Daily Tech News 17 December 2024

• Zotac has leaked Nvidia's new RTX 5000 series graphics cards. (VideoCardz)
  
  The lineup includes the RTX 5090, which you can't afford and probably won't be able to buy anyway, the 5090D which is a China-only edition for communists, the 5080 which will probably be overpriced and you won't want, the 5070 Ti which will probably be decent but expensive, and the 5070 which has 12GB of VRAM like the Intel B580 but which will definitely not cost $250 like the Intel B580.
  
  The new cards all reportedly use GDDR7, so memory bandwidth is likely to be significantly better than 4000 series cards. GDDR7 memory uses trinary rather than binary signals - a technique known as PAM-3 - so it can move data 50% faster at the same clock speed.
  
  Thunderbolt 5 also uses PAM-3 encoding but right now it's kind of useless so we should hope that's not a sign of things to come.

• TSMC employees account for 1.8% of the children being born in Taiwan. (Boom)
  
  That is not immediately noteworthy until you consider that TSMC employees account for 0.3% of all jobs in Taiwan.
  
  So even if only one member of each couple is employed by the company, that's still three times the national average fertility rate.
  
  
  
• Hygon's 16 core server CPU is kind of bad. (Tom's Hardware)
  
  It is literally a (licensed copy of) the original Zen architecture from 2017. And it behaves like it.
  
  
  
• Here's the full source code for the Commodore 64 version of Elite. (GitHub)
  
  Did that version include the rescue mission where the ungrateful bastards kicked your cargo out of the hold to make room for themselves?
  
  The GitHub repository is very comprehensive, with every line of code documented and extensive instructions on how to build and run the programs on modern systems. Also included are versions for the Apple II, BBC Micro, and the NES, and even Elite-A, a fan-made extended version.
  
  
  
• SoftBank has pledged to invest $100 billion in the United States over the next four years. (The Register)
  
  That used to be a lot.
  
  
  
• The Framework 16 laptop now supports up to four M.2 SSDs. (Notebook Check)
  
  The graphics card for this laptop lives in a plug-in module at the rear. If you don't need a dedicated graphics card it works fine without one, using the built-in AMD graphics on the CPU.
  
  Now you can plug a different module in that holds two extra M.2 slots, and the good part is the module only costs $39.
  
  
  

posted by Pixy Misa at 04:00 AM

| Access Comments