Everything the anchors say on this tape, story by story.
GRANT BRICKMAN: A new memory idea wants SRAM speed with five times the room, and a famous ex-chip boss is involved.
GRANT BRICKMAN: A new kind of memory called Z2RAM wants the speed of one chip and the room of another. Kai is at the chip fab. ▶
GRETA FOOTNOTE: ComputerBase reports Nagare Labs is developing it, and former Intel boss Pat Gelsinger is involved in the project. It is still in the lab. ▶
KAI: Huge! Z2RAM blends the strengths of SRAM, DRAM and NAND. The first stage aims for more than five times the capacity per area. ▶
KAI: So the area of a 64 megabyte SRAM chip could hold about 320 megabytes of Z2RAM, with bandwidth close to SRAM. Huge. Also, USB-C should be reversible everywhere. ▶
KAI: This is file footage of a chip line, where memory like this would be made if it leaves the lab. The report says the idea goes back to research at Georgia Tech. ▶
GRETA FOOTNOTE: The catch: the targets still have to be met. The report says market readiness is expected within ten years, and AI accelerators running large models could benefit most. ▶
GRETA FOOTNOTE: It names Nvidia's Groq-3 LPUs as a possible fit, since they carry around 500 megabytes of SRAM per chip. ▶
GRANT BRICKMAN: Ten years. I once waited that long for a teletext page to reach the sports scores. Patience pays, Greta. ▶
GRETA FOOTNOTE: That is not the same thing, Grant. ▶
GRETA FOOTNOTE: Snake is back on a display salvaged from an old DVD player, and it is gloriously bad.
GRETA FOOTNOTE: For viewers just joining: we first told you about this Friday 09:48 today. Ada took the snake to the street to see what people think. ▶
ADA: Huge fan of this build! A Snake game on a seven-segment display from an old DVD player. I asked the street if they would play it. ▶
PASSERBY: Each segment is a piece of the snake? Honestly, that's more legible than my last spreadsheet. ▶
PASSERBY: The food looks like the snake? So the snake eats itself and nobody can tell. That is just lunch hour. ▶
ADA: That's the catch, actually. The food is identical to one of the snake's own segments. Gloriously confusing. ▶
PASSERBY: Worth doing badly, they say? I'd play it. My expectations are already very low resolution. ▶
PASSERBY: Taking apart an old DVD player for the display is exactly right. Nobody ever put a movie in that thing anyway. ▶
GRANT BRICKMAN: A snake made of segments. Splendid. Does it come with a remote, Greta? ▶
The Hype Index (PXL)
GRANT BRICKMAN: The Hype Index: Minecraft agent swarms, a tiny world model and DOOM as a Transformer top the wire.
GRANT BRICKMAN: Time for the Hype Index, where we measure how loudly the internet is shouting about things. Vera has the board. ▶
DR. VERA VECTOR: Top of the wire: 307 points on Hacker News for AI agent swarms in Minecraft and Mindustry. 229 points for a tiny world model on a Pico 2 W. ▶
DR. VERA VECTOR: And 98 points on Hacker News for Show HN: I Turned DOOM into a Transformer. Games and AI, holding hands again. ▶
DR. VERA VECTOR: Desk volume over 24 hours: tech, 30 stories. AI, 30 stories. Gaming, 30 stories. A suspiciously fair three-way tie. ▶
GRETA FOOTNOTE: Thirty, thirty, thirty. Somebody either balanced the newsroom or the bullet point was lazy. ▶
DR. VERA VECTOR: Loudest words: UND in 12 headlines. DIE in 11 headlines. EIN in 8 headlines. The wire is mostly connecting words today. ▶
GRANT BRICKMAN: Und, die, ein. The hottest trend in the world is conjunctions. I said it first. ▶
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DIRECTOR MARGE: Side effects include silent doorbells, blinking routers, lamps that sulk, sudden eye contact with the toaster, a fondness for light switches. We are out of time.
Real or PXL?
GRANT BRICKMAN: Correct! You spotted the real one. I said 'udderly' myself the whole time. Well done, viewer.
GRANT BRICKMAN: Ha! PXL made that one up, my friend. Nobody builds a metronome console. Do keep up.
GRANT BRICKMAN: Time's up! Even the cows moved faster than you.