Soppro

Summary
Apple, listening to user? What??!
I loved my old Macbook with magsafe. Apple's bringing this back! But... how does it work if all the ports are USB Type C? Will Apple just include one of those nifty magnetic quick-disconnect adapters? No more touch bar! I'm so happy with this decision, because I still use the function keys (like F3 in Minecraft). More ports... seems to hint that maybe there will be other types of ports than just USB Type C. I could wish for HDMI and a Micro SD Card slot. What are your wishes here?  
Quotes
 
My thoughts
Apple, listening to its users needs? What??
 
Sources
Macrumors source: https://www.macrumors.com/2021/01/15/new-macbook-pro-models-magsafe-ports/

You do realize that Cloudflare is the one who ignores DMCA's, while Apple is the one who ignores requests for backdoors into their products right?
 
This is really a match made in hell for law enforcement, but really, when (mostly music) copyright holders go insane and want to make trivial copyright infringement into jailtime, perhaps this is the necessary evil needed to keep people out of jail for the stupidest of reasons. If you thought drug possession charges were extremely racist, just wait until the jails are full of dorky internet trolls who were making memes.
 

A reminder to all about differences between how Intel and AMD treat TDP and power consumption in general.
 
Intel TDP = suggested (not enforced) long term power limit. You are guaranteed to get base clock as long as you use a cooler capable of meeting TDP cooling. Short term power limit may go higher for a certain amount of time as conditions allow. Enthusiast overclocking mobos tend to set unlimited power limit so the CPU can boost as far as it can. This is all allowable without voiding warranty and is NOT considered overclocking. Thermal limiting is essentially off below some high threshold. MCE is considered overclocking.
 
AMD TDP presumably works in a similar way with regard to cooler and base clock. At stock, AMD CPUs have a power limit "PPT" that is higher than TDP e.g. for 65W TDP parts it'll actually limit to 88W PPT. The stock coolers included with those parts are insufficient if you want maximum possible boost due to thermal limiting, as the CPUs more gradually reduce clocks as temps increase unlike the Intel approach. AMD, unlike Intel, do treat changing the power limit as an overclock function.
 
An Intel CPU can often run cooler than a Ryzen CPU at same power due to the process differences, assuming equal cooling. The power density due to the smaller node works against heat transfer and it is more concentrated at the core. Without overclocking a decent high end air cooler as more than sufficient for mainstream (not HEDT) CPUs from both sides.

I'll try the paperclip method

I would disagree with this. The 3070 has basically the same performance as the 2080ti and even beating it in some games. Sure there are games where the 2080ti beats the 3070 but that doesn't make the 3070 all of a sudden between the performance of a 2080 super and a 2080ti. That would be like saying that 6800xt is between a 3070 and a 3080 in 4k performance.  

I was wondering what he was up to since I haven't seen him on YT for a hot minute. I still remember the ads he did with Kyle (Bitwit), they were really good 

The reviews of the M1 MBA and MBP are pretty incredible  Not only are the products amazing, but this release will ultimately push more Windows ARM laptops as ARM software support becomes more widespread. Rosetta's performance is insane, it's a whole compatibility layer not just an emulator 

I was wondering what he was up to since I haven't seen him on YT for a hot minute. I still remember the ads he did with Kyle (Bitwit), they were really good 

I was wondering what he was up to since I haven't seen him on YT for a hot minute. I still remember the ads he did with Kyle (Bitwit), they were really good 

Summary
Github has reinstated the YouTube-dl repository after the EFF sent them a letter explaining that YouTube-dl did not circumvent technological protection measures as the RIAA had claimed in their DMCA notice. They also started and donated $1 million to a new developer defense fund "to help protect open source developers on GitHub from unwarranted DMCA Section 1201 takedown claims". Github is also changing its review process for these types of claims to make it easier for developers to have their repositories reinstated and to ensure that each claim is carefully scrutinized by legal experts to prevent abuse of the DMCA.
 
Quotes
From Github's blogpost:
 
From the EFF's letter:
My thoughts
Glad to see the EFF joining this fight and Github standing up for its developers and putting its money where its mouth is. They seem to be taking this situation seriously and are going quite a bit beyond what would normally be expected. Hopefully the music industry will calm down with the recent onslaught of DMCA takedowns across the internet, but that is exceedingly unlikely until the DMCA gets a drastic overhaul, which is also unlikely given all of the money entertainment industries bribe lobby politicians with.
 
