Ambient Irony

Wednesday, November 18

Daily News Stuff 18 November 2020

Everyone Else Has A Better PC Than Me Edition

Tech News

Testing the new Mac Mini. (AnandTech)

The hardware is very good. The CPU beats Intel on single-threaded tasks and competes well with AMD, and while the integrated GPU can't beat a 580X (as one site claimed) it can beat a 560X. I wonder how wide the memory bus is - we know it's LPDDR4X-4266, but the performance is surprisingly good if that's just a 128-bit bus.

The software, unfortunately, is MacOS, which these days means you're a perpetual unpaid beta tester.

If this hardware were generally available and at all open it would be an exciting and potentially market-changing event. Instead it's a shiny piece of crap.
Intel is talking up its Ice Lake Xeon processors. (Serve the Home)

They claim that a 32-core Ice Lake Xeon can beat a 64-core Epyc Rome on AVX512 benchmarks.

The problem here is that (a) they're comparing against Zen 2 cores from last year when Zen 3 Epycs are already shipping to major customers, (b) Epyc doesn't have AVX512, and (c) Ice Lake Xeon doesn't even have a release date yet.

Still, it should be a decent chip.
Marvell is licensing 112G SerDes for TSMC's 5nm process. (AnandTech)

But to whom? Apple is the main customer of TSMC 5nm, and Apple has no use for this.
Resellee wants to become the Pinduoduo of Southeast Asia. (Tech Crunch)

I'm sure they do. Who wouldn't?
The censorship will continue until morale improves.

Natural News is a garbage website populated by alt-med cranks, but Twitter and Facebook are treating it as if it were malware.

Update: Original tweet went away, replaced with a comment about the issue.
Epic Games is suing Apple under Australia's consumer protection laws. (ZDNet)

This will be interesting; the ACCC, which manages such things, has real teeth.
There you go again.

We're moving off Ethereum at my day job because it is, not to put too fine a point on things, a complete fucking disaster.
Twitter has announced that it is adding an edit button. (Reuters)

Just kidding. Of course they're not doing anything logical or useful. They're adding tweets that disappear after 24 hours, leaving behind only a perpetual cryptographically verifiable audit trail and a billion screenshots.

Thanks for leaving the market open for me, anyway.

Deplatforming is the new blacklist. (Legal Insurrection)

Only now they come for you if you're not a communist.
Update: I go, I come back.

Basically, the Radeon 6000 series does what it needs to do, except that you won't be able to get one.

Plus in Australia, the 6800 is priced the same as a stock 3070, which it beats easily, and the 6800 XT is priced like a moderately overclocked 3070 - over $300 cheaper than the cheapest 3080.

But there are no 3080s to be had, currently no Radeon 6000s either, and there are some 3070s.

Except Kiara

http://ai.mee.nu/images/HoloPC.png?size=720x&q=95

(Discussion on Reddit.)

Disclaimer: Doesn't matter if you're a global idol with a million YouTube subscribers, you're still not getting an RTX 3080. And the supply situation isn't looking great for AMD's RX 6000 range, which launches in about five hours.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 06:44 PM | Comments (9) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
Post contains 533 words, total size 6 kb.

1 IF you can talk about it, I was wondering what you were using to replace ethereum in your day job.
(If I hadn't deleted my twitter account I guess I could go back and look up my old "it's a desert topping and a floor wax" tweet on the subject).
Part of the problem is that ethereum has no fixed value. It's presented as being backed up by the availability of "gas" but it's not actually coupled to the price of gas, it's just the unit that gas prices are expressed in.
In the real world, it's like saying dollars are backed up by gasoline prices because the local gas station has its prices in dollars.

Posted by: Phil Fraering at Thursday, November 19 2020 12:06 AM (Clxcy)

2 We're looking at Matic. It's Ethereum compatible and should be much faster and cheaper. We use Ethereum for distributing digital tokens, not for finance, so we don't care about the value of ETH, we just want something that works.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Thursday, November 19 2020 12:15 AM (PiXy!)

3 "The CPU beats Intel on single-threaded tasks and competes well with AMD"
I'm not paying close attention but I keep seeing Apple shills point to tests that aren't really fair Apples-to-apples test. "The new Mac can transcode streams superfast[1] compared to CPU transcoding on Intel. [1] (in tiny print) with our custom ASIC."

I asked someone several times where are the "how fast can it compile Chrome" tests, and, wouldn't you know it, crickets.
I suspect these things will be plenty fast for many things, including basic home web browsing and email, and that's fine--too bad they're linked to such an annoying OS, though, but I want to know how they'll compete in other areas, as well. I'm not going to buy one of the current new devices, because they're all iGPU only, even if that iGPU is pretty fast.

Posted by: Rick C at Thursday, November 19 2020 01:56 AM (eqaFC)

4 I managed to guess what SerDes was but it would be nice if "tech" sites would stop using terms without defining them, a thing that seems to be a relatively recent trend.

Posted by: Rick C at Thursday, November 19 2020 01:58 AM (eqaFC)

5 I really should have explained SerDes myself. Basically this will allow the development of PCIe 7.0, when 4.0 is still rolling out. One lane of this is equal to a PCIe 3.0 x16 slot.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Thursday, November 19 2020 02:09 AM (PiXy!)

6 The point of jargon is to create an exclusive group. Tech journalists (by and large (some definitely fatter than others)) don't know anything about technology, but it makes them feel like "better-than-yous" to shift the language and show off that they're in the kool kidz kollij. The other obnoxious term I've been quitely raging about lately is "uplift".

Posted by: normal at Thursday, November 19 2020 02:13 AM (LADmw)

7 Oh, I HATE "uplift". As far as trying to make exclusivity, Anandtech's got, as far as I know, all the same people, and they didn't used to suffer from this kind of laziness, so I don't know what the explanation is.
Uplift, at least, is obvious what it means, while still being a stupid term. But the entire industry started using it more or less overnight, which certainly shows some kind of slavish devotion to fashion or something.

Posted by: Rick C at Thursday, November 19 2020 03:03 AM (eqaFC)

8 I always like it when they say "dropped" to mean "started shipping", and then a few articles down someone else uses it to mean "stopped supporting".

-j

Posted by: J Greely at Thursday, November 19 2020 08:52 AM (ZlYZd)

9 As far as I'm aware the newer usage for dropped is from the negro music, where they would say "drop the beat' to mean "start making noise" instead of the older meaning of "the drummer just fucked up again".

Posted by: normal at Thursday, November 19 2020 10:33 AM (obo9H)

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