Daily Tech News 21 September 2024

• Qualcomm is reportedly in talks to acquire Intel. (The Verge)
  
  Intel's stock price is in the toilet after years of mismanagement, which is what makes this at all viable. The company is valued at less than Nvidia or AMD, and half as much as Qualcomm.
  
  Which is a little odd because none of those other companies have Intel's massive manufacturing capacity, and is testament to how badly Intel has screwed up.
  
  I very much doubt this deal will go anywhere. Intel is betting everything on its upcoming 18A and 14A process nodes (1.8nm and 1.4nm respectively). If those are successful then all is forgiven. If not, then who would want to buy them?

• Speaking of AMD the company's upcoming Strix Point Halo laptop chip has been spotted in a test sample of an HP ZBook Ultra. (WCCFTech)
  
  Specifically the Ryzen AI 390 variant with 12 Zen 5 CPU cores and 40 graphics cores.
  
  Since it's a ZBook - HP's workstation line - it will not be cheap, but it does come with 64GB of RAM standard.
  
  
  
• Which is just enough to run the latest edition of Microsoft Flight Simulator. (Tom's Hardware)
  
  The game recommends 64GB of RAM, at least a 12-core CPU, and an Nividia RTX 4080 or AMD Radeon 7900 XT.
  
  Which is a lot.
  
  
  
• Concord reportedly cost a total of $400 million to develop. (PlayStation Lifestyle)
  
  This is the game that Sony shut down less than two weeks after launch, at which point it had around 100 players. Total. Worldwide.
  
  Insiders have said that the game had already cost $200 million to develop by the start of 2023, at which point it was in a "laughable state". Sony spent another $200 million getting additional studios to clean it up and create pre-rendered content.
  
  That part seems to have worked because the problem when it launched last month was not bugs - it appeared to be technically competent - but that the game was ugly and boring.
  
  And that part was because nobody was permitted to offer any criticism, for the entire eight years it was in development, what the article calls "toxic positivity". No-one was permitted to speak out, and no-one dared to blow the whistle because they were dealing with the kind of people who would follow them to their next job just to libel them to HR.
  
  
  
• You can now reprogram the Windows Copilot key if (a) you are stuck with a Windows version with Copilot and (b) your keyboard has a Copilot key. (Tom's Hardware)
  

  We discovered that the Copilot key returns the F23 key, a key hearkening back to the IBM era when IBM keyboards came equipped with function keys from F1 all the way to F24.

  This took me a minute. They're not talking about PC keyboards, they're talking about mainframe terminals.
  
  Apparently I'm not that old just yet.
  
  
  
• You can get a 1.5TB Intel 905p for $299. (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Why would you want to do that? That sounds expensive.
  
  The answer is, you probably wouldn't. This is one of Intel's Optane models, and there's a reason the company doesn't make them anymore.
  
  But if you have an application that is very sensitive to read latency, these drives are five times faster than any flash-based SSD, and last basically forever.
  
  For sequential transfer rates, though, it is five times slower than the latest PCIe 5 M.2 drives.
  
  
  

posted by Pixy Misa at 04:00 AM

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