Hacker News: throwawayish

New comment by throwawayish in "Why Is the Pentagon a Pentagon?"

throwawayish — Tue, 11 Apr 2017 20:08:41 +0000

That Obelisk thing and the house with the Lincoln figure in it that is in the same park (or whatever).

New comment by throwawayish in "OpenBSD 6.1 released"

throwawayish — Tue, 11 Apr 2017 19:51:03 +0000

I have a Linux-based router/firewall, but it's all configuration files and stuff. Something with fancy graphs and statistics would be nice :)

New comment by throwawayish in "AMD Ryzen 5 1600X vs Core i5 Review"

throwawayish — Tue, 11 Apr 2017 19:47:16 +0000

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aXHlTMKyse8

(Heaven Unigine and Prime95 at the same time)

New comment by throwawayish in "AMD Ryzen 5 1600X vs Core i5 Review"

throwawayish — Tue, 11 Apr 2017 19:31:45 +0000

> But I guess the money you saved on buying the CPU will outweigh the electricity costs even in countries where electricity is expensive.

Unless he's running 24/7 and paying way too much, yeah, by a large margin. Even these older Xeons weren't that bad at energy saving.

New comment by throwawayish in "AMD Ryzen 5 1600X vs Core i5 Review"

throwawayish — Tue, 11 Apr 2017 19:08:49 +0000

I had a similar chip since 2011 and only recently upgraded. For thread-heavy workloads even one of the fastest E3 Xeons is only like 40-50 % faster (if no special insns like AES can be used).

Safe to say it had superb price/performance (IIRC paid like 150 € for it).

New comment by throwawayish in "OpenBSD 6.1 released"

throwawayish — Tue, 11 Apr 2017 18:52:20 +0000

Is there a router/firewall distro or administration tool for OpenBSD that's recommendable (e.g. like pfsense without all the enterprisey bloat, or like securityrouter without the licensing stuff)?

New comment by throwawayish in "An efficient power converter design reduces resting power consumption by 50%"

throwawayish — Thu, 16 Mar 2017 19:24:23 +0000

I recently powered an old Acer laptop on that I didn't use for a while. It informed me that "/dev/sda2 has gone 941 days without being checked", after it finished that and booting fully up (a quick affair, even on that machine with no SSD), the i3 status bar further informed me, that the battery still holds a 57 % charge :)

New comment by throwawayish in "The end-to-end refresh of our server hardware fleet"

throwawayish — Sat, 11 Mar 2017 17:24:24 +0000

Intel probably intentionally advertises with their weirdo socket names (1156 -> 1155 -> 1150 -> 1151) just to confuse people more. Heck, they probably choose the pin counts in such a strange order just to be more confusing. It's not like they have usable names (Socket H, H2, ...).

New comment by throwawayish in "Microsoft Pledges to Use ARM Server Chips, Threatening Intel's Dominance"

throwawayish — Wed, 08 Mar 2017 19:13:33 +0000

IA64 failed because it was a bad answer to a question no one asked. AMD got it right, that's why AMD64 won.

New comment by throwawayish in "AMD Prepares 32-Core Naples CPUs for 1P and 2P Servers: Coming in Q2"

throwawayish — Tue, 07 Mar 2017 22:03:45 +0000

CPU intensive != single threaded

New comment by throwawayish in "AMD Prepares 32-Core Naples CPUs for 1P and 2P Servers: Coming in Q2"

throwawayish — Tue, 07 Mar 2017 22:03:13 +0000

> Intel's quad cores are only really required for the pro Counter-Strike players who want 600fps at 1080p just to get the absolute latest frame.

The source engine isn't exactly the pinnacle of engine development.

It doesn't really know what to with more than 2ish cores, so you probably get more FPS by using a dual core instead of a quad core, which tend to go farther in terms of overclocking.

