Tech Brew Ride Home - Thu. 03/25 – DDR5 Arrives (F*** Everything, We're Doing Five Blades)

Episode Date: March 25, 2021

Remember that Onion headline, F- Everything, We’re Doing Five Blades? Well, Samsung says welcome to the DDR5 era. There’s more tech testimony on Capitol Hill today. That Arizona bill that would have regulated the App Store mysteriously disappears. Deliveroo is facing a full on revolt. And my wife covers the Chrissy Teigen twitter news. Sponsors: Calderalab.com use code TECHMEME (all caps one word) at checkout Masterworks.io, promocode ride Links: Samsung Announces 512GB DDR5 Memory That Is Twice As Fast As DDR4 (HotHardware) Zuckerberg suggests how to tweak tech's liability shield (Axios) Genshin Impact Races Past $1 Billion on Mobile in Less Than Six Months (SensorTower) Arizona Senate skips vote on controversial bill that would regulate Apple and Google app stores (The Verge) Independent cloud provider DigitalOcean drops in Wall Street debut (CNBC) Deliveroo Hit by Investor, Rider Revolt Ahead of London IPO (Bloomberg) Twitter’s ‘unofficial mayor’ Chrissy Teigen quits platform after years of harassment (The Verge) Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

On April 4th, 2023, around 2 in the morning, a man was found stabbed multiple times on a sidewalk in downtown San Francisco. Hey, who did this to you? What happened next turned the story into a political firestorm. Reports have identified the victim as Bob Lee, the founder of Cash App. From Bloomberg Podcasts, this is Foundering, the Killing of Bob Lee, beginning April 16. Welcome to the Tech Meme right home for Thursday, March 25th, 2021. I'm Brian McCullough today. Remember that onion headline, F everything, we're doing five blades. Well, Samsung says, welcome to the DDR5 era. There's more tech testimony on Capitol Hill today. That Arizona bill that would have regulated the app store mysteriously disappears.

Deliveroo is facing a full-on revolt, and my wife covers the Chrissy Teigen Twitter news. Here's what you miss today in the world of tech. The standard was settled on years ago, and some smaller manufacturers have released early products here and there. But everyone was waiting for this to make it official. Samsung has announced 512 gigabyte DDR5 memory chips, still in the verification stage, that deliver over twice the performance of DDR4 at up to 7,200 MbPS for advanced workloads. We are now officially in the DDR5 era, quoting, hot hardware. As we inch closer to Intel's Alder Lake and AMD's Zenfor architectures late this year and or early next year, barring any delays, memory makers have started announcing advances in

DDR5 memory, which will deliver a big increase in bandwidth. We've even seen some DDR5 module launches. Samsung, however, has managed to separate itself from the pack on announcing what it says is the industry's first 512 gigabyte memory module based on high K metalgate or HKMG process technology. According to Samsung, its 512 gigabyte DDR5 memory module delivers more than twice the performance of DDR4 add up to 7,200 megabits per second. This, the company says, will be beneficial for the most extreme compute-hungry and high bandwidth workloads. The 512 Gb capacity comes by way of stacking eight layers of 16-gabit DRAM chips. There's no mention of cost, though, Samsung says it is currently sampling its 512 GB modules to customers for testing and verification,

end quote. We've been in the DDR4 era for a long time now. Why are folks excited for this new era, quoting WiiPC. DDR5 RAM is set to supersede DDR4 in almost every area. Faster speeds, greater bandwidth, better power efficiency, you name it. DDR5 does it better. Developers are promising some impressive figures for DDR5 and have been quoted as saying the latest RAM modules will have twice the performance of today's DDR4-3200 RAM. The data rate, which for us is one of the better improvements we've seen over DDR4, actually allows for an increase of 1.36X effective bandwidth when comparing DDR4 versus DDR5 at 3,200 megahertz.

