• The Department of Energy has signed a $1 billion deal - of some sort - with AMD to build two new supercomputers for energy and medical research.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  The systems - one to be delivered early next year, the second in 2028 - use AMD's Epyc CPUs and Instinct accelerator cards.  Instinct is marketed mostly towards AI now, because that's where the money is, but it's a general purpose card for crunching lots of numbers very quickly and makes a fine building block for a supercomputer.
  
  
  
• Qualcomm meanwhile is chasing the trillion dollar bubble with its AI200 and AI250 accelerator cards.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  The two cards are expected to arrive next year and 2027 respectively.  Since these are new devices and don't have the track record of Nvidia or AMD (or even Intel) it's hard to know how well they will compete, but Qualcomm did announce that the cards will have 768GB of LPDDR memory each.
  
  These are strongly oriented towards low-precision calculations and would not be as useful for a non-AI supercomputer, or for playing Minecraft.
  
  
  

Tech News

• The M5 MacBook Pro's SSD is 2.5x faster than the one used in the M4 models.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  It can achieve...  6000MBps.
  
  Which is pretty fast, yes, but all but the cheapest M.2 SSDs can achieve that now, and Apple's storage prices are anything but cheap.
  
  And it means the M4 model only delivered 2400MBps, which if accurate is not fast at all.
  
  
  
• There's no point in waiting for the M5 MacBook Air.  (WCCFTech)
  
  Unless you want a fast SSD.
  
  
  
• Ultra HD televisions are not noticeably better for watching television, maybe.  (The Guardian)
  
  The researchers working on this study note that human vision (naturally good or properly corrected) is about 50% better than the common measure of 20/20 because Herman Snellen - who created the familiar eye chart - needed glasses.
  
  They also created a handy calculator that lets you put in your display details and see how good it is for your use.
  
  For example, my laptop's 2880x1620 screen shows that 66% of people with good vision could tell the difference between it and a "perfect" display.  By the time you get to a 4k laptop screen, that drops to 1%.
  
  And for common 27" or 32" monitors, something between 5k and 8k qualifies as close enough to perfect.  (96% of people can actually see the pixels of a 4k desktop monitor at normal viewing distances, but if you replace it with an 8k model that drops to just 1%.)
  
  
  
• Ex-CISA head Jen Easterly thinks AI might fix code so fast we won't need security teams.  (The Register)
  
  We can be thankful that this idiot no longer holds her role at CISA.
  
  
  
• CEO of Alphabet’s X, Astro Teller, on what makes a moonshot.  (Tech Crunch)  (archive site)
  
  What?
  
  
  
• Here's what ads will look like on your $2000 Samsung smart fridge.  (The Verge)  (archive site)
  
  Somehow I paid a quarter of that and didn't get any ads.
   

• Tojima Wants to Be a Kamen Rider: Tanzaburo Tojima wants to be a Kamen Rider.  Only problem is, he's now 40, and has to make do with beating the crap out of random bears.  But when criminals show up cosplaying as thugs from the Kamen Rider goon squad "Shocker", he finally gets his chance to live out his dream.
  
  And then things get weird.
  
  
• Sanda: Japan in the future is in decline and the latest generation of children only numbers around 50,000.  Who can save a nation's faltering dream?  No idea, honest.
  
  Things start off weird and get weirder.
  
  

Posted by: Joe Redfield at Wednesday, October 29 2025 03:08 AM (KOtXO)

Posted by: normal at Wednesday, October 29 2025 05:07 AM (e0fX0)

Hide Comments | Add Comment