Trails behind older Intel Core i7-12700F and mobile Intel Core i7-13850HX

New alleged benchmarks have surfaced online for the upcoming AMD Zen 5 Strix Point processors. While it might outdo the Ryzen 7 7700X and the Ryzen 7 7800X3D, it is still behind Intel's older gear.

This tech tipster, HXL, chucked a tweet out there saying an early version of the Strix Point CPU got put through its paces on Blender and notched up a score of 270.92. That's enough to outdo some beefy desktop CPUs like the Ryzen 7 7700X and the Ryzen 7 7800X3D.

Only a couple of tests have been done, so it's not a massive amount of data, but if it's legit, it's a cheeky peek at what AMD's new AI chips might be capable of. It's all a bit hush-hush about which Strix Point CPU it was, and since it's an early sample, we don't know the full power it's packing, but it's looking good.

Even with this, the tested Strix Point CPU is still trailing behind the older Intel Core i7-12700F and the mobile Intel Core i7-13850HX. Rumour has it it's a 12-core chip with four big performance cores and eight smaller efficiency cores, which might explain why it's not quite up there with Alder Lake and the other non-hybrid chips.

From what's been leaked before, we've seen Strix Point CPUs with slower clock speeds and beefier NPUs, which is a bit of a leap from the usual desktop gear. The big dog of the pack is meant to be the AMD Ryzen AI 9 HX 170, rocking 12 cores, 24 threads, and a 77 TOPS NPU.

AI computing is a whole different game, isn't it? It's pretty cool to see these Strix Point CPUs holding their ground against the desktop big guns, but they're playing by their own rules. It looks like AMD is thinking more about smart efficiency than brute force.

It's a bit of a switch-up from what we've seen with CPUs lately. Usually, they're all about cranking up the clock speeds and power to keep up. But now, it seems like we're going the other way – less juice, slower clocks, but more of those efficient efficiency cores.

Only two years after it appeared it rides off into the sunset

Intel's decided it's time to start saying goodbye to its Ponte Vecchio HPC GPUs.

According to Toms Hardware Chipzilla is winding them down just a couple of years after they first hit the scene, all because Intel's got its eye on the next big thing – Falcon Shores and the new Gaudi 2 and 3 AI accelerators.

Intel's not yet ditching Ponte Vecchio completely, but they're not pushing them anymore. They'll keep making them, but only for those who already have them. New customers will have to see what  AMD and Nvidia offer.

The HPC and AI game is mega competitive these days, what with the AI craze and  Ponte Vecchio's old news now, especially with AMD's shiny new MI300 and Nvidia's B200 Blackwell on the block.

Ponte Vecchio first popped up in 2022, and it was the biggest GPU Intel's ever made. Packed with over 100 billion transistors across 47 tiles, made on five different process nodes. Depending on how you set it up, a Ponte Vecchio GPU could have up to eight compute tiles and four HBMe2 stacks, all based on Intel's beefy Xe HPC architecture – that's even more hardcore than the standard Xe stuff in their Arc Alchemist GPUs.

Ponte Vecchio hasn't exactly set the world on fire. Take the Aurora Supercomputer – it's not exactly leading the pack, guzzling more juice and delivering less oomph than AMD's Frontier.

The latest Top500 list has Aurora in second place with 1,012 petaflops and using 38,698 kW, while the older Frontier's still ahead with 1,206 petaflops and only 22,786 kW. Sure, Aurora's got its moments with certain tasks, but it was meant to be hitting 2 exaflops – it's only halfway there.

Ponte Vecchio's looking a bit long in the tooth next to AMD's MI300 and Nvidia's B200. And

Falcon Shores was meant to be out in 2024, mixing it up with CPU and GPU cores to take on AMD's MI300 APU and Nvidia's Grace Hopper Superchip. However, Intel  pushed it back to 2025 and scale it down to just a GPU.

Kicking off Ponte Vecchio's retirement before Falcon Shores rocks up means Intel can throw more at getting Falcon Shores out the door quicker. It might help them catch up a bit with AMD and Nvidia, but they're still playing catch-up, since the other two are already cooking up the next gen of HPC hardware.

Analysts warn of long term nose-dive

While the cocaine nose jobs of Wall Street expect Nvidia to clean up making AI chips, there is a growing number of them who are less certain.

DA Davidson analyst Gil Luria warned that Nvidia's shares cannot continue to rise indefinitely, and the semiconductor giant is likely to face challenges as the demand for its GPUs decreases.

Luria told Bloomberg that Nvidia is not expected to experience a significant downturn in the short term. He anticipates that the company's profits for the last quarter will be "fantastic," forecasting revenues exceeding $25 billion.

However, he warns that a long-term decline for the chip manufacturer is unavoidable due to increasing competition in the coming years, including from its own clientele.

