Daily Tech News 3 January 2025

• Contract prices for memory are expected to rise by 50% this quarter, on top of the massive increases in the previous quarter. (WCCFTech)
  
  And that's if you can even get a contract. Spot prices are out of control.
  
  
  
• Which may be why Corsair has been cancelling orders for memory kits that were accidentally sold at only double the old price, rather than four times. (Notebook Check)
  
  The sales took place on New Years Eve, which is coincidentally when I bought 128GB of Corsair DDR4 RAM on Amazon - I noticed it was selling for close to pre-apocalyptic prices and pounced.
  
  The reported cancellations mostly involve a specific 48GB DDR5 kit, though, which is not at all what I ordered. And one 64GB kit I ordered has already shipped, so it looks like I lucked out. Waiting to see a shipping notice on the two 32GB kits.
  
  Every time I think maybe I bought too much memory I see another story that suggests things are going to get even worse. Memory rarely fails, and the next two generations of AMD CPUs will still support DDR5, so I should have enough to keep me going for years.

• On the positive-ish side, Chinese memory maker CXMT is preparing for a $4.2 billion IPO to expand its manufacturing facilities. (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Even if the chips go mostly straight into China's domestic market, anything that increases global supply is a good thing, even if it takes a couple of years. I hope to see similar investment in Taiwanese firm Nanya.
  
  
  
• Google AI overviews put people at risk of harm with misleading health advice. (The Guardian)
  
  She turned me into a newt.
  
  
  
• Police in Heber City, Utah, have been forced to explain why an official report stated that one of their officers had turned into a frog. (Futurism)
  
  He got better.
  
  And if you guessed AI, you win a frog.
  
  (Hat tip: Comrade Arthur.)
  
  
  
• Ghana is trying to regulate online prophecies. (The Economist) (archive site)
  
  Will this succeed?
  
  (shake shake)
  
  Signs point to no.
  
  
  
• The BBC is systematically biased... To favour conservatives. (SagePub) (PDF)
  
  Stop laughing, this is serious!
  
  
  
• Tesla has been overtaken by Chinese auto maker BYD as the leader in EV sales numbers, if not value. (Tech Crunch)
  
  As we covered previously, BYD engages in massive fraud to boost its sales numbers. Cars sitting unsold at dealers are routinely booked as sold, and then sold as second-hand vehicles at huge losses.
  
  
  
• On Steam's latest hardware survey, AMD is fast closing in on Intel, capturing 47% of CPU market share. (Tom's Hardware)
  
  The best selling CPUs and motherboards right now are AMD's AM4 models - five years old - because people already have DDR4 memory and are scrapping plans to upgrade to newer models that require DDR5.
  
  Intel's 12th through 14th generation CPUs support both DDR4 and DDR5 memory, but Intel's high-performance 13th and 14th generation CPUs, best suited to gaming, all died.
  
  
  
• The top selling motherboard on Amazon right now is the Asus ROG Strix B550-F Gaming WiFi II.
  
  I know this because I have a lot of DDR4 RAM myself and was looking for a good motherboard, and there are literally none available in Australia - they have either sold out or otherwise disappeared, leaving only the cheapest models, which all lack one or more key features like WiFi, 2.5Gb Ethernet, a second M.2 slot, more than just the basic three audio jacks, or a decent PCIe slot layout that would let you add cards to provide those missing features.
  
  This has all those features and five PCIe slots so... I bought one.
  
  
  
• I have rather less money saved up than a month ago, because I just bought all the hardware I had planned for this year - and probably next year, to be honest - in the space of three weeks.
  
  
  
• Speaking of things undergoing sudden unpredictable price increases physical copies of the PlayStation 4 game Star Wars Racer Revenge have abruptly increased in price from $20 to $400. (Tom's Hardware)
  
  This game is known to have a vulnerability that lets you unlock your PlayStation 5's boot loader. But there were only 8500 copies ever made - it was a remaster of a PlayStation 2 game, and mostly sold via digital download - and there are 85,000,000 PlayStation 5s in existence.
  
  
  

posted by Pixy Misa at 04:00 AM

| Access Comments