00:00SPEAKER- So I've been testing a different CPU
00:03SPEAKERfor an upcoming PC world thing.
00:05SPEAKERAnd when I swapped out the CPU in my machine
00:09SPEAKERwith a ostensibly faster machine,
00:11SPEAKERand then I fired stuff up and started playing games
00:14SPEAKERand seeing how it worked, everything was slower.
00:17SPEAKER- That seems the reverse of what you would want.
00:20SPEAKER- Well, it turns out what I had to do
00:23SPEAKERwas clean the chipset drivers
00:26SPEAKERand reinstall the chipset drivers in Windows.
00:28SPEAKER- Oh.
00:29SPEAKER- And then everything was groovy.
00:31SPEAKER- Is that that AMD thing of like,
00:33SPEAKERhey, you shouldn't just swap CPUs.
00:34SPEAKERYou have to kind of reinstall Windows.
00:36SPEAKERI remember that from when I had the 7950 X3D.
00:39SPEAKER- Well, so the reinstall Windows was specifically
00:41SPEAKERfor dual CCD, going from one CCD to dual CCD chips.
00:46SPEAKERI'm going from a one CCD to a one CCD,
00:48SPEAKERand I don't understand why,
00:50SPEAKERI don't understand why this would work this way.
00:53SPEAKERAnd it's-
00:54SPEAKER- I don't understand why any of this would be necessary.
00:56SPEAKERLike you would think the drivers would,
00:58SPEAKERlike what is being keyed in the drivers
01:00SPEAKERto specific hardware at time of install
01:02SPEAKERthat can't be changed later.
01:04SPEAKERThat's a strange design.
01:06SPEAKER- So I'm gonna ask about it.
01:07SPEAKERI want to do some more investigation.
01:08SPEAKERI think it's the Windows thread scheduler changes
01:10SPEAKERon a per CPU basis.
01:12SPEAKERSo if like you're changing from Intel to AMD or vice versa,
01:14SPEAKERyou obviously are gonna have a different one.
01:17SPEAKER- A, I would believe that,
01:18SPEAKERbut B, why is that still, still why is that necessary?
01:20SPEAKERLike you would hope that even the scheduling infrastructure
01:22SPEAKERwas robust enough to understand,
01:24SPEAKERyou know what doesn't have this problem?
01:26SPEAKER- Macs?
01:27SPEAKER- Linux.
01:28SPEAKER- Wow, what an amazing coincidence.
01:30SPEAKER- You can just boot a Linux install on anything
01:32SPEAKERand it'll just kind of work.
01:33SPEAKERI mean, you know, unless you're missing drivers
01:35SPEAKERlike that need a kernel module or something anyway, go on.
01:37SPEAKER- I'll be honest, I, if I had,
01:40SPEAKERif I could play Fortnite on Linux,
01:41SPEAKERI would probably be running a Linux desktop today
01:44SPEAKERright now, even as we speak.
01:45SPEAKER- That doesn't seem like it's in the cards,
01:46SPEAKERunless Epic has, unless Tim Epic has a dramatic change
01:51SPEAKERof heart about Linux at some point.
01:52SPEAKER- Well, I don't think Tim Epic hates that Linux.
01:54SPEAKERI think Tim Epic hates Valve.
01:56SPEAKER- Oh, sure.
01:58SPEAKER- And I think that's why Fortnite's,
01:59SPEAKER'cause the anti-cheat that's in Fortnite
02:03SPEAKERis in other games that run on Linux
02:05SPEAKERand are Steam Deck certified.
02:06SPEAKERIt's a choice.
02:07SPEAKER- Oh, I didn't know that.
02:08SPEAKER- He does not want to help the Steam Deck out
02:10SPEAKERby putting the Fortnite's on it.
02:12SPEAKER- Even though they make tremendous amounts of money
02:14SPEAKERfrom Fortnite, although granted the Steam Deck install day
02:18SPEAKERis probably not a big enough number to make a huge dent
02:21SPEAKERin, well, the Fortnite revenue.
02:23SPEAKER- And realistically, I mean, I guess if I had like,
02:27SPEAKERif I had a bunch of kids and they all wanted to play
02:28SPEAKERPC games, like buying a bunch of $400 Steam Decks
02:32SPEAKERprobably is a good entry point for that,
02:34SPEAKERrather than building a bunch of PCs.
02:35SPEAKER- Oh yeah, oh yeah.
02:37SPEAKERAlthough honestly, the way that,
02:39SPEAKERthe way I see people talking about moving to desktop Linux,
02:41SPEAKERespecially once Valve puts out their actual desktop Steam OS,
02:44SPEAKERwhich I think sounds like it's getting close.
02:46SPEAKER- This year sometime, yeah.
02:48SPEAKER- Like I actually wonder if that number gets big enough
02:50SPEAKERthat Epic kind of has to fold.
02:52SPEAKER- I mean, it could be, obviously it's a self-selecting group
02:55SPEAKER'cause it's people who like the kind of stuff that we talk
02:57SPEAKERabout here, but I'm hearing more from normal human beings
03:01SPEAKERabout Linux than I ever have before.
03:03SPEAKER- Yeah, I mean, yes.
03:04SPEAKERAnd algorithms are also a thing, you know, like even,
03:07SPEAKEReven Blue Sky, which has algorithm lists or supposedly,
03:11SPEAKERI mean, you know, it's still got a discover feed.
03:12SPEAKERLike of course that's gonna be tailored to my interests,
03:15SPEAKERbut yes, I am seeing a shocking uptick in posts
03:18SPEAKERfrom people saying, fuck Windows, I'm out, it's time.
03:20SPEAKER- Well, I mean, so I installed desktop Linux the other day
03:24SPEAKERon a machine to do some testing and I had forgotten
03:28SPEAKERwhat it's like to do a new, to like to boot into an OS
03:30SPEAKERfor the first time and it not try to sell me six things.
03:34SPEAKERI talked about this on a newsletter a couple of weeks ago,
03:35SPEAKERtoo, but it's like, it's remarkable, right?
03:38SPEAKERLike the number, you don't even, even Apple does it now.
03:41SPEAKERIt's like, hey, you want to sign up for, hey man,
03:44SPEAKERwe got this real good service that has TV and games.
03:47SPEAKERAnd then you also, it'll save your photos and all of your
03:50SPEAKERstuff gets backed up and it's only 20 bucks a month
03:52SPEAKERfor your whole family, you should totally sign up for it.
03:54SPEAKER- Where's Apple doing that, just on mobile?
03:56SPEAKER- No, it happens on a new Mac.
03:57SPEAKERWhen you upgrade your Mac, it hits you too.
03:59SPEAKER- Wait, really?
04:00SPEAKER- On my wife's Mac, it did.
04:01SPEAKERThe nice thing that Apple, the place that Apple is good
04:04SPEAKERabout it is if you're already paying them,
04:05SPEAKERthen they don't hit you again.
04:07SPEAKER- Sure, yeah.
04:07SPEAKER- Right, the Microsoft solution is, hey,
04:10SPEAKERI see that you're paying for Microsoft Office right now.
04:13SPEAKERWhy don't we just suggest that you could pay us
04:16SPEAKERfor Microsoft Office and then be like, oh no,
04:18SPEAKERyou're already doing this rather than just not show that.
04:20SPEAKER- Yes. - Anyway.
04:21SPEAKER- I think that there is a deeper episode to come
04:23SPEAKERon desktop Linux in the relatively near future.
04:25SPEAKERI've also been dabbling with it a little bit.
04:27SPEAKER- Yeah. - Currently,
04:28SPEAKERI've got Fedora and Nix OS installed at the moment.
04:30SPEAKERI've got like five others queued up
04:32SPEAKERthat I'm gonna try out at some point, but like,
04:34SPEAKERI don't know if I would be able to daily drive it
04:36SPEAKER'cause I still think about all the stuff I use on Windows
04:38SPEAKERthat does not have an immediate analog.
04:41SPEAKER- Or, you know, it has analogs, but are not as good.
04:43SPEAKERYou know, like Affinity Photo and is probably
04:46SPEAKERmaybe not the best example 'cause yes,
04:47SPEAKERthere are image editing programs on Linux.
04:49SPEAKERAre they as good as Affinity or Photoshop?
04:52SPEAKERNot necessarily, like Music Bee,
04:55SPEAKERthe kind of iTunes replacement that I use is Windows only.
04:58SPEAKERThere's just a lot of little day-to-day quality of life-y
05:01SPEAKERsorts of applications that I would miss a lot.
05:04SPEAKERSo I don't know, we'll see.
05:05SPEAKER- Apparently Affinity works with bottles now.
05:07SPEAKER- Bottles?
05:09SPEAKER- Bottles, the, the-
05:11SPEAKER- Was that a wine thing or something?
05:13SPEAKER- It's a wine thing, yeah.
05:14SPEAKER- Okay, I don't know that I wanna mess with wine.
05:16SPEAKERWe'll see. - Well.
05:17SPEAKER- We'll see a lot of things.
05:18SPEAKER- Yeah, yeah, we'll see.
05:20SPEAKERWe'll see if we have, you know, who knows?
05:22SPEAKERWho knows what tomorrow brings?
05:24SPEAKER- It feels like a big year for we'll see.
05:26SPEAKER(upbeat music)
05:50SPEAKER(upbeat music)
05:54SPEAKER- Welcome to Brad and Will Made a Tech Pod.
05:57SPEAKERI'm Will.
05:57SPEAKER- I'm Brad, hello.
05:59SPEAKER- Hi, we'll see.
06:00SPEAKER- We'll see, what will we see?
06:02SPEAKER- What are we gonna talk about this week?
06:03SPEAKERWe'll see, I don't know.
06:05SPEAKER- Figure it out as we go.
06:07SPEAKER- No, we know what we're gonna talk about this week.
06:08SPEAKER- Everybody's feeling punchy lately.
06:11SPEAKER- It's like, okay, I don't wanna talk about politics a lot,
06:15SPEAKERbut the thing that I had forgotten
06:16SPEAKERabout the bad times before
06:18SPEAKERare how each week seems like simultaneously
06:21SPEAKER15 minutes and two years.
06:22SPEAKER- Oh, it's insane.
06:23SPEAKER- Yeah. - It's crazy.
06:24SPEAKERI have every other podcast and my rotation
06:27SPEAKERhas been replaced by politics podcasts at this point.
06:30SPEAKERLike literally just feed has been purged of everything else
06:32SPEAKER'cause I don't have room for anything else
06:34SPEAKERwith all the politics podcasts I'm listening to right now.
06:37SPEAKER- I'm taking breaks.
06:38SPEAKERI can't pay attention all the time 'cause it breaks me.
06:40SPEAKER- I find this phenomenon extends to every domain in my life
06:44SPEAKERthat like everything is being crowded out by this right now.
06:47SPEAKERPut some.
06:49SPEAKER- Well, Mike Masnick this morning posted on Tech Dirt,
06:52SPEAKERwhich if you don't read Tech Dirt,
06:54SPEAKERTech Dirt's one of the great remaining tech blogs, I think.
06:57SPEAKERAnd he was like, look, if you wanna avoid politics,
07:01SPEAKERI got bad news for you
07:02SPEAKER'cause Tech Dirt's a democracy blog now
07:04SPEAKERbecause we all have to be democracy blogs
07:07SPEAKERif we wanna continue having democracies.
07:10SPEAKERAnd I respect that a lot.
07:12SPEAKERGood for Mike.
07:13SPEAKER- Oh, wow.
07:14SPEAKERI took a look at it just now.
07:15SPEAKERIt was full on just like a politics blog now.
07:18SPEAKER- Oh, yeah.
07:19SPEAKER- I mean, it's still fairly tech oriented
07:21SPEAKERlike a magistrate judge,
07:22SPEAKERif geofence warrants are unconstitutional,
07:24SPEAKERso are cell tower dumps.
07:25SPEAKERI mean, that's still pretty technical.
07:27SPEAKER- But that's also, that is the most Tech Dirt article
07:30SPEAKERthat they could possibly post, right?
07:32SPEAKERBut also he's taught, they were like, he's just saying,
07:34SPEAKERhey, we're not gonna ignore this stuff because you can't.
07:37SPEAKER- Yeah.
07:38SPEAKER- It's important, it turns out.
07:40SPEAKER- Maybe not coincidentally,
07:41SPEAKERI have also been developing a bit more of an interest
07:43SPEAKERin information security recently.
07:46SPEAKER- Weird, what a weird coincidence.
07:49SPEAKER- But I won't bore you with my efforts
07:51SPEAKERto generate TPM backed SSH keys right now.
07:55SPEAKER- No, we don't need to, look.
07:56SPEAKER- We'll talk about that later.
07:57SPEAKER- I learned that my BitLocker key is stored for my laptop,
08:01SPEAKERis stored in my Microsoft account last night.
08:04SPEAKERI didn't know that.
08:05SPEAKER- Yes, they do that.
08:05SPEAKER- That's very convenient.
08:06SPEAKER- Yeah, the BitLocker keys, I think,
08:07SPEAKERautomatically get put in OneDrive for safety.
08:09SPEAKER- Yeah, that's correct.
08:11SPEAKER'Cause I updated my BIOS and I didn't realize
08:13SPEAKERthat the laptop ship was BitLocker on.
08:15SPEAKERAnd I was like, oh crap, I'm free to build this laptop.
08:17SPEAKERThen it was like, hey, your key might be
08:19SPEAKERin your OneDrive account, in your Microsoft account,
08:22SPEAKERand I button downloaded and put it on a thumb drive
08:24SPEAKERand plugged it in there and it just worked.
08:25SPEAKER- That's cool, that's cool.
08:27SPEAKER- Saved me.
08:28SPEAKER- People complain about TPMs a lot, makes them work for you.
08:31SPEAKER- I was gonna say, I didn't realize,
08:33SPEAKERso switching CPUs in this machine
08:36SPEAKERthat I'm using in the same D machine,
08:38SPEAKERI didn't realize that the Windows Hello stuff
08:40SPEAKERis tied to the TPM 'cause every time, yeah.
08:43SPEAKER- You were opening a door here.
08:45SPEAKER- Oh no.
08:46SPEAKER- 'Cause that's exactly the SSH stuff I was talking about.
08:48SPEAKER- Yeah, like-
08:49SPEAKER- So when I generated an S key, S key, sorry, SK,
08:53SPEAKERSSH key, do you know what I'm talking about?
08:55SPEAKERLike when you-
08:55SPEAKER- No.
08:56SPEAKER- When you, it's UB key stuff.
08:58SPEAKERI gather that this is the same thing that works on a UB key,
09:00SPEAKERlike when you generate the-
09:01SPEAKER- Yeah, FIDO, FIDO, whatever.
