Summary of the week of February 12, 2024

[cobito]

More details of Zen 5

A patch for the GCC compiler has revealed some features of Zen 5. It will come with 6 integer units in the ALU (compared to 4 in Zen 4), 4 address generation units (compared to 3 in Zen 4) and 2 floating-point storage units that can be used in the same clock cycle (compared to the need to wait for successive cycles in Zen 4).

About the blue LED

In this interesting documentary, they explain the history of the invention of the blue LED and the great difficulties involved in completing the primary colors decades after the red and green LEDs appeared.

How port 22 was assigned to SSH

In 1995, when the creator of SSH was about to publish the program, he wrote without much hope to the IANA to reserve a port in the range 1-255 and preferably 22. A few hours later, the regulator replied saying that there was no problem.

Backblaze's statistics for 2023

The storage service Backblaze has published its hard drive reliability statistics for 2023. As has become customary, Seagate is in the worst position. The most reliable are the units from Western Digital and HGST.

Free games

Until February 15 at 17h CET, STEAM is giving away: Dead Island: Riptide Definitive Edition (2016). And for a limited time on GOG.com, nothing less than FlatOut, a classic game par excellence.

Ryzen 5 5500

Someone has brought us a Ryzen 5 5500. It is a Zen 3 with 6 cores, 16 MB of cache and a performance that leaves it at the doors of the top 100.