Summary of the week of June 16, 2025

[cobito]

Here is the summary of last week with a bit of delay and with the announcement, also delayed, that this week the cover will be on vacation:

Cuts continue at Intel

Intel has announced that in mid-July, it will begin to lay off workers from its factories. This initial cut (from which it is deduced that there will be more in the short term) will be executed until the end of the month.

PCIe 7.0 specification published

PCI-SIG has published the PCIe 7.0 specification that comes with a bandwidth of 128 GT/s. The new standard will accommodate 800Gbps network cards, quantum computing and, of course, will improve AI performance.

Plasma 6.4 available

Version 6.4 of Plasma comes with improvements in virtual desktops, in accessibility and some visual changes in the interface and themes.

New texture compression method

Nvidia has presented a series of techniques that use AI to improve graphic quality. Surely the most interesting is Neural Texture Compression, a new technique that allows to considerably reduce the use of VRAM with respect to traditional texture compression methods.

Core i3-1315U

Someone brought us a Core i3-1315U the other day. It has 6 Raptor Lake cores that reach a quarter of a million points with a TDP of only 15W. The micro laptop manages to sneak into the 71st position in the single-threaded ranking.