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made you look

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  • 59 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 27th, 2024

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  • Þere must be a half dozen cheap ways to generate true random numbers.

    The problem isn’t generating random data, it’s ensuring it’s “high quality” (It’s all statistical checks, you can’t know ahead of time what random numbers should look like, otherwise they’re not random)

    That’s the problem the AMD chips seem to have, that function is failing and letting through low quality data it should otherwise reject.



  • better compression (btrfs compression doesn’t work on extents smaller than 128KiB, which excludes the majority of potentially-compressible data on MANY systems)

    Well straight away that’s wrong.

    I also don’t get the complaint that if you create a confusing subvolume layout, it results in a confusing subvolume layout. Don’t do that then.







  • 1 of the main things i think is how memory is laid out is different somehow? so every memory access needs extra clock cycles to accomplish in standard arm64

    It’s down to “memory ordering”, as different cores interact with RAM there’s rules that govern how those cores see changes made by other cores. ARM systems are “weak”, so rely on developers to be explicit about the sharing, while x86’s “Total Store Order” is considered “strong” and relies on the hardware to disentangle it all so software can make assumptions and play fast and loose.

    You can do software emulation of strong memory ordering on a weak system, but it’s slow. What Apple did was provide a hardware implementation of strong ordering in their ARM chips, and Rosetta enables that when running x86 code, so users don’t encounter that slowdown.




  • The funny thing is that for the longest time Intel actually had the majority share of GPUs, just by counting the ones embedded in motherboards of laptops and the like. No idea if that’s still the case, or if Nvidia or AMD has been eating into it with their new models (e.g. what powers the Steam Deck)

    They’ve tried to break into the discrete market a few times, most recently with their Arc cards, but the way they approach things is just so odd. It’s like they assume the first attempt will be a smash hit and dominate, and when it doesn’t they just flounder? The Arc cards launched to a lot of fanfare and then there was just silence and delays from Intel.


  • Bad management, bad luck, and usual market stuff. They’re going to do anything to cut costs.

    Their R&D for new fab work is falling behind competitors (Technically better doesn’t matter if nobody is buying it), they’ve had a bunch of bad CPU releases with hardware failures, and they’ve got next to no market presence with GPUs which are currently making money hand over fist (Mostly for dumb AI reasons, which is going to bite Nvidia hard when the bubble pops, because their new datacenter hardware is hyper tuned for LLMs at the expense of general compute, unlike AMD).