Summary of the week of March 15, 2021

[cobito]

Linux for the M1

Asahi Linux is a project that is porting the kernel to Apple's new ARM processor. This extensive article details some parts of the micro.

Performance improvements in Rocket Lake

The microcode update on Rocket Lake processors (more specifically, the i7-11700K) has been proven to bring performance improvements of 1-2% in generic tasks and 2-3% in games.

Supply shortage hits Qualcomm

And with it, manufacturers of phones and tablets will have to slow down the pace of production.

MRAM development continues

Long before the first SSD drive appeared, this persistent RAM memory (the M stands for Magnetoresistive) was already being talked about. In this extensive article from Semiengineering, they explain what it's about and how development is going.

Restrictions for mining are bypassed

Someone has managed to bypass the restrictions that Nvidia imposed to prevent mining with the RTX 3060. More specifically, to mine Ethereum.

Nvidia accidentally unlocks their cards

Yesterday it was reported that someone had managed to use the RTX 3060 for mining and a few hours ago Nvidia came out saying that they actually unlocked them accidentally.

Micron abandons 3D XPoint memory

The development of this memory, which was being done jointly with Intel, has been abandoned. The goal was to have faster and more durable NAND memory for the manufacture of SSD drives.

Core i7-1165G7

Namiga brought us a portable beast in monohil yesterday. It's the first Tiger Lake to arrive. It seems that Intel has changed the internal nomenclature, a nomenclature that has been there at least since the Netburst era. Now the processor name is preceded by the Core generation. Leaving aside aesthetic issues, in this architecture the instruction cache has been increased to 48kB per core. This particular Tiger Lake comes with 4 cores with HT and is in fifth position in the overall monohil ranking. In addition, in the generic test (test 3), it is in first position in all modes except in AVX2 mode, where it is only surpassed by the Ryzen 7 5800X.

Microsoft enables AutoHDR in Windows

For now it is only available in the Insider Program, so owners of this type of screens will have to wait a bit to use it in stable Windows.

AMD will not prevent mining

After Nvidia's failed attempt to stop mining on their GPUs, AMD has said that they will not prevent the execution of any type of workload on their graphics cards.

Firefox ends Compact Density

Until now there were three sizes for the browser interface: touch screen, normal, and "Compact Density" (a reduced-size interface). Mozilla has decided to eliminate the latter option because people found it difficult to find where it was activated. This decision has raised controversy because of the excuse and the fact that lately they have abandoned the development of too many functionalities.

The state of Wayland

The eternal substitute for X continues to advance so that the change is as transparent as possible. In this entry, some functions that until recently were problematic in Wayland, such as screen captures, have been tested.