According to the video, the behavior the interviewed guy sees in his database of failing servers is that some CPUs are affected and some apparently aren’t. He had a very high rate, ~50% of CPUs in systems that he looked at were affected, but that the ones that weren’t just appeared to work normally. So even if you had an affected model, you might not be affected. Luck of the draw.
I mean, I don’t hate Intel – I’ve used exclusively their systems for, I dunno, maybe 25 years. And as Steve Burke says in the video, it’s not as if AMD has never had hardware problems on their CPUs. But this is a pretty insane dick-up on Intel’s part. Like, even if I’m generous and say “Intel had a testing regimen that these passed, because failures didn’t show up initially”, Intel should also have had CPUs that they kept running. They maybe didn’t know the cause. They maybe didn’t have a fix worked out or know whether they could fix it in software. But they should have known partway through the production run that they had a serious problem. And when they knew that there was a serious problem, my take is that they shouldn’t have been continuing to sell the things. I mean, I would not have picked up the second processor, the 14900KF, if I’d known that they knew that two processor generations were affected and they didn’t have a fix yet. Like, sure, companies make mistakes, can’t completely eliminate that, but they should have been able to handle the screw-up a whole lot better than they did.
Like, they could have just said “buy 12th gen instead, we can’t fix the 13th and 14th gen processors, and we’ll restart 12th gen production”, and I would have been okay – irritated, but it’s not like the performance difference here is that large. But they sold product in this case that they knew or should have known was seriously flawed for an extended period of time.
Plus, it’s not even the $1500 or whatever in hardware that went into the wastebasket surrounding this, but I blew a ton of time working on diagnosing and troubleshooting this. All Intel needed to do was say “we know that there’s a problem, we haven’t fixed it, this is what we know are affected, this is what we think likely are affected”, and it means that I don’t need to waste my time troubleshooting or go out and buying pieces of hardware other than CPUs to try to resolve the issue. Intel had a bunch of bad CPUs. I can live with that. But I expect them to do whatever they can to mitigate the impact on their customers at the earliest opportunity if they’re at fault, and they very much didn’t.
And obviously the R7 5800x is just a monster
I don’t think that this is cooling, and the video talks about the thing too. I initially suspected that cooling might somehow be a factor (or power), given that one of the use cases that I could eventually get to reliably trigger problems for me was starting Stable Diffusion, was inclined to blame voltage or possibly heat somehow. But the video says no, they logged thermal data and their test servers are running very conservatively. And I kept an eye on the temperatures the second time from the get-go.
It looks like the 5800x has a TDP of 105W.
I switched to a 7950X3D, which has a TDP of 120W, but on both the Intel processors and the AMD one, was using one of these water coolers (which was definitely overkill on the AMD CPU). Never used water-cooling before this system – was never something that I’d consider necessary until the extreme TDPs that the recent Intel processors had – but it does definitely keep the processor cool. I probably wouldn’t have bothered getting the thing had I just been using an AMD CPU, but since I had the thing already…shrugs
Also:
22:00:
One of the game companies said that they’re going to have to roll back some bans. They thought some people were cheating because the state of the game client was inconsistent with the state of the game server for some people enough that they were like “we don’t know what they’re doing, but the game client is inconsistent with the server…we’re just going to ban them”
Yeah, I’m wondering about what kinds of other nasty secondary fallout there will be. One reason that I didn’t want to spend time on this further – was willing to just eat the cost of the motherboard and a pair of CPUs and go AMD – was because I was developing root filesystem corruption just trying to boot with multiple cores, and I didn’t want to experiment on that further. It’s just not worth it to me as an individual dealing with a dicked-up filesystem to try to track down a piece of bad hardware. Like, there’s going to be unpleasant fallout out there with other people from data loss when a lot of CPUs are garbling data somehow.
I hit this.
I had a 13900KF fail after a few months on an Asus Z790-based motherboard; started seeing memory errors when anything more than one core was active (disabling additional cores in grub during Linux boot). Worked fine prior to that. I believe that the failures were progressive to some degree; I initially only saw sporadic errors, then saw them increasingly-frequently until it wasn’t possible to even boot with multiple cores. memory testers didn’t trigger it. Doing builds with many cores did consistently do so (I built Cataclysm: Dark Days Ahead at -j32, was the first test case I could find that reliably failed at some random point during the build on the failing processor, though never the same point). Starting up Stable Diffusion also could pretty consistently fail. I scripted up test cases using these to investigate downclocking memory and trying to fiddle with other settings. Downclocking the memory may have helped a bit – I didn’t gather enough data to try to get solid figures – but at the end, even having it all the way down wasn’t sufficient to cleanly boot the system; you’d have errors just trying to mount the root filesystem. Tried different Linux kernels, including building my own out of latest nightly code, tried fiddling with the kernel preemption mode (on the off chance that it was a Linux bug triggered by multiple core use). Got a 14900KF to replace it, made sure to turn off the default motherboard settings that were recommended against by Intel before inserting or ever using chip, assuming that it must have been overly-aggressive motherboard defaults. Had very hefty cooling on this. At first I thought it might be voltage drops due to the Stable Diffusion startup issues (maybe the GPU drawing power was a factor) or maybe even cooling (though temps seemed fine), but no – swapping the CPU made all the problems go away at first…and then it failed in the same way after a few months. Variety of problems, including Linux kernel complaining about hardware bugs, memory errors, kernel threads hanging, same as before. Same progressive failures that got more-frequent over time.
