• Hololive livestreams are a train wreck here in Australia.  They disable rewind, and that seems to completely ruin YouTube's streaming.
  
  On this laptop I can play regular videos perfectly fine, but Hololive livestreams are a stuttering unwatchable mess even dialed all the way down to 144p.
  
  Given that they make all their money from livestreams, this seems like a problem.
  
  Update: Huh.  Working today.
  
  
  
• The 2020 Acer Nitro 5 brings Renoir and Turing together starting at just $669.  (AnandTech)
  
  I/O is good, with USB-A and C ports, wired Ethernet, and HDMI, and expandability is great with user-upgradeable RAM, two M.2 slots, and a 2.5" drive bay.
  
  CPU performance is great as you'd expect from a 6 Ryzen 4500U, and gaming on the GTX 1650 is pretty solid, though it won't hit 60 FPS on max settings on some games.
  
  Most interesting is that for a cheap gaming laptop the battery life is not at all bad - 4 hours of gameplay or 10 hours watching movies.
  
  Downside is it weighs an old-school 2.4kg.
  
  It does have the Four Essential Keys, but in the form of a full numeric keypad, which I don't like on a laptop.  But YMMV.
  
  
  
• Speaking of Ryzen performance AMD announced the Ryzen 5000 lineup just as they announced they were going to announce.  (AnandTech)
  
  19% higher average IPC measured as the geometric mean across 25 benchmarks.  AMD says it's faster than both the 10900K and the 1185G7 on single-threaded tasks.  The latter is a laptop chip but should still be hitting its rated clock on a single core, so it's a fair test.  It will of course crush Intel on multi-threaded tasks.
  
  Clock speeds increased only marginally, by 100-200MHz, but it's the same TSMC 7nm process and the same TDP, so that's to be expected.
  
  Price got a $50 increase on all chips, so it now ranges from $299 for six cores to $799 for sixteen.
  
  No mention yet of new Threadripper or Epyc parts, though we can be sure they are on the way; they will use the same CPU dies as these Ryzen parts, and the same I/O dies as existing Threadripper and Epyc.
  
  
  
• AMD is reportedly looking to take advantage of it's restored market valuation to buy Xilinx.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  That would be an interesting acquisition.  Xilinx is one of the two main FPGA vendors; the other, Altera, got swallowed by Intel about five years ago.
  
  
  

Posted by: normal at Sunday, October 11 2020 12:03 AM (obo9H)

Posted by: Rick C at Sunday, October 11 2020 04:53 AM (eqaFC)

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