HackerNews Summary (2023-05-28 09PM)

Source: New Arm Cores Deliver up to 40% Better Performance

Summary
Arm has unveiled the Total Compute Solution 2023 (TCS23) chip designs with improved graphics and CPU cores for all types of mobile devices. The new Arm Cortex-X4 is a high-performance core for flagship phones, offering a 15% better performance using 40% less power than last year’s X3. Meanwhile, the Cortex-A720 and Cortex-A520 “big” and “little” CPU core designs offer a 40% performance boost and improved power efficiency.

Fact
💻 The new Arm Cortex-X4 core offers 15% better performance using 40% less power than last year’s X3.

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Source: Discovery of ‘2000-year-old computer’ leaves scientists baffled

Summary
The Antikythera mechanism, an ancient astronomical calendar found inside a Greek shipwreck in 1901, is actually a complex device that tracked celestial time, worked as a calendar, and was technically sophisticated. Scientists from the University College London discovered the device’s intricacies by conducting a 3D computer modelling research.

Fact

🗓️ The 2,000-year-old Antikythera mechanism is an ancient astronomical calendar and was dubbed the “first computer.”

⚙️ The device is a hand-powered time-keeping instrument that used a wing-up system and had 30 corroded bronze gearwheels to track the movement of celestial bodies.

🌞 The mechanism tracked the movement of the sun, moon, and planets on concentric rings, based on ancient Greek astronomical theories.

🧠 The Antikythera mechanism is more technically sophisticated than any other tool invented over the next 1,000 years, according to scientists from the University College London.

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Source: Secure Container Runtimes and Wasm Runtime on Arm

Summary
This blog gives an introduction and benchmarking on different runtimes on Arm64 platform, including Runc, Kata Container, gVisor, and WasmEdge. It explains the responsibility of a runtime and their adapted areas. Among the runtimes, WasmEdge has the advantage of smaller binary size and faster start time compared to container technology.

Fact

💻 WasmEdge is a lightweight, high-performance, and extensible WebAssembly runtime for cloud-native, edge, and decentralized applications.

🔒 Kata Container is a secure container runtime that uses hardware virtualization technology as an additional layer of defense providing stronger workload isolation.

🚪 gVisor is an application kernel, written in Go, that implements a substantial portion of the Linux system call interface to provide extra isolation between running applications and host OS.

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Source: Let us serve you, but don’t bring us down

Summary
Archive.org was down for about an hour due to tens of thousands of requests per second on public domain OCR files from AWS. Blocking IP addresses provided temporary relief, but another set of requests caused a second outage.

Fact

🛑 Archive.org was brought down by tens of thousands of requests per second from AWS.

📈 Users should start slowly and ramp up for bulk requests of public domain materials.

📧 Large project initiators should contact info@archive.org for help.

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