Never saw any problems with either CPU when running on a single core (maxcpus=1 passed to the Linux kernel), so at least I could get the system functional and stable, but obviously the performance was abysmal in that case. Using even one additional core and the problems were present (unusably so, towards the end on each CPU).
Switched to an AMD motherboard and processor. Haven’t had any problems. I expect that I’ll continue using AMD processors moving forward unless they put some serious lemons out.
No change in DIMMs (and in fact, used the same DIMMs just fine with the AMD processor).
At least I know that I’m not just crazy and that a ton of other people are getting this too. And the fact that this guy has been running on a different chipset and has a large dataset running within safe specs does kind of rule out the motherboard being at fault – I didn’t try running a motherboard with another chipset and another CPU from that class. The guy did say that some CPUs in his dataset just don’t seem to experience the problems (I saw him say a “50% rate”), so maybe there’s some sort of problem with Intel’s manufacturing process rather than with their design, and whatever testing methodology they used didn’t deal well with that.
And the guy is very explicit that they saw progressive degradation too, and had tests with logged times for it. 14:50:
We have datacenter logs from where these systems first went online, and with these systems first going online six months ago, they would pass these specific tests. Re-running these specific tests on the exact same hardware, it will not pass. That’s wild.
A big part of the problem – and this is not a new issue, goes back decades – is that a lot of terms in AI-land don’t correspond to concrete capabilities, so it’s easy to claim that you do X when X is generally-perceived to be a much-more-sophisticated thing than what you’re actually doing, even if your thing technically qualifies as X by some definition.
None of this in any way conflicts with my position that AI has tremendous potential. But if people are investing money without having a solid understanding of what they’re investing in, there are going to be people out there misrepresenting their product.
non-nuclear Tomahawk cruise, SM-6 and hypersonic missiles
Unless whatever hypersonic weapon this is is land-based, we can already park all of them on ships a lot closer to Russia than Germany. Tomahawks and SM-6s can be launched from ships.
Four Chinese vessels were ‘transiting in international waters but still inside the US exclusive economic zone’
The EEZ doesn’t pose any restrictions on international transit. The Chinese can sail in our EEZ. We can sail in their EEZ. It’s only the territorial sea that’s restricted.
Like, you can say that warships or warplanes being near territory is something to watch, sure, but news media needs to quit exploiting the fact that readers don’t know the difference between different types of waters to manufacture “more-interesting” stories.
I think that it’s theoretically possible to have a killer app for VR, something that a lot of people really want and that you can only really do with VR.
But I don’t think that that killer app exists yet. As I mention in another comment, VR might be a worthwhile buy today for hardcore flight-simmers, but I don’t think that it is for most other people.
Maybe if Facebook, Microsoft, Apple, Valve, Sony, etc all put off competing on this long enough to try to put together said killer VR app that ensures that they actually have a market to compete in.
thinks
On the hardware side…hmm. What would make me want to get a VR headset?
I don’t know if I’m a typical consumer, but I have a lot more interest in a monitor-replacement head-mounted display for portable computers than in VR stuff. Like, if you give me something that I can plug into a laptop or phone and can display high-resolution text better than my laptop display – where I can’t carry a large monitor or suspend the monitor right in front of my face – without blowing a bunch of battery power, that’s interesting to me. Existing VR headsets aren’t really aimed at that, as they blow pixels on peripheral vision, and tend to use a fair bit of battery power. The thing should be able to reduce power usage relative to a laptop, given that it had to emit less light to get a given brightness.
I’m fine with it burning power in VR gaming, but not when it’s just being used as a monitor. I want it to be comfortable enough that I can have the thing on my face for eight or more hours.
Like, if I get a VR headset, I want it to be because I’m ready to use it as my primary display device, not just as a neat game peripheral that I haul out when I’m playing a game. I do own a bunch of neat game peripherals, like a HOTAS rig, and my experience over the years has been that they tend to gather dust, aside from a decent gamepad…and gamepads benefit from games being developed for the console market.
If I get VR as an extra for gaming, that’s nice too.
