Month: April 2022

Enlarge / Intel's 12th-gen Core i3 and i5 CPUs are good options if you want good performance but need to save money. (credit: Andrew Cunningham)

It hasn't been a great time to build a computer on a budget. Some of that is due to ongoing supply issues and a particularly nasty GPU shortage (albeit one that may be very gradually easing). And some of it is because the products on offer haven't improved much lately—Intel's best budget and midrange processors were stuck with an aging architecture because of manufacturing problems, and AMD chose to focus on high-end products instead.

In anticipation of AMD's new sub-$200 processors, today we're looking at a pair of Intel's best sub-$200 processors in years. The Core i5-12400 ($210 with a GPU, $180-ish without one) is a six-core processor that offers great performance for budget-minded gaming PCs and anyone who wants to do light photo and video editing work without spending tons of money. And the Core i3-12100 (around $150 with a GPU or $120 without) is a quad-core chip that can handle games when paired with a GPU but is ideally suited for browsing, office work and schoolwork, video calls, and anything else you might want from a basic desktop in a home office setup.

Performance and power efficiency

We're primarily comparing the Core i3-12100 and Core i5-12400 to their immediate predecessors: the Core i3-10100, the Core i5-10400, and the Core i5-11400. We also threw in the Ryzen 5 3600 as a comparison point, which used to sell for $200 but hasn't been widely available at that price for a while; comparisons to the newer Ryzen 5 5500 and 5600 CPUs will follow after those chips have been released.

Enlarge / The crew of NS-20 view the New Shepard spacecraft and rocket prior to launch. (credit: Blue Origin)

Welcome to Edition 4.37 of the Rocket Report! The big event this weekend is a wet dress rehearsal for NASA's Space Launch System rocket, which begins on Friday and is presently scheduled to conclude on Sunday. Ars will have a full preview story on Friday morning, so be sure to check it out.

As always, we welcome reader submissions, and if you don't want to miss an issue, please subscribe using the box below (the form will not appear on AMP-enabled versions of the site). Each report will include information on small-, medium-, and heavy-lift rockets as well as a quick look ahead at the next three launches on the calendar.

Virgin Orbit loses $157 million in 2021. In its first financial results since going public in December after a merger with a special purpose acquisition corporation, Virgin Orbit announced Tuesday a net loss of $157.3 million for 2021 on $7.4 million in revenue. That is compared to a net loss of $121.6 million on $3.8 million in revenue in 2020, SpaceNews reports. Despite the significant loss, the launch company emphasized in an earnings call the increase in revenue, primarily from two LauncherOne missions conducted in 2021.

Enlarge / Firefighters from Stockton, California, put out flames off of Hidden Valley Rd. while fighting a wildfire, Friday, May 3, 2013 in Hidden Valley. (credit: Daria Devyatkina / Flickr)

In the western United States, summer 2018 was a bad time for wildfires. In all, according to the government of California, 7,948 separate fires saw 1,975,086 acres burnt to a crisp, 24,226 structures destroyed or damaged, and 100 confirmed deaths. In the following summers, things didn’t improve.

New research from a team assembled by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and various universities suggests that, if climate mitigation efforts don’t go far enough, summer wildfires will only get worse. In a worst-case scenario, the research said that the problems caused by fires in the Pacific Northwest could result in a tripling of air pollution.

“This is the pathway we want to avoid at any cost,” Meiyun Lin, one of the authors of the paper and a NOAA researcher, told Ars.