Daily Tech News 16 July 2024

• The Sixth Circuit has issued an administrative stay on the FCC's latest Net Neutrality nonsense pending a decision on a permanent stay. (The Verge)
  
  As I've been saying for at least a decade, the FCC doesn't have and cannot be permitted the authority to enact net neutrality without new legislation.
  
  Fortunately the recent Chevron decision cut the FCC's legs out from under it in this regard, if it didn't amputate them entirely. Even The Verge admits that the FCC is likely to lose this one.
  
  As usual, the comments over there are full of foaming illiterates, but there are only a few this time.
  
  
  

• The FBI has gained access to the would-be assassin's cell phone. (The Verge)
  
  Unlikely that this will change anything, of course.
  
  Best comment: Reddit is leaking.
  
  
  
• Microsoft's CTO denies the obvious, that AI is facing exponential scaling costs. (Ars Technica)
  
  He denies this in the face of exponential expenses in AI training. He's lying, badly.
  
  Best comment: Always listen to the Chief Tulip Officer's advice about investing in tulips.
  
  
  
• A look at AMD's Zen 5 microarchitecture. (AnandTech)
  
  Zen 1 through Zen 4 had the same basic design, able to issue and retire four instructions per cycle. Zen 4 also introduced a 256-bit half-width version of Intel's AVX-512 vector processing. Intel's own consumer CPUs lack AVX-512 in any form.
  
  With Zen 5 the issue width has been increased to eight instructions per cycle, and the AVX-512 unit is now a full 512 bits wide.
  
  If your code is poised perfectly to take advantage of the improved hardware it could run twice as fast on Zen 5 as Zen 4, but that's unlikely.
  
  The performance charts attached to this article show the 12 core 9900X running Handbrake video processing tasks 41% faster than Intel's 24 core 14900K, at half the power consumption.
  
  Of course Intel will have new chips itself later this year, but those are expected to focus on fixing the power issues more than increasing performance.
  
  These AMD chips are due to show up... Basically now.
  
  
  
• Also on the AMD front, testing the graphics performance of the new Ryzen HX 370 laptop chip. (Tom's Hardware)
  
  It's basically level with the desktop GTX 1070, laptop GTX 1650 Ti, or the Radeon RX 480. I used an RX 480 myself from 2017 to 2022, and it's a perfectly competent card. For integrated graphics performance it's amazing.
  
  AMD has another, much more powerful laptop CPU in the wings, with at least twice the graphics performance. No word yet on when that one will ship.

posted by Pixy Misa at 04:10 AM

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