Daily Tech News 18 March 2022

• The Apple Mac Studio: A historic achievement in not being overpriced garbage so long as you spend all day in Photoshop. (The Verge)
  
  It has a fast CPU, an adequate GPU, lots of memory bandwidth, and can run Photoshop and probably other Adobe apps quite well.
  
  If that's what you want to do, it should be great.
  
  If you want to run some Python code as well, it should be a solid choice for that - not the most cost-effective perhaps, but just fine. Likewise if you run Adobe apps and, say, JetBrains IDEs.
  
  If you want to play games, forget it. If you need to run x86 code, definitely not your best option. If you need to be able to upgrade memory and graphics later on, run in the opposite direction.
  
  And if you believe Apple's claims that the GPU on the new M1 Ultra is faster than Nvidia's RTX 3090, well:

  It was a different story with graphics performance, however. Apple, in its keynote, claimed that the M1 Ultra would outperform Nvidia's RTX 3090. I have no idea where Apple's getting that from. We ran Geekbench Compute, which tests the power of a system's GPU, on both the Mac Studio and a gaming PC with an RTX 3090, a Core i9-10900, and 64GB of RAM. And the Mac Studio got… destroyed. It got less than half the score that the RTX 3090 did on that test — not only is it not beating Nvidia's chip, but it's not even coming close.

  That's on a GPU acceleration benchmark. Gaming performance is even worse:

  On the Shadow of the Tomb Raider benchmark, the RTX was also a solid 30 frames per second faster. Now, this is Apple gaming, of course, so Tomb Raider was not a perfect or even particularly good experience: there was substantial, noticeable micro stutter at every resolution we tried. This is not at all a computer that anyone would buy for gaming. But it does emphasize that if you're running a computing load that relies primarily on a heavy-duty GPU, the Mac Studio is probably not the best choice.

  Good to see an honest review like this. The M1 Max / M1 Ultra are well-designed chips with excellent CPU performance and decent GPU performance, coupled with industry-leading power efficiency thanks to TSMC's 5nm process.
  
  But they are not, as Apple keeps claiming, a fundamental breakthrough in performance. They're merely very good.
  
  Also the article mentions the interconnect bandwidth on the M1 Ultra: 2.5TBps. That's rather a lot.
  
  
  

• The Apple M1 Ultra shows the future of chip design. (Serve the Home)
  
  Actually, no. It doesn't. In Apple's peculiar niche, it makes sense. They want one big chip they can use in laptops, and then glue two of them together to make a workstation chip. They don't want to design, test, and support a dozen different chips.
  
  AMD already has much faster CPUs than the M1 Ultra. Nvidia already has much faster GPUs. And that's despite both companies using an older process node than Apple.
  
  They can do this because they are designing chips that do one thing well. Apple is making laptop chips and repurposing them for desktops, and while there are benefits to that - low power consumption being key - there are limitations as well.
  
  
  
• Russia has confirmed that it is behind cyber attacks on Ukraine. (Bleeping Computer)
  
  They are extremely huffy about Ukraine joining a NATO-accredited cyber defense group. Not part of NATO, not requiring NATO membership. Because, apparently, this might make it harder for them to continue with their attacks, and that just isn't fair.
  
  
  
• Samsung has launched new Galaxy A-series phones. (Thurrott.com)
  
  I just bought an A52S and now the A53 is out. But it looks like it's significantly more expensive and they've removed the headphone jack, so the new version gets a big meh from me.
  
  Also, I'm using mine as a wifi hotspot and have yet to make a phone call with it.
  
  
  
• A new AI invented 40,000 chemical weapons in six hours. (The Verge)
  
  Well, that's just great.
  
  
  
• A Chinese Go player has been banned from competitions for a year for using an AI to cheat. (Global Times)
  
  The article does not state whether novel chemical weapons were also involved, but we must assume the worst.
  
  
  
• China meanwhile continues with its Orwellianisation of everything. (The Register)
  
  1. Put everything online.
  2. Control all internet access.
  3. Disappear anyone who argues.
  
  The question is, how far can this go before their economy implodes? I used to think it could go a long way, but recent moves have been extremely anti-business as well as oppressive generally.
  
  
  
• Microsoft is facing a complaint in the EU over anticompetitive behaviour in its cloud computing division. (Reuters)
  
  European cloud provider OVH is particularly upset that none of Microsoft's datacenters have burned to the ground recently. This just isn't fair.
  
  

posted by Pixy Misa at 05:30 AM

| Access Comments