Zoraptor

AMD's CES presentation was certainly full of memable content.. ..but nothing on Zen 3 or big Navi which were my main interests as a consumer of electronics. I'm not particularly worried about no big Navi news though, and don't think it means anything for when it's coming. I didn't watch the Intel presentation but the general reaction does not seem to have been positive.

Don't ask me why, but it's working again. I was installing a new SSD in the m2 slot which was why the Vega came out in the first place and it wasn't working, replaced the old SSD (so fully removed the Vega again to get there) and it still didn't work, tried my old 580 in both situations and it worked, installed windows on the new SSD and went to bed. This afternoon I though I'd try some more troubleshooting since I had some spare time and the Vega works fine first time. Only thing I can think of is that I might have changed over which 8 pin sockets the two theoretically identical 8 pin power connectors from the PSU went into.

Bit of an understatement, that. That's the memorandum in question, guess there's a bit of wiggle room but not a whole lot and it has effectively been instantly countermanded by Esper anyway. You can't really 'respect the decision to order a departure' and also not depart. Some people are claiming it's a draft that was sent accidentally (no signature makes it a credible scenario too), but even that would be somewhere between deeply disfunctional and utterly incompetent.

Well, that tempted fate. Dead as a dodo. Though I have to put some blame on Gigabyte's motherboard design, SATA sockets, m2, everything they could cram in expansion wise is next to PCIe x16 and inaccessible even with a short single slot graphics card, and a V64 ain't either. Having the m2 there in particular is stupid, why put something heat sensitive under the hottest part of the computer where it won't get any air flow? It's had to be removed about a dozen times and this time the fans didn't spin up afterwards. Under warranty, though I doubt they'll approve an RMA and say I mishandled it.

In a word, yes. If you don't care about paying extra for RTX consider a 1660Ti [or1660S, gods I hate GPU naming schemes] instead. Or wait a bit (couple of weeks?) and see how AMD's 5600s are. Personally I'd go a tier higher or a tier lower instead but for stated purpose a 2060 would be fine.

I haven't upgraded to the newest drivers yet as the big December updates are always a bit shambolic- and it seems pretty dumb to me doing them in December when there's not a lot of time to fix the inevitable bugs so I'm still on a November driver. I had similar symptoms a few months ago though, and it was windows update randomly insisting on installing year old drivers over new ones.

I've got a Vega64 as well and don't regret buying it even slightly. It's been stable, faster than a 1080 after tweaking and despite being a Strix was cheaper too. The power draw is higher but that's my least concern. Since RDNA2 is meant to be the iteration going into the consoles I'd suspect that power efficiency will have been a big factor in its development and differentiation from RDNA1. RDNA1 got a good 'IPC' boost over Polaris/ Vega but to get to a '2080 level' Navi GPU, based on RDNA1's power efficiency, looks practically impossible without big efficiency gains even if the 2080 were the MaxQ variant.

" actually, Both US and Iran are in a 'foreign country'. LMAO Last I checked, Iraq isn't part of Iran... yet. As much as the pro Iranians want it to be. " Actually actually, in the current flare up the US has been targeting almost exclusively- literally except for Soleimani so far as I am aware- Iraqis. Iraqis who are members of the Iraqi security services even. Propagandists call them 'Iranians' because it's the only way to sell killing another country's soldiers who fought ISIS, while being guests in Iraq and guests there supposedly to fight ISIS- and definitely not to pursue an entirely voluntary war post unilaterla JCPOA withdrawal. It's also why all the propaganda from Rubio et al and 'clarifications' from western journalists about the expulsion resolution are deeply misleading at best. Killing Iraqi security personnel and using Iraqi airspace to target foreigners means there is no 'one year cool down' as both break the agreement making it cancellable immediately, and while it requires an executive order from the PM to enact the resolution said resolution was proposed by, well, the same PM who has to approve it. So approval is... somewhat likely. There was also a quorum which seems to be another popular claim. It will certainly be interesting to see if the US actually honours the demand or not.

It might eventually, if Intel sticks with it. Drivers and no (? presumably, certainly the AMD agreement is CPU only) patent cross licensing is going to be a big problem. Larrabee was surprisingly decent but it was a fair while ago now. They do have a lot of talent working on them and unlike at AMD Raja is likely to be well funded. It's a pretty awful time for Intel to be trying to launch non core products though, since their fabs are a mess.

Iraqi parliament has voted to eject Operation Inherent Resolve wholesale, which is actually more than I expected. Thought they might have hedged by not ejecting the non US bits of it and letting them pull out voluntarily. Apparently the US? It was, after all and for those who have paid actual attention, Soleimani who coordinated the Iran-US cooperation in Afghanistan against the Taleban. It was only after noted non rabid dogs Cheney, Dumsfeld, Wolfowicz et al decided to go full Project for a New American Century on Iraq he became a 'rabid dog'. If true, that would almost certainly be another actual war crime, Perfidy.

