L'Ancien Regime

Nope that's one of the threadrippers. Congrats. What mobo will you use for it. My EE friend recommended that MSI’s new X399 Creation motherboard that I listed. And that price is the same....you got yours for $344 USD, that's $424.99 CDN.

I was all set to buy a new short term rig this weekend to serve in the interim but now that's all up in the air. The 1080Ti's are good but they're still commanding a high price despite the glut caused by the falloff in cryptocurrency mining. Those 2070's were annoying anyway in that they didn't allow for SLI or NVlink. What a scam. And there's virtually no good deals for Black Friday on components at all; the best I found was on some low end Asus mobos that were undesireable at any price. I guess I'll just have to wait some more and just surf the web on my $300 Dell Intuos craptop. I suppose I could make do with this for now but I just sense something really good is coming soon; https://www.amazon.com/AMD-Radeon-Vega-Frontier-Edition/dp/B072XKTT7C/ref=sr_1_3?s=electronics&ie=UTF8&qid=1543014738&sr=1-3&keywords=AMD+Radeon+RX+Vega+64 https://www.amazon.ca/AMD-Ryzen-Processor-Wraith-Cooler/dp/B07B428M7F https://www.anandtech.com/show/13020/msi-new-threadripper-2-motherboard-on-steroids-x399-creation And so on...

Oh god, the dying RTX cards phenomenon isn't just for the 2080 cards....now it's the 2070's too.

http://www.cgchannel.com/2018/11/quadspinner-open-sources-entire-vue-portfolio/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+cgchannel%2FnHpU+(CG+Channel+-+Entertainment+Production+Art) Terrain tools developer QuadSpinner has made its entire portfolio of Vue assets available open-source. The collection of resources for e-on software’s world-generation tool includes over 70 atmosphere presets, over 40 MetaNodes and 16 sets of materials, ranging from grasslands to rocks, ice and magma. https://github.com/QuadSpinner/VueLegacy An educational resource as well as a set of production-ready assets Most of the assets in QuadSpinner’s Vue Legacy collection are unlocked, making it possible for artists to explore how they were constructed. There is a further set of “half cooked” development materials from QuadSpinner co-founder Dax Pandhi’s own production library, used on projects like Star Trek and Battlestar Galactica. The main GitHub repository also includes supporting files for QuadSpinner’s Vue training videos, which are now being released via its YouTube channel. https://www.youtube.com/user/quadspinner/videos In addition, QuadSpinner has open-sourced Pandhi’s 2011 book, Realism in Vue, via a separate GitHub repo. The start of an ongoing open source initiative QuadSpinner, which now develops WorldMachine plugin GeoGlyph and standalone terrain design tool Gaea, describes the release as the start of a wider program of open source projects. “We … have not forgotten our roots, nor the community where it all started,” it wrote in a blog post. “On our 10-year anniversary, we are very pleased to announce the QuadSpinner Open Source Initiative.” “Over the next several years, we will be undertaking various open source projects aimed at helping the CG community at large, and creating new educational resources for environment artists.” Availability and system requirements QuadSpinner’s Vue Legacy assets are available under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 licence. Most of the files were created with Vue 7.5, 8, 9.5, 10.5 and 11.5, so “most recent versions” of Vue will open them. https://quadspinner.github.io/

Checkout Topaz AI Gigapixel at the 14 min mark; he's advocating doing lower quality renders then upresing them with this AI system and saving time on renders.

I was just rereading that CG Channel article. This is sort of amazing...to see the logic of Houdini's system end up being applied like this to plug in toolkit development so that they're able to be universally applicable across radically different apps.. It’s provided as a Houdini Digital Asset, which means that it should be possible to use it in other DCC applications, including 3ds Max, Cinema 4D and Maya, Unity, via Houdini Engine.

http://www.cgchannel.com/2018/11/master-gpu-rendering-for-production-with-redshift/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+cgchannel%2FnHpU+(CG+Channel+-+Entertainment+Production+Art) Since its release in 2014, GPU-based production renderer Redshift has become one of the visual effects industry’s staple tools. Next week, visitors to Gnomon’s Hollywood campus will be able to discover why. In GPU Rendering: An Introduction to Redshift for Production, a free two-hour masterclass, former CoSA VFX CG supervsior David Stipinis will explore how Redshift can be used on personal and professional projects. The session, which can be viewed free on Twitch via the player embedded above, will introduce the renderer’s key features and explore specific workflows for increasing productivity and creativity. The event will close with an audience Q&A, enabling viewers to ask follow-up questions. Free to attend, but register online in advance GPU Rendering: An Introduction to Redshift for Production takes place at Gnomon’s Hollywood campus from 7.30-9:30pm on Thursday 15 November 2018. Entry is free, but you’ll need to register online first. If you can’t make it to LA in person, the session will also be broadcast live on Gnomon’s Twitch channel. You don’t need to register to watch the stream, and can ask questions via Twitter using the hashtag #gnomon.

