Daily Tech News 2 August 2022

• Just on that "best small laptop" from yesterday: It's a great deal in the US ($1029) but crazy expensive in Australia ($2699).
  
  By comparison the Dell Inspiron 16 Plus - the top of the line model - is... Oh. Well, I guess they've fixed that then. I'll wait for that to go on sale as well. At US$1949 vs. A$3399 it's pretty close to what I'd expect (the Australian price includes sales tax) but it was A$2499 last week.
  
  
  
• Congress has said the CHIPS Act is not a $50 billion cash grab for semiconductor companies. (The Register)
  
  "Yeah, sure" say the semiconductor companies standing in line with their hands out.

• If you want a Radeon 6900XT now might be the time. I'm seeing them cheaper than the 6800XT, 6800, 6750XT, and some models of 6700XT. Of course there will be new cards coming along soon but pricing and availability of those is a big unknown right now.
  
  It's one of the cheapest cards around relative to recent prices. (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Not cheap in absolute terms though.
  
  
  
• Intel's Sapphire Rapids server CPUs are reportedly on their 12th revision ("respin") already and aren't even shipping yet. (Tom's Hardware)
  
  It's completely normal for a new chip to require a couple of hardware revisions before launch - expensive, but normal. Twelve is unusual.
  
  
  
• Is Winamp back to whip the llama's ass? (Bleeping Computer)
  
  Maybe. The project has been migrated from Visual Studio 2008 to VS 2019 so that they can actually compile it for modern operating systems, and there's a new release available to download. Not a lot of new features yet though.
  
  
  
• China's new 7nm chips aren't. (The Register)
  
  All those numbers are marketing bullshit anyway, but this is a double helping. China doesn't have access to the EUV (extreme ultraviolet) lithography equipment, or the components for that equipment, or the machines to make those components, so what they've done is applied older DUV processes and used multi-patterning to produce chips that they then slap a 7nm label on.
  
  Basically, what they have is Intel's 14nm+n, for some value of n that doesn't matter because increasing n doesn't change anything.
  
  
  

posted by Pixy Misa at 06:24 AM

| Access Comments