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OCAU News |
Tueday Afternoon
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Tuesday, 8-August-2017 17:03:22 (GMT +10) - by Agg
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Phoronix have been investigating an issue with Ryzen CPUs segfaulting under load. In their latest article they have a response from AMD. AMD engineers found the problem to be very complex and characterize it as a performance marginality problem exclusive to certain workloads on Linux. ... AMD was also able to confirm this issue is not present with AMD Epyc or AMD ThreadRipper processors, but isolated to these early Ryzen processors under Linux.
If giant fighting robots is your thing, you may be in luck soon. Two summers ago, a group of American roboticists formed a company called Megabots, and released a video challenging a Japanese collective to a giant robot fight. About a week later, the Japanese group, Suidobashi Heavy Industry, agreed to clash robots. After over two years of robot-building and excessive YouTubing of the process—and a year after MegaBots originally said they would fight—the two teams are nearly ready to engage.
The Net Neutrality debate continues in the USA, with Congress taking the FCC to task in a recent report. How and to what extent the FCC should regulate internet access has been a hot question for years, and the present administration holds opposite views than the previous one, resulting in a proposal to eliminate 2015’s Open Internet Order. But Congress (or at least a few of its members) isn’t going to take that lying down: 10 Representatives who helped craft the law governing the FCC itself have submitted an official comment on the proposal ruthlessly dismantling it.
Back to AMD, with the first single rack PetaFLOPS computer. On Monday, AMD unveiled a tiny supercomputer called Project 47 that achieves a whopping 1 petaFLOPS while being stuffed inside a single server rack. 1 petaFLOPS is equal to the world’s most powerful supercomputer circa 2007, IBM’s $100 million Roadrunner. IBM’s Roadrunner took up 296 racks and 6000 square feet of floor space and used 2,350,000 watts of electricity. The cluster consisted primarily of around 6,912 Opteron CPUs and 12,960 PowerXCell processors. Now ten years later the Law of Accelerating Returns (a lot of engineering work) has enabled the construction of a system that consumes 98% less power and takes up 99.93% less space than Roadrunner did.
This sounds like a sentence I would have posted about 15 years ago, but TomsHardware have a thermal paste roundup. The difference in quality between a celebrated third-party paste and what OEMs use on their builds is smaller than you might think. It's not uncommon to realize a performance improvement by simply bolting your hardware together more carefully. A lot of folks then erroneously attribute this betterment to their new paste.
Australia's National Portrait Gallery has a Digital Portrait Award contest. Submissions for the 2017 Digital Portraiture Award are now open and close at midnight on 17 September 2017. Finalist works will be exhibited at the National Portrait Gallery in Canberra from 1 December 2017 to 18 February 2018, and the winner will be announced at the opening.
Amazingly, it's almost 40 years since the Voyager Spacecraft launched into space. Voyager 1 and 2 achieve 40 years of operation and exploration this August and September, 2017. Despite their vast distance, they continue to communicate with NASA daily.
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All original content copyright James Rolfe.
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