• The secret weapon of AMD's 9070 XT graphics card: It exists.  (Twitter)
  
  Retailers report they have received more stock so far of the 9070 XT than of all the new Nvidia cards combined, including the unreleased RTX 5070.
  
  
  
• Meanwhile Nvidia says that it definitely didn't pay for the obviously paid pathetic puff-pieces posing as previews for the RTX 5070.  (Twitter)
  
  The 5070, which launches this week, is not headed for favourable reviews.  It increased the number of shaders over the older RTX 4070 slightly - 6144 over 5888 - but is down significantly over last year's 4070 Super with its 7168 shaders.
  
  And there hasn't been much improvement at all on shader performance or clock speed, so...  Eh.
  
  It will probably still sell out, but that seems to be more a function of supply than demand.

• It turns out that the new RTX 5090 - the only card in the family to show real gains - albeit mostly in price and flammability - performs worse on Passmark because Nvidia dropped support for 32-bit CUDA libraries.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  That in turn killed support for 32-bit OpenCL - which Passmark's benchmark suite uses - and 32-bit PhysX, which makes older games run at one quarter speed when you upgrade from a 4000-series card to its newer counterpart.
  
  Passmark tried to buy a 5090 to test its benchmark suite directly and track down the problem.
  
  They couldn't.
  
  There aren't any.
  
  
  
• Beelink has announced its first NAS, the Me mini.  (Liliputing)
  
  Specs are incomplete, but it includes an Intel CPU (presumably an Atom chip like the N100 or N150, which is fine) and six M.2 slots for storage.  Networking is dual 2.5Gb Ethernet ports, which is also fine.
  
  It's a 4" white cube, has an internal power supply to keep things tidy, and includes a single HDMI port and three USB ports.
  
  
  
• Anthropic has raised another $3.5 billion in funding.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  The company has revenues of around $1 billion a year...  And spends $3 billion a year on R&D.
  
  
  

Musical Interlude

Posted by: William Bell at Thursday, March 06 2025 09:45 AM (VZ4sY)

Posted by: Zendo Deb at Friday, March 07 2025 01:17 AM (BIWZq)

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• Qualcomm's next-generation Snapdragon X2 laptop chips are expected to offer 50% more multi-threaded performance than the current generation Snapdragon X chips.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Coincidentally, Qualcomm's next-generation Snapdragon X2 laptop chips are expected to offer 50% more cores than the current generation Snapdragon X chips.

• We don't really know anything about AMD's next-generation Zen 6 CPU cores, much less what graphics cores they will use.  (WCCFTech)
  
  Anyone who knows isn't telling, and anyone who is telling doesn't know.
  
  Wait for the details to show up in a leaked shipping manifest to the consumer electronics regulator in India.  Either that or a Linux driver.
  
  
  
• The Steam hardware survey results are frankly garbage.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Yeah, I don't think the proportion of Steam users primarily speaking Chinese grew by 60% in the space of a month.  Or any of the other strange results.
  
  
  
• Intel has announced new 10Gb and 200Gb Ethernet cards.  (Serve the Home)
  
  The 10Gb cards are interesting, claiming to use half the power of previous models.  And they're downwards compatible with 5Gb, 2.5Gb, 1Gb, and for the masochists or people whose bedrooms are half a mile from the router, 100Mb.
  
  
  
• Mark Cuban has offered to fund 18F, the unofficial name for a group of whiny tech gerbils at the GSA.  (Tech Crunch)

  Waldo Jaquith, a former 18F technologist, said that the federal government has been a good, reliable employer for generations.  "What the jobs lack in salary are made up for in stability.  Untold millions have been lifted into the middle class or kept out of poverty by having a single family member in a federal job.  Now that’s gone."

  Good.
  

Posted by: PatBuckman at Tuesday, March 04 2025 03:22 AM (rcPLc)

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• GPT 4.5 is here and it's... Not great.  (Ars Technica)
  
  It's slightly better than GPT 4o on some things, slightly worse on others...  And costs up to 30 times as much.
  
