Summary of the week of June 1, 2020

[cobito]

Intel Drivers 27.20.100.8280

The new version of Intel drivers comes with performance improvements for Minecraft Dungeons, Darksiders Genesi, and Warcraft III: Reforged when running on an Iris Plus iGPU from a 10th generation processor.

A Pulseaudio schema

Someone has created this schema where you can see the complexity of something that would be expected to be simpler.

Kernel changes to keep Wine working

New Windows programs have started making system calls that go directly to the kernel without going through WinAPI. This is causing Wine on Linux to intercept these calls and fail because they are directed at Windows. To fix this, a patch has been proposed that would allow them to be redirected to Wine.

Apple doubles the price of RAM

Increasing the memory of a 13-inch MacBook Pro from 8 to 16GB now costs €250.

FTP will stop working in Firefox

The once king of file transfer protocols has been losing popularity until the day comes when none of the most used browsers will support it anymore. For security reasons, Mozilla has decided that from here on, in three versions, Firefox will stop working as an FTP client.

Linux 5.7

In this version, something called "Thermal Pressure" has been applied. With this, the information that the task manager receives to determine the available computational power in each core is improved. The implementation of exFAT has also been improved and, as always, there are numerous improvements for different architectures

Version 1.4 of the test bench available

You can now download the new version of the test bench. It comes with bugs fixed, improvements, and changes in the interface.

Sega will release a miniature Game Gear

The portable console from the 90s will be resurrected by its original creator. It will come in a size that is perhaps too small to be practical, but unlike other gadgets from the past that have come back to life in recent years, it will have a reasonable price: about €45.

Elbrus, the 8-core Russian CPU

Russia has been working on a processor with its own architecture that comes with 8 cores at 1.6GHz manufactured on the 28nm node. The CPU is intended for government office computers and servers. In the latter case, up to 256 processors with a total of 12TB of RAM can be installed. Additionally, it will allow the execution of x86 programs through an internal translator with which there is a 20% penalty compared to using native software.

Firefox 77 comes with more Webrender

The web rendering engine through the GPU now works at all resolutions when using an Nvidia graphics card on Windows 10. For the rest of the GPUs, resolutions, and operating systems, you will still have to wait a bit.

Core i3-3120M

whoololon has brought us in its maximum mode a 2012 Ivy Bridge laptop with two cores without HT. With a TDP of 35W, it looks quite similar to a couple of U-series i5 from the same era. It is at the tail of the Ivy Bridge processor ranking, only ahead of a Core i3, some Celerons, and a Pentium.

The gate size measures nothing

As has been commented other times, the length of the gates of current transistors no longer really measures anything, so it is a metric that serves little when trying to compare the processes of different manufacturers. Here, three measures are proposed to define a process: density of logic transistors, density of bits in DRAM memories, and density of connections between logic and memory.

Intel is scared of the test benches

Zen3 is just around the corner and it seems that Intel is starting to prefer measuring processor performance using subjective methods. In reality, this began to be seen when UserBenchmark started to not give as much importance to a high number of cores and ended up equating Intel and AMD models with very different performances (in favor of Intel).

Corsair SF series power supplies are defective

The manufacturer has discovered a defect in a batch, so they will proceed to send a new power supply in advance to those affected so that they can return the defective one.