Zoraptor

Good to see some self reflection from you for once, as you are indeed spouting BS. Now if only you could recognise it more often you wouldn't think Russia was going bankrupt in 6 months, think you were an expert in earthquakes having never heard of the Mercalli scale, nor complain about how people opine ignorantly on the US while telling me how reality in New Zealand exactly matches your personal experience, in the fricking Dakotas. And then there was your defence of Iraq policy and how the US didn't lie... Still, at least this time you've managed to find a transcript, unless your mythical Hans Blix video, and it's actually relevant. Small improvements, baby steps, but credit where due. It actually does show the three previous questions had nothing to do with foreign policy, with the bit you highlighted was Johnson supplying a difference between the mainstream parties- and yours personally- beloved policy of blowing up random brown people for reasons either malign or so utterly and repeatedly moronic as to be functionally malign though. And you omitted the context at the end where it was clear he did know about Aleppo. Funny that. And reminder, these journalists were all creaming themselves over Trump bombing Syria, and it was the one thing he had near unanimous support over. No wonder war hawks hate someone who doesn't want hundreds of thousands of more dead, millions more refugees and trillions of wasted dollars.

Obviously sent by Vladimir Putin or the Ayatollah Khamenei. You should do the exact opposite of what it suggests, if you're a true patriot. Thing is, the actual answer to the question once he got the clarification was fine. Not particularly enlightening or anything, but you don't go to US politicians for nuanced and balanced views of the ME anyway unless you're a raging neocon/ neolib. Ironically- or not- that is of course what philosophy most US media subscribe to, cue Trump only becoming a 'true President' after bombing Shayrat from otherwise noted Trump fan Bryan Williams... The main reason the Johnson/ Aleppo incident happened was not because of ignorance- though inexperience with interviewer technique was definitely a factor- but because it was clearly intended as a gotcha question; supplied by the interviewer with no context out of the blue. Like asking a series of questions about car mechanics then asking someone what a 'microbe' is. Of course someone might be baffled by that question, the previous ones were about tire pressures and which oil grade to use in an older engine and they're naturally going to be thinking that a 'microbe' is something to do with a car. For Johnson the footage was also, consistently, edited maliciously to omit the (lack of) context to the question and his response after he got the clarification.

Hunter Biden is clearly corrupt- or an abject moron. His only qualification for a position at Burisma was being Joe Biden's son. That's just how Ukrainian business operates, you give directorships or other positions to relatives of powerful people and you get wheels greased in return; that's why Ukraine is the most corrupt country in Europe. If he weren't Joe Biden's son he wouldn't have been considered in a million years. That equally certainly doesn't mean that Joe Biden himself has to be corrupt though, he can't control what his son does. And it also has to be said that Trump is definitively not in a position to throw many stones when it comes to family corruption.

There's certainly an element of majority bias at play, one of the historic criticisms of Time Spy as a benchmark was that it forced AMD cards that could do proper async compute to use a crappy fallback instead-- because nVidia cards didn't support proper async compute and could only use the crappy fallback. (Though that shouldn't be a reason for a performance difference now, since 2000 series+ do have proper async)

We simply don't know enough to say much at all. Are the leaked benches even all the same chip? And it's not like Engineering Samples are all set up the same, even if they are the same chip we don't know if they're doing full power runs or whatever. Even the official benchmarks from the Ryzen presentation didn't say what chip it was. It's also kind of pointless engaging in speculation with so little time to go before we find out for reelz, but if my arm was twisted and assuming they are for the same general chip and set up... ..if there isn't some sort of semi deliberate chicanery going on like doing a combined CPU/GPU benchmark with a tricked out Zen3 vs a 2080Ti w/ a Celeron it could be the 'infinity cache' at work; CPU side some benchmarks absolutely love the big caches on Zen2/3 so similar could happen with video benchmarks. I'd suspect that would also be a lot more likely on an older benchmark.

Igor is out of line with most other estimates there, though not massively so. Around 280W seems to be the general consensus, and the PCB shot that leaked supports that since the VRM set up is robust, but less robust than a 3080. Though as with below that may be for a 6800XT rather than putative Biggest Navi. That graphic is likely wrong. Not the data itself, but the assumption that the benchmarks are for a 80CU unit. The leaks are from AIBs, and the consensus is that AIBs have only got Biggish Navi 6800XT (72CUs and down, most likely) with Biggest Navi(s) being 1st party AMD only, and AMD v2020 in comparison to Intel or nVidia leaks less than someone wearing half a dozen Depends. Guess we find out for sure in 100 odd hours anyway.

