Weekly News Roundup #6
Monday
The new Raspberry Pi 4 is ready for 4K video
With this amount of power, I can think this starts to look feasible as a very slim desktop pc for some business environments. If you run a call centre that just needs a browser for your telephony and you can use the online version of outlook this will look like a very nice option as the average desktop pc will cost you £300. I want to pick one of these things up and see how effective the arm version of windows is, And if I can then use it on a domain. Though I think I will have to go for the 4GB for this use.
Tuesday
AMD Ryzen 5 3600 review breaks cover early
https://hexus.net/tech/news/cpu/132050-amd-ryzen-5-3600-review-breaks-cover-early/
Of note is that the results for this are on an X470 and it seems as though the public bios is not quite ready yet as any change to the multiplier causes to freeze. Some good things are that even with the broken bios the 6 core is matching the 8 core 9900k in 3d Mark Time Spy so there is the potential is there we just need to see what happens with working BIOS.
Wednesday
RIP Dyn Dynamic DNS :'( Oracle to end Dyn-asty by axing freshly gobbled services, shoving customers into its cloud
https://www.theregister.co.uk/2019/06/25/oracle_dyn_cloud_axed_2020/
For a long while back in the days when Virgin Media was NTL I used this service for VPN-ing into my old home network. It was nice that someone offered a free service that allowed me to connect to the things on my home network then without having to remember my daily changing dynamic IP. You may have had to have the inconvenience of confirming your DynDNS name every month but back then it was not much of a chore. I now use a paid service from NoIP however it's sad to see one of these free services go under thanks to corporate greed, This kind of service helps people that can't afford to pay or don't want to pay to be able to get into their home or home office network remotely.
Thursday
Intel’s Internal “AMD Competitive Profile” Memo Revealed- AMD Competing On Perf/Dollar A Huge Risk For Intel, Acknowledges AMD As Formidable Competition
https://wccftech.com/intel-amd-competition-performance-per-dollar-risk-epyc-ryzen-threadripper-core/
It's nice to see that Intel is finally taking notice in AMD, However they are also trying to belittle any performance metrics that AMD is beating Intel with saying that it is a cinebench is a “synthetic test” and the best results will be in real-world work. I have a problem with this statement while synthetic benchmarks are designed to take advantage of both cores and IPC available to them, Real world work has been designed to work with the 99% of hardware on the market which until now has been 4c/8t parts that Intel has stuck us with for the past 10 years. Which means its most work is still single thread and will like single core IPC, Some work does take advantage of 8t and very small amounts of work have been designed to take advantage of more than that. I'm hoping with the advent of 16c32t on desktops we will see workflows that start to get designed to work more like benchmarks and take advantage of any hardware available to them, would be even nicer to see this using GPU compute as well at some point as well.
Friday
NVIDIA 'Super' GPU leaks hint at not-so-super speed boosts
https://www.engadget.com/2019/06/28/nvidia-rtx-super-graphics-card-leaks/
This is looking like a the graphics card industry equivilant of the second year iphone refresh, where the outside looks the same and you get a little spec boost. This also seems like Nvidia was holding onto this spec boost in the event of an AMD push, and has me wondering could this have been done earlier? As this is just putting more CUDA cores and memory controllers into the DIE it seems like its something that Nvidia could have actually done as the initial release and was just holding back because why offer more performance when you dont have to! Its frustrating seeing this considering what we have been seeing in the cpu space with intel holding back core count for years to finally release high core count only when pushed. I am hoping the same does not proove true for the GPU space.