Daily Tech News 12 December 2022

• NASA's Orion (not that one) Moon thingy has safely landed back on Earth. (WCCFTech)
  
  As part of the Artemis 1 mission it travelled to the Moon, orbited it - sort of - and returned to Earth 25 days later.
  
  NASA is planning a manned lunar orbit for 2024.
  
  Which is great and all, but (a) Apollo 8 did that in 1968, (b) private Japanese company ispace with only 200 employees launched an unmanned lunar lander yesterday, and (c) SpaceX plans to land a fully crewed Starship on the Moon in 2024.
  
  Which date might slip a bit because Starship has not yet had a successful orbital flight - and has not been cleared by the FAA for orbital tests. On the other hand, SpaceX has six Falcon 9 launches scheduled before the end of the year, so they're not just sitting around trolling idiots on Twitter either.
  
  
  

• If you want to get your hands on a classic Unix workstation like the SGI Indy or Sparcstation 10, it might be time to learn FPGA programming and look into large-format 3D printers. (OS News)
  
  Because increasingly there aren't any to be had, and what there are cost more than a new PC that runs anything from 10 to 100 times faster.
  
  And if you manage to get your hands on one, you can't get the installation disks, and if you do, somehow, forget about any software patches. It's all dead and forgotten.
  
  I still have an SGI O2 and a Sun Ultra 5, but I don't know whether they work at all. Last time I booted up the O2 - probably more than a decade ago - it worked fine except that one pair of DIMMs had failed, leaving it with all of 192MB of RAM.
  
  
  
• Sam Bankman-Fried hopes to find new suckers to fleece of $10 billion so he can set that on fire too. (BBC)
  
  Err, pay back the previous suckers. That's totally what he meant.
  
  Can we send this guy to jail already? Just to make him stop talking.
  
  
  
• The Core i5-13400 is 20% faster than the Core i5-12400. (Tom's Hardware)
  
  The 12400 and 12500 both had 6 P cores and zero E cores. The 13400 and 13500 both have 6 P cores, plus 4 and 8 E cores respectively, giving then a significant boost overall. (Intel's E cores run about half the speed of its P cores, so these effectively give you 8 and 10 cores of performance, respectively.)
  
  If the new chips fall into the same price brackets as the old ones, they'll be the best value CPUs for the average user who wants to be able to play some games as well as run spreadsheets and browse the web. Intel motherboards are cheaper, and available with DDR4 support so the memory is cheaper as well.
  
  While they won't break any records, both have better single-thread and multi-thread performance than the 11900K from less than two years ago while using about half the power.
  
  I still prefer AMD for high-end systems but these look to be very attractive for anyone on a budget.

posted by Pixy Misa at 04:00 AM

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