I was expecting a Daily Fail link to be honest. Don't see any problem with Subway 'bread' not being bread yet vegie snags or patties still being OK to be called that. Bread is a product where the majority of added sugar gets eaten by yeast (or there is no yeast or sugar). If you have lots of excess sugar then it's a cake. Vegie burgers or sausages are in my experience always labelled as being vegetarian because it's a selling point that they are, so there's no confusion. OTOH, I'm outraged about bananas having to have a certain curvature and cucumbers not being allowed to have any curvature, bureaucracy gone mad I tell you!

I'd say that Jun/Jul 2021 is at least plausible. I certainly find the rumours of bulk production at TSMC in 2021 to be rather unlikely given the sheer volume of wafers bulk production for nVidia implies, but I could see the top SKUs there by the middle of next year if they've moved to get capacity quickly enough- and Jensen hasn't worked his unique interpersonal magic. I'd suspect a lot of work had already been done for a potential TSMC release. GA100 is already there, and as was discussed here fairly extensively at the time nVidia was stating outright that TSMC would be used for some consumer units up until fairly recently. The initial chip lineup for Ampere was supposed to be GA100/2/3/4, we currently have A100 with GA100, 3090/80 with GA102 and 3070/60? will be GA104, so there is a potential 'missing' GA103. Personally, I would not be in the least bit surprised if GA102/3 were TSMC/ Samsung versions of the same basic chip with the TSMC one being shelved due to no capacity being available, or Samsung offering a deal too good to be refused.

That debate was infinitely better than the last one- not exactly glowing praise considering how bad the last one was.

12GB would have been a sensible compromise for the 3080. I hit more than 6GB VRAM used for 1440 ultrawide on games like Metro Exodus (not on the top settings either), and Watch Dogs Legion's top spec calls for 11GB- and it does look a bit bad that there is already a game that the 3080 is, at least technically, below top spec for. That would have required a bigger bus or 970 type compromise though, and the 3080 is already a large chip on quite tight margins with regards to heat. I wouldn't advise it at least yet. The TSMC switch is purely theoretical, and the release would be probably June-ish if they'd made the decision today. Samsung 8nm and TSMC aren't design compatible, the only Ampere chip we know nVidia has that is ready (and already in production) for TSMC is GA100 which isn't consumer and the spare capacity at TSMC from Huawei/ Apple has already been taken up, ironically mostly by AMD but they'd also be likely to be competing for space with Intel too by that time.

The alleged and never announced 16/20 GB versions of the 3070/80 have equally allegedly been cancelled. Cue lots of wags asking if the 10GB version of the 3080 is still due to be released sometime or not... The rumour of the cancellation of a rumoured product is mostly interesting because of the other rumour floating around, that nVidia wants to do a TSMC based refresh of 3000 series already. Not that extra memory made much sense anyway except to increase thermals even more unless you were a content creator type, in which case nVidia would probably prefer you to buy a 3090 or a pro card anyway.

Setting your own winning conditions is great, as it's only limited by your imagination.

Oh god yes. Absolute pet peeve of mine. It's in the name people, an RPG is Rocket Propelled; something like a Panzerfaust or PIAT is not Rocket Propelled so it's not an RPG.

We are having our own little election here and it's been an utter massacre. Jacinda Ardern is currently toasting the party with a cup fashioned from the hollowed out skull of her opponent and filled with the tears of the National Party faithful. No news on the two referenda (euthanasia and cannabis legalisation) for two weeks sadly. 2 million early votes, and we'll know the result in we already know the result, for all practical purposes. Would be relevant- if I was saying that the initial Soviet war strategy was competent. Think I'll just leave it at that this time.

I think it's very likely- close to certain- that they can detect stealth planes more or less fine. It's being able to do enough fast enough with that detection which I think is the more pertinent question. Even 20 years later you could still shoot a stealth plane down with a S-125 so long as you know when and where to fire the missile; it's the when and where which is the difficult part and that gets a lot more difficult as the range of the missiles increases to the distance a S400 is capable of. The interest in the salvage was probably for the electronics/ avionics more than the stealth tech per se. The geometry of RCS reduction is not all that advanced and even a layman can infer the basic principle of it via observation. The stealth tech they might well have been interested in was the radar absorbing materials, but even then finding something that absorbs radar wavelengths isn't that difficult. IIRC the US was also still having difficulties with that paint perishing rapidly from sunlight and water at the time that F117 was brought down.

