• What a difference a year makes: Microsoft's newly announced Surface Laptop 5 is slower and has worse battery life than the Surface Laptop 4...  Maybe.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Comparing the new Intel model with a U-series CPU (two fast cores, eight slow cores) against the previous AMD model with their U-series CPU (eight fast cores) from two generations ago, Tom's Guide found battery life about 20% worse and performance on some multi-threaded applications actually slower.
  
  It should do well on light tasks like word processing or web browsing...  Things that don't tax the CPU in the first place.
  
  
  

Tech News

• Do not taunt happy fun 12VHPWR cable.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  And never, ever feed it...  I mean, bend it closer than 35mm from the connector.
  
  It's designed to carry 50A on a pretty small connector, and if you fiddle with it too much, it will give up the magic smoke...  On your brand new $1600 graphics card.
  
  
  
• AMD is not going to the new 16-pin 12VHPWR connectors in this release cycle.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  So bend away - once you get your hands on one of those cards - and if the smoke gets out, it's for some other reason.
  
  
  
• Nvidia is launching the new RTX 3060 Don't Buy This It Sucks edition.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  It has 8GB of RAM - down from the normal 12GB - and a 128-bit bus down from 192 bits.  Which makes it likely to be about one third slower than the regular 3060 as well.
  
  
  
• Mediatek's Dimensity 9200 beats Apple's M1 chip...  On one benchmark.  (WCCFTech)
  
  The chip - apparently due out next month - has the brand new Arm X3 core, so it does legitimately offer a performance improvement.  Probably not enough to catch up with Apple's custom cores, but by no means bad.
  
  
  
• GitHub is now pulling in $1 billion in annual recurring revenue.  (Thurrott.com)
  
  Which makes me wonder how well Microsoft's other acquisitions are doing.  Microsoft acquired GitHub for $7.5 billion (which used to be a lot of money) in 2018, and miraculously, has not destroyed it.
  
  Yet.
  
  
  
• Python 3.11 is 50% faster.  (Phoronix)
  
  Than what, you ask.
  
  Basically any previous version.  Python performance has been static - a polite term would be stable - has been static for a very long time.  A 50% performance boost is nice to see.
  
  
  
• The Minisforum UM690 is another nice NUC.  (Liliputing)
  
  Featuring the Ryzen 6900HX it should perform about the same as other third-party high-end NUCs like the Asus PN64 with its i7 12700H, but the AMD chip has twice the graphics performance of the Intel one.
  
  Since these are tiny little boxes that can't really be upgraded, that might be worth considering.
  
  Of course, the Asus model is available in retail right now and the Minisforum is only up for pre-order, so eh.

Posted by: normal at Thursday, October 27 2022 11:00 AM (obo9H)

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