Summary of the week of January 11, 2021

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History of hard drives

On this page they have reviewed the history of hard drives, starting from the first domestic MFM drives of the 80s to the present day.

How integrated circuits are manufactured

This video shows the process of creating chips, starting with theoretical concepts and then moving on to the design table to finish with the manufacture of the wafers.

Nvidia drivers 461.09 available

Three days ago, new drivers were released that come with support for Quake II RTX 1.4.0 and new Vulkan Ray Tracing extensions.

Login with minesweeper

With this game, you can reinforce the security of the computers you manage if you don't appreciate users very much. It's a minesweeper that runs when a password entry error is made. It has no way to exit until you win a game.

Core i7-10870H

Krampak has brought us a Comet Lake from the recent batch that has really good performance with a fairly tight TDP. It stays in first and second position among the 9 Comet Lakes we have. Comparatively, it gets very close to the Core i9-9900K. It stays in eleventh position of the general ranking, between the Ryzen 7 3800X and the 3700X and it is the fastest portable CPU we have at the moment.

Radeon RX 6800 XT vs GeForce RTX 3080

In this video from Digital Foundry, a very thorough analysis of the performance of both GPUs with Ray Tracing has been done.

Samsung will use AMD GPUs in its SoCs

Samsung's mobiles and tablets will have a graphics processor with AMD's RDNA architecture. It's not the first time that AMD's graphics division has ventured into mobile GPUs integrated into SoCs since Adreno (anagram of Radeon) was developed by Ati.

First low-cost Risc-V SBC

BeagleV will probably be the first Raspberry Pi-style board with a reduced cost: about €150. Unfortunately, it seems that the SoC will bring NVDLA, Nvidia's deep learning acceleration, which wouldn't make it 100% free hardware.

Debian debates its package policy

The philosophy of Linux distributions in general is to package each dependency separately since supposedly, these can be shared with different programs. The problem is that nowadays, there is certain software (mainly written in JavaScript) that has hundreds of dependencies and in turn, these dependencies have theirs. Packaging each one separately involves a lot of work that induces errors and causes security problems.

Samsung presents screen with camera behind the panel

It is an OLED screen that will be destined for laptops and that has a camera behind the screen itself.

Wine 6 available

The Windows API that works on Linux comes with changes in Vulkan within WineD3D, support for DirectShow and Media Foundation and the redesign of the console.

Athlon 3000G

Yorus has brought us the first Athlon Zen+. It is a low-power, low-cost desktop processor with two cores and SMT. The closest micro found has been the Ryzen 3 2200U, although the Athlon outperforms the Ryzen by quite a bit in multi-threaded tasks. It stays in ninth position of the 10 Zen+ we have and it stays in position 97 of the single-threaded general ranking (without managing to enter the multi-threaded ranking).