Daily Tech News 26 May 2021

• Dear Microsoft,
  
  It's not fucking up to you how many fucking times I pause your fucking updates. Unlike you retards, I have a fucking job to do, so kindly take your updates, cover them in glitter glue, and shove them so far up your ass that you see stars when you close your eyes.
  
  Love,
  
  Pixy
  
  Update: WINDOWS YOU FUCKING PIECE OF SHIT DIE IN ALL THE FIRES.
  
  
  
• Arm has announced three new Arm cores. (AnandTech)
  
  Which is kind of a logical thing for Arm to announce, and a logical thing to be announced by Arm.
  
  Anyway, specifically we have the X2, following the high-performance X1, the A710, following the formerly high-performance A78, and the A510, following the power-efficient A55.
  
  All three support the new Armv9 instruction set, and the X2 and A510 are 64-bit only designs. As a developer I'm generally against ripping out backwards-compatibility like that, but on the other hand the x86 architecture has maintained binary compatibility since 1978 and as a result is now insane.
  
  Anyway, the X2 is 16% faster than the X1, assuming the same manufacturing process and power consumption. The A710 - no longer being the top performing core - delivers the same performance as the A78 but uses 30% less power. And the A510 is 25% slower than the A73, which was Arm's high-end core in 2017 - and what powers my "new" phone.
  
  Not an astounding upgrade but still pretty solid.

• A million PCs are being sold per day, with an expected growth of 18% for 2021. (Tom's Hardware)
  
  The article says that this is happening "despite" the component shortages, but that's backwards. This is a major factor causing the component shortages. PC sales have been trending slowly downwards for years and certainly no-one was stockpiling parts in the event of a surge.
  
  
  
• It may look like a Flavoradio from 1980 but it is actually an FPGA developer kit for vision-centric AI projects. (Serve the Home)
  
  At $199 it's a little more expensive than an AM radio too, but that's a pretty good price for this kind of developer board.
  
  
  
• Chrome 91 includes a gravity sensor API. (Phoronix)
  
  That will come in handy the next time I forget to pay the gravity bill.
  
  
  
• Mathematicians have figured out how to figure out the square root of one. (Quanta)
  
  For rather complicated definitions of "square root" and "one". Specifically it solves Hilbert's 12th problem from 1900 for what are known as totally real fields.
  
  Not in the way Hilbert envisioned, since mathematics has advanced somewhat in 121 years, but solved nonetheless.
  
  
  
• Russia has fined Google 6 million rubles - approximately twelve cents - for failing to remove what it calls "illegal content". (Engadget)
  
  What Russia means here is content inconvenient to their narrative, the kind of stuff Big Tech kills with an axe if it inconveniences their own narrative.
  
  
  
• Amazon's ad revenue is now twice that of Snap, Twitter, Roku, and Pinterest combined, or approximately twelve cents. (CNBC)
  
  I don't think any of those companies are exactly raking it in right now.
  
  
  
• I mentioned that Phison has a dumb name but makes good SSD controllers, but a 15 microsecond access time? Really? (Hot Hardware)
  
  That seems awfully fast but the chart data is at least consistent.
  
  And speaking of dumb names, one of their competitors is called InnoGrit. I guess eventually all the cool names are taken.
  
  
  
• I hadn't heard Subaru - the dancing duck girl from yesterday - sing before. Her voice drops by about an octave. Rather striking.

posted by Pixy Misa at 05:15 AM

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