SysOp, Gamer, Nerd. In no particular order.

  • 5 Posts
  • 29 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
cake
Cake day: June 11th, 2023

help-circle







  • Taiwan, not PRC. Mainland China isn’t capable of making CPUs and GPUs whith the performance and low power draw needed for a portable console in the volumes necessary. They brute-forced their way into a 7nm process, but it’s expensive and low yields, so they’re using it only for crypto mining ASICs and Huawei phones.

    To make a console like the Steam Deck, they would need an AMD64 chip on 5nm. Granted, Zhaoxin does have a licence for X86 architecture (inherited from Via, who got it when they bought Cirix), but they’re still far from being able to make those in 7 or 5nm.

    Meanwhile, TSMC in Taiwain is already shipping 3nm chips for Apple and soon for AMD too.

    Unless China figures out Extreme UV, like in the ASML machines, or direct stamping, like in recently announced Canon machines, they won’t be competitive with Intel, TSMC or Samsung anytime soon.





  • Not anymore. Bitcoin now requires dedicated hardware (ASICs). Other coins were designed to make use of ASICs impossible or impractical, requiring GPUs, but those still require a CPU to drive them.

    New developments, such as Ethereum moving away from proof of work to proof of stake made GPUs unnecessary, but you still need a computer with a CPU to validate the blocks on the block-chain.

    Edit: Even with ASICs mining bitcoin, you still need servers to distribute the work to them.





  • That might be true inside Russia, but not in the rest of the world. F5 could sue in the US and force the registrar responsible for the .org TLD to hand the domain to them.

    In his place, I would chosen something related but different enough to avoid trademark infringement, like “Freeginx”. IANAL, but I believe sometimes all it takes is one letter to keep lawyers away.