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[JEMC]

Bofferbrauer2 said:

JEMC said:

I can understand that coal from different places have different dross or unwanted minerals that can affect its combustion, but enough to shut down a plant? Unlikely.

What is more likely is that China hasn't found another source that sells them as much coal as Australia did, and that lack of coal is what makes China shut plants down.

A different composition can affect it's efficiency, but depending on what they were using as fuel since there's more than one type of coal: Brown coal, the youngest and cheapest, but also the least efficient and most polluting; black coal, which is quite a bit more efficient and has less polluting elements in it (things like sulfur for instance), but also more expensive, and anthrazite, which is almost pure carbon, but also by far the most expensive.

A power plant built for brown coal could overheat on Anthrazite, and a power plant built specifically for Anthrazite will potentially not get enough heat from brown coal. In most cases however, you can get by by using less heating material with those that were built for brown coal, while those built for Anthrazite would get less Steam and thus less power and very bad efficiency, but should still be able to work. That is, if the plant was working with a subcritical steam turbine.

The problem can however be very real if the steam generators are supercritical or ultra-supercritical, which often need high grade coal powder (coal gets powdered these days to burn better and hotter) to reach the necessary temperatures to work properly. Those are also the among the most modern and efficient designs, and most coal power plants built in the last 40 years are either of those types or co-generate both electricity and heat for heating buildings, So it's not impossible that the power plants really needed to be shut down if the coal available to them ain't of high enough grade for those power plants to reach supercriticality.

Thanks for the detailed explanation.

Pemalite said:

JEMC said:

But it also cost valuable space so, at the end of the day, one has to wonder is their bet on Infinity Cache is really paying off or if they'd be better going with a bigger memory bus while "wasting" more die space.

Who knows, maybe with RDNA3 and its MCM design, the extra cache is a better approach that routing all the extra memory lanes but, until then, it seems overly compicated with no real gains.

Indeed.
At the end of the day, faster RAM and more die-space to extra GPU hardware is the general preferred approach.

But to implement high-speed, wide memory controllers also costs a ton of die space and power... MCM with stacked cache is likely the end goal that AMD is walking towards, which will also show up in Ryzen as well.

I think it's proven itself on lower-end, 128bit memory buses. A-la. Radeon RX 6600XT where bandwidth is more of a premium.

JEMC said:

I can understand that coal from different places have different dross or unwanted minerals that can affect its combustion, but enough to shut down a plant? Unlikely.

What is more likely is that China hasn't found another source that sells them as much coal as Australia did, and that lack of coal is what makes China shut plants down.

I do mine-site rescue here as part of my response area... And the general consensus amongst employees/managers/staff is that Australia is trying to ditch China as a customer and diversify it's clients in order to reduce risk of Chinese "attacking" us through trade.

And it's not just our natural resources doing this either, grain (Another response area of mine) is doing the same thing with prioritization to South America, Africa and Middle Eastern customers.

Politically and economically we as a nation are changing tact and removing the issue of having all our eggs in one (chinese) basket.

To diversify your investments and who you depend of is always a smart move, specially when China is involved. Kudos to your government.