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Submission + - ARM Launches Juno Reference Platform For 64-bit Android Developers (hothardware.com)

Submitted by MojoKid
MojoKid writes: One of the trickiest aspects to launching a new platform update is the chicken and egg problem. Without any hardware to test on, developers are leery of committing to supporting new hardware features. Without software that takes advantage of new hardware capabilities, customers aren't willing to pay for new equipment. This is the crux of the issue with respect to the ARMv8 architecture and enabling development for 64-bit Android platrforms. As such ARM is readying their Juno development platform that combines several of ARM's most advanced technologies on a single board. The product supports big.Little in an asymmetric configuration; each board ships with two Cortex-A57s, four Cortex-A53s, and a modest Mali T-624 core. All this hardware needs an OS to run on — which is why ARM is announcing a 64-bit port of Android as part of this new development board. By including AOSP support as well as additional hooks and features from Linaro, ARM wants Juno to be a sort-of one-stop shopping product for anyone who needs to test, prototype, or design a 64-bit product for the ARM ecosystem. The Android flavor that's coming over is based on Linaro Stable Kernel 3.10. At launch, Juno will support OpenGL-ES 3.0, on-chip thermal and power management, up to 8GB of RAM (12.8GB/s of bandwidth), an optional FPGA, and USB 2.0. OpenCL 1.1 will be added in a future product update. The project is positioned as a joint ARM / Linaro launch with ARM handling the hardware and Linaro taking responsibility for the software stack.

Submission + - Microsoft Wants To Keep The NSA Out Of Your OneDrive And Outlook Accounts (hothardware.com)

Submitted by MojoKid
MojoKid writes: Ever since Edward Snowden leaked details on how the government had forced various IT companies to disclose information (or secured their willing cooperation), companies like Google, Facebook, and Microsoft have been desperate to regain their users' trust. Six months ago, Microsoft announced that it would re-engineer its products and services to provide a much higher level of security — today, the company revealed that it has reached an important milestone in that process. As of now, Outlook.com uses TLS (Transport Layer Security) to provide end-to-end encryption for inbound and outbound email — assuming that the provider on the other end also uses TLS. The TLS standard has been in the news fairly recently after discovery of a major security flaw in one popular package (gnuTLS), but Microsoft notes that it worked with multiple international companies to secure its version of the standard. Second, OneDrive now uses Perfect Forward Secrecy (PFS). Microsoft refers to this as a type of encryption, but PFS isn't a standard like AES or 3DES — instead, it's a particular method of ensuring that an attacker who intercepts a particular key cannot use that information to break the entire key sequence. Even if you manage to gain access to one file or folder, in other words, that information can't be used to compromise the entire account.

Submission + - Samsung Launches First SSD With 3D Stacked NAND And It's Fast, 10 Yr. Warranty (hothardware.com)

Submitted by MojoKid
MojoKid writes: Samsung has just unveiled its latest series of solid state drives for consumer applications, the SSD 850 PRO. Like the previously-released SSD 845 EVO series, the 850 PRO leverages Samsung's tri-core MEX controller, but these new drives also feature bleeding-edge, 32 layer, 3D V-NAND flash memory that offers better power, endurance, and performance characteristics than traditional MLC NAND. Other features of the Samsung SSD 850 PRO series includes "Device sleep" (DEVSLP), which can maximize battery life in mobile devices and support for Samsung's RAPID mode technology, which leverages system RAM to boost performance. The SSD 850 series drives put up impressive numbers in a variety of benchmarks, besting many other drives in its class, but they also carry a long 10 year warranty.

Submission + - Facebook Alters 689K User Feeds In 'Emotional Contagion' Experiment (hothardware.com)

Submitted by MojoKid
MojoKid writes: Here's an interesting psychological factoid: Emotional states can be transferred to other people via text-based messages on social media, such as Facebook. That means that if, for instance, you view a bunch of sad posts, you're more likely to pen a sad post yourself shortly thereafter even though you don't realize that the sad posts made you sad. Here's a snippet from the "Significance" section of the paper, which was published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America (PNAS): "We show, via a massive (N = 689,003) experiment on Facebook, that emotional states can be transferred to others via emotional contagion, leading people to experience the same emotions without their awareness." That's almost 700,000 people that Facebook experimented on. The social network purposely manipulated the Newsfeeds of hundreds of thousands of people. Shouldn't Facebook have had to notify those users that it was doing--something? The research itself is significant because, according to its authors, "emotional contagion" can happen not just in real-world interactions, but also from social media interactions. Thus, a social network could be a vehicle for massive, large-scale emotional contagion.

