Summary of the week of April 13, 2020

[cobito]

The challenges of 3nm

For a few years now, the increase in the level of integration has become a technically complex and economically costly challenge. Miniaturization is converging to the limits of physics and in this article from Semi Engineering they explain why.

Ethernet at 800Gbps is presented

The Ethernet Technology Consortium has presented the details of 800Gbps ethernet connections. The price of the equipment is not known but knowing that a 16-port switch at 400 Gbps costs about €11,000, it is clear that we will not see this in the domestic sphere for a long time.

The future of dynamic RAM

DRAM memory is composed of millions of tiny capacitors, which implies important constructive differences with respect to other integrated circuits such as CPUs. This means that the challenges to continue advancing in the increase of memory density are different from those found in other devices. In this article from SemiEngineering, they explain what is coming.

The SMR disk scandal

Storage enthusiasts have risen up in arms this weekend on Reddit, denouncing that Western Digital is placing SMR hard drives in its Red NAS series. SMR technology is capable of increasing the density of information at the expense of reducing performance. On some occasions, when using NAS formatted in ZFS, data loss can occur if one of the drives is much slower than the rest.

GitHub is now free for groups

It affects private repositories with an unlimited number of collaborators.

Toshiba and Seagate join the club of the smart ones

A few days ago, it was revealed that Western Digital was selling SMR hard drives in models that had previously been PMR, without informing the consumer. Now it has been discovered that, coincidentally, Toshiba and Seagate have also decided to make the switch without warning. Let us remember that in certain NAS configurations where, for example, the ZFS file system is used, data loss can occur if disks with very different performances are mixed.

An alternative to Raspberry Pi Zero is announced

It is BreadBee, a small board in the style of RPi Zero that comes with 64Mb of RAM, 16 Mb of flash, an MStar MSC313E Cortex-A7 SOC at 1GHz, ethernet at 100MBps, 24-pin GPIO with support for SPI, I2C and UART and a 21-pin connector that offers connections for SD cards and USB 2.0. The board costs about €10.

Nvidia presents RTX Voice

The GPU developer has announced the availability in a beta version of its system that allows you to eliminate background noise when having conversations through the PC microphone.

About PulseEffects

It is a program for Linux that allows you to introduce sound effects in the applications that use PulseAudio.