Supposed to remain sunny most of the week, too.
The morning was a mite chilly, but it looks like the plants survived. Now it's getting warm, and a breeze is picking up.
Alas, I need to avoid the distractions this afternoon and focus on that FPGA thing. More gardening tomorrow.
Got various supplies ordered, for gardening, grilling, suspending the kayak from the rafters in the barn, and whatnot. Taking inventory and surveying the situation, I realized I'm going to need more weed-barrier fabric to surround the planting strips; mowing the grass adjacent to the strips won't be practical (even with suitable fence planning) once the squash vines get to spreading. So, new plan is to set mower to "scalp", butcher the areas around the planting strips, and cover with weed barrier.
Based on a little bit of further research, I'm now favoring an AMD CPU (Ryzen 5 or maybe 7) for the next workstation; while I don't think hyperthreading gains me much, the AMD family can run its memory bus faster than the Core i5, and if I can't get quad-channel memory architecture I can settle for a faster bus. And... maybe even the latest-greatest X570-based motherboard, though it's looking like those are a bit bleeding-edge in terms of shipping with a usable BIOS, so maybe I want something not so new. Haven't evaluated video cards yet, but probably a fairly basic recent-generation NVIDIA-based card will do all I need, even if I eventually get that 4K monitor I've been wanting. Still not at decision time; maybe next weekend when it's supposed to be raining again.
Ah, well. Time to detach myself from the Internets and dive into the FPGA issue. If I can get it sorted out quickly, there'll be time for gardening!
Update: Got the FPGA thing addressed, I think. During a couple of gardening breaks, I got some more seeds stuck in little pots in the basement, and attempted an outdoors project that didn't go all that well. There are a bunch of bushy little trees, see, that have way too much near-ground-level growth, making it difficult to mow around them. I set off to deal with this - it turns out that some of the excess growth is unrelated trees, which adds to the amount of removal called for. Anyway, two problems turned up. Firstly, wielding the big pruning lopper involves the same sort of forces that damaged my left elbow, so ouch. Secondly, it's gotten windy enough that cut-off minor tree limbs don't stay in the cart; they try to scamper off downwind. Oh, well. I got a little done, and it's not really an urgent project.
Update 2: Just noticed a maybe-decisive difference between the Intel and AMD offerings. The Core i5 (9th/10th gen) supports up to 16 PCIe lanes; the Ryzen 5/7 (3x00X) supports 20. So, if you're trying to use an add-on graphics card (typically PCIe x16) at full bandwidth plus some other add-on card? If I'm understanding this correctly, Intel is out of the running. Not that I really expect to be giving the bus interface to the graphics card that much of a workout, besides which most i5 users will do fine with the on-chip graphics, but it seems like a strong consideration for some people, maybe including me. Um... a high-performance NVMe SSD uses 4 PCIe lanes, doesn't it?
(This also points to the Micro-ATX form factor making a lot of sense, if neither popular CPU family is designed to deal with a bunch of expansion slots.)
Hmph. Gotta do more research on CPUs, motherboard chipsets, specific motherboards, and PCIe system architecture in general.
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