Daily Tech News 25 September 2022

• Intel's 13900K has a PassMark score. (WCCFTech)
  
  PassMark - the benchmark used on CPUBenchmark.net - isn't a perfect benchmark, since there's no perfect benchmark except running your own application on the target hardware. But I've found it to map very closely to the stuff I run, so it's the one I pay attention to.
  
  Score is 4833 single-threaded and 54,433 multi-threaded. That's around the same multi-threaded score as the 24 core Threadripper 3960X, which uses 280W.
  
  On the other hand, the 3960X came out nearly three years ago, the 13900K uses up to 350W itself if you take off the limits, and the 13900K is also a 24 core CPU.
  
  On the third hand, the 13900K is 80% faster on single-threaded tasks on its Performance cores; it's the Efficiency cores that drag the overall score down.
  
  Still, if the difference between the cores doesn't matter to you, you're getting a workstation-class CPU from a couple of years ago in a standard desktop.

• Meanwhile the 7950X has been pushed to 6.5GHz on all cores. (WCCFTech)
  
  On liquid nitrogen, yes, so this is probably not something you'll be doing yourself. And it set some benchmark records, but again, not something you'll see direct benefits from.
  
  What is interesting though is that it only used 270W to do it - something that high-end Intel desktop chips can do without overclocking at all.
  
  I mean, that's still a lot, but it suggests that a good water cooler should be able to support a respectable all-core overclock on this beastie.
  
  
  
• Get3D generates 3D models from images. (GitHub)
  
  It's another of the recent wave of AI-based image generation tools, though it takes a slightly different tack, analysing sets of images and trying to build a consistent 3D model from them. The 2D tools - like Midjourney, which I've been playing with - don't actually have that kind of model of the shape of things, and will simply forget that a person's arms should be roughly the same length, for example, and end with hands.
  
  Since Midjourney (and similar tools) can take an image as reference, you could run the training data through Get3D, generate meshes, render them out into a scene, and then play that scene into the 2D generator to get a final product with consistent geometry, in that people don't suddenly have two heads.
  
  
  
• The new wave of JavaScript web frameworks and why they should all burn. (Front End Mastery)
  
  "Inspired by PHP" is a label very much akin to "LD 50 1ng/kg".
  
  
  
• Nobody wants plant-based meat. (The Guardian)
  
  A vegan friend mentioned that she tried these products a couple of times and couldn't stand the taste. If you you're not vegan or vegetarian, traditionally plant-based meat - the kind where you have a cow eat the grass for you - is just as healthy and a lot cheaper.
  
  
  
• NASA's test launch for the Artemis Moon rocket has been scrubbed for the third time in a row. (CNN)
  
  Unexpectedly.
  
  
  
• People can't even be bothered to steal Amazon's Rings of Power series. (TorrentFreak)
  
  I might check it out at some point. They actually did a pretty good job on Good Omens, and I have a Prime subscription for the free delivery (a big deal now that I'm 300 miles by road from the nearest warehouse).
  
  
  
• Meanwhile I'm watching Kumo Desu Ga, Nani Ka? a.k.a So I'm a Spider, So What?
  
  It's the usual power-trip wish-fulfilment story of a teenage shut-in transported to a world that works like a computer game where they get untold power, except that first, the main character is a girl - common in early "isekai" stories, less so now - and second, in the fantasy world, she's a spider.
  
  It works because being a spider, even a magical spider in a magical world, is pretty awful, and because she survives through intelligence and determination, not through luck or being handed the world on a plate.
  
  I hesitated to watch this one because I'd already read a thousand pages of the manga and I knew the anime took a different approach to the story. But not to worry, while the approach is different, the story itself is intact.
  
  Some things that take a long time to surface in the manga are apparent right away in the anime, but that turns out not to spoil things because even then you still don't know everything that's going on. My guess based on those thousand pages turned out to be dead wrong.

posted by Pixy Misa at 04:00 AM

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