A United Launch Alliance Atlas V rocket with Boeing’s CST-100 Starliner spacecraft onboard is seen as it is rollout out of the Vertical Integration Facility to the launch pad at Space Launch Complex 41 ahead of the Orbital Flight Test mission, Wednesday, Dec. 18, 2019 at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida. The Orbital Flight Test with be Starliner’s maiden mission to the International Space Station for NASA's Commercial Crew Program. The mission, currently targeted for a 6:26 a.m. EST launch on Dec. 20, will serve as an end-to-end test of the system's capabilities. Photo Credit: (NASA/Joel Kowsky)
Boeing and SpaceX are working toward crewed launches for their new spacecraft this year, but there have been setbacks for both companies. While SpaceX seems to have moved past its issues from last year, Boeing is still addressing the failed test flight from December. NASA and Boeing have jointly provided an update on the investigation, which cites three errors in the CST-100 Starliner test flight. Two of the issues are severe enough that they would have caused the loss of the capsule without intervention by the ground crew.
In December, Boeing was supposed to show everyone that the Starliner was able to launch and autonomously navigate to the International Space Station (ISS). However, unspecified software errors caused the Starliner to enter the wrong orbit and miss its ISS rendezvous. At the time, Boeing claimed the incident had a connection to the mission timer that was supposed to control the orbital burn. The full story is a bit more nuanced, though.
The mission elapsed timer (MET) was one of the three issues cited in the report. The spacecraft thought it was in a later part of the mission, causing it to fire the thrusters and waste fuel. We now also know that ground control had to step in and stop the CST-100 from continuing to burn fuel in that manner. The team had no choice but to redirect the spacecraft so it would make it into a stable orbit.
Separately, there was an issue with the Starliner’s Service Module (SM) Disposal Sequence. This is supposed to trigger the automated release of the SM before reentry, but the system didn’t properly register with the flight controller. The team on the ground had to step in and make propulsion changes to save the spacecraft (again).
Boeing’s CST-100 Starliner spacecraft passes by the Vehicle Assembly Building at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida on Nov. 21, 2019.
The last issue is still under investigation, so we can’t say how severe it is or how it contributed to the mission failure in December. NASA reports that the Starliner suffered intermittent communication glitches that impeded ground control’s ability to control the spacecraft. We should have more information about this in the future.
The update does seem surprisingly candid for a public-facing blog post. NASA says Boeing’s quality controls should have detected the software abnormalities at multiple points, and the problems with this mission suggest a basic breakdown in Boeing’s processes. It’s unclear how NASA will move forward, but it probably won’t let Boeing fly any people to space until the company can satisfactorily explain and fix the issues.
Tesla vehicles contain more fancy technology than anything else on the road today, which allows these electric cars to navigate the roads and find you in a parking lot. Although, you have to pay extra for Tesla’s full autonomous “Autopilot” features. If Tesla should ever suspect you haven’t paid for those features, the company is apparently happy to remotely nuke them. That’s what happened to one driver who bought a used Tesla late last year.
The buyer, identified in a Jalopnik report only as Alec, purchased a used 2017 Tesla Model S in December 2017. Alec got the car from a third-party dealer which itself had bought the car from Tesla at auction the previous month. Alec probably felt like he’d gotten a good deal at first because this vehicle (a 75D variant) came with the full “Enhanced” Autopilot suite. That adds about $8,000 to the purchase price when you buy from Tesla.
The car’s sticker listed the Autopilot features as included, so Alec was understandably confused when his car didn’t seem to have Autopilot navigation or Summon. When he contacted Tesla, Alec learned the company had remotely disabled those features after an audit found “Full-Self Driving was not a feature that [he] had paid for.”
It’s unclear why Tesla thought Alec wasn’t entitled to Enhanced Autopilot as the car had been configured and sold by Tesla with those features enabled. Yet, Tesla conducted its remote audit of the vehicle several days after it had sold it to the dealer. At that time, it disabled features on a car it did not own, leading Alec to purchase the Model S with the understanding he would get full self-driving. And of course, this situation only benefits Tesla. Alec cheekily asked if people buying used Teslas could opt to have features disabled to get a lower price. The rep said no.
