Daily Tech News 20 May 2025

• Intel has announced two and a half new graphics cards aimed at workstations: The Arc Pro B50 and B60. (Tom's Hardware)
  
  The B50, priced at $299, has 16GB of RAM and a cut-down version of the B580 GPU. It has 16 GPU cores rather than 20, and the 16GB of RAM is on a 12GHz 128-bit bus instead of having 12GB of RAM on a 19GHz 192-bit bus.
  
  So yes, it will run slower (unless you need more than 12GB of RAM, in which case the B580 will flounder), but on the other hand it uses only 70W of power, which is tiny. The B580 specified 190W.
  
  At just 70W it can run on power just from the PCIe slot, and it's available in a half-height version to fit in awkward cases like the Hyte Y family (which can only fit a single full-height card).
  
  The other card, the Arc Pro B60, is a B580 with 24GB of RAM. At full power (200W) it should perform within 10% of the B580. In low power mode (120W) it will slow down by about 15%. Priced around $500.
  
  
  
• Wait, you said two and a half.
  
  I did.
  
  The Intel Arc Pro Dual 48GB Turbo is the half. (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Made by Maxsun, it's two B60s sharing a single card. Very literally: The B60 uses a PCIe 5.0 x8 connection, so each of the chips on this card takes up one half of a PCIe x16 slot.
  
  If you're playing games you'll get the same performance as a B580 or B60. But if you're running AI, you can use all 48GB of RAM for a single task thanks to new software from Intel.
  
  And if you have a server you can combine four of these to assign 192GB of VRAM to a single task.

• Microsoft has produced a new command-line text editor for Windows. (The Verge)
  
  It's called Edit.
  
  Uh... Yeah, that's it.
  
  
  
• The judge in the Epic Games v. Apple case is mad again. (Tech Crunch)
  
  After the recent decision demolishing Apple in every way imaginable and requiring the company to comply with the court's orders immediately, Epic Games resubmitted its game Fortnite to the App Store.
  
  Apple responded that it wouldn't do so until the case had gone through the appeals process.
  
  This rather irked Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers, who had already ruled against exactly this kind of shit from Apple, and she has now told them to either approve the game immediately or show up in court in handcuffs to explain themselves.
  
  
  
• Klarna's revenue per employee has soared to nearly $1 million. (Tech Crunch)
  
  Profit per employee remains negative.
  
  
  
• Regeneron - which sounds like a company out of a Philip K. Dick movie - has announced it is buying defunct DNA testing outfit 23andMe for $256 million. (Tech Crunch)
  
  But not 23andMe's health business, which has the even more unlikely name of Lemonaid.
  
  
  

posted by Pixy Misa at 04:30 AM

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