Independent Experts United
Ars Technica published a look back at the rise and fall of Firewire.
Some highlights that jumped out to me: the connector was based on the original Game Boy connector, down to the pins. The original working name of the standard was ChefCat. Sony didn’t use the name “Firewire” in Japan because they thought it made Sony sound boring.
AMD Epyc sounds pretty epic, with epoch-defining memory, I/O, and even cores of a dual-socket server in a single socket. And that’s something to get excited about, especially considering that the Zen cores inside these chips are almost at IPC parity with Intel’s latest, and can handle dual threads like Intel, too.
A decade ago, flash began changing the storage market in profound ways. We’re now seeing similar disruptions with NVMe. But the speeds of the new interface bring to light new bottlenecks for performance, especially at scale. Intel designed their Storage Performance Development Kit to specifically focus on driving down latency to allow for scaling that borders on linear.
The race for desktop CPU dominance has proceeded in fits and starts for three decades, with improvements in architecture, manufacturing process, and clock speed ratcheting up performance. Now Intel is announcing high-end desktop CPU’s with many, many cores, including the long-awaited Core i9 series.
Intel’s Itanium processors remind me of the promise of every musical supergroup. He see the individual parts and think, “how could this not be awesome?!” Yet in the end, you’re left with a whole less than the sum of its parts. An overly ambitious, bloated, and unnecessary being is usually the result.
Intel isn’t known as a networking company, but they think they have a play in the network functions virtualization market. The round table discusses what future Intel has in the space, and how they compete with more historic players in the market.
It’s a question that’s boggled the great minds of our age. What’s the absolute cheapest modern PC you can make? I decided to find out. Welcome to the grotesque world of bargain basement PC building.
After hearing about it for too long, Intel finally released its first product using 3D XPoint memory, the Optane P4800X. For a cool $1,520, you can buy the 375GB PCIe based SSD.
At the Open Compute Summit, AMD went into some more details about it’s high end server CPU, codenamed “Naples”. At one time, the company’s Opteron processors were used in supercomputers. While never the dominant force in the data center, AMD had carved out a niche. The last decade has proven more problematic in the enterprise. AMD thinks Naples is not only competitive with the best from Intel, but will serve as a bulwark against what they describe as the problem of server “incrementalism”.
Ryzen really comes into its own when used for more professional applications. It routinely bests Intel’s fastest Core i7 in video and 3D rendering. This is where the silicon’s 8 cores and 16 threads really come to life. It’s other area of strength is in scientific and engineering applications. It doesn’t all out dominate Intel here, but trades top spots depending on benchmarks. If performance per dollar is important, AMD really separates themselves here.
