What do you think stops Intel from creating lower spec CPUs? Presumably fewer transistors means more per wafer (or same size wafer but cheaper production process.)

Design effort, production effort, power efficiencies, cost etc. Design a new CPU for an advanced manufacturing process and this new CPU will be power-efficient, fast, capable etc. Designing a range of different CPU dies for different market shares costs more and takes more effort. Intel are only going to design and produce one Sapphire Rapids die (with possible point revisions as production goes on) and if they make too many good-slash-perfect ones the market for lesser versions of the CPU is going to be lacking in available product. Using this software option to buy or lease extra cores some time after purchase and installation of the chips in servers meets that lower-tier demand.

One issue going forward is that the chip manufacturers are pushing towards "zero defect" wafer production. They won't manage zero, of course but a lot more fully-functional chip dies will be produced per wafer in the future if they succeed. That would mean fewer lower-end spec devices available to the consumer since the lower-spec devices are based on high-end dies that fail part of their testing and have the failed cores and other operating units fused off. A partially-defective die with 4 working cores can be sold for two hundred bucks while a fully functional 12-core monster can be sold for eight hundred but they're the same die, structurally speaking.

Without something like this proposed "pay per performance" option there will be few real lower-end CPUs on the market if the zero defect target is met, and lower-end cores are the majority of devices sold. Deliberately fusing off good cores etc. to make lower-cost CPUs from high-spec ones is the other way to do it but this "pay for IP upgrade" is a better bet. You don't have to buy that extra performance if you don't want it or don't need it from your lower-cost device but if you do want it some time after purchase then it's available to you with a paid-for software "patch".

IBM actually did this back in the 1970s -- they had a range of mainframe computers that were sold at various price points but the CPU unit was identical, just underclocked and with partially disabled functionality on the lower-end models. The owners could buy an on-site upgrade if they needed more CPU capacity at which point an IBM engineer would arrive at their premises, open a panel and set a switch or two and job done. This was colloquially known as the Golden Screwdriver" upgrade.

I can definitely see the utility of this "Golden IP Packet" upgrade for today's data centre operators -- they can buy lower-cost hardware with cheaper partially-disabled CPUs, install it and if they need more CPU capacity later they pay an upgrade fee and they get that extra capacity pretty much instantly rather than buying and installing more powerful servers to cope with increased demand. If they don't need that capacity then no problem, what they paid for at a discount price continues to work as normal.

I have an AMD 3600XT, a mid-range last-gen AMD CPU in my PC at home. It cost less than half the price of the top performer AM4 chips available at that time. I'd jump at the chance to pay AMD maybe two hundred quid for a function upgrade to, say, an AMD 5800X3D but right now my only option would be to pay full price for that chip (ca. 400 quid) and do a teardown and rebuild of my system to install it.

The engines did get re-used -- I think the engines that flew today had flown about eight or ten times each before. They're old tech now though, designed in the 1970s and well behind the modern technology curve even with the upgrades and mods carried out on them over the decades. Time for a new H2/LOX rocket motor design once the existing stock of older RS-25A motors are expended.

Fly and die, it's one way to reach Rocket Valhalla.

The 4080 is now $1200, the fake 4080 aka 4070 is $900. I bought the GTX 1070 for around $380. Yes it was a while ago but not enough to explain more than doubling the price with inflation.

The 1070 ti is PCI 3.0 with 8GB of GDDR5 RAM, 1700MHz clocks, 2400 CUDA cores etc. with a peak compute figure of 8 Tflops and is made up of about 7 billion transistors. The 4090 is PCIe 4.0 with 24GB of GDDR6X RAM, 2200MHz clocks, over 8000 CUDA cores and a peak compute approaching 100Tflops from 76 billion transistors.

I'd say that 1600 bucks for that performance uptick is a bargain, wouldn't you?

Looking at the accessible references about loss of helium from Earth's atmosphere they all seem to derive from a single theoretical paper (Ferguson et al, 1964) which gives a value of 50g/second due to ionisation of helium atoms in the upper atmosphere via cosmic rays and X-rays with the polar magnetic field then accelerating the ionised He atoms out into space. There doesn't seem to be anything later than that 60-year-old paper and nothing I can find that depends on physical observations and/or actual sampling.

The density of particular gases doesn't make that much difference to loss rates, according to other papers I've noted in passing. I think He is supposed to be mostly immune to the "Jensen tail" statistical effect since the nucleus is a lot smaller than the much larger noble gas atoms like Xe and Kr which have a greater cross-section hence the increased loss rates into space. I am no expert on this though.

