Zoraptor

I haven't read the books nor have I seen actual spoilers but the obvious plot point from the trailer was set up fairly obviously last season. If it's something else then I guess it isn't all that obvious.

There's a limit to what they can achieve in heat dissipation, even having moved back to solder from thermal toothpaste. Rocket Lake's architecture was initially designed for a far more power efficient node, and a far more dense node, so the chips will be larger and at equivalent clocks hotter than a skylake based equivalent. That's also likely the reason for consumer topping out at 8 cores. The practical improvement should still be better than anything Intel has had since Sandy Bridge. Core is still competitive as an architecture, and any new naming scheme would be a rebranding. At its heart Core descends from a Pentium Pro via Pentium III, so it wasn't itself a revolutionary design- much as with the Bulldozer -> Zen transition a lot of it appearing revolutionary is because its predecessor (Pentium IV) was rubbish.

Not announcing a 5700X certainly seems weird, unless they really are worried about confusion with the 5700/XT graphics card (which should have been predictable). No 5600 makes sense though, it would likely be the most in demand unit yet also be least profitable and they'd inevitably either have little supply which is very bad PR, or have to cut down chips they could sell for more to meet the demand. They had the near perfect budget king this gen with 3300X, if it were produced in enough numbers, and it would be a good candidate for a refresh. Ideally there would be a 4 core Zen 3 chiplet for a 5300X and lower, but that seems to go against AMD's design philosophy of using the same basic chiplet for everything and unless you had something like a 6 core 5500 (2 x 3 ccx) you'd have potential wastage for minor defects or have to sell super budget 2 core units (which are currently still on super duper cheap 12nm GloFo, iirc). They must have considered how the more budget orientated segments will work when making the switch to 8 core ccx so presumably they do have a solution.

To be fair to Intel they certainly do have architectural improvements, and they are pretty decent- on laptop. Both Ice Lake and Tiger Lake had decent IPC gains compared to skylake. Their problems are that firstly the architectural improvements were tied to the failed 10nm node (indeed, upcoming Rocket Lake is pretty much literally Sunny Cove (iirc) backported from 10nm to 14nm) and secondly that unless you can get the new arch also running at 5Ghz+ clocks a lot of that IPC gain will be 'masked' by loss of clock speed. Rocket Lake should have a decent (20% seems likely) IPC gain, but since it almost certainly won't be be hitting 5Ghz due to heat the practical improvement will be less than that.

IIRC Zen launch was only 1700/X and 1800X so 3 SKUs- 1600 (and 1500X) were a few months later (June? rather than March) and the 1300X/1200 and APUs released even later, and not that much time before the high end Zen+ units. Current gen there's an obvious price gap for a 5700X at least, and of course for lower budget options. The error/ defective die rate was/ is low enough it took/ takes a decent amount of time to build up stock numbers for the units that 'needed' defective cores unless they're willing to cannibalise good chiplets. For TSMC 7nm it's ~11% average error chance per single chiplet die (15% per 100mm^2 ~74mm^2 die size for a 3700X; chance is less near the centre of the wafer, more near the edge) and it was even less than that for the GloFo nodes used for Zen/+, hence there being a decent number of 8 core 1600s when they didn't have enough defective dies to meet demand but didn't laser off the extra functional cores. (If the technical limitations aren't too great I'd suspect they'd go for Zen 2 style (or keep Zen2 itself) 4 core ccx for the lower end, they shouldn't be getting many 'natural' Zen3s with 4 dud cores at all)

I doubt they'll have enough stock on hand to meet initial demand and there are several big sales days around their release, but I doubt it will be close to a 3080 type situation of unsatisfied demand for months on end. AMD has picked up extra capacity at TSMC. But yeah, going by the 3950X the 5950X is going to be the one that's hard to get hold of for a while. I'd be a lot more worried about the Radeon side's availability. They can get ~7 $300 (minimum, since with no defects they'd be 5800X at $450) CPUs for the wafer area of a single GPU they may well sell for less than $700, so if there's a supply/ demand mismatch it's likely to be the graphics side that suffers.

God bless you Henry! (Kingdom Come: Deliverance series/ movie adaptation under development, apparently)

I'd have to admit that AMD is the victim of their own success perception wise. A replacement for my 1700 would be more expensive but it would also have +~1Ghz and about +~40% IPC. If you went 3 years back from the 1700's launch in 2017 the increase was... ~6% IPC and nothing clockwise from haswell to skylake? and who cared if Bulldozer had any improvement, even if it did it was from rubbish to slightly less rubbish (and IPC went backwards from the older Phenoms, iirc). And to be fair to AMD, the 3600(x) is selling well below its launch price and has been for some time. That will probably happen with the 5600 at some point too.

