Summary of the week of March 2, 2020

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Biostar vuelve al H61

Intel's second and third generation processors are still pretty competent microcontrollers for most tasks. Seeing that there might be a market for reviving these CPUs from nearly a decade ago, Biostar has decided to resume manufacturing motherboards with the H61.

Pentium G2020

Krampak has brought us a 2-core Pentium from 2013. It's an Ivy Bridge comparable to Celerons and i3s of the era. Despite that contemporary similarity, the processor that is most similar is an i3-6006U, three years younger and with consumption nearly 4 times lower. In reality, this micro gave a pretty decent performance in single-threaded tasks although its topology ends up limiting it quite a bit in more demanding tasks. In the overall ranking, it is in position 82 in single-threaded and is very close to entering the top 100 in multi-threaded.

Adrenalin 2020 Edition 20.2.2

AMD's new drivers come with some bugs fixed, such as elements flickering on the desktop when a game is running in the background.

Introducción a Ray Tracing (parte 2)

A few days ago, Nvidia published the first installment of this introduction to the new lighting technique. This time it's the turn of rasterization.

Apple will pay 500 million for slowing down its phones

At 25€ per phone, this move to intentionally make them obsolete will cost Apple dearly.

Xiaomi presents its 40W wireless chargers

The Chinese manufacturer's fast chargers will be capable of charging a 4000mAh battery in 40 minutes.

The state of AMD in Coreboot

In this presentation from this year's FOSDEM, a review is made of AMD's collaboration with the free BIOS project, from the K8-based Geodes to the current AGESA.

On Mozilla's fight against Google

Unfriendly interview of the Firefox CTO by the newspaper DerStandard.

Intel wants to regain leadership in 2021

In terms of the manufacturing process, since it has been stuck for several years with 14nm and has only recently started offering its 10nm. For 2021, it wants to release CPUs on the 7nm node and shortly after, move to 5nm. As we have seen other times, these numbers are not really representative of anything and each manufacturer has its peculiarities.

The first 80-core ARM processor appears

It's called Ampere Altra and is intended for servers.

The Windows start menu could change

After having reinvented the wheel several times since the mid-90s, it has come to a design that is not the best of all those that have been seen. Now Microsoft wants to give the start menu another turn.

AMD will power a supercomputer of 2 exaflops

The machine is designed by the US Department of Energy and will carry EPYC Genoa processors (Zen 4). The machine will cost 600 million and will have a consumption of 30MW.

The end of Seti@Home

After 20 years of life, one of the first distributed computing projects has come to an end. It seems that there is enough processed data to be able to start drawing conclusions about this search, conclusions that will be published in a research article soon.

Core i7-950

Neptunno brings us a battery of tests of three models that we will see in chronological order of their release. The first is an i7-950 that appeared just over a decade ago. It's a micro from the pre-AVX era and the truth is that we don't have many contemporaries. The most similar is an i7-860 and in the list we see a couple of Xeons, also from the era.

Phenom II X6 1035T

The second one he brings is a K10 with 6 cores at 3.1GHz from 2010. Coincidentally, the i7-860 appears again as the most similar micro. In general, it performs somewhat worse in single-threaded than the Nehalems but its generous number of cores saves it in multi-threaded. We find this one in position 72 of the multi-threaded ranking although it doesn't show its hair in the single-threaded with less than 2000 points.

Pentium G3260

And to finish the round, we have a Haswell from five years ago with 2 cores without HT at 3.3GHz. It is comparable to a wide repertoire of architectures and ranges. Like most Pentium G, it has strength in single-threaded tasks but loses it when it comes to something more demanding. We find it at the bottom of both top 100 lists.

New Intel processor security flaw

In reality, it is one of the flaws that was supposed to be resolved but now it has been discovered that it is not possible to completely fix it. It seems that everything comes from something called CSME, the replacement for the Management Engine that is powered by a processor based on a 486 with its own RAM where a version of MINIX runs.

PowerShell 7 available

One of the most powerful tools of recent Windows has reached its seventh version. Among other things, it comes with support for ternary operators and pipelines in the style of Linux, which allows for chaining of command executions.