• Elon Musk roasted Microsoft for requiring use of a Microsoft online account when setting up a new PC.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  It's still possible to get around this, but Microsoft keeps making it more difficult.  And if your laptop finds and connects to a nearby free WiFi point, the usual options don't work.
  
  (This is a problem I no longer have; the only WiFi networks I can see from my house are my own router and the solar arrays on my roof.)

• Micron has announced volume production of 24GB HBM3E...  Things.  (AnandTech)
  
  They're not chips exactly - each one is technically a stack of eight individual chips - but they're not what we usually regard as memory modules, because there's no circuit board.
  
  Anyway, bandwidth of a single thing is 1.2 terabytes per second, about 100 times faster that the fastest SSDs, and 10 times faster than high-speed dual-channel DDR5.
  
  
  
• Intel has shown off it's upcoming 288 core Granite Rapids D server CPU.  (AnandTech)
  
  That's a lot of cores.  They're "Efficiency" cores, so they have half the performance of Intel's "Performance" cores, but they're a quarter the size and use a quarter the power, so it's a fair tradeoff.
  
  This CPU will arrive next year, and face off against AMD's 128 core Zen 5 and 192 core Zen 5c CPUs.  Performance will be similar on some workloads, though the AMD chips will mop the floor with Intel on anything that uses AVX-512, because Intel's Efficiency cores don't have AVX-512.
  
  
  
• Physicists have achieved the first demonstration of non-abelian anyons in a quantum processor.  (Phys.org)
  
  No, I don't know what that means either.
  
  
  
• Re-benchmarking the 7900 GRE now that it's actually available to buy.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  It's pretty decent, though not remarkable.  If you want to play games without ray tracing, it's a solid pick.  If you want to play games with ray-tracing, less so, though it's not embarrassingly bad.
  
  For accelerating Blender and AI workloads you're definitely better off with an Nvidia card.  And if you want to run professional 3D software like CAD, it's somewhere between 8% and 1500% faster than Nvidia.
  
  Nvidia deliberately limits their gaming cards on professional workloads, so there are cases where entry-level AMD cards outrun even an RTX 4090.
  
  
  
• The EU is investigating Apple to determine whether it needs to investigate Apple over Apple's assassination of persistent web apps in the EU.  (The Verge)
  
  Unless it isn't.
  
  
  
• HP has a new model of the Pavilion Aero 13.  (Liliputing)
  
  They removed the Four Essential Keys.  Otherwise it's basically unchanged, so buy the old model if you can.
  
  
  
• If YouTube were a newspaper, how much would it weigh?  (The Verge)
  
  Not an entirely frivolous question.  The Supreme Court has been hearing oral arguments in the Netchoice cases involving Texas and Florida laws forbidding viewpoint discrimination by social networks.
  
  Both sides are arguing largely by analogy, so the justices have been having fun forcing them to defend their analogies.
  
  
  
• Canada meanwhile plans to force social networks to remove "harmful content".  (Market Screener)
  
  By "harmful content" they mean, uh, revenge porn and what is now referred to as CSAM, both of which are actually illegal in all decent places.
  
  So...  Okay, Canada, you win this time.

Posted by: Rick C at Wednesday, February 28 2024 05:55 AM (BMUHC)

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