Daily Tech News 26 September 2022

• Intel's high-end Arc A770 graphics card is coming October 5. (Tom's Hardware)
  
  On the one hand, any competition for Nvidia and AMD in this space is welcome.
  
  On the other hand, Intel's high-end card is expected to compete with the RTX 3060 or possibly the 3060 Ti, which are low to mid-range cards.
  
  And on the third hand, Intel's dedication to dedicated graphics is dubious, and the entire venture could be dead in two years.
  
  We'll see how they go in the benchmarks, and if the drivers have improved in the past few weeks, because last time the tech sites took a look the driver situation was a disaster.
  
  
  
• Bae case arrives tomorrow. It actually arrived last Friday but I was otherwise occupied at that precise moment and it went away again. Time to camp out in the living room all day where I can see the courier van approaching.
  
  Also, StarTrack? Fix your website. It's one thing to not be able to schedule a redelivery because there's a glitch somewhere, but that took me to the contact form, and that also glitched out... And took me to the contact form.
  
  At least your call center is reasonably efficient.

• The low-end Ryzen 7000 chips - the six core 7600X and the eight core 7700X - are also a big improvement over their respective predecessors. (WCCFTech)
  
  Across multiple benchmarks - including tasks that take advantage of AVX512 - the 7600X averages 48% faster than the 5600X. Meanwhile the 7700X averages 39% faster than the 5800X. And there will likely be a faster 7800X eight core model in the near future.
  
  AMD's implementation of AVX512 is halved but not half-baked. It works by using the existing 256-bit hardware twice, but supports the more advanced AVX512 instruction set. The result is 85% better average performance on code that can take advantage of the new instructions, without the cost in die size and power consumption that comes from a full 512-bit floating point unit.
  
  
  
• JMAP is IMAP but sane. (Unencumbered By Facts)
  
  Which is probably a death sentence on the internet.
  
  IMAP is one of the three main email protocols (SMTP for sending, and POP and IMAP for receiving.) JMAP modernises it by running over HTTPS and using JSON as the data format.
  
  While JSON isn't perfect, the early internet protocols (including HTTP itself) are all text based and each needs its own dedicated parser, and there's a long history of subtle bugs in those parsers leading to disaster.
  
  Every programming language in the world can read JSON data, and the format is simple enough and universal enough that most of the horrible bugs have already happened to someone else.
  
  This makes it much easier to built a reliable email client, just leaving the problem that the big email providers make it almost impossible to deliver email to anyone anymore.
  
  
  
• 58 bytes of CSS to make your web pages look great everywhere, or at least not terrible in most places, probably. (GitHub)
  
  A few variations are provided taking the total payload as high as 200 bytes.

posted by Pixy Misa at 05:07 AM

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