73678263
submission
MojoKid writes:
Today, Microsoft announced that later this year, it will be releasing what could be the "ultimate" Xbox and Windows game controller. Called Xbox Elite Wireless, this gamepad has a dramatically overhauled D-pad and four paddles underneath. Other features that make this gamepad special: there are trigger locks, the ability to customize thumbstick sensitivity, along with the level of travel for the top triggers. In addition, it also sports swappable components, like the paddles, etc. Pricing has been announced at $149 and given just how advanced this gamepad is over the original, it's understandable but still pretty steep.
73609575
submission
MojoKid writes:
If you're an ardent PC racing fiend, chances are that you either own or have heard of Logitech's G27. The G27 has been a popular gaming peripheral (it supports the PC, PlayStation 2 and PlayStation 3) that not only includes a steering wheel and three pedals (accelerator, brake, clutch), but also a six-speed "H" pattern gearbox. Today, Logitech is finally introducing successors, the G29 Driving Force Racing Wheeland the G920 Driving Force Racing Wheel for PS3 and PS4, as well as PC and Xbox One racers, respectively. Both wheels are equipped with dual-motor force feedback, 900-degree (2.5 turns to lock) steering, helical gearing, and anti-backlash hardware. Logitech is also hoping to impart a premium feel to its new controllers courtesy of a hand-stitched leather wheel, stainless steel paddle shifters, and steel ball bearings to stand up to abuse. Like its predecessor, the G29 and G920 both come with a separate, floor-mounted three-pedal unit to keep your feet busy when blasting around the Nürburgring. Unfortunately, the six-speed shifter unit that used to come standard in the box with the G27 is now an optional accessory. The G29 will be available this July, while the G920 won't arrive at retailers until October.
73582353
submission
MojoKid writes:
Asus recently launched their Android Lollipop-driven ZenFone 2 and with its Intel Atom Z3580 SoC with PowerVR graphics and 4GB of RAM. It's an interesting low cost alternative to the major flagship smartphones on the market. Its 5.5-inch Full HD display looks great and build quality is surprisingly high with minimalistic styling and a rear-mounted volume rocker and power button setup much like the LG G4. It also supports dual SIM functionality and handles surprisingly well in the benchmarks and general use. Though its Atom chip doesn't break any records, it offers middle of the pack graphics performance, solid standard compute throughput but feels nimble and responsive with 4GB of RAM minimizing lag. For the price of a 16GB model at $199 and a 64GB variant at $299, it's definitely one to consider, especially for those looking for an unlocked, contract commitment-free Android smartphone.
73559903
submission
MojoKid writes:
A fresh alleged leak of next AMD Fiji graphics info has just hit the web and there's an abundance of supposedly confirmed specifications for what will be AMD's most powerful graphics card to date. Fiji will initially be available in both Pro and XT variants with the Fiji Pro dubbed "Fury" and Fiji XT being dubbed "Fury X." The garden variety Fury touts single-precision floating point (SPFP) performance of 7.2 FLOPS compared to 5.6 TFLOPS for a bone stock Radeon R9 290X. That's a roughly 29-percent performance improvement. The Fury X with its 4096 stream processors, 64 compute units, and 256 texture mapping units manages to deliver 8.6 TFLOPS, or a 54-percent increase over a Radeon R9 290X. The star of the show, however, will be AMD's High Bandwidth Memory (HBM) interface. Unlike traditional GDDR5 memory, HBM is stacked vertically, decreasing the PCB footprint required. It's also integrated directly into the same package as the GPU/SoC, leading to further efficiencies, reduced latency and a blistering 100GB/sec of bandwidth per stack (4 stacks per card). On average HBM is said to deliver three times the performance-per-watt of GDDR5 memory. With that being said, the specs listed are by no means confirmed by AMD, yet. We shall find out soon enough during AMD's E3 press conference scheduled for June 16.
