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7 Jan 2025

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German club ‘deeply shocked’ after 22-year-old footballer found dead
The midfielder played more than 100 games for his childhood club.

The ‘blight’ of Auckland’s stalled housing developments
“Its been a real mystery for everyone in the area,” say neighbours of one of a number of seemingly abandoned, graffiti-covered “eyesores”.

New mother's surprise $9000 tax bill
Megan Hunt was horrified to discover she had a huge bill from Inland Revenue for overpaid Working for Families credits.

Mase Mahonri Schwalger resigns as head coach of Manu Samoa
Mase, was suspended by the Lakapi Samoa Board last year after serious criminal charges were filed against him.

AMD’s monstrous Ryzen 9 9950X3D is ready to stomp all over Intel
At CES 2025, AMD revealed the Ryzen 9 9950X3D for desktop PCs, which the company is calling both the “world’s best gaming processor” and the “world’s best processor for content creation.” On paper, the comparison is brutal: AMD says its new chip is 20 percent faster in gaming than Intel’s Arrow Lake flagship, the Core Ultra 285K. AMD will ship the Ryzen 9 9950X3D and a second Ryzen 9 chip with v-cache, the Ryzen 9900X3D, to PC makers and customers beginning in the first quarter of 2025. Both of AMD’s new desktop chips outperform the existing Ryzen 9800X3D in terms of clock speed and core count — and give buyers additional choices to fill out their gaming systems. Remember, the Ryzen 7 9800X3D obliterated the competition in its review, then immediately sold out. AMD also said that will bring the X3D architecture to laptops with its “Fire Range” lineup of mobile processors, too. (We’ve covered that in a separate story.) Here’s what AMD is launching today: AMD Ryzen 9 9950X3D: 16 cores/32 threads, 5.7GHz turbo, 144MB cache, 170W TDP. AMD Ryzen 7 9800X3D: 12 cores/24 threads, 5.5GHz turbo, 140MB cache, 120W TDP. By comparison, AMD launched the Ryzen 7 9800X3D at the end of October, with 8 cores/16 threads, a base clock speed of 4.7GHz (5.2GHz turbo), a TDP of 120W, and 104MB cache, for $479. What AMD is disclosing today lacks a couple of key metrics: the base clock speed and most importantly, the price. Apparently AMD will release both of those details nearer to the actual availability of the two new processors. AMD believes its Ryzen 9 9950X3D will top Intel’s Arrow Lake chips in content creation…AMD AMD hasn’t changed the design of the Core Complex Die from the 7950X3D: each of the chip’s two CCDs has access to the stacked V-Cache, or SRAM, capable of pulling data from the cached memory rather than pulling it from system memory. The other die features unstacked cache, running at a maximum frequency to allow content-creation apps to run as fast as possible. (AMD’s previous family of Ryzen 7000X3D chips stacked the V-Cache on top of the CCD; the Ryzen 9000X3D family places the CCD on top, stacking the V-Cache underneath it, for better heat dissipation and to achieve higher clock speeds.) From a gaming perspective, AMD is confident that its new Ryzen 9950X3D will handily outperform the Intel Core Ultra 285K. …but also especially gaming, where the Ryzen 9 9950X3D trounces Arrow Lake in most games.AMD At 1080p “High” settings, AMD’s Ryzen 9 9950X3D outperforms the 285K by an average of 20 percent, AMD said. That includes games like Black Myth Wukong (a wash) all the way up to Far Cry 6 and Watch Dogs: Legion, where the performance gap widens to over 60 percent. Compared to AMD’s older Ryzen 7950X3D, the 9950X3D is about 8 percent faster, again at 1080p High settings. AMD didn’t use the same group of games for each test, however. If there has been a flaw in the Ryzen X3D’s armor, though, it’s been in productivity applications. The faster clock speed that AMD has added to the Ryzen 9 9950X3D should help overcome that, AMD believes, and that boost was enabled by the company’s second-gen v-cache technology. In applications ranging from Cinebench 2024 (essentially identical) to Adobe Premiere (a 14 percent advantage to AMD) to Adobe Photoshop (a 47 percent advantage to AMD), AMD believes it holds a 10 percent average performance advantage over Intel’s Core Ultra 285K chip. AMD’s 9950X3D also outperforms its older 7950X3D chip by a substantial amount.AMD Again, a key factor in how these chips will fare will be how AMD eventually prices them. But based upon the existing review of the Ryzen 7 7800X3D and how it’s vanished from store shelves, AMD could have another pair of winners in its hands.

Watch: Rough Cook Strait ferry crossing as huge waves hit
Kate Ghent, who sailed on the Interislander’s Kaitaki from Picton, said there were "some pretty huge waves" crossing the strait.

Shihad set off on their last ever tour
"I don't think we've got to the emotional part yet, the last show is going to be in Wellington, which is our hometown where we, sort of, formed and learned how to be a band. I think that'll be emotional. But all we're concentrating on is making sure ev...

The radical two-division plan for test cricket
The Black Caps could find themselves in a division with six other teams from 2027.

AMD’s Z2 arrives, heralding the next generation of PC gaming handhelds
CES 2025 hasn’t even kicked off yet, but thanks to AMD, we’re already getting a glimpse of what’s to come: the next generation of PC gaming handhelds. AMD announced that its hotly anticipated Ryzen Z2 processor is ready to rock after first revealing the chip at Computex last summer. AMD’s initial Z1 chip powered most of the first wave of gaming handhelds, while Valve’s Steam Deck uses a close custom-made sibling. AMD says the Z2 can provide “console-class” graphics that last for hours and hours, though it didn’t disclose any benchmarks or deeper performance context. (To be fair, that’s difficult since the design limitations of handhelds can drastically affect performance.) AMD The Z2 isn’t just a singular chip, but instead a lineup of offerings that all use Radeon RDNA graphics and Ryzen CPU cores — though the details vary wildly. There’s the standard Z2 with RDNA 3 graphics cores, but also a Ryzen Z2 Go with fewer CPU cores, older RDNA 2 graphics, and (much) lower clock speeds. Meanwhile, the high-end Ryzen Z2 Extreme offers 33 percent more Radeon graphics cores, and they’re the most potent as well, utilizing RDNA 3.5 tech. Of note, last generation’s Z1 was limited to eight Radeon CUs, but this generation’s base Ryzen Z2 chips match the Z1 Extreme’s beefier 12 Radeon CUs. Gaming handheld makers will be able to pick which chip they use depending on the performance and price point they’re targeting. AMD Speaking of, AMD’s slide included a trio of examples of the sort of handhelds these chips could appear in, and they’re heavy hitters: the Asus ROG Ally, Lenovo’s Legion Go, and — wait for it — Valve’s Steam Deck. Don’t get too excited by that seeming revelation though: “There is and will be no Z2 Steam Deck,” Valve’s Pierre-Loup Griffais said on Bluesky. “Guessing the slide was meant to say the series is meant for products like that, not announcing anything specific.” The wait for Steam Deck 2 continues, but look for AMD partners to announce some of their other Ryzen Z2-powered handhelds at CES 2025, with wider availability coming later this quarter.