Daily Tech News 4 October 2023

• Intel is spinning off its "programmable solutions" division as a separate company. (AnandTech)
  
  What is Intel's "programmable solutions" business?
  
  It's Altera. Intel bought the company in 2015 and filed off the serial numbers.
  
  Which does at least make it easy to come up for a name for the newly formed company...
  
  Coincidentally, AMD recently bought Altera's major competitor.

• Moronity Report: How good are the most advanced AI systems at predicting crime? Not. (The Markup)

  Diving deeper, we looked at predictions specifically for robberies or aggravated assaults that were likely to occur in Plainfield and found a similarly low success rate: 0.6 percent. The pattern was even worse when we looked at burglary predictions, which had a success rate of 0.1 percent.

  At least the Plainfield PD scrapped the system after two years and only wasted about $35,000. As this kind of nonsense goes that's practically winning the lottery.
  
  
  
• Inside the A510, Arm's boring workhorse CPU. (Chips and Cheese)
  
  If you like all that fiddly detail about pipeline stages and result forwarding and branch misprediction penalties, this will be a feast for you.
  
  The A5x series, unlike the higher end A7x and now Xx cores, is an in-order design. That makes it much simpler (and lower power), but it can't dynamically rearrange the instructions in your program to suit itself and still get the right answer, which is the crazy trick more powerful out-of-order cores do. Even something as simple as a Raspberry Pi does that these days.
  
  
  
• Much ado of a muchness: Comparing Intel and AMD CPUs on the same laptop. (Tom's Hardware)
  
  They didn't test GPU performance (where the AMD model should really shine), so the results are pretty close. Intel is around 5% faster on Geekbench, AMD nearly 10% ahead on Cinebench.
  
  On battery life tests, the Intel model lasted 11 hours 39 minutes, where the AMD version racked up 11 hours 38 minutes.
  
  So... Pick your poison.
  
  
  
• The Surface Laptop Studio 2 is a think that exists. (Tom's Hardware)
  
  At $3299 I don't know why though.
  
  
  
• Microsoft has overhauled OneDrive, and by overhauled they mean smeared AI shit all over it. (The Verge)
  
  Can we not?

posted by Pixy Misa at 04:00 AM

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