73551793
submission
Lucas123 writes:
Residential rooftop solar installations hit a historical high in the first quarter of 2015, garnering an 11% increase over the previous quarter and a 76% increase over the Q1, 2014. New installations of solar power capacity surpassed those of wind and coal for the second year in a row, accounting for 32% of all new electrical capacity, according to a new report by GTM Research and the Solar Energy Industries Association. Residential solar installation costs dropped to $3.46 per watt of installed capacity this quarter, which represents a 2.2% reduction over last quarter and a 10% reduction over the first quarter of 2014.
73534061
submission
MojoKid writes:
Most gaming notebooks, even boat anchor-class desktop replacements, would struggle to offer gaming performance competitive with the average gaming desktop PC. However, Dell's Alienware division decided to take a different approach to the problem of enabling sufficient graphics horsepower via a standard 15-inch laptop form factor. The recently launched Alienware 15 is a fairly stout 7 pound machine in its own right, with a GeForce GTX 970M mobile GPU on board, but connect it to Alienware's custom Graphics Amplifier box and the machine quickly converts into a system capable of desktop level gaming performance up to 4K resolution. Connected over an external PCI Express cable, the Graphics Amplifier allows essentially any standard desktop graphics card to handle the rendering workload sort of like a gaming docking station on steroids. In the benchmarks, with a desktop GeForce GTX 980 card pushing the pixels, it was easily the fastest notebook tested, as expected with its unfair advantage. Pricing-wise, the Graphics Amplifer box brings a $600 up-charge to a base config as tested with a dual-core 3.5GHz CPU, 16GB of RAM, 1TB HDD, 128GB SSD and GeForce GTX 970M on-board GPU for $1499. That said, you're better off going with an available quad-core Core i7 config, if you want to keep the external GPU fed optimally.
73400877
submission
MojoKid writes:
Your digital voice assistant app is incompetent. Yes, Siri can give you a list of Italian restaurants in the area, Cortana will happily look up the weather, and Google Now will send a text message, if you ask it to. But compared to Hound, the newest voice search app on the block, all three of the aforementioned assistants might as well be bumbling idiots trying to outwit a fast talking rocket scientist. At its core, Hound is the same type of app — you bark commands or ask questions about any number of topics and it responds intelligently. And quickly. What's different about Hound compared to Siri, Cortana, and Google Now is that it's freakishly fast and understands complex queries that would have the others hunched in the fetal position, thumb in mouth. Check out the demo. It's pretty impressive.
73354787
submission
MojoKid writes:
AMD previously only teased bits of detail regarding their forthcoming 6th Generation A-Series APU, code named "Carrizo," as far back as CES 2015 in January and more recently with AMD's HSA (Heterogenous System Architecture) 1.0 spec roll-out in March. However, the company has officially launched the product today and has lifted the veil on all aspects of their new highly integrated notebook APU. Carrizo has been optimized for the 15 Watt TDP envelope that comprises the bulk of the thin and light notebook market currently and it brings a couple of first to integrated notebook chip designs. AMD's Carrizo APU is the first SoC architecture to fully support the HSA 1.0 specification, allowing full memory coherency of a shared memory space for both CPU and GPU up to 32GB. It's also the first integrated chip to include full support in hardware for H.265/HEVC HD video decoding and finally, Carizzo is also the first AMD APU to have a full integrated, in silicon, Southbridge controller block. So, with its CPU, GPU, memory controller, Northbridge, Southbridge, and PCIe 3.0 links, Carrizo is truly a fully integrated System On A Chip. The company is claiming a 39% CPU performance lift (combination clock speed and IPC) and up to a 65% in graphics, versus their previous generation Kaveri APU. AMD notes laptops from major vendors will begin shipping in the next few weeks.