New comment by throwawayish in "AMD Prepares 32-Core Naples CPUs for 1P and 2P Servers: Coming in Q2"

throwawayish — Tue, 07 Mar 2017 21:43:24 +0000

Or when Intel HT first appeared. Or when Intel HT reappeared. Or when the first dual core appeared. Every time Windows needed updates to perform properly; Linux also needed patches to adjust scheduling for Zen and also received patches in many other instances.

This is nothing new or outstanding at all.

New comment by throwawayish in "AMD Prepares 32-Core Naples CPUs for 1P and 2P Servers: Coming in Q2"

throwawayish — Tue, 07 Mar 2017 21:26:54 +0000

The bigger E7 scratch the 200 W mark pretty hard and IBM already had POWER chips go beyond 200 W. However, cooling and power density are ... problematic. The same goes for accelerators. Supermicro will happily deliver you a 1U box with four pascals and two Xeon sockets, but there is no datacenter in the world were you can stuff 42 of those in a cabinet. [Which doesn't mean that these don't make sense]

However, high end systems don't lend themselves well to mass-deployment (i.e. scale out).

New comment by throwawayish in "AMD Prepares 32-Core Naples CPUs for 1P and 2P Servers: Coming in Q2"

throwawayish — Tue, 07 Mar 2017 19:43:23 +0000

"IBM did it first"

Well not with HBM (which is DRAM), but huge amounts of L3 SRAM on a MCM... POWER5 I believe.

New comment by throwawayish in "AMD Prepares 32-Core Naples CPUs for 1P and 2P Servers: Coming in Q2"

throwawayish — Tue, 07 Mar 2017 18:14:15 +0000

ARM cores are much weaker, crypto performance without NEON is absymal across the board. Of course, compared to hardware-acceleration software always seems slow; Haswell manages AES-OCB at <1 cpb.

New comment by throwawayish in "AMD Prepares 32-Core Naples CPUs for 1P and 2P Servers: Coming in Q2"

throwawayish — Tue, 07 Mar 2017 18:12:02 +0000

This is not part of AES-NI and has never been released in a mid-range+ server/desktop CPU, only part of some Atom parts (Goldmont). Therefore software support is poor (I think OpenSSL does not support it). It is said to be included in 2018+ Cannonlake, though.

New comment by throwawayish in "AMD Prepares 32-Core Naples CPUs for 1P and 2P Servers: Coming in Q2"

throwawayish — Tue, 07 Mar 2017 17:32:17 +0000

n-P / n-S / n-way = how many sockets/processors a system has. A 1S system has one socket / processor, a 2S system two, a 4S four and so on.

x U (or x HE, if you're talking with a German manufacturer, they like to make that mistake ... ;) are rack-units, i.e. how large the case is.

New comment by throwawayish in "AMD Prepares 32-Core Naples CPUs for 1P and 2P Servers: Coming in Q2"

throwawayish — Tue, 07 Mar 2017 17:25:17 +0000

I think Naples is a very exciting development, because:

- 1S/2S is obviously where the pie is. Few servers are 4S.

- 8 DDR4 channels per socket is twice the memory bandwidth of 2011, and still more than LGA-36712312whateverthenumberwas

- First x86 server platform with SHA1/2 acceleration

- 128 PCIe lanes in a 1S system is unprecedented

All in all Naples seems like a very interesting platform for throughput-intensive applications. Overall it seems that Sun with it's Niagara-approach (massive number of threads, lots of I/O on-chip) was just a few years too early (and likely a few thousands / system to expensive ;)

New comment by throwawayish in "WikiLeaks Releases Trove of Alleged C.I.A. Hacking Documents"

throwawayish — Tue, 07 Mar 2017 17:18:53 +0000

If I'm not mistaken then the NYT has shown in the past that it can get basic tech/security facts like these straight.

New comment by throwawayish in "CIA malware and hacking tools"

throwawayish — Tue, 07 Mar 2017 16:49:16 +0000