Daily Tech News 4 February 2023

• Before Intel cut the pay of everyone from the CEO to the mail room clerk, it quietly made changes to the stock benefits for senior executives... Making them worse. (WCCFTech)
  
  Yeah, normally they'd do an end run around the public salary cuts by propping up the overall package, but in this case stock bonuses have been delayed and the performance requirements extended - more growth over a longer period before the bonuses are triggered.
  
  This shouldn't be hugely notable, but compared to Intel's behaviour before Gelsinger became CEO, it's a dramatic reversal. If the company has been run like this all those years, it wouldn't be in trouble today. Also AMD would be toast.

• Speaking of Intel, the company's new workstation CPUs will launch this monthish. (WCCFTech)
  
  Full details (and presumably prices) on the 15th, reviews on the 22nd, with low-end parts arriving at retail in March and high-end parts in April.
  
  Which is much better than the usual pattern where the most expensive parts arrive first and if you're not made of money you're stuck waiting for anything affordable.
  
  I don't know if these will be particularly attractive offerings but they do have a slim chance since unlike Intel's server chips they're launching against older Zen 3 Threadripper parts from AMD.
  
  
  
• There's another Chinese spy balloon over Latin America but the US government is refusing to say where. (The Guardian)
  
  Because if people were allowed to know things like that... Nope. I got nothing.
  
  
  
• Australia has classified E and shrooms as prescription drugs. (The Guardian)
  
  This follows a series of trials showing positive outcomes for MDMA on PTSD and psychedelics for depression.
  
  
  
• If you run the Discord app on your PC, it will slow down the memory on your Nvidia graphics card. (Tom's Hardware)
  
  So don't do that.
  
  Or download the patch.
  
  One of those.
  
  
  
• Meanwhile likely specs for upcoming Radeon 7000 cards have been teased out of AMD's video driver code. (WCCFTech)
  
  None of this has been confirmed but none of it is implausible either. Everything really comes down to pricing anyway: Outside of ray tracing, AMD's low-to-midrange Radeon 6000 cards are the best value right now - from the RX 6600 up through the 6750 XT they deliver much better value than either AMD or Nvidia's new ranges.
  
  

posted by Pixy Misa at 04:00 AM

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