Sources
Techcrunch: https://techcrunch.com/2020/11/16/github-defies-riaa-takedown-notice-restoring-youtube-dl-and-starting-1m-defense-fund/
Github's blog: https://github.blog/2020-11-16-standing-up-for-developers-youtube-dl-is-back/
EFF's letter: https://github.com/github/dmca/blob/master/2020/11/2020-11-16-RIAA-reversal-effletter.pdf

I can't help but think that Microsoft and Qualcomm are sweating at least a little. They've been trying to push Windows on ARM for years, but even the Surface Pro X feels like a half-hearted experiment. Their fear, I'm sure, is that Apple succeeds where they failed and Macs take off on a level they haven't before. You can imagine that happening. If a student has to choose between a Windows laptop with 10-but-really-5 hours of battery life versus a Mac that's guaranteed to last the entire day under real conditions... yeah, the Mac could easily win it.

Aside from fixing their manufacturing woes, they need (and probably are working on) a significant architecture shift. Another clean sheet design or significant redesign of their Core architecture. AMD has been able to make such drastic improvements gen-on-gen because they have a much newer architecture and Intel needs to do something to get back up to speed. Perhaps Alder Lake will bring that, but who knows how that'll go.

Saying that SPEC2006 is a "14 year old benchmark" as some kind of reason why for it is irrelevant is like saying we shouldn't teach plus and minus in schools because they are over 4000 years old. "It's old" does not mean "it's bad" or "it's irrelevant".
 
Also, can you please explain why you think GeekBench is a joke? I would be very interested in knowing the technical details of why you personally believe it is a joke.
Because the article you linked does not say Geekbench is a bad CPU benchmark. The criticism the article you linked of GeekBench is stuff like "why doesn't it benchmark battery life as well", not "it gives inaccurate results for comparing CPU performance", which is what matters in this test.
 
  
Ehm, maybe SVE2 isn't included because it isn't supported by any processors yet?
But if SVE2 was included then the performance numbers for the M1 would just be even higher. So I am not sure what your point is.
 
 
Edit:
Hey, looks like Andrei actually addressed people like you in the the written article and he thinks the same way I do about these tests:
 
The reason why Linus Torvalds criticized GeekBench (version 4 at the time but it applies to GeekBench 5 as well) was because the benchmarks could fit in the cache and therefore did not put much stress on the memory. This is not true for SPEC.
I got a feeling that most people criticizing GeekBench probably think "Torvalds don't like it and since it shows Apple being good, which I don't want, I will say it is a bad benchmark too!".
Because for some reason people have a really hard time understanding and admitting that the ARM cores Apple have been pushing out for several years now have been absolutely amazing in terms of performance. People still seem to have this (incorrect) idea that ARM cores are power efficient because they are only capable of low performance. That is not the case as we can see in these benchmarks.

Summary
Every year Anandtech do a deep dive into the new A* cpu microarc and this year is not change. They have some very good things to day about the new chips, they even consider that apples claim the M1 chip have the fastest cpu core out of all cpus might well be true.  
 
These A14 Firestorm (the Big) cores have some very impressive specs when vs Intel/AMD
* 8-wide decode block vs 4-wide decoder for modern
* 630 out of order instruction buffer vs Intel’s Sunny Cove and Willow Cove cores with only 352 ROB
... and the list goes on a another extreme metric is the floating point throughput at 4 times the per-cycle throughput of Intel CPUs and previous AMD CPUs
 

 
Quotes
My thoughts
This does put the fire under other cpu makes (and not just mobile cpu makers) to keep in innovating. Apple is achieving desktop class performance at a fraction of the power draw of the rest of the industry, and while gamers might not think this is important reducing the per-core power draw of a cpu enables you to add more cores to your system. Now we have 3 cpu vendors pushing each-other and this will help push improvements in all vendors, it is good apple is coming into this space as it will ensure AMD do not just become lazy like intel did.
 
Sources
https://www.anandtech.com/show/16226/apple-silicon-m1-a14-deep-dive

These CPUs seem to be about what I was expecting.
Very good, but the 5600X is a bad buy unless you absolutely need single core performance above all else (such as price:performance or multicore performance).
 
 
Actually, the price to performance is way worse than I expected.
 
At 1080p gaming the 5600X is 50% more expensive than the 3600 but only performs 8.3% better.
 
At 1440p gaming the 5600X is 50% more expensive than the 3600 but only performs 3.2% better.
 
 
The 5600X is a very, very bad buy if you are building a gaming PC. Buy a 3600 instead. Almost the same performance at way lower of a price.
@spartaman64
@leadeater
@RejZoR

I’ve made a practice of not watching Rossman videos when they’re thrown at me in multiples since the last time someone threw like 40 minutes of them on the forum the last time something came up.  It was the beats headphone thing I believe.  I’ve watched a lot of rossman videos.  He’s a very smart very angry guy who makes a really really good living bashing Apple.  His disciples and his extremely aggressive style have earned him a richly deserved “I don’t waste my time” from me on those.
 
