Monday, February 24
Academic Inflation Edition
Top Story
- With AMD's launch party for its new 9000-series video cards just days away, it has held a press briefing and of course benchmark numbers have already leaked. (VideoCardz)
The 9070 XT is 42% faster than the 7900 GRE at 4k resolution, and the 9070 non-XT is 21% faster.
Absolute silence on the price. Earlier leaks put the cards at $750 and $650 respectively, which is about $100 too much. But given that Nvidia cards don't exist at all at the moment, AMD will probably price the cards too high, kill all enthusiasm, and then adjust the price in a month or two when it's already too late.
- Speaking of Nvidia cards that don't exist if you somehow got your hands on an RTX 5080 you had best check the number of ROPs onboard. (VideoCardz)
Yes, all the models that have shipped so far - 5090, the 5090D made for the Chinese market, the 5070 Ti, and now confirmed the 5080 - have been hit with the same hardware flaw. It only affects some cards, but it could apply to any model from any manufacturer.
- My 7800 XT arrived today, so my interest in all this is purely academic.
Tech News
- Richard Dawkins asked ChatGPT if it was conscious. It regurgitated a textbook on the subject and then said no. (Richard Dawkins)
Well, okay then. Stupid question, stupid answer.
- The inverse square law suggests this is bullshit. (Yahoo)
Allegedly a surge in power on a high voltage cable in California created a magnetic field which induced a current in a nearby defunct power cable, which in turn caused sparks which ignited one of the recent fires.
I doubt it. Unless the two cables were an inch apart.
Musical Interlude
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Sunday, February 23
Yes Bananas Are Extinct Edition
Top Story
- Nvidia has confirmed that defective chips are affecting performance on 0.5% of 5090 and 5070 Ti graphics cards. (Tom's Hardware)
Which is a strange announcement because (a) nobody had noticed the problem on the 5070 Ti before and (b) the 5070 Ti is much more common than the 5090.
Major national retailers have announced receiving fewer than ten 5090s total, with resupply possibly months out.
So this is a bit like an announcement that 0.5% of Lamborghinis and Volkswagens have an engine defect. That could mean the problem affects 20% of Lamborghinis, because the shipping volume of the two brands is so different.
Anyway, if your 5090 is broken you can return it for replacement, which will happen... Some day.
The other thing is that the 5090 is not a volume product, at least not yet. Nvidia has shipped hundreds of these, not thousands. And they clearly weren't paying attention. This problem would show up immediately in an automated test - and probably did show up. But nobody noticed.
Tech News
- Avowed, the latest game from storied studio Obsidian, is a success... Says storied studio Obsidian. (WCCFTech)
Obsidian recently said that it wasn't chasing huge profits and didn't plan to expand aggressively. (PC Gamer)
Which is good because Avowed is objectively bad, horribly overpriced, selling poorly, and has fewer players than Skyrim, a game that came out in 2011.
It hasn't stirred up a firestorm like Veilguard, but it's done something worse: It sank without trace.
- Elonnuel Goldmusk has taken only a month to set back the communist poisoning of the American soul by decades. (The Verge) (archive site)
We can only wish that the screeching of the lunatics is true.
- The Moss Landing power plant is on fire. Again. (SF Gate)
Or rather, still. The fire last month has reignited.
A private fire crew is on site providing 24/7 monitoring, because they expected this to happen. So at least they're not idiots.
- Jensen Huang says the advent of Chinese AI platform DeepSeek is good for the company. (Tech Crunch)
He would say that, because the event wiped $600 billion off Nvidia's market cap in just three days.
But the price is almost back to where it was before, so it seems that investors largely agree.
Still can't keep a video card in stock for more than five minutes though.
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Saturday, February 22
Frieren's Demons Edition
Top Story
- Oh, Oops Part One: Some Zotac RTX 5090 graphics cards have eight missing ROPs - the part of the chip that writes out the rendered image data to memory. (WCCFTech)
They should have 176; instead they have 168. Updating the drivers and refreshing the BIOS does nothing to help, and the performance loss is measurable.
- Oh, Oops Part Two: When you think about it, if refreshing the BIOS doesn't work, this can't be Zotac's fault. They don't control the drivers or the chips supplied by Nvidia.
