Electronics and such · 6:25am May 7th, 2019
Need to write, but don't want to "write" right now. That and I need to practice actually writing and thinking about saying stuff. So after finally getting some frustration that's been building on my chest within the last week off exploded out, I want to move on. So as a minor exercise, I can still write something I'm passionate about though. Namely electronics and computer builds. If you don't like seeing someone's passionate ramblings about this, you can skip it. If you're still interested in computer news, read on.
Oh, have some relaxing music from an anime I'm watching right now. (Got burned out on Chinese cartoons, but this one is winning me back.
)
Upcoming News:
God I can't wait for Summer. 
AMD is going to be releasing their new series of 7nm Ryzen chips then. Ryzen 3XXX. (The X's are various numbers from low to high, denoting how powerful they are.) It's supposedly supposed to be after their big reveal at Computex, a Taiwanese trade show.
The 7nm is very important. The seven nanometer refers to transistor sizes and has traditionally have been associated with higher clock speeds, power savings, and more space to put stuff into the x86 (and now ARM) CPU's. However, there's a fundamental problem. With smaller sizes, we come to a road block. Namely, the fundamental limits of our physical universe. Read what I said, "nano-meters". We're talking about sizes so small, you need electron microscopes to even see the damn things. So ask yourself, "how small are these transistors going to be when they're only several atoms big?"
"Want a bet?"
It can't go on forever. 7nm and possibly 4nm in the future might be the last we'll ever get such huge savings, and even that last one won't be realistically possible until the later half of the next decade. We're entering that period like the automotive industry did when we made car engines as good as they could ever get without experimenting with far out ideas on getting the most horsepower or savings on gas. There's only so much that can be done to make them better internally, they have to make other features better in order to get customers to buy their products. It's like going from very old economy cars to newer ones. Hopefully the x86 platform will have cruft removed from it or people will switch to ARM or RISC-V. (I hope there's a good RISC-V CPU platform in the future.)
"Can I fit this in my ass?"
The problem for these types of small chips is they're incredibly hard to produce compared to chips that were manufactured only a few years ago. The process to make them is like taking a photograph onto a sensitive silicone plate using powerful lights. While earlier iterations used normal visible light spectrum, we're already into the Ultra-Violet light spectrum on making these chips. It's very hard to accurately and reliably make them with any minor tolerances possibly turning it from a $1,000 chip to $75 chip or worthless.
But still, these chips will have huge power savings the likes of which they can be used for video games or servers and be passively cooled with a simple fanless heatsink. Slight exaggeration there since any CPU in the past 5 years (with integrated graphics too) can do it, but I'm talking about how my i7-4790k can be further surpassed with more than double the cores, higher clock speed, and more than half the power saving and heat thrown off. Yeah, my CPU is the highest tier you could buy from the beginning of 2014 (and it still kicks ass and costs as much), but the newer chips coming out will either match it or surpass it at the same or cheaper price it was. (Even with inflation.)
What I am laughing my ass off about?
Pictured: Intel executive.
They are getting their absolute shit pushed in. If you don't know about it, Intel has had a monopoly on the market, especially servers, for decades because of their great instructions-per-cycle scheme. However, with any monopoly comes with being a bloated, lazy, and despondent mess. I mean, it's bad enough they support shit like Feminist Frequency. Yes, each Intel chip you buy now, some of it goes towards Feminist programs. (Not that they actually give a shit. Most companies don't. But they want the good PR from Mainstream Western Media for being so "Progressive". Companies that actually turn a profit or stay in business without relying on scumbag tactics don't give a shit about women, their problems, or their bitching. I dare you to talk about Feminism.)
Back on topic, I saw a leaked old roadmap of what Intel wanted to release by now. Do you want to know what it was? They wanted to release a 6-core CPU on 10nm by now.
6-cores. And 10nm. By 2018.
While cheap 8-core CPUs are out right now and AMD's 7nm chips are coming out very soon. Intel is still using 14nm CPU's.
Intel isn't advancing the tech industry at all at this point. They're just coasting on their billions in profits. That was before they saw AMD actually making good CPUs like the Ryzen 1000 and 2000 series CPU's. Hell, the Ryzen 1200 is a awesome low-end CPU, especially when you want to run it Headless (no GUI, just make it a remote home server) or pair it with a mid-range GPU.
And the Thread-Rippers... Oh My God, if these things weren't such power suckers, I'd cream my pants at how good these are.
32 cores on a single CPU... MMPH! 
Well, Intel is now playing catch-up against their rival that anybody would have laughed out of the room 5 or 10 years ago. And just to remind you, AMD has 1/10th the budget, marketing, and resources of Intel, and they're just upsetting the hell out of the CPU market.
Now the GPU market is another story.... 
Wishlist 1:
To put it lightly, this is the best ARM board on the market. It's at the intersection between price, performance, and reliability that I like. The company that makes it is a great South-Korean outfit and really cares about their product and customer.
It's a 6-core, 4 Gigabyte (not going to bother with the 2GB model), fanless ARM board that has a lot of connectivity. It's over 2x the size of a Raspberry Pi and has terrible performance compared to a Windows rig.
[Video embed leads to a 4-part playlist on it.]
"But why would you get one?"
Low. Power. Seriously, this thing only takes up 6 watts at its highest stress and it can practically be a Linux daily driver. You don't need a lot of power for browsing the internet, writing stories, chatting online, making it a home server, a video server, or an emulation box.
The 200GE is a modern AMD Ryzen chip that can do much much better, but it still sucks up 47 watts for the whole computer at highest stress. With how low power the N2 is, you can throw it in a storage closet and forget about it while it's running as a media server for your network.
There's also another reason.
PRICE
With all of its accessories like a case, power supply (a simple wall wart), and EMMC storage (It's like an SSD on a chip), the Odroid-N2 is $115 USD.
The 200GE with a cheap AM4 motherboard, cheap case, 4GB RAM, and power supply, would still be $300~. I could go with a NUC, but I like supporting smaller companies that care about their customers like Odroid. I would want upgradability and go with the 200GE, but it's still crazy expensive for what you get and I might as well pay for another gaming PC if I want to get an x86 PC.
Going to wait till the new chips and boards are out.
Recycling:
I have to do something with my old PC once I get the Ryzen 3XXX series CPUs.
Also more USPS because fuck these brownouts.
