Summary of the week of July 12, 2021

[cobito]

Intel wants to build 8 factories in Europe

These factories will depend on state and community subsidies. It is still unknown where they will be installed.

A new type of processor

In this article, they interview Peter Foley, the co-founder of Ascenium. It is a company that has obtained 16 million in funding to create a new processor. Instead of improving what exists, they want to start from scratch.

TSMC investigates integrated water cooling

The company has tested three different systems, although in essence, they all consist of circulating a fluid inside the integrated circuit.

ARM vs x86

In summary, what matters is the implementation, not the ISA.

Firefox 90 comes with minor changes

Now it blocks Facebook scripts in Private mode to prevent tracking when leaving this mode. In addition, PDF printing has been improved and new options have been added in the settings.

Russia wants to manufacture RISC-V processors

A Russian state company wants to get on board with processor production using RISC-V. The chips would be intended for government and educational computers starting in 2025.

Ryzen 7 3800XT

Someone has brought us this Zen 2 with 8 cores and SMT. Its performance is practically identical to the 3800X. In theory, the difference between the X and XT is that the latter have a slightly higher boost frequency. But the truth is that there is no appreciable difference in single-threaded performance, even removing the contribution of the memory test.

Valve presents the Steam Deck

It is a portable console powered by a Zen 2 and an RDNA 2 GPU. It will come with SteamOS 3.0 (a distro based on Arch) and KDE Plasma as the desktop environment. Its price starts at €419.

Intel wants to buy GlobalFoundries

The acquisition is being negotiated for 30 billion. Let's remember that one of GF's big clients is AMD.

AMD publishes the source code of FSR

FidelityFX Super Resolution is AMD's technique for generating images of higher resolution from smaller images. The source code is available on GitHub under the MIT license.

Lenovo removes H.264 acceleration

The laptop manufacturer has sent out a BIOS update for its Legion series that has left the computers without acceleration in H.264 encoding. This has caused several programs like OBS or Oculus Quest 2 to stop working.