Hacker News Reader

redtuesdayon Intel Lines Up ThunderX ARM Against Xeons

> ThunderX2 is a 14nm FinFET design, and the company claims it will deliver 2 to 3 times the performance of ThunderX on select workloads with a higher performance to power ratio. Their plan for the X2 is to include 54 ARMv8.2 cores with a target frequency of 2.4 to 2.8 GHz and up to 3 GHz in turbo mode (versus their current 28nm, 48 core, 2.5GHz design), 32MB of what Cavium calls shared Last Level Cache (LLC), 6 DDR4 memory interfaces running at 3200MHz (1 DPC) or 2966MHz (2 DPC), multiple 10/25/40/100 Gb/s Ethernet (KR) interfaces, enhanced virtualization support (including IO), ARM Holdings Trustzone security and a variety of hardware accelerators. [...] [1]

Is ARM's TrustZone not the same as Intel's ME? At least I remember that AMD uses a ARM Core with TrustZone in it's x86 CPU's to basically achieve the same (or something similar) as Intel's Management Engine.

[1] quoted from: http://www.forbes.com/sites/moorinsights/2016/05/30/cavium-s...

redtuesdayon Intel knows it's no longer inside

To add to that, since Kepler AMD fell from ~45% marketshare to 20%. It seems they want to regain marketshare by starting with the 199 dollar AMD RX 480 which should deliver performance between GTX 970 and GTX 980 (maybe even like the small Fury).

There is also a rumor about AMD pushing Vega forward to october to release it around the new Battlefield (I doubt it, but it would certainly be nice).

redtuesdayon Intel knows it's no longer inside

I would guess frik probably means this: in 2010/2011 you had to pay ~350 euros for AMDs 5870 when it launched, or ~450 euros for nvidias GTX 580. Now you have to pay ~700 euros for AMDs Fury X or ~800 euros for nvidias GTX 980ti at launch. That's not 400% more expensive but they are not cheaper either.

redtuesdayon Vulkan Tutorial

Yes, totally forgot that game. Really a good showcase of what's possible.

Yes, AMD profits probably the most from the new API's, the CPU's from them get also a good boost because the kind of single threaded-ness of DX11 [1] hurt them. For example, Hitman with DX11 on a AMD FX 8370 and GTX 980 Ti achieves only 41.5 fps while a Intel 6700k reaches 72.5 fps. With DX12 the same AMD system achieves 65.2 fps (Intel 68.3).[2]

[1] http://www.littletinyfrogs.com/article/460524/DirectX_11_vs_...

[2] https://translate.google.de/translate?hl=de?sl=auto&sl=auto&...

redtuesdayon An Old Idea, Revived: Starve Cancer to Death

Just to be sure no one misunderstands: these milkshakes are not the same that one would drink at McDonalds etc. They are like the shakes overweight people drink to lose weight before surgery, only that they are for gaining weight. These shakes have many different vitamins, minerals etc. the body needs and have many calories (1.5-2.0 kcal/ml), and yes that means sugar.

These shakes are also low on lactase because depending on the chemo patients can become intollerant to lactase (either through the chemo or antibiotics that are given). They are also low on fibre so its easier to digest.

redtuesdayon Vulkan Tutorial

Depends probably on the games. I can see games like the recently released Stellaris [1] or Star Ruler 2 [2] with it's tens of thousands of spaceships or similar gain the most thanks to the new API's, and it should possibly enable developers to implement things that were previously not feasable because of the draw calls.

