Summary of the week of March 14, 2021

[cobito]

The chip shortage is getting worse

The imbalances between supply and demand for integrated circuits continue to increase. Although in January it seemed that a turning point was occurring, the average waiting time in February has set a new record with 26.2 weeks.

Why is it so difficult to compare processors

Some CPU manufacturers focus on energy efficiency while others focus on sustained power, which makes it difficult to compare processor performance.

TP-Link shares your data with third parties

The new TP-Link routers send all web traffic to third-party servers. Apparently, this is done to detect malware, but in this Reddit thread, people are skeptical about the final intention of this functionality.

AMD's Spectre patch has a flaw

Intel's security team has discovered that AMD's Spectre patch has had a vulnerability since 2018. AMD has already fixed the problem.

A game engine for BASH

Someone has created an ASCII game engine for BASH that allows you to create isometric perspective games in the style of the 8-bit era.

DirectStorage starts to work on PCs

DirectStorage is a component of DirectX that allows developers to adjust the priority of I/O operations on storage devices with other threads of execution. From now on, it is available for PC.

A walk through the PDP-11

In this article, they give an extensive review of one of the most popular minicomputers of all time. It is the PDP-11, which appeared in 1970, came with 4kB of RAM, a 1.25MHz CPU, and you had to program in assembly language.

Ryzen 3 3350U

Someone has brought us a Ryzen 3 3350U. It is a Zen+ laptop with 4 cores and a TDP of 15W. It is in ninth position in the Zen+ ranking and is far from entering the general top 100.

AMD will allow new CPUs on old motherboards

Finally, AMD has rectified and decided that the Ryzen 5000 series can be installed on motherboards with the B350 and X370 chipsets. These platforms appeared in 2017.

Intel will invest 33 billion in Europe

Intel is going to put 33 billion in R&D and manufacturing in Europe. In Spain, the Santa Clara company will establish joint laboratories with the Barcelona Supercomputing Center.

Nvidia presents the BaM

Big Accelerator Memory is a new Nvidia technology that will allow you to use an SSD drive installed in the system to store large datasets. Predictably, it will make use of DirectStorage so as not to have to go through the CPU.

A tool to download music from YouTube

Ytmdl is a tool written in Python that allows you to download music from YouTube and get metadata for the song in question from Spotify, Itunes, and company.

Core i5-1035G4

Krampak has brought us a Core i5-1035G4 in all its modes. It comes with 4 Ice Lake cores and although it gets the second single-thread position of the architecture, it fails in multi-thread probably due to thermal limitations since its 8 threads only double the single-thread performance. In this specific case, it could be more a limit of the Surface Pro 7 where it is mounted than of the micro itself.