Summary of the week of August 28, 2023

[cobito]

Steam on ARM64

Ampere has published a guide to using Steam on 64-bit ARM processors along with the RTX A6000 series. Initially, the guide is intended for their server platforms, although it is possible to use it on other AArch64 micros.

Mageia 9 available

After several delays, a new version of Mageia is now available. This distro is a fork of Mandriva, which in turn was derived from Mandrake.

Linux on a Commodore 64

Someone has created a Linux port for the Commodore 64. It has been tested in emulation, although it is estimated that the MOS 6510 would take about a week to finish booting the system.

GPU failure statistics

A Swiss retailer has published statistics on graphics card failures by brand. Gainward cards (owned by Palit) are the most reliable. The highest failure rate is found in Sapphire models.

PIM development

At this year's Hot Chips, Samsung made a presentation on Processing-in-Memory (PIM), a memory topology that has been on paper for years and is finding it difficult to materialize.

DirectStorage on AMD

In this analysis, they check the performance of AMD graphics cards with DirectStorage enabled and disabled. Apparently, and unlike Nvidia, the number of operations per second improves substantially when it is activated.

66 threads per core

Intel has presented a photonic processor with 8 cores and 528 execution threads developed in conjunction with DARPA. Instead of cache, it has a type of memory called Scratchpad (SPM) that allows some management through software.

3D DRAM memory

Vertical growth could soon arrive in dynamic RAM. Stacking would be achieved with horizontal NIM (metal-insulator-metal) capacitors, instead of the classic vertical configuration. It is estimated that at this time, 28-layer memories could be achieved.

Firefox 117

Firefox 117 comes with credit card number autocomplete in new languages, including Spanish. A CSS compatibility tool has also been added for web developers.