Wild carrots are white. He's just gone into a shop and bought that trophy!

That will probably have reversed if you're buying after Zen3 is out though, per below. Given the number of security problems Intel has it's certainly difficult to label them as the 'safe' option. I'd also add cooling and their constant socket changes to Intel's costs, generational upgrades require a new mobo and to get the better performance out of a k series you have to buy a good cooler. To be fair, Zen3 will probably be the last Zen on AM4 too, but that is after a good run. There is meant to be a significant price cut with whatever lake (comet?) the 10000 series is and they are meant to have HT turned on which should make Intel at least a bit better price/ performance wise, and at least against the 3000 series. OTOH IPC is actually meant to have regressed slightly but measurably due to security mitigations which is likely to counter any marginal overclocking increases while Zen3 is meant to have a decent IPC increase and should have a small frequency boost too if history is any guide.

I suspect there will be a top card with HBM that will solve the memory bandwidth problem, but it won't be cheap. But then the top nVidia offering is hardly cheap either.

Striking cultural sites- as Trump explicitly just threatened to do- is literally literally a war crime, though for some reason the impartial beeb fails to mention that. And, of course, IranAir 655 had rather more than 52 kidnapped people and they all died while the US awarded Will Rogers III and Scot Lustig medals, so maybe Iran should strike 270 US cultural sites. But one suspects that would be terrorism. US messaging is all over the place. They seem shocked that they haven't had universal support despite spending most of the past three years burning goodwill, not even bothering to inform allies (presumably because they knew the first thing would be them warning Iran because assassinating Soleimani was just that stupid) and this being a conflict that stems directly from the unilateral withdrawal from the JCPOA which everyone except for Bibi and friends including the US itself agreed Iran was upholding; it's to stop a war happening but every preparation shows that it was to provoke a war and every bit of rhetoric is about how they're going to escalate further. And that's when they aren't going complete alternative facts like Pence claiming Soleimani was involved in 9/11. The big irony is that Trump won't get impeached, for this, just for having some weapons that Ukraine wasn't going to use turn up a couple of months later than scheduled.

Tom's may well be right about nVidia's intentions as of now, but TSMC per pretty much every source has no spare capacity, now, since instead of there being at least three 'open' 7nm processes available- Samsung, TSMC, GloFo/ IBM and no an extent even Intel's 10nm was meant to be available to 3rd parties- there is only really TSMC working as of 2020. So they'll just have to wait until there is spare capacity and (if rumours are to be believed) existing customers are being given first right of refusal to extra capacity hence AMD doing 7nm laptop chips ahead of their expected time and not long after their 3000 series laptop chips were released. The rumours that nVidia were intending to be all in at Samsung were pretty strong and very persistent over a long period and from multiple sources. If they didn't book capacity they aren't magically going to get it and it's highly unlikely TSMC would kick loyal customers for a disloyal one. As for MCMs, programmers didn't want to deal with multi core CPUs for a long time either. Some of AMD's patents suggest they have solutions to some of the potential problems anyway, and nVidia is definitely looking at them as well.

The 'black elves' are meant to be dryads, aren't they? Still kind of weird but from what I understand everyone from actor to make up artist to directors hates using body paint which would be the alternative.

Eh, pretty strong rumour is that nVidia's 7nm is not announced due to them committing to Samsung 7nm instead of TSMC and Samsung's 7nm process being about as broken as Intel's 10nm- so nVidia cannot get top tier chips off it, TSMC's 7nm is by all accounts fully booked until their next plant comes online and Apple finishes up their orders, so even if nVidia wanted to do a 7nm release they cannot. And given Jensen's abysmal interpersonal skills who knows if he's burnt the bridges to TSMC along with the bridges to Intel, MS and Sony. Not that it really matters so far as nVidia is concerned, at the moment. AMD actually has no problem at all with raw performance, Vega was so popular for mining because it had great raw number crunching power. RDNA is also equal to Turing there. Their problem is turning their theoretical performance into practical performance and competing with stuff like nVidia's texture compression (albeit that ensures I'll never buy nVidia, while faster I find their colours to be badly washed out). AMD's real advantage will come when/ if they can start producing 'proper' APUs as that will eat nVidia's low/ mid end desktop and laptop lunch and when they've got Infinity Fabric/ Multi Chip Module video cards. On the V64 vs 5700xt comparison, remember the 5700xt only has 44 CUs vs a V64's, uh, 64. There's a pretty significant practical performance increase on a like to like basis, around 40%, it's just hidden by not having an RDNA card with 64CUs to do a direct comparison. End of the day matching nVidia in performance is irrelevant anyway, practically. Even when they've beaten nVidia in basically everything- price, performance, efficiency- nVidia has more sales; the 570 brutally murdered the 1050/Ti price performance wise yet the nVidia card sold better. [I'd put money on the actual top AMD card not being the rumoured 2080Ti competitor Navi21/ 80CU with that being the tier 2 card]

