Daily Tech News 1 July 2022

• Apple's senior legal executive in charge of preventing insider trading of Apple stock has been convicted on charges of insider trading of Apple stock. (The Register)
  
  Was that wrong? Should I not have done that?

• Dell has replaced the old New Inspiron 16 Plus, which I rather like, with a new New Inspiron 16 Plus which is also mostly good and sort of much cheaper.
  
  The new model swaps the 11800H CPU for a 12700H - 20% faster on single-threaded tasks and 30% faster multi-threaded. It only has six full size cores (down from eight) but also has eight half-size cores, for a convincing win overall.
  
  The 3072x1920 16" screen is still there, as are the Nvidia RTX 3060 graphics on the high-end model. RAM is now DDR5, but be careful - except on the high-end model, half the RAM on this new version is soldered in place and can't be upgraded.
  
  The list price in Australia seems to be about the same as the old model when it was 40% off. Since I got both of mine at 40% off I'm not mad about that, but I wonder if the new model will also get discounted. It will be a bargain if it does.
  
  The only other change is that the numeric keypad has bitten the dust.
  
  
  
• The Ryzen 5800X3D is a mixed bag. (AnandTech)
  
  This is the 8-core 5800X with a jetpack strapped to it in the form of an extra 64MB of L3 cache. This reduces the thermal efficiency of the cooler so it is clocked slightly lower than the regular version.
  
  The results depend on whether you need fast memory access, fast cores, or lots of cores to win a particular benchmark. It's the fastest CPU around for Dwarf Fortress for small and medium worlds, but lags behind for large worlds.
  
  Playing Factorio it is up to 60% faster than Intel's i9-12900K, a massive difference. But on many tests the extra cache doesn't help at all, and it's competing against chips with 16 or 20 cores, so those results aren't pretty.

posted by Pixy Misa at 04:36 AM

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