• I have all of next week off.  Just need to figure out how to upgrade my computers without having to get out of bed.
  
  
  
• Testing the best desktop APUs that you can't get.  (AnandTech)
  
  Ian Cuttress got his hands on some Ryzen 4000G OEM parts - Disguise 100 Trickery 100 - and put them through their paces.
  
  TL;DR: Need more bandwidth.  In laptops these chips can run with 4266MHz or even faster RAM; on the desktop there's not a lot of point in pairing a low-cost APU with expensive overclocked memory.
  
  DDR5 will solve this, but probably not until early 2022.
  
  
  
• The ASRock 4x4 NUCalike that Tom's Hardware tested recently has remote management.  (AnandTech)
  
  Not IPMI but a newer standard called DASH.  It provides basic management over a web interface, or full KVM with a suitable client application.  Both ASRock and AMD have clients available.
  
  Makes for a nice little mini-server.
  
  
  
• Smashing is a dashboard app.
  
  Open source.  Written in Ruby, but with Sinatra rather than Rails, so the code is likely to actually be sane.  I'm going to try running it here at PixyLab to monitor stuffs, because I have a lot of stuffs to monitor.
  
  
  
• Like, for example, this shit.
  
  
  Every time that happens, a key application at my day job breaks.
  
  
  
• Intel has new Optane drives for the datacentre.  (Serve the Home)
  
  PCIe 4.0 interface at up to 7.2GBps, 6µs access times, and 100 DWPD (drive writes per day) endurance.  Pricing not available just yet, but they won't be cheap.
  
  They also announced the 670p and H20 consumer drives.
  
  The 670P is an update to the QLC 660p and 665p, but from the sound of things not much of one. 
  
  The H20 is a weird split Optane/QLC device that requires driver support and only works on the latest Intel CPUs; it's really for laptop OEMS.
  
  HP uses these - you'll note that some of their laptops will have 8GB RAM, 512GB of SSD, and 32GB of Optane storage.  They don't have two NVMe devices, but one of these odd hybrids instead.  The Optane and flash storage on the H20 (and the existing H10) each have their own controller chip, and each connect to the CPU separately using two lanes of PCIe.
  
  A single integrated controller that used the Optane storage as cache for the QLC flash would make this far more interesting, but getting that 100% right does take time.  And I'd rather they got it right than shipped something that silently ate my data.
  
  
  
• Ten US states are suing Google and Facebook for colluding to control the online ad market.  (ZDNet)
  
  This is in addition to the existing lawsuits targeting Google and Facebook individually.
  
  
  
• The Orion crew capsule - which has flown exactly once, unmanned - has cost more than SpaceX has spent on every single thing they have done, combined.  (Planetary Society)
  
  The Orion capsule is designed for much longer missions than the Crew Dragon, but still.
  
  
  
• GOG has removed the indie game Devotion due to a hidden Winnie the Pooh reference.  (TechRaptor)
  
  China ruins everything.
  
  
  
• Fubuki from Hololive - the one with the Scatman video - had a sponsored collab stream with Asus lined up.  The Chinese division of Asus went anti and sabotaged the deal.  (Reddit)
  
  China ruins everything.

Posted by: Rick C at Friday, December 18 2020 01:15 AM (eqaFC)

Posted by: normal at Friday, December 18 2020 02:51 AM (obo9H)

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