Gases like xenon and krypton are already refined cryogenically from atmosphere, as a side-process of oxygen liquefaction for industrial processes. Krypton is rarer in the atmosphere than helium and, yes, it is considerably more expensive but it is available to buy.

Helium refined from natural gas wells around the world is cheaper than cryogenic distillation so there has been no real effort to make that process cheaper. If the demand is there then expect the engineering to improve and the cost to come down. No real need for cryogenic distillation of helium for at least the next hundred years or so though, probably.

Few things wrong with the clickbait summary -- helium is being created continuously in the Earth's crust from radioactive decay, it is not "non-renewable". It collects in gas domes close to the surface where we can get at it and there's lots of gas domes we can tap to recover helium, including "spent" oil and natural gas wells which will fill with helium and other radioactive decay product gases like radon over time.

Worst case there's about 5ppm helium in Earth's atmosphere, about two billion tonnes in total which could be concentrated using cryogenic distillation and/or high-pressure filtration using the convenient fact that He is the smallest molecule around. Adding to that possible source, each tonne of spent nuclear fuel produces about 20 grams of He every year due to radioactive decay.

Helium may become more expensive but it's not going to run out during the Anthropocene at current rates of consumption (ca. 15,000 tonnes a year according to market reports).

Yeah. But they go to a place to escape theirs and drag their culture with them. Mexicans do it here. They leave Mexico because it's shitty. Then they start to prosper in the US and the first thing many of the ungrateful assholes do is fly a Mexican flag above their home.

They learned from the best, like Sam Houston who emigrated to Mexico and then a few years later he was flying the flag of the USA in Mexico. Total failure to assimilate in his adopted country there.

Media in the UK carried out a few reports of the Cletus Safari sort after the Brexit vote, asking folks who had voted Leave why they had done so. Generally they wanted the Polish plumbers, Bulgarian NHS cleaners, Romanian care home kitchen workers and the like to go back where they came from. Economics, sovereignty, sunlit uplands, they didn't care about those, they just wanted the smelly foreigners they encountered on British streets to go away.

Occasionally they'd have an epiphany, like the Welsh guy who owned a florist shop and was glad we were out of Europe and the foreigners had mostly left his small town but the refrigerated trucks from Holland delivering fresh-cut flowers to his shop weren't turning up as often and the prices had gone up and couldn't the Government do something about it for him as a special case?

I thought the immigration concerns centered around Russian immigrants as well.

It started with the Poles, then the Romanians and other eastern Europeans, talking funny in the supermarket and opening their own shops selling food in foreign language wrappers and... Lots of xenophobes here in the UK, on the left and on the right too who ignore the fact that the history of this nation is made up of immigrants, from the Beaker People through to the Romans, Angles and Saxons, Vikings, Normans, Dutch etc.

Sunak is rich and well-spoken and doesn't smell of curry. He went to good schools and is more English than American-born Boris Johnston. The colour of his skin doesn't matter, it's the colour of his money that counts.

My commie socialist un-American government covers the cost of all prescriptions so I wouldn't know what this "price hike" you speak of is. I assume it's a Patriot Freedom Eagle Liberty thing but I could be wrong.

I couldn't give 2 squirts of piss about the pharma industry, you imbecile.

Funny you should mention that. Currently I take two pills a day that allow my bladder to have a mostly-unobstructed connection to the outside world. Before I started taking these pills I had a hose running up my urethra and a disturbingly warm plastic bag of piss strapped to my leg, sloshing around when I walked. Thanks, Big Pharma! (or as I like to call them, Big Quality Of Life Extension.)

The Xuntian telescope is intended to work as a sky survey telescope, recording large swathes of the celestial sphere over its lifetime rather than focussing in on small parts of the sky as the Hubble did, to push deeper into the cosmos and further back in time.

There's a Youtuber who presents Chinese space news on a channel called Dongfang Hour who posted a general guide to the Xuntian a few months ago. He discusses comparable fields of view and the like between Hubble and the new telescope, including showing image examples modelled with Stellarium. There is more technical detail on the telescope (instruments, pointing accuracy, FoV etc.) in published data you can read linked from the brief Wikipedia article on the Xuntian.

Its light grasp is about the same, it has an off-axis folded optical path rather than the Cassegranian optics of the Hubble which needs a hole in the centre of the mirror to pass the light back to the instruments.

The Xuntian is a different telescope to the Hubble, it's intended to be a wide-field survey telescope (F/14 rather than the narrower field of the Hubble at F/24). It benefits greatly from modern instrumentation with an 2.5 gigapixel imaging sensor compared to the Hubble's 15 megapixel sensor which was state-of-the-art back in the 1980s.