Tech News

• Despite the name, the A520 chipset is not really a chipset...  Oh.  (AnandTech)
  
  I mean, yes, it does have four SATA ports and nine USB ports and four downstream PCIe lanes and other stuff that looks very much like a chipset would if a chipset could chuck...  Getting off-track again, right.
  
  The other thing to note is that A520 motherboards are PCIe 3.0 only.  As far as I know the chipset can't control that, but only having to qualify for PCIe 3.0 saves money and A520 is the budget lineup.  Also, the desktop APUs are PCIe 3.0, or will be when they manage to crank up production to meet OEM demand.
  
  
  
• Cerebras are working on a new version of their insane pizza-size AI chip.  (AnandTech)
  
  The new model will have 850,000 cores and 2.6 trillion transistors.
  
  Those numbers are large.
  
  
  
• Microsoft has presented their Xbox Series X presentation now.  (AnandTech)
  
  Nothing truly new here since the slide deck was released yesterday, but a lot of the little details are filled in.  For example, the built-in DSP can mix 300 sound sources simultaneously into 3D positional audio.
  
  
  
• With Intel's 660p and 665p both assigned to the dustbin, is it Western Digital's time to shine in the $100 per TB NVMe niche?  Yes.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  They benchmark both the 500GB and 1TB models.  The 1TB model turns out to be significantly faster under sustained write loads, simply because it has more flash chips to share the work.  When its SLC cache is exhausted, write speeds drop to "only" 880MB per second.
  
  
  
• Baldur's Gate 3 hits early access on September 30.  (Tech Powerup)
  
  Only 17 years late.  I know how that can happen.
  
  
  

Posted by: Rick C at Wednesday, August 19 2020 11:53 PM (Iwkd4)

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