Tag: TechTips

Enlarge / This is not what a healthy lumbar vertebra is supposed to look like. (credit: Scorrano et al. 2022)

The eruption of Mount Vesuvius buried the Roman city of Pompeii in ash in 79 CE. Anthropologists recently sequenced ancient DNA from one of the victims, a man in his late 30s, providing a glimpse into the family background of a Roman citizen.

The results also suggest that he suffered from a tuberculosis infection in his lower spine. In one of the victim’s vertebrae, the study found DNA from the bacterium that causes tuberculosis, suggesting that the infection had traveled through the bloodstream from his lungs to his lower spine.

Pompeii man was Italian

A team led by anthropologist Gabriele Scorrano of the University of Rome sequenced the genome of the victim, which revealed, unsurprisingly, that man was of central Italian descent. Although the ancient man’s genome didn’t yield much new information about life in Pompeii, it proves that bones from Pompeii may still contain enough DNA to sequence—and that could be exciting news.

Enlarge / This “170W” number caused some confusion earlier this week because there are so many different numbers you need to know to understand CPU power consumption now. (credit: AMD)

AMD released some of the first details about its upcoming Ryzen 7000 processors, 600-series chipsets, and the new AM5 CPU socket earlier this week. We learned that Ryzen 7000 chips will perform at least 15 percent faster than comparable Ryzen 5000 CPUs and that they’ll require DDR5 RAM. We learned that all Ryzen 7000 chips will come with integrated RDNA2-based GPUs, though AMD still plans to offer a separate line of APUs with more capable integrated graphics for people who want to play games. And we found out some details about how PCIe 5.0 support will work for SSDs and GPUs.

Another bit of information AMD gave was about the AM5 socket’s power limits—the amount of power an AM5 socket will be able to provide to a processor. Power limits have become more important for PC builders and enthusiasts as core counts have increased and power consumption has gone up. Some of our recent Intel CPU reviews have explored how differently the same processor can perform with different power settings, though we’ve also discovered that boosting performance this way can have diminishing returns (that is to say, you can double your power use without doubling your performance).

AMD’s processors can work similarly, though the terminology is different. Intel uses different power limits, with the PL1 value determining power usage under a sustained workload and the PL2 value determining how much power the CPU can use in short bursts (a third number, Tau, defines how long the CPU will run at that PL2 limit). AMD has a few acronyms for different power figures, but the most relevant is package power tracking (PPT). PPT is the maximum power that a CPU package can draw from the processor socket.

Enlarge (credit: Getty Images | Diyun Zhu)

Three Republican senators are proposing a law to prohibit app stores from carrying apps that accept payments using China’s digital currency. The “Defending Americans from Authoritarian Digital Currencies Act” would prohibit app stores in the US from carrying or supporting any app “that supports or enables transactions in e-CNY,” also known as the digital yuan or digital renminbi.

The app stores would also be prohibited from supporting or enabling digital yuan transactions. The bill defines an app store broadly as “a publicly available website, software application, or other electronic service that distributes applications from third-party developers to users of a computer, a mobile device, or any other general purpose computing device.”

The bill was proposed by Sens. Tom Cotton (R-Arkansas), Mike Braun (R-Indiana), and Marco Rubio (R-Florida). “The Chinese Communist Party will use its digital currency to control and spy on anyone who uses it. We can’t give China that chance—the United States should reject China’s attempt to undermine our economy at its most basic level,” Cotton said in a press release on Thursday.