Daily Tech News 9 March 2023

• A team at the University of Rochester has discovered the Holy Grail of physics - one of the Holy Grails of physics, for there are many - a substance that acts as a room temperature superconductor. (Science)
  
  Or so they say. Nobody trusts them because they're not releasing the details, and Nature retracted a paper from the same group last year after nobody could replicate the results and they refused to release any more data.
  
  It looks like this one is just warmed-over cold fusion.
  
  Quanta also has a writeup of the story that may be more accessible.

• ASRock Rack has a new server motherboard for Ryzen 7000, with dual built-in 10Gb Ethernet ports and 8 SATA ports. (Serve the Home)
  
  It's microATX, but if they release a mini-ITX version - and they did for Ryzen 5000 - I'll buy two of them.
  
  
  
• AMD's 7745HX appears to be as fast as Intel's 13700HX. (WCCFTech)
  
  The 7745HX is the low end of the high-end Dragon Range family of laptop chips, with 8 cores; the 13700HX has 16 cores (8P + 8E).
  
  On the other hand, the 7745HX uses 50W when playing games, which is a lot for a laptop chip, where the 13700HX uses 80W.
  
  Oh. That's the same hand.
  
  
  
• GDDR7 uses PAM3. (AnandTech)
  
  GDDR7 is the next generation of memory for video cards, and will be about 50% faster than the latest current GDDR6X (and twice as fast as typical GDDR6).
  
  PAM3 is more interesting: It's trinary. It runs at three voltages, -1, 0, and 1. This allows three bits to be encoded as two signals - there are nine possible values and 0, 0 is treated as an error.
  
  The upcoming USB 4 v2 (which will hopefully become USB 5 before it arrives) also uses PAM3 to reach speeds of 80Gbps, twice as fast as regular USB 4.

posted by Pixy Misa at 04:00 AM

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