Summary of the week of March 6, 2023

[cobito]

Analysis of AMD's Van Gogh

In this post, they analyze Van Gogh, a purpose-specific APU that has been designed exclusively to power the Steam Deck. The main bottleneck of the machine seems to be in extremely high latency in the LPDDR5 memory.

Linux stops supporting ICC

Linux 6.3 will no longer have support for Intel's C++ compiler (ICC) because the processor developer has not updated it in 3 years.

Employee cannot use Windows for religious reasons

In this Reddit thread, they talk about a problem in the HR department of an American company: I recently hired a new employee for my team. [...] The problem arose during onboarding, when we provided her with the company laptop. She said she needed it configured with a Linux-based operating system because her religion does not allow the use of operating systems owned by Apple or Microsoft. [...] After many meetings yesterday with management, HR, legal, and IT, we decided to give it a try. The IT department is working on a computer for her.

Half-Life with Raytracing

Someone has created a patch to add Raytracing effects to Half-Life 1 from 1998. The result is quite interesting, especially in dark scenes.

Intel completes development of 2nm

Intel now has the specifications for its 1.8 and 2nm nodes available. They are not yet ready for mass production, but hardware developers can start adapting their designs to the new technology.

Comparison of GPUs for video encoding

In this post, they compare the performance of different brands of graphics processors in terms of video encoding. AMD continues to lag behind while Intel has made great strides.

Security flaw with Secure Boot

A security flaw has been found in Windows that allows Windows to boot with Secure Boot enabled and an infected UEFI.

GDDR7 specifications

The specifications for the new GDDR7 memory have been published, with which, by the way, some graphics cards have already been presented. It achieves 36Gbps with PAM3 encoding.

Improvements in Wayland failure recovery

The Wayland graphics protocol has received a patch that allows clients to recover from a failure in the window compositor.