If you do the same math against a higher speed DDR5, maybe 4,800 megahertz, then the results produce almost double what DDR4 has to offer, end quote. And quoting slash gear. Smartphones are starting to sport rather insane amounts of memory, up to 16 gigabytes in some places, but that still has nothing over RAM for PCs, servers, and HPCs. Memory in those computers number in the three digits, but are mostly limited to how much RAM chips can actually fit in a module. If you can cram more RAM in a single stick, you can have more memory in the same amount of slots, and Samsung's new 512 gigabyte DDR5D RAM module definitely

breaks the barriers not just in capacity or speed, but in the technology used. If you can cram more RAM in a single stick, you can have more memory in the same amount of slots, and Samsung's new 512 gigabyte DDR5 module definitely breaks the barriers, not just in capacity or speed, but in the technology used. Samsung's new module is not just its first based on the new DDR5 spec. It also claims the title being the first with that high capacity to be made using a high K metal gate or HKMG process. As components get smaller, so does the insulation layer that's supposed to prevent electrical currents from leaking. The solution Samsung found was to replace the usual silicon-based insulator with new metals and materials, which is exactly what HKMG does. The switch to HKMG and

lowering current leakage also have other benefits for the 512 gigabyte memory. Samsung was able to reduce power consumption by 13% while also increasing performance to 7200 MBS, noted to be twice that of DDR4. These are the very same traits that are sought after in RAM designed for energy-efficient data centers, end quote. Expect it to cost a lot for the foreseeable future and mainly go to power powerful data centers at first, but might we start seeing this in consumer hardware, maybe even smartphones by next year? There is a big tech hearing today in the U.S. House of Representatives, and all of our friends will be there. Zuck, Sundar, Jack, well, they'll be there virtually at least. It's going to be focusing on social media and misinformation, so expect a lot of talk of Section 230.

I've learned that I can't really cover these congressional hearings same day because they tend to go on forever, so it's best to wait for commentary to bubble up later tonight, I guess. But ahead of the House hearing today, Mark Zuckerberg again called for Section 230 reforms in a way that was very, very specific, quoting Axios. In written testimony ahead of the House hearing Thursday, Zuckerberg suggests making Section 230 protections for certain types of unlawful content, conditional on platform's ability to meet best practices to fight the spread of the content. Quote, platforms should not be held liable if a particular piece of content evades its detection. That would be impractical for platforms with billions of posts per day,

but they should be required to have adequate systems in place to address unlawful content, end quote. The detection system would be proportionate to platform size, with practices defined by a third party, end quote. In other words, as long as you at least try, as long as you have some sort of detection system in place, you get to keep your liability shield. You only get sued under this proposal if you do nothing at all. But I said that this was a very specific olive branch on Zuckerberg's part, because, well, what have we said before, about regulation often being bent to shore up the power of the incumbent.

The analogy of pulling the drawbridge up after you've crossed it, quoting Thomas Beckadell on Twitter, quote, existing platforms will be the only companies who could even do this. If this became law, nobody would ever be able to start anything new that could compete with Facebook, end quote. Sensor Tower says that freemium mobile game Genshin Impact has become the fastest gaming title to reach $1 billion in player spending on the App Store and Google Play worldwide. doing so in just under six months, quote. Genshin Impact's success is fueled by a substantial investment into the game's live-ops,

which is consistently implementing new events, features, and characters into the title. The introduction of these, particularly new characters, results in significant spikes in player spending. Who Tao's introduction saw revenue rise to close to $13 million in a single day on March 2nd, while Zhao's appearance saw player spending hit more than $15 million on February 3rd. For comparison, Jensen Impact has generated $5.8 million a day on average since launch. China ranks as the number one market for spending in the mobile version of Jensen Impact, generating $302 million to date or 29.5% of global player spending via iOS alone. Censor Tower does not track third-party Android store spending.

Japan ranks number two, accumulating 278.3 million or 27.2% while the United States ranks number three for revenue picking up approximately $189 million or 18.5% of the total. The App Store accounts for the lion's share of global player spending, accumulating 615 million or 60% of total revenue. Google Play, meanwhile, accounts for 409.4 million or 40% of player spending. Outside of China, however, Google Play makes up the majority of revenue with 56.7% of player spending, while the App Store accounts for $313 million or 43.3.3%. 3%. End quote. The Arizona bill that would have regulated the Apple and Google App stores has just disappeared. Funny that, right? Quoting the Verge. The Arizona State Senate was scheduled to vote on an