I was thinking of keeping my next workstation computer offline anyway and doing all my internet communications with other non SMT rigs I have. If I can't buy a new rig to sculpt, 3d texture and render with on Cyber Monday I may go insane.

I had this conversation with my EE friend in E. Europe last night on Skype after I sent him this screenshot from the latest Linus video; ME; Portsmash affects AMD too..it affects all parallel processors EE in EU; AWWW S*****!!! EE in EU; i guess we wont be buying anytime soon! ME; Why?? ME; ******* ME; Its that bad eh? EE in EU; ayup ME; How is it being spread? EE in EU; good question. https://www.zdnet.com/article/intel-cpus-impacted-by-new-portsmash-side-channel-vulnerability/ Researchers say they notified Intel's security team last month, on October 1, but the company has not provided a patch until yesterday, the date on which researchers went public with their findings. An Intel spokesperson was not available for comment regarding the state of the PortSmash patching process before this article's publication. AMD CPUS LIKELY IMPACTED "We leave as future work exploring the capabilities of PortSmash on other architectures featuring SMT, especially on AMD Ryzen systems," the research team said in a version of their paper shared with ZDNet, but Brumley told us via email that he strongly suspects that AMD CPUs are also impacted. The work behind discovering PortSmash is also the first result of "SCARE: Side-Channel Aware Engineering," a five-year security research project funded by the European Research Council. "Security and SMT are mutually exclusive concepts," he added. "I hope our work encourages users to disable SMT in the BIOS or choose to spend their money on architectures not featuring SMT."

https://wccftech.com/amd-radeon-instinct-mi60-first-7nm-vega-20-gpu-official/

No live stream I guess.. https://www.anandtech.com/show/13547/amd-next-horizon-live-blog-starts-9am-pt-5pm-utc Even the motherboard chipsets are going to be 7nm this year.

My 2 cents; Samsung 970 EVO 2TB2048 GB M.2 SSD with sequential read write speeds up to 3500/2900 MB/s$590.00 Intel CPUs have security vulnerabilities galore. AMD doesn't. https://wccftech.com/side-channel-portsmash-hits-intel-cpus/ What is the best AMD CPU bang for the buck? https://www.guru3d.com/articles-pages/amd-ryzen-threadripper-2950x-review,32.html if the software supports 32 threads, there's nothing stopping this processor ripping threads and spitting out serious numbers. The base clock is nice and, if all threads are used, you'll see something like 3.8~3.9 GHz on all cores. With a few threads, that's a staggering 4.4 GHz under the condition that you properly cool the processor. You can tweak all cores to 4.1~4.2 GHz of course, but remember that will increase power consumption severely, but also doesn't bring in heaps of extra performance. Only with many threads, you'll see a gain, with fewer threads that XFR2 enabled 4.4. Ghz on four bins brings in the better advantage. https://www.amazon.com/AMD-Ryzen-Threadripper-Processor-YD295XA8AFWOF/dp/B07GFN6CVF $899.00 Now imagine doing a 4k unbiased render with 32 threads and lots of materials and objects in your scene. Imagine cooking up new textures in Substance designer when you've got all those render buckets... I'll be going with a 1080Ti if there's no hope for the forseeable future on AMD GPUs.. https://www.amazon.com/GeForce-Advanced-Gaming-Graphics-ROG-STRIX-GTX1070TI-A8G-GAMING/dp/B076RCTXGX/ref=pd_day0_hl_147_1?_encoding=UTF8&pd_rd_i=B076RCTXGX&pd_rd_r=4e2ec403-e179-11e8-aa9e-d7a355075e98&pd_rd_w=wflHt&pd_rd_wg=VEZ7P&pf_rd_i=desktop-dp-sims&pf_rd_m=ATVPDKIKX0DER&pf_rd_p=ad07871c-e646-4161-82c7-5ed0d4c85b07&pf_rd_r=2ATSS96392JHBV4R2QXX&pf_rd_s=desktop-dp-sims&pf_rd_t=40701&psc=1&refRID=2ATSS96392JHBV4R2QXX I can see gettign two of these in SLI..

https://wccftech.com/amd-zen-2-ryzen-epyc-cpus-higher-than-expected-ipc-clocks/ AMD Zen 2 Frequency and IPC Higher Than Expected On Early Engineering Samples, Possible Preview Tomorrow at Next Horizon Event Tomorrow, AMD is going to talk a lot about their 7nm products which includes both CPUs and GPUs. While GPU talk would be mostly centered around Vega 20 with a possible look at AMD’s NAVI GPU which is aimed for launch sometime in 2019, the CPU talk would go around the AMD ZEN 2 CPU architecture. The event will start at 12 AM (Eastern Time) on 6th November, 2018.