09:03SPEAKER- Right, so like the encryption algorithm,
09:05SPEAKERwhen you generate the key instead of like ECDSA,
09:08SPEAKERit's ECDSA dash SK, meaning-
09:11SPEAKER- Okay.
09:11SPEAKER- Meaning generate this key against your hardware token,
09:13SPEAKERwhich could be a UB key or it could be your TPM.
09:16SPEAKERBut the thing I was gonna say is when you generate
09:18SPEAKERthat key in Windows, it full on pops up
09:20SPEAKERa Windows Hello prompt, and you have to pin number
09:24SPEAKERor face ID or thumbprint to generate the key.
09:27SPEAKER- I ordered a fingerprint sensor-
09:29SPEAKER- Did you?
09:30SPEAKER- To jam underneath my desk yesterday.
09:30SPEAKER- Did you? - Yeah.
09:31SPEAKER- I wanna hear more about that.
09:32SPEAKER- Yeah, that was a challenging,
09:35SPEAKERwe'll talk about that maybe on the Q&A episode
09:37SPEAKERor the patron episode this month,
09:38SPEAKER'cause the reviews were all over the place on those.
09:41SPEAKERAnd there's a bunch of like 17 to $18 USB thumb drivey
09:46SPEAKERlooking ones that are just like a USB plug
09:48SPEAKERand then a thing that you'd tap your finger on.
09:50SPEAKERThey all promise the same like half second read time,
09:55SPEAKERbut the reviews on them are all over the place.
09:57SPEAKERAnd some of them have like thousands of reviews
10:00SPEAKERand like a 4.2 or 4.1.
10:03SPEAKERBut then when you look at the one star reviews,
10:06SPEAKERthey're inevitably, hey, this thing worked
10:08SPEAKERfor a couple of weeks and then it stopped working.
10:11SPEAKERSo I don't know, I bought a $17 one.
10:13SPEAKERI'll let you know how it goes.
10:14SPEAKER- Okay, I'll be curious to hear about that.
10:16SPEAKERI know something that is managing your biometric security.
10:19SPEAKERI think I would be inclined to go
10:20SPEAKERfor the slightly more expensive name brand option
10:22SPEAKERif it came down to it.
10:24SPEAKER- I think I got, no, actually I didn't buy that.
10:26SPEAKERI bought the $27 Kensington one is what I got.
10:29SPEAKER- Yeah, Kensington is the brand I saw
10:30SPEAKERthat I recognize when I looked for those.
10:32SPEAKER- It had worse reviews than a lot of the knockoffs,
10:35SPEAKERother than the names that I didn't recognize.
10:37SPEAKERWe'll see how it goes.
10:39SPEAKERBut I'm excited, I have a little USB duper
10:41SPEAKERthat I'm gonna go just tape up underneath the deck,
10:44SPEAKERglue up under the desk, like right where my finger goes.
10:46SPEAKER- Yeah, that sounds good. - So I can scan in.
10:48SPEAKER- I should maybe do that too.
10:50SPEAKER- Yeah, why wouldn't you?
10:52SPEAKERI've gotten used to having the fingerprint sensor
10:53SPEAKERon the laptop and it turns out it's really nice.
10:55SPEAKER- Yeah.
10:57SPEAKER- Speaking of things that are really nice,
11:01SPEAKERwe've got a kind of hardware potpourri.
11:03SPEAKERThis is probably our last PC hardware state of the union
11:06SPEAKERfor quite a while 'cause all the video cards are out,
11:09SPEAKERexcept for the real low end stuff from Nvidia and AMD
11:12SPEAKERand all of the CPUs are out now.
11:14SPEAKER- With one kind of major exception,
11:16SPEAKERbut it's soon and probably not anything you're not expecting.
11:20SPEAKERI don't know.
11:21SPEAKER- I think it's pretty predictable given what we,
11:24SPEAKERlike there's a little couple of questions about it
11:25SPEAKERwe can talk about, but.
11:26SPEAKER- That's the 9950 X3D that we're referring to.
11:29SPEAKER- Yeah, the Ryzen, the AMD part.
11:31SPEAKERThe big 16 core and I think that's probably it
11:33SPEAKERfor CPU's this year, which we'll get to,
11:35SPEAKERbut I think from the sound of it.
11:37SPEAKER- I think we'll see stuff down,
11:39SPEAKERlike we'll see down, you know,
11:42SPEAKERdown the stack versions, material.
11:44SPEAKERYeah, right now the high and high mid are filled out
11:48SPEAKERand we don't have like low end equivalents,
11:50SPEAKERbut people don't really cover that stuff all that much.
11:52SPEAKER'Cause if you're buying a Celeron,
11:54SPEAKERit turns out you probably don't care about performance
11:56SPEAKERall that much.
11:57SPEAKER- Although actually, I mean, we'll get to it.
11:58SPEAKERMaybe we'll save this for the end,
11:59SPEAKERbut there is stuff going on in low power CPU's.
12:02SPEAKERI am very excited about it.
12:04SPEAKER- Well, yeah, so let's start with the Radeon stuff.
12:07SPEAKER'Cause the embargoes and the reviews drop
12:10SPEAKERfor the Radeon 9070 XT and 9070.
12:14SPEAKERThese are, it seems like the top of AMD's new stack.
12:19SPEAKERThey've said this generation with RDNA 4
12:22SPEAKERthat they're not chasing Nvidia at the high end.
12:25SPEAKERAnd it looks like they're going for the kind of high margin,
12:28SPEAKERhigh volume or lower margin, high volume parts
12:32SPEAKERthat are in the 550-ish MSRP.
12:36SPEAKER- Yeah, what is the XT 599 I wanna say?
12:39SPEAKER- The XT is 599 MSRP and then the other one's 50 bucks.
12:43SPEAKERThe 9070 is 50 bucks less.
12:45SPEAKERWe talked about this in the full nerd a little bit this week,
12:47SPEAKERbut presumably that's because of the 9070 exists
12:51SPEAKERso that the cards that don't bin at the XT speed,
12:56SPEAKERthey can still sell them.
12:58SPEAKER- Still get sold, that makes sense.
13:00SPEAKER- Typically that non XT is kind of a bad deal
13:02SPEAKERon the AMD side.
13:04SPEAKERBut in this case, I was watching the Digital Foundry review
13:08SPEAKERearlier this morning and they do dollars per frame,
13:12SPEAKERwhich is a funny metric to me.
13:14SPEAKER- Honestly, that might be the metric.
13:16SPEAKER- Yeah, and to their point, they were like,
13:19SPEAKERthe 9070 non XT dollars per frame is less bad
13:23SPEAKERthan it usually is.
13:24SPEAKER- So, but they seem like really good cards.
13:27SPEAKERThe big change with RDNA 4 is that they've added
13:32SPEAKERhardware acceleration for ray tracing and tensor core,
13:35SPEAKERlike neural AI type workloads to these GPUs finally.
13:39SPEAKER- Better hardware ray tracing, we should say.
13:41SPEAKER- Well, no, in previous days,
13:43SPEAKERthe ray tracing ran on the shader cores on the RDNA 3.
13:46SPEAKER- All of it?
13:47SPEAKER- Yeah, so that's why the performance was so shit.
13:50SPEAKER- Oh my God, I had no idea that was the case.
13:52SPEAKER- Yeah, so basically what you were doing
13:55SPEAKERwas sacrificing shader performance to run ray tracing.
13:59SPEAKERAnd it was a real double whammy of, let me put it this way.
14:04SPEAKERThere's a way to make it run right.
14:05SPEAKERAnd you see it happen on the consoles
14:07SPEAKERthat do ray tracing stuff because you just have to balance,
14:12SPEAKERlike when you're in a ray tracing,
14:13SPEAKERwhen you're making your ray tracing game
14:14SPEAKERfor say the Xbox series, you have to balance
14:17SPEAKERyour shader utilization with your ray tracing stuff.
14:21SPEAKERAnd you can do it if you know what the hardware is.
14:23SPEAKERBut if you're building,
14:25SPEAKERif you're in the real world making PC games
14:27SPEAKERand you're doing ray tracing stuff
14:29SPEAKERfor the 80% of the market that's on NVIDIA hardware,
14:32SPEAKERthen you're building for tensor cores
14:34SPEAKERand not expecting that shader model performance to drop.
14:39SPEAKERSo that's why you have games like Black Myth Wukong
14:41SPEAKERreally performing badly when you flip on ray tracing on AMD.
14:45SPEAKER- Yeah, that makes sense.
14:46SPEAKER- So that's fixed now.
14:47SPEAKER- I had no idea about that.
14:48SPEAKERThat is, that brings some things into relief.
14:51SPEAKER- Yeah, it explains, like it's why the recommendation
14:54SPEAKERfor previous Radeon cards has been,
14:59SPEAKERif you don't care about ray tracing, these are fine cards.
15:02SPEAKERIf you care about ray tracing, you should buy the other one.
15:04SPEAKER- Yeah, yeah, I had heard that for ages.
15:06SPEAKERThe thing I didn't realize is that they literally
15:08SPEAKERdid not even have hardware ray tracing.
15:09SPEAKER- Nope.
15:10SPEAKER- But that would explain the performance delta there.
15:13SPEAKERHere's my big question about these
15:15SPEAKERor about AMD's strategy here.
15:18SPEAKER- Yeah.
15:19SPEAKER- Was it around CES that they came out and said,
15:22SPEAKER"Hey, we're not gonna have a high-end part this generation,
15:25SPEAKERlike don't expect that, we're targeting the mid range here."
15:28SPEAKER- Yeah.
15:29SPEAKER- Do you think on the roadmap or in R&D,
15:32SPEAKERthe 9070 XT was a flagship part
15:34SPEAKERthat they thought would compete?
15:36SPEAKEROr was this always the mid range part
15:39SPEAKERand they just didn't ship what would have been
15:40SPEAKERthe high-end part?
15:41SPEAKER- My guess is that this was always the mid range part.
15:45SPEAKER- Okay.
15:45SPEAKER- The other theory I have is that maybe
15:48SPEAKERthey were looking at doing a disaggregated architecture
15:53SPEAKERand that they were gonna put multiples of these
15:55SPEAKERon one GPU package.
15:57SPEAKER- Yeah.
15:58SPEAKER- But that seems, nobody's done that
15:59SPEAKERand I'm sure there's good reasons for that,
16:01SPEAKERbut I don't know enough about how chip design works
16:03SPEAKERto know why you wouldn't do that.
16:04SPEAKER- Yeah, there's been, there's a bunch of talk about UDNA,
16:07SPEAKERwhich is the next gen architecture
16:08SPEAKERthat will succeed our DNA for.
16:10SPEAKERAnd this is from some people on the Discord.
16:12SPEAKERI tried to look up more information on this
16:15SPEAKERand could not find it, but their suggestion
16:17SPEAKERwas that UDNA might be disaggregated.
16:20SPEAKER- I haven't seen anything that implies that.
16:22SPEAKER- I could not.
16:23SPEAKER- As I like rumors.
16:24SPEAKER- I could not find anything specific there either, but.
16:28SPEAKER- I mean, look, disaggregate, going disaggregated
16:30SPEAKERin the CPU has been really good for AMD.
16:32SPEAKERSo my understanding is that if you want to,
16:36SPEAKERthe reason nobody's doing, like the reason Nvidia
16:38SPEAKERis making these enormous Blackwell dies
16:41SPEAKERis because the interconnects between different compute dies
16:46SPEAKERon a GPU would have to be much faster than on a CPU.
16:51SPEAKER- Yeah.
16:51SPEAKER- And, you know, in order for it not to impact performance.
16:55SPEAKERThis is why we don't do SLI anymore is 'cause, you know,
16:57SPEAKERthe SLI, the PCI express bus,
17:01SPEAKEReven with the SLI bridge thing was not fast enough
17:06SPEAKERor multiple GPUs to make sense given the timeframes,
17:10SPEAKERyou know, given that it's two milliseconds
17:12SPEAKERfor each frame that's rendered these days.
17:15SPEAKER- Yeah, like you're getting into territory
17:16SPEAKERwhere like any amount of cabling or even like traces
17:19SPEAKERon a PCB is too much, you know,
17:21SPEAKERlike it just needs to all be on the same chip.
17:23SPEAKER- Yeah, latency matters.
17:25SPEAKERSo anyway, yeah, but the point is,
17:30SPEAKERthese cards are reviewing really well.
17:32SPEAKERThe performance is really good.
17:33SPEAKERThey're showing decent ray tracing perf.
17:36SPEAKERIt's a little up and down from game to game.
17:39SPEAKERIt's probably worth mentioning that a lot
17:41SPEAKERof the heavy ray tracing games that we all use
17:43SPEAKERfor benchmarks like Wukong and Cyberpunk.
17:49SPEAKERWait, Indiana Jones doesn't have a built-in benchmark,
17:51SPEAKERso I haven't actually tested that.
17:53SPEAKERBut I mean, like the performance is all over the place
17:57SPEAKERand a lot of these are Nvidia implementations
18:01SPEAKER'cause there wasn't AMD hardware
18:03SPEAKERthat did hardware accelerated ray tracing
18:04SPEAKERuntil just recently.
18:06SPEAKERSo, you know, like Wednesday, just to be clear.
18:10SPEAKER- Yeah, I mean, I wonder like what are the,
18:13SPEAKERlike DXR, DirectX ray tracing
18:16SPEAKERis kind of the main generalized API for ray tracing.
18:20SPEAKERI don't know if they're, well, there's Vulkan.
18:21SPEAKERI guess Vulkan has also gotten ray tracing support, so.
18:25SPEAKER- Yeah, so, well, and like the full path tracing
18:30SPEAKERimplementations are often, depending on the game,
18:34SPEAKEReither built by the developers with help from Nvidia
18:37SPEAKERor like I assume there's some sort of co-marketing agreement
18:41SPEAKERfor some of these games that have full path tracing, right?
18:44SPEAKERSo, you know, put that in your conspiracy pipe
18:49SPEAKERand smoke it, if you will.
18:53SPEAKERBut yeah, so the perf is really good though
18:55SPEAKERat that mid range, at that $550 price point.
18:58SPEAKER- The gist I've gotten from looking at benchmarks
19:00SPEAKERand reviews is that like a 9070 XT is like
19:04SPEAKERsomewhere between a 5070 and a 5070 TI,
19:07SPEAKERdepending on the game.
19:08SPEAKERLike I think I saw in a few benchmarks
19:10SPEAKERthat maybe even beat out the 5070 TI just barely,
19:13SPEAKERbut it's kind of like low to mid end
19:16SPEAKERof the 50 series for 600 bucks.
