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Cake day: June 30th, 2023

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  • I don’t think Lunar lake wasn’t a “mistake” so much as it was a reaction. Intel couldn’t make a competitive laptop chip to go up against Apple and Qualcomm. (There is a very weird love triangle between the three of them /s.) Intel had to go to TSMC to get a chip to market that satisfied this AI Copilot+ PC market boom(or bust). Intel doesn’t have the ability to make a competitive chip in that space (yet) so they had to produce lunar lake as a one off.

    Intel is very used to just giving people chips and forcing them to conform their software to the available hardware. We’re finally in the era where the software defines what the cpu needs to be able to do. This is probably why Intel struggles. Their old market dominant strategy doesn’t work in the CPU market anymore and they’ve found themselves on the back foot. Meanwhile new devices where the hardware and software are deeply integrated in design keep coming out while Intel is still swinging for the “here’s our chip, figure it out for us” crowd.

    In contrast to their desktop offerings, looking at Intel’s server offerings shows that Intel gets it. They want to give you the right chips for the right job with the right accelerators.

    He’s not wrong that GPUs in the desktop space are going away because SoCs are inevitably going to be the future. This isn’t because the market has demanded it or some sort of conspiracy, but literally we can’t get faster without chips getting smaller and closer together.

    Even though I’m burnt on Nvidia and the last two CPUs and GPUs I’ve bought have been all AMD, I’m excited to see what Nvidia and mediatek do next as this SOC future has some really interesting upsides to it. Projects like ashai Linux proton project and apple GPTK2 have shown me the SoC future is actually right around the corner.

    Turns out, the end of the x86 era is a good thing?



  • Rant:

    I built a PC for a friend of mine recently and got a bundle CPU motherboard and GPU (5600x3D microcenter exclusive at the time). I had so many problems with the Phantom Gaming 6600xt at the time. The machine would boot inconsistently. I went back to microcenter and returned the card after reading that the sapphire 6750xt didn’t have the same problems and swapped up to a sapphire.

    This week I just bought a Radeon 7800 XT steel legend for 480$ USD. It was smaller and cheaper than comparable products. The card has the worst coil whine I ever heard and performed poorly. I assume I paid the price for not going for something like the sapphire nitro+. I went and swapped it out (at microcenter). 7800xt nitro+ is a much better card, does not whine and works as expected.

    This may be related to the AMD/Radeon products…

    I have a 3080ti from MSI that is a huge RGB glowing monstrosity in one rig and a dell 3090 24G in another. I got them used for 350$ and $600 respectively. I’m running the 3080 with a 12600k and the 3090 with a 7900x with higher end motherboards (Asus Maximus and ASRock Tai chi) and have no issues. I paid extra for these motherboards to ensure that I didn’t run into any weird compatibility issues.

    I just keep getting burned on ASrock, MSI, gigabyte models of things in the lower tier price category. It makes me feel like “the medium soda 40 cents cheaper than the large because it exists only to make the large seem like a better deal.”








  • Data hoarding is a truly unique experience. Just my two cents

    • raid is not a backup. Don’t use raid5 unless you’re using a filesystem like zfs that checksums your data. Raid5 is vulnerable to scenarios with a “write hole” that leads to bit rot.

    • split up your dataset into smaller more manageable datasets so you can more easily back it up in different ways like external drives, cloud storage, etc. You can then limit the dataset size to never exceed the same of your backup target.

    • snapshots, use them. Snapshots in your filesystem can make your backups more manageable by only sending the differential data as opposed to something like Rsync which may need to rsync an entire file.

    I use ZFS and have found that compression with ZSTD works pretty well for getting extra use out of your disks but unless you have a lot of RAM and some special metadata NVME disks, don’t use reduplication as it will be a serious performance impact.

    Now if you aren’t using a FOSS system like truenas and instead you’re using a system like a qnap off the shelf, the qnap hybrid backup and sync manager has a really elegant solution for doing policy based differential backups to back blaze b2 storage. Not only does this give you a copy of your data, you also get immutable points in time archives of your data.

    Good luck in your data hoarding endeavors!





  • Im pretty sure this method utilizes RDP. I’m thinking about getting an Intel ARC380 GPU for PCI-E pass through to a windows VM and doing the same thing. I’ve tested this with an Nvidia Tesla k80 (though it’s not a very practical card to have on a desktop). You should be able to get enhanced performance out of the VM if you enforce video encoding on GPU via group policy.

    The only downsides are :

    1. passing certain peripherals through RDP fails on Linux from my experience (for example, USB DAC, Xbox 360 USB controller). Your mileage may vary.
    2. absolute mouse position doesn’t work over RDP so don’t try this with any games that need a mouse for camera control (fps) it simply won’t work. If you want to game, lookingglass would probably be better for that but I haven’t tested that yet.