Daily Tech News 7 January 2025

• AMD announced about seven thousand new (and "new") mobile CPUs at CES. (Ars Technica)
  
  These start with the Ryzen AI Max+ Pro 395 at the high end, with sixteen Zen 5 cores and 40 RDNA 3.5 graphics cores, and go all the way down to the Ryzen 3 210, which "only" has four Zen 4 cores - three of which are the somewhat slower Zen 4c - and four RDNA 3 graphics cores.
  
  Which is still reasonably fast, true.
  
  
  
• Meanwhile Nvidia announced the new RTX 5000 family and lied about the performance. (Tom's Hardware)
  
  The new RTX 5070 is claimed to be as fast as an RTX 4090, but if you dig into the details it turns out they are literally doubling the numbers produced by the 5070.
  
  With the new AI frame generation, it generates three fake frames for each real one, which makes games smoother at the expense of being 75% bullshit.
  
  Pricing starts at $550 for the 5070 and goes up to $2000 for the 5090.

• HP announced the new ZBook Ultra 14 G1a with AMD's new Ryzen AI Max+ Pro 395. (Notebook Check)
  
  Depending on the options, it can have up to 128GB of RAM - and allocate up to 96GB of that to the GPU if you are doing AI work, which is a cheap way to get a GPU with a huge amount of RAM.
  
  The RAM is soldered and 128GB is going to be expensive, but it is available as an option.
  
  Other than that you get a 14" 2880x1800 120Hz OLED panel, up to 4TB of SSD, two USB4 ports - one on each side, which is convenient, two other USB ports, HDMI, and a headphone jack.
  
  Prices not announced yet but expected to start at $1500.
  
  Oh, and it almost has the Four Essential Keys. The Home key is shared with F12, but I don't really use F12 anymore since Chrome remapped the Dev Tools.
  
  
  
• A study found that Chinese propaganda network TikTok is a vehicle for Chinese propaganda. (Gizmodo)
  
  I am shocked.
  
  Also, Chinese propaganda network TikTok is banned in China.
  
  
  
• HDMI 2.2 has been announced, running at 96Gbps. (PC World)
  
  That's a lot of Gbps. It's intended for 8K and upcoming 10K displays, which nobody has.
  
  
  
• Intel announced a whole range of laptop CPUs as well. (Ars Technica)
  
  Nothing as exciting as AMD's Ryzen Max+ Pro, but if they have the same efficiency gains as the new desktop chips they might be decent.
  
  We'll see once reviews drop.
  
  
  
• Note to self: The magical memory reduction option for Minecraft modpacks is in ModernFix, not Ferrite Core.
  
  Add mixin.perf.dynamic_resources=true at the bottom of the config file and watch memory usage be cut in half.

posted by Pixy Misa at 04:00 AM

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