unprecedented and controversial bill Wednesday that would have imposed far-reaching changes on how Apple and Google operate the respective mobile app stores, specifically by allowing alternative in-app payment systems. But the vote never happened. having been passed over on the schedule without explanation. The Verge watched every other bill on the schedule be debated and voted on over the Senate's live stream, but Arizona HB 2005 listed first on the agenda never came up. One notable Apple critic is now accusing the iPhone maker of stepping in to stop the vote, saying the company hired a former chief of staff to Arizona Governor Doug Deucey

to broker a deal that prevented the bill from being heard in the Senate and ultimately voted on. This is after the legislation in amendment to the existing HB-2005 law passed the Arizona House of Representatives earlier this month in a landmark 31-29 vote. Quote, the big show turned out to be a no-show. The bill was killed in mid-air while on the agenda with a backroom deal. Apple has hired the governor's former chief of staff, and word is that he brokered a deal to prevent this from even being heard, said Base Camp co-founder David Hennemeyer Hansen, a fierce Apple critic who submitted testimony in support of HB 2005 on Twitter this afternoon. Apple declined to comment, end quote. As Dieter Bone joked on Twitter, pretty weird that this bill ghosted. Then again, an App Store bill getting mysteriously rejected without sufficient explanation is fitting, end quote.

I would call this the first notable hiccup in a while. Cloud Infrastructure Service DigitalOcean did not get a first day pop. on its debut on the public markets yesterday, closing down 10% after pricing shares that valued the company at $4.48 billion, quoting CNBC. DigitalOcean challenges much bigger companies, including Amazon and Microsoft in the market to provide computing and storage resources that companies can consume to run their software instead of operating their own data center infrastructure. DigitalOcean has built up a business by keeping its products easy to use. Most of its revenue comes from the use of droplets, which are virtual slices of physical servers.

DigitalOcean raised $775 million in the IPO. The company operates 14 data centers of its own in the U.S. and abroad through leases, and the company intends to continue expanding its footprint, like its competitors. But unlike its large rivals, DigitalOcean doesn't have billions of dollars that customers have agreed to pay for services they have not used yet. The company had less than $5 million in deferred revenue at the end of 2020, and quote. So we'll have to see if this is a sign of the market finally softening, or maybe it's a one-off case. Maybe it's a hot space for sure, but just a player in a hot space facing structural

disadvantages that investors sniffed out. UK delivery giant Deliveroo is looking to do an IPO itself in London next week, but there seemed to be some hiccups. Deliveroo is apparently facing a full-on revolt from both investors and its writers. Concerned about the way that Deliveroo treats the latter, quoting Bloomberg. Aberdeen Standard Investments and Aviva investors, two of the UK's biggest asset managers, said they won't be participating in the IPO. The investors, which manage about 830 billion pounds or $1.1 trillion combined, said they're concerned that the company's treatment of its writers doesn't align with socially responsible investing practices. We're looking to invest in businesses that aren't just profitable but are sustainable. Aberdeen's head of UK equities, Andrew Milligan said,

employee rights and engagement are an important part of that, end quote. Some writers agree with hundreds of couriers expected to refuse to make deliveries when the startup begins trading next week. The Independent Workers Union of Great Britain is protesting pay and conditions at Deliveroo. President Alex Marshall said by phone, quote, they stand to make billions while the workers have seen pay and conditions get worse, Marshall said. Demands for more benefits and protections for gig workers are gaining traction after a year in which shops and restaurants around the world were shut and the people who deliver food and packages proved vital. Deliveroo has listed this as a key risk to its business ahead of its as much as 1.77 billion pound IPO set to be the UK's biggest in

six months when it starts trading in London on March 31st. A Deliveroo spokesperson said that there has been quote, strong investor interest in our planned IPO and we are already backed by some of the most respected global tech investors, end quote. The company called the IWGB a, quote, fringe organization that doesn't represent its 50,000 UK writers. Still, Deliveroo said in its prospectus that, quote, our business would be adversely affected if our writer model or approach to writer status and our operating practices were successfully challenged, or if changes in law require us to reclassify our writers as employees, end quote. The company set aside 112 million pounds to cover potential legal costs. Labor groups have already racked up a big win this year. Uber, which runs the competing Uber

