Daily Tech News 30 August 2022

• AMD had its Ryzen 7000 launch event today. (Serve the Home)
  
  Top of the line is the 7950X, with 16 cores running at up to 5.7GHz, 80MB total cache, a 170W TDP, and a $699 price tag.
  
  That price tag is actually $100 less than the 5950X at launch, recognising that after a few years of AMD having it their own way, Intel is catching up again. But the 5950X is currently available for around $550, so building a system will be more expensive.
  
  Against that it offers average single-threaded performance increases of 29%, and a multi-threaded increase of 44%. Most of that comes from the clock speed increase - from 4.9GHz to 5.7GHz is a big jump for one generation - and the TDP increase from 105W to 170W.
  
  But if you want to reduce power consumption you can adjust that in your BIOS, and AMD says that performance at 65W is 75% better than the previous generation. That bodes well for upcoming Zen 4 laptop chips as well.
  
  It looks like a good launch if parts are actually available. AMD made the right move in reducing prices of the high-end parts, and I'll be looking forward to the third-party benchmarks.
  
  No discussion of the performance of the integrated graphics on these chips, which I'd expect to be pretty bad. They reportedly have 2 graphics cores where AMDs latest mobile chips have 12, so don't expect too much there.

• Reported for Facecrime: California's new age verification law is a privacy disaster. (TechDirt)
  
  The proposal here is to prove your age whenever you visit any website by recording a video of yourself repeating a random phrase, and using AI analysis to estimate how old your are based on your facial characteristics. Seriously, that's what they're suggesting.
  
  Just block California at the firewall and be done.
  
  
  
• An animated map of the Berlin subway. (Ubahnchen)
  
  Not useful, perhaps, but cool. You can set the speed to 100x and watch all the little trains scurry about.
  
  
  
• Austria decided to block a bunch of servers belonging to Cloudflare. (Bleeping Computer)
  
  Cloudflare delivers some absurd percentage of global web traffic, so the results were as hilarious as they were predictable.
  
  
  
• OpenSea - the world's leading NFT marketplace - has seen its transaction volume drop 99% since May. (Fortune)
  
  Good. I work with NFTs, but with low-cost NFTs that are designed to be of practical use, not with Ugly Monkey JPEGs that trade for the price of a sports car. That nonsense caused real problems with the work I do.

posted by Pixy Misa at 05:00 AM

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