Daily Tech News 3 September 2021

• So I've been working crazy hours recently - and less recently, this has been going on since February - but it's paying off. Not only did they give me a raise, and even backdate it, they've offered me a second raise starting next month.
  
  And now that things are slightly less insane and I have some money to spend, it turns out that everything I want to buy, from gluten-free chicken nuggets to a second one of those Dell laptops, is now out of stock.
  
  Fortunately, given the looming nugget famine, I can actually cook. I just tend not to.
  
  
  
• Turns out I can order a Lenovo Tab M8 FHD from Amazon US. I can't order it from Amazon US via Amazon AU, though, because... Yeah, I got nothing.
  
  
  
• GM can't get its nuggies either it seems, and is temporarily shutting down all but four of its US factories. (Engadget)
  
  Nuggies make the world go 'round.
  
  
  
• Yes, we need to nuke South Australia. Again. As with the burning of Washington, the British had the right idea but no follow-through.

• IBM and the L3 Cacheless society. (AnandTech)
  
  I mentioned this previously - IBM's new mainframe CPUs have no L3 cache. Or L4 cache, which is also something the previous model had.
  
  Instead, they have very large L2 caches - 32MB per core - and share them between cores as a virtual L3 cache, and between sockets as a virtual L4 cache. A large system can have 8GB of virtual cache this way.
  
  The article notes that this L2 cache has a 19-cycle latency, where AMD's current Ryzen chips are 12-cycle, but Ryzen only has 512kb per core and the L3 cache is much slower.

  How Is This Possible?
  
  Magic. Honestly, the first time I saw this I was a bit astounded as to what was actually going on.

  
  
  
• Windows 11 is launching October 5. (PC Perspective)
  
  Hurrah.
  
  
  
• The Silicon Power XD80 gives you a terabyte of TLC flash with proper DRAM caching for $110. (Tom's Hardware)
  
  It's a PCIe 3.0 drive so it peaks at "only" 3.4GB per second - which is astoundingly fast, really - and not quite up with the top models in that class like the WD SN750 or the Samsung 970 Evo Plus. But it's priced to compete with low-end DRAMless and/or QLC drives and it blows them out of the water.
  
  Worth a look.
  
  
  
• The 1170 words you can't say on GitHub. (The Register)
  
  Or more specifically, can't say to GitHub Copilot.
  
  The list includes such horrific slurs as "Israel", "man", and "woman".
  
  
  
• UK ISP Sky Broadband feeds your bandwidth data straight to a bunch of sleazy lawyers so they can sue you over copyright infringement. (TorrentFreak)
  
  If we have any nukes left over after South Australia...
  
  
  
• The Chinese mafia - which is to say, the Chinese government - is looking to steal $15 billion from Alibaba. (Reuters)
  
  Watch for their economy to unexpectedly tank in a couple of years.
  
  
  
• Asus is going all-in on OLED in its new notebooks. (Engadget)
  
  Including the - I've mentioned this before and I swear I am not making this up - ProArt Studiobook Pro. It will come with a 16" 4K panel with 550 nit brightness and 100% DCI-P3 colour gamut.
  
  Asus is also pretty good (if inconsistent) about including the Four Essential Keys, so I'll keep an eye out for these new models. I only have one OLED device so far - my new phone - and that screen is pretty great.

posted by Pixy Misa at 05:18 AM

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