Summary of the week of December 18, 2023

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The mechanical problems of today's GPUs

More and more cases of PCB breaks in modern graphics cards are being seen due to their weight. It is not clear if it is a design flaw or if the breaks are caused by improper handling by users.

Intel requires 16GB in dual channel for gaming PCs

From now on, laptop manufacturers who want the Arc Graphics sticker on their models will have to install at least 16 GB of RAM in dual channel.

AMD releases the source code of FSR 3

AMD has released the code for its FSR 3 (FidelityFX Super Resolution). The code is available on GitHub and is intended for integration into DirectX 12 and Unreal Engine 5.

Core i3-1220P

Someone has brought us a Core i3-1220P. It is an Alder Lake with only two P cores and 8 E cores. Despite everything and with its reduced TDP of 28W, it achieves 400,000 points and manages to enter the top 100 of the general ranking.

The virtual reality market is deflating

The virtual reality market has been reducing figures for two years. The beginning of the fall coincidentally occurred when Meta announced its metaverse. Since then, the company's virtual reality division has lost €2e10.

Firefox 121 available

The one hundred and twenty-first version of Firefox comes with native support for Wayland. The possibility of links always being underlined has also been added.

Khronos has ready H.264 and H.265 extensions

The Khronos group has finished defining the extensions for hardware video encoding in H.264 and H.265. Until now, specific APIs had to be used for each manufacturer such as NVENC for Nvidia or QuickSync for Intel. From now on, there will be a generic option that does not depend on any brand.

Fans with screen

Lian Li has presented some fans that include a small 1.6" LCD screen where system status information, such as temperature, is displayed. They cost about €50.

1-bit processor

A company is selling a kit to assemble a 1-bit CPU. It works at 1 Hz, has an address space of 2 bits and includes a ROM programmable by 4-bit switches.

Debian begins to abandon 32 bits

Debian's i386 architecture (which is actually i686) is numbered days as the people who maintain the package repository have the green light to stop compiling programs for 32-bit x86 systems.

Universal package manager

Someone has created a universal package manager that works on any operating system.

The versioning system of TeX

There are two widely used versioning systems: semver (semantic version) where there are usually two or three digits such as 3.11 and calver (calendar version) where date digits are used to compose the version number. TeX, the typesetting language behind LaTex, uses the piver system and is at version 3.141592653.