Seems to me a lot of people are getting an intolerance to light, so don’t expect too much.

That’s it!! Now I will NEVER use an iPhone as a server. 😋

Yes this too is really a turnaround compared to “old times”. Intel used to be the safe choice, that’s definitely not the case anymore.

calculating every SHA256 of all MACs

Yes but because I don’t have the folder it reads myself, I can’t see what actually encoded. Are you sure /etc/machine-id is ONLY the MAC address?

because it’s possible to connect to natural persons.

That’s debatable, and is only based on the claim that it’s just a 24bit decoding that can be brute forced. I don’t know for a fact that it’s true that it can be boiled down to 24bit.
I checked my own /etc/machine-id, and the folder doesn’t even exist, so what exactly is supposed to be in it IDK. And yes I use Manjaro.

Absolutely, if Intel hadn’t been sleeping on their laurels for 5 years on desktop performance, and had made 6 and 8 core CPUs themselves before Ryzen arrived. Ryzen would not have been nearly as successful. This was followed by the catastrophic Intel 10nm fab failures, allowing AMD to stay ahead even longer.

So absolutely, AMD has been helped a lot by Intel failing to react in time, and then failing in execution when they did react.
Still I think congratulation is in order, because Ryzen was such a huge improvement on the desktop and server, that they absolutely deserve their success. Threadripper was icing on the cake, and completely trashed Intel in the workstation segment.

And AMD exposed Intel’s weakness in face of real competition. Arm and Nvidia had already done that in their respective areas, but AMD did it on Intel’s core business.

I predicted in 2017 stock price over $100 when that happened.
Took about 3-4 years longer than expected, but still congratulations to AMD, on their successful fight back from the brink of bankruptcy.

You could just assign a random number on install or whatever.

Funny, I thought the exact same thing.

this would have is some sort of tracking.

It’s right at the top of the announcement, that it’s mainly for more accurate stats on unique users.
It’s not that I think this is a good idea, because I don’t, but some people are blowing it out of proportions. Especially since this isn’t at all decided. Which I seriously doubt it will.

And he is, one review at a time.

You can see the code of what is send.
I’m not aware that Google claims they collect data anonymously, on everything where you are logged in.
So that’s a false equivalence.

The MAC address is anonymized with sha256, and IP adresses aren’t stored.
So this seems to me to be perfectly anonymous.

This may be illegal in EU if they don’t use opt in. Even then it may be illegal for under 18 year olds to collect MAC addresses and disk serial numbers, as those can potentially be used for identification.

The data is anonymized, and the IP is NOT stored. So I’m not sure this violates GDPR?

From the code we can see the machine ID is anonymized, sending only a SHA256 checksum.

def get_hashed_device_id():
    # Read the machine ID
    with open("/etc/machine-id", "r") as f:
        machine_id = f.read().strip()

    # Hash the machine ID using SHA-256 to anonymize it
    hashed_id = hashlib.sha256(machine_id.encode()).digest()

    # Convert the first 16 bytes of the hash to a UUID (version 5 UUID format)
    return str(uuid.UUID(bytes=hashed_id[:16], version=5))

This makes it somewhat a nothingburger IMO.

Power consumption is not efficiency, PPW is.

From then on the entire point is moot.

No it’s not, because the point is that design matters. When Ryzen came out originally, it was far more energy efficient than the Intel Skylake. And Intel had the node advantage.

I heard that they don’t have similar problems in China, because they’ve made laws against it.
Why can’t we do that here in EU?

No but the M4 Max is claimed to be as fast, and Intel improved their chip, so it’s down from 250W for previous gen! And the M4 Max is faster.

The new Intel Arrow Lake is supposed to max out at 150W, but it doesn’t. And that’s still almost 40% better than previous gen Intel!
So hovering around 80-90W max is pretty modest by today’s standards.

The laws of physics apply to everyone

That is obviously true, but a ridiculous argument, there are plenty examples of systems performing better and using less power than the competition.
For years Intel chips used twice the power for similar performance compared to AMD Ryzen. And in the Buldozer days it was the same except the other way around.

Arm has designed chips for efficiency for a decade before the first smartphones came out, and they’ve kept their eye on the ball the entire time since.
It’s no wonder Arm is way more energy efficient than X86, and Apple made by far the best Arm CPU when M1 arrived.

The great advantage of Apple is that they are usually a node ahead

Yes that is an advantage, but so it is for the new Intel Arrow Lake compared to current Ryzen, yet Arrow Lake use more power for similar performance. Despite Arrow Lake is designed for efficiency.

It’s notable that Intel was unable to match Arm on power efficiency for an entire decade, even when Intel had the better production node. So it’s not just a matter of physics, it is also very much a matter of design. And Intel has never been able to match Arm on that. Arm still has the superior design for energy efficiency over X86, and AMD has the superior design over Intel.

I look forward to watching a Gamers Nexus review of this. I hope it’s as good as they say. 😀