Summary of the week of January 13

[cobito]

Performance drop in SSD Evo 860 when updating firmware

Someone on Reddit has posted a series of tests showing a drop in performance on these SSD drives when the firmware is updated. In a comment, someone says that after the update, data may be being reorganized, and another says that the update may bring security and durability improvements that cause that drop. But no one knows anything for sure.

Microsoft is improving repairability

In a world lacking screws and full of glues, repairs, when possible, are complicated and delicate. Microsoft has said that since it only gets 5% of its profits from selling hardware, it will make it easier to repair its devices.

A critique of current graphical interfaces

For the past few years, the classic File, Edit, etc. menus have been disappearing. Each program has been including its own style, such as the Office Ribbon interface. This article questions why concepts that have been with us for decades and have proven their effectiveness are being abandoned, and instead, concepts that don't really bring substantial improvements are being included.

Next week Microsoft begins migration to Chromium

As already announced in November, Microsoft will abandon its EdgeHTML web rendering engine to start using the Chromium engine.

Sony won't go to this year's E3

For the second consecutive year, Sony will skip the most important video game fair, and that's in the year when the PlayStation 5 is planned to be released.

Towards the end of third-party cookies

Privacy has become a battle for certain browsers. This time it's Chromium's turn, the completely free browser from Google. In fact, today, most browsers already block this type of cookie. What we can expect now is an alternative that will surely come from those most interested in making advertising as personalized as possible.

Intel security flaws penalize its iGPUs

Phoronix has published the results of a series of tests showing a considerable drop in performance in the Gen7 integrated graphics corresponding to Haswell processors. Patches for the different operating systems for this vulnerability came out during November of last year.

Intel i5-9600KF

Namiga brings us a Coffee-Lake that came out exactly a year ago with 6 cores and curiously, without HT. In theory, the 9600KF is identical to the 9600K but without an iGPU. Since we don't have a 9600K, we can't compare it. Its performance is practically the same as the i7-9750H. Both CPUs are very similar except that the i7 has a lower TDP and comes with HT. Another very similar processor is the i5-9600, which has a slightly lower frequency than the KF. One of the novelties of this processor is what is called "low power frequency" that puts the micro at 800Mhz, although I'm not sure under what circumstances that frequency is reached. The performance ratio between single and multi-thread corrected with base and boost frequencies is practically 6, so there's nothing noteworthy in this aspect. In the general ranking, it takes the bronze medal in single-thread and stays in twelfth place in multi-thread.

Vulkan 1.2 specifications are published

The cross-platform graphics API continues to mature. In this revision, all the changes that have been made so far are unified. One of the biggest advances is in the improvement of semaphores, a signaling mechanism for sharing GPU resources. This improvement will facilitate development and improve performance. HLSL, the shading language, is another beneficiary.