I’m not terribly price sensitive as long as the thing is something that I’m going to use for a long time – my experience has been that I normally use a monitor for a long time, so the cost per year is low relative to the unit price. I doubt that existing VR headsets will do that, as the technology isn’t mature.
I don’t know if that’s what the broader market would care about, though – a low-power, 2D monitor replacement.
I’d get VR googles if I were really hardcore into flight sims and had a modern flight sim that I were willing to sink a lot of time into. I think that they’re legitimately a good match there. And they compete favorably both in price and performance with some of the alternatives that people have used in the past for that, like a wall of monitors and eye-tracking systems.
But I don’t think that they’ve met the threshold for being worthwhile for most people in most other genres.
Virtually any escalation between Russia and the West is going to be disadvantageous to Russia.
I’m seriously surprised that the Russian government is doing this (not to mention the earlier likely attempted hits on that Bulgarian arms dealer, Emilian Gebrev).
First, if you’re dealing in arms, the fact that you might be in proximity to conflict is not new. You can’t just back off whenever threatened. That comes with the job. So it’s probably not going to deter the arms company.
Second, if someone is exporting arms, it’s probably (and in this case, definitely) a matter of national policy. That is, the government is driving the policy, not the CEO. So you’re probably not killing the people who have it in for you.
Third, if you’re a member of the Russian government, you are very likely reasonably personally safe. We can’t (easily) stop Russian assassins (though it looks like we did in this case). But the same is also true in reverse. Russia’s border is an imaginary line on the map. Russia only has the ability to provide protection to people in its territory if other countries agree not to cross that line. One of the few ways that you can personally probably put yourself at risk is by doing hits on people in other countries, because the ability to provide protection in one’s territory relies on reciprocity.
Fourth, while I don’t know the specifics of this German assassination attempt, and I don’t know if the same was true here, the Bulgarian one was apparently covert, the idea being that the death wouldn’t be attributed to Russia. That seems strange to me. If Russia’s goal is to deter, then killing someone secretly won’t accomplish anything. Other people must know it was them, and be sufficiently afraid of a repeat to be deterred. Otherwise, how have you gained from your assassination? Are you going to kill the head of every arms dealer in the world over and over, trying to reroll the dice until you wind up with someone who just has some unrelated aversion to doing arms deals with Ukraine?
It just seems to me like there’s a lot of potential downside and not much potential upside. But I guess the Kremlin’s got their own view on the matter.
Scissors manufacturers: yet another victim of disruptive technology.
I made the same mistake in a comment on here in the past couple months. Kind of mentally linked, those two.
This is what happens when you ban guns but don’t fix the root issue of why people are violent in the first place
Eh. In the US a while back, we had that ninja that attacked the Night Stalkers at their base a bit after midnight.
I think that there are just some people determined to follow the path of the ninja no matter what.
I was using it on Linux too!
It sounds like it does radar and that it’s the radar antennas at issue, and there’s some separate antenna that they can use to communicate.
Also, a previous satellite of the same design that was manufactured by Airbus worked. So they know the likely system and that it’s a manufacturing problem. They don’t need to design a replacement from scratch, just manufacture it. They have one satellite up. And while their older satellites in the previous constellation are past their design life and aren’t as good, they’re apparently still functioning, and hopefully will for several years.
So it doesn’t sound that bad.
Aside from broken controllers, which I don’t think can reasonably count, the Atari 2600 joystick.
One button, a lot of resistance to push on the stick.
After that, an elderly Logitech gamepad from the 1990s that had a D-pad that rolled diagonal way too easily. IIRC it had a screw-in mini-joystick that could attach to the center of the D-pad. Don’t remember the model. White case, attached directly to a joystick/MIDI port.
After that, I think the NES controller. I have no idea why people like those or actually buy recreations. Yes, nostalgia, but the ergonomics on it were terrible. Hard buttons, sharper corners on the D-pad than is the norm today, and a squared-off controller made the thing downright uncomfortable to use for long periods of time.
I was pretty happy with my most-recent Logitech gamepad – I think an F310 – but I had another from the 1990s that was terrible, had a D-pad that rolled to diagonal movement far too easily.
Apparently it’s an American English-British English difference.
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/on_sale
(British, Australia) Available for purchase.
(US, Australia) Available for purchase at reduced prices.
That’s true, though IIRC there are two planes, and I think that one of them – and the more-numerous one – is a variant of some multirole fighter.
kagis
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kh-47M2_Kinzhal
Launch platform
- MiG-31BM/K
- Tu-22M3M
- Su-34 (reportedly)
- Su‐57 (planned)
Looks like two confirmed, another possible, another eventually (though I can’t imagine using the rare, intended-for-another-purposes Su-57 if they could use the others).
South Korea is low, but I’m sure it’s not that low.
kagis
Yeah.
https://www.cnn.com/2024/05/09/asia/south-korea-government-population-birth-rate-intl-hnk/index.html