Daily Tech News 31 August 2022

• The world's leading maker of chip making equipment, ASML, can't get the chips it needs to make its equipment to make the chips it needs. (Tom's Hardware)
  
  I'm not sure quite how things got this screwed up, but we've long known that a 100% efficient system can fracture under any minor stress that comes along.
  
  Think of a bridge, for example, that is designed to withstand exactly its predicted traffic load and not one ounce more. Smaller, cheaper, easier to build than a more conservatively engineered bridge - and also a disaster waiting to happen, and not waiting very long.
  
  One of the things that complicated moving house for me was cupboards full of stuff I was keeping against the chance of eventually needing it, from tinned food to computer cables. I threw out - maybe literally - a ton of stuff rather than packing it all up and moving it to the new house.
  
  But if I had suddenly needed a charge and sync dock for a Palm Pilot, or a classic 50 pin SCSI cable with matching terminators, or three cans of borlotti beans for a new stew recipe, I had them. I didn't have to wait six months for the manufacturer to run another batch.
  
  Not an efficient way to manage things at all, right up until the moment that it saves your trillion dollar industry.
  
  I mean, I probably didn't need three cans of borlotti beans, and I doubt ASML does either. But somewhere in between there is a better balance than the current situation.

• Nvidia's GPU sales were down 26% in the most recent quarter. (Tom's Hardware)
  
  And AMD was down around 8%. One of the major problems - particularly for Nvidia - is that blockchain miners have not only stopped buying cards, but are selling of the cards they already had. Or attempting to; reportedly they have not adjusted their expectations to match the current realities of the second hand market and there's a huge glut of cards sitting unsold in China.
  
  
  
• AMD could be launching their Zen 4 3D cache CPUs at CES in January. (WCCFTech)
  
  They have said there will be 3D cache versions of Zen 4 / Ryzen 7000, and hinted that there will be more than one model. With Zen 3 we only got the eight core Ryzen 5800X3D; this time there looks to be 12 and 16 core versions as well.
  
  
  
• The Solana-based OptiFi decentralised finance protocol lost $661k by, uh, accidentally deleting itself. CoinDesk)
  
  On the one hand, oops. On the other hand, the amount is tiny compared to other losses and the company will reimburse its users.
  
  On the third hand, where does the money go in this situation? Nothing of real value has been destroyed, it's just bits on a computer somewhere that no longer do what they are intended to do.
  
  If the amount were large enough you could fork the blockchain just prior to the accident and you'd get the money back. Ethereum did just that back in 2016, which is why there is also something called "Ethereum Classic".

posted by Pixy Misa at 05:42 AM

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