https://www.tomshardware.com/news/samsun...nand-v-ssd

Quote:Just last week, Yangtze Memory Technologies Co., Ltd (YMTC) revealed 128-layer 3D NAND chips, an upgrade from its previous max count of 64 layers and a new push for non-volatile flash memory and very dense SSDs. Now, it appears that Samsung is feeling the heat. The Korean manufacturer is rumored to be accelerating development of V-NAND that stacks 160 layers tall, as reported by Korean publication Etnews.

According to the report, which doesn't make clear who its source is, Samsung will be using its "Double-Stack" method for developing this new stacked V-NAND, which, as the name implies, uses vertical stacking in a 3D structure. Samsung's Double-Stack method cuts the holes for interconnecting the layers in two steps instead of in one go, as Samsung currently does.

https://www.extremetech.com/computing/30...-customers

Quote:The problem with SMR drives is that when you overlap the tracks like this, it means that there’s no way to write to just a single track without affecting the data on nearby tracks. Writing data to an SMR drive requires that the drive scan multiple tracks at once and then rewrite them. There’s a significant performance penalty for doing so, and that’s not the only issue with SMR drives. Users have complained that SMR drives are so slow, you can’t use them when rebuilding a ZFS array, and that you can’t create a RAID array if you add an SMR drive to it. There are very good reasons, in other words, why customers need to know if they’re buying an SMR drive.

Western Digital disagrees. The company is shipping SMR drives in its WD Red family without disclosing this fact. Customers have already been burned by the swap. If you’ve already used PMR-based WD Red drives in your RAID array, attempting to include SMR drives may not work at all. According to Western Digital, the 8-14TB drives they sell are all based on PMR, while the 2TB-6TB parts are all SMR drives. The performance difference between the two is significant, with the 2TB -6TB drives in the 150MB/s to 180MB/s range, while the 8TB-14TB drives run at 198MB/s to 215MB/s. While SMR drives are cheaper to manufacture than PMR drives, none of the savings is being passed on to customers as far as we can tell.

WD isn’t the only company lying by omission as far as which HDD tech its hard drives use. A number of drives in Seagate’s Backup Plus family are also reportedly using SMR instead of PMR, and again, they aren’t disclosing this fact to customers.
...
Western Digital and Seagate both need to make it clear when their products use SMR and to communicate to customers that these products may not meet their performance or compatibility needs. The difference between PMR and SMR isn’t academic. The two drive technologies are not equivalent, either in terms of compatibility or performance.
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Update (4/16): It isn’t just Seagate and Western Digital pulling this crap. Toshiba has been caught doing it as well, except Toshiba is selling these drives in the consumer P300 desktop line, where they are completely unsuited. Seagate is also selling these drives in consumer products, with both updates provided by Blocks and Files. If you needed a reason to dump hard drives for SSDs, this would be it, right here. If these three drive manufacturers can’t be bothered to tell consumers when they are buying hard drives blatantly unsuited to the task of driving a consumer system, I see no reason why anyone should ever buy a spinning hard drive again, from any vendor.

I don’t like being lied to.

https://www.tomshardware.com/news/doom-e...han-nvidia
There are 3 possibilities:

1. Doom Eternal massively favors AMD cards from 7 years ago vs. Nvidia cards from 7 years ago
   
2. Hardware Unboxed botched the testing
   
3. AMD bribed them
   

Quote:In its testing, Hardware Unboxed found that in pairs of GPUs from AMD and Nvidia, where they used to battle neck-in-neck at their release, AMD's GPUs today come out with significantly higher performance than Nvidia's counterparts in testing Doom Eternal.

Take for example the GTX 780 and its main competitor from when it was out seven years ago, the almighty AMD Radeon R9 290. Back then, the two battled closely with one or the other winning at different games, but in Doom Eternal we see something completely different. Whereas the GTX 780 is able to put down an average of 45 FPS, the R9 290, pushes out 116 FPS on average -- that's more than twice as fast as Nvidia's card!

https://www.extremetech.com/computing/30...raphics-ip

Quote:AMD has released a statement regarding a theft of its graphics IP and what may have been a subsequent attempt to blackmail the company. The statement reads:

Quote:At AMD, data security and the protection of our intellectual property are a priority. In December 2019, we were contacted by someone who claimed to have test files related to a subset of our current and future graphics products, some of which were recently posted online, but have since been taken down.

