Daily Tech News 22 January 2022

• Intel is spending $20 billion on a new manufacturing facility in Ohio. (AnandTech)
  
  The new facility will initially include two factories on 1000 acres, with room to expand to eight factories.
  
  These won't come online until 2025, so they're not going to help you buy that video card you want, but they are in addition to the $20 billion expansion Intel already has under way in Arizona, $3.5 billion in New Mexico, $3 billion in Oregon, and $7 billion in Malaysia.
  
  Almost as if chip making was big business these days.
  
  
  
• Weekends are question and answer time. Drop your questions in the comments today and I'll attempt to answer them tomorrow. If you left a question during the week I'll try to answer those too but I might miss seeing some of them.
  
  
  

• Google's inclusive language police are working tirelessly to prevent offense to inanimate objects. (Wall Street Journal)
  
  Not a surprise to see stories like this; we all know the lunatics have taken over the asylum at Google. Bit of a surprise to see the story being written by eminent theoretical physicist Lawrence Krauss.
  
  
  
• Athletes competing in the 2022 Winter Olympics should keep their mouths shut if they want to get out of China alive. (South China Morning Post)
  
  Interesting to see this article not quite directly accusing the Chinese government of genocide but liberally citing others who do level those accusations. The SCMP is owned by the Alibaba Group, which is not exactly on cordial terms with the Xi dictatorship.
  
  It also puts he boot squarely into the International Olympic Committee, which has entirely earned this kicking.
  
  
  
• The Raden 6500 XT is a crap desktop graphics card because AMD never intended it to be a desktop graphics card. (Hot Hardware)
  
  The design choices are focused on reducing power consumption, not cost, for a laptop graphics solution. And it works fine... Works acceptably in that scenario.
  
  So for example it only has 4 lanes of PCIe. That's fine - acceptable - if you have PCIe 4, but slows things down significantly in older systems with PCIe 3. But in laptops that's irrelevant, because nobody is going to produce a laptop with a four year old CPU and the latest graphics chip.
  
  The only reason it's shown up on the desktop at all is the ongoing shortage of graphics cards - better to have something out there than nothing at all.
  
  That explains all the shortcomings of the card - the limited I/O and memory bandwidth, the missing video compression codecs, the lack of VRAM - they grabbed some spare mobile chips to try to keep up with desktop demand.
  
  It's still a bad card and you shouldn't buy one, but it's not malice aforethought.
  
  

posted by Pixy Misa at 04:00 AM

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