Weekly News Roundup #2 — Target-Bravo

Monday

AMD Computex Keynote

Source https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jy0Q75xCwDU

Realistically what else was I going to write about today? Some really big news here let us start out with the GPU side as there was less here than on the CPU side.

Navi AMD’s new graphics card is based on a new architecture called RDNA this has a claimed performance per watt increase of 50% over their older GCN architecture. Now while they did do some benchmarks no concrete numbers were shown but there was a side by side comparison against Nvidia’s RTX 2070. The Naming scheme for this new series of graphics card is RX 5070. I find this really funny as it was rumoured earlier in the week it was said that AMD would be naming their graphics cards with 30xx or 40xx in the name, This prompted Nvidia to trademark these numbers to protect their RTX lineup for future cards only for AMD to leapfrog them further with the RX5070. We will learn more about AMD’s Navi lineup at E3.

AMD’s new Ryzen 2 CPU’s we have more information on. They have released information on 3 SKU’s 3600x (6c12t), 3700x(8c16t), 3800x(8c16t), and 3900x(12c24t). This once again one-ups Intel in the core game. And with a 15% IPC increase over the last generation brings AMD closer if not equal to Intel in single core performance, This IPC will probably Increase the lead AMD had over Intel in multi-core performance and leads me to question the response from Intel as cramming 4 more cores into their desktop form factor socket would be very tricky thermally as right now the 9900k runs very hot. We also learned that the top price 3800x will be priced at £499 this puts it at price equilibrium with the 9900k, Now if after third-party testing this does equal the IPC of the 9900k it really makes the choice a no brainer as you are getting 4 more cores with the same performance for the same price. Should you be looking for lower core counts the 3800x will be £399 and the lower clocked 3700x £329.

If after review this CPU does live up the hype I may configure an Unraid server to be both my gaming pc (virtualised) and my video conversion computer as the more cores the quicker I can handbrake my physical media onto my NAS.

Tuesday

"Buildzoid will my X370/X470/B450/B350 mobo be good enough for Ryzen 3rd gen" / Maybe

Source https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qn3rd6N9vGM&t=0s

This is a nice little video from Buildzoid, and I'm not going to spoil it too badly so give it a watch and it should allow you to tell if you can or can't upgrade your CPU in your current motherboard or use an older motherboard for your new cpu.

Wednesday

Asus showcases Prime Utopia motherboard concept

Source https://hexus.net/tech/news/mainboard/131150-asus-showcases-prime-utopia-motherboard-concept/

This artical looks over Asus’s newest concept re-imagining the motherboard. I'm going to leave what they have imagined to the article as what they have done will require specialist cases. I am going to discuss what could actually change in the motherboard/case market without changing much.

1. Standardised front panel connector. I can't stress this enough the current one is just plugging pins into pin connectors now some motherboard manufacturers remove some of the pins to save space but if this was standardised to 1 connector for all front panel uses you could make that connector smaller as you don't need to make it for big human hands to plug in one by one.

2. Power distribution. This is not a desperate need but it would help make cases look really nice. What I am thinking of is a power distribution board that sits on the motherboard tray with POGO pins to transmit power to the motherboard this could remove 3 connectors from the front of the motherboard. And if they got creative they could use the mainboard to give GPU’s supplemental power.

3. VRM layout and mounting hole position. While we have monoblocks for some motherboards they are not available for all because of the variations in mounting holes. And to lesser extent variations in the positioning of the VRM. Now while CPU vendors have an exclusion zone for the CPU socket if they also had a spec for the VRM in terms of mounting holes Inductor line(s) and mosfet line(s) this could enable monoblocks on any board that supported the spec and custom VRM cooling as from watching allot of Gamers-Nexus and Builzoid most of the cooling on VRM’s is just a block of metal that heat soaks eventually rather than a heat sink that vents heat using fins.

Thursday

We ain't afraid of no 'ghost user': Infosec world tells GCHQ to GTFO over privacy-busting proposals

Source https://www.theregister.co.uk/2019/05/30/tech_hits_back_at_gchq_ghost_user_privacy_buster/

I can't agree more with the resistance to this proposal. Adding a third “ghost” person to every encrypted conversation is an incredibly bad idea, it means they won't be able to monitor persons of interest but everyone. And as is the way with backdoors if the good guys have access then it won't be long before it gets breached. And it won't be easy to fix as the government who placed that backdoor will want to keep it. This is one of the reasons I stopped using WhatsApp the second it being facebooked. The article is right in saying some poeple will stop updating to remain confidentially encrypted but what I believe more likely is that people who went to these platforms form anonymity will abandon them for platforms that do not comply with these measures. I have tried creating a Rocketchat server with E2E encryption and it's not hard, and in the end the government would have wasted a lot of peoples time and money over something that could be easily gotten arround.

Friday

PCIe 5.0 specification completed

Source https://hexus.net/tech/news/industry/131186-pcie-50-specification-completed/

Well this is supprising, Pcie4.0 is still not in the hands of consumers and yet they now have 5.0. It has taken a long time for PCIE 4.0 to come to market, It was made available back in 2011 and the real reason it hasnt been adopted yet was that 3 was not saturated yet by graphics cards which is what its mostly used for. However storage easily saturates this connection spec, and they have already stated maximising the use of 4.0 with a Gigabyte 4x NVME RAID at 15GB/s sequential read. If you have a look here you can see that even now graphics cards are not limited by the PCIE bandwith, The only use i see for PCIE4/5 right now is for high speed storage arrays in servers.