• Intel announced their brand new 8 core mainstream processors - expensive but good.  They showed off benchmarks that displayed the benefits of the new chips relative to AMD's own 8 core mainstream processors.
  
  Reviewers are under embargo until the 19th, so no detailed benchmarks are available except for the official Intel ones.
  
  Which are a bit...  Odd.
  
  The Intel results seem fine - mostly - but the comparison AMD results are...  Off.  Lower than they should be.
  
  Almost as if the AMD CPU had been, I don't know, artificially limited by inappropriate settings and software.
  
  
  
  
• Things just keep getting worse for Bloomberg.  Another of their sources has spoken out against the Ricegate article saying that his research has been misrepresented.  (Serve the Home)
  
  Specifically, this researcher has seen hardware hacks on specific individual servers, not limited to SuperMicro, and not done as part of a production run, but added after the fact and switched during shipment.
  
  Bloomberg, meanwhile, is refusing interviews and instead has published a new article alleging that unnamed sources say that unnamed unspecified chips added to unknown motherboards at an indeterminate manufacturer were used to break security at an unmentioned major US phone company.  Every major US telco has gone on record to deny this.  (Ars Technica)  [Don't read the comments.  After the first page it's complete crazy town.]
  
  Bloomberg seem to have gone full Dan Rather.  Maybe they'll be vindicated, but I rather (hah) doubt that.
  
  
• TSMC has taped out their first second-generation 7nm parts with 5nm to enter risk production in Q2 2019.  (AnandTech)
  
  Intel is still hoping to get 10nm parts into mass production by the end of 2019, which will put them roughly in parity with TSMC's first generation 7nm.  (The numbers are about 40% real and 60% marketing fluff.)
  
  [While this is bad for Intel, having multiple companies on a roughly level playing field is good for the consumer in the long term.  Intel clearly held back technology from consumers for many years because of a lack of competition, as we can see by how quickly they released 6 and 8 core parts after AMD challenged them with Ryzen.]
  
  TSMC's 5nm is about 45% smaller than their 7nm process, but only uses 20% less power.  So you can roughly double the number of transistors on a chip, but that would lead to a 60% increase in power consumption.
  
  This sort of thing is why Nvidia have divided their new GPUs into specific modules for rasterisation, ray-tracing, and AI.  If all you're doing is rasterisation, the other modules can sit idle and not use any power.  And since the rasterisation cores don't need to be able to do ray-tracing or AI, they can be kept simple and power-efficient.
  
  Expect to see a lot more of that in the future as we head on down to 3nm.
  
  
• Google announced the Pixel Slate, their first ChromeOS tablet.  (AnandTech)
  
  It's a 12.3" device with a 3000x2000 display and a detachable keyboard and optional pen, with up to a Core i7 CPU and 16GB RAM.
  
  Waaaait a minute....
  
  Yeah, it's pretty much the same hardware as my Spectre x2, though with slightly better battery life, a lot less storage (maximum is 256GB), only one USB port, and way more expensive.  Starting at US$599 for the 4GB model with a Celeron CPU and just 32GB of storage, plus $100 for the pen and $200 for the keyboard, the cheapest config runs as much as I paid for the Spectre x2 with a Core i7, 16GB RAM, and 1TB of SSD.
  
  Fortunately that doesn't matter because it's not available in Australia at all.  (Finder)
  
  Also, why would anyone even want a premium ChromeOS tablet?  Cheap Chrome laptops for education, absolutely, but a tablet that runs close to US$2000 when fully configured?
  
  
• Google also released the Pixel 3.  (Android Central)
  
  It's a phone.  It does phone stuff.
  
  
• Evil-doers are using the EU's fictional right to be forgotten to erase stories about them using the EU's fictional right to be forgotten to erase stories about their evil-doing.  (TechDirt)
  
  Everything goes down the memory hole.
  
  
• Microsoft may be looking to buy Obsidian.  (WCCFTech)
  
  I'm okay with that.  If anyone is going to buy Obsidian, I'd prefer it to be Microsoft.  But WCCFTech, so take it with a pound of salt.
  
  
• Boltons is a collection of small libraries for Python that augment the builtins.  Hence the name.
  
  Supports 2.6, 2.7, 3.3 and up, and PyPy.
  
  
• RedHat's Flatpak considered harmful?

Posted by: StargazerA5 at Wednesday, October 10 2018 10:19 PM (Q7Wqc)

Posted by: Rick C at Thursday, October 11 2018 02:34 AM (Q/JG2)

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