It's a big enough (relative, obviously it's not that massive absolutely) price jump that the 10700/k becomes competitive. 1600/ 2600/ 3600 were near no brainers for mid budget gaming over the past 3 years because for GPU bound operation the cheaper option was better since you just needed a 'decent' CPU; and they typically had other advantages over their direct competition like SMT vs HT lacking 8400/9400/9600 and better out of the box cooling. The 10700 is a decent CPU, has HT, and it will be cheaper than the 5600X- though that stock cooler is still a dumpster fire. Probably the 5600 would be cheaper, but there's no announcement on that so it's mythical for now and it isn't like lower AMD SKUs have brilliant availability even this gen- eg the near literally mythical budget king 3300X*. Dunno, just seems like a missed opportunity to really go for Intel's jugular, everything else is great but the pricing gives something to complain about. *Caveat: AMD should have improved fab availability with Huawei gone and Apple migrating fully to 5nm, and presumably the bulk of launch console production is off to assembly by now.

I'm impressed with everything except the pricing. The 5600x will be more than I paid for my 1700 3.5 years ago despite having 2 less cores. Maybe a bit unfair considering that TSMC 7nm is far more expensive than GloFo 14nm and there's a load more cache on the newer chip, but still, the people demand more cores for less money! There was a Big(gish, may well not be Biggest) Navi slide shown at the presentation. Looks like that extra 100W for 10% performance really was necessary for nVidia as 3080 is only just ahead. It's certainly enough to put the 'only a 3070 competitor' to bed. (As noted, 'Badass' quality is the tier above 'ultra' for BL3)

Gah, Rocket Lake is only up to 8 cores. The weird 16/24 config is Alder Lake's big/ little one.

Pretty sure Alder Lake is slated for next year too so they may have a new gen every six months. Then again Alder Lake is meant to be desktop on 10nm so it will almost inevitably slip as every other 10nm product has. The most amazing thing about Rocket Lake (even more than it being 16 core/ 24 thread) is that for once it won't need a new motherboard.

After DivOS2 I'd be very happy with 'a bit over the top and irritating'. Though I guess that was mainly the way every fight devolved into an epileptic seizure inducing clash of environmental effects rather than direct spell effects.

The price differential in Europe is usually cited as being due to typically having high VAT. OTOH Steam definitely does charge GST here while GOG doesn't (? there's a turnover limit for 'having' to charge it, and I'm not sure there's much that can be done if a fully online overseas store refuses to comply) but their pricing is generally identical anyway; and $5 doesn't cover a 15% GST. Given that both BG3 and Cyberpunk have the exact same pricing- $65.08- I'd suspect it's a straight conversion from 99.99NZD 89.95 AUD to USD, which would be the 'typical' retail price. Historically they had (high) regional pricing here due to having to physically distribute relatively few copies over a large area, which did incur some extra costs. They then maintained the elevated prices throughout the shift to downloads which was... more difficult to justify. They're not bad now, but it is mostly due to US prices appreciating while ours haven't changed since the late 90s.

It's got regional pricing, and I'm not in the US. Price is definitely 65USD here. (To be fair- ish- it seems like we're getting less screwed over by regional pricing now because typical US base pricing has risen from 40 ->50 -> 60$ over the past 20 years but ours has stayed static around 100NZD/ 90AUD. We now only pay an extra $5 for the extra distance the photons have to travel)

It's only a 67GB download though, per GOG. OTOH 65USD definitely seems a bit steep for the privilege of beta testing. Bannerlord had a decent discount and cheaper base price.

Do they use any licensed music? I saw someone mention music rights for the first games, and I know the first two games' original soundtracks have had a relatively recent commercial re-release.

Bruce linked to a sites.forbes.com article which is, basically, a blog. There's even less editorial control and oversight there than with an opinion piece in a newspaper/ website. If something from a reputable- and much of the time even semi reputable- source contradicts a sites.forbes article on a matter of fact it's almost certain it's the forbes blog which is wrong. (There are some pretty good opinion pieces from forbes- eg Erik Kain on entertainment- but it's almost entirely useful just for opinion)

Presumably because it doesn't really apply to Trump. Obviously low income would be an appropriate factor for Trump in 2015 and the years previous going by his tax returns, but he at least gets the Presidential income now- not as high as many would think, but which is certainly well above low income.