This is an unusual situation for a car buyer to find themselves in, but it’s one that may only become more common. All modern Tesla vehicles are capable of enhanced Autopilot, but the car’s software determines whether you can use it. If Tesla ever decides to remove access, it can flip the switch remotely. Imagine if you bought a car advertised as all-wheel drive, but the manufacturer decided one day that you weren’t entitled to that feature. Suddenly, you’re only getting power to two wheels. This is the brave new world of connected cars.
The 2020 tax season is here, and that means everyone is getting ready for the arduous task of filing their income tax returns. This is often a difficult task, and it hasn’t got any easier with recent tax reforms. If you feel nervous about filing your taxes, however, taking a class to learn how to file your taxes correctly may be a wise move. Udemy’s “How To Prepare Your Taxes” aims to take the stress out of filing your taxes by doing just this, and it’s been updated as recently as February 2019 with the most recent tax changes.
Course Overview
Throughout the course, the instructor goes over the papers you would use to fill out your tax return by hand. Each line of the form is discussed line by line with few exceptions. The instructor doesn’t waste time explaining things like the name and address boxes, as these are self-explanatory, but few other lines are skipped.
The topic of dependents and filing status is covered in exceptional detail early on in the course, and I found this section be highly informative. The instructor doesn’t just say if you have a child you have a dependent; instead, the lecture goes into more detail explaining the amount of financial aid you provide for the child in order to claim them as a dependent. The course also covers details such as how much income a family member living in your household can earn before they no longer can be claimed as a dependent. (Apparently this bar is set at $4,500.)
Of the next several sections the course goes over reading and understanding W-2 forms and how to properly report income you earned from various sources including interest, dividends, capital gains and losses, and retirement income. Afterward, the lecturer discusses the importance of using itemized deductions or standardized deductions, and this is followed up with information on tax credits and various other smaller topics.
Conclusion
If you’re looking to better understand the tax forms that you need to fill out each year, then Udemy’s “How To Prepare Your Taxes” course is an excellent source of information. It’s not ideal for everyone, though. If you work for a company or are retired, then these classes will likely prove useful while filing your taxes. But the course is less useful to freelancers, those that are self-employed, and small businesses. If you fall into one of these categories, as I do, then filing your taxes is a more complicated affair and this lecture simply doesn’t go over that. I’d still recommend the course, as I found no issues with it, but only if you are employed directly by a company.
AMD at CES in Las Vegas, Nevada, Monday, January 6, 2020. (Photography by PaulSakuma.com Photography)
Today, AMD is launching their Ryzen Threadripper 3990X — a 64-core CPU with a base clock of 2.9GHz, a boost clock of 4.3GHz, and a 256MB L3 cache. Originally, our plan was to present a deep-dive review on the CPU, briefly discuss the overclocking project, and follow up with an in-depth article on the overclocking component on Monday.
Unfortunately, a family emergency has yanked me away from the keyboard and that plan is going to need some modification. While I’ve got most of the data I needed for the review, I need some time to pull it together. Instead of burying you in charts and graphs, I’m going to talk a little about this CPU, what I’ve seen, and what I think it means.
First, here’s a little something to whet your appetite:
Stock score on the 3990X: 25,394. The 3970X scores 17,286.
At all-core 4GHz, the 3990X is 1.21x faster than stock and 1.81x faster than the 3970X.
As of February 6th, 2020, that’s the highest single-socket Cinebench R20 score in the world, according to HWBot. It’s the fourth-highest Cinebench R20 score overall. I achieved it using an Asus Zenith II Extreme motherboard and AMD’s Ryzen Threadripper 3990X at an all-core locked clock of 4GHz on 64 cores. That’s 256GHz altogether, or 0.256THz. While it obviously doesn’t scale the way a 0.256THz single-core CPU would, that’s how fast the CPU is running, in aggregate.
If all goes well, I’ll break that record and formally log the results over the weekend, then talk about the OC project on Monday. I will say this, though — the power and current challenges of operating at a high all-core clock across this many CPUs are formidable. I do not know what the highest clock I can achieve in stable operation is. I hope to answer that question this weekend.
So. With that teaser out of the way, let’s talk about the 3990X and its performance and positioning at stock configurations.
What the 3990X Brings to the Table
The first and most important thing to understand about the 3990X is that this is not a CPU for everyone. The vast majority of applications are not designed to scale this high. Windows itself is not designed to scale this high. Microsoft’s support for more than 64 threads in Windows is a bit of a kludge.
