Daily Tech News 27 September 2022

• The reviews of AMD's Ryzen 7000 are in and it looks pretty darn good. (AnandTech)
  
  The first PassMark scores are in too.
  
  The 7950X is 25% faster than the 5950X single-threaded, and 44% faster multi-threaded. (CPUBenchmark.net)
  
  The 7900X is 35% faster than the 5900X on multi-threaded tests, confirming that the 5950X was indeed limited by power / thermals, and the increase to 170W has fixed that.
  
  And finally, while Intel's upcoming 13900K has a small advantage on single-threaded tasks - around 8% - the 7950X beats it by 21% on multi-threaded work.
  
  Which means - if you read through all 20 pages of that AnandTech review and get to the experiment at the end - that if you turn the power down on the 7950X all the way from 170W to 65W, it is still slightly faster than the 13900K, because that only reduced multi-threaded performance by 18%.
  
  And that means two things: First, AMD's upcoming Dragon Range laptop chip will deliver true desktop-class performance to high-end laptops. And second, if they could jam in the chiplets somehow, AMD could deliver 32 cores in Socket AM5 without any real bottlenecks.
  
  
  
• Bae case quite notably has not moved from the depot. I called again and they put in a redelivery request again. And this time gave me a case number to refer to when I call again tomorrow.
  
  Their web site is still broken.
  
  
  

• The Banana Pi PicoW is an ESP32-S3 board in the same form factor as the Raspberry Pi Pico. (Tom's Hardware)
  
  It appears to have a faster CPU - twice the clock speed plus vector operations for DSP, but lacks the programmable I/O controller of the Raspberry flavour. That Raspberry Pi Pico's I/O controller is so powerful that it can generate an HDMI signal entirely in software.
  
  
  
• Venus before Mars? (The Guardian)
  
  There's an argument being presented for making a manned mission to Venus before Mars. There's one major upside: Venus at closest approach is much easier to reach, and a flyby and return mission could be done in a year, against three years for Mars.
  
  There's one major downside: If you land, you die. It's actually quite pleasant a few miles up, but visiting a planet and never touching the ground because it's instant death does seem to defeat the purpose just a tiny bit.
  
  
  
• If the iPhone app you developed is working fine and doesn't need to be updated, Apple will delete it from the App Store. (Simulated Annealing)
  
  Because fuck you, that's why.

posted by Pixy Misa at 04:42 AM

| Access Comments