Daily Tech News 28 May 2021

• Intel's next-generation Alder Lake is expected to arrive this year - and probably with a whimper. (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Intel has been talking up its single-core performance, but they need to, because it looks like the low power laptop parts - 15W - will have two cores. Well two large cores - the type of core you normally find on laptops - and also eight small cores, like a smart phone.
  
  AMD can provide eight large cores at a 15W TDP.
  
  So Intel not only needs to deliver a really fast large core, because they'll only have two of them, and a really fast small core, because they'll only have two large cores, they need to deliver the really fast large cores and the really fast small cores working together seamlessly at a low power consumption and that just plain ain't on the cards.
  
  It looks like it could be even more power-hungry than Tiger Lake... It is Tiger Lake, right? When that is exactly the issue these small cores are supposed to address.
  
  I do expect it to deliver on single-threaded workloads. And it will be arriving well before AMD's Zen 4, so it should have time to establish itself before it gets demolished in turn by the competition. Competition of this sort is a fine thing.
  
  
  
• Actually the thing that had me earlier muttering under my breath oh, great* - I save my expletives for the written word, mere shrieks of anguish being too ephemeral to be a worthy medium - turned out to be pretty reasonable.
  
  At my day job we're currently suffering from success. It's better than the alternative, but it's going to be hectic for the rest of the year. October in particular is going to be 31 days of crazy. The length and frequency of these posts might get a little glitchy around then.
  
  * Just realised that this will be a non-sequitur to readers on Ace's site where I don't publish the little extra edition names. Let's just say I had a call scheduled that I wasn't looking forward to, but it worked out pretty well in the end.
  
  

• Marvell has announced the first PCIe 5.0 SSD controllers. (AnandTech)
  
  Intel's Alder Lake is expected to provide PCIe 5.0 - I don't remember if that has been officially announced as yet, or merely leaked - as is AMD's Zen 4 next year. But this controller is aimed at servers, not at desktops, let alone laptops. Power consumption for the controller chip alone is 9W, where an 8-core AMD APU - CPU and graphics combined - uses 15W.
  
  PCIe 4.0 is already pretty power hungry; PCIe 5.0 isn't going to improve that. But it is fast; this controller will deliver up to 14GB per second.
  
  
  
• Speaking of Zen 4, here's Zen 5. (WCCFTech)
  
  I'm not sure this even deserves being called a leak; it consists of a name - Granite Ridge - and a diagram so pixelated it could appear on a true crime show without any additional editing.
  
  
  
• How to get all your work done on an iPad. (ZDNet)
  
  Step 1: Have very, very low expectations.
  
  He lists email, a calendar, a password manager, and a text editor. He could get by with a Tandy Model 100.
  
  
  
• AI's core competence seems to be screwing things up faster and on a larger scale than mere humans can hope for. (Vox)
  
  And we are very, very good at screwing up. The problem is we need to eat and sleep and stuff like that, so I'm told, so we take regular forced breaks from screwing up.
  
  AI can screw things up 24x7.

posted by Pixy Misa at 04:47 AM

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