Daily Tech News 1 September 2022

• As we head into spring the weather here in New House City is trending towards what would be a chilly midwinter week in Sydney. But since it never gets particularly cold in Sydney, and this house is built for cold weather, it's actually quite pleasant.
  
  My daily heating bill is coming down too; yesterday it was about half what it was during the coldest days of July. Which is good because while Australia hasn't had Europe levels of energy crisis - we export LNG rather than import it - it sure hasn't gotten any cheaper.
  
  And the garden is starting to bloom. At some point I'll have to find out what these plants are.
  
  
  
• The CEO of Turkish crypto exchange Thodex, who looted his customers of $2 billion in crypto assets and fled to Albania, has been caught and extradited and now faces 40,000 years in prison. (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Pour encourager les autres.

• Arm is suing Qualcomm and its newly acquired subsidiary Nuvia because although Qualcomm has an Arm architecture license and Nuvia has an Arm architecture license, Qualcomm is not permitted to use Arm architecture developed by Nuvia. (Tom's Hardware)
  
  This seems shortsighted by Arm, because it eradicates the whole chip design startup model - build a better CPU and get acquired by one of the big players.
  
  
  
• The Asus Zenbook 17 Fold is a 17" laptop that folds to become a 12.5" laptop. (Tom's Hardware)
  
  This is one of those things that might be great someday when the technology crosses over a some threshold but right now is an expensive gimmick.
  
  
  
• The first leaked independent benchmark of the Ryzen 7950X looks promising. (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Integer performance is 23% faster single-threaded and 45% faster multi-threaded; floating point is 22% and 38% respectively.
  
  Cryptography is 70% faster single-threaded, which is a huge boost likely attributable to support for AVX-512 - new instructions that can process 512 bits of data per cycle instead of the usual 256.
  
  A couple of interesting things about AVX-512: First, AMD supports the instruction set but didn't bother to increase the hardware to 512 bits - which makes the chip larger, more power hungry, and more expensive. Instead they use the existing 256 bit floating point unit twice. The new instructions are still better suited to certain tasks so even with this cheap and cheerful approach they get between 30% and 150% better performance.
  
  Second, AVX-512 is an Intel instruction set, but no Intel consumer CPUs support it. It's in Alder Lake chips, making those chips larger, more power hungry, and more expensive... But they've deliberately disabled it.
  
  
  
• Speaking of AMD it looks like the full lineup of Zen 4 server CPUs has leaked. (WCCFTech)
  
  Up to 128 cores, 1152MB of L3 cache, 4GHz clock speeds, and 400W TDP, though not all at once.
  
  The lineup is divided into single and dual socket Genoa chips with up to 96 cores and optional 3D cache, and dual socket Bergamo chips with 112 or 128 cores at lower clock speeds.
  
  Genoa is built on 5nm; Bergamo will come along a bit later on TSMC's 4nm process.
  
  
  

posted by Pixy Misa at 04:10 AM

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