Summary of the week of May 5, 2025

[cobito]

The front page returns after a couple of weeks off:

Memory writing record

A Chinese research team has published an article in the journal Nature where they say they have managed to increase the writing rate in non-volatile memory by 4 orders of magnitude, doubling the performance of the fastest static RAM memory.

RTX 50 series prices start to drop

A strong euro and weaker demand than expected have caused the price of the RTX 50 series to drop in Germany and France. The drops are up to €80 and, although they may seem generous, they are small compared to the starting prices.

Scythe's European subsidiary closes its doors

Scythe's European subsidiary has decided to close up shop due to solvency problems and after a few weeks with lower-than-usual stock across the continent.

USB 2.0 turns 25

A week ago, USB 2.0 turned 25. The second version of the standard multiplied the speed of its predecessor up to 480Mbps, an incredibly fast rate compared to what was seen back in 2000.

Ryzen 9 9950X3D

A few days ago, someone brought us a Ryzen 9 9950X3D. The processor takes the bronze medal in the overall ranking with over two million points that it achieves thanks to its 16 Zen 5 cores, 128Mb of cache and a TDP of 170W.

CUDA stops supporting several GPUs

Nvidia has stopped giving CUDA support to Maxwell, Pascal and Volta GPUs. For now, version 12.x still allows programs to be compiled and executed on these architectures, but in the next major version, they will stop working.

New Intel update

Intel has published a microcode update for generations 13 and 14 that improves voltage stability. This makes one think that the patches that have been published have not fully mitigated the initial problems.

Toshiba will not sell the N300 24TB in Europe

Toshiba has said that Europeans are not consuming enough large hard drives, so it has decided not to sell its 24TB N300 models here, which are intended for small businesses and the domestic sphere.