Ambient Irony

Sunday, March 09

Daily News Stuff 9 March 2025

Unrained Edition

Top Story

AMD may finally be breaking the 16 core ceiling with the Zen 6, offering as many as 24 and even, well, 24 cores. (Hot Hardware)

The next generation is expected next year, and will offer 12 Zen 6 or 16 low-power Zen 16c cores on each CPU chiplet, with the standard two chiplets on desktop chips.

So 24 Zen 6 cores, or 32 Zen 6c cores which will run at about 75% the performance, which works out to... Exactly the same.

Zen 6 is expected to arrive on the AM5 platform, the same motherboards used for Zen 4 and Zen 5, so it should be a pretty healthy upgrade.
Intel meanwhile is rumoured to be preparing a 52 core desktop chip. (TweakTown)

That's 16 full-size cores, 32 low-power cores, and 4 really low-power cores.

Intel's low-power cores are a separate design and run at about half the speed of the full ones, and Intel no longer supports hyperthreading on its consumer CPUs, but with that many cores it's hard to go wrong.

Except perhaps in power consumption, and even there Intel has reduced power draw of recent parts for horrifying to merely bad.

Tech News

Micron has shown off the world's fasted PCIe 6.x SSDs, deliver 27GB per second. (Tom's Hardware)

That's not quite twice as fast as the best PCIe 5.0 models, or eight times as fast as the three-year-old PCIe 3.0 drive I'm running now.

Power consumption is quoted as "lots" and temperatures cited as "hot", albeit not by Micron. I wouldn't expect these to show up in consumer products anytime soon, but I was wrong when I said that about PCIe 5.0.

Though not about PCIe 5.0 graphics card, which only showed up this year and which only run about 3% slower when plugged into PCIe 3.0.
Snack makers are looking to remove artificial colours from, well, snacks. (Bloomberg / MSN)

But not from breakfast cereals, which you can remain assured will contain colours not found in nature, or indeed on the electromagnetic spectrum.
Burned down, fell over, and sank into the regolith: The Intuitive Machines Athena lunar lander is dead. (CNN)

Not that private lunar mission, another private lunar mission. Which landed in the same week.

This one did land successfully at the Moon's south pole, but then tipped over. The solar panels are pointing away from the Sun now, and its battery is empty after a single day of operations.
Did I slip a gear earlier this week and suggest some new NAS supported 5.25" hard drives? I think I did. Anyway, the LincStation S1 and N2 definitely don't. (Liliputing)

The S1 supports four 3.5" drives and two M.2 SSDs, and the N2 supports two 2.5" drives and four M.2 SSDs.

Crowdfunding prices are $429 for the hard-drive based S1 and $309 for the SSD-oriented N2, which also offers 10Gbit Ethernet rather than the S1's slower dual 2.5Gbit.

Musical Interlude

Disclaimer: Yeah, I know what the lyrics say. I don't look for informed political commentary from 1970s New Zealand pop groups. It's still a good song.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 07:00 PM | No Comments | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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