• The Sbox has been announced.
  
  
  
  
  From the pictures, the Series S is about half the size of the Series X, which measures 6" x 6" x 12".
  
  Tech specs according to Wikipedia - not sure of the source - include the same 8 core 3.8GHz Zen 2 CPU as the X, 20 Navi 2 CUs delivering 4 TFLOPS, 10 GB of GDDR6 RAM, and a 512 GB NVMe SSD.
  
  For $299.
  
  They're targeting 1440p with this; it will certainly breeze through 1080p games, with about three times the performance of the Xbox One.  The GPU is within 5% of the raw performance of the PS4 Pro, and on a newer architecture, with more memory bandwidth and a much, much faster CPU.
  
  Wonder what it would take to get Imagine-Emu to run on it...
  
  
  
• SiPearl's Rhea has 72 Zeus cores.  (AnandTech)
  
  Zeus is a new Arm server core, but I don't know any details and a quick search failed to turn up anything.  It might well be a server version of the client-oriented Cortex X1, because the codename for that is Hera.
  
  If so, this will be the fastest Arm Chip yet; the X1 is expected to be 30% faster than the current A77.
  
  
  
• Yet another lake emerges from Intel.  (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Jasper Lake is the new Tremont-based Atom lineup.  It's expected to deliver 30% better IPC than current Goldmont-based Gemini Lake Refresh chips, and the same TDP and slightly better clocks.
  
  Which doesn't mean a lot if you don't know that Gemini Lake is already pretty decent on light workloads.  (CPUBenchmark)
  
  A 6W Pentium Silver N5030 delivers a PassMark score of 1346 single-threaded.  My Ryzen 7 1700 is only 50% faster, and current Ryzens are only 30% faster than that.  Of course with a 6W TDP the multi-threaded performance tails off rapidly - four cores delivering only 18% of the eight core Ryzen 1700 - but if you're only using one or two cores it's not actually terrible.
  
  
  
• Ryzen 4000 will include 10-core parts. (WCCFTech)
  
  This is entirely possible.  AMD didn't do this before because it would have meant an asymmetric core layout, which causes scheduling complications.  But with Zen 3 they're moving from two 4-core CCXs per chiplet to a unified 8-core CCX.  That means they could also do 14 cores if they really wanted to segment the market.  That might actually be worthwhile too; dies with only one defective core can be sold at a small premium over those with two.
  
  
  
• Progress is acquiring Chef, the devops automation tool. (Chef)
  
  I saw this on Hacker News and said, Progress?  That Progress?
  
  Yes, that Progress.
  
  
  
• Italy and now Australia have opened antitrust investigations into Apple over iCloud and the App Store.  (9to5Mac)
  
  Congratulations, Apple.  Senpai noticed you.
  
  
  
• Did a little experiment today with translucent playfields for the Imagine - that is, if you have a blue pixel, rather than being opaque to the field behind it, it tints it blue.
  
  Using a dead simple approach of adding the three three-bit RGB values and reading off the top three bits of the result, something that would have required only a handful of transistors to implement...  It actually works pretty well.  So that's going in.
  
  The only limitation is that you can either have the tenth bit giving you an extra Â½ LSB of brightness on all three colour channels or using it to select alpha mode, not both.
  
  Colour register 0 on overlays is still transparent; the remaining colours can be any mix of opaque and translucent.
  
  
  
• If I actually get this working - and working or not I'll release the source code - there's a ton of stuff on Itch.io to build cool games with.
  
  Looking for a space-based shmup rather than a turn-based strategy game?
  
  
  
  Or maybe an epic RPG?
  
  
  
  Or a platformer?
  
  
  
  Oh, there it is.  I found an even better platformer set, but then lost the link.  It's the same artist.  (PixelGameArt)
  
  
  
  
  Or a...  Map?  This is awesome, but the license precludes using it in a game; you can only use it to create static maps.
  
  
  
  Ah, this one isn't pixel art, but anything can be turned into pixel art if you squash it hard enough.
  
  
  
  Like this.
  
  
  
  That was just quickly squashed to 480 pixels wide and reduced to 32 colours, then resized back up for this page, so it's, well, not perfect.  But it's not a bad start.  32 colours is a bit restrictive, but we do have that 16+16+512 colour mode.
  
  
  There's also the Kenney asset packs which are public domain so I could even bundle some parts of those with the emulator, but while they offer a huge number of elements the individual sets aren't that extensive; they don't offer the scope of some of the ones above.

Pixel Game Art Music Video of the Day

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