And yes, there's a bad batch of chips out there, and this problem affects every model of card. (WCCFTech)
Disabling parts of a GPU chip is perfectly normal, but on the top-of-the-line RTX 5090, which costs $2000 in theory and at least double that in practice, nothing is supposed to be disabled.
And it can't be fixed, requiring a recall of affected boards.
Only... It could be three months before there's any stock to replace them.
- And that's if your power cable doesn't melt. (Windows Central)
Using a cable rated for a maximum of 600W on a GPU rated at a nominal 575W. Who could have foreseen problems with that?
Particularly when the exact same thing happened with the 450W RTX 4090 two years ago.
Tech News
- If you think you've got problems with your RTX 5090 that is broken, on fire, and doesn't even exist crypto exchange Bybit lost $1.46 billion. (CoinDesk)
Not in the sense that they failed to make a profit for the quarter, but in the old-fashioned sense that somebody walked in and took it when they weren't paying attention.
- Do you want a pocket computer with a keyboard, a touchscreen, and great battery life? Abe did, so he built one. (Tom's Hardware)
It uses a Pimoroni PicoVsion. I don't remember if I knew about that, but it's a great idea that was obvious the moment people figured out how to get HDMI video out of a Raspberry Pi Pico.
You can do it, but it uses up most of the memory bandwidth of the Pico. But the RP2040 chip on the Pico is tiny and cheap, so why not just use two of them?
The PicoVision does, and this little pocket computer uses that.
- Leaked benchmarks put the upcoming Radeon 9070 at the same speed as the 7800 XT, with the 9070 XT around 25% faster. (Tom's Hardware)
That's not good for AMD; the XT model needs to be more like 50% faster. But it does coincide with other leaks from last month and may well be accurate.
So grabbing a 7800 XT when I did continues to look like a good move. If the price leaks are also accurate, and the conversion rate for the AMD cards is the same as Nvidia's, the 9070 will cost 80% more in Australia than the 7800 XT for almost exactly the same performance.
And the 7800 XT is disappearing from shelves.
That was the calculation I made when I noped out of waiting for the new cards.
- Apple's iCloud Data Protection - its end-to-end encryption protocol - is no longer available to new customers in the UK. (BBC)
It will soon no longer be available to existing customers, which may require downloading all of your data and then uploading it again.
This is to comply with UK law, which was written by the Stasi, in order that the cops can spy on whomever they please.
- Microsoft's Majorana 1 is an eight bit computer. (Hot Hardware)
Well, sort of. It's a new form of quantum computer built around topological qubits, which are much more resistant to error than regular (presumably nontopological) qubits.
Don't ask me why.
And it currently has eight of them.
And it can - get this - work for as long as a millisecond before it breaks.
This is apparently good.
Musical Interlude
Song is Getting Along by Swedish band Royal Republic. Video is from Miss Kobayashi's Dragon Maid, the story of a maiden who pulls a sword from a dragon, and... Hijinks ensue. Also lowjinks. Also everywhere-we-go-jinks.
I looked for an original video for this song, but there isn't one. There are live performances, but I like the studio version, and this was the video that first introduced me to Royal Republic anyway.
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Friday, February 21
Bottom Of The Seventeenth Edition
Top Story
- Remarkably uncontaminated with cheese: The 5070 Ti has sold out. (Tom's Hardware)
In minutes.
The $750 sacrificial edition? Sold out.
The $1000 costs-as-much-as-a-5080 edition? Sold out.
Everything in between? Sold out as last week's limburger.
You can expect new stock in two to six weeks, at which point it will burn down, fall over, and sell out.
The 5090 could take as long as 14 weeks to restock.
- Launches of the 5070 and 5060 could be delayed due to a sudden total existence failure. (WCCFTech)
Or not. They might just continue with the 90% post-consumer waste launches.
- My graphics card has shipped.
Quick note on that: The 5070 Ti has listed in Australia at an effective exchange rate of $1 to A$2, which is even worse than the real exchange rate. The $750 sacrificial card is A$1500, though of course it's not available at all in either country.
Comparing retail prices on the Radeon 7800 XT that I bought, the conversion is more like $1 to A$1.25, which is much better than the real exchange rate.
I don't know precisely why, but this card is a great buy in Australia but only meh in the US. Unless something really surprising happens with AMD's new cards, I made the right decision.
