Summary of the week of February 17, 2020

[cobito]

AVIF vs JPEG

Netflix wants to leave the JPEG format behind to display images on their platform. To know which option could be the most valid, they have analyzed AVIF as a potential substitute and have published their impressions.

Threadripper in Windows and Linux

Larabel has published an interesting comparison between Windows and Linux when using this heavyweight from AMD. The analysis consists of checking how each system behaves with a different amount of available cores, from 16 to 64 with SMT. Linux wins and important differences are noticed between Windows 10 Pro and Enterprise.

AMD E-350

Namiga has brought us a portable AMD CPU from 9 years ago. It is a Bobcat with 2 cores and a TDP of 18W. It is the older brother of the C-60 (which we also have) and were the alternative to the Atom of the time (possibly a substitute for the N-450 in the case of the C-60). It is no coincidence that the most similar micros are the C-60 and the E-450. You can also see some Core Duo from the T series there. The multi-thread performance practically doubles that of the single-thread despite the fact that the results sent have been passed on a PC with only one memory module, so in that aspect, it surpasses the single-core options with HT that Intel offered in this segment by quite a bit. However, the reality is quite different.

Centaur CHA seen at CES

The x86 processor with 8 cores and AVX2 developed by VIA that includes a coprocessor for AI has been seen at CES. For now, it seems that there are no benchmarks or any kind of comparison.

The OpenPOWER license

Work is still being done to release the ISA of IBM's POWER architecture, but the license seems to be quite permissive to the point of being considered free hardware in the style of RISC-V.

Context switching in Linux

If you are thinking of developing an operating system, you should surely have a clear concept of context switching. The operation consists of making the processor switch processes to give the illusion of having a multitasking system on a single-processor machine. In this extensive article, you can see the evolution that this operation has had in Linux on x86 processors.

AMD FX 8120

An anonymous has brought us this AMD processor. It is a Bulldozer from 2011 of those that seem to have 8 cores but that actually have 4, with an unleashed TDP and a moderate performance. The micro that most resembles it is an i5-2300, which has a substantially lower TDP and is announced as a 4-core processor without HT. In the general ranking, it is in 85th place in single-thread and 75 in multi-thread.

The attempt to sell phones for 2000€

It seems that there is a special effort on the part of Samsung to release a phone with a price that is increasingly close to 2000€. Apple already put the brakes on the price escalation and stayed at 1000.

Qualcomm's new 5G modem

The semiconductor developer already has the third generation of its 5G modems available. The big novelty is that they are manufactured in the 5nm node.

Historical overclocking data

A former worker of Hwbot has published a series of articles about the evolution of processor and RAM frequencies. In this one, in particular, he reviews the world records of frequency from the mid-90s (with an oc of 266MHz in 96) to the present day (from 8780MHz in 2012).

Introduction to Ray Tracing

Nvidia has published a video (of which they seem to be making a series) where they explain the fundamentals of a technique that is already giving very good results in games.

Where do the 1500 bytes of MTU come from

MTU (Maximum Transmission Unit) establishes the maximum size of a packet in an Ethernet network. In this article, they explain the reason for this seemingly arbitrary size.

VA-API acceleration arrives in Firefox

For those users of Wayland, very soon they will have hardware video acceleration available in Firefox.

Core i3-2120

Krampak has brought us a Sandy Bridge from 2012 with 2 cores without HT. Its performance is quite similar to much more recent U series portable processors like the i3-6006U or the i5-5200U. The tests were passed with 4 threads instead of 2 and, curiously, the multi-thread performance is more than double that of single-thread. If we look at the multi/single ratios, it is behaving like a processor with HT. Perhaps segmentation or instruction cache has something to do with this performance increase, although I am not sure of the true reason.