Daily Tech News 15 February 2025

• Nvidia has delayed the launch of its RTX 5070 card - a $549 high-end model - until after AMD's announcement on the 28th. (Ars Technica)
  
  The article points out something I hadn't noticed before: The 5070 is likely to be markedly slower than the 4070 Super, since it cuts the number of shaders from 7168 to 6144. The 5070 Ti is pretty much a wash; it increases the core count slightly but decreases clock speeds a little.
  
  The 5090 and 5080 meanwhile are overpriced, irrelevant, and not available for purchase anywhere. The $750 5070 Ti will launch next week, and is expected to be more of the same.
  
  The mainstream market is now AMD's race to lose, and they probably will.

• Feel-good story of the day: The technical staff of Elizabeth Warren's unconstitutional plaything the CFPB has been "gutted". (The Verge) (archive site)
  
  Cue the utterly predictable wailing that all the information collected by the CFPB is no longer in the hands of incompetents and thieves.
  
  
  
• Nintendo's legal pursuit of Palworld, which has been described as "Pokemon with guns" and has sold tens of millions of copies on the basis of simply not being lazy garbage, has hit a snag after the US Patent Office denied 22 of the 23 patent claims that Nintendo wanted to use against Palworld developer Pocketpair. (Hot Hardware)
  
  Oops.
  
  With only one patent in dispute the case is likely to end up with a minor settlement from Pocketpair to Nintendo and some small changes to the game. Given that Pocketpair is a small company and swimming in cash, this isn't going to slow them down.
  
  Recent sales numbers haven't been published but Palworld sold 25 million copies in the first month after release last year, netting the company hundreds of millions of dollars off a budget around $7 million.
  
  
  
• We were wrong about GPUs. (Fly.io)
  
  Minor but interesting point: Nobody is looking to deploy their own LLMs on cloud servers. They either use their own hardware or APIs from one of the big players.
  
  Fly.io is a small cloud provider with a GPU offering. They're not canceling the product, but they're not planning major upgrades or expansions either.
  
  
  
• There are now five makers promising Ryzen 370 mini-PCs with upgradeable memory. (Liliputing)
  
  Minisforum, GMK, Geekom, Acemagic, and AOOSTAR, making Beelink the only Chinese player in this space without an announcement.
  
  The articles (this one links to the others) note the similarities between the models, with the author also suspecting that there are rather fewer than five distinct motherboard models.

posted by Pixy Misa at 04:00 AM

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