19:19SPEAKER- But also the 5070 TI is a $650 card
19:22SPEAKERthat you can't really get for less than $900 right now.
19:24SPEAKER- I mean, what's going on with price markups
19:26SPEAKERis like a whole separate conversation,
19:28SPEAKERwhich mostly really sucks.
19:30SPEAKERExcept I think some of these, I think the AMD cards,
19:33SPEAKERat least some of them have been landing in MSRP.
19:36SPEAKERSo yeah, some of the cards are landing in MSRP.
19:40SPEAKERNvidia had two 5070s, I think an XFX and a SUSE.
19:46SPEAKERMight've been a gigabyte too,
19:48SPEAKERthat were MSRP priced cards for the 5070 at 550.
19:53SPEAKERThey also had a couple of 5070 TIs
19:55SPEAKERthat were MSRP priced that actually shipped,
19:58SPEAKERbut those cards are insanely hard to get.
20:01SPEAKERAnd like all of these cards are going the moment,
20:07SPEAKERbasically the moment they go on sale right now,
20:09SPEAKER'cause demand is really high.
20:10SPEAKER- Yeah, I have not seen the PC channel and the Discord
20:13SPEAKERthis buzzy about maybe any product launch,
20:17SPEAKERbut definitely a graphics card launch in a while.
20:19SPEAKERLike people are, these AMD cards are,
20:22SPEAKERI think, going to go very fast.
20:24SPEAKER- And I think I might've said the wrong prices a minute ago,
20:27SPEAKERthe 9070 is 550 and the 9070 XT is 600 bucks.
20:30SPEAKER- Yeah, that's right.
20:31SPEAKER- Okay.
20:32SPEAKER- Yes, this is just a weird aside.
20:34SPEAKERIt's kind of, it's been funny talking about,
20:37SPEAKERor I'm sorry, seeing people talk about like the clamoring
20:41SPEAKERfor some of the brands that people are talking about here,
20:43SPEAKERbecause it's almost, it's largely different vendors
20:46SPEAKERI feel like in the AMD space these days
20:48SPEAKERthan you see in Nvidia.
20:49SPEAKER'Cause Nvidia is like, Nvidia is all a SUSE
20:51SPEAKERand gigabyte and MSI and like,
20:53SPEAKERI guess ASRock is making cards now.
20:55SPEAKERIt's mostly motherboard makers actually,
20:57SPEAKERI guess now that EVGA is gone,
20:58SPEAKERbut it's like big brands like that.
21:00SPEAKERAnd then over here, it's like, oh, I got the Sapphire card
21:03SPEAKERwhere I'm getting the power color or the XFX.
21:05SPEAKERIt's like, there's nothing wrong with those brands.
21:07SPEAKERIt's just, I never see them referenced anymore
21:09SPEAKERbecause people talk about Nvidia so damn much
21:11SPEAKERthat it just kind of like drives home what a,
21:16SPEAKERI don't know if you see change is not the right word,
21:18SPEAKERbut like it's kind of a reframing of the graphics race here
21:20SPEAKERwhere like AMD has actually got a product
21:22SPEAKERpeople really want again.
21:23SPEAKERAnd it's kind of cool to see different names popping up.
21:26SPEAKER- Yeah, AMD, I mean, these are all like classic AMD
21:30SPEAKERgraphics vendors. - Yeah, I know.
21:32SPEAKER- But yeah, it's been interesting to see.
21:35SPEAKERI think that there's a couple of things causing,
21:38SPEAKERokay, so there's a couple of things happening.
21:39SPEAKEROne is a lot of the up and down of the Nvidia pricing
21:43SPEAKERis because they announced pricing at CES.
21:48SPEAKERAnd then before they knew what the tariff situation
21:51SPEAKERwas gonna be. - Darn.
21:53SPEAKER- And then that means that the vendors have to choose
21:56SPEAKERto eat the MSR, the tariff in their pricing if they can.
22:00SPEAKERAnd most of them are not gonna do that
22:01SPEAKERbecause they're all out to make money.
22:04SPEAKERSo it's a really unfortunate,
22:06SPEAKERlike it's left a lot of ambiguity in the pricing
22:10SPEAKERfor these AIB cards. - Yeah, I get it.
22:13SPEAKERI mean, on the Patreon episode last week,
22:15SPEAKERI complained about how expensive
22:17SPEAKERthe supposedly budget iPhone 16E is.
22:19SPEAKERAnd I'm sure some of that is probably absorbing tariffs
22:21SPEAKERas well. - 10 or 20% for everything,
22:23SPEAKER20% for everything in China, I think is what it is now.
22:26SPEAKER- Good stuff.
22:29SPEAKERYeah, so like they're selling out really fast.
22:34SPEAKERIt seems like the MSRP cards sold out
22:36SPEAKERalmost immediately this morning.
22:37SPEAKERI'm looking at a PC world article by Mike Crider
22:40SPEAKERthat talks about that.
22:41SPEAKERFive minutes after the time of sale went on,
22:46SPEAKERyou could get cards that were marked up about 150 bucks.
22:49SPEAKERI wouldn't do that.
22:50SPEAKERLike just like don't, unless like,
22:54SPEAKERso the thing that's happening is people
22:56SPEAKERwho are sitting on like 20, 80 systems right now
22:58SPEAKERare looking for upgrades, right?
23:00SPEAKER'Cause those 1080 TI's, those 2080's, those 1070's,
23:03SPEAKERthose 1060's especially are starting to feel the pinch.
23:07SPEAKER- Yeah, and I mean, this card isn't,
23:08SPEAKERfor the money, if you get it at retail
23:11SPEAKERis an unbelievable upgrade over cards like that.
23:13SPEAKER- Yeah, I mean, like you're upgrading a card that was,
23:17SPEAKERif you're upgrading a 1080 TI,
23:18SPEAKERyou're upgrading a $700 card
23:20SPEAKERto a card that's a little bit cheaper
23:22SPEAKERand is gonna be way faster.
23:25SPEAKER- I don't think we did 1080 TI numbers.
23:29SPEAKERHe might've done 1080 TI numbers with the 5070.
23:33SPEAKERBut the, we did 1080 TI numbers for the 5070,
23:40SPEAKERno, for the Battle Mage cards when we reviewed those
23:44SPEAKERto see what you get.
23:45SPEAKERAnd it's actually, the average frame rates
23:47SPEAKERare kind of the same, but the 1% lows on a 1080 TI
23:51SPEAKERversus a new card that you buy today
23:54SPEAKERare dramatically, dramatically better.
23:56SPEAKER- Sure.
23:56SPEAKER- So you're getting smoother frame rates
23:58SPEAKERwith less micro stutter and less freezes
24:00SPEAKERand stuff like that.
24:01SPEAKERAnd you know, that's what you want, I think.
24:06SPEAKERFor what it's worth, the other Brad in my life,
24:08SPEAKERBrad Charcus over at PC World really liked the 50,
24:11SPEAKERthe 9070 XT.
24:13SPEAKER- Yeah, I can see it.
24:14SPEAKERYou know, like we should also mention,
24:16SPEAKERso like kind of every pillar of the card
24:20SPEAKERoutside of game performance has also gotten better.
24:22SPEAKERYou know, like when you look at, we talk about Nvidia
24:24SPEAKERa lot in this context of like, hey, Nvidia cards
24:27SPEAKERhave a lot of fringe benefits
24:28SPEAKERthat are not just raw performance, you know,
24:30SPEAKERlike obviously DLSS is huge, like the ray tracing
24:34SPEAKERhas been best in class and also in the ink,
24:36SPEAKERthe onboard video encoder for better streaming and stuff,
24:41SPEAKERyou know, has also been industry leading.
24:43SPEAKERSo apparently like all of that is significantly better
24:46SPEAKERfor AMD now on this gen.
24:48SPEAKERSo like FSR4, their latest version of their upscaling tech
24:51SPEAKERapparently is like, it's all digital foundry saying like,
24:54SPEAKERhey, it's finally really good.
24:55SPEAKERLike it's finally competitive with DLSS.
24:58SPEAKERAnd apparently AMD's video encoder has been terrible
25:02SPEAKERfor a long time.
25:03SPEAKER- It's bad to the point that nobody supports it.
25:06SPEAKER- Yes, yes.
25:06SPEAKERLike I keep an eye on EposVox on YouTube
25:09SPEAKERhas been doing quality comparisons between NV Ink,
25:13SPEAKERQuicksync, which is Intel's streamer encoder.
25:16SPEAKERAnd AMD's is so rarely used.
25:19SPEAKERI can't even remember what it's called.
25:20SPEAKERIs it AMF? I want to say, I forget.
25:22SPEAKERAnyway, it doesn't matter.
25:24SPEAKERThe point is he also posted a video that said that,
25:26SPEAKERhey, the onboard video encoding on these new radions
25:30SPEAKERis finally totally fine.
25:31SPEAKERLike it's, 'cause he does actual quantitative analysis
25:36SPEAKERof the video quality and it's like right up there
25:37SPEAKERwith NVIDIA stuff now.
25:38SPEAKERIt's like, it's kind of impressive.
25:40SPEAKERLike they really just like on every metric,
25:43SPEAKERthey have gotten this card competitive to the point
25:46SPEAKERthat I would almost actually consider using one now
25:48SPEAKERfor stuff that's not just the raw performance.
25:51SPEAKER- Yeah, the FSR4 stuff is really neat.
25:54SPEAKERThey like, as is often the case with AMD,
25:56SPEAKERthey have a little bit of an outreach
25:58SPEAKERand developer engagement problem,
26:00SPEAKERjust because NVIDIA is an enormous company
26:03SPEAKERand employs a buttload of people in their dev rel team.
26:07SPEAKERAMD doesn't have that, those kinds of resources.
26:10SPEAKERSo they have a bunch of games
26:12SPEAKERthat are supported out of the gate,
26:13SPEAKERbut they, you have to use a driver,
26:17SPEAKERlike it applies at the driver level.
26:19SPEAKERSo if you flip it on in there,
26:21SPEAKERwhat's it called?
26:22SPEAKERThe Ryzen, no, no, the Catalyst software, I think.
26:25SPEAKEROr Adrenaline software.
26:28SPEAKERCatalyst is the old one.
26:30SPEAKERSo the Adrenaline software you do is you say,
26:32SPEAKERhey, I want to use FSR4.
26:33SPEAKERAnd then some games that support FSR 3.1,
26:38SPEAKERit'll override the FSR number.
26:43SPEAKERIt'll override the version of FSR
26:45SPEAKERthat ships with the game to the FSR4 one
26:48SPEAKERthat uses the AI up-sampling
26:51SPEAKERinstead of the old shader model up-sampling.
26:55SPEAKER- Yeah, that thought did occur to me
26:56SPEAKERas I was thinking, we'll get into this in a second,
26:58SPEAKERlike as I was thinking like,
26:59SPEAKERmaybe I should move to one of these cards
27:00SPEAKERfor a number of reasons.
27:01SPEAKERBut that did hit me that like any game older
27:04SPEAKERthan six or eight months, maybe a year,
27:07SPEAKERyou're still going to be on older,
27:09SPEAKERfrappier versions of things like FSR.
27:11SPEAKERSo it's not great if you play a lot of games
27:14SPEAKERthat are not brand spanking new.
27:17SPEAKER- Yeah, I mean, and that also is one of the questions
27:20SPEAKERwe get when we were talking about these cards, right?
27:23SPEAKERIs, hey, how are the drivers?
27:25SPEAKER'Cause a lot of people have had problems
27:26SPEAKERwith AMD drivers before.
27:28SPEAKERAnd like realistically, the games that we tried
27:33SPEAKERout of the gate, Adam ran benchmarks
27:37SPEAKERand then spent a couple of days
27:38SPEAKERjust playing as many games as he could touch.
27:40SPEAKERAnd the results were pretty good.
27:43SPEAKERBut the stuff like, hey, the FSR4
27:45SPEAKERis not natively supported.
27:46SPEAKERYou have to do this weird control panel override.
27:50SPEAKERAnd it crashed in a couple of tests
27:52SPEAKERwith the pre-release driver, which not unusual.
27:54SPEAKERLike the 1590 had some crashes
27:57SPEAKERand that first post 1590 launch driver
28:00SPEAKERthat Nvidia released was,
28:02SPEAKERI had a really awful time with it.
28:05SPEAKERBut it's always something that's nervous making.
28:09SPEAKER- Yeah, I could see that.
28:11SPEAKERI mean, unless you literally have no video card
28:13SPEAKERand you absolutely need something immediately,
28:15SPEAKERI don't think it would maybe be prudent
28:17SPEAKERto give it three months for supply and prices to settle down
28:21SPEAKERand see how drivers shape up and stuff like that.
28:24SPEAKER- Yeah, I mean, here's the thing.
28:25SPEAKERIf you can get one of these at MSRP,
28:27SPEAKERI think it's, and you're in the market for a card,
28:30SPEAKERI think it's okay to go for it.
28:31SPEAKERBut yeah, like it's, you're not gonna have a bad time.
28:35SPEAKERBut I do, and like the one place
28:38SPEAKERthat AMD has an enormous advantage is the graphics drivers
28:42SPEAKERand Linux.
28:43SPEAKERLike they are, their Linux drivers are world-class.
28:46SPEAKER- Well, or their own source is the big thing.
28:48SPEAKERLike that's the split there.
28:49SPEAKERAnd so I've been looking at this,
28:51SPEAKERI've got a 4090 in this machine,
28:52SPEAKERbut I have also been dabbling with some desktop Linuxes
28:55SPEAKERand probably will continue to do so.
28:56SPEAKERSo I was like, and I need a smaller card.
28:58SPEAKERThat's the other thing.
29:00SPEAKERMy, this 4090 is a four slot card effectively.
29:04SPEAKERIt was like three and a half slots already
29:06SPEAKERbefore I replaced the shroud
29:07SPEAKERand put some Noctua fans on it.
29:09SPEAKERAnd now it's like basically a four slot,
29:11SPEAKERwhich really limits my motherboard options
29:13SPEAKERfor when I want to upgrade.
29:15SPEAKERSo I was, I've also kind of wanted to get
29:16SPEAKERonto a smaller physically graphics card.
29:19SPEAKERSo I was looking at this and I was like,
29:21SPEAKERyou know, AMD like just works on Linux
29:23SPEAKERwhere in video you have to jump through extra hoops,
29:25SPEAKERlike certain things on the desktop still don't work as well.
29:28SPEAKERLike problems get fixed much slower.
29:32SPEAKERIt's a pretty big performance downgrade
29:34SPEAKERfrom a 4090 to a 1970 XT though.
29:37SPEAKER- It is a pretty substantial performance downgrade.
