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SILICON
SILIC
CHIP
www.siliconchip.com.au
Publisher/Editor
Nicholas Vinen
Technical Editor
John Clarke – B.E.(Elec.)
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Bao Smith – B.Sc.
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Associate Professor Graham Parslow
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FRANZCO
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Phil Prosser – B.Sc., B.E.(Elec.)
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Louis Decrevel
loueee.com
Founding Editor (retired)
Leo Simpson – B.Bus., FAICD
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2
Silicon Chip
Editorial Viewpoint
Close-up vision: use it or lose it
Like most people, as I am getting older, I have
noticed that it’s becoming harder to focus on tiny
objects close to my face. However, I think this has to
do with more than just age.
These days, due to my editorial duties, I spend a
lot more time editing documents on the computer,
answering e-mails and so on, and less time building
PCBs and such. That means my vision is fixed at the
same distance of around 30-50cm for much of the day.
When I recently managed to get far enough ahead in my editing duties to
work on some projects, I struggled working with parts that I had no difficulty
with just a few years ago. But I noticed that over time, as I did more soldering
and assembly work, much of my good close-up vision started to come back,
and I was suffering less from eye strain and such.
One of the reasons our vision deteriorates as we age is that the flexible
lens in our eyes becomes less elastic over time, making it harder to focus on
objects closer to our faces. But I wonder if that is accelerated if we are not
using our close-up vision enough.
I also suspect that the muscles that change the shape of the lens will weaken
if they are not used, leading at the very least to increased eye strain when
working with small objects or reading small type.
Regardless of the mechanism, I think you are more likely to keep your
close-up vision if you use it regularly. Having said that, it probably isn’t
great to use it too much, either. We need to spend some time looking into the
distance every day too, and many hours spent working with tiny details are
likely to result in eye strain and headaches at the end of the day.
Competition resulting in innovation
It looks like the CPU market is heating up again (quite literally in some
senses). After seemingly almost a decade of stagnation, AMD and Intel are
finally working hard to leapfrog each other. The just-released Ryzen 7000
series runs at impressively high frequencies, up to around 6GHz in stock
form, compared to around 5GHz for the previous generation AMD parts and
current Intel CPUs.
That frequency jump primarily comes down to the process node shrinking
from 7nm in the previous generation to 5nm in the current generation (see
our articles on IC Fabrication Technology in the June-August 2022 issues for
details: siliconchip.au/Series/382).
Along with efficiency improvements, the result is an approximately 30%
improvement in single-threaded performance. That’s similar to the previous
generation’s gain, so we’ve seen computer speeds jump nearly 70% in just
a couple of years.
Parallel processing users won’t be disappointed either, with the flagship
AMD CPU (Ryzen 7950X) beating the Intel i9-12900K by 42%.
And now, just after I wrote that, Intel announced their 13th-generation
parts (that we knew were coming). They are certainly an improvement over
the 12th-generation, increasing both the core count and maximum operating
frequencies. But it looks like AMD is still in the lead in many workloads, at
least for now, as Intel have not changed their node so radically.
We don’t want the situation we had for most of the last decade where AMD
was down (but not quite out), and Intel had no real competition. They would
bring out a new generation of CPUs now and then with modest improvements,
but it didn’t seem like they were really trying that hard. That laziness has
cost them their technology lead, and now they are scrambling to catch up.
Cover image source: https://unsplash.com/photos/BvAoCypqRXU
Australia's electronics magazine
by Nicholas Vinen
siliconchip.com.au
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