Daily Tech News 15 May 2023

• An open letter to tech workers about careers in "public service". (Tech Crunch)
  
  The gist of it being, the government never fires anyone, no matter how bad they are at their jobs, no matter how dire the economy is. As long as you lick the right boots, you're secure for life.
  
  Your soul, on the other hand...

• HP has a new Pavilion Aero 13 range, replacing the 5800U with a 7735U, which is to say a 6800U. (Liliputing)
  
  This offers basically the same CPU performance as before, but double the graphics performance, so it's a pretty solid update.
  
  It's configurable with a decent 1920x1200 screen or a very nice 2560x1600 version, has the Four Essential Keys, and comes 8GB or 16GB of RAM soldered in place, which is not so nice. If you want a small, light notebook with a great screen and don't need to run anything intensive - or only use one application at a time - it's pretty good. But with 32GB of RAM it would be great.
  
  
  
• Apple is reportedly preparing the new M3 Pro chip for laptops, with 12 CPU cores (sort of), 18 GPU cores, and 36GB of RAM. (Bloomberg)

  I'm sure you're wondering: How can Apple possibly fit that many cores on a chip? The answer is the 3-nanometer manufacturing process, which the company will be switching to with its M3 line. That approach allows for higher-density chips, meaning a designer can fit more cores into an already small processor.

  No, I'm not wondering that, because I'm not an idiot.
  
  AMD's 6800U processor mentioned above has 8 CPU cores - all full-size, not half full and half crippled - and 12 GPU cores, is built on TSMC's older 6nm process, and measures 208 square mm. And was launched at the beginning of last year.
  
  
  
• OpenSearch hasn't failed. (InfoWorld)
  
  OpenSearch was born out of a dispute between Elasticsearch and Amazon. Amazon offered Elasticsearch as a service. Elasticsearch didn't like that but couldn't do much about it because their code was open source, so they change the license to make it less open to prevent Amazon from doing this.
  
  Amazon took the previous version of Elasticsearch, under the old open source license, renamed it OpenSearch, and started updating it themselves.
  
  And... It seems to be working.
  
  
  
• Crucial's 2TB P3 SSD is available at Amazon for $88. (Tom's Hardware)
  
  On the one hand, it's not a high-end drive; it's DRAMless QLC, which used to be instant death but is now merely kind of meh thanks to dramatically improved controllers.
  
  On the other hand, my benchmark price for a decent budget SSD is $100 per TB, and this is less than half that.
  
  Team's 2TB MP33 is available for $78, and that's TLC, though it's a slower controller - it maxes out at about 2GB per second, and gets quite slow if you need to write hundreds of gigabytes of data all at once. (Tom's Hardware)
  
  But if you do that, you can probably afford more than $78 for an SSD.
  
  
  
• You can run LLaMA 13B on a 6GB graphics card. (GitHub)
  
  Previously - as in, last week - you would have looked towards the smaller 7B model if you were looking to run LLMs on budget hardware, but with some adjustments the 13B model runs well enough on an RTX 2060 or a laptop RTX 3060.
  
  This should work for Alpacas and Vicunas as well. No word as yet on Guanacos, or on Old World camelids.

posted by Pixy Misa at 04:00 AM

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