The show starts on a high note, with Henry’s audio being amazingly echo free. Usually we hear a lot of echo as Henry talks, which is due to the rammed earth walls of his new abode, plus the fact that there isn’t any carpeting or anything else to absorb his nasal tones. But somehow Henry has broken the code and is sitting in exactly the right place where the echo either doesn’t happen or they miraculously cancel each other out perfectly. Don’t expect to see it happen again. We’re at 3/4^th strength as Jessie is still at Marine Officer Candidate School.

We have big news today. Well, not news about us, we’re not making the news. And it’s not all that new either, but, as we say on the podcast, it’s news to us and that’s enough reason for us to tackle it. What are we talking about? Amazon’s new Graviton2 processor. (Here’s a great article from AnandTech comparing Graviton2 vs. AMD and Intel.) This Graviton2 is based on Arm and sports 64 physical cores, large caches, competitive frequency at 2.5Ghz. In the call, the boys talk about the specs and how they favorably compare – at least on paper – well against Intel and AMD x86 processors. However, we don’t know what applications are available for Graviton2 and how it would compare in a real apples-to-apples showdown with all three processors running real workloads. We also have a discussion of the economics behind the new chip and how Amazon is charging significantly less for instances powered by Graviton2 vs. AMD and Intel. Dan thinks this is a big deal and will roil the CPU market, Henry isn’t convinced, and Shahin says it’s not a watershed moment, but is an important evolution in cloud computing.

Henry Newman’s Reasons Why No One Should Ever be Online. Ever.  Henry flips the script this week and points out a piece of clickbait that has really riled him up. This is a CNN Business story that purportedly proves that if someone can monitor your internal residence wireless traffic, they can then tell when no one is home. Um….duh?

Catch of the Week:

Henry:  is so upset by the stupid clickbait CNN story that he couldn’t even gather his net. But his ‘deer in the headlight’ comments brought on a tangential conversation about this classic YouTube video where a deer beats the crap out of a hunter. Enjoy

Shahin:  Retro phone headsets are making a comeback. It’s the new stylish choice for hipsters or someone looking to return back to an older, simpler, time.

Dan:  Announcing a NEW CONTEST! We will give a fabulous prize bundle to the 23^rd listener email we receive at podcast@radiofreehpc.com . Why 23? We love the prime numbers here at RF-HPC, they’re incredibly useful. Plus 23 listeners is a stretch goal for us, we barely made it to 18 in our last contest. Send in those emails soon!

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