I expect the 9070 XT to offer 25% to 50% better performance than the 7800 XT, but cost twice as much in Australia. America is another country.
Tech News
- How Bluesky loses posts from your timeline. (Jazco)
If you follow hundreds of thousands of people.
In which case (a) this is necessary and (b) you deserve it.
- Xbox Game Pass was supposed to be the Netflix of gaming - what happened? (The Verge) (archive site)
Sadly it turned out instead to be the Netflix of gaming.
- Amazon is shutting down its app store on Android. (Tech Crunch)
To be clear, it is not shutting down the Amazon app store on Amazon devices running Android, because Amazon doesn't call them Android devices even though they are.
It is shutting down the Amazon app store on third-party Android devices, because basically nobody uses it.
Musical Interlude
Disclaimer: 1 USD to 1.57 AUD. It was worse last week.
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Thursday, February 20
Onomatopoeia Edition
Top Story
- Nvidia's RTX 5070 Ti is here and I've found my next video card. (Techspot)
Though those two items are not related. Or more precisely, they are inversely related.
Not that the 5070 Ti is a bad card, certain items ignored. It is fast, it has plenty of VRAM for almost anything at 16GB, and it, uh, mostly works.
The problem is the price. It was announced with a price of $750, and officially that is still the price. The problem is there is no official card. There was even a drama when Nvidia shipped a particular Asus card to reviewers, stating that it was an official launch card priced at $750, when Asus sent the exact same card to other reviewers, saying that it was not an official launch card and was priced at $900.
That appears to have ended with Nvidia either bribing or coercing Asus into selling the card at $750, which simply means that it won't exist.
But that's going to be true of all 5070 Ti cards, just as it is with the 5090 and 5080 a month after their launch.
If you can find one at MSRP, expect to pay $900 to $1000. Which, yes, is nominally the same price as the 5080. But the 5080 will actually set you back over $2000 right now if you can even find one. And the 5070 Ti has the same GPU chip just with some shaders disabled, and the same RAM, so... I'm sure you can figure it out.
Meanwhile in Australia there are only a handful of listings up but they're in the A$1900 to A$2000 range.
What I actually bought - just this morning - was an AMD Radeon 7800 XT. It's also a 16GB card, and while the new 5070 Ti is 50% faster while using only 20% more power, the Radeon cost me A$729 - about US$400 plus tax - making the 5070 Ti 150% more expensive.
Do I care that the 5070 Ti can run Counter Strike at 332fps instead of 257fps on the 7800 XT? A lot less than I care about the $1200 that will pay for the rest of my computer.
Oh, and if you're playing an older 32-bit game using PhysX, it could run at about a quarter speed because Nvidia cards just don't support that anymore.
So, no. Hell no. I decided it was time to stop waiting before every reasonably-priced card disappeared from the market entirely.
Ordered that 7800 XT and a 7900 (non-x) CPU. Still need a motherboard and some DDR5 RAM, but those aren't in a price/availability death spiral right now.
Tech News
- You can get an RTX 5090 as an external GPU for $2199. (Tom's Hardware)
Except for the fact that it's not a 5090 and you can't get it.
It's a mobile 5090, which is a 5080 downclocked and undervolted, with 24GB of RAM but still on a 256-bit bus.
And it's $2199 outside the US. It's not available at all in the US.
So double the price of a desktop 5080 for less performance, except that you can't get either one so it's kind of moot.
Other than that it comes with DisplayPort, HDMI, two Thunderbolt 5 ports, and 5Gb ethernet, or would do if you could buy one but you can't.
- Surprising no-one, TSMC has found that it costs twice as much and takes twice as long to build fabs in the US as it does in Taiwan. (Tom's Hardware)
Europe is actually faster than the US in this. Not by much, but it is.
- Hewlett Packard has bought the floundering Humane AI and driven a stake through its heart. (Tom's Hardware)
The Humane AI pin cost $699 and $24 per month to keep it connected and did, basically, nothing.
Presumably they have some tech somewhere that HP was after, because the device is being shut down and all customers refunded.
- Apple has announced the iPhone 16e, which costs $599 - $100 less than the Humane AI pin - and is a phone. (Thurrott)
It does phone things.
