Summary of the week of June 8, 2020

[cobito]

USB-C and the mess of specifications

The versatility of the connector has made its implementation chaotic. Not only are there different protocols traveling through the cable, but there are also different specifications to establish the maximum power that can be moved.

Amazon shuts down Echo Look

It consists of a camera connected to Amazon's services that, based on photos it takes of the user, gives fashion advice. This gadget was released in 2017 and Amazon has encouraged its users to recycle the device.

Brave is inserting affiliate codes

And it's doing so without the user's permission. When the browser was released, its creators were already talking about monetizing it by showing advertising and distributing profits among the webmasters who joined the club. Now it has been discovered that it is introducing affiliate codes to the URLs that its users visit.

AMD releases drivers for Kaby Lake-G

The G series was that attempt at collaboration between Intel and AMD where the former provided the CPU and the latter the GPU, all in the same package. Last year, this collaboration ended, leaving the owners of this hardware without support. Finally, an agreement between Intel and AMD has meant that AMD is the one offering support through its Adrenalin drivers.

Information leakage between cores

CossTalk is a tool that allows intercepting data that travels between the cores of an Intel processor. It seems that there is a buffer connected to all cores where data such as the output of the random number generator (used in encryption tasks) is stored, which could be accessed by bypassing the mitigations of Spectre, Meltdown, and company. This could be the preamble to the announcement of a new vulnerability in Intel processors.

Linux is not well patched against Spectre on AMD

It has been discovered that the Linux kernel has not been correctly applied with the security patches related to speculative execution. The result is that AMD processors have been exposed all this time.

Performance of Intel processors continues to decrease

With the mitigation for the security flaw announced yesterday, the random number generator in Intel processors now has 3% of the performance it had before. It should be noted that RdRand is hardly executed in daily use.

Everything about RAM

In this informative article, all the details about RAM are broken down. At the beginning, it explains why this memory is needed and ends by detailing the meaning of timings, going through constructive details and the different technologies that have been adopted.

Core i7-4710HQ

An anonymous has brought us a Haswell laptop with 4 cores without HT. Its performance is comparable, as expected, to the i7-4720HQ although it also has a reasonable resemblance to the Xeon E3-1220 v3, which, being only a year older, consumes almost double. In the multi-threaded ranking of Haswell processors, it ranks fourth, becoming the fastest Haswell laptop we have. In the overall ranking, it manages to place itself in the middle of the table.

Intel gives details of Lakefield

This platform offers a combination with a powerful Sunny Cove core along with 4 low-power Tremont cores, used in Atoms. The TDP of the processor is 7W and it works with LPDDR4X-4266 memory.

Roadmap for Zen 3 and RDNA 2

It is confirmed that Zen 3 will be manufactured in the 5nm node. In addition, they say that RDNA2 will come with a 50% performance increase compared to the first version of the graphics architecture.

Mobian appears, a distro for mobiles

It is based on Debian and is intended for PinePhone phones. At the moment, there is not much information about the project.

Celeron N4100

An anonymous has brought us the first Goldmont Plus to the database. It is a Celeron with 4 cores without HT with a boost frequency of 2.4GHz and a TDP of 6W. No processor has been found that closely resembles it (one would have to do a comparison test by test both in single and multi-threaded). In addition, it is far from the latest model in the top 100 and, being the only Goldmont Plus, there is no architecture ranking yet.