Since Windows Server 2008, Microsoft deals with systems with more than 64 threads in a specific fashion: by creating processor groups. Each group contains up to 64 logical processors (a Hyper-Threading core and a physical core are treated identically), though Microsoft does employ spatial locality awareness to keep a logical core and a physical core part of the same processor group when possible. What this means, however, is that by default, applications can only use 50 percent of the 3990X’s 128 threads. (You can read more on this topic at Bitsum here.) There are ways to get around it — applications can implement their own schedulers that take better advantage of a large-core CPU.
What this means, in aggregate, is that Linux often offers better scaling for the 3990X than Windows does. Rob Williams at Techgage has done a great deal of Linux testing and I’d recommend his article if you want a specific comparison of scaling in this area.
Under Windows, the 3990X shows significant performance uplifts over the 3970X in several areas. Rendering is easily the CPU’s biggest winning category; a number of rendering engines show uplift over the 3990X ranging from 1.3x to 1.6x depending on the application. One of the steps I took for this review was to buy access to the Blender Cloud in order to test some of the professional-quality scenes provided in that system. The more than 30 render tests I ran in Blender alone confirmed that users of this application can look forward to strong scaling, though the exact amount depends on the type of scene. We’ll also examine how the 3990X and the 3970X compare when running multiple workloads simultaneously.
Because Microsoft’s threading engine can’t support more than 64 threads by default, there are a handful of instances where turning SMT off on the 3990X improves performance. We’ll examine those as well and discuss whether there’s a case for the CPU as a 64C/64T chip compared to the 3970X. We’ll include performance figures for Cascade Lake and the 10980XE, not because Intel is directly competing against the 3990X with that chip, but because it’s important to put the best representative figures in that we can, and Intel is currently making its own argument at the $1,000 price point. There are a few tests where the 10980XE pulls ahead, core counts notwithstanding. With a chip this expensive, I wanted to explore the nooks and corners of the performance world.
One reason that this review will take a bit longer to pull together is that I’m also working with different benchmarks than we’ve used before. Applications like Agisoft Metashape, Pix4D, Da Vinci Resolve, and Maya 2020 (with a CPU-stretching benchmark created by Antonio Bosi), plus a heck of a lot of Blending. We’ve got applications where the 3990X proves its own value (if you play in this kind of professional market, at least), and yes, tests that demonstrate you’d really be better off with a 3970X.
We’ll also have more overclocked benchmark results and, if things go my way, a few higher scores to crow about. It’ll be worth the wait.
First Conclusions
I’m going to keep some of my thoughts back for the actual review, but I’ll say this here: The 3990X is a very exciting CPU, even if it isn’t a chip that it makes sense for most people to buy.
Testing this chip reminded me that there was a time when we waited on operating systems and applications to be able to take advantage of CPU features.
The first iteration of Hyper-Threading only worked properly if you ran either XP SP1 (SP1 itself was still fairly new) or had installed SP4 for Windows 2000. We waited on applications to add SSE2 support for the Pentium 4. We waited for a 64-bit Windows and native applications, just as we waited for 32-bit apps and OS support in an earlier era. Now, thanks to the 3990X, we’re waiting for Microsoft to improve how it handles high core-count CPUs.
The Difference in Approach Between AMD and Intel
AMD, to be clear, isn’t the first company to run into this problem with Windows. All of Intel’s high core count CPUs encounter the same issue. Intel, however, has kept its core counts much lower and its price-per-core much higher. The Xeon-W line, which is intended for workstations, scales up to 28 cores in a single socket but offers no dual-socket compatibility. I checked prices at Dell — a dual Xeon Gold 6252 workstation (24C/48T, 2.1GHz base, 3.7GHz Turbo) starts at $10,138. The same system with a Xeon Bronze CPU starts at $1579. That’s an $8559 upgrade fee for two CPUs that offer just 75 percent of the Threadripper 3990X’s core count, at more than twice its base cost.
These price cuts should drive higher core-count CPUs into more professional markets, which will, in turn, encourage Microsoft and Linux developers to better support them.
Finally — because the workstation market doesn’t just respond to core count — we’ll also be examining some performance cases where Cascade Lake remains a better option. Applications that don’t scale particularly well with core count sometimes run significantly better on Intel hardware. I’ll tell you upfront that Cascade Lake does win a few tests against the 3990X. That’s why it’s important to understand the various characteristics of the CPU before buying it.
