Summary of the week of February 24, 2020

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The latest Lenovo ThinkPads have problems with Thunderbolt

Lenovo laptops are having problems with the Thunderbolt controller. It should be noted that these machines use the USB-C port to charge.

Intel 26.20.100.7870 drivers

This version of the drivers for Intel iGPUs brings some bugs fixed with Blu Ray playback using PowerDVD and a flicker that appeared when pressing the brightness or volume keys with OpenGL/Vulkan running.

Visualization of Moore's Law

This animation shows the prediction that Moore made about the number of transistors that a processor would include with respect to the date, from 1965 to the present. The graph shows the models that have broken records in all architectures.

Apple could switch to ARM in its laptops

It's a rumor from an analyst who usually gets it right. And what he says is that in about a year, Apple will put laptops for sale using ARM processors instead of the x86 from Intel that it has been using since OS X.

Xbox Series X specifications announced

Two of the most relevant hardware pieces are Zen 2 and an RDNA 2-based GPU.

The new Xeons come discounted

AMD continues to force Intel to adjust prices and performance. This time it's the turn of the newly launched Cascade Lake where a 28-core model that in previous generations cost about €13,000, will now cost about €4,000.

Cloudflare switches to AMD

Until now, it has been using Xeon E5-2630 and Xeon Platinum 6162 processors. Now, one of the most used CDNs has decided to leave Intel's options aside to migrate to the EPYC 7642.

Firefox premieres DNS over HTTPS

The encrypted name resolution service is now a reality, although for now it comes by default only for American users. For the rest, you have to enable DoH manually.

A guide to placing access points

Arstechnica has published an article where they explain the best places to put the router and the biggest obstacles that are found in a home when propagating Wifi.

Celeron M 575

Namiga brings us a low-end mobile processor from the past. With a single core without HT and a TDP of 35W, this Meron from 2008 is capable of outperforming some Core 2 Duo (in single-thread). It is far from the last place, but much further from even entering the top 100.

Hardlimit Museum

We premiere the museum with some of the dissections that have already been shown.

AMD gets into low-power APUs

The developer has announced a series of APUs based on Ryzen with TDPs starting from 6W. It is the R1000 series of which 4 models have been revealed, all with 2 cores and frequencies ranging from 1200/2600 to 2600/3500 MHz.

Chinese processors based on Zen

When in 2016, AMD was still coming out of the difficult Bulldozer/Piledriver/Excavator era and needed liquidity, it signed an agreement with a Chinese company to place its new architecture there. In this article, they detail the history and the processors that resulted from that.

The more affordable Raspberry Pi 4 doubles the memory

The board that until now had 1Gb of RAM will have 2 while maintaining the price.

Security flaw in Broadcom chips

The flaw is in mobiles, tablets, routers and Raspberry Pi 3 among others. The flaw seems to occur when a device disconnects from an access point being one of the two vulnerable.

Core 2 Duo T6400

Namiga returns to the attack with a Penryn from 2009 that carries 2 cores at 2GHz. Its performance is comparable to the famous Core 2 Duo E6600 and, in general, to many of the Core 2 models of the era. It gets approximately half the points of the last processor in the top 100.