[1] https://www.paradoxplaza.com/stellaris

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6ChMEMQxQLw

redtuesdayon NVIDIA Announces the GeForce GTX 1000 Series

Thank you for the detailed explanation. Always thought the added latency came from GDDR5. Good to know.

redtuesdayon NVIDIA Announces the GeForce GTX 1000 Series

Was the difference between HMC and HBM not basically HMC had good latency comparable to normal main RAM like DDR3 plus good bandwith (up to 400 GB/s), while HBM had worse latency than DDR3 (like GDDR5) with a large bus and really good bandwith (1 TB/s)? Will indeed be interesting to see what AMD means with next gen memory.

redtuesdayon NVIDIA Announces the GeForce GTX 1000 Series

Yes, Zen for the desktop (Summit Ridge) is even listed for end of 2016 [1], followed by first Zen APU's (Raven Ridge) sometime 2017 and Vega early 2017. [2]

[1] http://imgur.com/rRjKZDk [2] http://i.imgur.com/lkjgayO.jpg?1

redtuesdayon NVIDIA Announces the GeForce GTX 1000 Series

Yeah, it will be interesting to see how good AMD's Polaris chips will be, especially when it comes to energy efficiency. Fury was a step in the right direction (I'm wondering how much of this can be attributed to HBM's lower voltage etc.). But I'm even more interested in AMD Vega - the high end competitor to Nvidias GP 100 that is equipped with HBM2. Especially if AMD has an advantage over Nvidia when it comes to implementing HBM, since they developed it together with SK Hynx and have previous experience with Fury, or if this doesn't make a difference.

Vega is also exiting because it should be released when AMD's Zen CPU's will be released, and there were rumors about a HPC Zen APU with Vega and HBM.

redtuesdayon Intel Pentium 4 2.0 GHz vs. Intel Pentium III 1.0 GHz (2001)

Yes, absolutely the price and price/performance from AMD is good (I would compare it against the 2600k (4 core/8 threads) though, which was 300 but still faster, or even the 2500k (4 cores/4 threads) which was ~230 but still faster).

Unfortunately as merb already mentioned the performance to power ratio is not really good for AMD, which I guess contributes quite a bit to AMDs lost marketshare in the server segment (plus it doesn't look good in reviews which is bad for AMDs mindshare, which already is far behind Intel and Nvidia). And until Mantle/Vulkan/DX12 the performance in quite a few games was noticable behind Intel because AMDs single core performance was not on par which was bad because DX11 is basically single threaded. [1]

Overall I guess AMDs biggest problem is the mindshare. Wheras Intel or Nvidia can allow themselves one or two not so great generations, AMD tanks as soon as they have problems. AMDs HD 5000 generation was out sooner than Nvidia, faster and more energy efficient, but it only helped them gain 5% marketshare (around 45% at the time). AMDs 7000 generation could compete with Nvidia, but used more energy and bang, Nvidia regained more than the 5% percent that they lost, and that continued with Maxwell (they now have ~75% marketshare even though AMDs cards can compete on performance). [2] The same with Intel, when AMD could compete, and even beat Intel in performance and efficency over many years, they gained not that much marketshare (in part because of Intels shady manipulation, but in part probably also because of mindshare). Intels Conroe could regain some of the marketshare Intel lost thanks to its Pentium 4 (which reduced AMDS ~48% to 35%). Then came Bulldozer, which was underwhelming outside of multithreaded tasks and late in part thanks to GloFos 32nm problems and now AMD has aroun 20% marketshare). In the server space it's even worse for AMD with less than 1% marketshare compared to 25% around 2006-2007.

[1] http://www.littletinyfrogs.com/article/460524/DirectX_11_vs_...

[2] http://cdn.wccftech.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/04/Nvidia-AM...

redtuesdayon Bank of Japan Is an Estimated Top 10 Holder in 90% of the Nikkei 225

This sounds really nice, especiialy the possibility to easily block scripts for a single site. That NoScript by default activates the scripts on all sites is sometimes annoying. It seems I need to take a closer look at uBlock Origin.

redtuesdayon [dead]

The original - linked in the comments - is better written: https://mathiasbynens.github.io/rel-noopener/

redtuesdayon [dead]

Ugh, I hate target="blank". It takes the control away from the user. I want to decide how to open links. If I want a new tab I will do so. If I just want to follow the link I don't want a new tab even if the link takes me away from the website I'm surfing on.

