As Ferris Bueller famously said, "Life moves pretty fast." Blink and you could miss it. Last week Intel was Intel, Arm was Arm, and RISC-V was RISC-V. But that all changed. Did you blink and miss it?

Intel made several major announcements recently including the launch of its Intel Foundry Services business. It will offer capacity in the U.S. and Europe, along with an IP portfolio for customers, including x86 cores as well production support for ARM and RISC-V cores.

Context Switching

I am having fun with my Raspberry Pi Pico, and I thought I would put together a small multitasking OS for the Pico, which I have called Piccolo OS. This first video covers the idea of Context Switching, a key concept for any multitasking OS.

Piccolo OS

Piccolo OS is a small multitasking OS for the Raspberry Pi Pico. It is designed primarily as a teaching tool. It demonstrates the fundamentals of a co-operative multitasking OS and the Arm Cortex-M0+. You can find the Piccolo OS source code on GitHub.

Silicon Wars: Snapdragon vs Exynos vs Apple vs Kirin vs MediaTek

Which is the best SoC for 2021? Is it the Qualcomm Snapdragon 888? Or maybe the Samsung Exynos 2100? What about the Apple A14 Bionic, or the Kirin 9000? Is the MediaTek Dimensity 1200 a contender?

Snapdragon 780G

Qualcomm has launched the Snapdragon 780G. Seven of its eight cores are the same design as the Snapdragon 888! Built using a 5nm process, there is a better GPU than the one found in the Snapdragon 855, plus a triple 14-bit ISP, 5G, and more!

 

PinePower Desktop Charger

The PinePower desktop power supply could be the perfect charger for your desk. It features a 65W USB-C PD port, an 18W QC3.0 port, three 15W USB-A ports, and 10W wireless charging. And let’s not forget the nifty display!

Charger Not Included: How fast will the Galaxy S21 charge?

The S21 doesn’t come with a charger in the box! So how fast will the S21 charge using the charger you already have (even one from Samsung)? The S21 needs a USB-C Power Delivery (PD) Programmable Power Supply (PPS) compatible charger to get the fastest charging. But what if you use your old charger, how fast can it charge the S21?

• NTFS vs FAT32 vs exFAT – Everything You Need To Know  – Like JavaScript Frameworks there are way too many filesystems in the world. When it comes to Windows the three main file systems are NTFS, FAT32, and exFAT. But what are the differences? And which one should you be using?
• Effective Git as a solo developer – Git can be a valuable tool without ever setting up a remote repository!
• Turbo Pascal Compiler written in JavaScript – A web-based Pascal compiler that runs a subset of Turbo Pascal 5.5 code. See the full write-up or try it now!
• Why Birds Don’t Get Cold Feet – Even if they stand in snow or ice-cold water!
• ‘Hovering ship’ photographed off Cornish coast by walker – Superior mirages and all that jazz.
• Bill Gates Says that Bitcoin is bad For the Planet – Bitcoin uses more electricity per transaction than any other method known to mankind.
• Speed of Rust vs C – The run-time speed and memory usage of programs written in Rust should about the same as of programs written in C, but overall programming style of these languages is different enough that it’s hard to generalize their speed. This is a summary of where they’re the same, where C is faster, and where Rust is faster.