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October 28, 2021 Archives

Thursday, October 28, 2021

THE HAPPENING WORLD: Intel 12th Generation “Alder Lake” i9-12900K Processor—Press Kit and a Look Inside

Intel's 12th generation CPUs, code named “Alder Lake” is scheduled to launch on November 4th, 2021. Here is a description of the chips and rumoured specifications.

Chips and compatible motherboards and memory are already in the hands of the trade press, with reviews expected to drop as soon as the embargo lifts on November 4th. Ian Cutress is one of those reviewers, and provides a look inside Intel and MSI's press kits sent to reviewers.

German extreme overclocker and YouTuber “der8auer” is also reviewing the chip and managed, by a fat finger, to blow up his i9-12900K CPU. He took the opportunity to remove the lid and take a look inside, evaluating the physical construction of the packaging and its suitability for direct die cooling for power-mad overclockers.

And, by the way, if you think overclocking is some kind of outré activity undertaken by gamers with an excess of time on their hands and a shortage of common sense, did you know that Intel publishes a document titled “How to Overclock Your Unlocked Intel® Core™ Processor” and even provides a free “Extreme Tuning Utility” to aid in the process?

Posted at 13:58 Permalink

CONTEXT: Dinosaurs—The True Story

How's that space program coming along?

Posted at 13:05 Permalink

TRACKING WITH CLOSEUPS: An Appreciation of Pure LISP

John McCarthy's 1960 paper, “Recursive Functions of Symbolic Expressions and Their Computation by Machine, Part I” [PDF, reproduction of original], which introduced the LISP programming system, was a stunning achievement in the history of computing. McCarthy proved that with only a minimal set of functions and linked lists, it was not only possible to evaluate any computable function (Turing completeness), but that there was no distinction between programs and data—programs could manipulate themselves as easily as they could items of data. In a sense,a large part of the history of programming languages in the six decades that followed was re-inventing concepts inherent in Lisp from its origin.

In this talk from 2019 Linux conference, Kristoffer Gronlund describes LISP, demonstrates how so few primitives can have such power, and describes how it has influenced programming languages and how we think about computing over the years.

Posted at 12:33 Permalink

CONTEXT: Florida Man—NASA Administrator Clarence William Nelson on UFOs

This is an excerpt from an hour long interview on 2021-10-19 at the University of Virginia Center for Politics. Scroll back to the beginning if you wish (why?) to see the whole thing.

The interviewer/host, Larry Sabato, Director of the Center for Politics, is also a prize: “Of course, Einstein believed in parallel universes. So, that's good enough for me, if Einstein believed in it, and he inspired a lot of Rod Serling's ‘Twilight Zone’s” [56:50].

Posted at 11:26 Permalink

CONTINUITY: A Dyson Sphere May Double the Lifetime of a Low Mass Star

Here is the full paper, “Evolutionary and Observational Consequences of Dyson Sphere Feedback” [PDF].

Posted at 10:46 Permalink