Summary of the week of February 8, 2021

[cobito]

This week @Yorus has delighted us with a new entry on his blog where he has told us about installing drivers and, especially, his adventure with the mouse.

DOOM on a €4 FPGA

Someone has managed to run DOOM on an Icebreaker test board that comes with an ICE40 FPGA. This low-cost integrated runs at 20MHz.

Celeron N4120

Someone brought us a Goldmont Plus with 4 cores a couple of days ago. With a TDP of only 6W, it looks quite similar to the Core i5-3317U in multi-threaded performance. It fails to enter the overall ranking and ends up in second position of the three CPUs we have of this architecture.

Engineering sample 906ED

Xevipiu has brought us an engineering sample that, by similarity of results, looks like it could be a Core i9-9900K/S or, broadly speaking, a Coffee Lake with 8 cores, HT and a boost frequency of 5GHz. It ends up in first position in some of the individual tests and achieves second position in single-threaded of the overall ranking. All this, assuming that the test bench has been passed without OC, something that cannot be confirmed due to lack of information.

Mounting M.2 drives without screws

The screw for these SSDs usually comes with the motherboard but not with the disk itself. If you decide to install one a while after buying it, it's possible that by then, you may have ordered the screw.

B460 and H410 will be incompatible with Rocket Lake

Owners of some low-end boards will be forced to change them if they want to use any of these processors that will be released in a couple of months.

A visual explanation of SSH tunnels

In this StackExchange entry, someone has made a fairly descriptive graphic representation of SSH tunnels.

Ryzen 7 PRO 4750GE

Yesterday someone brought us this Zen 2 with integrated graphics. It has no less than 8 cores with SMT and a TDP of only 35W. Contrary to what one might expect with this disproportion, the multi-threaded performance does honor the 8 cores. Of the 11 Zen 2s we have, it ends up in sixth position. In the overall ranking it ends up in 15th position.

Details of the Raspberry Pi integrated

One of the engineers who developed the new Raspberry Pi microcontroller has written a comprehensive article with code examples and photos detailing the development process.

Xeon Bronze 3206R

Yesterday Krampak brought us this Cascade Lake that is now a year old. Curiously, it doesn't have a boost frequency and runs at a fixed 1.9GHz. It has 8 cores, which, curiously also, come without HT. It is not possible to compare it with portable or desktop CPUs due to the disparity between single and multi-threaded results. Of the three Cascade Lake we have, the last one is far behind the second. In the overall ranking it ends up in 59th position.

On the reliability of automotive integrateds

Improving the reliability of chips that go into vehicles is becoming increasingly complicated. On the one hand, higher levels of integration and the consequent smaller size have made the chips more fragile. On the other hand, the increasing demand has meant that test cycles have been reduced.

Pentium Project – 4. Drivers

"We're back in action!, and it's that between Christmas, pandemics, snowstorms and even Brexit the project had stopped a bit."

AMD drivers 21.2.2

The new drivers for AMD graphics solve an image corruption problem in Quake III Arena. Visual and performance issues in Blender and Wolfenstein: Youngblood have also been fixed.

Discovering a 24-year-old bug in Linux

A company has been investigating the origin of a bug in Linux that caused TCP connections to get stuck under certain circumstances.