Summary of the last half of July 2020

[cobito]

We've all been impacted and caught off guard by the most repeated news in recent days: it's summer and it's hot. But we have to move forward (even if it's half-speed), so here's the news summary of the last two weeks:

Why Samsung players have stopped working

Samsung's 2015 Blu-Ray players send an activity log over the Internet to the company. It seems that when this information is sent, an XML file is downloaded that is used to boot the player. Well, in mid-July, Samsung sent a faulty file that now prevents the players from booting. The only way to fix the problem is by accessing low-level (directly to the flash memory) and updating the firmware.

AMD presents its Ryzen 4000 for desktops

For now, they will only be available for PC assemblers, so those who want to build their own machine will have to wait (we don't know how long). The APUs based on Zen2 in AM4 format are quite similar to the 4000 series for laptops that the company presented not long ago. The models will come with 4 to 8 cores (all with SMT), the GPU will have 6 to 8 processing units and the TDPs will be 35 or 65W.

Intel's 7nm is delayed

The developer is having problems with manufacturing in the 7nm process and will be delayed a few months compared to what they had planned.

Coreboot could arrive at current AMD platforms

Someone from System76 is working on bringing the universal and free BIOS/UEFI to current AMD platforms. For now, AGESA is still closed-source but AMD has shown interest in the project.

GnuTLS does not encrypt correctly

According to the security notice CVE-2020-13777, GnuTLS has a flaw that allows connections in TLS up to version 1.2 to be decrypted in a trivial way.

Intel makes organizational changes

Intel has been making strategic mistakes that are dragging it to a second position in a market with only two contenders.

Firefox 79 advances in Webrender

The new version of Firefox expands support for the GPU rendering engine to AMD and Intel graphics cards (for now, only on Windows).

Hardware that stops working when the manufacturer changes hands

This has happened with the smart glasses of a Canadian company, which have been out of order for weeks after Google bought the company. Google will refund everyone who bought one of these glasses.

Valve hires an engineer to work on AMD drivers

One of the advantages of publishing the source code under a permissive license is that sometimes other companies might end up investing their resources in doing the work. On this occasion, Valve is going to hire an engineer to get their hands dirty with Radeon's Vulkan drivers.

Grub update breaks booting

The different distros are applying a security patch for Grub2 (the most popular boot loader in Linux) resulting in the system not being able to boot again. It has been seen in RHEL, Debian, and Ubuntu.

In addition to this, we have received a multitude of results to the test bench with a good number of new micros that have not been subjected to the proper mini-analysis. Here is the list of new CPUs that arrived in July:

Intel Core i5-4690 by @Namiga
AMD Athlon II X2 260 (anonymous)
AMD FX 9590 (anonymous)
Intel Pentium N3530 (anonymous)
Intel Atom x5-Z8350 by @krampak
Intel Core i7-8650U (anonymous)
Intel Core i7-10510U by @Nemo
AMD Athlon II M300 by @danipro23
AMD A9 9425 by my sister
Intel Core i3-8145U (anonymous)
Intel Core i9-10940X (anonymous) and which, by the way, takes the silver medal in the multi-thread ranking.
Intel Core i5-1038NG7 (anonymous). It's a somewhat exotic model because it comes from a MacBook Pro.
AMD Ryzen 5 3400G (anonymous)
AMD Ryzen 7 3750H by @sinchan2
Intel Core i7-1065G7 (anonymous)

Thanks to all of them for their contributions