Daily Tech News 7 June 2024

• I was still kind of expecting an Earth-shattering kaboom: SpaceX's Starship's fourth test flight went without any serious mishaps. (Ars Techica)
  
  A suborbital hop followed by splashdown of both the booster and second stage in the Indian Ocean about an hour apart.
  
  Even the Ars Commentariat couldn't whip itself into its usual love/hate mix on this one.
  
  
  
• And Boeing's Starliner has successfully docked with the ISS. (Tech Crunch)
  
  Good news all round.
  

• AI company Humane is up for sale at an asking price of $1 billion - that's $100,000 per customer. (Engadget)
  
  The company sold just 10,000 of its massively hyped AI pins.
  
  Good luck in bankruptcy court, guys.
  
  
  
• HSBC believes that Indian edtech company Byju's is now worth approximately absolutely nothing. (Tech Crunch)
  
  Formerly valued at $22 billion, reduced to $250 million in a recent fundraising round, and HSBC believes that is still wildly optimistic.
  
  
  
• Intel has dropped hyperthreading in Lunar Lake. (PC World)
  
  It's not clear if this is actually absent in the silicon or just disabled, but it makes sense.
  
  Hyperthreading was added to get a little more performance out of a limited number of cores - originally just one. It can run two programs on one core, each at about 60% performance, so the total performance is a little better than it would be otherwise.
  
  But now Intel CPUs come with "Efficiency" cores that run at about 50% of the performance of a full core, but use a quarter of the area and a quarter of the power of a full core, making them both more efficient and simpler than hyperthreading.
  
  
  
• Asrock has shown off its motherboards for Ryzen 9000. (AnandTech)
  
  No 10G Ethernet, but 5G is present on the top 3 boards. The problem is that 5G switches simply aren't a thing; you'll not only need to buy a 10G switch but make sure it supports the intermediate 5G speed.
  
  
  
• XPG's Nia handheld gaming device has upgradeable RAM using CAMM2. (AnandTech)
  
  That's a change. Every competing device has soldered RAM.
  
  
  
• The Chinese Hygon 8 core CPU matches multi-threaded performance of a three-generation old AMD CPU in Geekbench. (Tom's Hardware)
  
  A three-generation old 6 core AMD CPU.
  
  Still, not awful.
  
  
  
• Ryzen AI 9 HX 370 benchmarks put it 20% faster than the 8945HS. (WCCFTech)
  
  Though the CPU clocks peak at 4.2GHz where the chip is rated at 5.1GHz, so that's not even close to full speed.
  
  Also, the chart lists 40 cores. It's not a 40 core CPU. I don't know what's going on here.
  
  
  
• GOG will start deleting excessive cloud saves soon. (ExtremeTech)
  
  If you use more than 200MB for a single game for cloud saves, GOG will delete the older saves for that game. Not sure what it will do if a game uses more than 200MB for a single save file.

posted by Pixy Misa at 04:15 AM

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