Submission + - LG Innovates With 2560x1440 G3 Smartphone Display And Frickin' Laser Beams (hothardware.com)

Submitted by MojoKid
MojoKid writes: LG is probably getting a little tired of scraping for brand recognition versus big names like Samsung, Apple and Google. However, the company is also taking solace in the fact that their smartphone sales figures are heading for an all-time high in 2014, with an estimated 60 million units projected to be sold this year. LG's third iteration of their popular "G" line of flagship smartphones, simply dubbed the LG G3, is the culmination of all of the innovation the company has developed in previous devices to date, including its signature rear button layout, and a cutting-edge 5.5-inch QHD display that drives a resolution of 2560X1440 with a pixel density of 538 PPI. Not satisified with pixel overload, LG decide to equip their new smartphone with 'frickin' laser beams' to assist its 13MP camera in targeting subjects for auto-focus. The G3 performs well in the benchmarks with a Snapdragon 801 on board and no doubt its camera takes some great shots quickly and easily. However, it's questionable how much of that super high res 2560 display you can make use of on a 5.5-inch device.

Submission + - Google Cardboard, A DIY VR Headset You Can Build, Fold And Recycle (hothardware.com)

Submitted by MojoKid
MojoKid writes: Google's I/O developer conference has had a large number of announcements, some a little more interesting than the others. Then there are some that are down-right strange — at least at first. Google's "Cardboard" easily falls into that category. Imagine sitting at I/O, watching a keynote, and then being told to pick up some cardboard on the way out. You might begin to think that Google had lost it. Well, that really did happen, and event-goers were handed a sheet of corrugated cardboard on their way out of the auditorium. Of course, this wasn't an ordinary piece of cardboard — it could be unfolded, and reconstructed into a Virtual Reality housing unit for an Android smartphone. A device like this would be useless without an app, so don't worry, Google has one. With it, you can take a tour of different locations through Google Earth, watch YouTube videos on a "massive screen", walk down the street with Street View, and partake in some other fun activities, while the app takes advantage of a phone's head-tracking functionality.

Submission + - NVIDIA Tegra K1 At Google I/O, Unreal Engine 4 "Rivalry Demo" On TK1 Impresses (hothardware.com)

Submitted by MojoKid
MojoKid writes: NVIDIA is claiming that its Tegra K1 low power SoC has "led the charge" at I/O with Android-based products on the way that target the gaming, TV, automotive, and robotics markets. K1, for example, is the first processor to support Google's upcoming Android L release. Making this even more important is the fact that Google will have a 64-bit version of L, which not so surprisingly will suit NVIDIA's upcoming 64-bit Tegra K1 variant as well. That same K1 variant will be the backing CPU in Android's Project Tango devkit. As if that wasn't enough, K1 is also the first processor to support the new Android TV development platform. In conjunction with all of these announcements, NVIDIA showed once again what their new Tegra K1 SoC can muster from a gaming standpoint. The company had the Unreal Engine 4 "Rivalry" demo and running on Tegra K1 with effects like tessellation, image-based lighting, HDR tone-mapping, and so forth all running on a mobile platform. The demo simply looks awesome by any measure but especially when you consider it was targeted to run on a mobile device like a tablet.

Submission + - Intel And Micron Build New Xeon Phi Processor With Hybrid Memory Cube Technology (hothardware.com)

Submitted by MojoKid
MojoKid writes: Intel today made a splash at the International Supercomputing Conference in Leipzig, Germany by revealing new details about its next-generation Xeon Phi processor technology. You may better recognize Xeon Phi by its codename, Knights Landing. No matter what you call it, this represents a significant leap in High Performance Computing (HPC) that will deliver up to three times the performance of Intel's previous generations while consuming less power. A big part of the reason for this is the construction of a new high-speed interconnect technology called Intel Omni Scale Fabric, which Intel has been a bit cagey about, though reportedly it is comprised of silicon photonics interfaces as well as IP from Cray and QLogic. This will be integrated into the next generation of Xeon Phi processors as well as future general-purpose Xeon chips. At launch, more than 60 HPC-enhanced Silvermont-based cores will connect with up to 16GB of on-package, high-bandwidth memory designed in partnership with Micron, which leverages the fundamental DRAM and stacking technologies found in Micron's Hybrid Memory Cube (HMC) product.

Submission + - How Vacuum Tubes, New Technology Might Save Moore's Law (hothardware.com)

Submitted by MojoKid
MojoKid writes: The transistor is one of the most profound innovations in all of human existence. First discovered in 1947, it has scaled like no advance in human history; we can pack billions of transistors into complicated processors smaller than your thumbnail. After decades of innovation, however, the transistor has faltered. Clock speeds stalled in 2005 and the 20nm process node is set to be more expensive than the 28nm node was for the first time ever. Now, researchers at NASA believe they may have discovered a way to kickstart transistors again — by using technology from the earliest days of computing: The vacuum tube. It turns out that when you shrink a Vacuum transistor to absolutely tiny dimensions, you can recover some of the benefits of a vacuum tube and dodge the negatives that characterized their usage. According to a report, vacuum transistors can draw electrons across the gate without needing a physical connection between them. Make the vacuum area small enough, and reduce the voltage sufficiently, and the field emission effect allows the transistor to fire electrons across the gap without containing enough energy to energize the helium inside the nominal "vacuum" transistor. According to researchers, they've managed to build a successful transistor operating at 460GHz — well into the so-called Terahertz Gap, which sits between microwaves and infrared energy.