"We're not as optimistic as others because we're looking ahead. What will happen next year? What about 2026? There's growing evidence that this trend cannot persist," Luria stated.

"When a company garners such substantial profits from the market, competitors inevitably emerge, and for Nvidia, they are arising from within its customer base."

Turning benign whales into terrorists

New research suggests that Underwater Data Centres (UDCs) might be at risk from acoustic attacks, which could be as simple as broadcasting a high-pitched musical note underwater.

For those not in the know, UDCs utilise the ocean's natural cooling ability, which could significantly reduce the energy usage and emissions compared to traditional data centres.

Vole tested one in 2018, where servers were submerged off the coast of Scotland. This demonstrated the potential of this technology, which has since been adopted by other firms. However, this approach also introduces specific vulnerabilities.

The University of Florida and the University of Electro-Communications in Japan have found that UDCs are vulnerable to a novel form of sonar attack due to the efficient long-range sound propagation in water.

The study showed that targeted acoustic waves can disrupt the servers underwater. Sound travels well through dense water, and attackers could induce malfunctions and crashes by targeting the resonant frequencies of hard drives. Extended exposure could cause irreversible damage to the storage devices.

Professor Sara Rampazzi, the lead researcher from the University of Florida, explained, "A denial-of-service attack could take just a few seconds, depending on the strength of the acoustic signal. However, the longer the sound is emitted, the more damage is inflicted on the computer storage device."

The research team conducted experiments on a computer server rack submerged in water, using a metal enclosure to mimic a UDC, in both a lab tank and a lake. They found that a tone of 5 kilohertz could disrupt computer operations from a distance of over six metres.

Using a commercial speaker to emit this tone at 152 decibels underwater—equivalent to 92 decibels in the air—resulted in compromised hard drives within 2.5 minutes.

However, the calls of blue whales, which can reach 180 decibels, could also theoretically pose a threat.

The team developed a machine learning algorithm capable of detecting patterns of disruption caused by attacks. Further refinement could allow networks to mitigate damage by reallocating resources before a total system failure.

We would never crush creativity

Samsung is having a field day with Apple’s bizarre marketing mistake in which it promised to crush all creativity of users who bought its new iPad.

Apple has since admitted that the advert, which showed Apple putting symbols of arts, music, and crafts into a crushing machine, went down amongst its target audience like a lead balloon and might have been a mistake.
That has not stopped Samsung from pointing out that there was nothing new in the advert, and Jobs’ Mob has been crushing creativity for years.

This week Samsung released a response to the advert untitled "UnCrush," created by BBH USA and directed by Zen Pace.

 In contrast to Apple's destructive message, Samsung depicts a woman navigating debris reminiscent of Apple's ad, using a Galaxy Tab S9 and Galaxy AI to play a broken guitar.

"We would never crush creativity," the caption of Samsung's video reads.

British top spook warns

A top British spook warned that Tsar Putin of all the Russias, is actively motivating and guiding hackers to launch attacks against British and other Western targets.

Speaking to the hushed throngs at her inaugural keynote address as the leader of the UK intelligence agency Anne Keast-Butler expressed her agency's growing alarm over the strengthening ties between Russian intelligence and proxy hacker groups, which have historically thrived in Russia's lenient environment.

"Previously, Russia merely provided the conditions conducive for these groups' operations, but now they are actively fostering and encouraging these non-state cyber actors," she stated at the Cyber UK conference, labelling it a "globally pervasive" menace.

The intelligence chief, who became the first woman to assume this position last year, pointed to ransomware as "the most acute and pervasive cyber threat." In such attacks, cybercriminals, often from Russia, seize control of a company's data and systems, demanding substantial payments for their release.

Keast-Butler affirmed that GCHQ is fully committed to combating ransomware perpetrators, undermining their capacity to target government and business infrastructures, and ensuring those involved are held accountable. She emphasised that cybercriminals would find no refuge.

Recently, the UK's National Crime Agency exposed Dmitry Khoroshev, a Russian national, as the head of the LockBit ransomware group. LockBit's tools have been implicated in over 7,000 attacks from June 2022 to February 2024 across the US, UK, France, Germany, China, and other locations.

The National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC), GCHQ's outward-facing internet security division, released a guide in collaboration with three insurance industry bodies, aiming to dissuade businesses from funding Russian and other hackers by paying ransoms.

While paying ransoms to cybercriminals isn't typically illegal—unless the hackers are recognised as a terrorist group—firms often discreetly pay in cryptocurrency, sometimes through insurance, hoping for a swift resolution to the attacks.

A big upgrade compared to the 5nm Exynos W930

According to a fresh report coming from Korea, Samsung's Galaxy Watch7 could get the new 3nm Exynos W1000 chipset, which could bring a significant boost in both performance and efficiency.