That article is not exactly... definitive in its conclusions. They infer that Turkey could detect them because they didn't publicly complain about not being able to. (They almost certainly can detect them by using detection bands where the stealthing is ineffective, the trade off is that those bands are a lot less useful for guiding missiles to target. Since Turkey was part of the F35 program they may well know a decent amount about its stealth capabilities and how to exploit any weaknesses)

Would be relevant- if I was saying that the initial Soviet war strategy was competent. But I was only saying that their political strategy was, and that it mirrored that of the allies with the exception of being successful. Sure, Soviet deployment was idiotic, Stalin actively ignoring that an attack was coming was worse than idiotic and the initial strategic response was about the worst imaginable combination of ossified theory and a top down central command devoid of connection with reality but that doesn't mean anything for the political set up, just that Stalin squandered said set up. Which was completely in character. Having said that if there was one thing that Hitler, Churchill and Stalin all had in common it was that disaster near inevitably followed when they interfered in military matters. Sheesh, Churchill would have had Britain at war with the USSR and Germany- and Norway (!)- simultaneously if he had his way but fortunately Chamberlain was still PM in early 1940. And given all the squandering that went on it is still militarily significant that the M-R pact occurred. The Germans got within eyesight of the Kremlin from a starting point halfway through Poland, if they'd been able to launch from within spitting distance of Minsk they'd almost certainly have got to Moscow proper. Whether they'd have taken it or whether taking it would have 'won them the war' are both of course open questions. I'm sure the 25 million Soviet war dead appreciate all the British efforts to help. Shame that they didn't make a bit more of an effort to contain Hitler a few years earlier, if they had those 25 million would likely still be alive not have died.

Aggressors vs Poland, sure, though from the soviet perspective the choice was all of Poland under Nazi occupation or half of it. Expecting them to fight for a country that was rabidly anti soviet and had conquered a big chunk of Byelorussia not even two decades before was a pipe dream. OTOH that was exactly what the western powers hoped for. Much as the M-R pact was appeasement by the Soviets Munich was appeasement by the western allies, and it was that which convinced Stalin that the allies would not be reliable. The Soviet strategy was to delay fighting Germany as long as possible- but that was also the western allies' strategy too with both sides trying appeasement. The Soviets were just more successful. The Soviets had also been trying to get some sort of unified response to Nazism for ages. Sure, it's understandable that the western allies weren't enthusiastic about much to do with the soviets, but they also did almost nothing at all independently against the Nazis. Their response to the Spanish Civil War was supine, jelly like; pathetic hand wringing that made the response to the Rwandan Genocide look robust. At least the Soviets actually did do something. I'm always slightly amused by "if it weren't for the winter.." because basically nobody ever says the equally logical corollary- "if it weren't for summer existing the Germans wouldn't have got near Moscow". Both seasons are, after all, inevitable and if you go into Russia not expecting it to be cold it doesn't speak well for your competence*. IIRC much like Napoleon's winter in 1912-3 the Winter of 41-2 even started out mild, and it was the equally inevitable autumn Rasputitsa which did the vast majority of the damage in terms of stalling momentum. Stalin's expectations really depended on the times. Initially he was expecting the allies and nazis to fight each other to a bloody standstill and then sweep in to mop up the leftovers. Ironically, that was what the allies expected before M-R, just with the obvious substitution of the soviets for the allies. After June 1940 it became a matter of deferring the nazi attack for as long as possible, but if things had gone to expectations an attack on a Germany bogged down fighting France and Britain in 1941 was certainly plausible. As it was Soviet deployments in 1941 were made for attack rather than defence, with almost all troops distributed along the border itself which lead to the massive encirclements they suffered (and perhaps more pertinently, the massive losses in equipment since almost their entire air force was shot up in days by the same German airforce that had difficulty bombing the far more geographically limited Britain). Having said that, even at their most successful stretch in the first 6 weeks of Barabarossa the Germans suffered more casualties than the previous 21 months of war combined. *ok, it was ultimately a choice between transporting ammunition/ war supplies or winter supplies on a very tenuous- and how they must have wished it were literal- logistical train that relied mostly on horses and they decided on the ammunition but still, same mistake Napoleon made despite the example having been set and studied ad nauseum.

I thought it ended that way because Scott Buck feeds on the disappointment and outrage of fans.

Games probably won't require more than an 8/16 processor in any reasonable timeframe, but that isn't to say that more cores won't perform better. Even now most high demand games don't literally require more than 4 cores- stutter fest as they may be on that config- and you can still get by with a 4/8 configuration. But most of the new high end games do benefit from more cores than that; if nothing else a full core will be a lot less likely to be saturated by a workload than a SMT/HT virtual core with 2/3 to 3/4 less performance. AMD has hit the practicality limit of core counts on AM4. Either or both faster RAM or more channels is needed now.

All the brands' support has been pretty decent for Zen, with a few oddities mostly from ASRock and ASUS. My GB x370 Gaming 5 has had BIOS updates up until July this year for the 3000XT processors, so couldn't have asked for much more. For 500 series Gigabyte and MSI in that order have the best regarded boards.

