Friday, October 15

Geek

Daily News Stuff 15 October 2021

Just Like That Edition

Top Story

  • The cache on AMD CPUs is up to 12 times slower on Windows 11 than on Windows 10.  (Tom's Hardware)

    I don't know how they managed that.  The article carefully measures and explains the effect - and that this drastic reduction in cache performance only means that your applications run 7% slower - but doesn't go into why.

    A fix is expected next week, but nothing I've seen, including AMD's own announcement of the problem, discusses why it is happening.


  • But new emojis.  (WCCFTech)

    Yes, the people working on emoji updates for Windows 11 are entirely independent of the team fixing the cache latency issues, but still.


Tech News

  • The Radeon RX 6600 is pretty much sold out already.  Checking two online stores here in Australia, each is down to a single model, after having at least five on launch day.

    How much of that is lack of supply and how much was pent-up demand for a card at anything on the same planet as a reasonable price I don't know.  Performance is  generally within 10% of Nvidia's RTX 3060 - mostly slower, but sometimes faster, depending on the game - but the retail price was about 40% lower than the 3060.  


  • Ubuntu 21.10 is here.  (Serve the Home)

    I'm mostly interested in the LTS releases, which will next appear with 22.04, but 22.10 is a good indicator of what will make it into 22.04.  I'll give it a try in a VM at least.


  • If you join a banned Telegram channel in Belarus you will go straight to jail.  (Bleeping Computer)

    Who do they think they are, Melbourne?


  • There is no cloud, there's just, um, your computers.  (ZDNet)

    Google Distributed Cloud Hosted runs Google's management software on your own servers, so you can run them as if they were Google Cloud without actually depending on Google Cloud.

    The Google Cloud management dashboard is actually pretty nice, and it sounds like this works without needing to connect to the actual Google Cloud at all, which is definitely a win.


  • Apple will probably be announcing stuff next week.  (ZDNet)

    Everyone is watching for a version of Apple's M1 CPU that supports more than 16GB of RAM.  Intel and AMD's laptop CPUs all support 128GB, and even if that's rarely implemented, if you shop around for high-end professional laptops they do exist.  Apple is currently stuck using Intel chips for anything beyond basic requirements.  For all the efforts of the tame Apple press to insist that 16GB is enough for anyone, anyone who uses Adobe software knows that ain't so.


  • Crystal 1.2 is out.  (Crystal-Lang)

    Crystal is one of the four new-ish programming languages worth watching, alongside Nim, Rust, and Julia.  It's basically a compiled version of Ruby with the worst parts of Ruby removed and performance that is orders of magnitude better.  (Nim is basically the same thing for Python.)


Kind of Nuts But in a Good Way Video of the Day



This is a Minecraft server built by Hololive fans - in four months.  According to the video, this is in survival mode.  That is, not only has everything you see been built by hand, one block at a time, those blocks were mined one at a time while fighting off all the monsters in the game.

Feels slightly odd for me because I know that music as Pina Pengin's theme, and she's with rival vtuber agency Prism Project.  

Update: And apparently Pikamee's new closing theme.

Meanwhile, I build my first automated farm - a combination sugar cane / bamboo harvester,  based on the design Kiara and Mamatori (her real-life mother) built on stream.  It works, but it's not exactly fast; I'll need to expand it about ten times to make i really useful.



Disclaimer: G-o-g-g-  Aye, it's a wee ripper!

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 05:50 PM | Comments (11) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
Post contains 643 words, total size 5 kb.

1 48G of RAM isn't enough to browse certain websites (without adblock).  I have a cow orker (well, more than one, actually) who doesn't have a clue about adblocking, and it's nearly physically painful to look at certain websites on her computer.  To say nothing of the performance issues (I take a great number of very expensive pills for that, and don't you forget it!).

Posted by: normal at Friday, October 15 2021 10:13 PM (LADmw)

2 Watching a busy Hololive livestream in Chrome I've seen the memory used for just that one tab hit 12GB.

(The browser implementation of YouTube live chat is terrible.  The Android app handles the same streams without a blip.)
I've seen a number of reasonably priced Windows laptops lately with 1TB of NVMe SSD, the latest Core i7 CPUs, good screens, Thunderbolt support, sometimes dedicated graphics...  And 8GB of soldered-in RAM.  Instant e-waste.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Friday, October 15 2021 11:23 PM (PiXy!)

3 So, if I have 16Gb in a machine intended to be a workstation, and have slots for more, I should buy more?

Posted by: PatBuckman at Saturday, October 16 2021 01:27 AM (r9O5h)

4 I mean, you can always *use* more memory, but if you're not experiencing memory pressure, you may not *need* it.
I upgraded my PC from 16 to 32GB because I run a modded Minecraft that uses enough RAM (as well as a copy of MS SQL Server) that I would sometimes see overall system slowdowns, including MC being choppy.  32GB solved that problem.  (I'm not one of those 200-browser tab people, but I sometimes have more than a dozen and that never used enough memory to be a problem.)

Posted by: Rick C at Saturday, October 16 2021 03:10 AM (Z0GF0)

5 I've had firefox hitting swap and a load average of 15 on an 8 core machine with 32G of ram with one tab open.  Install noscript and for some reason the problems just go away.

Posted by: normal at Saturday, October 16 2021 04:53 AM (obo9H)

6 "Install noscript and for some reason the problems just go away."
LOL.  And your Electron and React apps are 100x faster, although they also don't actually do anything.

Posted by: Rick C at Saturday, October 16 2021 05:36 AM (Z0GF0)

7 I haven't had much problems with browsers, since I switched to having javascript off most of the time again.

Before, those memory leaks were a huge source of issues. 

I have a different application that was taking forever to run on my older desktop, that was lickety split when I ran it on a newer machine.  Or at least, fast enough that I could work out that part of the problem was me badly misconfiguring something. 

I have something new that I may need to run on my home machine, the data is big, and it may be a while before I know enough to get it to run without pointlessly wasting memory.  I'm also wondering if my older machine would stop locking up some of the time with certain programs if I increased the memory.  (I suspect I may have a hard time finding good memory for the older machine.)

Anyway, I think I haven't bought RAM in a decade.  I did some price checking on newegg, and either best buy or office max.  I'm not sure who reputable vendors are, or what, if any, the reputable brands are. 

Posted by: PatBuckman at Saturday, October 16 2021 10:40 AM (r9O5h)

8 RAM is generally pretty reliable.  Kingston, Corsair, Crucial (Micron), and G.Skill are all well-regarded.  Samsung and Hynix also sell modules under their own brand names.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Saturday, October 16 2021 11:31 AM (PiXy!)

9 Also--if you're running an OEM (eg Dell) system, don't bother getting fast RAM (e.g., stick with 2933 or slower) because they don't generally give you the capability to use the faster stuff, so there's no point in spending the extra money.  If your BIOS has an option for XMP or  DOCP, then you can get the faster stuff for a small boost.

Posted by: Rick C at Saturday, October 16 2021 01:40 PM (Z0GF0)

10 I'm glad you liked the holocons server video. I hope you join sometime at least just to walk around and see some of the sights. The map art gallery is really nice. Also if you like Subaru, come build something at Shuba Nation!

Posted by: Mumberthrax at Sunday, October 17 2021 05:05 AM (YVq1I)

11 It's amazing!  I don't know if I have time to join or the skills to contribute, but it's amazing.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Sunday, October 17 2021 09:40 AM (PiXy!)

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




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