29:40SPEAKERIf you're playing at 1080p, it doesn't matter.
29:41SPEAKERIf you're playing at 4K, you're going to feel it.
29:43SPEAKER- I'm at 1440, so I'm kind of in the middle of that.
29:46SPEAKER- Yeah, these are pretty clearly 1440p cards
29:50SPEAKERfor the most part,
29:52SPEAKERespecially if you're talking about ray tracing games,
29:54SPEAKER'cause you know, the ray tracing,
29:56SPEAKERlike Indiana Jones and the Star Wars Outlaws
29:58SPEAKERand all those use a ton of memory
30:01SPEAKERand they will fill a 16 gig card.
30:04SPEAKER- So there is no option for more RAM.
30:06SPEAKERThat's the only one on the market.
30:07SPEAKER- 16 gigs.
30:09SPEAKER- Yeah.
30:12SPEAKER- But you can play 4K raster games pretty easily.
30:15SPEAKERLike I played some Fortnite the other day
30:17SPEAKERand got really nice perf out of that at 4K,
30:20SPEAKERbut you're not gonna, you know,
30:22SPEAKERyou're not gonna, like the weird thing is I've been,
30:26SPEAKERwe've been testing these OLED monitors.
30:28SPEAKERMSI sent me one of the 4K 240 Hertz OLEDs
30:33SPEAKERthat they released at CES.
30:36SPEAKERAnd honestly, if you're sitting,
30:38SPEAKERlike this is the most, like the overall verdict,
30:42SPEAKERwe don't need to get into the Nvidia stuff
30:44SPEAKER'cause you've already talked about it.
30:45SPEAKERThe 5070 is kind of a stinker.
30:47SPEAKERThe 5070 Ti I think is okay.
30:50SPEAKERThe internet's upset that it doesn't have as much RAM
30:52SPEAKERas they felt like it should.
30:54SPEAKER- Does it have 16 also?
30:55SPEAKER- It's 16, they think it should be 24.
30:58SPEAKERBecause you know, of course, why shouldn't it have 24?
31:01SPEAKERThey made a decision like four years ago
31:03SPEAKERabout how much RAM that card should have
31:04SPEAKERand it seemed reasonable at the time.
31:06SPEAKERAnd then three games came out
31:08SPEAKERthat filled your video card RAM for the first time
31:11SPEAKERin the entirety of the time
31:12SPEAKERthat I remember covering video cards, right?
31:16SPEAKERSo like, I'm not making, just to be clear,
31:19SPEAKERnot making excuses for Nvidia.
31:21SPEAKERThey just missed the, they misprojected
31:23SPEAKERwhen they specked out this card ages ago.
31:27SPEAKERLike if you're on a last gen video card,
31:28SPEAKEReither AMD or Nvidia, and you have $1,000 burning a hole
31:33SPEAKERin your pocket for a new, to buy something new,
31:36SPEAKERI would buy one of these OLED monitors
31:38SPEAKERbefore I would buy either of these new video cards.
31:41SPEAKERRight, it is an enormous upgrade.
31:44SPEAKERThe HDR support is really nice.
31:46SPEAKERIt actually works in Windows 11 finally.
31:49SPEAKERAnd 240 hertz OLED with good blacks
31:51SPEAKERand like a thousand nit panel is fricking gorgeous looking.
31:57SPEAKER- It's honestly, it's the pure blacks,
31:59SPEAKERthe contrast, the classic OLED advantages
32:01SPEAKERthat would move the needle for me
32:03SPEAKERbecause like even these like relatively decent IPS panels
32:07SPEAKERthat I have, contrast is just shit on PC monitors
32:10SPEAKERin general, LCD ones, or has been traditionally.
32:13SPEAKERSo like- - It's rough, yeah.
32:14SPEAKER- Like getting real actual black levels
32:16SPEAKERon a PC monitor would be real nice.
32:18SPEAKERBut I was looking at 1440p OLED monitors the other day
32:22SPEAKERjust for fun, I'm not actually gonna buy anything,
32:25SPEAKERbut like even those are still like $700, which is just,
32:30SPEAKERno, that's for something I don't need, that's too much.
32:35SPEAKER- Well, I mean, this is firmly in the realm
32:37SPEAKERof if you use this all the time and this is the thing,
32:40SPEAKERyou know, go nuts, but-
32:41SPEAKER- I mean, I'm in front of this computer
32:43SPEAKERfor 10 plus hours a day, but-
32:45SPEAKER- Yeah, your eyes deserve, you should get two,
32:47SPEAKERone for each eye.
32:50SPEAKERThe 1440p ones are also the Pulsar ones,
32:52SPEAKERI think in some cases, so they go up to 500 hertz,
32:54SPEAKERwhich means you can run the CRT emulation
32:58SPEAKERphosphor stuff on them. - CRT shader.
33:00SPEAKER- Yeah, the Blur Busters one.
33:02SPEAKER- Now I might be back on port.
33:03SPEAKER- Yeah, you need to put it in portrait though
33:06SPEAKERso you can play Donkey Kong, that's the real test.
33:09SPEAKEROkay, so other things going on,
33:13SPEAKERanything else on the Radeon side
33:14SPEAKERbefore we skip through the Nvidia
33:15SPEAKERand then tell stuff real fast?
33:17SPEAKER- I mean, I wrote down next gen console applications here,
33:20SPEAKERlike this all seems very promising
33:23SPEAKERfor whatever the next boxes end up being,
33:25SPEAKER'cause all the rumors, I mean,
33:29SPEAKERthe console design rumors are very hard to nail down.
33:32SPEAKERIt doesn't sound like,
33:33SPEAKERdefinitely nothing is in production yet.
33:35SPEAKERI don't know that any specs
33:36SPEAKERhave been 100% fully locked yet.
33:37SPEAKERMaybe on the Xbox side, there was a report from,
33:39SPEAKERI think, Windows Central recently
33:41SPEAKERthat the next Xbox is past the pitch phase
33:44SPEAKERand has been approved, so maybe that design is locked.
33:46SPEAKERI don't know, but like-
33:48SPEAKER- That makes sense.
33:49SPEAKER- This is really exciting
33:50SPEAKERbecause I think we've talked about before,
33:52SPEAKERlike these previous consoles landed
33:54SPEAKERat a really terrible time for graphics technology.
33:57SPEAKER- Yeah, it's-
33:58SPEAKER- It was right before ray tracing
34:01SPEAKERreally got serious in hardware,
34:03SPEAKERright before machine learning upscaling happened,
34:06SPEAKERlike a number of very critical foundational technologies
34:10SPEAKERwere just starting to happen
34:12SPEAKERwhen the current consoles came out.
34:14SPEAKER- When did they launch, 2019?
34:16SPEAKER- 2020.
34:17SPEAKER- 2020, winter of 2020, like during the pandemic?
34:20SPEAKER- Yeah, November, 2020.
34:22SPEAKER- Yeah, so-
34:23SPEAKER- So they don't have,
34:24SPEAKERthey've got like very, very limited FSR support.
34:27SPEAKERThey've got, you know, whatever shader-based ray tracing
34:30SPEAKERAMD was capable of five years ago.
34:33SPEAKER- Yeah, well, they've got the FSR support
34:34SPEAKERthat runs on the shader model, shader units,
34:36SPEAKERjust like on every other AMD video card up until Wednesday.
34:40SPEAKER- So like breakdowns of the PS5 Pro that I saw
34:43SPEAKERtheorized that it was using a fair number
34:45SPEAKERof RDNA4 features similar to what we're looking at here.
34:48SPEAKER- That's interesting.
34:49SPEAKER- And so if you project out another three to four years,
34:52SPEAKERah, maybe, ah, three years tops probably, right?
34:57SPEAKERLike I'm surely, I think it sounds like by 27 or 28,
35:00SPEAKERwe're gonna see proper new consoles
35:02SPEAKERand there's even a rumor floating around.
35:04SPEAKERThis was on like, how was it?
35:06SPEAKERAnd the site starts with a W, you know,
35:09SPEAKERthe one WWCC tech, WCF tech, you know what I'm talking about?
35:14SPEAKER- Oh, WCCF tech, yeah.
35:15SPEAKER- Yeah, that's the one, that's the one.
35:16SPEAKERSo, I mean, this was a rumor from there.
35:18SPEAKERYou tell me how credible those things are,
35:19SPEAKERbut there was a rumor floating around on there
35:22SPEAKERthat the PlayStation 6 will have 3D V-cache support as well.
35:26SPEAKER- That seems like fanboy wishful thinking.
35:29SPEAKER- I don't know.
35:30SPEAKERThe point I'm making though is, I mean,
35:31SPEAKERwhether it does or not, like look at,
35:34SPEAKERlook at how many like pretty significant new technologies
35:36SPEAKERhave come online in games performance
35:38SPEAKERsince these current consoles shipped.
35:42SPEAKERSo it seems, it seems pretty promising for the next gen.
35:45SPEAKERI think that a lot of this stuff can make its way in there.
35:48SPEAKER- Like the, this is the first one,
35:51SPEAKERthis is the first new GPU architecture AMD's released
35:55SPEAKERsince the last consoles came out
35:57SPEAKERthat feels like an actual upgrade
35:58SPEAKERrather than just an incremental upgrade.
36:01SPEAKERAnd I think like my assumption is
36:06SPEAKERif they think the Xbox is locked on paper,
36:10SPEAKERthat means they have an APU picked out.
36:12SPEAKERYou know, they've worked with AMD to design an APU
36:16SPEAKERand we're into the process.
36:18SPEAKER'Cause it's usually a five-year loop on the,
36:20SPEAKERfrom the initial design phase to like tape out to shipping.
36:25SPEAKERSo yeah, I don't know.
36:27SPEAKERIt's interesting.
36:28SPEAKERIt's, I mean, if this is the basis of the next gen consoles,
36:33SPEAKERthat's fantastic, right?
36:35SPEAKERI mean, it may be that this is the basis
36:37SPEAKERand it's thicker pipelines
36:39SPEAKERor more memory bandwidth or whatever.
36:41SPEAKER- Yeah, there are only two weeks.
36:42SPEAKER- Yeah, typically the consoles both have used
36:44SPEAKERunified memory with the GPU and CPU,
36:46SPEAKERwhich gives them a lot of interesting efficiencies
36:48SPEAKERthat don't exist across the PCI express bus and the PC.
36:51SPEAKER- Yeah, they've been doing that since the 360,
36:53SPEAKERbut then also like the current consoles,
36:55SPEAKERlike the Zen 2 cores have way less cache
36:57SPEAKERthan the desktop parts.
36:58SPEAKERSo like there's always trade-offs back and forth anyway.
37:01SPEAKER- On an interesting note,
37:03SPEAKERAdam and I did a live stream over at PC World
37:06SPEAKERwhen these, with the embargo lifted for these cards.
37:09SPEAKERAnd one of the things that we tested
37:11SPEAKERthat I hadn't actually seen anywhere
37:12SPEAKERas we tested kind of casually,
37:15SPEAKERwhat Cyberpunk perf, how it was impacted
37:19SPEAKERby slower PCI express.
37:21SPEAKER'Cause somebody asked if they had a PCIe three
37:23SPEAKERor PCIe four system, how would one of these cards do?
37:28SPEAKERSo we flipped it off.
37:29SPEAKERWe flipped it down from five to four to three to one.
37:32SPEAKERAnd like, yeah, it was old.
37:35SPEAKER- That's fun.
37:37SPEAKER- And the perf difference was negligible.
37:40SPEAKER- Really?
37:40SPEAKER- Yeah, it was like 1.2 frames a second at most.
37:44SPEAKER- For which versions of the bus?
37:49SPEAKER- To go from five to one,
37:50SPEAKERit was like 1.2 frames per second total.
37:52SPEAKER- Total on one?
37:53SPEAKER- Yeah, I don't think most games are optimized
37:55SPEAKERto not need to send anything.
37:57SPEAKERLike this is why the video cards have so much RAM, right?
37:59SPEAKER- Yes, fair.
38:00SPEAKER- Like your load times may be better
38:02SPEAKERif you have faster PCI express.
38:03SPEAKER- Very fair.
38:04SPEAKER- But your in-game frame rate was pretty negligibly hit.
38:08SPEAKERWe also turned off resize bar
38:09SPEAKERand had a similar impact on Cyberpunk at least.
38:11SPEAKERNow that may be more dependent on different games
38:14SPEAKERand different drivers.
38:15SPEAKERBut, so we didn't test on old hardware in this case
38:18SPEAKER'cause it's a pain in the ass.
38:20SPEAKER- I mean, I guess it makes sense.
38:21SPEAKERLike whatever data needs to go back and forth
38:23SPEAKERbetween the CPU and the GPU is like relatively small.
38:26SPEAKER- Yeah.
38:27SPEAKER- It's not like bandwidth between the card
38:30SPEAKERand the processor should not be a limiting factor
38:32SPEAKERfor, you know, ray tracing setup and whatever.
38:36SPEAKER- You optimize it so that it's not,
38:38SPEAKERbecause like in the case of like Indiana Jones,
38:40SPEAKERwhen you fill up video card RAM on that game,
38:43SPEAKERit goes from 40 or 50 frames a second
38:45SPEAKERto three frames a second.
38:47SPEAKERReally, really reliably.
38:48SPEAKERSo you're not gonna run Indiana Jones on Supreme
38:53SPEAKERwith a 16 gig card.
38:55SPEAKER- Is that the name of their top tier graphics?
38:57SPEAKER- They call it Supreme, yeah.
38:59SPEAKER- That's great.
39:00SPEAKER- The other one I saw the other day
39:02SPEAKERthat was really good was somebody has Very Ultra.
39:03SPEAKERThey have Ultra and then Very Ultra.
39:05SPEAKERAnd I was like, that's Very Ultra is fucking fantastic.
39:07SPEAKERI love that.
39:08SPEAKER- That's really funny.
39:09SPEAKER- Yeah.
39:10SPEAKERSo, okay.
39:11SPEAKERSo Intel also rolled out Battle Maze.
39:12SPEAKERWe talked about this a little bit earlier this year.
39:15SPEAKERThere's been more testing.
39:19SPEAKERPeople have been doing ongoing testing with them.
39:21SPEAKERThe drivers are generally,
39:23SPEAKERlike the big question after the first arc cards,
39:26SPEAKERthe A580 and A480 and A470, I think,
39:32SPEAKERwhere the drivers were pretty rough for a while.
39:34SPEAKERAnd it seems like Intel's worked most of that out.
39:40SPEAKERThere was also some brouhaha
39:44SPEAKERabout how those cards worked on older boards
39:47SPEAKERthat don't support resizable bar or have slower CPU's
39:50SPEAKER'cause a classic Intel move with their hardware
39:53SPEAKERis to use the CPU for things that typically aren't used for
39:56SPEAKERin that device.
