Friday, April 03

Geek

Daily News Stuff 3 April 2020

Blargh Edition

Tech News

  • Everything we know about RDNA 2 and Big Navi.  (Tom's Hardware)

    Which is not nothing, because both the Xbox Xeriex X and the PS5 are based on RDNA 2 and they've announced detailed specs (in Sony's case, excruciatingly detailed).

    It looks like it will run at faster clock speeds than current RDNA cards (PS5 runs at up to 2250 MHz vs. 1900 MHz for the 5700XT), more shaders (the Xbox XXX has 52 CUs vs 40 on the 5700XT), and 50% better performance per watt.

    It is also believed to lift the 64 CU limit of the Vega architecture, though I haven't seen an official announcement of that.


  • It's even worse than you thought.  (TechDirt)
    [W]e could not review original Woods Files for 4 of the 29 selected FISA applications because the FBI has not been able to locate them and, in 3 of these instances, did not know if they ever existed…
    All of the FISA warrant applications examined had significant errors, with an average of twenty errors each.


  • Moving anime to 4K. (Netflix)

    Meanwhile to save bandwidth we've changed your preferences to 240p.


  • Intel's Xeon Gold 6226R gets a full workout.  (Serve the Home)

    This is quite a capable and reasonably-priced chip...  For Intel.

    But it's the same price as the Threadripper 3960X which - so long as you don't need more than 256GB of RAM - crushes it like a bug.


  • More on the Apple / Amazon peace talks.  (MacWorld)

  • Zoom: Ah, yeah, maybe we should fix that.  (ZDNet)

    I mean, it's only leaking your IP address, username, host name, and password hash.  What's the big deal?


  • Have you tried turning your airliner off and on again?  (The Register)

    Did Boeing outsource software development to Zoom or something?


  • Ran a quick Python benchmark today across four selected servers.

    Just a single-threaded test of looping, counting, string manipulation and the like.

    Cloud server 1 (E5-2683 v3): 18.1s

    Cloud server 2 (E5-2690 v4): 14.9s

    E3-1230 v3: 7.7s

    Threadripper 3960X: 5.1s

    I'm not sure why the cloud server performance is so bad, but it's consistent and that is where all our stuff is running at my day job.  And our codebase is indeed mostly Python.  I expect people will notice when we get things migrated to the new servers.

    The E3-1230 did pretty well for itself, though it is a 4 core chip, not 24.  It's a physical server, no virtualisation overhead.



Video of the Day

Zen 2 is kicking Intel all over the place - from thin-and-light laptops all the way up to supercomputers.  But AMD isn't resting on its laurels, or on anything else.  Zen 3 is on its way this year.

Next year: Zen 4, with AVX512 and DDR5, so it will be able to squash Intel at their last few remaining strong points.



Disclaimer: Blargh and double blargh.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 11:39 PM | Comments (3) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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1 Like a lot of people I hadn't heard of Zoom before they started closing schools, but apparently it's been around for years.  On a forum I read someone said last night that Zoom's "been eating Webex's lunch for a few years".
My company's been using paid GoToMeeting for forever.

Posted by: Rick C at Saturday, April 04 2020 12:39 AM (Iwkd4)

2 Zoom is the app that installed a local web server on your computer so that they could override your camera settings and turn it on without your authorisation.  Before Apple stomped on them, anyway.

A company that thought that was a good idea likely has other nasty surprises waiting for us.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Saturday, April 04 2020 01:41 AM (PiXy!)

3 Yeah, I remember that.
I read somewhere that there are a ton of programs that install local web servers for various reasons.  Progress includes a Tomcat server with a database server-management app, which is probably a somewhat better reason than Zoom's.

Posted by: Rick C at Saturday, April 04 2020 04:45 AM (Iwkd4)

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




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