While we are aware the perpetrator has additional files that have not been made public, we believe the stolen graphics IP is not core to the competitiveness or security of our graphics products. We are not aware of the perpetrator possessing any other AMD IP.

We are working closely with law enforcement officials and other experts as a part of an ongoing criminal investigation.

That’s all the detail we have right now, but these kinds of efforts rarely end well for the parties involved. AMD, Intel, Nvidia, and other semiconductor companies have often cooperated to prosecute individuals who have tried this kind of stunt before. While it might seem ideal for one company to attempt to get a leg up on another by directly copying its product design, this kind of trick is fraught with legal peril for the company that tries it.
...
We’ve reached out to various sources within AMD and several have quietly confirmed that the company is framing the situation accurately. The IP in question wasn’t core to either the competitiveness or the security of future AMD products.

3-19-2020 Outage was my fault

I didn't catch the data center changed name servers.

I changed and came right back up.

3-9-2020

After 20 years of searching for alien life, SETI@Home is shutting down

After more than 20 years of inviting the public to help in the search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI), the distributed computing project SETI@Home is shutting down.

A lasting legacy
The SETI@Home project never did find any evidence of alien life, but it still leaves behind an important legacy as one of the first and most successful examples of distributed computing. Initially, the project intended to try to reach up to 100,000 home computer users, but it was far more widely used than was originally imagined.

Since it was released to the public in May 1999, over 5 million people have participated in the project. It was one of the pioneers of distributed computing, in which volunteers donate processor cycles to allow complex problems to be solved through the use of thousands of computers. Similar projects have sprung up for various functions in recent years

Corona Virus Pandemic of 2020

https://www.techpowerup.com/264172/pci-e...21-rollout

Quote:The PCI-Express gen 6.0 specification reached an important development milestone, with the publication of its version 0.5 first-draft. This provides important pointers to PCI-SIG members on what features and design changes gen 6.0 hopes to bring, and what its all important number is - bandwidth. PCIe gen 6.0 quadruples per-lane bandwidth over gen 4.0 to 64 GT/s (double that of gen 5.0), resulting in bi-directional bandwidth of 256 GB/s in an x16 configuration.

The spec also introduces a new physical layer change, with PAM4 (pulse amplitude modulation) signaling replacing NRZ (non-return to zero), a key ingredient in the generational bandwidth doubling effort. Despite this, PCIe gen 6.0 retains backwards-compatibility with all older generations of PCIe, which could mean the PCIe slot on motherboards may not look any different. PCIe gen 6.0 also introduces FEC (forward error-correction), and has similar per-channel reach as PCIe gen 5.0. Our older article on Intel's proprietary CXL outlines a key feature of PCIe gen 5.0 besides its bandwidth doubling over gen 4.0 - scalability. Although targeting completion in 2021, it could take several more years for the technology to transcend enterprise computing segments and reach the client. PCI-SIG anticipates the need for gen 6.0 kind of bandwidth in the industry by 2025.

https://www.tomshardware.com/news/mac-ma...lwarebytes

Quote:Malwarebytes announced today its annual State of Malware report, which detailed findings for 2019. One of the key revelations is that throughout the year, Macs saw an average of 11 threats per endpoint. Meanwhile, Windows-based systems experienced an average of 5.8 threats per endpoint.

Notably, the number of threats to Macs grew by over 400% year-on-year compared to 2018, making it clear that cybercriminals are favoring Apple operating systems as of late. However, it's important to note that Malwarebytes researchers saw a larger Mac user base in 2019 but said that "when calculated in threats per endpoint, Macs still outpaced Windows by nearly 2 to 1."

https://www.tomshardware.com/news/steam-...le-5-valve

Quote:The Steam Controller was all the hype early in development, but ultimately it saw few adopters and far less love than the community was expecting Consequently, it’s no surprise that Valve has announced that it won’t be making any more. This comes just a year after Valve discontinued Steam Link. It’s not all bad, though. If you’re quick, you can still grab one for just $5.
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Hilariously, the shipping costs more than the controller itself, so the purchase will end up costing you $13 – but even that’s still a great price. Quantities are limited, and Valve is reporting a longer delivery time than usual, so be fast if you still want to score one.