Trump simply doesn't have the ability to 'think' about such things, he lacks any depth of knowledge or critical acumen beyond seeing everything as a business transaction. Situation would have been something like he'd have got a phone call from Netanyahu urging him to 'eliminate a terrorist' and done it with no one left to tell him that it's the equivalent of eliminating the US SecDef, if the US SecDef happened to also be George Washington- Soleimani was ludicrously popular in Iran, even US surveys had him at 80% approval. He was also ludicrously popular in places the US really needs for when they'll be kicked out of Iraq, like Iraqi Kurdistan since Soleimani lead the Iranian response to Anfal and Saddam's chemical weapons attacks on the Kurds at a time when the US was still arming Saddam and claiming it was Iran framing Iraq for the CW attacks. Of course, the main US supporter there and his party was actually working for Saddam while his compatriots were being gassed...

I've never had any significant technical problems with Origins software (or uPlay for that matter). Very occasional crash, but I'm talking once or twice over multiple years. Only ever used it as a launcher though so I have no comment on its other aspects, but then Fallen Order is also single player so Origin would be just a launcher for it The only 'moral' reason not to was for people who believed poor multi billionaire monopolist Gabe Newell was being bullied, bullied, by nasty EA refusing to give him 30% of their PC revenue. Even that is out of date now.

Hmm. CNN did not break the story of Libyan slaving. It's been going on since 2012 so it took them 5 years to report on it. They did however try to run interference by blaming ISIS for it. Which as with most good propaganda is true, from a certain point of view, however... There's massive slaving still going on despite ISIS practically not existing any more in Libya. The primary slavers are, surprise surprise, western backed militias- and always have been. The collapse of Libya was 100% due to the west. Not the US in this case which largely got dragged along by its allies, but due to that noxious dwarf war criminal Nicolas Sarkozy wanting to cover up getting illegal donations from Gaddafi. Libyans were literally 100% better off under Gaddafi in every conceivable way and every conceivable measure, including the possiblity of arbitrarily being tortured or killed from which the threat now comes from a befuddling array of possibilities rather than just if you challenged Muammar. The popular revolution was so powerful that even with NATO illegally acting as its airforce the rebels still took 6 months to win.

Iraqi TV and a Hezbollah TV channel (and secondary sources like Al Jazeera quoting them) are reporting that the US has droned Qassem Soleimani and PMU head al Muhandis. If so, it's difficult to see anything other than outright war following, but there are also sources (eg BBC Arabic) denying it and the whole situation is pretty murky- the initial reports were of an attack being made on US troops at Baghdad Airport. Given that 10 Iraqi soldiers proper are also reported dead or injured I'd suspect at very least the US is going to be 'invited' to leave Iraq in the next few days.

Libya having huge migrant exploitation and literal slave markets has been known for absolute ages, but nearly no one in the press wants to actually report on it- mostly because it would involve strong tacit criticism of an intervention they were wildly supportive of and make other interventions they're wildly supportive of harder to sell. The really weird thing about Libya is the split in who supports which faction. Sworn enemies in Syria- Russia, Syria; UAE, KSA, France and Israel along with Egypt which was broadly neutral- all teaming up to take on the Turkish backed formal government in Tripoli, and Turkey is even flying in the jihadi mercenaries it used in its ethnic cleansing campaign in northern Syria as expendable cannon fodder.

Beeb's understating it, by a fair bit, though it's a lot clearer in the South Island today than yesterday when that pic was taken. Here in the northern North Island it's pretty much like a London afternoon, a bit hazy and very yellow light but not Mars sandstorm. Should probably be said that the phenomenon leading to the fires is 100% natural (Indian Ocean dipole, for those familiar more with Pacific patterns it's basically El Nino just for the Indian Ocean) but the severity has been made a lot worse by warming temperatures. Think my favourite ScoMo comment was saying that "now isn't the time to talk about climate change and anyone doing so was playing politics with tragedy". Not a dfirect quote, but certainly the gist of it.

Largely reporting bias due to Betelgeuse being well known and 'everyone' wanting to witness a supernova- stars dim (or brighten) all the time, they just don't tend to make the news because GCK53421B doing it isn't very catchy. Somewhere, someone just choked on their empanada.

The sky is orange here, and we're 1500km of sea and a decent sized mountain range away. They've had to add a new 'fire haze' graphic to the weather forecasts. Might possibly be a good idea to start paying those 'volunteer' firefighters who've been working non stop for months, eh Mr Morrison?