Daily Tech News 3 May 2023

• Reader Rick C pointed out that the Liliputing article on the new Beelink Ryzen NUCs has been updated to note that those absurdly high prices are just placeholders on Aliexpress.
  
  Good.
  
  The current generation Beelink SER 6 is available for $520 with 32GB of RAM and a 500GB SSD - and it's not much slower - so a $1299 base price for the new model without memory or storage seems slightly excessive.

• AMD's consumer chip sales are down even more than Intel's - by a massive 65%. (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Unlike Intel, though, AMD's other divisions - servers, gaming, and embedded - saw pretty solid performance, with gaming down slightly and embedded up by 163% thanks mostly to the Xilinx acquisition.
  
  They still lost money for the quarter, but $140 million compared to Intel's $2.8 billion in red ink.
  
  Strongest economy ever.

• Part of the reason was that AMD's new mainstream laptop chips were delayed from March to May, pushing those sales out of the quarter entirely. (Tom's Hardware)
  
  These chips are featured in a ton of new products, from the Beelink desktop mentioned above, to the Asus ROG Ally and an infinite number of other Steam Deck clones, to the new AMD model laptop from Framework.
  
  But they didn't have any, so they couldn't sell any.
  
  
  
• There's a bug in AMD's TPM security module which lets hackers compromise your secret keys if (checks notes) they have complete access to the insides of your computer. (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Which is almost the equivalent of having a door lock that is easily picked - but only from the inside.
  
  Not quite, but almost.
  
  
  
• Samsung has banned its staff from using ChatGPT and similar pieces of crap. (CNBC)
  
  Not mentioned in this article is that Samsung caught three leaks of proprietary data in the space of a month, all traceable to use of ChatGPT.
  
  
  
• Twitter hiccupped briefly. (Bleeping Computer)
  
  You might have had to log in again.
  
  
  
• The gang's all here: Linode also has a datacenter in Sydney. Since 2019, apparently. Guess I wasn't paying attention.
  
  So that's Vultr (who were first), Aussie company Binary Lane, DigitalOcean, Linode, and SSDNodes on the bargain side of things. Also AWS competes in the $5 server market with its Lightsail range. For Amazon it's likely a loss leader to pull people into its more expensive offerings.
  
  I'm reconfiguring stuff right now to work better and save me some money. I was starting to do that last year then the whole buying-a-house-and-moving-three-hundred-miles thing happened, and everything else got put on hold.
  
  I also have new servers for the websites - a pair of AMD 5950X systems with 128GB of RAM each - and they'll be going into production in the next few weeks.
  
  
  
• Vice Media, parent of the soon-to-be-defunct Waypoint, is looking pretty defunct itself. (New York Times)
  
  The entire company is looking at bankruptcy after trying and failing to find a buyer.
  
  Lol.
  
  

posted by Pixy Misa at 04:00 AM

| Access Comments