Submission + - Mozilla Developing Chromecast-Like Open Source Firefox OS Streaming SticK (hothardware.com)

Submitted by MojoKid
MojoKid writes: Low cost and convenient streaming solutions are become pretty plentiful these days. Perhaps inspired by what Google has done, Mozilla is said to be working on a streaming device of its own, only it will be powered by its own Firefox OS. Mozilla is mostly hush-hush on the project, though there is a prototype making the rounds to a select (and small) group of developers. Developers will be free to add casting abilities to Windows Phone or Fire Phone apps, as well as add to desktop apps. They will even be allowed to build their own cast-enabled hardware without much interference from Mozilla. Like Chromecast, Mozilla's dongle can beam things from a mobile device and eventually from a Firefox browser.

Submission + - See The World's First Microchip, Asking Price $1 Million (hothardware.com)

Submitted by MojoKid
MojoKid writes: There's a little mess of wires and solder that started it all--the world's first microchip for which its creator, Jack Kilby of Texas Instruments, eventually won the Nobel Prize in physics. And although at auction, the thing stirred up bids as high as $850,000, it failed to reach the reserve bid nor hit the $1 million to $2 million range expected by auction house Christie's. A second, more stable prototype was also in the lot along with a letter from Kilby about the process of making them. The microchip is a germanium wafer that has gold wiring and is mounted on a glass plate embedded in clear plastic.

Submission + - EA Offers Free Titanfall Trial, No Constraints, No Feature Reductions (hothardware.com)

Submitted by MojoKid
MojoKid writes: If you're bored this weekend with a fast Internet connection and some time to kill, EA is offering a free download of Titanfall to everyone, no questions asked, for the next two days. The game is the full version — you won't have any feature restrictions or locked-off areas. While it's being billed as a weekend offer, that's not the case — EA has said that you've got 48 hours to play the game from when you first launch it, not just over the next two days. This offer is good for PC users only but is open to anyone whose system can handle the game. This program is part of EA's new Origin Game Time service — once you start the game for the first time, the 48 hour clock starts counting down in real-time — meaning you get 48 hours of real-time to play the game, not 48 hours of play . If you like the game and want to buy it, you can do so — your progress will be saved when the trial ends and you'll be able to pick up where you left off.

Submission + - Harley-Davidson 'Project LiveWire' Marks The First Electric Hog (hothardware.com) 1

Submitted by MojoKid
MojoKid writes: Harley-Davidson is going green. No, not a Lime Green motorcycle or anything to do with paint jobs, but a brand new hog that runs on electricity instead of gasoline. To kick off the initiative, which HD is calling "Project LiveWire," the iconic motorcycle maker is taking 22 electric bikes on a tour across the U.S. next week to both promote the new rides and gauge the public's reaction. Once the attention rolls off of social media and into the streets where the hardcore bikers prefer to spend their time, it will be interesting to see what kind of reaction an electric hog elicits. These bikes lack an exhaust and the accompanying rumble that bikers love to hear. HD even tried (unsuccessfully) to trademark its bike's "Potato-Potato-Potato" sound. On the flip side, HD could attract a whole new audience to the world of motorcycles, one that cares more about carbon footprints than a rumbling exhaust.

Submission + - Intel To Offer Custom Xeons With Embedded FPGAs For The Data Center (hothardware.com)

Submitted by MojoKid
MojoKid writes: For years, we've heard rumors that Intel was building custom chips for Google or Facebook, but these deals have always been assumed to work with standard hardware. Intel might offer a different product SKU with non-standard core counts, or a specific TDP target, or a particular amount of cache — but at the end of the day, these were standard Xeon processors. Today, it looks like that's changing for the first time — Intel is going to start embedding custom FPGAs into its own CPU silicon. The new FPGA-equipped Xeons will occupy precisely the same socket and platform as the standard, non-FPGA Xeons. Nothing will change on the customer front (BIOS updates may be required), but the chips should be drop-in compatible. The company has not stated who provided its integrated FPGA design, but Altera is a safe bet. The two companies have worked together on multiple designs and Altera (which builds FPGAs) is using Intel for its manufacturing. This move should allow Intel to market highly specialized performance hardware to customers willing to pay for it. By using FPGAs to accelerate certain specific types of workloads, Intel Xeon customers can reap higher performance for critical functions without translating the majority of their code to OpenCL or bothering to update it for GPGPU.

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