Summary of the week of March 4, 2024

[cobito]

Problems with Wifi7 in AMD

Intel has released a driver update for its newly launched Wifi7 adapters. But it seems they are unable to solve some compatibility issues with AMD platforms.

Intel publishes the code of its NPU

Intel has published the source code of its NPU (Neural Processing Unit) library for Python under the Apache 2.0 license. Along with the code, some examples are provided.

Asus puts the first NUCs on sale

Asus has started to market the first NUCs a few months after taking over the development and manufacturing of Intel's former line of mini PCs. Prices start at around 400€.

GTA Vice City on a router

Someone has taken a TP-LINK router from 2013, installed a graphics card and an SSD drive and was able to play GTA Vice City. Unlike other equipment in the guild, this one comes with a Power PC CPU and good PCIe compatibility. To make it work on that architecture, they compiled reVC, an open-source version of the game obtained through reverse engineering.

Chip manufacturing

In this beautiful interactive article, they explain to the average citizen how chips are manufactured.

Openmediavault 7 available

The seventh version of Openmediavault, one of the most popular distros for setting up a home NAS, comes with a big change: the update to Debian 12.

Nvidia wants to prohibit CUDA on other brands

The historic sales increase that Nvidia is enjoying with data centers is largely thanks to the exclusivity of its CUDA platform. There are projects that offer a translation layer to make CUDA software compatible with other manufacturers. Now Nvidia wants to prohibit such translators.

The GDDR7 standard is published

JEDEC has published the specifications for the GDDR7 standard. Among other novelties, the new graphics memory will use PAM3 modulation when very high bandwidths are needed and NRZ for more limited scenarios.

About scaling in GTK

Screen scaling is becoming more common due to the increase in pixel density of screens. In GTK, the quality of fonts is not especially good when partial scaling is applied, partly because GTK4 does not have an alpha channel and cannot smooth with subpixels, but in version 4.14 of the graphics library, they seem to have addressed the problem.