bk99.de entertain the web since 1997

bk99.de
g · HardwareCurated

New Chinese x86 CPU in development

Summary

Golem’s short news of 5 January 2022 reported that the Chinese manufacturer Zhaoxin was planning new x86 processors for desktop and server for 2022, without giving details. The current state was, for example, the KX-U6780A with eight cores and 16 nm manufacturing. Further topics were a VA-API backend for Nvidia’s NVDEC under Linux and an AR chip from Qualcomm for Microsoft.

Ideas

  • China is developing its own x86 processors to become more independent of US manufacturers.
  • A free VA-API backend is meant to enable hardware-accelerated video in Firefox with the Nvidia driver.
  • Nvidia no longer supported the VDPAU backend used until then.

Insights

  • Technological sovereignty drives states to develop their own processors.
  • Gaps in vendor drivers are often closed by individual independent developers.

Facts

  • The Zhaoxin KX-U6780A has eight cores and is manufactured in 16 nm.
  • The new VA-API backend uses Nvidia’s NVDEC interface.

References

Critique

  • As a round-up, the text provides no more than an announcement without details on any topic.

Recommendations

  • Under Linux, use vainfo to check whether video acceleration is active for your graphics card.
  • Judge new processor vendors by driver and firmware support under Linux.

Read the original article

Search the Web Archive

g · 2022

Arduino chip adds Wi-Fi to the hobbyist board

In 2022 Arduino co-founder Gianluca Martino wanted to fund the Jolly module via Kickstarter; it replaces the Arduino Uno’s microcontroller with a variant with Wi-Fi. It combines an ATmega328PB with an ESP8285 including 2 MByte of flash, an integrated antenna and Wi-Fi 4. Because the chip is compatible with the ATmega328P, form factor, GPIO pins and existing Arduino software are meant to keep working.

g · 2020

L1DES and VRS make Intel chips vulnerable

In January 2020 Intel disclosed two further variants of Microarchitectural Data Sampling, found by the University of Michigan and VU Amsterdam. With L1DES, alias CacheOut (CVE-2020-0549), data is evicted from the L1 data cache into the fill buffer and can be read there; with VRS, vector registers are affected. Kaby Lake, Coffee Lake, Whiskey Lake and Cascade Lake, among others, were affected, and Intel announced microcode updates.

g · 2010

Linux kernel 2.6.33-rc5 released

In January 2010 the fifth release candidate of Linux 2.6.33 brought a driver for DVB cards with the widely used Mantis chipset into the main branch. The Intel graphics driver gained support for embedded DisplayPorts, and there were fixes for Radeon KMS, XFS and eCryptfs. According to the report, Nouveau, DRBD and Ceph had made it into the kernel before, while Btrfs was still considered experimental.