Daily Tech News 9 December 2023

• The duck has been cooked.
  
  Came out great. Could have used a little more seasoning perhaps, but the skin crisped up just right and the meat wasn't dry at all.
  
  I have acquired a chicken to try out the new slow cooker, but not today, because today I am full of duck.
  
  
  
• Beeper Mini is an Android iMessage client from the team behind Beeper, an Android everything-but-iMessage client. (Ars Technica)
  
  Through a clever bit of reverse engineering it is able to talk directly to Apple's messaging servers and interoperate with MacOS and iOS devices.
  
  
  
• Beeper Mini is dead, killed by Apple. (Tech Crunch)
  
  It was three days old.

• Phison is set to unveil new consumer SSD controllers that can hit 14.7GBps. (AnandTech)
  
  That's pretty much the speed limit of a PCIe 5.0 x4 connection, so don't expect any advances on that until PCIe 6.0 comes out.
  
  Which won't be until... Next year.
  
  Right now, SSDs are the only consumer devices using PCIe 5.0; even Nvidia's RTX 4090 is still built on 4.0.
  
  
  
• If you want as much PCIe 5.0 as you can get you can't go far wrong with the Asus Pro WS WRX90E-SAGE SE. (Tom's Hardware)
  
  It has seven PCIe slots, six of them PCIe 5.0 x16, and the seventh PCIe 5.0 x8, plus four M.2 slots, all PCIe 5.0 x4.
  
  Cheap at $1299. Then you'll need to spend the same again for an entry-level Threadripper Pro 7000 CPU. Oh, and eight sticks of DDR5 ECC registered memory.
  
  
  
• New benchmarks have leaked for Intel's Meteor Lake laptop chips, and once again they are slower than current AMD chips while consuming more power. (WCCFTech)
  
  Not a great combination.
  
  
  
• The Biden Administration is threatening to revoke patents of high-priced drugs developed using taxpayer money. (Associated Press)
  
  That's... Actually not entirely without merit.
  
  Just mostly.
  
  
  

posted by Pixy Misa at 04:00 AM

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