Daily Tech News 13 September 2023

• Intel has shown off its new Thunderbolt 5 controllers (though those won't actually arrive until next year) and announced details of the standard, most of which we already knew. (AnandTech)
  
  Also they lie about USB4, but what else is new?
  
  Thunderbolt 3 and 4 are the same speed - 40Gbps - and USB4 is based on Thunderbolt 3.
  
  Thunderbolt 5 doubles the speed to 80Gbps, and has a special mode for video where it can transfer 120Gbps in one direction and 40Gbps the other way. It has four lanes, and usually there's two in each direction, but if you're mainly using it in one direction it can dynamically configure itself as 3+1 instead of 2+2.
  
  With this you can run two 6k monitors from a single port.
  
  Other details I don't remember seeing previously are support for at least 140W power delivery, 64Gbps networking - though only really between two computers, since Thunderbolt network switches aren't a thing, and something welcome and a little surprising: It supports the new speeds on existing Thunderbolt 3 and 4 and USB 4 cables up to a distance of 1 metre.
  
  Beyond that you need active cables with tiny chips in them and those don't exist yet for Thunderbolt 5. The increased speeds are produced with the help of trinary encoding, while passive cables don't care that you're sending voltages of -1 / 0 / +1 instead of just 0 / 1, those tiny chips very much do.

• aaah shit i guess i owe Unity $5,600,000
  anyone got some spare change? pic.twitter.com/HcgaMTDOt5

  — Dani (@DaniDevYT) September 12, 2023

  
  
  Unity has decided to charge developers $0.20 per game install starting January 1.
  
  Using the free version of Unity? Suck it, loser. If your free game, supported by ads or donations or DLC, suddenly starts making you some money, Unity could send you a bill for everything you earned and more.
  
  If you make $200k in a year on 5 million downloads, Unity will want five times your total revenue for using their "free" toolset. And every download costs you money whether it's earning you revenue or not.
  
  The company has published a helpful FAQ for developers concerned about these pricing changes.
  
  What about early access games, beta releases, and demos? What if people reinstall the game, or install it on multiple devices? What if they simply pirate the game?
  
  Don't worry. You'll get charged again every time.
  
  
  
• Godot - a competing game engine - is not only free but open source under the MIT License. (Godot)
  
  I think the only thing Unity has united is game developers, in outrage.
  
  
  
• Unreal Engine meanwhile charges a straightforward 5% of your revenue - per game, past a threshold of $1 million. If you're a studio putting out a bunch of small games that sell for five bucks and average 100,000 copies, you pay nothing. If one of your games is a breakout hit and makes $2 million, you pay $50,000 on that one game and nothing on the rest of your titles.
  
  Not long ago Unity was a community-focused upstart against the big bully Unreal Engine. Then they hired a CEO from Electronic Arts.
  
  
  
• Stack Overflow hates its users almost as much as Unity. (Stack Overflow)
  
  A user posts a detailed discussion on the problems with Stack Overflow in 2023, and the comments immediately prove him right.
  
  
  
• Apple's brand new A17 Pro CPU, used in the iPhone 15, is built on TSMC's brand new 3nm process - the first widely available chip to use 3nm technology - and is, uh, 10% faster than its predecessor. (Tom's Hardware)
  
  But it has ray tracing.
  
  On a phone.
  
  Speaking of phones, the iPhone 15 is out. It's 10% faster than the iPhone 14.
  
  Oh, and 1 gram lighter.
  
  
  
• Google says it is the number one search engine because users prefer it over whatever else is out there, we don't know, does it even matter, and not because it spends $10 billion a year keeping it as the default search engine across a wide range of browsers and devices. (Bloomberg) (archive site)
  
  Though it does indeed spend $10 billion a year keeping it as the default search engine across a wide range of browsers and devices. Only reason Firefox is still with us, given that the company is run by communists these days.
  
  
  

posted by Pixy Misa at 04:00 AM

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