Summary of the week of November 16, 2020

cobito

The 2nm take a step forward

TSMC is developing the new process through an architecture called MBCFET which seems to be solving the problem that FinFET has with leakage currents at these scales.

Youtube-dl returns to GitHub

The program that is used to download videos from Youtube has become available again on GitHub after the American copyright protection organization requested its removal.

Smart Access Memory is not exclusive to AMD

The technology that allows for an increase of around 5% in gaming performance can be used in hardware from any manufacturer. The reason why it is only seen in AMD processors and GPUs is because, at the moment, it is the only developer that gives it support.

Analysis of a Mac Mini with M1

The people at Anandtech have published an analysis of this mini-desktop that runs on Apple's new ARM processor. Let us remember that the company is getting rid of the x86 architecture in all its computers.

Firefox 82 comes with HTTPS-only mode

In addition there are improvements of up to 15% in the performance of SpiderMonkey, the JS engine and a reduction in memory usage of 8%.

Ryzen 9 3950X

Someone has brought us this Zen 2 with 16 cores, SMT and 64 megs of L3 cache. It gets close to a million points, which places it in third position in the overall ranking. It has a performance similar to the i9-10940X, which it slightly surpasses in single-thread but Intel ends up getting 15% more in multi-thread. It is the fastest AMD we have and it stays in first position in the zip compression test.

Librem 5 enters production

The non-profit organization that has developed the free phone has announced that it has entered production for the general public.

Ryzen 9 4900HS

Last night someone brought us a portable Zen 2 with 8 cores, SMT and a TDP of only 35W. Its performance is very different from the rest of the processors, which is understandable given the generous amount of cores combined with a moderate TDP. In single-thread it is comparable to a Core i7-9750H and in multi-thread it gets a score similar to the Ryzen 5 3600. In the single-thread tests, both in integer and floating point tests, it doesn't fare very well and in the integer test in particular, its result is one of the worst we have in AVX2, surpassing only a U series i3 and an AMD A9. On the other hand, it stands out in performance for generic tasks, giving a performance similar to an i9-9900K. It stays in position 24 in the overall ranking and is the slowest Zen 2 that has come to us.