Summary of the week of April 29, 2024

[cobito]

About Intel's stability issues

Stability issues have been detected in Intel processors that affect generations 13 and 14. According to the manufacturer, the root of the problem lies in the configuration of motherboards with chipsets from the 600 and 700 series, where protections against overcurrent, temperature, and frequency are deactivated to achieve better performance or lower consumption.

Flickering on screens with VRR

It has been known for some time that certain screens with variable refresh rate activated can suffer from flickering that occurs when there is a sudden change in frame rate. This happens with all technologies, but OLED panels seem to be more problematic than the classic TN, VA, and IPS.

Intel's first quarter earnings report

Intel is not recovering. Filtering out the company's propaganda in the first part of the year's earnings report, it can be glimpsed that it could almost be a profitable company if they had saved the dividends. As its CEO said a few weeks ago, the future of the once king of domestic processors depends on the success of its manufacturing technologies.

Playing Doom in htop

Someone has created a program that allows you to play Doom using htop statistics as the display screen.

MiB or MB in KDE

The KDE team has created a configuration option where you can choose the storage units: the IEC system where 1024 bytes are 1 kibibyte, the JEDEC system where 1024 bytes are 1 kilobyte, or the international system where 1000 bytes are 1 kilobyte.

A worm without support continues to spread

PlugX is malware that was discovered in 2019. The worm has been spreading through pendrives to computers around the world. But a while ago, the developers abandoned the server to which communications were directed. Despite this, it continues to reproduce. A security company has decided to buy the block of IPs to which the program communicates and has discovered that about 100,000 connections are made from different IPs per day.

xconsole 1.1 available

18 years after the publication of the first stable version, xconsole 1.1 has appeared this week. A problem with vertical scrolling has been solved and from now on, it is invulnerable to the 2038 effect.

Core i5-1335U

Someone has brought us a Core i5-1335U. It is a Raptor Lake that came out just over a year ago and comes with 2 P cores, 8 E and a TDP of 15W that, as usual in this range, limits its performance. It manages to exceed a quarter of a million points, but it is not enough to enter the top 100.

nano 8 available

The famous minimalist text editor for the console nano has reached the eighth version. It comes with many changes related to keyboard shortcuts and the possibility of scrolling with the mouse wheel.

A new battle on the AI front

It seems that AI is going to arrive at home computers one way or another. From this arrival, whose benefits for the average user are still to be proven, two currents of thought have emerged: on one hand, Nvidia advocates using powerful GPUs to do the work and on the other, Microsoft prefers efficient NPUs.

AMD's sales plummet

AMD's sales of gaming graphics cards have dropped by nearly 50%. This drop is offset by the increase in GPUs for data centers, but it makes it clear that AMD has not calibrated the prices of its models well to deal with the extra features that Nvidia offers.

Breaking Android's encryption key

A research article has been published explaining how to break Android's encryption key. The attack is based on the DRAM remanence effect, which consists of the fact that when the RAM stops being powered, the data remains for a few tenths of a second. To extract the key, you have to cool the memory quickly so that the data lasts for a few minutes and, from there, follow a series of steps that are not easy to execute.