Category: Technica Aquarius

Enlarge / The 5800X3D is Zen 3 with extra cache. (credit: AMD)

AMD will release its latest experiment in CPU packaging to the general public next month. The Ryzen 7 5800X3D, announced at the Consumer Electronics Show in January, is an eight-core Zen 3 processor that uses unique memory-stacking technology to triple the amount of L3 cache in the standard Ryzen 7 5800X—96MB of L3 cache instead of 32MB.

The result is a chip that ought to run games 15 percent faster than a Ryzen 9 5900X, according to AMD’s figures. The company also says the chip will run games faster than Intel’s flagship Core i9-12900K, though it didn’t say by how much. The processor goes on sale for $449 starting on April 20th.

The 5800X3D and the half-dozen low-end Zen 2 and Zen 3 processors AMD announced today are likely the last hurrah for Socket AM4, the physical socket that AMD has been using since just before the introduction of the first Ryzen chips back in 2017. The years since have seen AMD regain its competitive footing against Intel thanks to several strong iterations on the original Zen architecture and use of TSMC’s 7 nm manufacturing process.

Enlarge (credit: Getty Images | Vertigo3d)

VPN operator TorGuard has agreed to block BitTorrent traffic on its US-based servers to settle a piracy lawsuit filed by a variety of companies that own movie copyrights.

“Pursuant to a confidential settlement agreement, Plaintiffs have requested, and Defendant has agreed to use commercially reasonable efforts to block BitTorrent traffic on its servers in the United States using firewall technology,” according to a joint stipulation filed on March 3 by plaintiffs and defendant VPNetworks, which does business under the name TorGuard. The plaintiffs’ claims against TorGuard “are hereby dismissed with prejudice, each party to bear its own costs and attorneys’ fees,” said the filing in US District Court for the Southern District of Florida.

TorGuard says it operates VPN servers in 50 countries, so its users can presumably still use BitTorrent by connecting to a non-US server. Though torrenting is widely used for piracy, the peer-to-peer technology is also used for legal distribution of files such as Linux ISOs and many types of content on the Internet Archive.