Summary of the week of June 15, 2020

[cobito]

Photonics gains popularity

The technology that uses light instead of electrons to transmit data is relatively new in commercial products. At the moment it is used almost exclusively in network devices although in the coming years it could be found in other areas.

Ventoy, a tool for creating bootable USB drives

A new program has appeared that allows you to create bootable drives on USB sticks. It is available for both Windows and Linux. The version for Microsoft's system comes with a graphical interface while in Linux you have to navigate through the command line.

The aging of semiconductors

As the gate size is reduced, new problems are emerging such as the hot-carrier injection effect that appeared from 0.5um or the temperature instability of the bias current that came from 180nm. Now, with 5nm around the corner, new challenges are emerging.

Anti-malware by hardware

Intel plans to include protection against unwanted software in its processors with something called Control-Flow Enforcement Technology.

Images of the boxes of old graphics cards

On PCGamer they have made a compilation of some of the worst illustrations that have been seen on the boxes of graphics cards from a few years ago.

Core i7-9700K

DoraemonCat has brought us a Coffee Lake with 8 cores without HT that came out at the end of 2018. It is in 12th position in the general multi-thread ranking and of the 17 Coffee Lakes we have, it is in fifth position. The most similar model is its predecessor, the i7-8700K. For some reason, the processor did not reach the boost frequency during the execution of the benchmark, so the scores obtained are substantially below what could have been obtained under optimal conditions.

FFmpeg 4.3 comes with TrueHD in MP4

The multimedia library comes with support for hardware decoding of MJPEG and VP9 in Intel processors with QSV and hardware acceleration in video encoding in AMD GPUs through the Advanced Media Framework.

Nvidia's hardware JPEG encoding

On the Nvidia developer blog they have published an article about their hardware encoding/decoding of images including a brief explanation of the JPEG compression process, tables with comparisons of hardware vs software performance and examples of code to carry out the operation.

Qualcomm details the mid-range 600 series

The 690 SoCs will come with 2 ARM Cortex-A77 cores at 2GHz, 6 A55 cores at 1.7GHz, an Adreno 619L GPU and a 5G module, among other hardware.

Intel XE is stepping on AMD's APUs' ground

The new architecture of Intel GPUs seems to be doing it much better than what has been seen with their iGPUs so far. It seems that with the Tiger Lakes, they intend to grab a piece of the integrated graphics pie of certain power. In this video, you can see an XE running Battlefield 5 with some ease.

Booting Linux in 0.38 seconds

Monolinux Jiffy is a distro for ARM boards. Specifically, that speed in booting was achieved on an i.MX6UL (ARMv7) SoC at 528MHz with 1GB of DDR3 RAM.

Intel presents the second generation of its Optane

The high-performance SSDs that come mounted on a memory module have a new generation. They will come with capacities of 128GB, 256GB and 512GB, with read-write rates of 3.15-8.10GB/s versus 2.3GB-6.8GB/s of the first generation.

Krita 4.3 available

The free program for creating illustrations has a new version that comes with watercolor effect brushes, performance improvements in animations, a new gradient map for pixel art creators and a large number of additional features and improvements.

Core i5-3570

An anonymous user has brought us an Ivy Bridge with 4 cores without HT. Its performance is practically identical to the 3570K, which is to be expected since they are two identical CPUs. The difference lies in the iGPU since the 3570 comes with an HD2500 while the K comes with the HD4000. In the general ranking, it is in the last quarter of the table while of the 18 Ivy Bridges we have, it is in third position.