• Legislation proposed in India is seeking to ban cryptocurrencies and crypto-assets while promoting use of the blockchain.  (Reuters)
  
  

  The bill, one of the world’s strictest policies against cryptocurrencies, would criminalise possession, issuance, mining, trading and transferring crypto-assets, said the official, who has direct knowledge of the plan.Given all the fun I've had programming contracts for Ethereum, I certainly sympathise, but I don't think they've quite thought this through.
  
  I think a more appropriate remedy would be to hit the planet with a relativistic neutron star, or perhaps summon Cthulhu and have him file a suit over theft of trade secrets.
  
  
  

• Why the new USPS truck looks dumb.  (The Drive)
  
  In short: The requirements were sufficiently restrictive that there was no other solution.  
  
  Really, I'm slightly surprised that there was a solution available.
  
  
  
• Oops.
  
  
  What this doesn't say is that all other Azure services were up, but you couldn't log in to any of them for up to five hours depending on your location.
  
  That's not easy to prevent.  If you have a unified global platform, you have a unified global authentication service, and that's a single point of failure.
  
  If you have multiple authentication services that somehow need to interact, it becomes exponentially less secure.
  
  
  
• Is the Epyc 7453 a hidden gem, or just a torpedo aimed at Intel?  (Serve the Home)
  
  The article doesn't actually answer that question, by the way, or even ask it.  I just noticed this while going through the table of Milan SKUs.
  
  The 7453 is a 28-core part.  AMD couldn't actually make that before, not without unbalancing the CCXes, which would make life hard for operating system schedulers.  With Zen 3 it's easy - four chiplets with seven active cores.
  
  Compared to the 24-core 7443, it has slightly slower base clocks - 2.75 vs 2.85GHz - four more cores, and costs $440 less at $1570.  It does also have lower boost clocks - 3.45 vs 4.0Ghz - and only 64MB of L3 cache, which is half what is physically found on four chiplets.
  
  It can't be a coincidence that Intel's closest fastest readily available Xeons also have 28 cores, and have much less cache than Epyc.  The Xeon 6258R has 28 cores, a base clock of 2.7GHz,  37.5MB of cache, and costs $3950, though it does offer a turbo speed of 4GHz.
  
  This lets AMD point out that two of its 28-core parts cost less than one from Intel.
  
  It's not the only odd duck in the lineup, either; the 16 core 73F3 (the F series all clock up to 4.0GHz) costs more than the 24 core 74F3.  Speculation is that there's some specific package that increases license costs sharply if you have more than 16 cores per socket, and AMD was delivering the fastest possible part to fit in that constraint, with a price to match.  It has a full eight chiplets populated, each with just two cores active.
  
  The benchmarks compare AMD against Intel and also against the Ampere Altra, an 80 core Arm-based server processor.  The new Epyc parts win across the board - little surprise - but the Arm chips do surprisingly well.

Gremlin Shark Video of the Day

Posted by: Rick C at Wednesday, March 17 2021 12:45 AM (eqaFC)

Posted by: normal at Wednesday, March 17 2021 12:22 PM (+Kfbd)

Posted by: Rick C at Wednesday, March 17 2021 01:00 PM (eqaFC)

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