40:01SPEAKERThat is still a little bit less clear.
40:03SPEAKERSo I would love, it's funny,
40:07SPEAKERI kinda wanna dig out my 9900K machine
40:10SPEAKERand do some perf testing
40:12SPEAKER'cause if you have a 9900K, probably still fine
40:17SPEAKERfrom a CPU standpoint for a lot of people,
40:21SPEAKERbut you're not gonna, if you put a 1590 in it,
40:24SPEAKERyou're not gonna see the lift that you would
40:25SPEAKERif you put it in a 9800X3D or something like that.
40:28SPEAKER- Sure.
40:30SPEAKER- And then it does ray trace.
40:31SPEAKERIt has hardware accelerated ray tracing.
40:34SPEAKERIt also has a new version of XeSS,
40:36SPEAKERtheir super sampling and frame gen protocols.
40:40SPEAKERIt's all AI accelerated now.
40:42SPEAKERIt uses the machine, the tensor core equivalents,
40:46SPEAKERsame as AMD does.
40:48SPEAKERAnd it's worth mentioning, FSR4 and XeSS2, I think,
40:52SPEAKERneither of those work,
40:54SPEAKERbut while XeSS1 and FSR3, 2, and 1 worked
40:57SPEAKERon non-AMD hardware and non-Intel hardware,
41:00SPEAKERthe new versions are locked to the hardware
41:02SPEAKERthat ships with them.
41:05SPEAKEREverybody's doing their own hardware
41:06SPEAKERand machine learning stuff now.
41:09SPEAKEROne other question about Battlemage,
41:11SPEAKERback when these, the newest ones,
41:13SPEAKERthe B580 and 7, or I guess 70s newer.
41:16SPEAKERAnyway, this generation, when they came out,
41:18SPEAKERone of the things I saw about driver quality
41:20SPEAKERwas that people said that older games
41:21SPEAKERwere struggling pretty well,
41:23SPEAKERlike DirectX 9 era stuff, particularly.
41:27SPEAKERWas not great.
41:28SPEAKERCan you speak to how older games are doing now?
41:30SPEAKER- So I didn't test any DX9 stuff,
41:34SPEAKERlike DX9 games not in the normal
41:37SPEAKERbenchmark rotation these days.
41:39SPEAKERThey had problems with DX11 performance
41:41SPEAKERon the Alchemist, the A480 and A470 cards.
41:49SPEAKERThe, so I don't know what the DX9 situation is,
41:54SPEAKERbut DX11 was much better on the Battlemage cards
41:57SPEAKERthan it was on Alchemist.
41:58SPEAKERAnd also, by the end of the Alchemist,
42:01SPEAKERby the end of life on, not end of life,
42:03SPEAKERbut by the end of the, you know,
42:05SPEAKERthe drivers had improved on Alchemist.
42:07SPEAKERI actually think they're using that DXBK wrapper
42:10SPEAKERto wrap DX11 games to Vulkan.
42:13SPEAKER- Interesting. - 'Cause they're like,
42:15SPEAKERyou would, look, I'm gonna tell you a secret, Brad.
42:18SPEAKERThere's a lot of games that run on DX11
42:21SPEAKERthat have performance problems,
42:22SPEAKERand they're just like, hey man,
42:23SPEAKERwhat if we just put this Vulkan wrapper in,
42:25SPEAKERand then a lot of your weird bottlenecks
42:27SPEAKERjust kind of fix themselves.
42:28SPEAKER- Seems to be working well
42:29SPEAKERfor a lot of situations these days.
42:31SPEAKER- Yeah, so that's what's going on with Intel.
42:34SPEAKERThose cards are 250 bucks.
42:35SPEAKERSo if you're sitting on a 1080 or a 10 series card
42:39SPEAKERor 20 series, 2060 or something,
42:41SPEAKERand are looking for an upgrade,
42:43SPEAKERassuming you don't get hit by the low-powered CPU problem,
42:47SPEAKERwhich, again, I read a bunch of reviews of this,
42:51SPEAKERand there's no real consensus.
42:52SPEAKERSome people blame it on resized bars,
42:54SPEAKERsome people blame it on not-of-cores,
42:56SPEAKERsome people blame it on a lack of certain instructions.
42:59SPEAKERThere's no, I don't see a clear consensus.
43:01SPEAKERSo Hardware Unboxed has done some stuff on that.
43:05SPEAKERI feel like First Level Text
43:08SPEAKERdid some good stuff on that as well.
43:10SPEAKERSo yeah, I don't know.
43:11SPEAKERYeah, it's a weird recommendation.
43:14SPEAKER- I mean, I've said this before.
43:15SPEAKERI mean, it's great to see, you know,
43:17SPEAKERwell, right now everybody's got their own market segment,
43:19SPEAKERwhich is less great than if everybody was competing
43:21SPEAKERagainst each other head to head.
43:23SPEAKERYou know, like Intel's in the low end,
43:25SPEAKERAMD's in the mid range,
43:26SPEAKERand Nvidia still owns the high end.
43:28SPEAKERLike it obviously would be better
43:30SPEAKERif everybody had high end and low end and et cetera, et cetera.
43:33SPEAKERBut still, much like with AMD finally getting competitive
43:37SPEAKERagain on CPUs a few years ago.
43:40SPEAKER- Yeah.
43:41SPEAKER- Like it's just exciting to see some actual competition
43:43SPEAKERtaking place again.
43:44SPEAKERAnd really kind of calls into question
43:47SPEAKERwhat the future of Nvidia's desktop graphics efforts are.
43:50SPEAKERI mean, let's be real here.
43:52SPEAKERNvidia probably could not give less of,
43:53SPEAKERlike Jensen Huang could not give less of a shit.
43:55SPEAKER- Something like 12 times as much revenue from AI
43:58SPEAKERas from desktop graphics.
44:00SPEAKER- This is not me saying like,
44:00SPEAKER"Oh, Nvidia's are in real trouble here."
44:02SPEAKERBut like the state of their desktop graphics offering
44:05SPEAKERlike does have some questions swirling around it
44:08SPEAKERbetween what's going on with these competing cards
44:10SPEAKERand also some of the problems here
44:12SPEAKERthat we are about to discuss.
44:13SPEAKER- Yeah, so the Nvidia stuff, there's a lot of smoke.
44:17SPEAKERIt's hard to know what's actual smoke and what's just,
44:21SPEAKERwell, what's literal smoke, what's figurative smoke,
44:24SPEAKERand what's just somebody blowing smoke, I guess.
44:28SPEAKER- The 12 volt, two by six thing,
44:30SPEAKERI think we talked about this a little bit.
44:32SPEAKERThere's, once again, Nvidia has this new high power,
44:37SPEAKERmore manageable cable for supplemental power to video cards.
44:42SPEAKERIt's a 600 watt cable.
44:43SPEAKERIt's part of PCI Express now.
44:45SPEAKERIt's part of the PCI Express, PCI 3.0.
44:48SPEAKER- Yeah, we did discuss this recently
44:49SPEAKER'cause I remember being shocked at the revelation
44:52SPEAKERthat this was an Nvidia designed connector
44:54SPEAKERthat got kind of backfilled into a spec.
44:56SPEAKER- Yeah, but I mean, that's how PCI Express happened too,
44:59SPEAKERfor what it's worth.
45:00SPEAKER- Yeah, I mean, anyway,
45:01SPEAKERwe don't have to belabor this point too much,
45:02SPEAKERbut there are at least isolated instances
45:05SPEAKERof this connector melting again.
45:08SPEAKER- So there were a handful of people that came out early.
45:10SPEAKERI haven't seen a whole lot more.
45:12SPEAKERSo it seems like it's maybe a combination
45:15SPEAKERof people who are using the connector
45:17SPEAKERbeyond its rated wear life,
45:19SPEAKERdue to the number of rated duty cycles,
45:23SPEAKERweird aftermarket cables, all that stuff.
45:26SPEAKER- I am, it's definitely not a problem
45:29SPEAKERfor the cards that aren't the 1590.
45:31SPEAKERThe 1590 is just like it's a 575 watt card
45:35SPEAKERand it's a 600 watt cable.
45:37SPEAKERSo if you have any point of failure
45:41SPEAKERwhen you're running on a 1590, it's a little scary.
45:43SPEAKER- Yeah.
45:45SPEAKER- And the kind of TLDR on what happens
45:50SPEAKERis if one or more of the cables that carry the current
45:55SPEAKERon the 12 volt two by six are not connected properly,
46:00SPEAKERthe cards just try to suck all the power that they need
46:03SPEAKERthrough one or two of the cables instead of three.
46:06SPEAKERAnd that's not good.
46:10SPEAKEROr six, I guess, instead of six.
46:11SPEAKERYeah, it seems bad.
46:12SPEAKER- Seems like a questionable design.
46:15SPEAKER- They also have had this ROP problem.
46:17SPEAKER- Yeah, like that seems more damning
46:19SPEAKERthan the power connector stuff
46:20SPEAKERbecause how was this not caught?
46:21SPEAKERLike, come on.
46:23SPEAKER- Yeah, the ROP thing is, we talked about this.
46:26SPEAKERI feel like I'm doing so many podcasts
46:28SPEAKERwhere I talk about this stuff now,
46:29SPEAKERit's hard for me to keep track
46:29SPEAKERof what I've talked about where.
46:31SPEAKER- Fully identify with that.
46:32SPEAKERI think we talked about this briefly
46:34SPEAKERon the patron episode last week, but.
46:37SPEAKER- Yeah.
46:37SPEAKER- So mentioning here, if we are evaluating
46:39SPEAKERthe kind of future of NVIDIA's graphics hardware,
46:43SPEAKERlike this is, some of these cards shipped
46:46SPEAKERwith a number of ROPs, raster operation pipelines disabled.
46:51SPEAKER- Yeah, so the theory is that this is just a matter
46:54SPEAKERof binning, having some unintended consequences.
46:58SPEAKERBinning is when they tested a card
47:00SPEAKERand they over-spec all of these cards now, right?
47:04SPEAKERSo they build them with more graphics pipelines
47:05SPEAKERthan they intend to ship with them.
47:07SPEAKERAnd then they just turn off the ones
47:08SPEAKERthat perform at least well
47:10SPEAKERwhen they're doing the testing on them.
47:13SPEAKER- Right, the problem is when you sell a card at one spec
47:17SPEAKERand then some subset of the cards
47:18SPEAKERthat you sell under that label are actually below that spec.
47:22SPEAKER- Not saying they're not wrong, they didn't fuck up.
47:26SPEAKERWhat I'm saying is the mistake is
47:28SPEAKERthat when they disqualified certain parts of the chip
47:32SPEAKERthat were adjacent to each other,
47:33SPEAKERit disabled entire pipeline, raster operation pipelines,
47:37SPEAKERthat's what the ROP stands for,
47:40SPEAKERthat were not being used then
47:41SPEAKERbecause all of the downstream units
47:44SPEAKERin that ROP were not being used anymore.
47:48SPEAKER- Yeah.
47:49SPEAKER- The performance impact was pretty negligible.
47:51SPEAKERIt seems like I think they said half a percent
47:53SPEAKERof cards are probably affected,
47:55SPEAKERbut it's all the five series cards and it's embarrassing.
47:58SPEAKERIt's a mistake they shouldn't have made.
47:59SPEAKER- Yeah, and reports are coming out in the last day or two
48:02SPEAKERthat it looks like Nvidia has denied them
48:04SPEAKERthat apparently this may affect laptops
48:05SPEAKERwith mobile 50 parts in them as well.
48:08SPEAKER- I don't know.
48:09SPEAKERIt's easy to tell, you just load up GPU-Z
48:11SPEAKERand it tells you how many ROPs you have.
48:12SPEAKERAnd if it's not the number that's on their website,
48:14SPEAKERthen you call them and they send you a new card.
48:16SPEAKERThe annoying thing is you have to go
48:18SPEAKERto the manufacturers if you have an AIB,
48:20SPEAKERwhich means you may be waiting a little bit
48:22SPEAKERto get the replacement card
48:23SPEAKERbecause the supplies are still really tight
48:25SPEAKERon especially the high-end parts.
48:26SPEAKER- Yeah, I guess maybe to focus what I was saying earlier,
48:30SPEAKERlike the questions this raises
48:31SPEAKERaround Nvidia's desktop graphics are like,
48:34SPEAKERwhere are their priorities right now?
48:35SPEAKERLike, I mean, that's a pretty rhetorical question.
48:37SPEAKERI think we know where their priorities are,
48:39SPEAKERbut it's like, you know, if this was really a focus,
48:43SPEAKERif this division or this business was a focus for them,
48:48SPEAKERyou would think the QA effort would be such
48:50SPEAKERthat something like this would have been caught?
48:53SPEAKER- I think that this realistically,
48:56SPEAKERif I'm ranking which of these problems are worse
48:58SPEAKERbetween the 12 volt, two by six and the ROP thing,
49:01SPEAKERthe ROP thing is mostly a paper problem
49:04SPEAKERthat the vast majority of people
49:05SPEAKERaren't going to realize is a problem
49:07SPEAKERunless they load up GPU-Z.
49:09SPEAKER- No, but the second it's discovered
49:10SPEAKERand you find out that you were, let's be real,
49:13SPEAKERthis could affect your $2,800, 50, 90.
49:16SPEAKER- Oh.
49:17SPEAKER- Like that's not a good feeling once you know about it.
49:19SPEAKER- No, 100%, but I guess what I'm saying
49:22SPEAKERis it's an invisible failure,
49:24SPEAKERwhereas melting the cable that the power goes
49:27SPEAKERinto your video card from is bad.
49:31SPEAKERAnd when you, there've been every electronic,
49:34SPEAKERevery electrical engineer in the world apparently
49:36SPEAKERhas tapped in with, hey, this is an easy problem
49:39SPEAKERthat they could have fixed
49:40SPEAKERif they added a couple of circuits to the board.
49:42SPEAKER- That's the bigger point I'm trying to make here
49:44SPEAKERis that just these are things for one of,
49:48SPEAKERlet's be real here,
49:49SPEAKERone of the most valuable companies in the world.
49:51SPEAKERThis doesn't seem great.
49:53SPEAKER- And I wonder how much of this,
49:55SPEAKERI mean, we know brain drain is happening at Nvidia
49:59SPEAKERfrom people who we know who've worked there
50:01SPEAKERfor a really long time.
50:03SPEAKERThe people who had low stock prices
50:07SPEAKERand sold when the stock was at like $900 or whatever
50:11SPEAKERdon't work there anymore.
