Summary of the week of March 17, 2025

[cobito]

NES clock degradation

A group dedicated to speedrunning has discovered that one of the clocks on the NES degrades over time, causing the audio processing unit to speed up. This makes it very difficult to establish deterministic methods for measuring times.

SteamOS debuts Plasma 6

SteamOS 3.7.0 comes with the notable update of Plasma to version 6. The kernel has also been updated to version 6.11 and Mesa and the Arch base have been updated.

GIMP 3.0 available

The GIMP team has released the third version of the image editor. It is being touted as a free alternative to Photoshop and with this version, it is getting closer in functionality by adding, among many other things, non-destructive editing and compatibility with new formats.

Core Ultra 7 258V

Someone brought us our first Lunar Lake the other day. The Core Ultra 7 258V is an 8-core, no HT, 17W TDP mobile processor that manages to sneak in at position 87 in the overall ranking.

GNOME 48 available

The forty-eighth version of GNOME comes with significant performance improvements thanks to the use of dynamic triple buffering that smooths on-screen movements. Improvements have also been added to the applications built into the desktop environment.

Core Ultra 9 185H

Someone has brought us a Core Ultra 9 185H. It is a 16-core, 45W TDP Meteor Lake mobile processor with performance that places it in the middle of the top 100.