Summary of the week of February 3, 2020

[cobito]

This week seems to have been quite slack in general:

The details of the Apollo computer

A few months ago, it became fashionable to talk about Apollo 11 and dozens of crappy entries about its onboard computer appeared. ArsTechnica has published a complete article of an educational nature (without going into dry details) about this machine with some interesting technical details.

UFS memory is better than SD

And also more expensive. It is the Universal Flash Storage that Samsung is already selling cards for and where compatibility is only found with one model of its laptops. A 64Gb card costs about €25 while a SD card of the same capacity costs about €10 less. In return, we get a memory that by definition includes a non-volatile cache of SLC memory, improved energy management and additional information about performance and temperatures that are sent to the host device.

EPIC donates a quarter of a million to Godot

In a somewhat strange move, the developer of one of the most used graphics engines (Unreal Engine), has donated $250,000 to a project that could become direct competition. Like UE, Godot is open source, although the latter is also free software.

What is a VRM

Today we have one on power electronics with this entry where they explain what a VRM is and how it works. In summary, it is a DC-DC converter that converts voltages of 12 and 5V to the voltages necessary for elements such as the processor or graphics card to function.

TSMC presents its 5nm

The semiconductor manufacturer has revealed some details such as extreme ultraviolet lithography and HMC (High Mobility Channel) which represents an improvement in FinFET transistors.

JEDEC has updated HBM2 memory

Simply the bandwidth increases from 307 to 410GB/s. Both capacities and voltages remain as they were.

Intel continues to make strides for Thunderbolt adoption

Initially, the protocol was closed and proprietary. The only one who could produce the integrated ones with the controller was Intel. A few months ago, it decided that anyone could manufacture their own controllers. And yesterday, it certified the first AMD board with Thunderbolt. Let us remember that the protocol moves through a USB Type-C port, which can handle power, a PCIe line, DisplayPort and its bandwidth is 40Gbps.

Security flaw in Cisco devices

IP phones and routers are the most affected. The vulnerability comes from the Cisco Discovery Protocol. There are even those who have exploited the flaw to install DOOM on a phone.

Micron begins production of LPDDR5 memory

The low-power version of DDR5 (which is not yet available) is already being mass-produced. Initially, these chips will be destined for mobile phones.

Epson PC Portable Q150A

In this entry, we are going to dust off a laptop that appeared back in June 1989 and that originally came with an 8088 at 10MHz, 640kB of RAM, a 3.5" double-density floppy drive and a 20Mb hard drive.

[kynes]

Thank you very much for these summaries. I follow the RSS but sometimes I skip some news, and thanks to these posts I check if there is any interesting news that I have not been able to read.