50:12SPEAKERAnd I'm assuming that that wasn't just
50:14SPEAKERin the us facing parts of the business,
50:16SPEAKERbut in the people who did the power
50:20SPEAKERand the people who did the ROP testing
50:22SPEAKERand all of the other things.
50:24SPEAKER- That's a real interesting problem
50:26SPEAKERto become a victim of your own success
50:27SPEAKERas a large corporation like that.
50:29SPEAKER- I mean, I'm not weeping for Nvidia,
50:32SPEAKERbut yeah, I wonder if they're gonna see a decline
50:35SPEAKERas a result of brain drain at the high end.
50:39SPEAKER'Cause once you have 20 or $30 million worth of stock
50:43SPEAKERand you're 50 years old,
50:47SPEAKERwhat are they gonna give you that's worth coming back?
50:50SPEAKER- Unless you just love the job that much.
50:54SPEAKERI don't think I would still be there.
50:55SPEAKER- I mean, I know a lot of people there
50:57SPEAKERwho are true believers and who are gonna work
51:00SPEAKERuntil they're not able to work anymore, right?
51:02SPEAKERBecause they think that they're building artificial
51:05SPEAKERintelligence, like actual artificial intelligence,
51:07SPEAKERnot Markov chains.
51:12SPEAKERBut also a lot of people don't and just wanna spend time
51:14SPEAKERwith their wives and buy a house on the lake, right?
51:17SPEAKERSo anyway, that's what's up with...
51:21SPEAKEROh, and then the other thing is the paper launch.
51:23SPEAKERLike they haven't...
51:26SPEAKERIt's hard to know whether it's a paper launch
51:28SPEAKERor whether it's just supply is so outstripped by demand.
51:33SPEAKER'Cause the demand, especially on the high end,
51:35SPEAKERis still really, really high.
51:36SPEAKERLike cards are dropping with $800 markups,
51:39SPEAKERlike stock normal ass video cards.
51:42SPEAKER- That's rough.
51:43SPEAKER- And they're gone in like three minutes.
51:44SPEAKERSo Central Computer, our local screwdriver shop
51:48SPEAKERhere in the Bay Area, had a...
51:53SPEAKERYo, we just don't have these.
51:56SPEAKERI've never seen it before on their site.
51:59SPEAKERWhen you search for 5090s...
52:00SPEAKEROkay, so they actually do have 5090s listed on the site.
52:05SPEAKERNow, the only one that has a price
52:08SPEAKERis the MSI G5090 32 GTC Gaming Trio OC Edition,
52:16SPEAKERwhich has a price of $2639.
52:20SPEAKER- That's quite a bit of money.
52:21SPEAKER- Yeah, the water-cooled Supreme, the other MS...
52:25SPEAKERIt's all MSI boards.
52:26SPEAKERThere's one PNY board on here too.
52:28SPEAKERBut for a while, they just had a...
52:30SPEAKERWhen you went to the 5090 page, it just said,
52:32SPEAKER"Hey, we don't have these in bundles, in systems,
52:35SPEAKERor in standalone boards, so please don't call."
52:38SPEAKERWhich I've never seen before.
52:39SPEAKER- That's funny for a retailer.
52:41SPEAKERShout out to Central.
52:42SPEAKER- Yeah.
52:43SPEAKER- Shout out to computer shops.
52:44SPEAKERI know we've said this before,
52:45SPEAKERbut there was an item I have been trying to get my hands on.
52:49SPEAKERIt's just a set of key caps for this keyboard.
52:50SPEAKERIt's nothing crazy, but they have been out of stock
52:53SPEAKERin the normal vendor locations for ages.
52:56SPEAKERAnd I was like, man,
52:57SPEAKERI wish I could get some of those key caps,
52:58SPEAKERbut I just can't find them anywhere.
53:00SPEAKERWhat do you know?
53:01SPEAKEREvery Central in the area around here
53:02SPEAKERhas like two or three of them in stock.
53:04SPEAKERSo I'm just gonna go and buy a set at a store in person.
53:08SPEAKERWhat a concept.
53:10SPEAKER- I love Central so much.
53:12SPEAKERAnd the customer service is kind of bad,
53:16SPEAKERbut it's applied equally to everybody who hits the door.
53:19SPEAKERSo I'm okay with that.
53:21SPEAKER- I've had a decent experience there.
53:23SPEAKER- Honestly, the only time I have a problem
53:24SPEAKERis when I need them to unlock something from one
53:26SPEAKERof the cabinets and there's never anybody around
53:28SPEAKERwhen that happens.
53:29SPEAKER- That's fair.
53:30SPEAKERI've found most of the people there I talk to
53:31SPEAKERto be pretty knowledgeable though.
53:33SPEAKERIt seems like they're actually into the product.
53:35SPEAKER- Yeah, like when you ask them,
53:38SPEAKERso when I ask them for something specific,
53:42SPEAKERthey know enough to know that it's something specific
53:44SPEAKERand they don't try to push me on to whatever else
53:46SPEAKERthey're looking for, like it's really nice.
53:50SPEAKERIt's nice to have that kind of store here.
53:52SPEAKERWe don't have micro centers yet where we are.
53:54SPEAKERAlthough when that one opens in the South Bay,
53:56SPEAKERwe should go.
53:57SPEAKER- Yeah, I'm totally, I'm down, I'm down.
54:00SPEAKERSo yeah, so the page, the 50 series page
54:05SPEAKERhas a bunch of updates.
54:07SPEAKERThe 5090 says we still do not have any 5090 GPUs
54:10SPEAKERfor sale in systems or standalone.
54:12SPEAKERETA is not yet clear.
54:14SPEAKERWe will announce as soon as we receive updates.
54:18SPEAKERExcitement and demand for this latest generation
54:20SPEAKERof Nvidia GeForce GPUs is as high as ever.
54:22SPEAKERWe wish we had them available for you sooner
54:23SPEAKERand in greater quantity.
54:25SPEAKERAs of now, supply is still very limited.
54:27SPEAKERWe will always share the latest updates with you
54:28SPEAKERas we confirm them and that's it.
54:33SPEAKERThey've done five updates since the January 30th launch
54:36SPEAKERof the 5090s.
54:37SPEAKER- That's quite a bit of communication.
54:39SPEAKER- I mean, they have banners at the top of the page.
54:41SPEAKERThere's one that's the RTX 50 series alert sign up,
54:45SPEAKERAMD RX 9000 alert sign up and Ryzen 9 X3D alert sign up.
54:50SPEAKERSo good for them.
54:51SPEAKER- I wonder what the state of 40 series stock is
54:54SPEAKERin the channel these days.
54:55SPEAKERAre they just gone?
54:56SPEAKERIs that why it just completely dried up?
54:58SPEAKERThat's a bummer.
54:58SPEAKER- Nothing.
55:00SPEAKERSo that's the other side of this, right?
55:01SPEAKERIs if you don't wanna get this five series Nvidia card
55:04SPEAKERor a nine series Ryzen or a Battlemage card,
55:07SPEAKERyou can just buy the last generation, right?
55:09SPEAKERNo, get fucked.
55:10SPEAKERThey don't exist anymore.
55:11SPEAKER- Sucks.
55:12SPEAKER- Well, so the nice thing is for GPUs aftermarket stuff
55:18SPEAKERhas been off the table during the two and three series,
55:22SPEAKERespecially generations because of the Ethereum mining
55:25SPEAKERand the number of GPUs that got bought
55:27SPEAKERand then torched doing that.
55:29SPEAKERI think that the 40 series and the 9000 series,
55:33SPEAKERor sorry, 7000 series from AMD are probably safe
55:38SPEAKER'cause they didn't exist until the Ethereum stuff
55:41SPEAKERwas already done.
55:42SPEAKERSo while you might buy something from an AI farm,
55:46SPEAKERit's not quite as bad a life for a GPU
55:49SPEAKERas the Ethereum mining was.
55:53SPEAKERSo if you wanna buy a used 4090,
55:58SPEAKERit doesn't feel great, but I think it's not a terrible,
56:02SPEAKERespecially if you're buying from a normal person
56:03SPEAKERand not somebody who's doing AI stuff.
56:06SPEAKER- Yeah, the only 40 cards that Central has in stock
56:09SPEAKERat this point are from 4060s.
56:11SPEAKER- They'll be around for a long time.
56:12SPEAKER- Yeah.
56:15SPEAKER- You wanna talk about CPUs a little bit?
56:16SPEAKEROh, wait, wait, we forgot one last Nvidia scene drama.
56:23SPEAKERThey killed 32-bit CUDA support for the five series.
56:26SPEAKER- I saw that, that's fresh on the heels of,
56:28SPEAKERor I mean, technically it happened in the same product
56:30SPEAKERas the death of 32-bit PhysX support.
56:34SPEAKER- Well, it's not just 32-bit PhysX support,
56:36SPEAKERit's hardware accelerated PhysX support.
56:39SPEAKERSo that means that the,
56:41SPEAKERI think there were several dozen in like 2008
56:44SPEAKERwhen a Jia was selling PhysX acceleration cards.
56:49SPEAKER- Oh, this was after, wasn't it?
56:50SPEAKERI thought that, I thought a Jia got bought
56:53SPEAKERand discontinued these separate cards
56:56SPEAKERsome years earlier than that.
56:57SPEAKER- So they sold a separate card, they got bought,
57:00SPEAKERbut the separate card and the GPU acceleration
57:03SPEAKERwere the same thing.
57:04SPEAKERSo, okay, history lesson.
57:07SPEAKERA Jia is this company that they wanted to get,
57:11SPEAKERthey saw the success of Nvidia's branding of a video card
57:15SPEAKERprocessor as a GPU.
57:17SPEAKERAnd they were like, hey man, we can do our own PU,
57:20SPEAKERwe're gonna make a PhysX processing unit.
57:22SPEAKER- That's right.
57:23SPEAKER- And so then they did, and they released with it
57:27SPEAKERPhysX middleware that was free for everyone to use.
57:29SPEAKERYou didn't have to pay them per unit sold
57:32SPEAKERor part of your revenue.
57:34SPEAKER- Classic thing, they were in the hardware business.
57:36SPEAKER- Yeah, and then they weren't in the hardware business
57:39SPEAKERanymore, really, 'cause Nvidia bought them
57:41SPEAKERfor their PhysX library.
57:44SPEAKERBut there were games that came out that used the PPU,
57:47SPEAKERor alternately, I think around the GeForce 8800,
57:51SPEAKER8000 series, the first, hold on, what are we on now?
57:55SPEAKERThe 5000, it's like two laps ago maybe, 2008?
58:00SPEAKER- 2008 is when they bought a Jia,
58:01SPEAKERso the cards that came out shortly after that.
58:04SPEAKER- Yeah, so that's, at that point you could say,
58:06SPEAKERhey, I want to use my video card to accelerate PhysX,
58:11SPEAKERor you could just put a second video card in your computer,
58:13SPEAKERwhich was great for Nvidia, they loved that.
58:15SPEAKERSo there were games that came out that utilized
58:19SPEAKERthe hardware physics acceleration.
58:22SPEAKERBatman Arkham Asylum, Mirror's Edge are two of the big ones,
58:25SPEAKERbut like Auto Assault was one of them,
58:27SPEAKERFour Lens 2 was one of them, just two.
58:32SPEAKER- Cryostasis, remember Dave Snyder's game of 2008?
58:35SPEAKER- Cryostasis was one of them, yeah.
58:37SPEAKER- Hadn't had, actually, I've got a list here,
58:39SPEAKERthat's a decent number of games, it looks like.
58:42SPEAKER- It is, there's a bunch of games that you can no longer
58:45SPEAKERplay, there's a bunch of MMOs from that time period
58:47SPEAKERthat just don't exist anymore.
58:50SPEAKERCity of Villains was one of them, right?
58:51SPEAKER- Yeah, yeah, we should stress real quick here,
58:54SPEAKERwe're not talking about your average CPU-based,
58:56SPEAKERor sorry, Havok physics that you've been seeing in games
58:59SPEAKERfor 20 years now, it's pretty serious.
59:03SPEAKERPull up some YouTube videos of some of the PhysX
59:05SPEAKEReffects and the games we're talking about here,
59:07SPEAKERlike there's some like pretty outlandish stuff
59:10SPEAKERthat you don't see in current games.
59:12SPEAKER- It was mostly cloth physics or extra garbage in the level
59:15SPEAKERwere the two main things that seemed to have,
59:18SPEAKERI reviewed a bunch of these cards when they came out,
59:20SPEAKERBFG made one, and also it's worth mentioning
59:26SPEAKERthat we're not, this doesn't have any impact at all
59:29SPEAKERon anybody that uses the software PhysX API,
59:33SPEAKERthat an enormous number of Unreal 4
59:35SPEAKERand 3 games shipped with.
59:37SPEAKER- Yeah, this is like specifically games
59:38SPEAKERthat we're using this version of the hardware-based
59:41SPEAKERacceleration from around this era,
59:43SPEAKERso this is more of a game preservation thing than anything.
59:46SPEAKER- Yeah, and those games will still run,
59:47SPEAKERthey all have a toggle that lets you turn off
59:49SPEAKERPhysX hardware acceleration.
59:51SPEAKERAlso, you can run, if you have a lot of cores in your CPU,
59:55SPEAKERyou can just run PhysX hardware acceleration on your CPU now.
59:58SPEAKERI ran, we tested this during the livestream the other day,
1:00:02SPEAKERand I played Batman Arkham Asylum
1:00:04SPEAKERwith this stuff turned all the way up on a 9800X3D,
1:00:08SPEAKERand it was like 60 frames a second, pretty solid.
1:00:11SPEAKER- Okay, well, did you hit any serious physics calculations
1:00:14SPEAKERthat you could tell, though?
1:00:15SPEAKER- I mean, Batman's cape is on every single shot of that game
1:00:18SPEAKERso we did not, I did not see as much garbage laying around
1:00:23SPEAKERas I remember seeing in those PhysX games.
1:00:28SPEAKERBut yeah, so the other thing that's worth considering
1:00:32SPEAKERabout this is if you really, really care about this,
1:00:33SPEAKERyou can put literally any old Nvidia card
1:00:36SPEAKERinto your machine as a second GPU, and it'll just work.
1:00:40SPEAKERSo anyway.
1:00:42SPEAKER- Yeah, I mean, it's not impossible to still play
1:00:45SPEAKERthose games the way they were meant to be played.
1:00:48SPEAKER- Yeah, so it's a preservation, like you said,
1:00:52SPEAKERit's a preservation issue.