Now it seems I have another reason.

redtuesdayon Intel Pentium 4 2.0 GHz vs. Intel Pentium III 1.0 GHz (2001)

Since I can't edit my post anymore - the closest thing I could find was Cinebench R10 32 Bit (Single Core) comparisons (unfortunately without deactivated turbo boost and adjusted clock and RAM speeds):

  Intel Pentium 4 660    - 3.60 Ghz - 2245 Points
  AMD Athlon X2 6000+    - 3.00 Ghz - 2848 Points
  Intel Core2 Duo E8400  - 3.00 Ghz - 3647 Points
  AMD Phenom II X6 1075T - 3.00 Ghz - 3820 Points
  AMD FX 8320E           - 3.20 Ghz - 4056 Points
  Intel Core i7 950      - 3.06 Ghz - 4353 Points
  Intel Core i7 3930     - 3.20 Ghz - 6268 Points 
  Intel Core i7 5960X    - 3.00 Ghz - 6950 Points

It's sad to see that AMD could compete in single core performance until Sandy Bridge (i7 3930) came along. Would be nice if Zen can at least get Sandy Bridge numbers paired with good efficiency so we get more competition in the x86 space again. Numbers taken from: http://cpuboss.com/cpus/Desktop-CPUs-best-Overall-Performanc...

redtuesdayon Intel Pentium 4 2.0 GHz vs. Intel Pentium III 1.0 GHz (2001)

Yeah, that would be interesting. I would not be surprised if some people did that already with Cinebenchs single thread mode.

redtuesdayon Intel Pentium 4 2.0 GHz vs. Intel Pentium III 1.0 GHz (2001)

Ah, the good old times when AMD could beat Intel in performance and efficiency with it's XP series.

redtuesdayon Heroku Kafka

Yes, would be nice if they could upgrade the version of some of the dbs/languages/etc. they support. As a user I could write my own cartridge to support a newer version of Postgres (like I did for Playframework 2.4+), but then I lose the automatic updates and have to update the gear myself.

redtuesdayon Heroku Kafka

btw: it seems you still can't automate the cert renewal for let's encrypt on openshift online.[1]

[1] https://openshift.uservoice.com/forums/258655-ideas/suggesti...

redtuesdayon Heroku Kafka

Check out Red Hat's Openshift Online [1] if you haven't already. They offer 3 Gears for free, each with 512 MB Ram, 1 GB Disk space (install e.g Postgres into one gear and you have a DB with 1 GB) and you can use Lets Encrypt with their Bronze plan (which is free if you only use the 3 free gears). Depending on what your hobby sites do this could be enough.

[1] https://www.openshift.com/pricing/

redtuesdayon Bank of Japan Is an Estimated Top 10 Holder in 90% of the Nikkei 225

NoScript can do this too. You have the choice to activate certain scripts permanently (of course you can deactivate them later again if you want), or you can even activate them only for the current session and the next time you start the browser the temporary activated scripts are blocked again.

redtuesdayon Scala vs. Node.js as a RESTful back end server (2015)

> 1) Slick is bloated and kludgy and still produces bad SQL queries...I've resorted to using the plain SQL interface which is nice, but not great.

You could check out quill [1]. Haven't used it in a real application yet but the codebase seems easier to understand and the sql it produced seemed reasonable. virtualwhys could probaly tell you more - if I remember correctly he is a contributor for quill (and was/is (?) a longtime user of scalaquery/slick).

[1] http://getquill.io/

redtuesdayon Atom text editor 1.7.0 released

Could be, but it could also have not much (nothing?) to do with hardware.

Anecdotal: back in the late 90s, or early 00s, unlike now, the pc hardware got old really fast in terms of performance. Unlike a classmate of mine I didn't keep up with hardware changes. When I bought my hardware and played games they ran really good, but after a while my pc was not fast enough even for low graphic settings, and the games stuttered really strong with fps probably below 30 fps and around the 20 fps mark (only a guess). At first this was horrible compared to the smoothness of playing games directly after buying the new pc, but after a while I got used to it and couldn't understand why my classmate (which kept up with the new hardware that came out) could not stand to play games on my pc. Later I bought a new pc and could play the games with smooth fps again. When I now played games on slow hardware I could not stand it, just like my classmate before.

