Blender 3.1 gets a gang of new features, AMD enables support for Ryzen 5000 CPUs on 300-series motherboards, 7 inch mini-laptops, and a RISC-V powered thermal printer.
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Timestamps:
00:00 Intro
06:09 Blender 3.1 hotness
12:49 Return of the 7″ laptop
20:24 AMD will support 5000 CPUs on 300 motherboards
29:29 Quartz64 Pro
33:44 RISC-V powered DevTerm kit
Blender 3.1
https://www.blender.org/download/releases/3-1/
- Blender, our favorite open source and 3D computer graphics software, has just had a new release, version 3.1.
- There are so many awesome new features we won’t be able to cover them all!
- Cycles now has a Metal GPU backend, contributed by Apple, which takes advantage of hardware accelerated renders on macOS.
- There are 19 new nodes:
- Including an Extrude node for extruding objects directly in the node editor.
- An Arc node for creating incomplete circles.
- And a Vertex Neighbors node which gives access to the number of vertices and faces connected to each vertex.
- Blender 3.1 brings performance in Geometry Nodes to the next level.
- Many nodes are now multi-threaded and use less memory.
- Exporting .obj files is now orders of magnitude faster thanks to porting it to C++.
- I was having a look at the latest benchmark and ran across the meta analytics.
- Didn’t expect the OS breakdown.
- Welcome to mass adoption of FLOSS software.
- Blender is mainstream in the OS breakdown.
Itsy bitsy
- OMG! I have been wanting one of these! I had put this one and the 8 inch Chuwi MiniBook in my AliExpress Wish List a few months ago..
- This is even smaller and cuter than my Asus Eee PC 701.
- Or this rare orange Eee PC knock-off made in France called the Lexibook Laptop!
- The Celeron J4125 is a little less than half the performance of a Ryzen 5 3600.
- Eye melting 1024 x 600 pixel touchscreen display.
- Headphone jack!
- 8GB RAM and a M.2 slot.
- Going to run you around $300.
- I’ve included a non data scraping link in the show notes.
AMD 300
- Tossing this in because Linux users love them some AMD.
- We can thank Intel for releasing their recent budget oriented CPUs.
- After a future AGESA UEFI update, AMD Ryzen 5000 CPUs will be supported in 300-series motherboards.
- Assuming that your board vendor issues such an update.
- While I wouldn’t recommend plopping a Ryzen 7 5800X3D into a budget board from 4 years ago, you could.
- Jackbox, the PC running the audio for the show has a B350 board and the biggest baddest APU it can handle is the R5 3400G.
- These little guys still demand $200+ on the used market.
- Welp, for a few bucks more I could snag a AMD Ryzen 7 5700G if MSI does the thing.
- That’s where things get a wee sticky.
- Motherboard manufacturers would much rather you buy a new mobo.
- Even if they add support things could be a bit squirrely.
- This is awesome!
- AMD has been so good about backwards compatibility on motherboards with their Ryzen processors. Saves us $$$!
Slice of Pi
Quartz Pi (Rtheren)
https://www.pine64.org/2022/03/15/march-update-introducing-the-quartzpro64/
- $300 and bring a coupon.
- That’s right, open to developer orders for now.
- 16GB RAM and 64GB of expandable eMMC.
- 4x A55 and 4x A76 cores clocked at 1.8GHz and 2.4GHz respectively.
- 4 core GPU based on the Valhalla architecture.
- So they are releasing this?
- A sample cost is $249 with a shipping lead time of just 7 days.
- I would recommend waiting a few months and see how the software stack matures.
- The QuartzPro64 will only be available publicly when BSP (Business Service Provider) releases are in good shape.
- Pine64 will announce QuartzPro64’s availability on their Telegram, Matrix and Discord channels and on their social media in the coming weeks.
- Thanks to RTheren, our Advisor in chat, for posting this news.
DevTerm Kit R-01
https://www.clockworkpi.com/product-page/devterm-kit-r01
- This is the DevTerm Kit R-01 from ClockworkPi that you can build.
- The DevTerm is an open source portable terminal for every developer and Linux nerd.
- The DevTerm is an A5 sized notebook with a 6.8 inch ultrawide IPS screen, and a ClockworkPI mainboard.
- But what makes this DevTerm Kit special is that it has a RISC-V processor, and is the world’s first 64-bit RISC-V portable terminal!
- So back in November of 2020 on LWDW 250, we talked about the DevTerm ARM64-bit kits.
- You can buy the DevTerm Kit R-01 for $239.00.
- But be warned, ClockworkPi states:
- “Please Note
- DevTerm R-01 is a highly experimental model and requires some experience with Linux system & FOSS. We strongly recommend all beginners to choose other models.”