I'd put 25% at the upper limit of credible improvement, so long as they can get clock improvement as well as IPC it's doable. Zen -> Zen2 was around 15% IPC and 10% clocks so there is precedent. Also, Raja excepted, AMD has tended to underpromise and overdeliver the last few years. Skepticism is good though, that way you can't be disappointed, only pleasantly surprised.

First performance leaks for 5000 series have been found from CPUZ and AotS, showing 20-25% overall performance improvement from 3000 series. Still grain of salt for another week though.

Wasn't Aran'gar technically a lascivious bloke rezzed into a hot woman's body as a bit of irony/ punishment? Or am I misremembering? (loads of implied same sex stuff with the female Aiel and Aes Sedai, can't think of any male homosexuality though)

If Trump had condemned all racially motivated groups it probably would not have made much difference to the critic/ pundit reaction. The commentary would be about how he'd dodged the question of condemning specifically white groups and how he was saying that a BLM guy protesting George Floyd's death and Tim McVeigh were the same in magnitude. Weird as it may be failing to condemn the Proud Boys or whoever is almost certainly not a vote loser for Trump, anyone who viewed such things as disqualifying isn't voting for him anyway. As for why workers and farmers would vote for Trump he does offer more hope for them than the Democrats. What really lost Clinton the election- because it lost her those 3 critical rust belt states- was her telling all those desperate people that they were irrelevant and had to get with the program and become web designers/ programmers/ 'new economy'. If you're offered that as an alternative Trump saying he's going to bring back the jobs and take on Chinese manufacturing offers the only hope. Same for farmers, practically Trump's idea of being pro farming is pro corporate farming rather than pro mom & pop farming, but Hillary (and Biden) are 100% economic orthodoxy including things like the TPP which the farmers feared and Trump got rid of (ironically, the TPP also got far more attractive for all remaining participants as soon as the US left). It doesn't matter if you're offered false hope when the other side is telling you you're on an inevitable spiral to oblivion. I always find it far more 'confusing' why US voters are so keen to vote along moral lines and impose their own morality on others rather than they'd vote for someone who offers them at least a theoretical future vs someone telling you you're a dinosaur staring at an oddly expanding star in the end Cretaceous sky.

If the figure bandied about here is true and 100 million people watched it would be an order of magnitude bigger than any other single thing- conventions, rallies, interviews- in terms of influence. A bit above 130 million americans voted in the last election so at least in theory they reached ~3/4 of the voting electorate in a single go. I do agree on them not being in a vacuum, though that works both ways. Part of it not being a vacuum works in Trump's favour, those Trump wants not voting were those with pre-existing reasons for disliking Biden and who are voting for him more or less solely because he's "better than Trump". The debate was the biggest chance for Trump to target those voters with the idea that they're flip sides of the same coin.

It's always amusing watching people say exactly the same things they said in 2016 now, when they were proven wrong then. Those who don't learn from history are doomed to repeat it and so far the pundit class- and to a large extent the Democratic Party- has repeated just about every mistake from last time. Trump's strategy shouldn't be a winning one, but then his strategy in 2016 shouldn't have been a winning one either, but was. The big problem in getting proper analysis is that most pundits are inside the system and all orthodoxy related to that system- except the last election- says you should not campaign as Trump does. The fundamental problem with the polls is that they analyse voting intentions, not what people will actually do. That debate played into Trump's hand because making the tepid Biden voter disengage is what would win him the election, attracting undecideds or getting people to swap votes is mere garnish. Trump only plays to the undecided voter on the most simple of levels, mostly by shouting about the economy which is always the big ticket item and how he's been tough on China and put America First etc. If every single undecided voter stayed not voting that's fine by Trump- after all, Biden doesn't gain then either- if he splits off the tepid Biden supporters too. Which he does by throwing dirt to make Biden look the same as him, by making the process as unattractive as possible- pie fight debates- and making sure Biden gets dragged into the pie throwing and alienates people wanting something more. If Trump is saying to the Biden supporter "he's just like me, really" and Biden ends up behaving like Trump in the debate it's a win for Trump. Critically, most of the people turned off would still say that they're voting Biden if polled, they just won't when it comes down to it.