I regret that I didn’t have the full review finished in time for you to read it this morning. I hope that what I’ve laid out here in my version of a “Coming Soon” gives you something to look forward to — and a fair look at what my thoughts on the CPU are, even if I need a few more days to finish the project.
From time to time, Intel will make mention of the fact that it sells CPUs directly to specific large companies — think Google or Amazon. Unlike AMD, which breaks this segment out into its own semicustom business, Intel typically doesn’t talk about the specific parts that it builds for customers, and only occasionally mentions doing so.
One of those custom chips has tipped up in China as the CC150, an eight-core CPU without typical Intel brand markings, It’s badged with “SRFBT,” and we know the “S” means it’s a production chip, not a sample. There’s no mention of a CPU family such as Celeron, Pentium, or Core — it’s badged only as an “Intel Processor.”
Image by DDAA117/Zhihu
The CPU appears to be a 9th Generation Core i9, with 8 cores, 16 threads, and a constant 3.5GHz clock speed, according to THG. There’s a full-sized 16MB L3 cache, which means this isn’t some cut-down variant or low-end core, despite the lack of turbo boost. Performance-wise, the CC150 had a very low CB20 single-thread score of 151 (no turbo whacks it hard), but the multi-threaded score of 1510 compares well against the 9700K (8C/8T, 3.6GHz base, 4.9GHz boost).
THG also examined the reported power consumption as compared with other Intel CPUs and writes: “based on what we have seen, the CC150 seems like it performs similarly to an i7-9700K in multi-core workloads with a rather modest power consumption that’s equivalent to an i5-9500.”
That explanation might be why the CPU exists in the first place. It’s a relatively low-power eight-core CPU at a modest clock speed. The 9700K draws 115W – 130W in AIDA64 Full Load and 190-220W in AIDA64 FPU. The CC150, in contrast, draws 61-63W in AIDA64 FL and 77-78W in AIDA64 FPU. With the CC150, Intel is delivering 9700K-equivalent performance in less than half the power envelope. That’s a significant win for efficiency and potentially quite valuable to any company that wants low-power, high-efficiency desktop chips that still pack a significant amount of compute resources into each CPU.
There have been rumors that these CPUs are being used in services like GeForce Now, but that may or may not be true. Like Intel’s KF CPUs, the CC150 lacks integrated graphics. It’s showing up at retailers in China for $310. Single-threaded performance is well below the 9700K, but multi-threaded performance is equivalent, for about $85 less.
One thing to note, even if you’re curious about trying to source one of these parts. While it’ll likely drop into any motherboard that supports 9th Generation CPUs based on its physical design, it isn’t clear how the motherboard UEFI will handle the chip. Some motherboards will boot a CPU as “Unknown Processor,” if the initialization process is similar enough to other CPUs the motherboard already supports, but it’s more common for a board to refuse to power up at all until updated properly. Be aware of this if you want to pick one up to play around with.
Frankly, I wonder what the market demand would look like if Intel brought a CPU like this to market in retail. While it might not be very flashy, the combination of a lot of cores and very low power consumption might appeal to some enthusiasts who prize low-power/high-efficiency computing over raw performance.
Amazon isn’t the only retailer getting a jump start on Presidents’ Day. Today you can get Dell’s Presidents’ Day deals early, including a $350 discount on a feature-rich AMD Ryzen 7 2-in-1 laptop.
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This premium, midrange, metal-clad notebook features an Intel Core i5-8265U quad-core processor and a 4K touchscreen display. According to Dell, this system also has excellent battery life and can last for up to 21 hours on a single charge. Right now you can get it from Dell marked down from $1,568.99 to $849.99 with promo code LTXPS133AFF.
With a hexa-core Intel Core i5-9400 clocked at up to 4.1GHz and an Nvidia GeForce GTX 1660, this system’s ready to tackle the graphically challenging games on the market today. Gamers will also appreciate the edgy Alienware case that features LED lights on the side panels. By using promo code AWR8420OFF at checkout on Dell’s website, you can get this system marked down from $1,099.99 to just $679.99.
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Everyone understands the value of learning another language. But even taking into account the professional, personal and even sociological benefits, lots of people see the value, yet can’t bring themselves to make that commitment.
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