Daily Tech News 11 June 2022

• Did not go below zero last night in New House City, but 2C was quite cold enough when I had to sort through an unheated garage at 2AM looking for the two boxes with all the bedding. They were supposed to be at the top, since they weigh almost nothing (one box was literally filled with pillows), but turned out to be underneath not only multiple layers of boxes filled with books, but under a stack of bookshelves as well.
  
  
  
• Acer has warned of a potential oversupply of laptops as inflation begins to bite and supply chain issues are slowly corrected. (Tom's Hardware)
  
  If you need a new laptop, keep an eye out for bargains on previous-generation models - Intel's 11th generation and Ryzen 5000. They're perfectly good chips, and if manufacturers find themselves with growing inventories, they're likely to cut price to clear them out.

• AMD's Zen 5 - due in 2024 - will be a major redesign with wider instruction issue. (AnandTech)
  
  Both AMD and Intel have been stuck at issuing a maximum of 4 instructions per cycle for the past decade. It's a little more complicated than that... It's a lot more complicated than that, but that's the essence.
  
  Issuing more instructions per cycle makes for a faster CPU, but it also makes for a more complex CPU, and the complexity rises a lot faster than the performance. Still, with clock speeds only gradually drifting higher, and most software only taking advantage of a limited number of cores, it's a key change that designers will have to adopt.
  
  
  
• If OpenSSL were a GUI. (Smallstep)
  
  It's not the only command line tool that looks like this either.
  
  
  
• Is the iPad a substitute for the PC yet? No. (ZDNet)
  
  It never will be so long as Apple maintains its restrictive software practices. High end iPad hardware is powerful enough to act as a general-purpose PC, and the operating system is Unix. But Apple blocks a whole range of useful functionality from appearing in the App Store, and also blocks you from working around that block.

posted by Pixy Misa at 04:00 AM

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