Friday, October 23

Geek

Daily News Stuff 23 October 2020

INTERNATIONAL CAPS LOCK DAY EDITION

Tech News

  • No, I wouldn't do that to you.


  • I have two Butchers and a Bujold to read this weekend.  As an indication of how busy I've been, I haven't yet read Peace Talks, let alone Battle Ground.


  • Intel's DG1 discrete graphics chip is shipping now.  (AnandTech)

    To laptop makers - it's not available as a card.  I don't think the laptops themselves have shipped yet, so no benchmarks.


  • Speaking of benchmarks, the Ryzen 5600X is fast.  (Tom's Hardware)

    If this is real, it's spectacular.  (CPUBenchmark)

    The multi-threaded performance looks entirely plausible, but the single-threaded performance is a surprise.  It is just one benchmark and it's perfectly possible that this benchmark runs particularly well on Zen 3.  But I've found that Passmark scores track very closely with Python code performance, so it's a useful benchmark for me.

    If it stands up, then AMD's new 6 core processor has 110% of the single-threaded performance and 94% of the multi-threaded performance of Intel's 10 core flagship 10900K.  It's faster than an 18 core Xeon Gold 6140.

    And would be a pretty major upgrade over my current Ryzen 1700.


  • Even when it says "Ships from and sold by Amazon" you have to read the fine print.



    No, I wasn't burned - this doesn't apply to the 400GB model, which appears to be genuine.  But if you look up SanDisk microSD cards on Amazon AU, everything smaller than 400GB has that weird disclaimer:

    • This is an aftermarket of generic part.


  • Ubuntu 20.10 is out, including a Raspberry Pi edition.  (Tom's Hardware)

    I was meaning to check if it was out yet, and there it is.  I need to install a new Linux VM on New Spare Laptop since the old one was kind of a mess.


  • Speaking of spare laptops, turns out that Old Spare Laptop has the same battery problem as New Spare Laptop.

    With Old Spare Laptop there is also a loose connection, which coupled with the failing battery means it's unreliable even when plugged in.  But it turns out that loose connection is in the charger cable, not the laptop.  I remembered that I had another charger with the same plug, swapped them, and suddenly it works.

    At least until you unplug it, whereupon it dies instantly.


  • In Hololive news, Gawr Gura hit 1 million subscribers and Mori Calliope hit 500k during the same Minecraft collab stream (which I caught live), and Calliope had the #1 iTunes album worldwide on the same day, Coco is back to insult her fans, and HololiveCN is being, um, granted independence.

    The HoloCN girls are being given all rights to their characters so they can go independent. China is too toxic for Cover to want to deal with right now, particularly with the runaway success of HoloEN.


  • Anemoia is the feeling of nostalgia for things you never experienced.  (Wiktionary)


  • Not to be confused with Amemoia which is how Gura feels about Watson.




  • Huawei has launched their Mate 40 series powered by the new Kirin 9000.  (AnandTech)

    The main feature in the Kirin 9000 is a huge Mali G78MP24.  My Mediapad M3 has a Kirin 950 with a Mali T880MP4, so this is six times faster even before clock speed and architectural improvements.

    You'd have to be crazy to buy a Mate 40, though.  It's far from cheap, doesn't include Google services, and the CPU - made on TSMC's new 5nm process - has already ended production due to US sanctions on Huawei.



Disclaimer: But it helps.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 10:23 PM | Comments (4) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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1 Even worse, that's "Amazon's choice" for "sandisk 200gb."

Posted by: Rick C at Saturday, October 24 2020 02:03 AM (eqaFC)

2 It turns out I had a solder bridge between two pins on that MCU.  Fortunately, that was an easy fix, but when rewiring it I must have done something wrong, because when I tried to reflash the bootloader I got an error.  I have a spare MCU but no more boards.  That means I can remove the existing chip and either hand-solder a 32-pin chip with 0.8mm leads, or I can remove the chip *and both sets of header pins* so I can hot-plate reflow it.  Neither choice sounds like fun.  Oh, I suppose I could order another board.
Or I could use one of the 64-pin MCUs I've been holding on to, with a square breakout board, which is what I did.  I wound up with a dozen or so bridges but all but one were easy fixes--the last two pins weren't bridged but the lines running out to the place where you attach headers was.
If I do that I probably have to build my own bootloader.  On the positive side, the larger chip has an internal 48MHz oscillator.

Posted by: Rick C at Saturday, October 24 2020 02:07 AM (eqaFC)

3 Progress!

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Saturday, October 24 2020 08:56 AM (PiXy!)

4 Yeah. I just am not sure how much effort roll-my-own will be.

Posted by: Rick C at Saturday, October 24 2020 09:03 AM (eqaFC)

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




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