Daily Tech News 23 October 2021

• Do not use Node.js, under any circumstances, for anything. (Reddit)
  
  Yet another massive package compromise because the entire ecosystem is built and managed by morons. (Not the good kind either.)
  
  I don't know who it was or why they decided we needed something worse than PHP, but that's what we have.
  
  
  

• Apple's new M1 Max has the GPU compute power of an RTX 3060. (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Benchmarks on GPU acceleration in Adobe Premiere Pro are in line with the raw specs listed by Apple, rather than with the synthetic OpenGL benchmarks that put it closer to an RTX 3080.
  
  It's still very, very good for integrated graphics.
  
  The M1 Max is a huge chip - three times the size of AMD's 8 core laptop chips despite being built on the smaller 5nm process. What I think they've done is undervolted it to keep power consumption low, and that is constraining GPU performance (though not CPU performance, since the chip is 80% GPU and only 20% CPU).
  
  In a desktop system with twice the power budget it might perform quite a bit better. Not twice as fast, but better.
  
  
  
• Intel's discrete GPUs will be available at retail in Q1 2022. (AnandTech)
  
  Finally, we'll have a source of graphics cards not restricted by the limited space available TSMC and Samsung's production lines.

  The fundamental building block of Alchemist is the Xe Core. For manufacturing, Intel is turning to TSMC's N6 process to do it.

  Well, crap.
  
  
  
• The ASRock X570S Riptide has PCIe slots. (AnandTech
  
  Specifically, six of them. Most ATX motherboards these days only have three. With the built-in hardware on those boards you can get away with just one, for a GPU, but if you then add a 10Gb Ethernet card, and one of the slots shares lanes with an M.2 slot, you suddenly run out.
  
  This board gives you one x16 slot, one x4, one x2, and three x1. Which is fine; a PCIe 4 x1 slot is enough for 10Gb Ethernet and nearly enough for dual 10Gb. Plus two M.2 slots, built-in 2.5Gb Ethernet, and the other usual stuff.
  
  
  
• The Polygon blockchain paid a security researcher $2 million for finding a bug and then not stealing $600 million. (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Not crime pays sometimes.
  
  
  
• DDR5 will be 60% more expensive than DDR4, at least initially. (WCCFTech)
  
  Not unexpected, and previous memory generation shifts have been worse.
  
  
  
• Working in tech kind of sucks. (ZDNet)
  
  On the other hand, these people are idiots:

  So pervasive were the feelings of burnout amongst data engineers that 78% said they wished their job came with a therapist to help them manage stress

  
  
• Intel's future depends on making everyone else's chips. (Ars Technica)
  
  No it doesn't.
  
  
  
• Safari is the new Internet Explorer. (The Register)
  
  Chrome supports 94% of the 2021 web compatibility suite. Firefox manages 91%. Safari just 71%.
  
  At my day job the UI team curses Safari constantly. But it's the only browser available on iOS. No matter what you install, it's just Safari with a coat of paint over it.
  
  
  

posted by Pixy Misa at 03:33 AM

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