  That's not a great combination.

• The RTX 5070 has been listed online for $550 with availability just a couple of days away.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  But the RTX 5070 Ti was listed for $750 just a few days before it launched, and we know how that turned out.
  
  
  
• New weight loss drugs could be a $100 trillion disruption across a broad range of global markets.  (Wildfire Labs)
  
  Or, y'know, not.
  
  
  
• Researchers have been using a memory leak in the Great Firewall of China to keep track of what China is censoring.  (The Register)
  
  The bitter, bited.
  
  
  
• Another look at the Asus ROG Flow Z13.  (The Verge)
  
  This is a 13" tablet laptop with AMD's new Ryzen 395 Max Pro Plus Gold GTI.
  
  It's pretty good, but with the thermal constraints of a tablet it performs closer to an RTX 4060 than a 4070.

• Skype will die in May.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  May 5, to be precise.
  
  Microsoft thinks you will move to Teams.  I don't think anyone who isn't already using Teams is going to switch to it because the messaging app they liked is being killed off.

• AMD has officially announced pricing of the 9070 XT graphics card at $599.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  The 9070 will also exist.
  
  This competes fairly evenly - if we accept AMD's numbers - with Nvidia's RTX 5070 Ti, which has an MSRP of $749, but sells for $899 and up at retail, or would do if it were available at retail at all, which it isn't.
  
  None of the new Nvidia cards announced in recent months are available to buy.
  
  So if AMD's new card is $300 cheaper, and has very similar performance, and is actually available - and reports are that cards have been shipping from manufacturers since January - AMD could do well here.
  
  It's not quite cheap enough or fast enough to make me regret buying the 7800 XT, but so far it looks very promising.  It's seems to outperform Nvidia's RTX 4080, which launched in November 2022 for $1199.
  
  It's a bit annoying though seeing a $600 card described as "mid-range".  That's a high-end card.  $1200 is a stupidly overpriced card.
  
  
  
• Intel's $28 billion Ohio fabs have been delayed, just a bit.  (Thurrott)
  
  Work started in 2022, with the first fab planned to come online this year.
  
  That date has been shifted out to 2030.  Or maybe 2032.
  
  
  
• Autodesk, the market leader in design software because it bought all its competitors, is laying off 9% of its workers because it saw a year-on-year revenue increase of 23%.  (Fast Company)
  
  That makes sense.
  
  
  
• Firefox is saying that its new license, which allowed the company to do whatever it wanted with your data, was never intended to say that it allowed the company to do whatever it wanted with your data.  (The Verge)
  
  Remember that data is encrypted from your browser to whatever website you are using.  If the browser itself steals your data, there is nothing you can do to prevent that.  So the threat that a browser could do that will be taken seriously.
  
  And if Mozilla didn't mean to say this in their license agreement...  Why did they?
  
  
  
• "I recommend being in the office at least every weekday", said Google co-founder Sergei Brin, without a trace of irony.  (New York Times)  (archive site)
  
  "Your weekends are your own", he added.  "As long as you put in another twenty hours from home."

Posted by: Tim Turner at Saturday, March 01 2025 08:14 PM (As8gg)

Posted by: stargazera5 at Sunday, March 02 2025 11:55 AM (8Wura)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Sunday, March 02 2025 05:26 PM (PiXy!)

Posted by: Rick C at Monday, March 03 2025 06:40 AM (NEIix)

Posted by: Rick C at Monday, March 03 2025 06:42 AM (NEIix)

Posted by: Rick C at Monday, March 03 2025 06:42 AM (NEIix)

Posted by: Rick C at Monday, March 03 2025 06:43 AM (NEIix)

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• The low-cost (for Apple) iPhone 16E is here and it's...  Okay.  (The Verge)
  
  Yes.  It's okay.
  
  It's also $599, which is cheap for an iPhone, but not cheap.

