Daily Tech News 8 May 2023

• The Gateway 14.1 Ultra Slim Notebook is $279 from Walmart. (The Verge)
  
  Yes, Cowputers is still around though now it's a Walmart house brand.
  
  Anyway, this model has the 11th generation i5-1135G7 - only a little slower than the laptop I used all last year while moving house, a 1080p IPS display, 16GB of RAM, and a 500GB SSD. (The RAM is soldered to the motherboard, though nothing says that anywhere.)
  
  And the Four Essential Keys.
  
  The 2022 update dropped the four essential keys, and is also significantly more expensive, so don't buy that one.
  
  The screen isn't high-end and the trackpad is a bit finicky, but it's $279.
  
  And it's blue.

• Nvidia is using neural texture compression to save memory on its graphics cards. (Hot Hardware)
  
  Or they could just install more memory.
  
  
  
• Doubling the RAM on a Radeon 5600 XT more than doubled performance on high-resolution graphics benchmarks. (Hot Hardware)
  
  If you try to do this on an Nvidia card, it won't work. They don't want you making your $600 card run like their $1600 card.
  
  
  
• NEO Semiconductor has unveiled 3D X-RAM, which is RAM but 3D. (Hot Hardware)
  
  3D stacking saved flash memory, which was becoming unreliable as memory cell sizes shrank. Cell sizes are now larger than they used to be, but they stack them over a hundred deep so the chip capacity is much larger as well.
  
  The plan here is to initially stack eight DRAM storage cells on top of each other to produce a 128 gigabit memory chip by 2024. Which is next year. The largest chips currently in production are 24 gigabit.
  
  That would mean a laptop with two DIMM slots could be upgraded to 512GB of RAM, and a four-slot desktop to a terabyte.
  
  Which used to be a lot.
  
  
  
• Is the Crucial P3 Plus any good? (Serve the Home)
  
  It's okay for desktop use. Speeds are very good until the drive fills up, whereupon they plummet to spinning disk levels.
  
  The Team MP34 is probably a better bet. Its peak transfer rates are lower, but it retains that speed even when full.

posted by Pixy Misa at 04:20 AM

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