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Cake day: June 18th, 2023

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  • Not even first batch as far as this connector goes. This has been an issue ever since this connector was released on the 40 series cards in 2022.

    The sensible thing would’ve been to just rollback to the standard 8-pin PCIe power connector that has been reliable for many years. I guess requiring 4 of these for 600 watts would highlight how ridiculous the power draw of the 5090 is.

    Instead they made small iterations to this 12VHPWR connector (changing sense pin lengths and other small adjustments) and they’re letting their paying customers test the new iteration with the 50 series.

    Admit that 12VHPWR is bullshit and revert to 8-pin. Come up with a working solution or just stick with 8-pin long-term.






  • Speculative execution seems to be the source of a lot of security flaws in many different CPUs. CPU manufacturers seem to be so focused on winning the performance race that security aware architecture design takes the backseat.

    Also, it’s more and more clear that it’s a bad idea that websites can just execute arbitrary code. The JS APIs are way too powerful and complex nowadays. Maybe websites and apps should’ve stayed separate concepts instead of merging into “web apps”.

    I also wonder if it’d be possible to design a CPU so vulnerabilities like these are fixable instead of just “mitigable”. Similar to how you can reprogram an FPGA. I have no clue how chip design works though, but please feel free to reply if you know more about this.








  • GPU that’s roughly on par with the Steam Deck.

    …when comparing TFLOPs, and that’s not comparable across architectures (by different companies as well!).

    If we take similar-performing (in rasterization) Ampere and RDNA 2 cards (say a 3080 and 6800 XT), we can see the 3080 has 29.77 TFLOPs and the 6800 XT has 20.74 TFLOPs, an RDNA 2 FLOP is worth about 1.4x as much as an Ampere FLOP.

    So extrapolating the 1.6 “RDNA 2 TFLOPs” of the Deck we get 2.24 “Ampere TFLOPs” and that’d make the Deck quite a bit faster than the Switch 2 in portable mode, but slower than the Switch 2 in docked mode.

    This is obviously all just wild and silly speculation, but I doubt the Switch 2 will match the Deck in portable mode. Samsung 8nm would just eat too much power for this to realistically happen in a handheld form factor.




  • Honestly - lack of large trackpads aside (it does have a tiny one on the right side) - the Legion Go S looks like a good deal. Price should be equal to the OLED Deck for the 512 GB variant, for that you get a device with a more modern CPU architecture and 50% more GPU cores. The display is quite a bit larger (8.1" vs 7.4", which is a larger difference than it might seem), it’s higher resolution 120 Hz and - most importantly - it has VRR, which the Steam Deck OLED lacks. Sure, it’s not OLED and some people are seemingly allergic to higher resolution displays (“think about the battery life!!!” or “not powerful enough to play games at this res” (upscaling exists)), but 2D games like Hollow Knight or Cuphead should look amazing on this display and font rendering should be a lot better.

    Also, Lenovo might sell this in countries where the Steam Deck isn’t officially available.