Month: October 2022

Enlarge / A Mazda RT-24P emerges from the Catesby Tunnel. (credit: Multimatic)

A tip of the hat to the editor over at Dailysportscar this morning for reminding me of one of the cooler bits of industrial repurposing in the automotive world. It's a Victorian railway tunnel in England that saw its last train in 1966 but is now entering its second life as an advanced aerodynamics test facility and an interesting alternative to a wind tunnel.

The Catesby Tunnel can be found in Northamptonshire, but more importantly it's in the heart of what's sometimes called the UK's motorsport valley because of the concentration of Formula 1 teams—Mercedes, Aston Martin, Alpine, Williams, and Red Bull—and their suppliers. Originally built in 1897, it was part of the Great Central Line and connected London with the industrial cities of Manchester and Sheffield.

But the UK's train network was devastated in 1963 by the Beeching cuts, where 3,000 miles of railway were torn up, market towns and villages were cut off from the rail network, and the nation—like so many others—started becoming much more car-centric. Ironic, then, that the tunnel is, too, more than 50 years later, thanks to a company called Aero Research Partners.

Enlarge / Intel's new flagship desktop CPU, the Core i9-13900K. (credit: Andrew Cunningham)

When AMD brought the first Ryzen processors to desktops in 2017, the chips' secret weapon was cores. AMD couldn’t match Intel’s number of instructions-per-clock or hit the same clock speeds, but what it could do was sell you six or eight reasonably performant processor cores at the same price Intel charged for four.

The 12-core and 16-core options came a couple years later, bringing high-end workstation performance to much less expensive PCs—and forcing Intel to follow suit. That brought down costs. In 2014, an 8-core CPU cost $999 on top of a pricey workstation motherboard; today, you can get 8-core chips for less than $300 and pop them into an $80 board if you want.

Five years after Ryzen debuted, the shoe is on the other foot. AMD now has the technological lead, in terms of instructions-per-clock, CPU manufacturing, and power efficiency. But by throwing more cores at the problem and pricing its chips aggressively, Intel has put together a desktop lineup that’s easier to recommend than AMD’s, even though AMD just fielded its fastest desktop processor lineup ever.