Maybe this is (in some cases) also the case with people who have no problems with the performance of Atom.

Personally I also find the performance of Atom could be better (on both Windows and Linux) with a 5820k @ 4Ghz, 32 GByte Ram and installed on a SSD (Crucial MX 100/512 GByte). But I only try it from time to time to see how much better it got compared to my previous try.

redtuesdayon RISC-V Offers Simple, Modular ISA

Cool, haven't thought about that. I probably need to get an FPGA. Really liked the book "The Elements of Computing Systems" [1][2] in which one builds a computer from NAND gates upwards, a compiler, vm and finally a simple OS with applications. The hardware part of the course seems to be on coursera now as well. [3]

[1] https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/elements-computing-systems

[2] http://www.nand2tetris.org/

[3] https://www.coursera.org/learn/build-a-computer

redtuesdayon Go 1.7 toolchain improvements

Yes, I doubt it too. But are they interested in contributing to the go compiler if they don't already do that? I would guess go users are more interested in contributing to go. Plus the compiler people who are good at c and are already contributing can probably get up to speed with go quickly if they want to and don't know go yet. Or they already know go because they use it.

redtuesdayon Unreal Engine 4.11 Released

I believe it was around 70-80 engineers, and the number mentioned in the twitch stream was lower (keep in mind I have no experience when it comes to writing large 3d engines. maybe my expectation was ridiculous to begin with). I actually tried to hunt down the video in which they mentioned that, but Epic is just too productive when it comes to producing videos, and I gave up. :D

redtuesdayon Go 1.7 toolchain improvements

More developers (who don't know c (good enough), but are proficient in go) who can contribute to the compiler code long term (and improve the transpiled compiler). Other reasons would interest me as well.

redtuesdayon Unreal Engine 4.11 Released

They mentioned that in some of their twitch streams relatively short after Unreal 4s initial release. I don't remember the number, but it was smaller than what I thought it would be. Plus of course the people not working for epic who contribute to the source code on github.

redtuesdayon Unreal Engine 4.11 Released

Ok, I should have made that clearer. What I meant was that at least one post on a minor release of Unreal gets to the front page (at least when I'm browsing HN, maybe later or earlier in the day the postings are not on the front page). Out of curiosity I checked my above claim and it was wrong (hehe), but many releases hit the front page:

4.11 - now

4.10 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10548139 [75 comments]

4.9 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10147368 [50 comments]

4.8 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9694885 [98 comments]

4.7 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9103050 [88 comments]

??? (when they released UE4 for free) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9132815 [240 comments]

4.0 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7429774 [163 comments]

But it's probably as you say. Not every interesting post (which also depends on the readers interests, of course) get's to the front page. Coupled with the bigger mindshare of Unreal, and the not so interesting Cryengine releases in the past (especially compared to Unreal) we get more Unreal postings on HN.

redtuesdayon Unreal Engine 4.11 Released

It's interesting that Unreal releases end up always on the front page, but when Crytek released the source code of Cryengine 5 for free ~3 weeks ago [1] (with DX12, official C# bindings, volumetric clouds, no royalties, even better renderer, VR support for all major VR headsets, Python scriptable editor based on QT, a humble bundle including Ryse assets etc.) it didn't even scratch the front page.

I know most people prefer Unreal for ease of use, documentation etc. but I also read often that they like the technology of Cryengine better (real time GI (SVOTI), better performance, better skin and eye shader for example), so I would have thought that the free source code release would stir things up.

Yes, Unreal released the full source code long ago, so they (Crytek) are late to the party, and the marketing of Crytek is... not the best (to put it kindly), but why is it that the Cryengine 5 release was not really discussed on HN?

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11294763 [1 comment --> I myself]

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11300017 [0 comments]

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11313695 [0 comments]

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11295419 [0 comments]

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11297215 [0 comments]