NZCity NewsLinks -

All Links

16 May 2025

Search

Judith Collins defiant over survey involvement: 'The Greens are frankly bonkers'
The Public Service Minister claims questions around religion, te reo Maori and rainbow identities infringed on people's privacy.

PGA Championship: Ryan Fox starts strong at Quail Hollow with four-under first round
Ryan Fox has taken his winning form into the first round of the PGA Championship.

On The Up: Napier nonagenarian gears up for possible final 10km at Hawke’s Bay Marathon
Nearly 8000 participants are expected for this weekend's Hawke’s Bay Marathon.

On the Up: Hawke’s Bay bus driver’s shelter project keeps kids warm and dry
His bus, known as the 'music bus', features daily singalongs and games.

Unclear how much abuse in care redress will reach survivors
Some $533.5 million has been earmarked, but the Minister's office cannot confirm how much will be spent on administration.

Transpower warns of higher blackout risk in winter 2026
Previous estimates had the margin between demand and supply lasting until 2030, but that has reduced dramatically.

Huge demand for Ryzen X3D chips sparked a crazy quarter for CPUs
The CPU market experienced its most tumultuous quarter in some time, decreasing as a whole for AMD and Intel in terms of unit shipments. As Intel struggles, however, its competitors are seizing opportunity where they can. Mercury Research released its report for the CPU market for the first quarter of 2025, and behind the numbers are multiple stories to tell. Arm’s market share has finally broken into double digits. AMD, meanwhile, is all over the place: strong in servers, especially strong in desktop PCs, but unexpectedly weak in notebook shipments. Overall X86 processor units declined, Mercury said. That’s normal for the second quarter, as hardware sales tend to crest in the fall and drop in the spring or summer. (Mercury saves this precise information for its paid clients.) Total X86 share — including PCs, embedded processors and systems-on-a-chip (SOCs) like game processors, again favors AMD, as it grew 1.5 percentage points to 27.1 percent. Intel holds the remaining 72.9 percent. Subtract embedded and SOC numbers, however, and AMD lost slightly, shrinking 0.3 percentage points to 24.4 percent and leaving Intel with the remainder. Mercury Research Both AMD and Intel also saw sequential increases in server processors, as well, supporting what seems to be Wall Street’s belief that the more silicon shipped into the enterprise and AI space, the better. Compared to the same quarter last year, server processor unit shipments grew a whopping 20 percent, Mercury found. Arm continues to surge And Arm? That’s on the the rise, too, reaching double-digit market share in the client PC market, which includes PCs and Chromebooks. PCs, Chromebooks, and Apple Mac PCs with Arm chips inside them now make up 13.9 percent of the market, up from 10.9 percent in the fourth quarter of 2024. It’s the first time Arm has reached double digits in overall share, including servers — that climbed from 9.6 percent in the fourth quarter to 11.9 percent in the first quarter of 2024. Mercury Research “While Apple’s Mac shipments were lower, we noted a modest increase in ARM CPUs going into Copilot enabled PCs,” Mercury principal analyst Dean McCarron said in an emailed statement. “However, the overall estimate for ARM client was much higher in the quarter primarily to what we believe was a large increase in shipments of processors into Chromebooks.” Mercury acknowledged, as it has in the past, that it has more difficulty tracking the Chromebook processor market than the major PC vendors. Still, he said, “the increase in ARM Chromebook activity in the past quarter also strongly supports a large increase in ARM CPU shipments into the segment” alongside wins for Intel’s X86-based N-series chips as well. AMD: up and down, all at once Intel, of course, has weathered the departure of one CEO, the hiring of another, and layoffs which have stitched together both administrations. Both AMD and Qualcomm have benefited. The unexpected surge in AMD’s desktop shipments took an unexpected turn. Normally, consumers buy PC processors during holiday sales. But Mercury found that consumers snapped up AMD’s Ryzen 9000 (Granite Ridge) as well as the 9000X3D versions of those CPUs, pushing the selling price of AMD’s desktop (and overall client) to record levels. The average selling price actually exceeded Intel’s ASP for the first time ever, McCarron said. Mercury Research “The average price increase [was] so large that AMD’s revenues were up substantially and set new records even though desktop unit shipments declined and are less than half of AMD’s peak for the segment,” Mercury’s McCarron wrote. AMD’s growth in the server space was “multiples” of Intel’s own, McCarron said, setting a new record high at 27.2 percent overall, AMD, however, couldn’t keep up with the competition in mobile. Though AMD and Intel both declined, Intel’s declines were much smaller than AMD, and so it gained 1.2 percentage points of market share. Mercury attributed that to Intel capitalizing on its traditional success in business PCs, and AMD suffering normal declines. (PC vendors and especially Microsoft have pushed hard for customers to replace their Windows 10 PCs with a Windows 11 machine when Windows 10 support ends this October.) Mercury Research Qualcomm has yet to launch a desktop CPU, too, meaning that Arm’s influence in the PC market has focused solely on notebook PCs. However, that drop was partially offset in AMD’s growth in SOCs, which basically equate to the processors found in game consoles. Here, AMD gained 1.5 percentage points. The one word which didn’t appear in Mercury’s report: tariffs. PC vendors have said previously that the CPU market is one segment that does not suffer from tariffs, as the three top CPU vendors all have their “point of origin” in the United States.