Most people are willing to give Finland a pass for being allies of Hitler, not without reason but still... Or, say, Poland a pass for invading Lithuania when they were fighting the soviets, or taking part in the dismemberment of Czechoslovakia; or Churchill a pass for starving millions of Indians. People are willing to give all sorts of things a pass- or be utterly shocked and appalled- not so much depending on the action itself but on who is doing it. (People also tend to 'forget' that Stalin had tried for years to get an alliance with the western powers against Hitler prior to Molotov-Ribbentrop, and western plans specifically involved getting the Germans and Soviets to fight each other to a bloody stand still while they stayed out of it. Undoubtedly Molotov- Ribbentrop sucked for Poland, but for Stalin it was utter genius. Which he later ruined with the most stupid deployments and grossly gross incompetence leading up to Barbarossa, but that was later)

Not really any clarification. 128MB would fit, but it's definitely a lot of space (~140mm^2, so over a quarter of the die taken up), but it is by far the most commonly cited amount. Personally, if it is 16 GB VRAM and 256 bit bus I'd say it would definitely need more than 128 Mb of cache to compensate or everyone would have smaller buses and bigger caches. Though as I've said elsewhere, this really does seem to be more than touching on the high end problems HBM was designed to solve... AMD itself hasn't invested the time or money, but they have been funded by Sony and especially Microsoft, who have deep pockets and in MS' case a decent amount of independent R&D into relevant fields as well. RDNA2+ will have raytracing, just no separate RT/ Tensor hardware. NextBox will definitely have a DirectML/ Azure DLSS equivalent, AMD may get access to it as well but it's certainly unconfirmed. I'm more than a little skeptical of nVidia on the added specialist hardware front, especially the raytracing side, though I will freely admit there's a healthy dollop of my intrinsic dislike of nVidia potentially at play; but if RDNA2 can get to above Turing performance in raytracing without specialist hardware then much of the point of that specialist hardware has evaporated.

Thought it might be sensible to do a general purpose thread for Radeon as there is for Intel/ nVidiaRTX and Ryzen and speculation was occasionally spilling over Anyway, RDNA2X speculation ahead of the October 28th announcement. AMD has been very restrictive on the leaks, so at this point very little concrete is known. High confidence- explicit statements from AMD or other official or hard to fake sources Big Navi is >40CUs, ie more CUs than 5700XT, and there is more than one 'Big Navi' TSMC 7nm hybrid Raytracing; uses the same hardware for both raster and raytracing performance (from PSXBox information) Navi 21, 22, 23 chips at least 2.2+ Ghz clocks (PS5) (claimed) performance for a big navi card just below RTX3080 (per Ryzen 5000 launch). Phrasing was cagey as to whether it was the biggest navi variant or not; and obviously not independent benchmarking (claimed) 50% perf/watt improvement over RDNA1 Medium Confidence- from leakers with good track records and Apple OSX beta updates (which are solid, but OSX of course isn't windows and for example had RDNA1 cards with HBM that windows never got) 505-540mm^2 for largest die (by way of comparison, 5700XT 40CU was ~200mm^2) 256/192 bit buses 16/12/8 GB GDDR6 non X 128MB (most commonly cited) 'Infinity Cache' on die HBM is definitely supported (but 'confirmed' only for Apple SKUs) Up to 2.5Ghz clocks (Apple) 80CU Navi21, 72CU (and 52CU, if 60 CU 'Navi 22') non XT models Lower Confidence- more speculative, from consoles and inference from leakers with good track records, or information from otherwise good sources where there are significant contradictions DirectML for DLSS equivalent (albeit w/ no tensor cores; definite on xbox but speculative for AMD brands) HBM for consumers at top end 'Biggest Navi' (92-100CU) 280-300W for the 80 CU variant 40CU Navi22 and 32CU Navi23 listed in Apple OSX update; but other sources consistently have a 60CU Navi22, and a 40CU gap from Navi21 ->22 then just 8CUs to Navi23 seems unlikely, so the exact set up is unconfirmed. Speculation is that the raytracing performance will be better than Turing but worse than Ampere. Some sort of large on die cache is now very likely, this should help raytracing performance significantly and compensate for a relatively slow 256 bit bus. Speculated launch date is sometime in November. Availability may be interesting. For a 540 mm^2 GPU chip AMD could make around 7 Zen chiplets and there has clearly been a shortage of fab space at TSMC recently. While that should have eased with some companies shifting to 5nm and Huawei gone if there is supply pressure it's likely to be the GPU side that suffers first because they simply make a lot more money off CPUs for the wafer space.

While the 5600X does have a cooler supplied it's apparently going to be the cheap- and pretty nasty- Stealth rather than the more capable Spire or Prism. Still better than the Intel stock cooler (which the 10700 has, albeit it's a model with some copper contact surface instead of just aluminium), but it's not exactly premium.