• Leaks ahoy!
  
  
  
  
  Okay, so this is AMD's next-generation embedded processor.  Looks nice for people working on mid-range embedded systems, but doesn't do a whole lot for the rest of us.
  
  Except that advanced chip design is expensive.  A large chip like a CPU or GPU at modern nodes - 7nm, 6nm in this case, 5nm, costs in excess of $100 million to develop.  AMD simply doesn't have the scale to drop that much money just on an embedded design.
  
  This is Rembrandt, the fill-in between current Zen 3 chips and the Zen 4 chips set to arrive late next year.
  
  CPU performance will be basically the same as current generation - it's still Zen 3 - but with a bit of a boost from the 6nm process and the DDR5 memory.
  
  PCIe 4.0 is new for AMD mobile parts.  So is USB 4.0.
  
  The dual 10G Ethernet ports are interesting, but those might not survive in the consumer models.  Every first-generation Ryzen chip has 10G Ethernet support built in, but it's not wired up to anything.  There's a crossbar switch inside the chip that connects various on-chip I/O devices - USB, SATA, PCIe, and Ethernet - to the pins on the package.  All generations of desktop Ryzen parts have 32 PCIe lanes internally, but only 24 are available because the other pins are used for SATA and USB.
  
  Same deal is likely here - the consumer version will likely have more PCIe lanes but no 10G Ethernet.
  
  And finally, 12 RDNA2 compute units.  It's a bit hard to say how that will perform since it's a combination of the number of compute units, clock speeds, memory bandwidth, and on-chip cache.  For comparison the Xbox Series S - the cheaper one - has 20 RDNA2 compute units, but according to WCCFTech the graphics cores on this chip are clocked about 30% faster than the Xbox Series S.
  
  Still not a replacement for an RTX 3090, but probably capable of playing Minecraft even at 4K.
  
  
  
  

Anime of the day is Dragon Half from 1993.  There's seven volumes of manga, but just two episodes of the anime.

The anime makes no sense whatsoever but in the best possible way.  These are the closing credits, but the show is all like this.

Tech News

• China is ruining the cryptocurrency mining ecosystem with shutdown orders - and that's a good thing.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  China ruins everything.  Crypto mining ruins everything.  So what if China ruins crypto mining?
  
  
  
• Well, graphics card prices come back down, for a start.  (WCCFTech)
  
  Slowly but steadily.  I haven't seen a 6700 XT for under $1000 just yet.
  
  
  
  
  
  
• Rocky Linux 8.4 is here.  (Rocky Linux)
  
  Rocky Linux is a replacement for the late lamented CentOS project, recently killed-ish by IBM.  It's led by one of the founders of CentOS and named after another (actually late and lamented) founder.
  
  8.4 is the first version because the version numbers are synchronised to RedHat Enterprise Linux, for which it is a drop-in replacement.  Except free.
  
  
  
• Of course, being a drop-in replacement means copying all the design flaws too.  (DoltHub)
  
  Dolt - why the hell did they choose that name? - is a MySQL-compatible database that supports Git operations like cloning, branching, and merging data.
  
  Those aren't things you'd want to do in your conventional OLTP environment, but for development and research they are amazing tools.  Want to try out some new code?  Just branch the database and run it on the branch.  Want an up-to-date local copy?  Just clone the remote database to your computer.
  
  Merge is likely to be a problem though.  It always is.
  
  Anyway, the article is about how if you want to be truly compatible you have to be compatible with all the weird shit a platform does as well as all the sane, documented shit, because no matter how screwy a feature might be, someone, somewhere, has written code that will break if you fix it.
  
  Microsoft understands this.
  
  Apple also understands this but doesn't care.
  
  
  
• Eight cheap M.2 SSDs compared.  (Serve the Home)
  
  Not everyone needs a RAID array of 15TB enterprise drives.  Sometimes you just need something better than your seven year old hard drive.  These are that, though if your motherboard is also seven years old it won't have an M.2 slot.
  
  
  
• ADATA - a memory and SSD maker included in the review above - got hit by ransomware.  (Bleeping Computer)
  
  They told the hackers to go fuck themselves and restored from backup.
  
  
  
• Apple is designing a whole new MacBook Air.  (MacRumors)
  
  It will increase the count of graphics cores from 8 to 10 and have a new style of rubber feet.  On the underside, the article takes care to note.  I'm not sure where else Apple puts rubber feet, and not sure I want to know.
  
  
  
• Sony has won an order from a court in Germany forcing DNS provider Quad9 to block lookups to an unnamed "popular pirate site".  (TorrentFreak)
  
  Quad9 is based in Switzerland, which is not (hang on) yes, not part of Germany.  Or the EU for that matter.
  
  The court order carries fines of €250,000 per infringing lookup - which could easily run to a trillion dollars a day - and two years in prison.

ADATA has also hit the news for changing the hardware specs of a single SSD model at least seven times.  Basically I would trust Samsung and Micron/Crucial, who manufacture their own flash, Toshiba/Kioxia likewise, probably Western Digital and Seagate, and no-one else.

Because of this bullshit it doesn't matter how good the reviews are.  You can buy the exact same model and get a different product.  Even Kingston, which has a decent reputation, is pulling this shit with their NV1 SSDs.  At least they're honest enough to not even list detailed specs.



Disclaimer: ENOWATER: Extra crispy noodles.

Posted by: Mauser at Friday, June 25 2021 01:23 PM (Ix1l6)

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