Summary of the week of April 22, 2024

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Zilog retires the Z80

Zilog has decided to stop producing the famous Z80 CPU after being in production for no less than half a century. The 8-bit processor powered the MSX computers, several Sinclair models and the Osborne 1, the first laptop to have some success. The repertoire will continue to be available in later models (still on sale) such as the eZ80 and the Z180.

Horizontal scrolling compositor

Niri is a compositor for Wayland that displays windows in a horizontal row with infinite scrolling.

Ryzen 7 7840HS

Someone has brought us a Ryzen 7 7840HS. It is a Zen 4 laptop with 8 cores that exceeds half a million points. With a TDP of 35W, it manages to place itself in position 47 of the general ranking.

File manager for the console

TUIFI Manager is a file manager for the console that uses UniCurses. Thanks to this library, text mode interfaces can be created that mimic a graphical interface quite well.

Core i5-12500H

Namiga brought us a Core i5-12500H in all modes some time ago. It is an Alder Lake with 4 P cores and 8 E that comes mounted on a Lenovo V15 G4 IAH, which seems to be limiting its frequency to 3.8GHz (compared to the official 4.5GHz), so it does not achieve a great result.

AMD will release more Radeon code

AMD has announced that it will release the code for more parts of the Radeon driver for Linux throughout this year. This is a different announcement from the work they are doing to publish the code of the Micro-Engine Scheduler which, by the way, could also be beneficial in Intel CPUs.

Qemu 9.0 available

The popular multi-architecture emulator Qemu has reached its ninth version. One of the most interesting new features is the ability of virtio-blk to manage multiple IO queues in multithreading for a single disk.

Ryzen 9 7940HS

Someone brought us a Ryzen 9 7940HS a few days ago. It is a Zen 4 laptop with 8 cores and a TDP of 35W that exceeds 700 thousand points. It achieves position 38 of the general ranking and its performance is on par with the Ryzen 7 7700X.