Daily Tech News 23 February 2023

• Social media is causing a mental illness epidemic. (Substack)
  
  In teenage girls specifically, but in everyone else as well. The same effect is observed in teen boys but to a much smaller degree, and if you've seen social media lately the trend very obviously extends to adults as well.
  
  What's the solution? Banning teenagers from anything doesn't work terribly well, so I would suggest the old standby of throwing communists out of helicopters. It's like ice cream: It makes everything better.

• Intel's new Xeon W workstation CPUs are nearly as fast as AMD's old Threadripper 5000 range. (WCCFTech)
  
  The story is ostensibly about the new Intel chips setting a world record in one benchmark, which they did, bathed in liquid nitrogen and drawing 1000 amps of current.
  
  But if you scroll down there are some benchmarks that don't involve simultaneously freezing and burning your house down, and they show that while the new Xeons have better single-core performance, they scale worse and are slower on all multi-core tests.
  
  The 24 core Xeon W is faster than a 24 core 13900K, but it should be because all the cores on the Xeon are full size and 16 of the cores on the 13900K are half-size "Efficiency" or E cores. The 13900K is clocked higher, but not enough to catch up.
  
  I'd like to get a proper workstation system so I'm waiting for full reviews of these chips, but I expect the pricing on a full system will exceed my budget.
  
  
  
• AI-based search engines are not only complete garbage but cost ten times as much to run as existing search engines which are still marginally useful some of the time. (Ars Technica)
  
  Let's raise a glass as Google sinks without a trace.
  
  
  
• Gigabytes Aorus Gen 5 10000 has a price and is up for pre-order. (Tom's Hardware)
  
  This is one of the first PCIe 5.0 SSDs, with a transfer rate of 10GBps. Upcoming models expected later this year should hit 12GBps.
  
  The 2TB model is priced at $339. For $399 you can get a Western Digital SN850X - which is PCIe 4.0 and only delivers 7.3GBps, but stores 4TB. Or you can get two of the $160 2TB model and run them in RAID-0, get twice the capacity of the Gigabyte model, 46% better peak transfers, and save $20.
  
  There's not a whole lot of point to PCIe 5.0 on the desktop just yet, but another year will likely change that.
  
  
  
• The latest Razer Blade 15 features a 13800H CPU (6P/8E cores), RTX 4060 or 4070 graphics, a 2560x1440 (probably) screen at 100% DCI-P3 colour, dual Thunderbolt 4 ports, user upgradeable memory and storage, and no trace whatsoever of the Four Essential Keys. (Liliputing)
  
  Because we can't have nice things.
  
  
  

posted by Pixy Misa at 04:00 AM

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