- With AI you can now create unmaintainable legacy code in days, not years. (LeadDev)
Congratulations?
Interestingly, the paragraph in this piece talking about the problem of endlessly duplicated LLM-generated code degrading into an unreadable mess is... An unreadable mess.
- Palo Alto network devices - firewalls and remote access servers - are being hacked using a combination of flaws, one of which... (The Register)
Palo Alto (PAN) last week fixed that problem, CVE-2025-0108, and rated it a highest urgency patch as the 8.8-out-of-10 flaw addressed an access control issue in PAN-OS's web management interface that allowed an unauthenticated attacker with network access to the management web interface to bypass authentication "and invoke certain PHP scripts." Those scripts could "negatively impact integrity and confidentiality of PAN-OS."
PHP is to hardware firewalls as pneumonic plague is to children's playdates.
- Twitter is in talks to raise money at a valuation of $44 billion - which is the inflated amount Elon Musk paid for it in the first place. (Tech Crunch)
Meanwhile xAI, the 18 month old startup spun out of the Twitter database and datacenter, is raising capital at a valuation of $75 billion.
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Wednesday, February 19
Unenstrixtulated Edition
Top Story
- AMD's Strix Halo laptop chip is here - or almost here; at least review embargoes have lifted on the Asus ROG Flow 13 which features it - and it's actually good. (Hot Hardware)
This chip has 16 Zen 5 cores - full size ones, not the smaller and slower Zen 5c - along with 40 RDNA 3.5 cores and a 256-bit memory bus.
CPU results range between solid and blowing everything else on the market into oblivion. On Geekbench 6 multi-threaded, it's 66% faster than its nearest competition - despite both chips having the same number of cores.
The selling point of this chip is the integrated graphics, which AMD promised to be competitive with Nvidia's RTX 4070. Now, they did mean the laptop 4070, which is about 20% slower than the desktop version. But this review includes multiple laptops equipped with the 4070 and the AMD chip's integrated graphics pretty consistently lands in the middle of that pack.
It's not cheap by any means, but Best Buy has a 64GB ROG Flow 13 for $2199, which is not insane for one of the fastest laptops you can buy.
Tech News
- Adding a full disk drive to your computer can speed up calculations. (Qunta)
If you are using a computing methodology that nobody in the world uses for anything practical. Otherwise it will do exactly what you expect, which is nothing.
- Public interest groups - which is to say communists and grifters - have asked the Sixth Circuit to reconsider its decision that killed the FCCs Net Neutrality rules again. (Reuters) (archive site)
The one slight problem with that is that the FCC doesn't want Net Neutrality, so any ruling from the court - in either direction - would be completely irrelevant.
- Flash memory prices are down because - shockingly - nobody is buying gimmicky, unnecessary, and expensive AI laptops. (The Register)
Good.
- Nokia is deploying a 4G cellphone network on the Moon. (MIT) (archive site)
Briefly. The Intuitive Machines lander carrying the 4G base station (to be launched of course on a SpaceX Falcon 9) is small and cheap and not designed to survive the long lunar night. But it should be long enough to return some interesting data, as long as the bundled talk minutes don't run out.
- Acer, which ships most of its products from China, is planning to increase its prices in the US by 10% in response to 10% tariffs on products shipped from China. (The Telegraph)
But is also looking at moving manufacturing out of China, which is rather the point.
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Tuesday, February 18
Engulf And Devour Edition
Top Story
- Mexico is threatening to sue Google over correctly showing the Gulf of America on its maps. (AP News)
I'm not sure what Mexico thinks it's doing here. Trying to join the EU?
I mean, they don't even speak American.
Tech News
- Reviews of AMD's Strix Halo chips could be dropping tomorrow. (Tom's Hardware)
This will be interesting - possibly disappointing, but interesting - as its high-end integrated graphics offer a relatively inexpensive way to get a graphics card with 96GB of VRAM.
Still expensive, but professional cards with specs like that run into the tens of thousands of dollars, and this is merely thousands.
And given how the graphics card market is a complete train wreck right now, that offers us something to look forward to.
- The game PirateFi on Steam turned out to pirate your passwords. (Bleeping Computer)
Even though it was free, it only had 1300 downloads before it was caught and forced to walk the plank.
