Hackaday posts about the Infini-Z 3D printer, which aims to eventually print a copy of itself. The printer features an infinite Z-axis design that extrudes its own legs to raise the gantry. While the printer cannot currently create a practical printer due to the need for additional parts like bearings and electronics, the creator believes these challenges can be overcome.
The project reminds one of the Creality CR-30, which also features an infinite axis system.
Source: Hackaday.
Hackaday reports on the challenges of preserving data stored on magnetic storage devices from the 80s and 90s, such as floppy disks. These storage methods are slowly degrading, making data recovery difficult after several decades. However, in a recent project, the Bloop Museum was able to successfully decode information from a 5.25" floppy disk last written to in 1993 using a DEC PDP-11. They used a GreaseWeazle controlled by a Raspberry Pi to generate an audio file from the data on the disk and then worked backwards to extract usable information. The data on the disk was from a digital stenography machine, and decoding it required further expertise.
Source: Hackaday.
The HUNSN BM34 mini PC offers a compact design with extensive connectivity options. It features three video outputs, two Ethernet ports, mic and speaker jacks, a DC power input, and eight USB ports. However, only two of the USB ports support USB 3.0 speeds. The PC also supports multiple storage options, including an M.2 2280 PCIe NVMe SSD, an mSATA SSD, and a 2.5-inch hard drive or SSD. It can accommodate up to 16GB of DDR4-3200 memory and is powered by an Intel Processor N100 chip.
The fanless design and low-power processor make it suitable for silent operation. The PC is available on Amazon starting at $200 for the barebones model. It can be used for various purposes, including as a low-power router or home media server.
Source: Liliputing.
Phoronix reports that AMD has released ZenDNN 4.1, the latest version of their Zen Deep Neural Network Library. This release is aimed at accelerating inference workloads on AMD Ryzen and EPYC processors. The library is API compatible with Intel’s oneDNN library and helps optimize AI workloads for use on AMD Zen processors.
The ZenDNN 4.1 release notes state that the library has been updated to support TensorFlow 2.12, PyTorch 1.13, and ONNX Runtime 1.15.1. There are no other mentioned changes or optimizations in this release.
The new ZenDNN 4.1 release can be downloaded from GitHub, and more information about the Zen Deep Neural Network library can be found on AMD’s Developer Central website.
Source: Phoronix.
Phoronix reports that early testing of the Linux 6.6 kernel shows impressive gains for AMD’s high core count server processors, particularly the EPYC 9754 “Bergamo.” The new Linux 6.6 kernel features the Earliest Eligible Virtual Deadline First (EEVDF) scheduler, which is a major improvement over the existing Completely Fair Scheduler (CFS). The EEVDF scheduler has shown to help with latency sensitive tasks and has led to a lot of CFS code being removed. Additionally, the Linux 6.6 workqueue improvements benefit AMD CPUs and other chiplet-based CPUs with multiple L3 caches. In testing, Linux 6.6 has shown dramatic improvements on higher core count processors like the AMD EPYC 9754.
The article discusses the testing of the Linux 6.6 kernel on an AMD EPYC 9754 server configuration with 128 cores and 256 threads per socket. The benchmarks were carried out using Linux 6.5.1 stable and then with Linux 6.6-rc1. The results showed significant performance improvements with the Linux 6.6 kernel.
Source: Phoronix.
PostgreSQL 16 has been released has been released with several new features and performance improvements. The update includes enhancements in query parallelism, bulk data loading, and logical replication. One of the notable additions is SIMD support for both x86 and ARM architectures, which improves ASCII and JSON string processing, array operations, and sub-transaction searches. The release also introduces more SQL/JSON syntax, pg_stat_io for key I/O metrics, and various security and access control enhancements. Bulk loading using COPY can see up to a 300% performance improvement in some cases.
Source: Phoronix.