Daily Tech News 13 May 2021

• Xioami will be removed from the list of Chinese companies working with the Chinese military because the Department of Defense says, and I quote, Meh. (ZDNet)
  
  Xiaomi makes - as far as I know - only consumer products, which puts them in a very different class from Huawei which makes communications infrastructure as well as cheap (and not so cheap) phones.
  
  On the other hand, the TikTok ban on government devices looks set to go ahead. (Reuters)
  
  I'd advocate for every country in the world to ban all social media, frankly. Automatically ban any platform with more than, say, a million users.
  
  
  

• The Asus Zenfone 8 is one of the smallest Android phones on the market with its 5.9" screen. (AnandTech)
  
  Though at 169 grams it's just 3 grams lighter than my Oppo A91, which has a 6.4" screen. In fact, apart from the much newer CPU - an Arm X1 instead of the A73 in the Oppo - it's much the same hardware for three times the price. 2400x1080 AMOLED screen with an in-display fingerprint sensor and all.
  
  Speaking of the Oppo A91, it works pretty well. It's smaller than I expected for that screen size, and while certainly not up with the latest flagship models is quite zippy except when you're installing 150 apps all at once.
  
  
  
• Here's an RTX 3060 with a custom paint job for $839. (Tom's Hardware)
  
  For perspective the RTX 3080 - which is much, much faster than the 3060 - launched at $699 before everything went to hell.
  
  
  
• The Gigabyte Aorus FV43U is a high-end 43" gaming monitor. (Tom's Hardware)
  
  If you want a huge 4K monitor for work and a 144Hz Freesync gaming monitor and an HDR10 QLED TV with 97% DCI-P3 colour and 1000 nits max brightness that won't spy on you because it can't, all in one unit - and are prepared to spend something like a thousand bucks - this could be it.
  
  
  
• What kind of idiot would spend $1600 on a Z590 motherboard? (WCCFTech)
  
  On second thought, don't tell me, I don't want to know.
  
  
  
• Comparing Intel's 40 core Ice Lake Xeon with AMD's 64 core Epyc Milan in floating-point workloads. (Phoronix)
  
  They swap positions in the benchmark results because the Xeon supports AVX512 - that is, it can do 16 32-bit calculations per cycle - while the current generation Epyc parts can only do 8. So it depends on the specific benchmark whether the extra cores outweigh the better floating point performance per core.
  
  If you're mostly focused on integer workloads (which includes jobs like websites and databases) then the extra cores will win every time, but in that case the storage subsystem, memory, and networking also play a huge role so it's much harder to create a specific benchmark suite.
  
  
  
• It's not Cancel Culture, it's consequences, shrieked the mob as they waved their iPitchforks. (9to5Mac)
  
  Apple made the mistake of hiring someone who speaks the truth:

  Most women in the Bay Area are soft and weak, cosseted and naive despite their claims of worldliness, and generally full of shit. They have their self-regarding entitlement feminism, and ceaselessly vaunt their independence, but the reality is, come the epidemic plague or foreign invasion, they'd become precisely the sort of useless baggage you'd trade for a box of shotgun shells or a jerry can of diesel.

  Replace "women" with "people" and it's still true. Replace "the Bay Area" with "any large city" and it's still true.

posted by Pixy Misa at 03:35 AM

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