• Nvidia announced their new Grace CPU, which they claim offers ten times the performance of x86 servers. (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Couple of problems here, of course.
  
  First, it will be out in 2023.
  
  Second, it's actually slower than last year's AMD CPUs, never mind this year's or next year's or 2023's. The claimed speed increase is for a specific design of server using this chip, compared with a different design of server using a different chip.
  
  This chip does include NVLink, offering very high CPU to GPU bandwidth - far more than a generic PCIe bus. On the other hand, each CPU connects to just one GPU in this design, where a dual-socket AMD server can run ten GPUs at full bandwidth.
  
  The CPU core itself is a standard Armv9 design, and they don't even specify which one.
  
  In short, it's designed for one specific, lucrative field: Training large neural networks. It's not exciting at all as a general-purpose server processor.
  

Tech News

• Nvidia also announced their BlueField-3 and BlueField-4 network accelerators. (Tom's Hardware)
  
  A little more interesting for me. The BlueField-3, due out next year, contains 16 A78 cores - found in most current mid-to-high-end Android phones - plus an array of custom VLIW cores for data acceleration.
  
  These are designed to go on very high end networking cards - 400Gb and 800Gb - where just dumping all the data straight onto the CPU can cause major bottlenecks.
  
  Right now I'm happy we've finally moved all our servers to 10Gb Ethernet at my day job.
  
  
  
• AMD has officially announced the Ryzen 5800 I spotted yesterday, as well as the Ryzen 5900. (WCCFTech)
  
  These are 65W OEM parts. Boost clocks are 100MHz lower than the retail 5800X and 5900X, but base clocks are significantly lower because of the TDP reduction - the 5900 just 3.0GHz down from 3.7GHz on the 5900X.
  
  You can't buy them directly but Dell is already selling systems based on them, and at a decent discount from the X versions.
  
  Oh, and the 5950X is out of stock in Australia again.
  
  To be expected, I suppose.
  
  
  
• Just what you want to see on a production server at 11:30 PM.
  
  
  
  
  
• Amazon's OpenSearch is an open source version of Elasticsearch. (Amazon)
  
  Elasticsearch was open source, but they changed their license because Amazon was offering it as a service and eating into their own business model. Which is entirely justifiable, but the license changes affect end users, and not just Amazon.
  
  And Elasticsearch is infamous for dumping personal data onto the internet because for years not only did it ship without forcing you to configure a password,it shipped with no way for you to configure a password unless you bought an enterprise license.
  
  Not getting instantly hacked being a very enterprise feature, you see.
  
  We had one scare with that several years back with a server with a misconfigured firewall, but the Elasticsearch instance was properly configured to only bind to the private network and was inaccessible. These days everything I do is double-firewalled so that nothing can be reached from the internet without a specific route or tunnel being added.
  
  
  
• Verbing weirds HTTP. (HTTP Toolkit)
  
  HTTP is getting a SEARCH verb. It's not for searching, though, it's really just a GET with form data.
  
  I implemented this in our REST APIs at work years ago, borrowing the specification from WebDAV. This new standard also borrows from WebDAV so we're likely to be compatible. Or compatible enough, at least.
  
  
  
• Dutch hackers are holding the country's cheese to ransom. (Bleeping Computer)
  
  I am not, as Dave Barry would say, making this up. A logistics company handling refrigerated shipping within the Netherlands got hit by a ransomware attack and their computer systems are locked up, so they can't process orders and don't know where the cheese is anyway.
  
  
  
• I love the details on these things.
  
  
  
  
  
• The unit conjecture is false. (Quanta)
  
  Interesting point: We know it is false because a mathematician has provided a counter-example. But he hasn't presented a paper on how he found that counter-example, so we don't know how we know that we know it is false.
  
  
  
• Brave also blocks FLoC. (Thurrott.com)
  
  FLoC is Google's new global privacy violation scheme. The DuckDuckGo plugin for Chrome blocks it, and now so does the Brave browser.
  
  Worth taking a look at Brave if you value your privacy; all the major browser companies except Microsoft have disgraced themselves in recent months.
  
  
  
• Microsoft has bought Nuance for $19.7 billion. (Thurrott.com)
  
  It used to be that when that much money was being thrown around you would be sure to have heard of both companies. Now sometimes I haven't heard of either.
  
  
  
• Intel has called for a US "moonshot" project to boost the country's chipmaking capabilities. (Axios)
  
  In other words, they want a massive bailout of taxpayer funds after spending the past five years wallowing in failure of their own making.
  
  
  
• The Google Shopping app is joining the Google Graveyard, the company's largest and most profitable business division. (9to5Google)
  
  No, seriously, here's a list of all the projects they've killed.
  
  They're about as reliable as a clockwork teapot.
  
  
  
• Logitech has discontinued its Harmony line of programmable remote controls. (CEPro)
  
  This leaves the market in the hands of... Apparently, no-one. Nobody makes these anymore.
  
  
  
  
• Apple and Google have banned an update to the UK's Wuhan Bat Soup Death Plague (WBSDP) tracing app. (BBC)
  
  The new version would allow users to upload a list of their recent locations if they tested positive. Apple and Google banned the app from collecting any location data, even that offered explicitly and voluntarily, because fuck you that's why.
  
  
  
• Twitter brand account vs. the world's most overrated science communicator.
  
  
  @steak_umm wins this round.
  
  
  

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