• AMD showed off the interesting Ryzen 3000 after officially launching the boring Ryzen 3000 a few days ago. (AnandTech)
  
  More thoughts here, but short take is that it looks like a mid-range Ryzen 3000 will compete evenly with Intel's fastest mainstream desktop parts at much lower power and probably much lower price.
  
  Ian Cutress of AnandTech is writing up the Q&A session with AMD CEO Lisa Su that followed the keynote, but it won't be published for a day or two. (Twitter)
  
  Meanwhile:
  

  Lisa Su tells us don't count on 3rd Gen Ryzen to be limited to 8 cores. That extra room will be used!

  — Mark Hachman (@markhachman) January 9, 2019

  
  
• AMD also announced the Radeon VII which is the graphics card version of the Radeon Instinct MI50 accelerator card released last year. (AnandTech)
  
  60 CUs, 16GB HBM, 1TB/s bandwidth, $699.
  
  As well as twice the bandwidth and memory of Vega 64, it also has twice the ROPs (raster output pipelines) so where Vega 64 was ROP limited, this certainly won't be. Later reports say it is still limited to 64 ROPs, so performance will still be limited likewise.  That's less than ideal for AMD.  It will be up to detailed reviews to show how much difference this makes in the real world and whether this is a genuine competitor for the RTX 2080.
  
  Meanwhile the rest of use are still waiting for Navi for realistically-priced cards.  Speculation is that Navi test chips came back in September but needed another round of revisions that will push the launch back three months, so Radeon VII is just a stopgap.  None of that is confirmed, but it's from AdoredTV, the same guy who had the details of Ryzen 3 exactly right, so only a medium-sized grain of salt.
  
  
• We found the missing galaxies. Only problem is, we keep finding them. (Quanta)
  
  Computer models disagreed with observations on how many dwarf galaxies like the Magellanic Clouds should orbit the Milky Way, predicting far more than we could actually find. Now updated models and better observations have flipped the picture, with more galaxies being found than there should be.
  
  This is not currently expected to destroy the Universe and kill all life everywhere, but please check back regularly for updates.
  
  
• Thermaltake showed off water-cooled RGB-lit RAM for... I don't know who for. (AnandTech)
  
  Seriously?
  
  
• FSP showed off water-cooled power supplies just in case things weren't hazardous enough. (AnandTech)
  
  I think CES is winding down.
  
  
• Apple Death Watch: iPhone production has been cut by another 10 percent, according to the Nikkei Asian Review. (Thurrott.com)
  
  Across all the current models, including the XR which is reportedly selling relatively well. Unit sales are apparently down 20% since the same time a year ago. So to all those in the tame Apple press who offered excuses when Apple stopped reporting unit sales - surprise.
  
  
• Lenovo's Yoga S490 is another 13.9" notebook with no dedicated pgup/pgdn/home/end keys dammit. (Thurrott.com)
  
  What it does have is a camera array that would shame the Hubble Space Telescope that can detect when shady characters are trying to peek at your computer and shoot them with a 90,000 volt military-grade taser. (Optional extra.)
  
  
• Lexar has a 1TB SD card.  (AnandTech)
  
  Full size, not micro SD.  $499.99.  For which price you can get a 2TB Samsung 970 Evo, which is about 30 times faster but probably won't fit in your DSLR.

• Facebook blocked the trailer for the game Gris by Devolver Digital. (TechDirt)
  
  Okay, no big deal, rogue bot. Just appeal.
  
  They did.
  
  Facebook upheld the ban, saying they don't allow nudity on their site.
  
  There is nothing even resembling nudity in the trailer. It's kind of weird, yes, but there's no nudity.
  
  This is stupid.
  
  
  
  
• There's a teeny bug in Google search that lets people inject nonsense into search links. (Tech Crunch)
  
  That is, searching by yourself works fine, but if someone gives you a link that does a Google search, they can attach parameters that look like the normal stupid link-tracking crap but actually change the results. Like this:
  
  
  
  Try it yourself.

Posted by: Rick C at Friday, January 11 2019 01:30 AM (Q/JG2)

Posted by: Rick C at Friday, January 11 2019 01:32 AM (Q/JG2)

Posted by: Rick C at Friday, January 11 2019 01:35 AM (Q/JG2)

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