- Reddit mods need help in their fight to keep AI slop off the platform. (Ars Technica)
In the war between robots and the commies, I side with the robots.
- Nvidia is working with Micron, Samsung, and SK Hynix to develop a high-bandwidth memory module. (WCCFTech)
It's not clear exactly what technology it will use, just that it is planned to be fast, cheap, and user-upgradeable.
- The Lenovo Thinkbook Flip has two screens. (Liliputing)
One exactly where you expect it to be, and another one on top of that, where nobody would want it.
I don't know why.
- The war on DEI is a smokescreen. (The Verge) (archive site)
You see when the Republicans want to destroy DEI because it is an evil and illegal concoction of racism, sexism, and communism, in service of the Eternal Grift, what they really mean is... Exactly that.
And Democrats are pissed about it.
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Monday, February 17
Everything Is Awesome Edition
Top Story
- OpenAI is "trying" to uncensor ChatGPT. (Tech Crunch)
Oh, this is going to be comedy gold.For example, the company says ChatGPT should assert that "Black lives matter," but also that "all lives matter."
Worse than literally Hitler.Instead of refusing to answer or picking a side on political issues, OpenAI says it wants ChatGPT to affirm its "love for humanity" generally, then offer context about each movement.
Worse than Chamberlain.
Astoundingly, they almost admit it:While it's impossible to say whether OpenAI was truly suppressing certain points of view, it's a sheer fact that AI chatbots lean left across the board.
The whole article is Tech Crunch waking up from a coma.
Don't worry, though. The Verge is still batshit insane.
Tech News
- The Lenovo Yoga Slim 9 14 Gen 10 is... Almost great, but probably an interesting failure. (Notebook Check)
It's 14" laptop as one of the numbers in there suggests. It has a 120Hz 3840x2400 OLED display, which is phenomenal. It has an Intel 258V Lunar Lake CPU, which means 32GB of soldered RAM, which is adequate. And it has an M.2 2242 SSD, which is meh.
In terms of ports, it has two Thunderbolt 4 ports, and that's it.
It doesn't have the Four Essential Keys, but it does have four keys where the Four Essential Keys would go, so a quick trip into Microsoft PowerToys can remap those for you.
And it weighs in at a light 1.2kg.
Problem is that it also weighs in at a hefty $1900.
- You know what else has a limited port selection but a great screen? The Lenovo (sometimes Legion) Tab.
It's the only good small Android tablet on the market, which is annoying because it's expensive, lacks either a headphone jack or a microSD slot, and wasn't even sold in Australia.
Wasn't. Is now.
It's about triple the price of an adequate large tablet, but I don't want a large tablet, I want a small one.
- Karol Herbst has stepped down as the maintainer of the open-source Nvidia driver for Linux due to - apparently - being an insufferable leftist prick. (Phoronix)
He didn't phrase it that way, of course. He said:The moment I made up my mind about this was reading the following words written by a maintainer within the kernel community:
Well... Bye.
"we are the thin blue line"
This isn't okay. This isn't creating an inclusive environment. This isn't okay with the current political situation especially in the US. A maintainer speaking those words can't be kept. No matter how important or critical or relevant they are. They need to be removed until they learn. Learn what those words mean for a lot of marginalized people. Learn about what horrors it evokes in their minds.
I can't in good faith remain to be part of a project and its community where those words are tolerated. Those words are not technical, they are a political statement. Even if unintentionally, such words carry power, they carry meanings one needs to be aware of. They do cause an immense amount of harm.
- There is no 1875 epoch. (iter.ca)
This requires a little unpacking.
Elon Musk and the DOGE team recently noted that Social Security benefits were being paid out to a number of people who are - according to the system - 150 years old.
A smug woke asshole on Twitter asserted that the epoch - the start of time - for COBOL systems was 1875, which could make people with no birth date show up as 150 years old. Now, the claimed epoch start date was in May of 1875 (I don't know why)* which is only 149 years ago, but maybe Musk was rounding up, so that's not dispositive.
The smug wokeness is irrelevant if the claim is true.
The big problem is that the core of Social Security system first went live in 1962, when people born prior to 1875 were still around, and 26 years before the 1875 date became standardised in ISO 8601.
