Summary of the week of March 9, 2020

[cobito]

IBM doubles the density of its eDRAM

It has achieved this in its 14nm node, which will allow the construction of 256Mb level 3 caches and level 4 caches of around 1Gb.

Security flaw in AMD processors

The hunt is open for AMD processors. This attack consists of monitoring the interactions of processes with the cache and thus being able to extract data from said memory.

More details about ATX12VO power supplies

It has been a few months since the details of what will be the replacement for the classic ATX power supply were revealed. After maturing the topic a bit, PCWorld has published an article about the implications that the new power standard will have.

Rambus develops the HBM2E controller

It is a memory controller with a bandwidth of 3.2Gbps and a bus width of 1024 bits which translates into a theoretical rate of just over 400 Gbytes/s.

LVI, another vulnerability of Intel processors

Another episode of the bug hunt that is affecting all processors in general but Intel's in particular. This time it's SGX's turn again, the instruction set that is responsible for keeping data secure. In reality, it's not so important for the average user, but the correction of the flaw will decrease SGX's performance by 50%.

AMD increases the Linux developer team

The processor and graphics card developer continues to bet on Linux drivers. Recall that AMDGPU are half open and half closed: the first half is responsible for the basic operations necessary to do any task that is not 3D and the closed part takes care of 3D acceleration.

Firefox 74 available

One of the few alternatives to Chrome and its derivatives releases a new version. It comes with improvements in the password manager and a new profile importer from Microsoft Edge. The most interesting thing about this version is Facebook Container, which minimizes as much as possible the tracking that the social network does throughout the web.

GNU patches LVI

The latest Intel vulnerability already has mitigation (not a solution) in the GNU assembler.

Gnome 3.36 available

One of the most widespread environments releases a new version that comes mainly with some visual changes.

The right to repair

Whether by engineering design or by obsolescence design, consumer electronics have become a disposable product, where the useful life is limited by the weakest component. The EU wants to legislate on this matter so that equipment is more durable and repairable.

The new Windows explorer

The industry's trend to reduce complexity by eliminating functionality continues. Now it's the turn of the Windows file explorer, where large areas of the screen are seen as unused. In principle, it is a proof of concept but the idea of minimizing the density of information as much as possible is clear.