Daily Tech News 24 August 2023

• A new ruling from the NHTSA says that car makers must comply with Massachusetts' right-to-repair law and provide a standard mechanism for retrieving data from the cars' computer systems for owners and independent repair shops. (Tech Crunch)
  
  Eventually. The ruling allows "a reasonable period of time" for manufacturers to make the necessary updates, without ever bothering to define that.
  
  This overturns a previous ruling saying that manufacturers did not need to comply with the law, issued, uh, two months ago.
  
  
  
• Meanwhile a right-to-repair bill has passed 38-0 through the California Senate and attracted the full-throated support of... Apple. (404 Media)
  
  The same Apple that has for years been one of the most aggressive and most disingenuous opponents of right-to-repair legislation.
  
  More on that below.

• AMD will be announcing the Radeon 7800 XT and 7700 XT at Gamescom tomorrow-ish. AMD has one event at noon on the 25th German time and another at 5pm. (Videcardz)
  
  Expect these cards to be pretty decent overall, but priced too high, because there's so little competition right now.
  
  
  
• The reason there's so little competition is that Nvidia simply doesn't give a shit. And the reason for that is that they make four times as much from AI as they do from consumer graphics cards. (WCCFTech)
  
  And that's revenue numbers. Margins are a lot better on the high-end AI cards, so the difference in profits would be even larger.
  
  AMD could be more aggressive, but Nvidia can more easily afford a price war right now, so expect prices to remain high at least until Intel releases its second-generation "Battlemage" cards.
  
  
  
• Geekom has announced the Mini IT13, a NUC with an Intel 13900H CPU. (Liliputing)
  
  
  
• SimplyNUC has announced the Onyx, a NUC with an Intel 13900H CPU. (Liliputing)
  
  That's not a coincidence; both companies are sourcing their motherboards and cases from another manufacturer, and the two are nearly identical. The Geekom model is blue and has 40Gbps USB-C ports, while the SimplyNUC is black and appears to have 20Gbps ports, but the cases are otherwise the same, and the port arrangement is exactly the same.
  
  On the CPU side the 13900H closely matches AMD's 7840HS, also popular in recent NUC announcements.
  
  On the graphics side, though, the AMD chip demolishes Intel, being nearly three times as fast. So unless you just don't care about graphics performance, go with AMD.
  
  
  
• OptiLOL: When adding a print statement makes your code run twice as fast. (Medium)
  
  This is really a case of a failed compiler optimisation; adding the print statement allowed the compiler to find that optimisation.
  
  It is a very specific issue related to branch predictions (the ChatGPT explanation inserted into the article is correct but eye-glazingly dull) but basically this is just a compiler bug.
  
  
  

posted by Pixy Misa at 04:00 AM

| Access Comments