Thursday, July 02

Geek

Daily News Stuff 1 July 2020

Half-Way Mark Edition

Tech News

  • The Apple press is insane, part one.

    Apple Silicon - that is, Arm - trounces Microsoft's Surface Pro X - again, Arm - in first tests.  (ZDNet)

    A desktop device scored 800/2900.  That's within 5% of Microsoft's mobile device - faster on single-core tests, slower on multi-core tests.  The article actually lies about the Surface Pro score - it links to a list of benchmark results, and then ignores the top 300 results.


  • The Apple press is insane, part two.

    Apple Silicon - that is, Arm - may have killed the PC as we know it.  (ZDNet again)

    No, but it's kiled the Mac as a general-purpose computer.  Enjoy your walled garden.


  • YouTube TV has hiked its rates by 30%.  (Six Colors)

    Does anyone use that?  I suppose someone must.


  • AWS Snowcone is an 8TB drive wrapped in an impact-resistant rubber brick, designed for getting bulk data into or out of the Amazon cloud.  (Phoronix)

    Since data transfer out of AWS starts at $90 per TB, this could save you a lot of money at the cost of inconvenience and time and oh they fucking charge you per gigabyte for data transferred out of AWS on these devices.

    Pro tip: Don't use AWS if you're the one paying for it.


  • Pandas cause global warming!  (GitHub)

    It reads like a parody of every bad woke "open source" license ever.  They're going after the Python Requests library, which reads web pages and APIs, because everything else uses it.

    If that were to happen, the library would get forked on it's existing open-source license in about three femtoseconds and the woke version would die.


  • The Samsung 870 QVO: Up to 8TB, slower than a hard disk.  (AnandTech)
    In general, the latency scores from the Samsung QVO drives are worse than from the DRAMless TLC drives, while the 4TB QVOs still have better overall throughput. The 1TB QVOs (both old and new) are prone to write latencies that are worse than the 5400RPM hard drive. Both capacities of the 870 QVO have worse read latency but better write latency scores than the 860 QVO.
    99th percentile write latency was 34ms.  That's not as bad as the worst case on a hard drive, but it's several times the typical latency.

    It's probably fine for regular desktop use - files, not databases - though the average write latency of a full drive is still 3ms, which is only twice as fast as a 5400 rpm laptop drive.

    Also, in testing the 4TB model, they found that its idle power consumption was the highest of any drive tested because it was never actually idle.  It was running garbage collection throughout the entire test period, even when they weren't actually testing it.


  • Qualcomm has a new Snapdragon processor aimed at smartwatches.  (AnandTech)

    It has four 1.7GHz A53 cores.

    Who is doing something on a watch that requires four 1.7GHz cores and would you please stop that right now?


Disclaimer: Ugh.  EOFY.  Just say no.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 12:43 AM | Comments (1) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
Post contains 506 words, total size 4 kb.

1 I know publications like MacWorld & such are full of fawning bullshit, but that first ZDNET article reads like a seriously unsubtle parody of the sort of Jobs Knob Gobbling we use to get back when he invented the telephone and the desktop and the computer and the butt plug and whatever else in the early 2000s.  And yeah, they're shameless about flat-out lying about the benchmarks.  And the comments are no less sycophantic.  What a life that must be!

Posted by: normal at Thursday, July 02 2020 06:30 AM (obo9H)

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




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