The ugly plush toy having its moment, even in NZ
Seen swinging from the luxury handbags of trendy A-listers, the collectible Labubu plush is everywhere.

Christchurch health workers share struggles as sector faces increasing pressure
"Waitlist to get into the spinal service, two spinal unit in New Zealand both of which have long waitlists," Hall said. "New acutes are waiting in the acute hospitals to come across to the units because of a lack of space. And some innovative things ha...

Rotorua tourism ‘on the up’ as city eyes future with investment and planned growth
City moving out of the twin shadows of Covid and emergency housing debate.

Social services react to damning report into Oranga Tamariki
The Auditor-General said now knowing the impact cuts would have on children and their families was "unacceptable".

I spent $27 and future-proofed my home network, forever
About a week ago, I decided I would never buy another Ethernet cable, ever. If you’re like me, you have a box or drawer with dozens of cables. And while some cables have specific connections, like USB-C, my wired network (such as it is) is just a random collection of colored Ethernet cables with tiny little markings telling me what they can or can’t do. How much data can that cable transfer? I had no idea. And that’s bad. I had never really thought about which Ethernet cables were being run between my cable modem, router, Xbox, and desktop PC. But I had performed speed tests more than once, and worried that my network was running slower than usual. And I also knew the problem: my network would run only as fast as its slowest segment. If my Ethernet cables were transferring less data than my router or gateway, I was potentially wasting money. I didn’t need to spend time researching the fastest mesh router or the best Internet gateway. If my cables were ancient, my entire network would be bogged down by my slowest cable. If my ISP quietly increased the speed of my broadband connection, I might not see any benefit. And I had already found an old Cat5 cable hooked up to my Xbox, a standard which had been basically extinct for about two decades. Ew! A Cat5 cable may be good enough for your current router, but it might not be for long.Mark Hachman / Foundry About a week before my colleague Dominic Bayley published a helpful explainer on the differences between Ethernet cables, I researched the problem myself. Ethernet comes in different categories, all the way from the ancient Category 3 to the latest Category 8. So Category 8 is the latest and greatest? OK, fine. How much does a Category 8 cable cost? Basically nothing, as it turns out. I discovered I could buy a five-pack of color-coded, nylon-braided Category 8 Ethernet cables for $26.99 on Amazon. Broadband services are always getting faster. Cable modems are, too. But even the fastest cable modems and broadband plans offer just a few gigabits per second, while this Cat8 cable offers a whopping 40Gbits/s of speed. Owning color-coded, braided Ethernet cables for about the price of a nice lunch made me happy.Mark Hachman / Foundry For me, it was a no-brainer. I bought the cables from Amazon, quickly swapped out my existing cables for the new color-coded options, and resolved never to think about what Ethernet cable I owned ever again. Get a five-pack of color-coded, nylon-braided Cat8 Ethernet cables for $26.99Buy Now at Amazon