Daily Tech News 12 March 2023

• This just in: Silicon Valley Bank is still splut.
  
  
  
• Hey, who changed the clocks?
  
  
  
• No, Apple's A17 Bionic mobile CPU is not going to be 59% faster in single-threaded performance than the A16. (WCCFTech)
  
  As a rule of thumb, CPU performance rises with the square root of the issue width, and complexity and transistor count (and also power consumption) rises with the square of the issue width, so to increase performance by 59% without increasing the clock speed Apple would need to make a chip more than six times larger using six times the power.
  
  Increasing the clock speed by the same amount would have similar effects on power consumption.
  
  And both approaches have limits where requirements zoom off the charts for minimal gains. You can see this in existing chips, where the 170W Ryzen 7900X is only 7% faster than the 65W 7900 non-X model.
  
  This supposed leak is garbage.

• Pimoroni's DV Stick will use two RP2040 chips to provide a retro-gaming tinkerer's delight. (Tom's Hardware)
  
  The RP2040 is the chip in the Raspberry Pi Pico. It has no video circuitry at all, but it is flexible enough nonetheless to generate and encode an HDMI signal.
  
  That keeps the chip pretty busy, so Pimoroni has added a second RP2040 to act as the CPU while the first is being the the video chip.
  
  Each chip has 256k of RAM, more than enough for old-school games, though the included language of choice is MicroPython rather than Basic.
  
  
  
• At the higher end of the gaming scale, AMD's 7800X3D is almost here. (Tom's Hardware)
  
  AMD launched the more expensive 16 core 7950X3D first, knowing that everyone would buy the cheaper 8 core 7800X3D if it were available. At $449 it averages 20% faster in AMD's admittedly selective benchmarks than Intel's $589 13900K, while also using much less power.
  
  It's slower for heavily multi-threaded tasks - if you want to game and also run particle accelerator data analysis you should go for the 7950X3D. Unless you live above the Arctic Circle where the 13900K's furnace-like qualities would be a net win.
  
  
  
• Google hired thousands of employees it didn't want or need just to make the company look bigger - and to make them unavailable to competitors. (Yahoo)
  
  And they just sat there doing nothing while drawing huge salaries.
  
  Allegedly, but it certainly fits the results we've seen from Google in recent years: Nothing.

posted by Pixy Misa at 05:00 AM

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