Summary of the week of March 16, 2020

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Processing capacity against coronavirus

For a few days now, messages have appeared on various sites encouraging owners of powerful CPUs and GPUs to process project units on BOINC related to biotechnology and more specifically, to Folding@Home. As a result, this one in particular has run out of packages to offer to volunteers.

MSI releases a motherboard with ISA and PCI

It is an LGA1151 motherboard that comes with a 16-bit ISA slot and 5 PCI slots. Despite everything, it does not come with an AGP port, so it looks like it is aimed at laboratory environments where the cost of replacing old hardware is prohibitive.

Hardlimit video section

The platform for watching and sharing videos on video.hardlimit.com is now available. If you've been binge-watching Netflix and your Steam account has exploded these days, don't forget to stop by to watch and participate.

Details of the Ryzen 4000 Mobile appear

Zen 2 for laptops now has a name and specifications. They are seeing micros with up to 8 cores with SMT using the 7nm node. In addition, it comes with two memory controllers that reach a rate of 68GB/s when using 4 LPDDR4x modules.

Intel presents its 1Tbps switch

The gadget uses optoelectronics to handle such a data rate.

SBC with Zen

DFI has presented a Raspberry Pi-style board with a Ryzen Embedded R1000 APU. Although the concept is not new in x86, it is new using AMD's famous architecture. The price is not known but the specifications are: 8Gb DDR4, 64Gb of flash, gigabit network, USB 3.1 Gen 2 Type-C bus, and two micro-HDMI 1.4 outputs.

Ray Tracing in Vulkan

One of the reference graphics APIs has begun to support the new lighting technique.

Vulkan ray tracing will use the CPU

But it will only use the idle cycles. The idea is to get the most out of processors with a large number of cores that the game in question cannot take advantage of. The tasks that the free cores will handle are basically the restructuring of the data that is sent to the GPU for it to do the hard work.

Sony publishes the specifications of Play Station 5

It will come with an 8-core processor based on Zen at 3.5GHz, a GPU with 36 CUs at 2.23GHz, 16Gb of GDDR6 RAM, and an 825Gb SSD drive.

Atom x5-Z8350

Krampak brings us a rarity among the repertoire of processors that we have in the database. It comes in an embedded gadget along with 2GB of RAM and Windows 10 Home. The performance itself leaves much to be desired until you observe its star feature: a TDP of a mere 2W. Its 4 cores without HT are impossible to compare with what already exists since a single core performs like a low-end micro from the Conroe and Peryn era, while in that range and generation, there are no 4-core processors. In summary, it could have powered a modest PC for basic tasks from 10 years ago.

Microsoft announces DirectX 12 Ultimate

With a retro-looking logo that clearly refers to the Xbox, Microsoft's marketing team is leading the announcement of a new version of DirectX that, more than bringing new features, seems to focus on enhancing existing ones. In any case, it doesn't come empty-handed. As novelties, it brings Mesh Shaders (gives developers more control over the geometry unit) and Sampler Feedback (allows only the necessary textures to be loaded as the world is shown).

Raytracing demo on RDNA2

A few minutes after DirectX Ultimate was announced, AMD has published a video showing the potential of its RDNA 2 on the newly released version of DX. Just like with the logo, the aesthetics seem to be brought from the past, with an almost obscene excess of chrome that prevents clearly perceiving what they are trying to teach.

Adrenalin 2020 Edition 20.3.1 available

The new version of AMD's driver comes with timid performance improvements for DOOM Eternal, support for Half-Life: Alyx, and the possibility of using Ghost Recon Breakpoint on Vulkan.