A week in the IT world: EU focuses on electronics repairs, new processors from Intel

Another week is behind us and we can look at some interesting things from the IT world, which we did not cover in a full-length article during the week, but which are still worth a (brief) mention.

Large foreign media have (somewhat belatedly) she noticed of the new initiative of the European Commission, which approved a memorandum a few days ago, the aim of which, with the help of electronics manufacturers, is to achieve that mobile phones, tablets and other products will have a longer life both thanks to the improvement (extension) of software support, and also from the point of view of simplifying some service tasks - for example, replacing batteries, which should now be feasible even by non-specialist personnel. The whole idea is currently only on a theoretical level, it will be interesting to see how the EU, or Will the EK succeed (and if at all) somehow translate this goal into practice.

During the week, information about the upcoming generation of desktop processors from Intel - the 10th generation of Core chips from the Comet Lake-S family - reached the web. This generation is interesting to us mainly because it can be expected to be used in iMacs and Mac Minis, which will almost certainly receive a hardware update this year. According to the leaked internal documentation, the new chips from Intel will be released sometime during the second quarter, specifically between April 13 and June 26. Intel will offer a total of 17 different chips (see table below, source Videocards.com) with the fact that the highlight of the offer will be the i9-10900K processor, which, in addition to the unlocked multiplier, will offer 10 physical cores, i.e. a total of 20 with HT. This will be a premiere for Intel in the mainstream segment that clearly shows how good it is to have competition. It is not yet clear what CPU Apple will ultimately choose for its products, but it can be expected that users will get to choose from a cross-section of the offer, i.e. from i3 to i9.

TSMC, which is engaged in the production of microchips, has announced that it will start in April commercial production on production lines that will produce processors made with the 5nm manufacturing process. This was preceded by several months of testing, which has now seemingly come to an end. This is very important news for Apple, as the company from Cupertino is one of the first (if not the first) customers for which TSMC will produce 5nm chips. In the case of Apple, it should be the new A14 processors that will appear in the new iPhones in the fall. According to information from the industry, TMSC has production capacity for the 5nm process completely blocked for a relatively long time.