• Just a few hours until AMD announces the prices on its new video cards.
  
  We already know all the technical details, and Nvidia has screwed up its RTX 5000 launch in every way imaginable, so the door is open for AMD to walk through, or to slam in its own face.
  
  Update: AMD's livestream is still blathering on but the prices have been announced elsewhere: $549 for the 9070 and $599 for the 9070 XT.  (The Verge)
  
  That would be a bit iffy if the 5070 Ti was actually selling at the $749 MSRP.  But with it selling at $899 and up - when it is available at all, which right now it isn't - it's 50% more money than the AMD alternative and not nearly 50% faster.
  
  The 9070 XT will likely be around $1200 in Australia, so nearly 70% more money for a little over 60% more performance than my 7800 XT.  Good value, though not so good that I regret buying my card.
  
  At $549 the 9070 non-XT is not quite as good value; it should probably be around $529.  Not awful though.
  
  So far AMD has not fumbled this one.  Good to see.
  
  
  
• Nvidia meanwhile doubled its annual revenue over last year, mainly by selling insanely expensive GPUs to AI companies.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Certainly not by selling RTX 5000 cards to gamers.
  
  
  
• Several of the old Command and Conquer games are now open source.  (Gaming on Linux)
  
  This seems to include Red Alert, Tiberian Dawn, Renegade, and Generals, with the Zero Hour expansion.
  
  And it's Electronic Arts that did this, somehow.
  
  
  
• Apple's "Find My" network lets you track any Bluetooth device anywhere.  (9to5Mac)
  
  Welcome to the goldfish bowl.
  
  
  
• Thousands of GitHub repositories that were public but are now private can still be accessed via Copilot.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  Uh, yeah.  That's how making something public works.  You can't shove the mushroom cloud back into the Demon Core.
  
  
  

Posted by: Rick C at Saturday, March 01 2025 12:09 AM (NEIix)

Posted by: Rick C at Saturday, March 01 2025 12:12 AM (NEIix)

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• China is accusing Taiwan of not sitting still and letting China kill it and steal all its stuff.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Taiwan replied "Nuh-uh!" and continued right on doing what it was doing.

• How much will AMD's 9070 XT Cost?  Nobody knows, not even AMD.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  The company is reportedly scrambling to take advantage of Nvidia's series of disasters - from having no stock to speak of, to having what stock there was being riddled with chip faults disabling functionality, to what cards actually worked to start with going up in smoke.
  
  But AMD has a long history of being handed opportunities in the GPU space and fumbling them with high prices.
  
  Current leaked prices for the 9070 XT start at $700, which is between $50 cheaper than Nvidia's 5070 Ti if you believe Nvidia, and $200 cheaper than the cheapest actual cards listed, but there are no 5070 Ti cards available at all so it may just be time to roll the dice.
  
  AMD did manage not to screw up the 9800X3D CPU launch, so there may be a chance of them doing it again.
  
  
  
• AI has yet to find a killer app to match Excel or email, says Microsoft.  (The Register)
  
  We know.
  
  
  
• The Ayaneo Flip isn't.  (Liliputing)
  
  The pocket-sized gaming device has been cancelled without even shipping all the pre-orders.  If you tried to buy one, you can request a refund or another Ayaneo product.
  
  
  
• Hands on with the new Framework Desktop.  (The Verge)
  
  It doesn't add much to yesterday's information, but they're not insane, so I'll toss them a link.

Posted by: Joe Redfield at Friday, February 28 2025 04:36 AM (KOtXO)

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• Framework has announced three new models: The low-end education-focused Laptop 12, a new Laptop 13 with AMD's Ryzen 300 series chips, and the all-new Desktop.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  The new Framework 13 keeps the upgradeable memory, with up to 96GB to accompany an up to Ryzen 370 twelve-core CPU.  Still no Four Essential Keys though.
  
  The Framework Desktop is a mini-ITX system in a compact 4"x8"x9" case.
  