Eats service, said it will reclassify its 70,000 UK drivers as workers, entitling them to the minimum wage and vacation pay after losing a landmark ruling in the country's Supreme Court last month, end quote. Finally today, when I woke up this morning, my wife asked me if I was going to do the Chrissy Teigen story on the show today, and I was like, what's this now? But lo and behold, Here's the story at the top of tech meme. And clearly, I had no knowledge of this story. So finally today, someone who is much more qualified than I am to cover this one, take it away, Lisa. Chrissy Teigen, who had 13.7 million Twitter followers was once called the unofficial mirror of Twitter by the company,

quits the platform after years of harassment, quoting The Verge. Teigen quit the social media platform Wednesday night. In a series of now deleted tweets, Teigen said Twitter no longer search. me as positively as it serves me negatively, and I think that's the right time to call something. The model and media personality who is married to singer John Legend was a witty presence on Twitter, and she had 13.7 million followers on the platform, which she joined more than a decade ago. Tegan tweeted about everything from her kids to cooking projects to personal challenges in her life, including a miscarriage she suffered last October.

She was famously blocked on Twitter by former President Trump, who was himself banned from the platform in January. It was one of a handful of counts followed by the official POTUS account when President Biden took office. Twitter even promoted her as the unofficial mayor, doing a behind-the-tweets video segment in 2019, where she gave some backstory about several of her higher-profile tweets. But Tegan, who was also a target of vitriolic abuse and ongoing harassment, both on and off of Twitter, Pizzagate conspiracy theorists baselessly claimed Tegan and legend were a part of a non-existent pedophile ring, supposedly run out of a Washington, D.C. pizzeria.

She said she deleted thousands of tweets and blocked more than a million Twitter accounts last July after ongoing harassment by QAnon followers. For years, I have taken so many small two-follower account punches that at this point I am honestly deeply bruised, she tweeted last Wednesday. This is a very bad look for Twitter, which despite all of its efforts to reduce harassment on the platform, was unable to protect a woman of color and arguably one of the best-known personalities from being targeted and harassed. The company declined to comment to The Verge on Thursday, end quote. As Kurt Wagner noted on Twitter, Chrissy Teigen quitting Twitter is a really, really bad reflection on the company's ability to fight abuse. She wasn't just some famous person.

She was a power user. She was a fan favorite internally. She spoke at Twitter's company-wide retreat in early 2020. This one will sting, end quote. Chrissy didn't deserve this. We love you, Chrissy. Also this morning I had one of those glitch in the matrix moments, and I swear to God this is true. You can also ask Lisa to confirm this.

Penny had crawled into bed with us at some point last night, and so as I often do, I started to sing songs to try to wake her up. Whatever song is in my head, I just, you know, replace the lyrics with words to the effect of, hey, get up. It's time to go to school or something. Since her name is Penny Jane, very often I sing the Beatles Penny Lane with. the lyrics changed to her name, etc., etc. So this morning, for whatever reason, that old commercial jingle from Big Red Chewing Gum commercials

from the 1980s popped into my head, and I started singing that. It really is just the quintessential 80s jingle. The tune is just completely 80s. But then, after that, as I was getting dressed, I popped on my first podcast of the day. It's Thursday today, so it's Freedom Day for me. And right at the beginning of today's episode,

Paul and Lauren and Scott, for whatever reason, started singing old TV commercial jingles, and sure enough, they started singing the Big Red jingle. Literal glitch in The Matrix Moment. I haven't thought of that song in maybe 20 years, but as soon as they started singing commercial jingles, I just knew that they were going to do the big red one. I just knew it. And then, weirdly, in my brain, I was like, of course, made total sense. I could feel the threads of the space-time continuum running forwards and backwards.

I felt like the song had been incepted in my head because the universe knew I was going to be reminded of it this morning. It just so happened that it happened in reverse order. I swear to God, I sang the song to Penny before I heard the podcast. I swear all of this is true. And I know it's not a big deal in the grand scheme of things, but when things like this happened to you, doesn't it kind of freak you out just a little bit? Anyway, here you go.