Daily Tech News 20 February 2025

• Nvidia's RTX 5070 Ti is here and I've found my next video card. (Techspot)
  
  Though those two items are not related. Or more precisely, they are inversely related.
  
  Not that the 5070 Ti is a bad card, certain items ignored. It is fast, it has plenty of VRAM for almost anything at 16GB, and it, uh, mostly works.
  
  The problem is the price. It was announced with a price of $750, and officially that is still the price. The problem is there is no official card. There was even a drama when Nvidia shipped a particular Asus card to reviewers, stating that it was an official launch card priced at $750, when Asus sent the exact same card to other reviewers, saying that it was not an official launch card and was priced at $900.
  
  That appears to have ended with Nvidia either bribing or coercing Asus into selling the card at $750, which simply means that it won't exist.
  
  But that's going to be true of all 5070 Ti cards, just as it is with the 5090 and 5080 a month after their launch.
  
  If you can find one at MSRP, expect to pay $900 to $1000. Which, yes, is nominally the same price as the 5080. But the 5080 will actually set you back over $2000 right now if you can even find one. And the 5070 Ti has the same GPU chip just with some shaders disabled, and the same RAM, so... I'm sure you can figure it out.
  
  Meanwhile in Australia there are only a handful of listings up but they're in the A$1900 to A$2000 range.
  
  What I actually bought - just this morning - was an AMD Radeon 7800 XT. It's also a 16GB card, and while the new 5070 Ti is 50% faster while using only 20% more power, the Radeon cost me A$729 - about US$400 plus tax - making the 5070 Ti 150% more expensive.
  
  Do I care that the 5070 Ti can run Counter Strike at 332fps instead of 257fps on the 7800 XT? A lot less than I care about the $1200 that will pay for the rest of my computer.
  
  Oh, and if you're playing an older 32-bit game using PhysX, it could run at about a quarter speed because Nvidia cards just don't support that anymore.
  
  So, no. Hell no. I decided it was time to stop waiting before every reasonably-priced card disappeared from the market entirely.
  
  Ordered that 7800 XT and a 7900 (non-x) CPU. Still need a motherboard and some DDR5 RAM, but those aren't in a price/availability death spiral right now.
  

• You can get an RTX 5090 as an external GPU for $2199. (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Except for the fact that it's not a 5090 and you can't get it.
  
  It's a mobile 5090, which is a 5080 downclocked and undervolted, with 24GB of RAM but still on a 256-bit bus.
  
  And it's $2199 outside the US. It's not available at all in the US.
  
  So double the price of a desktop 5080 for less performance, except that you can't get either one so it's kind of moot.
  
  Other than that it comes with DisplayPort, HDMI, two Thunderbolt 5 ports, and 5Gb ethernet, or would do if you could buy one but you can't.
  
  
  
• Surprising no-one, TSMC has found that it costs twice as much and takes twice as long to build fabs in the US as it does in Taiwan. (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Europe is actually faster than the US in this. Not by much, but it is.
  
  
  
• Hewlett Packard has bought the floundering Humane AI and driven a stake through its heart. (Tom's Hardware)
  
  The Humane AI pin cost $699 and $24 per month to keep it connected and did, basically, nothing.
  
  Presumably they have some tech somewhere that HP was after, because the device is being shut down and all customers refunded.
  
  
  
• Apple has announced the iPhone 16e, which costs $599 - $100 less than the Humane AI pin - and is a phone. (Thurrott)
  
  It does phone things.
  
  
  
• With AI you can now create unmaintainable legacy code in days, not years. (LeadDev)
  
  Congratulations?
  
  Interestingly, the paragraph in this piece talking about the problem of endlessly duplicated LLM-generated code degrading into an unreadable mess is... An unreadable mess.
  
  
  
• Palo Alto network devices - firewalls and remote access servers - are being hacked using a combination of flaws, one of which... (The Register)

  Palo Alto (PAN) last week fixed that problem, CVE-2025-0108, and rated it a highest urgency patch as the 8.8-out-of-10 flaw addressed an access control issue in PAN-OS's web management interface that allowed an unauthenticated attacker with network access to the management web interface to bypass authentication "and invoke certain PHP scripts." Those scripts could "negatively impact integrity and confidentiality of PAN-OS."

  PHP is to hardware firewalls as pneumonic plague is to children's playdates.
  
  
  
• Twitter is in talks to raise money at a valuation of $44 billion - which is the inflated amount Elon Musk paid for it in the first place. (Tech Crunch)
  
  Meanwhile xAI, the 18 month old startup spun out of the Twitter database and datacenter, is raising capital at a valuation of $75 billion.

posted by Pixy Misa at 04:00 AM

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