Summary of the week of May 11, 2020

[cobito]

Doom on an FPGA

Someone has crossed the final frontier by running Doom on some strange hardware. In fact, they've managed to run Doom on an electronic system without a processor because the game itself is the processor.

The MacBook Air 2020 screen is brighter on Windows

The difference is a not insignificant 30%, from the 415 nits achieved on MacOS to the nearly 550 of Windows. The reasons for this limitation are not known, although it could be to maintain brightness consistency between computers, since each screen has a different maximum brightness.

How an SSD works

In this educational video, they explain how an SSD works. It details basic concepts that we all know but at the same time, it delves into the operation of the flash memories we use today.

Pi-hole 5.0 available

The distro for Raspberry Pi focused on filtering advertising and trackers that circulate through a network, has a new version. One of the most important new features is content blocking based on the client.

Introduction to ZFS

The file system is becoming very popular in home NAS. In this article from Arstechnica, they introduce the Zettabyte File System.

Vulnerability found in Thunderbolt

The security flaw requires physical access to the computer.

Changing the color of AMD LEDs from Linux

Someone has made a program with a graphical interface for Linux from which you can control the RGB LEDs of the Wraith fans from AMD.

Ryzen 9 3900

Hayo has brought us one of the fastest Ryzens in all modes. It stays in third position in the multi-thread ranking, behind the 3900X. It's 12 Zen 2 cores with SMT with no less than 64MB of level 3 cache. This huge amount of cache from the top Zen 2 models is noticeable in the memory tests where it takes second place for the multi-thread tests. Comparatively speaking, it resembles its older brother, the 3900X which with its slightly higher frequency, but a considerably more bloated TDP, manages to get 20% in multi-thread. In general, this model stays in the top positions in practically all rankings.

Blackblaze statistics for the first quarter of 2020

The data center has published the quarterly statistics of hard drive failures. As has been tradition, of their 130,000 drives, Seagate units are the ones with the highest failure rate. The ones that seem to fail the least are HGST's. Interestingly, it seems that they no longer use Western Digital hard drives.

Noise reduction in ray tracing

This is one of a series of videos that Nvidia has been publishing about ray tracing. Here they talk about noise reduction when applying the lighting technique with few samples per pixel.

Unreal Engine 5 on PlayStation 5

The UE team has presented the new version of their graphics engine running on Sony's new console. It must be said that the graphics are spectacular, largely thanks to the new lighting techniques.

Epic says the new generation of consoles will be special

The CEO of the game developer has emphasized the PS5 although he talks about the entire generation. Whether it's propaganda or not, what seems clear is that the entertainment hardware that is coming will represent an important qualitative leap in graphics, as seen in the UE5 demo.

Microsoft begins to withdraw 32-bit support

Since the mid-2000s, practically all processors are 64-bit. There are some exceptions like the Atom that powered the classic netbooks with around 1GB of RAM, hardware that is insufficient for Windows 10 to be practical. Microsoft will leave the Windows editions compiled for IA-32 in the background, offering basic support.