That’s not going to go away by switching to AMD or some ARM implementation, they all have their own equivalent. Maybe if you’re running some fully libre open-source RISC-V chip, but those are currently nowhere near capable of competing on the big stage for anything other than embedded/hobbyist stuff.

Traditional graphics code works by having the CPU generate a sequence of commands which are packed together and sent to the GPU to run. This extension let’s you write code which runs on the GPU to generate commands, and then execute those same commands on the GPU without involving the CPU at all.

This is a super powerful feature which makes it possible to do things which simply weren’t feasible in the traditional model. Vulkan improved on OpenGL by allowing people to build command buffers on multiple threads, and also re-use existing command buffers, but GPU pipelines are getting so wide that scenes containing many objects with different render settings are bottlenecked by the rate at which the CPU can prepare commands, not by GPU throughput. Letting the GPU generate its own commands means you can leverage the GPU’s massive parallelism for the entire render process, and can also make render state changes much cheaper.

(For anyone familiar, this is basically a more fleshed out version of NVIDIA’s proprietary NV_command_list extension for OpenGL, except that it’s in Vulkan and standardized across all GPU drivers)

Only if the old software happens to have drivers compatible with the new hardware, which it almost certainly doesn’t.

“Better” in the sense that it actually has the ability to check for corruption at all, as all metadata and data are checksummed.

25% of millions of people is still many people, they didn’t say “a majority of people”.

You’ve made me uncertain if I’ve somehow never noticed this before, so I gave it a shot. I’ve been dd-ing /dev/random onto one of those drives for the last 20 minutes and the transfer rate has only dropped by about 4MB/s since I started, which is about the kind of slowdown I would expect as the drive head gets closer to the center of the platter.

EDIT: I’ve now been doing 1.2GB/s onto an 8 drive RAID0 (8x 600GB 15k SAS Seagates) for over 10 minutes with no noticable slowdown. That comes out to 150MB/s per drive, and these drives are from 2014 or 2015. If you’re only getting 60MB/s on a modern non-SMR HDD, especially something as dense as an 18TB drive, you’ve either configured something wrong or your hardware is broken.

This is for very long sustained writes, like 40TiB at a time. I can’t say I’ve ever noticed any slowdown, but I’ll keep a closer eye on it next time I do another huge copy. I’ve also never seen any kind of noticeable slowdown on my 4 8TB SATA WD golds, although they only get to about 150MB/s each.

EDIT: The effect would be obvious pretty fast at even moderate write speeds, I’ve never seen a drive with more than a GB of cache. My 16TB drives have 256MB, and the 8TB drives only 64MB of cache.

My 16TB ultrastars get upwards of 180MB/s sustained read and write, these will presumably be faster than that as the density is higher.

not sure what you’re on about, i have some cheap 500GB USB 3 drives from like 2016 lying around and even those can happily deal with sustained writes over 130MB/s.

That’s like 1/7th of the cost of a single passenger car. I’m sure they can easily afford to take that hit if it doesn’t end up panning out.

Because none of that unused land is set up to allow a machine to easily roll over it and automatically place/replace/clean the panels. Putting panels between the tracks means you get that for free, as the tracks are there anyway, and are already have electrical infrastructure all along their length.

The point of the experiment is to see if those benefits end up outweighing the presumably higher chance of panels getting damaged. In the worst case it ends up not being worth while and there isn’t a huge loss, in the best case we end up being able to add a bunch of additional solar capacity without having to build much new infrastructure or cover any previously unused land.

And it would be trivially easy to have a train run over the tracks to clean the panels, there are already trains which use compressed air/sandblasters/lasers to remove leaves and stuff from the rails. Just add a few more compressed air nozzles in between and boom, all your panels are now clean.

This is Switzerland, outside of a small number of corridors the majority of tracks see virtually nothing but passenger trains.

Okay, but the commenter said “my laptop with jts integrated GPU”. Obviously, laptops with a dedicated AMD GPU would be affected by this change.

It specifically says the change only applies to dedicated GPUs, not integrated ones.

I always wonder what’s going on in the heads of Americans when they go to an area notorious for being hit by hurricanes or tornadoes and then decide they should build their house out of basically toothpicks with some plaster. Here in Switzerland, pretty much everything except for maybe a garden shed is poured concrete, and I guarantee that if the folks in Florida or Oklahoma did the same the “devastation” would be comparatively tiny.

It is the point, this is exactly what Broadcom does.

If you don’t leave the building you will not be having any more meals ever again.

“Please insert your webcam.”

Yes

Yes, which is why these settings can also be configured per-directory as well as per-file.