Monthly Archives: November 2020

Article note: Good.

Article note: That was quick. Looks promising that Apple didn't do anything too demented.

Article note: Neat, desktop-class ARM parts from a major vendor. I'm curious about the boot-loader situation, these things might be appliances. The benchmarks look a little cooked (I think the i7 comparisons are throttled to base clock?) Max 16GB memory cuts the current generation of machines off from any "high end" applications. Looks like their "Rosetta2" translation layer is a decent JIT, though it sounds like there are some quirks around memory behaviors (4k vs. 16k page size?), I'm excited to see how that works out.

Apple's "One More Thing" event is all about Macs. Here's the scoop on Apple's latest chip, the M1, which is the first ARM-based computer chip the company is making in-house.

The M1 is the first computer chip built on a 5nm process with 16 billion transistors. Optimized for Apple's lower-power systems with minimal size and maximum efficiency, there are four performance cores and four efficiency cores in the CPU. Pound for pound, Apple says it has the highest CPU performance per watt, and the four efficiency cores alone match the performance of a dual-core MacBook Air while using much less power. This should contribute to longer battery life and better efficiency in low-power tasks like checking emails, for instance.

The integrated graphics card has eight cores and can process up to 2.6 teraflops, making it the world's fastest integrated graphics chip in a computer. In concert with the 16-core neural engine, which is capable of 11 trillion processes per second, Apple says apps like Garage Band can handle three times more instruments and effect plugins, while Final Cut Pro, for instance, can render complex timelines up to six-times faster. Compared to "previous-generation Macs," Apple says the M1 delivers "up to 3.5x faster CPU performance, up to 6x faster GPU performance, and up to 15x faster machine learning" with up to double the battery life.

Article note: Oooh, my being slow to cancel my Youtube Premium because I mostly had it for Play Music (RIP) and YTM is a garbage fire just got me $100 worth of Chromecast Ultra and Stadia controller.

Article note: It's a nifty piece of writing, more thought-provoking poetry than a traditional argument. In several ways I agree. (Commented on HN:) Thinking about the state of the software world in the last several years always makes me think of Vernor Vinge's notion of a "Mature Programming Environment" from _A Deepness in the Sky_ (1999), "The word for all this is ‘mature programming environment.’ Basically, when hardware performance has been pushed to its final limit, and programmers have had several centuries to code, you reach a point where there is far more significant code than can be rationalized. The best you can do is understand the overall layering, and know how to search for the oddball tool that may come in handy" (Longer excerpt with an earlier bit about rewriting things always eventually just moving around the set of bugs, inconsistencies, and limitations rather than improving them here: http://akkartik.name/post/deepness ) And and Danny Hillis' idea about the Entanglement ( excerpt from a 2012 interview with SciAm) - "But what's happened though, and I don't think most people realize this has happened yet, is that our technology has actually now gotten so complicated that we actually no longer do understand it in that same way. So the way that we understand our technology, the most complicated pieces of technology like the Internet for example, are almost like we understand nature; which is that we understand pieces of them, we understand some basic principles according to which they operate, in which they operate. We don't really understand in detail their emerging behaviors. And so it's perfectly capable for the Internet to do something that nobody in the world can figure out why it did it and how it did it; it happens all the time actually. We don't bother to and but many things we might not be able to." (more: https://www.scientificamerican.com/podcast/episode/the-coming-entanglement-bill-joy-an-12-02-15/)

Article note: Internet-of-shit, cloud-centric products, folks. Your device becomes a brick in 24mo, and we'll sell any leftover data to the highest bidder.

Article note: Oh damn it, my M254dw is on the "no longer accepts 3rd party toner after Nov. update" list. I don't have a stock of 3rd party cartridges, and don't recall if I turned off updates, but it's still _infuriating_. I was recommending HPs after Samsung got out of the printer market, but it looks like Brother is the least-asshole standing. The whole Internet-of-Shit hardware-as-a-service scam really needs to be aggressively punished.

Article note: I love it. It's like the old double joke about fad technology names being gibberish and hapless tech recruiters: "I typically ask recruiters to point out which of these are pokemon" https://imgur.com/gallery/r0SEEoh You could probably get your pokemon-related research published in a legit high-power journal if you did enough back scratching: use someone else's cited tool or method. Use a compute center or other shared-use grant instrument. Enlist some cross-disciplinary collaborators. Employ buzzwords for whatever is hot in your field. Cite vigorously into the pool of likely reviewers. Etc.

Article note: If anything has ever called for downfall memes.

Article note: Zen3 press embargo is up, and AMD wasn't lying about their benchmarks. The Zen3 parts are accelerating away from Intel's offerings. Its like the mid-2000s again.

Enlarge / Brand-new CPUs look so pretty before you put the thermal paste on and hide them under a cooler. (credit: Jim Salter)

Specs at a glance: Ryzen 5000XT CPUs, as tested
OS	Windows 10 Professional
CPU	Ryzen 9 5950X (16c/32t) Ryzen 9 5900X (12c/24t) Ryzen 9 3900XT (12c/24t)—$455 at Amazon
RAM	2x 32GB Corsair Dominator Platinum RGB DDR4 3200—$180 ea at Amazon
GPU	MSI GeForce 2060 RTX Super—formerly $450 at Amazon
HDD	Samsung 860 Pro 1TB SSD—$200 at Amazon
Motherboard	ASUS ROG Crosshair VIII Hero (Wi-Fi)—$380 at Amazon
Cooling	NZXT Kraken X63 fluid cooler with 280mm radiator—$150 at Newegg
PSU	EVGA 850Ga Modular PSU—$140 at Amazon
Chassis	Primochill Praxis Wetbench test chassis—$200 at Amazon
Price as tested	≈$1,500 as tested, excluding CPU

A month ago, AMD announced the arrival of the Zen 3 desktop CPU architecture. The announcement included new AMD internal benchmarks that implied Intel had lost its last desktop performance trophy—pure single-threaded performance.

Last week, Ars got samples of the two highest-end models in the new CPU lineup—the $800, 16-core/32-thread Ryzen 9 5950X, and the $550 12-core/24-thread Ryzen 9 5900X. And we can confirm most of AMD's benchmark claims—IPC has improved, along with both single and multi-threaded performance, across the board, beating Intel soundly on nearly all fronts.

The only quibble we have with AMD's claims regards power consumption, not performance—and to be fair, it's almost certainly not AMD's fault. The system's desktop idle power consumption increased about 10W—but the increase affected our older Ryzen 9 3900XT CPU, as well as the two new Zen 3 parts. Knowing that, we expect the increase comes from the mandatory BIOS upgrade we had to perform on the ROG Crosshair VIII Hero motherboard, rather than the new CPUs themselves.