Daily Tech News 8 June 2022

• Apple's new M2 chip ain't all that. (Tom's Hardware)
  
  It's by no means bad, but it's pretty comparable to AMD's 6800U. The M2 has better single-threaded performance; AMD has better multi-threaded. The raw compute performance of the respective GPUs (10 graphics cores in the M2, 12 in the 6800U) is similar, but benchmarks of the Mac Studio showed it falling behind in all but a few very specific graphics benchmarks.
  
  And they're both 15W parts.
  
  Still, if you're Mac-inclined, and spending your own money, not a bad option.

• Apple's M2 Pro and M2 Max are still expected to enter production this year on TSMC's brand new 3nm process. (WCCFTech)
  
  Given the lead times of advanced semiconductor fabrication - 4 to 6 months - and TSMC's own statements, we shouldn't expect completed products until 2023, and probably not in Q1 either.
  
  
  
• Dell has announced a new Threadripper Pro 5000 workstation - the Precision 7865. (Tom's Hardware)
  
  It's not an impressive design though. While it can house a 64 core CPU and a terabyte of RAM, apart from the USB-C ports the case could have come from 2002. And they only provide five expansion slots for a CPU that has 128 lanes of PCIe.
  
  
  
• A senior Chinese economist has written that China "must seize TSMC". (Tom's Hardware)
  
  China's home-grown semiconductor efforts are currently about where Intel was in 2009 - which is not as bad as it seems, because Intel was doing great in 2009. But many generations behind TSMC, Samsung, or Intel today.
  
  The problem with this idea is that TSMC is not, say, two hundred thousand square miles of prime agricultural real estate where if you drop a few bombs - or a few hundred - the value remains largely intact.
  
  It's more like a bridge, over an impassable canyon, made of glass. Seizing it intact would require the cooperation of TSMC itself, which is unlikely to be forthcoming.
  
  
  
• Want a bunch of NVMe storage for your new Threadripper Pro workstation? Highpoint has you covered. (Tom's Hardware)
  
  The card comes with eight M.2 slots, a massive heatsink/fan arrangement, and a PCIe switch. $729 for PCIe 3.0, and $1099 for PCIe 4.0.

posted by Pixy Misa at 04:42 AM

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