1:00:53SPEAKERIf I'm ranking the severity of the GeForce drama right now,
1:00:57SPEAKERit's like 12 volt, two by six is number one,
1:01:00SPEAKERROPS is number two, price gouging/tariffs/price uncertainty
1:01:06SPEAKERslash availability are number two, ROPS are number three,
1:01:10SPEAKERand then 32-bit CUDA is like a distant 12th.
1:01:13SPEAKER- Yeah, yeah.
1:01:15SPEAKER- So anyway.
1:01:16SPEAKER- But it's still kind of sad to see.
1:01:18SPEAKER- It's a bummer, yeah.
1:01:20SPEAKERI mean, look, I get them not wanting to support that stuff
1:01:23SPEAKERforever and ever, but it would have been cool
1:01:26SPEAKERto build a wrapper for 32-bit CUDA or something like that.
1:01:30SPEAKER- Maybe that'll still come, I don't know.
1:01:33SPEAKERBut I mean, when the GPUs are getting physically
1:01:36SPEAKERas big as they are on these current cards,
1:01:38SPEAKERI guess I can see the need to eliminate things
1:01:40SPEAKERfrom the die that aren't critical anymore.
1:01:43SPEAKER- Well, and it's unclear if this is a need
1:01:45SPEAKERto eliminate something from the die or just,
1:01:46SPEAKERhey, we don't want to have to support this ancient shit
1:01:49SPEAKERthat nobody uses on our drivers anymore.
1:01:50SPEAKER- Yeah, it could also just be that.
1:01:53SPEAKER- You want to talk about CPUs a bit?
1:01:55SPEAKER- Yeah, I don't think there's a ton to update on here
1:01:57SPEAKER'cause most of everything has been out for a while,
1:01:59SPEAKERbut what do you got?
1:02:00SPEAKER- Yeah, we'll rise in 9950 X3Ds as evidenced
1:02:04SPEAKERby the central page that says,
1:02:06SPEAKERhey, do you want to sign up for notifications
1:02:07SPEAKERabout when these are going to be available
1:02:09SPEAKERare probably coming soon.
1:02:11SPEAKER- Okay.
1:02:12SPEAKEROh, has the date actually not been announced yet?
1:02:18SPEAKERHas the date been announced yet?
1:02:20SPEAKER- So anyway.
1:02:21SPEAKER- Publicly announced, you can answer,
1:02:22SPEAKERyou can tell me if the date has been publicly confirmed
1:02:25SPEAKERor not.
1:02:25SPEAKER- I don't know, dude.
1:02:26SPEAKER- Oh, you don't know.
1:02:27SPEAKEROkay, I thought you were being coy
1:02:29SPEAKERabout something you did know.
1:02:30SPEAKER- I do know something, but we got to cut this part out.
1:02:33SPEAKER- Nope, nope, I just looked it up.
1:02:35SPEAKERThey have in fact been announced.
1:02:36SPEAKER- Okay, what's March 12th?
1:02:38SPEAKERSo that's next--
1:02:39SPEAKER- Pricing and date.
1:02:41SPEAKER- It's next Wednesday.
1:02:42SPEAKER- 9900 X3D, which I assume is still 12 cores.
1:02:44SPEAKERI don't have it in front of me.
1:02:45SPEAKER- 12 cores, yeah.
1:02:46SPEAKER- Is 599, the 9950 X3D, which is 16 cores is 699.
1:02:51SPEAKERAnd this is the hybrid, the dual CCD one
1:02:55SPEAKERwhere one has the 3DV cache and a whole buttload L3 cache
1:02:58SPEAKERand one has no 3DV cache that runs
1:03:02SPEAKERat slightly higher speeds.
1:03:03SPEAKER- Which I, you know, I still, I thought it was neat
1:03:05SPEAKERto begin with when I had one of the previous gen,
1:03:07SPEAKERbut I don't know that I'm ready to jump back in.
1:03:09SPEAKER- I think that the big question I have about this
1:03:12SPEAKERis if the Windows Task Scheduler stuff
1:03:15SPEAKERthat they rolled out around the time
1:03:17SPEAKERof the 9,000 series launch is actually going
1:03:19SPEAKERto improve the problems that you and a lot of other people
1:03:23SPEAKERhad with the last gen of these.
1:03:24SPEAKER- To be fair, I didn't have a lot of identifiable problems
1:03:27SPEAKERthat you could trace to the split CCD design.
1:03:31SPEAKER- Yeah.
1:03:31SPEAKER- I didn't get a lot of the stuttering
1:03:33SPEAKERthat was supposed to be the telltale sign
1:03:37SPEAKERthat that was a problem.
1:03:37SPEAKERI did have it assigning games through the wrong cores.
1:03:40SPEAKERLike I did see that happening when I would tab out
1:03:42SPEAKERand look at, or have task manager up or process lasso
1:03:46SPEAKERor whatever I was looking at at the time.
1:03:48SPEAKER- Love process lasso, yeah.
1:03:49SPEAKER- Like I would see game threads ending up
1:03:51SPEAKERon the wrong cores occasionally.
1:03:55SPEAKER- About what you want.
1:03:56SPEAKER- But it never seemed to like manifest as a huge problem
1:03:58SPEAKERin terms of stutters and stuff like that.
1:04:00SPEAKERAnyway, that was the first version of that part.
1:04:02SPEAKERLike that was the first time they had ever even tried that.
1:04:04SPEAKERSo here we are, God, almost two years later now.
1:04:08SPEAKER- Yeah, ish.
1:04:09SPEAKER- With all of the advancements
1:04:12SPEAKERthat have taken place since then.
1:04:13SPEAKERSo I'll be curious to see how this second stab
1:04:15SPEAKERhas turned out.
1:04:16SPEAKER- Yeah, me too.
1:04:18SPEAKERThe other thing that's happened
1:04:19SPEAKERis people have started doing new benchmark passes
1:04:22SPEAKERon the CPU's that came out last fall.
1:04:24SPEAKER- Oh.
1:04:25SPEAKER- We talked about it at the time,
1:04:26SPEAKERbut both AMD and Intel
1:04:29SPEAKERhad technical back-end
1:04:33SPEAKERshenanigans read difficulties.
1:04:34SPEAKERIt wasn't intentional.
1:04:36SPEAKERIt was difficulties where everybody involved
1:04:39SPEAKERfelt like the launch day benchmarks
1:04:42SPEAKERthat were posted on YouTube and across the web
1:04:45SPEAKERprobably didn't actually reflect
1:04:46SPEAKERwhat those chips would be capable of doing in the end, right?
1:04:50SPEAKER- I still see people occasionally
1:04:52SPEAKERvery snidely dropping Zen 5% on social media.
1:04:56SPEAKER- Yeah.
1:04:57SPEAKERSo Wendell over at Level One Text
1:05:02SPEAKERis a real good YouTube channel
1:05:03SPEAKERfor people who like real hardcore nerdery.
1:05:06SPEAKER- Yes, he has a video up that I have not watched yet
1:05:08SPEAKERabout the 9070 XT on Linux specifically.
1:05:12SPEAKER- Yeah.
1:05:13SPEAKER- That's his beat.
1:05:14SPEAKER- Yeah, he's always good for Pharaonic's benchmarks.
1:05:17SPEAKER- Oh, I love Pharaonic's.
1:05:19SPEAKERJust don't read the comments.
1:05:21SPEAKER- Look, he has racks in his lab.
1:05:23SPEAKERHe has racks with multi-phase power in his lab.
1:05:25SPEAKERSo Wendell knows what's up.
1:05:27SPEAKERBut the point is,
1:05:28SPEAKERhe went back and retested a 285K
1:05:31SPEAKERand a 285 non-K machine
1:05:34SPEAKERand was really pleasantly surprised by the perf,
1:05:38SPEAKERby the delta between the benchmarks that we saw at launch
1:05:41SPEAKERbecause they had some power management problems.
1:05:43SPEAKERThey were sleeping the CPU
1:05:44SPEAKERwhen they shouldn't be basically.
1:05:46SPEAKERAnd it's an interesting watch if you care about that.
1:05:50SPEAKERIt made me reconsider the 285
1:05:55SPEAKERas like, I've been on the 7800 X3D for a while now.
1:05:59SPEAKERAnd the thing I will say about it is
1:06:02SPEAKERthe perf is really good in games
1:06:04SPEAKERand it's a little bit frustrating
1:06:06SPEAKERwhen I'm doing productivity stuff
1:06:07SPEAKERcoming from a 24 core Intel machine before.
1:06:13SPEAKER- Prior to this, right?
1:06:14SPEAKER- Yeah, an error like obviously is very good
1:06:16SPEAKERon application productivity type stuff.
1:06:18SPEAKER- Yeah, well, yeah.
1:06:21SPEAKER- It was up there.
1:06:22SPEAKER- It was not as good as 14900K.
1:06:23SPEAKERIt was better than AMD.
1:06:26SPEAKER- Oh, you mean the one that just rules your power bill?
1:06:29SPEAKERIt's still among the fastest.
1:06:31SPEAKER- I'm already paying 500 bucks a month for power.
1:06:33SPEAKERWhy not go, why not add another 20 on there?
1:06:35SPEAKER- Yeah, Tech Power Up did some benchmarks.
1:06:38SPEAKERYou know, AMD and Intel both issued both BIOS updates
1:06:42SPEAKERand also there were Windows updates like scheduler fixes
1:06:45SPEAKERin the wake of Arrow Lake and Zen 5.
1:06:48SPEAKERTech Power Up a few weeks ago,
1:06:49SPEAKERI've got the benchmarks in front of me,
1:06:50SPEAKERdid benchmarks on Arrow Lake 285K
1:06:55SPEAKERbetween like shipping drivers and BIOS and Windows
1:06:59SPEAKERand then the kind of the current updates to everything.
1:07:01SPEAKERSome cases there were huge gaps.
1:07:04SPEAKERLike Alan Wake 2 at 1080p was a difference of
1:07:09SPEAKERand it's like 27 frames per second, pretty huge,
1:07:13SPEAKERbut some games showed next to no change.
1:07:16SPEAKERSo it's very situational, but in some cases
1:07:19SPEAKERthere were pretty dramatic improvements.
1:07:24SPEAKER- Yeah, I was kind of pleasantly surprised.
1:07:27SPEAKERI think we're gonna revisit it at PC World
1:07:28SPEAKERif we can find some time,
1:07:30SPEAKERbecause I wanna spend time using,
1:07:33SPEAKERthe other thing Wendell said is that
1:07:34SPEAKERin his experiential stuff,
1:07:36SPEAKERjust using the machine for a few weeks,
1:07:39SPEAKERhe was really pleasantly surprised
1:07:41SPEAKERby how performant it felt,
1:07:44SPEAKERwhich is like on the eight core machine,
1:07:47SPEAKERI occasionally get OS hitches that I definitely notice
1:07:51SPEAKERand it's like, hey, I launched,
1:07:53SPEAKERit's when I boot the computer up
1:07:54SPEAKERand it's launching all the applications that run at startup
1:07:56SPEAKERand like a few things stall out
1:07:59SPEAKER'cause there's just not a thread available for them, right?
1:08:03SPEAKERAnd having more threads fixes that problem.
1:08:05SPEAKERSo anyway, that's that.
1:08:09SPEAKERThe Ryzen, I think most people redid the Ryzen benchmarks
1:08:13SPEAKERactually when they did the 285K reviews
1:08:17SPEAKERbecause the fixes for that had been in by then.
1:08:20SPEAKERBut yeah, that's what's going on in that front.
1:08:22SPEAKER- That's cool.
1:08:23SPEAKERI was interested in Aero Lake for a little bit.
1:08:25SPEAKERI decided to chill when the gaming performance
1:08:28SPEAKERcame in under par, let's say.
1:08:30SPEAKER- Yeah.
1:08:31SPEAKER- So I've been keeping an eye on Panther Lake
1:08:32SPEAKERis supposed to be the successor,
1:08:33SPEAKERthe first one on Intel's own fab.
1:08:36SPEAKER- Yeah, this is the Intel 18A process now.
1:08:37SPEAKER- Yeah, the 18A process that we've talked about
1:08:39SPEAKERin the past.
1:08:41SPEAKERRumor as of the last few days coming out of analyst spaces
1:08:44SPEAKERis that Panther Lake might now be a 2026 release.
1:08:49SPEAKERUnfortunately.
1:08:50SPEAKER- I would bet dollars to donuts
1:08:51SPEAKERthat they'll roll something out by the end of the year
1:08:53SPEAKERand it'll be a real soft supply at launch.
1:08:57SPEAKER- That was kind of what the analysts were.
1:09:00SPEAKERI think Ming-Chi Kuo was one of the people
1:09:02SPEAKERthat posted about this.
1:09:04SPEAKERIt may be a tail end of 2025 like on paper,
1:09:08SPEAKERbut general availability probably sometime next year,
1:09:11SPEAKERunfortunately.
1:09:12SPEAKERI'm very curious to see how that one turns out.
1:09:16SPEAKER- Yeah, I mean, it's a real make or break situation
1:09:19SPEAKERfor Intel, it seems like.
1:09:21SPEAKER- Yeah.
1:09:24SPEAKER- Like they made this huge investment in US fabs
1:09:27SPEAKERand they have to get something back from it
1:09:30SPEAKERor they're going to have problems.
1:09:34SPEAKER- Yeah, yeah, that's about all there is to say
1:09:36SPEAKERabout that right now,
1:09:37SPEAKERbut maybe a little bit longer to wait on the next gen Intel.
1:09:40SPEAKERAnd I don't know where AMD is at.
1:09:42SPEAKERI mean, if they're just shipping the 16 core gaming
1:09:46SPEAKERZen 5 parts, I'm assuming any next gen CPUs
1:09:50SPEAKERare good ways off for them.
1:09:51SPEAKER- Well, I mean, one of the reasons we said
1:09:53SPEAKERthis was the last time we're gonna talk about this
1:09:54SPEAKERfor a while is my assumption is that we aren't going
1:09:56SPEAKERto have new CPUs until Panther Lake
1:10:00SPEAKERand my assumption is AMD will be on the Zen 5 stuff
1:10:04SPEAKERfor 18 months, at least.
1:10:06SPEAKER- Yeah, I was thinking maybe early next year
1:10:07SPEAKERfor what I assume will be Zen 6 or whatever they call it.
1:10:10SPEAKER- That makes sense.
1:10:12SPEAKER- Can I get the thing in here that I'm actually
1:10:15SPEAKERthe most excited about real quick?
1:10:17SPEAKER- Yeah.
1:10:18SPEAKER- Wildcat Lake.
1:10:19SPEAKER- I don't know what that one is.
1:10:20SPEAKERI saw it here on the list.
1:10:21SPEAKER- So I'm sure you probably remember me having talked
1:10:24SPEAKERin the past about Alder Lake Inn.
