WeDoTech
Apple Announcement
Apple’s spring unveiling event had a few decent announcements and releases. The iPhone SE has been upgraded to use the A15 Bionic chip, the same one the iPhone 13 uses as well as 5G. Pricing starts at $429 up from $399 and pre-orders start on the 18th of March. The iPad Air also got a brand new version, this is the first revision since 2020 and features the M1 chip from Apple, sales start at $599 and pre-orders start on the 11th of March. One of my favorites is the Mac Studio, which boasts the M1 Ultra chip, which is essentially 2 M1 dies that interconnects with each other, giving you double the core count and up to 128GB of memory. The Mac Studio has six Thunderbolt 4 ports that can display up to four Pro XDR monitors. The entry-level one will cost you $1,999 or $3,999 for the version with Apple’s new M1 Ultra chip. You can already order it and its shipping starts on March 18. Then lastly was the 27-inch 5K Retina Studio Display. It comes with a 12MP Ultra Wide camera with Center Stage, 3 USB C port and 1x Thunderbolt 3 port. Six speakers and starts at $1599 It does come with a stand but if you want height adjustment then it’s an extra $300 plus an additional $300 for the Nano-texture glass.
M1 Ultra Benchmarks
Now talking about this new M1 Ultra chip from Apple, we were kind of hoping for the M2 chip but we will take the M1 Ultra. We at least have some benchmarks on it. And by these, it seems like this is a serious contender in the CPU market. On the Geekbench 5 benchmark, it scored 24055 on multithreaded performance, now to put that into perspective the i9 12900K scored 17204. That’s almost a 40% increase. single-core performance it lacks behind a bit scoring 1793 versus the i9’s 1997. This means the M1 Ultra is only 4% behind a Threadripper 3990X!
https://www.tomshardware.com/news/apple-m1-ultra-mac-studio
https://www.tomshardware.com/news/apple-m1-ultra-nearly-matches-amd-threadripper-3990x
Intel GPUs “Release Date”
A while ago Intel announced that they are pushing the launch of their GPUs to Q2 this year and we now might have a bit more accurate date. The Arc high-end desktop SKUs are rumored to launch between the 8th of May and June 5. Igors Lab stated “Several different sources have told me of another Intel card postponement, at least as far as SKU 1 to 3, the three performance models, are concerned. There are currently consistent rumors that the first models will be released between May 2 and June 1ste.
Twitter on TOR
Twitter is launching a Tor-service for more secure and private tweeting. Alec Muffet announced on Twitter that it’s possibly the most important and long-awaited tweet he has ever done. Now you could always use Twitter on a Tor-based browser but the new version will add more layers for protection and security. In Muffet’s Tweet, he also said “Setting up an onion address is a practical step which demonstrates that the platform is providing explicitly for the needs of people who use Tor.”
https://www.theverge.com/2022/3/8/22967843/twitter-tor-onion-service-version-launch
RTX 3060 Laptop To Desktop GPUs
So a Chinese OEM has found a way to convert laptop 3060s to desktop 3060s and sell them in bulk to miners. The laptop version of the GPU was never really thought to be used for mining so the LHR limiter was never implemented on them, therefore they actually mine better than a desktop 3060. These 6GB 3060s have a hash-rate of 50 MH/s. The OEM also placed NVIDIA logos onto the new cards, with a unique backplate, they have only one HDMI output and a dual-fan. Now it’s unknown if NVIDIA actually approved this redesign or not, but there have been prices of up to $570 per card on some Chinese websites.
RTX 4000 leaks
So we might see a mid-tier card from NVIDIA that’s going to offer a 30% performance boost over the 3090! The rumors suggest that the RTX4090 and 4080 will feature GDDR7 memory that runs at 32Gbps, versus the 21Gbps of GDDR6X. But the true hero will be the AD103 SKU which will power the 4070 and 4060Ti. And according to sources the RTX 4070 should offer another 10-30% performance over the RTX 3090, and offer “2-3 tiers better” ray-tracing performance than the best Ampere GPU.
Nvidia Selling Both RTX 30 & 40
Yet more news from NVIDIA is that we might see the current 30 series and coming 40 series GPUs co-exist. During an Investors meeting on Monday Nvidia CFO hinted at the possibility of both current and next-gen cards being produced and sold alongside each other. She stated “Even during this period of COVID and supply constraints, it’s been interesting because it’s given us the opportunity for gaming to continue to sell both the current generation as well as the Turing generation,” “So we’ve been doing that to provide more and more supply to our gamers in that. And we may see something like that continue in the future.” Hopefully, that will push cards prices down a bit and give some people hope to own a decent GPU.
https://www.techspot.com/news/93685-nvidia-hints-rtx-3000-series-rtx-4000-cards.html
Google Spending Some Money
Google’s second-biggest acquisition of $5.4 Billion is underway. The acquisition is for the Cyber Security company called Mandiant, Inc. Now the acquisition is still subject to regulatory approval, but Google says they expect it to go through by the end of this year. Now, Mandiant was key in investigating many of the world’s biggest security incidents, like the SolarWinds supply-chain attack, the Log4j vulnerability, and the Pulse Secure VPN vulnerabilities. So no doubt that Google is investing a lot in cyber security right now. They are probably scared of Lupsos or something.
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