Daily Tech News 22 February 2025

• Oh, Oops Part One: Some Zotac RTX 5090 graphics cards have eight missing ROPs - the part of the chip that writes out the rendered image data to memory. (WCCFTech)
  
  They should have 176; instead they have 168. Updating the drivers and refreshing the BIOS does nothing to help, and the performance loss is measurable.
  
  
  
• Oh, Oops Part Two: When you think about it, if refreshing the BIOS doesn't work, this can't be Zotac's fault. They don't control the drivers or the chips supplied by Nvidia.
  
  And yes, there's a bad batch of chips out there, and this problem affects every model of card. (WCCFTech)
  
  Disabling parts of a GPU chip is perfectly normal, but on the top-of-the-line RTX 5090, which costs $2000 in theory and at least double that in practice, nothing is supposed to be disabled.
  
  And it can't be fixed, requiring a recall of affected boards.
  
  Only... It could be three months before there's any stock to replace them.
  
  
  
• And that's if your power cable doesn't melt. (Windows Central)
  
  Using a cable rated for a maximum of 600W on a GPU rated at a nominal 575W. Who could have foreseen problems with that?
  
  Particularly when the exact same thing happened with the 450W RTX 4090 two years ago.

• If you think you've got problems with your RTX 5090 that is broken, on fire, and doesn't even exist crypto exchange Bybit lost $1.46 billion. (CoinDesk)
  
  Not in the sense that they failed to make a profit for the quarter, but in the old-fashioned sense that somebody walked in and took it when they weren't paying attention.
  
  
  
• Do you want a pocket computer with a keyboard, a touchscreen, and great battery life? Abe did, so he built one. (Tom's Hardware)
  
  It uses a Pimoroni PicoVsion. I don't remember if I knew about that, but it's a great idea that was obvious the moment people figured out how to get HDMI video out of a Raspberry Pi Pico.
  
  You can do it, but it uses up most of the memory bandwidth of the Pico. But the RP2040 chip on the Pico is tiny and cheap, so why not just use two of them?
  
  The PicoVision does, and this little pocket computer uses that.
  
  
  
• Leaked benchmarks put the upcoming Radeon 9070 at the same speed as the 7800 XT, with the 9070 XT around 25% faster. (Tom's Hardware)
  
  That's not good for AMD; the XT model needs to be more like 50% faster. But it does coincide with other leaks from last month and may well be accurate.
  
  So grabbing a 7800 XT when I did continues to look like a good move. If the price leaks are also accurate, and the conversion rate for the AMD cards is the same as Nvidia's, the 9070 will cost 80% more in Australia than the 7800 XT for almost exactly the same performance.
  
  And the 7800 XT is disappearing from shelves.
  
  That was the calculation I made when I noped out of waiting for the new cards.
  
  
  
• Apple's iCloud Data Protection - its end-to-end encryption protocol - is no longer available to new customers in the UK. (BBC)
  
  It will soon no longer be available to existing customers, which may require downloading all of your data and then uploading it again.
  
  This is to comply with UK law, which was written by the Stasi, in order that the cops can spy on whomever they please.
  
  
  
• Microsoft's Majorana 1 is an eight bit computer. (Hot Hardware)
  
  Well, sort of. It's a new form of quantum computer built around topological qubits, which are much more resistant to error than regular (presumably nontopological) qubits.
  
  Don't ask me why.
  
  And it currently has eight of them.
  
  And it can - get this - work for as long as a millisecond before it breaks.
  
  This is apparently good.
  
  
  

posted by Pixy Misa at 04:00 AM

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