• The long weekend is over (for America; mine is coming up) and the Radeon RX 5600 XT reviews are out.  (PC Perspective)
  
  Initial impressions on the announcement were lukewarm, but an after-the-last-minute performance boost from AMD changed everything. 
  
  Both Sebastian Peak at PC Perspective and Ryan Smith at AnandTech comment that their reviews turned out far more positive than they were expecting thanks to AMD's BIOS update that unlocked more performance.
  
  Instead of competing against Nvidia's 1660 Ti, it now trades benchmark wins with the RTX 2060.  The 5600 XT also uses less power than the 2060, even with that last minute update and a factory-overclocked card, and that's an area where AMD really needed to catch up.
  
  Both sites reviewed the Sapphire Pulse, which seems to be a well-engineered card even if it doesn't look like a cat or an owl or something.
  
  
  
• Google wants the government to regulate their AI research.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  As always, this has nothing to do with ethics and everything to do with raising barriers to entry for smaller competitors that aren't carrying tens of thousands of hyper-woke dead weight employees.
  
  
  
• Comet Lake won't support PCIe 4.0.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  If you have not the faintest idea at this point which one is Comet Lake and didn't know that Intel was even considering PCIe 4.0 support for it, then welcome to the club, membership 7.8 billion.
  
  
  
• Another early benchmark of the Ryzen 4700H mobile part puts it ahead of Intel's desktop i7-9700K unless it doesn't.  (WCCFTech)
  
  That's the 45W part so it's just a very solid result rather than an astounding one.  Still, good stuff, and AMD if you're listening please double everything and give us a chip with 16 CPU cores, 16 GPU cores, and 4 four memory channels.
  
  
  
• Lego ISS.  (CollectSpace)
  
  At $70 it's a lot more affordable than that Saturn V, and includes a rather chibi-looking Space Shuttle.
  
  
  
• That's it!  That's exactly it!
  
  
  
  
  For the antithesis of Google's latest mess:
  
  
  
  
  Nobody likes the new Google.  (Hacker News)
  
  
  
• DuckDuckGo is relatively small.  (DuckDuckGo)
  
  Only 15 billion searches in 2019?  That's just - wait, does the calculator still work now that I've switched?  Yes! - just 475 per second on average.
  
  
  
• PHP in 2020: Just say no.  (Stitcher.io)
  
  They try to paint a happy face on a corpse.  Just let it die already.
  
  (Had to help fix a legacy PHP app today.  Nobody enjoyed the experience.)
  
  
  
• Blocked by default.  (dijit.sh)
  
  Cloudflare is not the worst of the vast overbearing internet companies with too much power and zero accountability, but it's a low, low bar.
  
  
  
• Intel's $2.40 2.5Gb Ethernet controller is not suitable for servers - say server motherboard manufacturers - because it doesn't support sharing the port with BMC which is a terrible idea they should stop doing anyway.  (Serve the Home)
  
  

Posted by: Rick C at Thursday, January 23 2020 01:33 AM (Iwkd4)

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