Summary of the week of May 24, 2021

[cobito]

About whether what you buy belongs to you

There have already been quite a few cases in the world of hardware where a device changes its functionality when updating firmware or directly stops working because the manufacturer decides so (printers are a classic example). This concept has spread to other areas and a much more unethical case has appeared, such as motorcycle airbags that do not work if you do not pay extra.

How a power supply works

This entry explains in a fairly simplified way the different stages of conversion, from filtering and rectifying the input to the output stage with its different voltages.

This is how processors were made in 96

To put us in context, these were CPUs that ran at 100-133Mhz and used a lithography of 350nm.

This could have been Windows Vista

One of the most infamous versions of Windows could have looked much different from what it finally had. This is a presentation from 2003 showing the concept that was expected.

Console with graphic acceleration

Someone has developed a console for Linux that offloads the processor from the work of displaying the output on the screen. From a practical point of view, there are still potential benefits to be found (in addition to a possible energy saving) although from a security point of view it could have substantial advantages over consoles rendered by the CPU.

New type of RAM memory

The creators of NAND memory have presented a research paper where they talk about DFM (Dynamic Flash Memory) whose read process is not destructive.

Meteor Lake will go in 7nm

The architecture that will debut in 2023 will be encapsulated with Foveros and will be manufactured with the 7nm Enhanced SuperFin process.

A P2P web browser

Beaker Browser is a browser that uses the Hypercore protocol instead of the classic HTTP/S. From it, you can create HTML webs that can then be shared between peers.

Valve could be making a console

And it would be a console in the style of Switch. The codename of the device is SteamPal where games that have been ported to Linux would run. The technical details of the device are not known and in reality, there is nothing confirmed by the company.

USB-C will be able to handle 240W

Cables currently have a capacity of 100W.

SH cheat sheet

Cheat.sh is a file that, when executed, allows you to search for examples of how Linux commands are executed without having to resort to the manual pages

ARM presents mobile ARMv9

These are the Cortex-X2, Cortex-A710 and Cortex-A510 which, in addition to being compatible with ARMv9, will come with SVE2 (the AVX of this architecture).

14GB/s NVMe controller

Marvell has presented its PCIe 5.0 controller that doubles the transfer rate compared to PCIe 4.0. On the other hand, the chip has a consumption 60% higher than the previous version.