Daily Tech News 1 May 2021

It was, of course, a descendent of these eccentric poets who invented this curious tale of impending doom which enabled the people of Golgafrincham to rid themselves of an entire useless third of their population. The other two-thirds, of course, stayed at home and lived full, rich, and happy lives until they were all suddenly wiped out by a virulent disease contracted from a dirty telephone.

— The Hitch-Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy, Radio Series, Episode Six, by Douglas Adams

• After Basecamp recently clamped down on the woke bullshit compromising their business they are now seeing exactly the desired result: An entire useless third of their employees have boarded the Ark. (Gizmodo)
  
  If I ever see a Basecamp resume crossing my desk - at least, one from this mass exodus - I will laugh myself sick before binning it.
  
  And then pull it out of the bin, laugh some more, tear it up, and bin it again.

• Intel's future Sapphire Rapids server CPUs could have as many as 80 cores. (Tom's Hardware)
  
  This will be Intel's first chiplet-based CPU. AMD started this trend in 2017, largely because they simply didn't have the budget to design and manufacture huge server chips with a then-unknown market acceptance.
  
  Instead, AMD's engineers added three high-speed interconnects to the standard desktop CPU, so that four eight-core parts could be linked together as a single 32-core part.
  
  It worked, and AMD now has server market share they haven't seen in 15 years, leaving Intel playing technical - if not sales - catchup.
  
  It's not clear when Sapphire Rapids will actually ship; the only official word so far is that Intel will be using these parts in a supercomputer for Argonne National Lab starting this year.
  
  
  
• Taiwan has banned recruitment for semiconductor industry jobs located in West Taiwan. (Tom's Hardware)
  
  The Chinese government is scrambling to build up its semiconductor industry, after being banned from purchasing both latest-generation chips and latest-generation manufacturing equipment by the Trump Administration.
  
  Despite the changeover in Washington DC those bans are still in effect. China is five years behind Taiwan, and while that might not sound like much, five years ago Taiwan's semiconductor industry was a mess. Back in 2016 TSMC was still mostly producing 28nm parts, because the 20nm process was a disaster and 16nm was still ramping up.
  
  This year they plan to start production of 3nm.
  
  So five years behind actually means ten times worse.
  
  
  
• The unannounced Zen 3+ core for Ryzen 6000 may have been cancelled. (WCCFTech)
  
  Or not.
  
  It looks like there won't be a new desktop lineup from AMD this year, with Zen 4 expected to arrive in Q1 of 2022. With manufacturing constrained and demand consistently outstripping supply across AMD's entire product range, it makes sense for them to focus on major new generations rather than trying to fill in gaps in the schedule to keep marketing happy.
  
  Intel will ship Alder Lake late this year, and that will introduce support for DDR5 and PCIe 5.0 - double the memory bandwidth and double the I/O bandwidth - but that doesn't look like a great part for desktop systems, since it's limited to 8 full-size cores where AMD already goes to 16.
  
  For laptops, possibly yes, since it also has up to 8 low-power cores, similar to the recent Arm based MacBook. That could help deliver all-day battery life in a lightweight notebook.
  
  
  
• Do not buy the PNY CS2130 SSD. (Serve the Home)
  
  Instead of office chair, shipment contained live bobcat. Would not buy again.
  
  
  
• Pornhub received 500,000 DMCA takedown notices lat year - and issued nearly ten times that number. (TorrentFreak)
  
  They all deserve each other, frankly.
  
  
  

posted by Pixy Misa at 03:02 AM

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