Daily Tech News 3 April 2023

• Remembering Gordon Moore and the iAPX432 debacle. (The Chip Letter)
  
  Intel's planned followup to the wildly successful 8080 was not the 8086 or even the Z80-like 8085, but the iAPX432, an object oriented mainframe-on-a-chip (well, mainframe-on-a-board since it was a multiple chip implementation) that actually eventually worked but was so slow that nobody ever used it for anything.
  
  It took a diametrically opposite approach to RISC: Instead of relying on clever compilers to make simple hardware work, it tried to bring the hardware up to the level of advanced programming languages like Ada.
  
  In 1975.
  
  It was 30 times as complicated as the 8080 but worse by almost every measure, and was completely abandoned.
  
  The only other company I know of that has attempted this is hi-fi maker Linn, whose Rekursiv CPU suffered a similar fate when it turned out that commodity Sun 3 workstations ran the same code cheaper and faster.

• AMD's 7800X3D is the new AMD 5800X3D. (WCCFTech)
  
  That is, not necessarily the fastest gaming CPU in every single case, but mostly faster than more expensive chips that use much more power.
  
  It's priced the same as the 7900X which is about 50% faster for many non-gaming workloads, so if you only spend part of your time gaming it might not be the best choice.
  
  It does avoid the issue with the 7900X3D and 7950X3D which have two slightly different CPU chiplets, because it only has one CPU chiplet.
  
  
  
• The RTX 4070 might be a good graphics card. (WCCFTech)
  
  Due this month (probably) for around $600 (we think), it should use the same power as the 3060 (more or less) but deliver the performance of the 3080 (ish).
  
  It will (likely) come with 12GB of VRAM, which is the minimum you should buy these days. The 3060 Ti, 3070, and 3070 Ti all have 8GB of RAM, and are starting to suffer on some new releases.
  
  The Xbox Series X and Playstation 5 both have 16GB of RAM, most of which can be used for graphics, so titles designed for consoles can play poorly on even some fairly recent graphics cards.
  
  The 3060, curiously enough, has 12GB of RAM and sometimes runs better than more expensive cards with less RAM.
  
  
  
• The Framework laptop is very exciting and I'd love to buy one but I'm sticking with my MacBook Air because I have the intelligence of a potato and am happy paying 16x the market price for storage in laptop that can never be upgraded or repaired. (The Verge)
  
  Ijits gonna ij.

posted by Pixy Misa at 04:45 AM

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