• Apple has announced its new MacBook Pro range with update M5 Pro and M5 Max CPUs and faster SSD speeds.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  The SSD speeds are simple: They're still Apple's awkward proprietary solution, but the speed has been increased to PCIe 5.0 levels.  I'm not sure how much difference that makes to a laptop, but it's not unwelcome.
  
  The CPU story is a little more complicated.  Both the M5 Pro and M5 Max feature up to 18 cores, though only 6 of those are performance cores, or what Apple has retroactively renamed "Super" cores.  They are the same as the performance cores in the existing M5 chips, which we know because those cores have also been renamed.
  
  But the other 12 cores aren't efficiency cores, they're "Performance" cores, though precisely what that means we don't know.
  
  Also, there's no longer a 512GB option; the price has been increased by $100 but the base model now comes with 1TB of SSD.
  
  Most importantly, the price of memory hasn't increased.  It's not exactly cheap, but it's not much more than the market price for regular DDR5 modules now, and provides a lot more bandwidth.
  
  
  
• There's also a new MacBook Air and, expected tomorrow, the entry-level MacBook Neo.  (Notebook Check)

• Arm's own Cortex X925 core - found here in Nvidia's GB10 AI processor - reaches desktop class performance when provided a desktop class power budget.  (Chips and Cheese)
  
  It's neck-and-neck with AMD's 9900X and Intel's 285K desktop chips.
  
  
  
• Seagate has started shipping 44TB hard drives.  (Tom'ss Hardware)
  
  You can't have one, or at least not yet.  Right now they're only going to one large, unnamed, customer.
  
  
  
• Intel has announced its new Clearwater Forest server CPUs with up to 288 cores.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  They're all efficiency cores, but that's a valid option when you pack that many onto a chip.
  
  
  
• Drones launched in Iran's attempt to make as many enemies as possible before it expires hit an Amazon datacenter in the UAE, and took out power to another of its datacenters in Bahrain.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Born just in time to have my servers blown up in the sandbox.
  
  
  
• LexisNexis got hacked via a flaw in React.  (Bleeping Computer)
  
  Stolen data included employee passwords - encrypted, so probably not a problem - and API keys stored in AWS Secrets - not encrypted at all, so definitely a problem but relatively easy to address.
  
  
  

Musical Interlude

Posted by: Frank at Wednesday, March 04 2026 07:25 PM (zCiG7)

Posted by: PatBuckman at Thursday, March 05 2026 03:02 AM (rcPLc)

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