1:10:26SPEAKER- Yeah.
1:10:27SPEAKER- Which is probably maybe what's in your Beelink
1:10:29SPEAKERor no, yours is before that.
1:10:30SPEAKERI think yours is 11th gen.
1:10:32SPEAKER- It's the one, Alder Lake Inn is the one before Raptor.
1:10:36SPEAKERWell, it's the one before what became Raptor Lake, right?
1:10:39SPEAKER- Well, Alder Lake was the 12th gen desktop part,
1:10:42SPEAKERbut we're talking CPUs in the small fanless,
1:10:45SPEAKERlow power space.
1:10:47SPEAKER- Gotcha.
1:10:48SPEAKER- Alder Lake Inn, it's like the N100, N200, N150.
1:10:52SPEAKERIt's that line.
1:10:53SPEAKER- Yeah, yeah.
1:10:54SPEAKER- It's kind of the thing you buy right now
1:10:55SPEAKERif you're gonna make a little Plex machine
1:10:57SPEAKER'cause they've got quick sync or like a very powerful
1:11:00SPEAKERhome router, for example.
1:11:02SPEAKER- Mine is an N5105, which is an 11th gen.
1:11:06SPEAKER- Yeah, I think that's right before
1:11:07SPEAKERthe Alder Lake Inn stuff came out.
1:11:09SPEAKERAnyway, these are all rumors, completely subject to change,
1:11:11SPEAKERbut coming out of supply chain or wherever,
1:11:14SPEAKERWildcat Lake supposedly is going to be the successor
1:11:16SPEAKERto Alder Lake Inn.
1:11:18SPEAKER- Oh.
1:11:19SPEAKER- So like full on next gen version of the low power CPUs
1:11:23SPEAKERthat are going into these little kind of
1:11:25SPEAKERvery heavily network enabled router boxes
1:11:27SPEAKERand stuff like that.
1:11:29SPEAKERIt sounds awesome based on these rumors.
1:11:30SPEAKERThese rumors could be, you know,
1:11:33SPEAKERalways grain of salt, I guess, out of the stuff.
1:11:35SPEAKERAlthough I feel like leaks and rumors probably generally
1:11:37SPEAKERfrom vetted people are more accurate than not these days,
1:11:41SPEAKERor at least within a ballpark, right?
1:11:43SPEAKER- Yeah, yeah.
1:11:44SPEAKER- If not fully.
1:11:46SPEAKER- Look, there's enough stuff in the chain
1:11:47SPEAKERthat like the leaks have a better chance of being real now
1:11:51SPEAKERthan they ever used to be.
1:11:52SPEAKER- That's what it is.
1:11:53SPEAKERThere's too much interconnectedness,
1:11:55SPEAKERbetween companies and shipping partners and marketing
1:11:57SPEAKERand you name it, too many people have access
1:12:00SPEAKERto information these days.
1:12:03SPEAKERThe gist of Wildcat Lake is they're talking
1:12:06SPEAKERtwo performance cores and four LPE cores,
1:12:10SPEAKERlow power efficiency cores,
1:12:11SPEAKERwhich is like what's in Lunar Lake.
1:12:13SPEAKER- Yeah.
1:12:15SPEAKER- So, and those are like the next gen versions
1:12:18SPEAKERlike Cougar Cove and Darkmont would be the,
1:12:20SPEAKERI have no idea about the performance of those things.
1:12:23SPEAKERI'd like, I assume those are just a linear increase
1:12:27SPEAKERin performance and not some offshoot
1:12:29SPEAKERthat might make concessions somewhere.
1:12:31SPEAKERBut anyway, and they're saying this would be fabbed
1:12:34SPEAKERon 18A as well.
1:12:35SPEAKER- Oh, that's interesting.
1:12:36SPEAKER- Like very low TDP.
1:12:38SPEAKER- Well, so the Lunar Lake stuff is an evolutionary dead end,
1:12:41SPEAKERbut the performance cores in that
1:12:43SPEAKERand the efficiency cores in that are moving forward
1:12:46SPEAKERin different processors is my understanding.
1:12:48SPEAKER- Yeah, so this report says these things
1:12:50SPEAKERwould be trickling down from Panther Lake.
1:12:55SPEAKERSo, you know, it sounds like if the stuff is real,
1:12:58SPEAKERthe next gen version of this, you know,
1:13:01SPEAKERthese little fanless Intel boxes are everywhere
1:13:03SPEAKERor even ones with fans, like the B links are everywhere now,
1:13:06SPEAKERbut like what's happening in the low power space
1:13:09SPEAKERwith x86 I think is kind of some of the most exciting stuff
1:13:12SPEAKERhappening in CPU's right now.
1:13:13SPEAKER'Cause that means more cool little boxes
1:13:15SPEAKERthat don't suck a lot of power around the house
1:13:17SPEAKERdoing things.
1:13:18SPEAKER- Yeah, I mean, that's exactly it.
1:13:20SPEAKERLike I'm stoked about the ability to run,
1:13:25SPEAKERlike my B-Link is starting to show its age a little bit.
1:13:28SPEAKERIt's having trouble with 4K stuff, quick sync setup.
1:13:32SPEAKERSo yeah.
1:13:33SPEAKER- Like the idea of a little box that pulls 10 or 15 Watts
1:13:35SPEAKERand maybe doesn't even have a fan running in it
1:13:37SPEAKERor maybe a small one that is faster than my gaming PC
1:13:40SPEAKERof eight years ago, pretty rad.
1:13:44SPEAKERYou know, like if that's my router,
1:13:45SPEAKERwhich it's going to be if the stuff comes together,
1:13:47SPEAKERlike that's very exciting to me.
1:13:49SPEAKER- I tested, well, and the other interesting thing
1:13:51SPEAKERthat's happened is Intel as it,
1:13:53SPEAKERwhen Intel sold off the Nuke line,
1:13:55SPEAKERa bunch of other people started making them
1:13:57SPEAKERand they're doing interesting stuff.
1:13:59SPEAKERLike I tested out an MSI QB Nuke,
1:14:02SPEAKERone of their little like 0.8 liter computers,
1:14:05SPEAKERnot whatever they call it, but it had,
1:14:10SPEAKERit was like, it was a box that I looked at and I was like,
1:14:12SPEAKERthese people clearly think that
1:14:13SPEAKERthis is going to be a router, right?
1:14:15SPEAKER'Cause it had two ethernet ports.
1:14:17SPEAKERIt has HDMI, it has an external two pin header for power,
1:14:21SPEAKERfor the power switch.
1:14:22SPEAKER- Oh, interesting.
1:14:24SPEAKER- I mean, I think that's so that if you hang it off
1:14:26SPEAKERof a VESA mount on the back of your monitor,
1:14:28SPEAKERthen you plug that in and you put a button
1:14:30SPEAKERwhere you can see it.
1:14:31SPEAKERBut also it means that if you wanted to use it
1:14:34SPEAKERwith like your Pi KVM, you just run the jumper to the jumper
1:14:37SPEAKERand you're good to go, right?
1:14:39SPEAKERThere's no shenanigans.
1:14:40SPEAKER- That's nice to hear that like known companies like that
1:14:43SPEAKERare getting in on the space.
1:14:44SPEAKER'Cause I'm still maybe a little on the fence
1:14:46SPEAKERabout ordering a no name box from AliExpress
1:14:50SPEAKERto use as my router, so we'll see.
1:14:52SPEAKER- Yeah, but yeah, I think low power, low power PC,
1:14:57SPEAKERlike, look, I plugged the watt meter into my computer
1:15:01SPEAKERthe other day just to see what I was drawing.
1:15:04SPEAKERAnd it's like, I'm pulling 247.1 Watts right now,
1:15:08SPEAKERjust on the desktop without the monitors or the lights
1:15:11SPEAKERor anything else that I'm using.
1:15:12SPEAKER- Okay.
1:15:14SPEAKER- And I'm thinking maybe I should, like, it might be cheaper
1:15:17SPEAKERfor me to buy a $300 NUC that I use for desktop stuff
1:15:20SPEAKERand then switch on the gaming PC
1:15:22SPEAKERwhen I wanted to do the gaming PC stuff.
1:15:23SPEAKER- God, I didn't even think, that's crazy.
1:15:25SPEAKERI didn't even think about something like that.
1:15:26SPEAKER- Yeah.
1:15:27SPEAKER- And you could get a visa mount
1:15:28SPEAKERon the back of your monitor and just stick the little NUC
1:15:31SPEAKERon the monitor and you'll never even see it.
1:15:32SPEAKER- Dangle it off there, yeah, exactly.
1:15:36SPEAKER- All right, let me throw out my pie in the sky finisher
1:15:41SPEAKERfor this little conversation.
1:15:42SPEAKER- Okay, what do you got?
1:15:43SPEAKER- You can shake your head at me
1:15:44SPEAKERand then we can end this episode.
1:15:45SPEAKER- All right, I love shaking my head.
1:15:47SPEAKER- Whenever I finally get whatever this box is going to be
1:15:49SPEAKERthat I ended up buying to replace my router,
1:15:51SPEAKERI think I might just put bare Linux on it.
1:15:54SPEAKER- Oh, Jesus Christ.
1:15:55SPEAKER- I think I might go all the way.
1:15:57SPEAKER- How good are you a firewall configuration, Brad?
1:15:59SPEAKER- Not very.
1:16:00SPEAKER- That's a bad idea then.
1:16:00SPEAKER- That is 100% the thing I need to bone up on.
1:16:03SPEAKER- You need to bone, but you need to bone harder
1:16:06SPEAKERthan you've ever boned before
1:16:07SPEAKERif you're gonna run a naked Linux machine on the internet.
1:16:10SPEAKEROr you're going to, it's either, you have to choose
1:16:13SPEAKERwhether you want to be the boner or the boney.
1:16:15SPEAKER- Yes, I know.
1:16:16SPEAKER- 'Cause if you do not have your firewall shit dialed in,
1:16:19SPEAKERyou will be boned, not boning.
1:16:22SPEAKER- In fairness, it's pretty easy to go maximal firewall
1:16:25SPEAKERand then very slowly walk back the ports you need
1:16:28SPEAKERand the protocols from there.
1:16:30SPEAKER- I just-
1:16:31SPEAKER- It's easy to let nothing through.
1:16:33SPEAKERThe trick is not letting too much through.
1:16:36SPEAKERBut like how much is there in a router?
1:16:38SPEAKERThere's a firewall, you need a DHCP server.
1:16:40SPEAKERYou might have to set some custom routes.
1:16:43SPEAKERYou might have to set some custom routes
1:16:44SPEAKERif you're doing anything fancy.
1:16:46SPEAKER- Yeah, you need the NAT stuff and-
1:16:49SPEAKER- Like, I think it's doable.
1:16:52SPEAKER- I mean, yeah, it's doable.
1:16:54SPEAKERIs it smart?
1:16:55SPEAKERAbsolutely not.
1:16:56SPEAKERNo, that's a bad idea.
1:16:58SPEAKER- Quite a, there are a number of people on Discord
1:17:00SPEAKERwho have been doing it for a while.
1:17:02SPEAKER- Yeah, but like, look, they're just messing with you, man.
1:17:06SPEAKERThis is a terrible idea.
1:17:08SPEAKERLike, here's the thing.
1:17:09SPEAKERYou just need to think about what happens
1:17:12SPEAKERwhen it stops working for two days
1:17:15SPEAKERand how much of a pain in the ass that's gonna be.
1:17:17SPEAKER- Nah, we'll see.
1:17:18SPEAKER- It'd be like, this is where PFSense
1:17:19SPEAKERor OpenSense comes into place, right?
1:17:22SPEAKER- Yeah, maybe.
1:17:22SPEAKERMaybe.
1:17:23SPEAKER- Like, it's, you know, it's a true,
1:17:26SPEAKERit's a vetted open source.
1:17:28SPEAKER- You're not wrong.
1:17:29SPEAKERI would probably start with OpenSense.
1:17:32SPEAKER- I mean, no, you're not.
1:17:32SPEAKER- Probably.
1:17:33SPEAKER- You're gonna do the bad thing.
1:17:35SPEAKERThis is a bad idea, Brad.
1:17:37SPEAKERThis is a bad idea.
1:17:39SPEAKERBut you know what's a great idea?
1:17:42SPEAKERSupporting this podcast.
1:17:44SPEAKERWe are a listener-supported show.
1:17:45SPEAKER- True.
1:17:46SPEAKER- That means we don't take money from ads.
1:17:48SPEAKERWe don't take product placements.
1:17:50SPEAKERNobody's paid us money to talk about this today,
1:17:52SPEAKERexcept for you, the listener.
1:17:53SPEAKERAnd without you, we wouldn't be here,
1:17:55SPEAKERso we appreciate each and every one of you.
1:17:56SPEAKERBut especially, oh, but if you wanna learn
1:17:59SPEAKERhow to support the show, I need to tell you that
1:18:00SPEAKER'cause I haven't done that yet.
1:18:02SPEAKERI'm off my game today 'cause the carbon dioxide level
1:18:05SPEAKERin my office right now is very high
1:18:06SPEAKER'cause we've been talking for a long time.
1:18:09SPEAKER- It's patreon.com/techpod.
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1:18:23SPEAKERAnd well, I mean, those two things are it,
1:18:25SPEAKERbut they're both very good.
1:18:27SPEAKERYou would like them if you go to, yeah.
1:18:29SPEAKER- And you keep this podcast going.
1:18:31SPEAKER- And yeah, and we, yeah, we get paid.
1:18:34SPEAKER- Podcast itself would not exist without you.
1:18:36SPEAKER- Food is important to me, my family,
1:18:38SPEAKERBrad, his family, everyone.
1:18:40SPEAKERSo yeah, with that in mind,
1:18:43SPEAKERwe're gonna thank our executive producer to your patrons
1:18:45SPEAKERwho we think every single week,
1:18:46SPEAKERincluding Jason Lee, Andrew Slosky, Jordan Lippitt,
1:18:51SPEAKERBunny Fiend, Twinkle Twinkie, David Allen,
1:18:54SPEAKERJames Kamik, and Pantheon, makers of the HS3
1:18:57SPEAKERhigh-speed 3D printer.
1:18:58SPEAKERThank you all so, so much.
1:18:59SPEAKER- Yeah, thank you.
1:19:01SPEAKER- And that'll do it for us this week.
1:19:02SPEAKERWe will be back next week
1:19:03SPEAKERwith another edition of the Tech Pod.
1:19:04SPEAKERUntil then, please consider the environment
1:19:06SPEAKERbefore printing this podcast.
1:19:09SPEAKER(upbeat music)