Daily Tech News 4 March 2025

• The secret weapon of AMD's 9070 XT graphics card: It exists. (Twitter)
  
  Retailers report they have received more stock so far of the 9070 XT than of all the new Nvidia cards combined, including the unreleased RTX 5070.
  
  
  
• Meanwhile Nvidia says that it definitely didn't pay for the obviously paid pathetic puff-pieces posing as previews for the RTX 5070. (Twitter)
  
  The 5070, which launches this week, is not headed for favourable reviews. It increased the number of shaders over the older RTX 4070 slightly - 6144 over 5888 - but is down significantly over last year's 4070 Super with its 7168 shaders.
  
  And there hasn't been much improvement at all on shader performance or clock speed, so... Eh.
  
  It will probably still sell out, but that seems to be more a function of supply than demand.

• It turns out that the new RTX 5090 - the only card in the family to show real gains - albeit mostly in price and flammability - performs worse on Passmark because Nvidia dropped support for 32-bit CUDA libraries. (Tom's Hardware)
  
  That in turn killed support for 32-bit OpenCL - which Passmark's benchmark suite uses - and 32-bit PhysX, which makes older games run at one quarter speed when you upgrade from a 4000-series card to its newer counterpart.
  
  Passmark tried to buy a 5090 to test its benchmark suite directly and track down the problem.
  
  They couldn't.
  
  There aren't any.
  
  
  
• Beelink has announced its first NAS, the Me mini. (Liliputing)
  
  Specs are incomplete, but it includes an Intel CPU (presumably an Atom chip like the N100 or N150, which is fine) and six M.2 slots for storage. Networking is dual 2.5Gb Ethernet ports, which is also fine.
  
  It's a 4" white cube, has an internal power supply to keep things tidy, and includes a single HDMI port and three USB ports.
  
  
  
• Anthropic has raised another $3.5 billion in funding. (Tech Crunch)
  
  The company has revenues of around $1 billion a year... And spends $3 billion a year on R&D.
  
  
  

posted by Pixy Misa at 04:00 AM

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