Daily Tech News 15 October 2021

• The cache on AMD CPUs is up to 12 times slower on Windows 11 than on Windows 10. (Tom's Hardware)
  
  I don't know how they managed that. The article carefully measures and explains the effect - and that this drastic reduction in cache performance only means that your applications run 7% slower - but doesn't go into why.
  
  A fix is expected next week, but nothing I've seen, including AMD's own announcement of the problem, discusses why it is happening.
  
  
  
• But new emojis. (WCCFTech)
  
  Yes, the people working on emoji updates for Windows 11 are entirely independent of the team fixing the cache latency issues, but still.
  
  
  

• The Radeon RX 6600 is pretty much sold out already. Checking two online stores here in Australia, each is down to a single model, after having at least five on launch day.
  
  How much of that is lack of supply and how much was pent-up demand for a card at anything on the same planet as a reasonable price I don't know. Performance is generally within 10% of Nvidia's RTX 3060 - mostly slower, but sometimes faster, depending on the game - but the retail price was about 40% lower than the 3060.
  
  
  
• Ubuntu 21.10 is here. (Serve the Home)
  
  I'm mostly interested in the LTS releases, which will next appear with 22.04, but 22.10 is a good indicator of what will make it into 22.04. I'll give it a try in a VM at least.
  
  
  
• If you join a banned Telegram channel in Belarus you will go straight to jail. (Bleeping Computer)
  
  Who do they think they are, Melbourne?
  
  
  
• There is no cloud, there's just, um, your computers. (ZDNet)
  
  Google Distributed Cloud Hosted runs Google's management software on your own servers, so you can run them as if they were Google Cloud without actually depending on Google Cloud.
  
  The Google Cloud management dashboard is actually pretty nice, and it sounds like this works without needing to connect to the actual Google Cloud at all, which is definitely a win.
  
  
  
• Apple will probably be announcing stuff next week. (ZDNet)
  
  Everyone is watching for a version of Apple's M1 CPU that supports more than 16GB of RAM. Intel and AMD's laptop CPUs all support 128GB, and even if that's rarely implemented, if you shop around for high-end professional laptops they do exist. Apple is currently stuck using Intel chips for anything beyond basic requirements. For all the efforts of the tame Apple press to insist that 16GB is enough for anyone, anyone who uses Adobe software knows that ain't so.
  
  
  
• Crystal 1.2 is out. (Crystal-Lang)
  
  Crystal is one of the four new-ish programming languages worth watching, alongside Nim, Rust, and Julia. It's basically a compiled version of Ruby with the worst parts of Ruby removed and performance that is orders of magnitude better. (Nim is basically the same thing for Python.)

posted by Pixy Misa at 04:03 AM

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