Daily Tech News 22 April 2023

• The 7730U isn't a 6800U, but a 5800U. We'll get to why that matters in a moment.
  
  
  
• Apple isn't planning to release an M2 update to the Mac Studio over worries that it will compete with the Mac Pro. (WCCFTech)
  
  
  
• Which doesn't exist. (WCCFTech)
  
  And if and when it does show up, will have RAM soldered in place, making it not so much a professional workstation as a highly polished turd.
  
  Soldered RAM is a disaster in laptops when it comes to any kind of professional use. It's inexcusable in a workstation-class desktop.

• The Asus Vivobook 15X is almost a very good laptop. (Asus)
  
  It has a 15.6" 120Hz 2880x16201 OLED display covering 100% of DCI-P3 colour, the Four Essential Keys in the form of a three-column numeric keypad, an eight core 15W Ryzen 7730U CPU, 16GB of DDR4 RAM, a 1TB SSD2, a physical webcam privacy shutter (something I appreciate since I work from home and have to join online meetings multiple times a day), one USB-C, three USB-A, HDMI, and a headphone jack (no microSD here either), and a separate power jack if you don't want to charge over USB-C.
  
  There are just a couple of problems with this.
  
  First, the digit 3 in 7730U means it's a Zen 3 chip despite being a 7000-series CPU, and the most recent Zen 3 U-series chip is the 6800U. But the 6800U doesn't work with DDR4 RAM, so either the specs are wrong, or... Well, the specs aren't wrong. The 7730U isn't last year's 6800U, but the previous year's 5800U.
  
  It's not exactly the same; the CPU side of things runs 100MHz faster. But the performance differences between the CPU sides of the three chips are minimal, and all are very strong performers given their minimal power draw.
  
  On the graphics side though the 7730U is a potato compared to the 6800U. Not even half as fast. It's comparable with Intel's Xe graphics at lower power, but that's all.
  
  Oh, and that screen resolution? It's an "up to". An up to that doesn't exist. The 1TB SSD is also an up to, but at least you can upgrade that yourself.
  
  And the RAM is half-upgradeable - 8GB soldered and 8GB in an SO-DIMM. So in theory you can upgrade to 40GB though that will lose dual-channel mode. I'm not sure exactly how bad that would be for performance but it couldn't be worse than running out entirely with 16GB of soldered RAM.
  
  It is cheap, and it's light at 1.6kg, and the screen, whole only 1080p, really is OLED and really does cover 100% of DCI-P3.
  
  I keep mentioning that, and I should explain what it means. DCI-P3 is the colour system used for digital movie projection, so if your screen covers 100% of that, it means it can display every colour visible in an IMAX cinema.
  
  The Acer laptop I mentioned yesterday can't do that. I couldn't find a review of the exact model that measured the screen colours, but two similar models clocked in at 36% and 38% of DCI-P3, which is, um, bad. My current laptop covers 100% of the smaller sRGB colour space, or did before the screen went funny, which was quite acceptable if not startlingly vivid. The Acer screen covers about 54% of sRGB. That's like looking outside on a cloudy day through a dirty window.
  
  The Vivobook can't go all the way to 64GB of RAM and doesn't have a discrete graphics card. On the other hand it should run much cooler and has a vastly better screen, though not as vastly better as Asus tried to make me believe.
  
  It's not much more expensive despite the Acer being discounted by 45% right now and the Asus being at list price.
  
  So maybe.
  
  There's a model that fixes all of these shortcomings: 3200x2000 screen, 13980HX, 32GB RAM upgradeable to 64GB, and an RTX 4060. It does cost A$3399 vs A$1399 though. Also it's not available.
  
  
  
• There is no AI, only Zuul. (New Yorker)
  
  The article explains that what is currently being touted as AI is nothing of the sort, just a glorified typeahead tool, and the concerns about its impact are mostly nonsensical.
  
  It then -this is the New Yorker after all - proposes a global totalitarian nightmare state to allay these delusional fears.
  
  Yeah. No.
  
  
  
• I'm not sure if all AI ethicists are fascists, but the correlation is unmistakable. (Overcoming Bias)
  
  Build a bridge out of them.
  
  
  
• The Atari 800 XL is back. (Revive Machines)
  
  Almost. Well, an FPGA implementation of it.
  
  I only read up on the details of the Atari internals recently. The custom graphics chip was a clear predecessor to the Amiga hardware and much more sophisticated than I had realised.
  
  
  
• ChatGPT can write code. The code is terrible. (The Register)
  
  ChatGPT is aware of this, but won't tell you unless you ask. Or possibly even then.
  
  
  
• Google's Bard chatbot has also been updated to write code. (The Verge)
  
  Bard is, if anything, less reliable than ChatGPT.
  
  
  
• Twitter has stopped labeling state-affiliated media as "state-affiliated media" after the state-affiliated media threatened to leave the platform over being labeled as "state-affiliated media". (The Verge)
  
  The Party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command.
  

posted by Pixy Misa at 04:00 AM

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