I also listened to Rusch Limbaugh about 30 years ago and he earned the same treatment then, but mostly because i did competitive debate in highschool and knew cheap tricks when I heard them.
 
in any case my point stands regardless of anything he could say.

So... most functions still work with the swapped camera? And the enormous jump that everyone is taking is that Apple is intentionally is only breaking 10% of camera functionality just because... why not?
 
If they wanted to actually break the functionality, they'd break all of it, not just portrait mode for giggles. The more likely scenario is that there's a bug somewhere down the line or some kind of factory calibration that's missing once the camera is swapped.

Any release of Intel GPU will be exciting for me. Because no matter how bad it is, it will find its place on the market and meddle with competition. And that's always good. And eventually they'll get things somewhere, that's for sure.

I guess they're going to start DMCA'ing every screen and audio capture tool as well since they can record YouTube music videos, what a bunch of pricks.

I don't think they're short on cash to spend on CPUs. In a quick search, as of 2019 they had over 13B cash on hand.

It was well produced and while I think some of the features were a little mundane, I don't think it was a mess at all. My definition of an absolute mess would be Google's event ..

I get why people are a little disappointed with this latest lineup, but to be honest I feel it's the biggest real improvement they've made for years. The new lineup looks great... even if their professed push for environmental conservation is really an only slightly-veiled move to make their products even more profitable.
 
Finally, the main iPhone model has for the first time actually improved in pixel density over the iPhone 4... and it only took them a decade!  And it's gone back to that great iPhone 4 design with the flat edges. It seems kind of funny to me that after a full decade Apple's design team haven't been able to come up with a design that's better than that of the iPhone 4; but hey-ho we are talking about a company that happily sold laptops with defective keyboards for 4 generations.
 
To be fair though there are also some genuinely cool new things, imo. The iPhone 12 Mini is a great option for those who still want a premium, flagship iPhone but want a smaller version of it. MagSafe seems pretty nifty and is surprisingly affordable for an Apple peripheral. The camera improvements seem great, and the maximum screen brightness is pretty fantastic so should make the screens much more usable in brightly lit areas. The impact of 5G on battery life seems to not be that bad (especially considering they've made the phones thinner, and so likely decreased actual battery capacity ever so slightly).
 
Now... if only they'd ditch Lightning already and embrace USB C. You want to talk about environmental impact and not encouraging ewaste? Don't force people to buy proprietary cables and accessories.

Yeah, that's why the top selling iPhone models have been the mid range ones. Basically below $600 is the sweet spot for moving units. The iPhone XR is remaining in the lineup this year along with the iPhone SE. Given that the user experience is like 98% identical from the SE all the way up to the $1299 model, I don't expect that the iPhone 12 was supposed to be the model that knocks it out of the park in terms of sales. 
 
Apple is currently going for an increase in marketshare and they are using their large scale and upfront R&D to lower the production cost of previous models and to continue printing fat stacks long after a model is no longer the latest and greatest. 
 
When your lowest common denominator is the A12 Bionic, that really makes your competition look bad. Especially when you can beat/match them on price all while offering a device that's built better, lasts longer, and gives you a blue chat bubble. 

Was bored, so I decided to play with the colors/colours of the supposed design of the upcoming Radeon RX 6000-series card's cooler. Came out pretty good if I say so myself: 
 
 

 

 

 

 
If this actually ended up happening (even with only these colors as alternatives to the original/standard Red/Scarlet option), I really think AMD would give NVIDIA a run for their money on reference cooler design. 
 
Of course this wouldn't be complete without proper related song referencing:
 
 

Wechat and Tiktok are definitely security risks at least in regards to national security for the United States.  Wechat at least is known to be a pretty big app in China and sends a lot of data to the CCP.  
 
I think, however, that banning the apps isn't the answer.   The truth is, the United States conducts similar operations with Facebook and Google.  No doubt China also conducts proper nation-sponsored attacks just like the United States does. 
 
The US should keep an eye on TikTok and pay attention to any CCP propaganda, and run regular in-depth audits of the app (perhaps yearly?).  The US should avoid being like China, and censoring anything that is potentially harmful to views of the state.  
 
People who want to download those apps should understand that it contains Chinese Spyware and should be advised of this fact.  If they continue to use the app, it is their problem. 
 
My opinion is that:
 
The US must enforce very strict rules for anyone who works for the government and should ban anyone from using these apps if they work for the government, or on any device that will, at any time, be connected to the same network as a government work device.  
 
The US should also work with companies and any companies are used, sponsored or affiliated with the US government in any way should have it in their work agreement that apps that are known to by Chinese Spyware are not to be used by any means on the same network as a government work device.