Daily Tech News 21 August 2022

• I am now a full-time resident of New House City. Thanks to my brother for his help with the infinite number of "last few items" that needed to be moved.
  
  Schedules should slowly return to normal as I begin fixing the many things that have been broken for months while I ran around like a crack-addled squirrel with its tail on fire.
  
  
  
• Samsung is building a $15 billion chip R&D facility. (AnandTech)
  
  That's in addition to the $200 billion they're spending on new and expanded factories. I think they might be serious about this stuff.
  
  

• The entire history of human ingenuity was leading to this point:
  
  

  Very happy about this. pic.twitter.com/1FofmKbqJP

  — James Brown (@ancient_james) June 7, 2022

  
  
  The computer inside that Lego brick is an Arm Cortex M0 with 16k of flash and 4k of RAM. That's a low-end microcontroller but plenty to liven up your next Lego spaceship build.
  
  More here. (The Verge)
  
  
  
• Lego?
  
  

  SO ITS A SYSTEM OF SMALL INTERLOCKING PLASTIC BRICKS WHICH CAN BE USED TO BUILD CREATIONS OF ANY KIND THE POSSIBILITIES OF THESE BEAUTIFUL LITTLE BUILDING BRICKS IS ONLY LIMITED BY YOUR IMAGINATION AND YOUD BE AMAZED AT HOW MUCH SATISFACTION YOULL FIND FROM CLICKING THEM TOGETHER pic.twitter.com/HkqxA9fhSp

  — BrickinNick (@BrickinNick) August 19, 2022

  
  
  I assumed at first that this was a 3D render but it's real.
  
  
  
• And speaking of low-end microcontrollers the Pi Pico isn't the only Pi Pico in the sea. (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Raspberry Pi sells the chip they developed - called the RP2040 - directly to other manufacturers who are now selling a variety of compatible boards.
  
  
  
• Alleged specs of Intel's 13th generation Raptor Lake lineup. (Tom's Hardware)
  
  At the high end this is stuff we pretty much knew already, but further down the list the i5-13500 and 13600 both include 8 E-cores - where their 12th gen counterparts had none. That will make those mid-range chips about 60% faster on multi-threaded tasks.
  
  
  
• A roundup of upcoming AMD motherboards. (WCCFTech)
  
  10Gb Ethernet is still thin on the ground, but every board listed here has at least 2.5Gb.
  
  
  
• Samsung will be launching 32Gb DDR5 memory in early 2023, with modules to follow in late 2023. (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Not sure exactly why there's such a lead time between the chips and the modules, but it's pretty consistent with past launches.
  
  This will mean 64GB DIMMs for desktops and laptops, so desktops (and servers based on desktop systems) will be able to go up to 256GB of RAM and laptops that use modules rather than soldered-in RAM will go to 128GB.
  
  That assumes that the memory controllers in existing CPUs properly support the new capacity. They should - the DDR5 spec list chip sizes up to 64Gb - but it's a bit hard to test until the chips are actually out.
  
  
  
• Gigabyte's new Aorus 10000 PCIe 5 SSDs deliver up to 12.5GBps transfer rates. (WCCFTech)
  
  That's on reads - writes get 10GBps, hence the name. Or number. Whatever.
  
  It will be interesting to see how pricing on these works out. The Aorus Gen 4 delivers 5GBps reads at a very competitive price, so the new drive will have to do better than just buying two of the existing drives and putting them in RAID-0.
  
  
  
• Comparing Apple's M2 vs. AMD's Ryzen 6850U under Linux. (Phoronix)
  
  Interesting tradeoffs here. They run lots of benchmarks, and in one AMD will absolutely clobber Apple, and in the next the scores will be just as widely divergent but the other way 'round.
  
  There are certain quibbles about the hardware being compared, but this is the hardware that is available now, which makes the benchmarks valid in the real world even if they don't meet some arbitrary ideal of like-against-like.
  
  
  
• Speaking of Apple, the company is looking to Vietnam to make MacBooks and Watches. (Nikkei Asia)
  
  On the one hand, nominal commies. On the other hand, not China.
  
  We'll see.
  
  
  
• Which Ubuntu desktop variant has the lowest resource usage? (The Register)
  
  Honestly they're all the same within the margin of error. Just pick the one you like.
  
  
  
• Snap has cancelled Pixy. (Liliputing)
  
  You bastards!
  
  Oh, their Pixy camera drone.

posted by Pixy Misa at 04:00 AM

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