Daily Tech News 21 September 2022

• Nvidia had its big announcement. (AnandTech)
  
  Lots of stuff, but the most immediately interesting are the RTX 4080 and 4090. (Tom's Hardware)
  
  The 4090, launching October 12, has twice the performance of the 3090 Ti - from 40 TFLOPs to over 80 TFLOPs - while being 20% cheaper. Which would be more impressive if the 3090 Ti hadn't been priced at $2000.
  
  The 4080 will arrive in November in two models, with 12GB of RAM and 40 TFLOPs at $900, and 16GB of RAM and 48 TFLOPs at $1200. That's a significant difference; either the 16GB model should be called the 4080 Ti or the 12GB model should be the 4070 Ti.
  
  While the base 4080 has the same compute power as the 3090 Ti at less than half the price, it also has half the memory and half the memory bandwidth. Nvidia is making up for that by increasing the on-chip cache from 6MB to 48MB (and 96MB on the 4090).
  
  AMD did that with the Radeon RX 6000 range, and it worked pretty well. The options for doubling bandwidth over the 3090 Ti are pretty much restricted to HBM, which isn't exactly cheap. On the other hand, moving from Samsung's 8nm process to TSMC's 4nm meant Nvidia had a huge number of transistors to play with - up from 28 billion on the 3090 Ti to 76 billion on the 4090 - so using five billion or so on cache was not a hard call to make.
  
  While $900 for the smaller RTX 4080 looks good compared to the $2000 3090 Ti, it doesn't look nearly so good when compared with the $700 RTX 3080, and gamers don't seem to be happy. It's about 30% more expensive and offers about 30% more performance.

• At least when it comes to raw calculation. Nividia's selective game benchmarks paint a rosier picture. (Press Start)
  
  The 4080 is nearly twice as fast as the 3080 Ti in Microsoft Flight Simulator and more than twice as fast in Cyberpunk 2077, for example. Definitely a case of wait for the third-party benchmarks.
  
  That article also lists Australian prices for the three cards, and it's pretty painful reading: A$1659 for the 12GB 4080, A$2219 for the 16GB model, and A$2959 for the 4090.
  
  The 10GB RTX 3080 is available for A$1149 right now, and even the 3090 Ti is down to A$2399.
  
  
  
• AMD will be launching its own new lineup of graphics cards November 3. (Tom's Hardware)
  
  It will be interesting to see how they set pricing. Being second to market is not always a disadvantage.
  
  
  
• Star Citizen - a crowdfunded space game - has raised half a billion dollars. (WCCFTech)
  
  Over the course of ten years.
  
  And it's still not in beta yet.
  
  On the other hand, it's apparently fun to play and fans are happy to keep throwing money at it. They're not lying, they're not stealing, and as far as I know they're not pretending an ugly monkey JPEG is worth a quarter million dollars.
  
  
  
• Decentralised finance platform Wintermute, which I have never heard of, just lost $160 million. (Tech Crunch)
  
  And unlike Star Citizen they don't even have cool exploding spaceships to show for it.
  
  
  
• You can run arbitrary code on an x86 CPU without running any code. (Dartmouth) (PDF)
  
  The memory management and interrupt handling units form a Turing-complete environment even without executing a single instruction.
  
  
  
• QNAP has a couple of new small NASes. (Serve the Home)
  
  Hardware looks good. Software, well, it's QNAP. Keep it away from the internet.
  
  
  
• Germany's broad data retention laws are illegal, says the EU. (Reuters)
  
  And sometimes Europe just fights among itself. Themselves?
  
  
  
• If you want to buy some floppy disks, time is running out. (The Register)
  
  They haven't been made for a decade, and the one company still selling them in volume has about half a million new disks left in stock.

posted by Pixy Misa at 04:00 AM

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