Summary of the week of April 17, 2023

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4K codecs

In this post, they talk about the options available for encoding video in 4K and why the natural successors to very popular codecs for 1080p have been a fiasco.

Hard drive sales down 35%

Hard drive sales have suffered a drastic reduction compared to 2022. The decline is in line with the reduction in PC sales.

Nvidia in no hurry to sell the 40 series

It seems that Nvidia is not in much of a hurry to sell its RTX 40 series based on Ada Lovelace. It is believed that the slowness is due to the excess inventory of the RTX 30 series that they want to sell first.

Cybersecurity attack on Western Digital

Western Digital has suffered an attack in which 10 TB of data was stolen, including customer information and code certificates that can be used to impersonate the company.

Composing music with a random generator

Someone has created an open-source tool for creating musical bases using Linux's pseudo-random number generator.

Using a teletype as a console

Someone has used a teletype as a console connected to a machine with Debian 12.

How a modern processor boots up

CPUs can't do anything without being told what to do, which leaves us with a problem: how do you tell a processor to do the first thing? In many CPUs, this is handled in the form of a reset vector, which is an address programmed from where to start reading instructions when powered. In this post, they explain how a current x86 processor boots up.

European Chip Law

The Council and the European Parliament have reached an agreement on the new law regarding semiconductor production. The goal is to support the creation of large-scale technological capacity and create a framework to ensure supply security. The document emphasizes RISC-V.

DirectStorage 1.2 available

Microsoft has released the DirectStorage 1.2 SDK. It comes with the possibility of enabling the I/O buffer. Currently, DirectStorage opens files without a buffer. This avoids unnecessary copies to get the data to the GPU as quickly as possible. But it seems that some developers have commented that they would like to be able to use the same code for both SSD drives and mechanical hard drives, and mechanical drives need a buffer to reduce seek times.

AM64 turns 20

The first 64-bit extension for home processors came from AMD with its AMD64. The repertoire has turned 20.

The index adds 117,000 files

This week, the file search index has added 117,727 new files, reaching 3,782,337 and 447 GB.