  Using AMD's latest Strix Halo CPUs, up to the Ryzen 395, with its 16 CPU cores and 40 graphics cores.
  
  Memory this time is soldered, though you can specify up to 128GB of it, and it's only a 100% markup over retail.  The company said that it worked "for months" with AMD but couldn't make the memory user-upgradeable while maintaining the 8000MHz target frequency.  (The new Laptop 13 uses 5600MHz memory.)  
  
  There are two M.2 slots for storage, so you're free to upgrade that at least.
  
  Plus two USB 4 ports, two DisplayPort ports, HDMI, 5Gb Ethernet, two regular USB ports, a headphone jack, and two of Framework's flexible expansion ports at the front, though the video is already prewired to the rear of the case so you can't put the DisplayPort or HDMI options there.
  
  Price for the 128GB model is $1999, which is not exactly cheap, but a Mac Studio configured with 128GB of RAM will set you back $4799, which is even less exactly cheap.
  
  Laptop 13 ships in April; Desktop ships in Q3.

• And that seems to be the only thing that happened today.  Tom's Hardware covered it, Hot Hardware covered it, Serve the Home covered it, The Verge covered it and managed not to mention Elon Musk even once, Liliputing covered it, Notebook Check covered the Laptop 12 though not the other two announcements, and Ars Technica managed to turn it into three separate news items.
  
  
  
• Well, this paper is interesting at least.  (GitHub)  (PDF)
  
  AI models designed to sneakily slip insecurities into the code they generate for you are good at the slipping in insecurities part but much less good at the sneaky part.  They literally turn into Nazis.
  
  That's because AI models are lobotomised to make them behave.  If you want them to behave poorly, they behave poorly all the time because they are still lobotomised.
  
  
  
• Oh, and there's this little gem: Assassin's Creed Shadows, Ubisoft's latest megaflop...  Leaked.  (BBC)
  
  Not details of the game.  Not video of the game.  The entire game.

Posted by: bob in houston at Thursday, February 27 2025 02:52 AM (YBLgY)

Posted by: SophiaRodriguez at Monday, March 10 2025 05:50 PM (ncNbW)

Posted by: helendam at Monday, March 10 2025 05:51 PM (ncNbW)

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• Apple plans to invest $500 billion to expand operations in the US, hire an additional 20,000 staff, and start building servers in Texas.  (The Verge)
  
  Servers?
  
  Apparently just for internal use.
  
  
  

Tech News

• AMD announced six new Ryzen 5000G-series CPUs.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  They seem to be identical to the six existing Ryzen 5000G-series CPUs, so I'm not sure why.
  
  
  
• Intel's 6700P server CPUs are here, starting at $2700 for 32 cores.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  That's not particularly cheap, but these chips have 136 lanes of PCIe 5, so if you need a ton of I/O bandwidth it's not so bad.
  
  In fact, there's a 6500P model starting at $815 for 16 cores which has the same 136 lanes of PCIe 5, which is a good price for a bandwidth-intensive application.
  
  
  
• Stupid people are spamming the reply address to the "five things you did last week" email.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  If you have a .gov email, that's a very bad idea.
  
  If you don't have a .gov email, you ended up in the spam folder.
  
  Good work.
  
  
  
• Dutch technology startup Bird is abandoning Europe because it is an over-taxed, over-regulated nightmare state.  (Reuters)  (archive site)
  
  And moving to...  New York?

• With AMD's launch party for its new 9000-series video cards just days away, it has held a press briefing and of course benchmark numbers have already leaked.  (VideoCardz)
  
  The 9070 XT is 42% faster than the 7900 GRE at 4k resolution, and the 9070 non-XT is 21% faster.
  
  Absolute silence on the price.  Earlier leaks put the cards at $750 and $650 respectively, which is about $100 too much.  But given that Nvidia cards don't exist at all at the moment, AMD will probably price the cards too high, kill all enthusiasm, and then adjust the price in a month or two when it's already too late.
  
