Daily Tech News 21 May 2023

• I used to recommend that people only buy SSDs from companies that made their own flash memory and controllers, like Samsung, Intel, and Micron/Crucial.
  
  Intel has quit the industry entirely, Samsung had a series of serious issues with its high-end 980 Pro and 990 Pro drives, and now Sandisk (owned by Western Digital) is suffering drives spontaneously eating all your data. (Ars Technica)
  
  This specific issue has been discussed on Reddit and covered by Louis Rossman and is supposedly due to MacOS constantly probing the drive even in sleep mode and eventually causing a bit to flip that turns on drive encryption without first setting a key and corrupts the entire thing.
  
  Which (a) sounds like something a Mac would do and (b) would not be possible unless the drive was broken in the first place.
  
  The bigger problem being that Sandisk refuses to admit to a problem at all.
  
  So that leaves Micron / Crucial (Crucial is Micron's consumer brand), which hasn't done anything too outrageous except that its low-cost P3 models aren't as attractive for heavy workloads as Team's MP34.

• Intel is looking at making future chips 64-bit only. (Tom's Hardware)
  
  While this would technically break backward compatibility, that's not entirely bad. Nobody is running 8086 code directly on a 13900KS. If you want to play an old game it likely won't work outside of an emulator like DOSBox, and DOSBox won't break with this change.
  
  Removing the two 16-bit modes (8086 and 80286) likely won't cause much fuss and won't require any changes except for BIOS writers who will breathe a sigh of relief, because they no longer have to bootstrap up through those two modes to reach 32-bit and 64-bit mode.
  
  Removing 32-bit mode is a bit more controversial. Apple did it and it broke stuff everywhere, but Apple's approach to this has always been that it's your own stupid fault for buying their products in the first place.
  
  
  
• 6+8=16. (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Intel's new 16 core Meteor Lake chip really does have 6 Performance cores and 8 Efficiency cores on the CPU chiplet, because all Meteor Lake chips have two additional Efficiency cores on the I/O (Intel call it the SOC) chiplet. The extra two cores are extra low power, designed to keep running when your computer is in sleep mode, doing stuff you don't know about and didn't ask for.
  
  
  
• Run Linux.
  
  
  
• It still does things you don't know about and didn't ask for - systemd I'm looking at you - but at least everything is documented. Somewhere.
  
  
  
• Is the Internet of Things - what I call the Internet of Insecure Pieces of Crap - insufficiently broken? If so, surely the solution is to add ChatGPT. (Atomic14)
  
  Yep. If it's not broken enough now, that will solve the problem.
  

posted by Pixy Misa at 04:00 AM

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