• The Pilet 5 and Pilet 7, two handheld computers from another dimension, launched as a Kickstarter project two days ago.  There must be a lot of people visiting here from that dimension because the project hit its funding goal in five minutes.  (Kickstarter)
  
  They're not cheap because so far they're only planning to make a thousand or so of them, and you have to add a Raspberry Pi 5 yourself, but they do look very cool in a retrofuturistic kind of way.
  
  So far the larger Pilet 7 takes a Bluetooth keyboard and not the physical add-ons that we've seen pictured with the handmade prototypes, but those are planned if the project hits $1 million in funding.  And since it's reached $578,000 in just two days that seems pretty likely.
  
  I'll keep an eye on this one.  I have a Pi 5 so that expense is already covered.

• Divide FLOPs by four and multiple dollars by two.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Raja Koduri - former head of AMD's Radeon division - talking about Nvidia's Project DIGITS desktop supercomputer.  It starts at $3000 and promises 1 petaFLOPs of AI compute - at 4 bits of precision - but according to Koduri once you start looking at more general purpose tasks the performance is closer to that of a $250 Intel B580.
  
  
  
• Speaking of Intel AMD is blaming their competitor for shortages of the Ryzen 9800X3D.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Specifically that Intel's latest CPUs are so bad that everyone is now buying AMD instead.  And since AMD's 9000 series before the 9800X3D was kind of underwhelming - since fixed with price cuts - everyone wants the 9800X3D specifically.
  
  AMD announced the 9900X3D and 9950X3D at CES, so maybe there will be more chips available for purchase soon.
  
  
  
• Minisforum has also announced a Ryzen 370 mini-PC with upgradeable RAM.  (Liliputing)
  
  I noticed this a few days ago with Geekom, and wondered if it was real, because I didn't think the Ryzen 370 supported regular SODIMMS - only soldered LPDDR5X.  
  
  But apparently I was wrong because Minisforum already has a Ryzen 370 mini-PC with soldered RAM, and is now releasing a new model with socketed RAM - up to 96GB of it.
  
  In addition to that it has three M.2 slots, two USB4 ports, two 2.5Gb Ethernet ports, OCuLink for an external GPU, a built-in power supply, a fingerprint scanner recessed into the top of the case, and...  We don't know.  A couple more USB ports at least, and a couple of video ports of some description, but the exact tech specs have not been listed yet.
  
  The one catch is that with DDR5-5600 instead of LPDDR5X-7500 the GPU performance will suffer.  You get the full GPU but the RAM likely won't be fast enough to keep it fed.
  
  So graphics will probably run like the 8840HS (which definitely ships with regular DDR5) but the CPU will easily outpace the older chip.
  
  
  
• TikTok staff affected by the Los Angeles fires will have to take time off from work if they can't work from home because they don't have one anymore.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  That is how things usually work, isn't it?  The sense that I'm not the unreasonable one here is reinforced when the article goes on to complain that sick TikTok workers have to use their sick days when they can't go into the office because they are sick.
  
  
  
• Scale AI, which is not an AI company at all but a people farm, is being sued - again - because it classes its staff as contractors rather than employees and only pays then $15 per hour instead of the California minimum of $16.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  Which if true is extremely stupid on Scale AI's part, because saving one dollar per hour only to risk a lawsuit that is extremely likely to succeed because the state government nets 75% of any penalties seems like a poor business plan.

Posted by: Rick C at Saturday, January 11 2025 09:42 AM (NEIix)

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