  
  
• Speaking of Nvidia cards that don't exist if you somehow got your hands on an RTX 5080 you had best check the number of ROPs onboard.  (VideoCardz)
  
  Yes, all the models that have shipped so far - 5090, the 5090D made for the Chinese market, the 5070 Ti, and now confirmed the 5080 - have been hit with the same hardware flaw.  It only affects some cards, but it could apply to any model from any manufacturer.
  
  
  
• My 7800 XT arrived today, so my interest in all this is purely academic.

• Richard Dawkins asked ChatGPT if it was conscious.  It regurgitated a textbook on the subject and then said no.  (Richard Dawkins)
  
  Well, okay then.  Stupid question, stupid answer.
  
  
  
• The inverse square law suggests this is bullshit.  (Yahoo)
  
  Allegedly a surge in power on a high voltage cable in California created a magnetic field which induced a current in a nearby defunct power cable, which in turn caused sparks which ignited one of the recent fires.
  
  I doubt it.  Unless the two cables were an inch apart.
  
  
  

Posted by: normal at Monday, February 24 2025 08:46 PM (bg2DR)

Posted by: Frank at Monday, February 24 2025 10:12 PM (+i6Xr)

Posted by: PatBuckman at Tuesday, February 25 2025 01:12 AM (rcPLc)

Posted by: PatBuckman at Tuesday, February 25 2025 12:32 PM (rcPLc)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Tuesday, February 25 2025 06:01 PM (PiXy!)

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• Nvidia has confirmed that defective chips are affecting performance on 0.5% of 5090 and 5070 Ti graphics cards.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Which is a strange announcement because (a) nobody had noticed the problem on the 5070 Ti before and (b) the 5070 Ti is much more common than the 5090.
  
  Major national retailers have announced receiving fewer than ten 5090s total, with resupply possibly months out.
  
  So this is a bit like an announcement that 0.5% of Lamborghinis and Volkswagens have an engine defect.  That could mean the problem affects 20% of Lamborghinis, because the shipping volume of the two brands is so different.
  
  Anyway, if your 5090 is broken you can return it for replacement, which will happen...  Some day.
  
  The other thing is that the 5090 is not a volume product, at least not yet.  Nvidia has shipped hundreds of these, not thousands.  And they clearly weren't paying attention.  This problem would show up immediately in an automated test - and probably did show up.  But nobody noticed.

• Avowed, the latest game from storied studio Obsidian, is a success...  Says storied studio Obsidian.  (WCCFTech)
  
  Obsidian recently said that it wasn't chasing huge profits and didn't plan to expand aggressively.  (PC Gamer)
  
  Which is good because Avowed is objectively bad, horribly overpriced, selling poorly, and has fewer players than Skyrim, a game that came out in 2011.
  
  It hasn't stirred up a firestorm like Veilguard, but it's done something worse: It sank without trace.
  
  
  
• Elonnuel Goldmusk has taken only a month to set back the communist poisoning of the American soul by decades.  (The Verge)  (archive site)
  
  We can only wish that the screeching of the lunatics is true.
  
  
  
• The Moss Landing power plant is on fire.  Again.  (SF Gate)
  
  Or rather, still.  The fire last month has reignited.
  
  A private fire crew is on site providing 24/7 monitoring, because they expected this to happen.  So at least they're not idiots.
  
  
  
• Jensen Huang says the advent of Chinese AI platform DeepSeek is good for the company.  (Tech Crunch)
  
  He would say that, because the event wiped $600 billion off Nvidia's market cap in just three days.
  
  But the price is almost back to where it was before, so it seems that investors largely agree.
  
  Still can't keep a video card in stock for more than five minutes though.

Posted by: furball321 at Monday, February 24 2025 04:16 AM (As8gg)

Posted by: Joe Redfield at Monday, February 24 2025 04:24 AM (KOtXO)

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