Summary of the week of September 16, 2024

[cobito]

The smallest ESP32 S3 board

OMGS3 is a Raspberry Pi Nano-style board that mounts an ESP32 S3. It comes with 8MB of flash, 2MB of RAM, 26 I/O ports, an RGB LED, and an antenna for WiFi.

Core i9-14900KF

Hin has brought us an i9-14900KF that takes the gold medal in single-thread performance. In multi-thread it takes fourth place, with a performance very similar to the i9-13900K/F/S and i9-14900K/F.

AMD drivers are too big

AMD drivers for Linux have reached 6 million lines, something that is causing problems on old computers where boot times are longer than usual. This excessive size is due to the addition of custom auto-generated code for each GPU model.

Linux 6.11 available

Linux 6.11 comes with improvements in AMD's P-State drivers and Intel's new Lunar Lake. It also brings support for new Lenovo and ASUS laptops.

Gnome 47 available

Gnome 47 comes with the ability to customize the colors of additional interface elements. In addition, the Screencast screen capture now has hardware acceleration on Intel and AMD GPUs. It also brings changes to the open/save file dialog.

Word processor with e-ink

Zerowriter Ink is a kind of typewriter based on the ESP32 that comes with an e-ink screen. Texts are stored on a microSD card and includes a 5Ah battery.

Real-time Linux

Linux 6.12 will have the possibility to activate a new mode called PREEMPT_RT that will make it, for the first time and after 20 years of development, a true real-time operating system. PREEMPT_RT is intended for specific environments such as industrial or sound processing, so for desktop PCs the classic PREEMPT_DYNAMIC will continue to be recommended.