative code it tells you you're racist and stomps off to its room to smash the patriarchy.
  
  
• New flaws have been found in WPA3 and apparently will require changes that break backward compatibility.  (ZDNet)
  
  Fortunately, no-one even has WPA3 yet; we're all running on WPA2, which is also broken, though not fatally.
  
  
• CriticalPast, an archive of historical photos, images, film, and video, has been banned from YouTube for hate speech.  (One Angry Gamer)
  
  
• Crystal 0.30 is out.
  
  It's not a huge release feature-wise but brings the version of LLVM up to 8.0 and adds the work-in-progress multi-threading support.  (The standard way to do this right now in Crystal is to mix lightweight fibers and OS processes.  That actually works pretty well.)

I'm picking up my developer board for the A750 project today.  My brother, who does this sort of nonsense for a living, added it to his latest parts order to save me on shipping which was nearly as much as the board.

Speaking of nearly as much as the board, the NuXT is a new XT - IBM PC XT, that is.

It has an NEC V20 CPU, which can run both 8088 and 8080 code (so you can boot regular CP/M) at up to 9.55MHz.  832K main memory, a 256K VGA or 512K SVGA card, optional 8087 coprocessor, serial and floppy controllers, and a Compact Flash slot to substitute for a hard drive.

It is hand-assembled and costs $340, but it does pop into any standard microATX case.

Genuine 8088s are still available today - as are Z80s, 6502s, and with a little searching, 6809s as well - but they're not cheap compared to their modern equivalents.  $10-$15 a piece, where in that same price range you can get something that not only runs at 100 times the clock speed, but has everything on that motherboard built in and also running 100 times faster.

Well, the developer kit was $40, but for just the chip it's $11.  And US$3.30 in volume.

I found another Amiga-on-a-chip too, the Microchip SAMA5 family.  It's cheap. starting at A$9.84 with external memory or A$14.86 with 16MB built in, and it has crazy 2D video capabilities, with overlays within overlays and all sorts of blending modes.  Two problems: No internal flash so it needs a boot ROM (like the RZ/A1 series), and worse, it's only available in BGA so it would be a real pain to prototype.

The developer kit is $150, which slots geometrically in between the little Nucleo board I already bought for the H750 ($40) and the spartan but nonetheless rather expensive kit for the RZ/A1 ($750). 

Compared to the Nucleo board, though, the SAMA5 board has 128 times as much flash and 256 times the RAM, so you can see where some of that money went.  The only problem is that it has too much memory.  I want to keep things simple, and 256MB of RAM is not conducive to simplicity.

A simple old-school square-wave electronic keyboard, with a quick demo of how PWM changes the sound of the wave.  I'm planning to use wavetables on the A750, so you can have any basic wave shape you want, but then on top of that it will have programmable AM, FM, and PWM effects.  Output will be through the built-in 12-bit DAC, so it won't be CD quality, but it will do.

Posted by: Rick C at Sunday, August 04 2019 03:09 AM (Iwkd4)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Sunday, August 04 2019 03:48 AM (PiXy!)

Posted by: J Greely at Sunday, August 04 2019 11:25 AM (ZlYZd)

Posted by: Rick C at Sunday, August 04 2019 02:01 PM (Iwkd4)

Posted by: J Greely at Sunday, August 04 2019 05:11 PM (ZlYZd)

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