Daily Tech News 2 February 2025

• Nvidia's RTX 5060 and 5060 Ti might arrive in March to steal the thunder from AMD's launch of its Radeon 9000 family, but probably won't succeed at doing that. (Tom's Hardware)
  
  The problem is twofold.
  
  The best selling point of the 4060 is its low power consumption, and Nvidia is using the same 4nm TSMC process for the 5000 series, so there are no easy wins there. They can use GDDR7 memory, but that's more expensive and the chip on the 5060 is unlikely to be fast enough to make good use of it.
  
  With the 5060 Ti things are more complicated. The 4060 Ti is 40% faster in theory than the base 4060, but has exactly the same 8GB of GDDR6 RAM on a 128 bit bus, so the performance of the card is meh, and collapses as soon as games demand more than 8GB. You can get a 16GB model, but it's still constrained by the 128 bit bus.
  
  With the 5060 Ti, Nvidia can use GDDR7 - around 40% faster - and use 24Gbit chips so that the base model has 12GB of VRAM instead of just 8GB. That would give the chip a lot more breathing room - but if it works well it will encroach on the 5070 and Nvidia can't have that.
  
  Also Intel's B580 already exists, has 12GB of VRAM, and costs just $250, constraining both AMD and Nvidia when it comes to lower-end cards.
  
  

• While we're engaging in wild speculation, will there be a desktop version of the Ryzen 370?
  
  This is a laptop chip with four Zen 5 cores, eight slower Zen 5c, and sixteen RDNA 3.5 graphics cores, and it's quite a sold performer.
  
  Originally there seemed to be no chance for this arriving in an AM5 socket because it only supports soldered LPDDR5 memory. Except last month Geekom, Acemagic, and Minsiforum all announced mini-PC models with the Ryzen 370 and socketed DDR5 memory, and if that is possible then a regular AM5 model should also be possible.
  
  
  
• OpenAI has announced o3-mini, and updated reasoning model that is smarter and smaller than o1. (Ars Technica)
  
  According to OpenAI.
  
  
  
• The US is - as expected - imposing tariffs on imports from Canada, Mexico, and China. (The Verge)
  
  The Verge here is helpfully explaining that companies don't pay taxes; the cost is always passed on to the consumer... Oblivious to the fact that this fact directly counters a critical Democratic talking point.
  
  
  
• I'm not saying it's a cult but... Wait, yes I am. This is definitely a cult. (SF Gate)
  
  What the hell kind of name is Ziz, anyway? Zardoz. Now there's a proper name.

posted by Pixy Misa at 04:00 AM

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