Yep, that’s pretty much the gist of it. Driver overhead isn’t something completely new, but with the B580 it certainly is so high that it becomes a massive problem in exactly the use case where it would make the most sense.

Another albeit smaller issue is the idle power draw. Here is a chart (taken from this article)

Because for a honest value evaluation that also plays a role, especially for anyone planning to use the card for a long time. Peak power draw doesn’t matter as much imo, since most of us will not push their system to its limit for a majority of the time. But idle power draw does add up over time. It also imo kind of kills it as a product for the second niche use besides budget oriented games, which would be for use in a homelab setting for stuff like video transcoding.

So as much as i am honestly rooting for Intel and think they are actually making really good progress in entering such a difficult market, this isn’t it yet. Maybe third time’s the charm.

hardware unboxed for example did some benchmarks on the topic a few days ago. The issue wasn’t noticed at launch, where everyone tested with high end processors to eliminate any bottlenecks, but has recently been discovered.

I would say a 8700k is maybe lower midrange considering its been a while since it was released? Not sure if someone else tested it with older Intel CPUs, since here it is mostly with AMD stuff, but the problem still applies.

The problem with the B580 is the huge issue with driver overhead leading to worse performance when paired with lower or even midrange CPUs. Which is exactly what you’d usually pair it with

Isn’t this the same architecture that is also in their iGPUs? That should help keep them motivated to improve drivers even if they lose interest in dGPUs.

I recently read a plausible reason that I hadn’t thought of yet:

Apple would need to include a specific flexible cable rated for continuous movement with the mouse. If the port was in the regular spot, then people would ofc also use it wired at times. However if buyers would use regular charging cables, then the experience would both be worse and the cables might get damaged over time from bending.

I still think the main reason is simply that they value form over function, otherwise the shape would be more ergonomic, but it’s another interesting factor to consider.

Importantly they tried to enter the market with a $40 purchase price, when the existing competition is mostly free to play.

I never used it myself, but rather than a dedicated alarm clock app, maybe look at tasker?

Looking at their website they actually list your use case as an example of what is possible

wake up with a random song from your music collection

(Third point under “usage examples”)

Yeah, hadn’t heard about it until today either. But Steam also kind of torpedoed their launch by lifting their NDA for Deadlock on the same day. Not sure how similar they are, but that’ll grab most of the attention from gamers right now.

The issue is that I bet modifying the firmware will have consequences on insurance and liability in case of an accident. Regardless of whether or not one is at fault or not, and that it didn’t have any effect

The performance was never the consideration for Nintendo. They want a handheld that can last a long time, so they will always clock their chips down.

I fully agree with the first sentence, but i don’t think the second quite hits the mark. The real reason is simply cost.

If Nintendo was concerned with battery life, then they’d still go with a modern processor, but as you say clock it down to hit the efficiency sweet spot over chasing performance. But instead they usually choose something that is already dated at release (even accounting for development time), as opposed to a company like Apple that pays a premium to get first dibs on any new processing node.

It’s a ton of money when comparing it to mainstream electronics, but I’d imagine that $300 single payment is a drop in the bucket for something medical. Anyone who needs it probably spends similar amounts or more adapting other everyday things for ease of use.

It’s a niche probably low volume product that requires a good amount of hardware and software engineering.

I mean there definitely are some valuable metals in there, but I can’t imagine that this is a competitive price to pay for them, especially since extraction wouldn’t be easy. And some parts do have value, even if it ends up being the case that running the full cluster isn’t economic anymore.

I do wonder who at this point could use all those processors (and Mainboards), but the ram might still be reasonable to use, maybe the cables, the cabinets themselves too. And I think the video also mentions that there are two managing servers. Those might be most likely to actually be useful for their original purpose.

Ian Cutress recently did a video on the topic here (I think he changed the title to reflect the end price of the auction), which does a bit of a breakdown. You for example also have to add shipping costs (from a certified company) to the price.

Pretty crazy to think that it is actually not sure whether spending less than 500k on a supercomputer is worth it. Goes to show how far technology has come.

I guess if everything sells you might make profit, but then it also comes with a lot of hassle and risk. And for actually using it, I imagine that electricity cost would be a huge factor.

I agree that it is about market power, but one could make the argument that Xbox/PlayStation have a duopoly similar to iOS/Android.

Although I think PlayStation dominated with roughly a 70/30 split worldwide (higher in Europe). Nintendo is somewhat in its own category imo, since they mostly do their own games and don’t directly compete in that sense.

But I guess in a way consoles also compete with PCs.

Is it actually that little that gets used by the CPU? I assume there’d also be some overhead that gets claimed by the OS and not the game. Maybe 1-3gb?

The PS5 has shared RAM between CPU and GPU. Not sure what the average split between the two is in games, but it would certainly be wrong to say it has use of the full 16gb like desktop cards have.

I would say yes and no.

Games definitely have become way better technically especially the graphics. And there are plenty of great games coming out regularly. Plus when looking at the past there might be some survivorship bias, as we might just remember the good ones and forget about all the crap that also existed.

What has however changed and influences new releases massively is monetization. Especially when paired with the ever increasing budgets that we see in the AAA releases. That leads to decision making not based on what makes a game actually good, but how can we squeeze as much money out as possible.

I think you are right, the first article I linked was a bit ambiguous about it, but rereading the second one it seems that I misunderstood it and you are right.

One aspect through which one could argue that they might stifle competition is their price parity rule, for which it seems they are being sued. See here (not sure if there is any new development.

Hard to compete with steam if you cant at least do it through lower pricing. Although this article suggests that at least for epic exclusives publisher seem to prefer to just pocket the difference, rather than pass on those savings.

Add the update policy to the cons. 2 major versions and 3 years of security updates is just bad, especially for a device of this price range

Yeah that seems really weird. $100 is so little money that you might as well hold onto it even if it were indeed worthless.

That would only make sense if there was something external forcing the sale or some kind of liability that you could escape through selling. And I can’t see either applying here

Yeah, the possibilities are definitely exciting. But i guess as far as Covid19 vaccines are concerned it was probably a good thing that none required their direct use. As is we already had a ton of missinformation and fearmongering, i don’t even want to imagine how bad it would have been, if gene editing was involved in any direct way.

If your question is whether crispr gene editing was used by any of the vaccines, then no none of them used it as a direct mechanism.

However it might have been used somewhere along the line in their creation, e.g. to knock out a gene in the viral vectors. But i couldn’t tell you that with certainty.

Not all of them, but the most successful from Biontech/Pfizer and moderna are both mRNA based. However there were also others based on protein subunits or viral vectors for example.

Thanks i’ll check it out for sure. Even if the UI recording is already out of date it already shows a feature i really liked about relay on mobile:

The feature that you swipe right->left to reveal the options (up/down vote, save, share and so on) is something i really liked about relay. And at least until now i haven’t really adjusted/grown to like the way most other apps including connect seem to handle it. Which is having a quick action based on how far you drag the post towards the left.

I think we are still in the phase where there is so much movement this answer might become outdated rather quickly.

For what it’s worth I have installed: connect, liftoff, thunder, jebora and werwef (web app). But there are more I haven’t tried yet

Currently writing from connect, which is my favorite.

As reference for Reddit clients I used to used relay (on my phone) and slide (on my tablet)