Summary: Today we talk about potential uses for that spare mac mini you have sitting around, how much I hate to love my new phone, Solar roof sales are… through the roof (deal with it), Intel and AMD’s new CPU architectures, converting 80 years of film to HDR, I’m not a millionaire, two deathwatch discussions, Today I Learned and more - but we’ll lead off with your spare Mac Mini, Ethan. WHAT SHOULD ETHAN DO WITH A SPARE MAC MINI? 16GB, i7, 1TB Fusion drive. Home automation center? Is there such a thing? Media server such as Plex? VMware ESXi? Linux? ERIC HATES TO LOVE HIS NEW PHONE. Android vs. Apple discussion. SOLAR ROOF TILE UPDATE https://electrek.co/2017/05/31/tesla-solar-roof-tiles-permitting-installations/ https://electrek.co/2017/05/25/tesla-solar-roof-tiles-sold-out-2018/ Orders exceeded Tesla’s expectations. Pilot manufacturing in Fremont soon. Volume production in Buffalo soon after. Other slowdowns to installation will be installers. On the plus side, they’ve received the Underwriters Laboratories “Class A” roofing classification, which should help with permitting. Greasing the skids with local bodies that give building permits was the impression we got. INTEL X-SERIES I9 CPUS VS AMD “THREADRIPPER” https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2017/05/intels-new-high-end-desktop-platform-up-to-18-cores-36-threads-2000/ http://wccftech.com/amd-ryzen-threadripper-16-core-cpu-849-us-price-x399-motherboards/ This is all about HEDT - the “High End Desktop” market Kaby Lake X - different socket, Socket 2066 - clock speeds go up nominally compared to the non-X variety for similar price. Skylake is where things get more interesting… Based loosely on the Xeon architecture 1MB per core of dedicated L2 cache (4x improvement) Shared cache is actually reduced - which should net performance improvements, since latency of private cache is significantly less than shared - no scheduling, etc. Supports 4 memory channels