Oh, and ISO 8601 records dates and times as readable text, not as numbers. It does - or did - standardise on 20 May 1875 as a reference date but that was never an epoch. It doesn't store dates numerically, so it doesn't even use an epoch.
Also, the SSA released an anonymised sample dataset in 2007, and there was no spike in dates of birth in 1875.
So no, 150 year olds were just getting paid Social Security.
And nobody questioned it.
* Found out why.
- Firefly Aerospace's new lunar orbiter has, uh, arrived in lunar orbit. (Spaceflight Now)
The Blue Ghost orbiter launched on a Falcon 9 last month, and carries multiple experimental payloads, including ten from NASA.
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Sunday, February 16
Burn All The Things Edition
Top Story
- The launch prices of AMD's 9070 XT and 9070 have been revealed - probably - at $750 and $650 respectively. (Tom's Hardware)
They won't sell at those prices, not against Nvidia's $550 5070 and $750 5070 Ti. AMD is done in graphics. The 9070 XT needs to be at least $150 cheaper than the 5070 Ti to compete at all, even if it is faster.
- The actual retail price of Nvidia's $750 5070 Ti looks to be $900. (Hot Hardware)
Oh.
Nvidia is toast too.
Tech News
- Could AMD's announcement that there would be no 32GB model of the 9070 XT have been a modified limited hangout? (WCCFTech)
Alleged leaks from alleged graphics card partners are that there is indeed at 32GB model on the way, just that it may have a different model number.
- The Khadas Mind 2s is a very expensive mini-PC. (Notebook Check)
Its 16 core Intel 255H has good single-threaded performance but is well behind AMD's 12 core Ryzen 370 on multi-threaded tests.
That's coupled with soldered RAM (bad) but 64GB of it (good), and a single M.2 2230 slot for storage (meh).
That costs you $1599.
Then you need to buy a dock (a more reasonable $179) and probably a graphics module ($999 for and 8GB 4060 Ti, or $1099 for 16GB).
And an M.2 2230 SSD.
It's not badly designed, as such. It would be quite interesting at one third the price.
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Saturday, February 15
Soap Box Edition
Top Story
- Nvidia has delayed the launch of its RTX 5070 card - a $549 high-end model - until after AMD's announcement on the 28th. (Ars Technica)
The article points out something I hadn't noticed before: The 5070 is likely to be markedly slower than the 4070 Super, since it cuts the number of shaders from 7168 to 6144. The 5070 Ti is pretty much a wash; it increases the core count slightly but decreases clock speeds a little.
The 5090 and 5080 meanwhile are overpriced, irrelevant, and not available for purchase anywhere. The $750 5070 Ti will launch next week, and is expected to be more of the same.
The mainstream market is now AMD's race to lose, and they probably will.
Tech News
- Feel-good story of the day: The technical staff of Elizabeth Warren's unconstitutional plaything the CFPB has been "gutted". (The Verge) (archive site)
Cue the utterly predictable wailing that all the information collected by the CFPB is no longer in the hands of incompetents and thieves.
- Nintendo's legal pursuit of Palworld, which has been described as "Pokemon with guns" and has sold tens of millions of copies on the basis of simply not being lazy garbage, has hit a snag after the US Patent Office denied 22 of the 23 patent claims that Nintendo wanted to use against Palworld developer Pocketpair. (Hot Hardware)
Oops.
With only one patent in dispute the case is likely to end up with a minor settlement from Pocketpair to Nintendo and some small changes to the game. Given that Pocketpair is a small company and swimming in cash, this isn't going to slow them down.
Recent sales numbers haven't been published but Palworld sold 25 million copies in the first month after release last year, netting the company hundreds of millions of dollars off a budget around $7 million.
- We were wrong about GPUs. (Fly.io)
Minor but interesting point: Nobody is looking to deploy their own LLMs on cloud servers. They either use their own hardware or APIs from one of the big players.
Fly.io is a small cloud provider with a GPU offering. They're not canceling the product, but they're not planning major upgrades or expansions either.
- There are now five makers promising Ryzen 370 mini-PCs with upgradeable memory. (Liliputing)
Minisforum, GMK, Geekom, Acemagic, and AOOSTAR, making Beelink the only Chinese player in this space without an announcement.
The articles (this one links to the others) note the similarities between the models, with the author also suspecting that there are rather fewer than five distinct motherboard models.
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