The rumor, spotted by Sammobile.com, citing the original source coming from Korea, gives a bit more details about the new Samsung 3nm W1000 SoC for smartwatches. According to rumors, the Exynos W1000 SoC is built on Samsung's 2nd generation 3nm manufacturing node and should be a big improvement compared to the Exynos W930 used in the Galaxy Watch 6.

In case you missed it, the Exynos W930 is a 5nm dual-core SoC with two Cortex-A55 1.4GHz cores, Mali-G68 GPU, and is paired up with 2GB of RAM. The new Exynos W1000 should also have an upper hand when compared to the Apple 5nm S9 SoC.

Other reports also suggest that Samsung will unveil three models for the Galaxy Watch7 series. The event is rumored to be set for July 10th, and focus heavily on the 2024 Summer Olympics which will be held later that month in Paris, with Samsung as one of the biggest sponsors of the games. The event will bring the Galaxy Ring, Galaxy Z Fold and Flip 6, Galaxy Watch 7, and probably new earbuds.

Samsung has yet to send out invites for this event, but we get a feeling we could see it pretty soon.

Hoomans only

NetBSD contributors are prohibited from incorporating any AI-generated code from ChatGPT, CoPilot, or other similar AI tools.

The revised commit guidelines for NetBSD are of utmost importance. They emphasise that coders should only commit code they authored and ensure that the code's license allows for import into the NetBSD source repository and its free distribution.

“Confirm with the code's author(s) that they are the code's sole creators and have not replicated any other code. Code produced by a large language model or comparable technologies, such as GitHub/Microsoft's Copilot, OpenAI's ChatGPT, or Facebook/Meta's Code Llama, is considered suspect and must not be committed without express prior written consent from the core team."

The impact of this decision on both their user base and the core team remains to be seen, but it is a move against the tide of companies who increasingly want to speed up their development projects by using AI-generated code.

A larger battery, standard M.2 slot, and fixed microSD slot  

The Asus ROG Ally X handheld console is set to be unveiled on June 2, and the fresh report from a well-known Asus leaker suggests that Asus is also squeezing a bit more RAM in the new ROG Ally X, equipping it with 24GB.

While it will be based on the same AMD Ryzen Z1 Extreme SoC, the new ROG Ally X handheld console will fix the microSD card slot, have a 40 percent larger battery, which should give it a battery life of up to 8 hours, and comes with standard M.2 2280 SSD slot with 1TB SSD, giving users a bit more choice when upgrading storage.

The newest rumor, coming from MysteryLupin over at Twitter, who is a well-known Asus leaker, suggests that Asus is also equipping the ROG Ally X with 24GB of RAM, up from 16GB on the original one. This could give it a decent boost in performance, at least in some games.

24 GB of RAM (LPDDR5X), up to 8h of battery life. https://t.co/GCuBVoGTTm

— Arsène Lupin (@MysteryLupin) May 15, 2024

Some previous rumors also said that Asus is apparently planning a $100 increase in price compared to the standard ROG Ally, putting the ROG Ally X at a $799 starting price, and making it quite a deal. As said, Asus is holding a special announcement event on June 2nd, where we will get all the details and confirmations for these rumors.

Asus Vietnam jumps the gun

Asus Vietnam has leaked its own version of the laptop that will be based on Qualcomm's upcoming Snapdragon X Elite SoC. Asus decided to go with the Vivobook S 15 OLED design, which puts it in a bit of a premium segment with an OLED screen.

As spotted by Roland Quandt over at Twitter, Asus' first Snapdragon X Elite laptop will be called the Vivobook S 15 OLED Snapdragon X1E. It is equipped with Qualcomm's Snapdragon X Elite X1E-78-100 SoC with 12 Oryon cores with peak clock speed of 3.4GHz, 42MB of cache, and 75 TOPs of AI performance. Of course, it comes with the Adreno GPU but so far, Qualcomm keeps the details about the GPU well hidden.

The Snapdragon X1E SoC is paired with 32GB of LPDDR5X memory, a 1TB PCIe 4.0 NVMe SSD, a 70WHr battery, and the usual connectivity options. What makes it special is the beautiful 15.6-inch 2,880x1,620 resolution OLED screen with 600 nits of peak brightness. Unfortunately, the screen is a glossy type, but it should not be that bad.

According to Roland Quandt, the price could start as high as €1,500, which definitely puts it in the high-end to premium segment. Asus Vietnam pulled the site but the screenshot still remains.

Here's ASUS' first Snapdragon X Elite laptop, that was listed on their vietnamese store for some time. pic.twitter.com/3mCKn0nVto

— Roland Quandt (@rquandt) May 16, 2024