AMD Investor Relations will host a "Next Horizon" event on November 6th, and although there is no confirmation on what products will be announced there, the title alone makes us think about AMD's Zen 2 architecture. The company has just explained that on that day their executives will "discuss the innovation of AMD products and technology, specifically designed with the datacenter on industry-leading 7 nm process technology". AMD announced Ryzen and quite a lot of details about the Zen's processors on their last "Horizon" event, so it seems plausible that the incoming event will be perfect to talk about its next-gen architecture. That focus on the 7 nm process technology will probably make AMD talk about their new Vega graphics, but it seems end users will have to wait, as datacenters come first. https://community.amd.com/community/amd-corporate/blog/2018/08/27/expanding-our-high-performance-leadership-with-focused-7nm-development AMD’s next major milestone is the introduction of our upcoming 7nm product portfolio, including the initial products with our second generation “Zen 2” CPU core and our new “Navi” GPU architecture. We have already taped out multiple 7nm products at TSMC, including our first 7nm GPU planned to launch later this year and our first 7nm server CPU that we plan to launch in 2019. Our work with TSMC on their 7nm node has gone very well and we have seen excellent results from early silicon. To streamline our development and align our investments closely with each of our foundry partner’s investments, today we are announcing we intend to focus the breadth of our 7nm product portfolio on TSMC’s industry-leading 7nm process.

I'm hoping AMD is going to take over Linux and save it from the PC COC cabal too.

Come Cyber Monday this month I'll be buying the 1080ti for my new rig...AMD GPUs will come out in January. Will AMD steal a march on Nvidia and come out with a 7nm GPU that blows the door off Nvidia the way they did with Intel CPUs? I can dream, can't I? AMD’s 7nm Vega is a Monster – 1.25x Turing’s Compute at Half The Size Whilst the company hasn’t disclosed detailed specifications relating to the new GPU we could reasonably expect around one terabyte/s of memory bandwidth, higher clock speeds and significantly better power efficiency thanks to TSMC’s leading-edge 7nm process technology, which has reportedly enabled the company to extract an unbelievable 20.9 TFLOPS of graphics compute out of 7nm Vega, according to one source. If true, it would make it the world’s first 20 TFLOPS GPU. That figure is simply unheard of especially out of a chip of this size, which Anandtech estimates to be roughly 336mm² large. To put this into perspective, if accurate, the figure would put it 25% ahead of NVIDIA’s most powerful GPU yet, the 754mm² monster Turing GPU. All the while Vega 20 allegedly achieves this with half the silicon real-estate. https://wccftech.com/amd-confirms-new-7nm-radeon-graphics-cards-launching-in-2018/ And it's probably going to be a much lower price than NVidia too...

Wow the story has legs... https://wccftech.com/geforce-rtx-2080tis-are-dying-and-there-are-different-rtx-2070-chips/ NVIDIA and the GeForce RTX 2080ti and the rest of the RTX family can’t seem to stay out of the headlines these days. But, all press is good press right? Maybe not always in this case. The RTX 2080ti is apparently having some issues staying alive and there are multiple variants of the RTX 2070 floating about that offer up very different performance levels under the same branding name. RTX 2080ti Failures Reports sprang up just before Halloween regarding an unusual amount of RTX 2080ti’s being reported on the GeForce forums indication a rather high number of cards dying for a new launch. Defects and DOAs aren’t exactly uncommon and do happen at launch and with a GPU with such a massive die it’s quite possible for some to slip through QA and make it out into the wild, only to be found by the unfortunate person it was shipped to. But this time the numbers appear, based on reporting so far, that there are quite a few more than normal. Visiting the GeForce forums will unveil quite a few threads regarding dead or dying RTX 2080ti’s or tales of RMAs gone wrong. The most common occurrence seems to be related to artifacts appearing on screen and ultimately crashing to black and never recovering. Artifacts like shown in the threads are typically a results from unstable memory overclocks, or just bad memory, which has caused quite a bit of finger pointing towards the GDDR6 memory used on the RTX 2080ti. But that’s kind of a hard sell to some since the issues appear to be pretty isolated to the RTX 2080ti Founders Edition and not the other AIB variants and cards that also carry GDDR6. I personally have a friend who’s card died on him just this morning after being hit with massive artifacts even on the desktop. I’ve actually spent the past several days trying to confirm whether ours was dying or not, thankfully our test card is okay since it turned out to be nothing more than a bad M.2 drive, odd that it would function fine with other cards but the test bench is rock solid again. GeForce RTX 2080ti’s Are Dying And There Are Different RTX 2070 Chips.

https://www.techradar.com/news/nvidias-flagship-rtx-2080-ti-graphics-cards-are-failing-more-than-they-should The most powerful consumer GPUs to hit the market are experiencing some teething problems at the moment, with a number of early users reporting their Nvidia GeForce RTX 2080 Ti graphics cards are failing in a variety of ways. Among the issues being reported are day-one failures, according to Digital Trends, with instabilities and artifacts being found immediately after installing the card, while others are seeing their GPUs die after a few days of nominal use. Across both the Nvidia forums and relevant Reddit threads, an alarmingly high number of users have told the tale of their cards dying – more often than not, it's the Founders Edition of the GPU and, in some cases, even their replacement cards from the manufacturer have gone the same way.

Just found this one in an old image file..