73344913
submission
MojoKid writes:
The high speed Thunderbolt intereface standard, which is used for everything from hyper-fast external storage solutions to external graphics cards, has been slow to take off. You can blame the high-priced Thunderbolt peripherals and the uber-expensive cables (at last when compared to your garden variety USB cables).For most people, USB 3.0 is "good enough" and making a huge investment into the Thunderbolt ecosystem has been reserved for those in the professional video editing arena. However, Intel is looking to change all of that with Thunderbolt 3. Thunderbolt 3 once again doubles the maximum bandwidth, this time jumping from 20Gbps to a whopping 40Gbps. While that is impressive in its own right, the truly big news is that Thunderbolt 3 is moving away from the Mini DisplayPort connector and is instead adopting the USB-C connector. As a result Thunderbolt will also support USB 3.1 (which is currently spec'd at 10Gbps) and can optionally provide up to 100W of power (in compliance with the USB Power Delivery spec) to charge devices via USB-C (like the recently introduced 12-inch Apple MacBook).
73327087
submission
MojoKid writes:
It's definitely not as creepy as Tony The Toilet Buddy from Better Call Saul, this latest Kickstarter project is definitely puts the "whiz" in gee-whiz. GlowBowl is an LED-light for your toilet that is seems to be aimed at males, because females probably won't have a use for such a product (and probably think it's too childish to boot), that bathes your toilet water in seven selectable colors. The GlowBowl simply attaches to your toilet bowl like any garden variety toilet fresher and serves as a night light so you don't have to sear your retinas with the fancy pants LED lighting in your overhead bathroom fixtures during late night pee runs. And if you simply can't settle on one single color for your last night "exit stream," there is a carousel mode that will cycle through all seven colors every four seconds.
73306239
submission
MojoKid writes:
NVIDIA lifted the veil on the GeForce GTX Titan X's closest sibling today, announcing the new GeForce GTX 980 Ti. Like the Titan X, this card is driven by NVIDIA's most powerful, single-GPU, though a few things have been tweaked to bring its price point down to more approachable levels. The GeForce GTX 980 Ti has a base clock of 1000MHz and a boost clock of 1075MHz, the same that are found on the higher-end GeForce GTX Titan X. While the GM200 GPU on the Titan X is packing 3072 CUDA cores, 192 texture units and 12GB of 7GHz memory, the GeForce GTX 980 Ti has 2816 CUDA cores, 176 texture units and 6GB of on-board memory. Peformance-wise the GeForce GTX 980 Ti offers about 95 percent of the perf of a full-fledged GeForce GTX Titan X, but at roughly $350 less gamers can't go wrong, if they want to save a few bucks and still get top-end performance.
73304161
submission
Deathspawner writes:
In advance of the rumored pending launch of AMD's next-generation Radeon graphics cards, NVIDIA has decided to pull no punches and release a seriously tempting GTX 980 Ti at $649. It's tempting both because the extra $150 it costs over the GTX 980 more than makes up for it in performance gained, and despite it coming really close to the performance of TITAN X, it costs $350 less. AMD's job might just have become a bit harder.
73261205
submission
Lucas123 writes:
Remote robotic surgery performed hundreds or even thousands of miles away from the physician at the controls is possible and safe, according to the Florida Hospital that recently tested Internet lag times for the technology. Roger Smith, CTO at the Florida Hospital Nicholson Center in Celebration, Fla., said the hospital tested the lag time to a partner facility in Ft. Worth, Texas and found it ranged from 30 to 150 milliseconds, which surgeons could not detect as they moved remote robotic laparoscopic instruments. The tests, performed using a surgical simulator called a Mimic, will now be performed as if operating remotely in Denver and then Loma Linda, Calif. The Mimic Simulator system enables virtual procedures performed by a da Vinci robotic surgical system, the most common equipment in use today; it's used for hundreds of thousands of surgeries every year around the world. With a da Vinci system, surgeons today can perform operations yards away from a patient, even in separate but adjoining rooms to the OR. By stretching that distance to tens, hundreds or thousands of miles, the technology could enable patients to receive operations from top surgeons that would otherwise not be possible, including wounded soldiers near a battlefield. The Mimic Simulator was able to first artificially dial up lag times, starting with 200 milliseconds all the way up to 600 milliseconds.
73243773
submission
MojoKid writes:
NVIDIA officially launched its SHIELD Android TV set-top device today and it's sort of a "tweener" product, with far more horsepower than something like Roku or Apple TV, but on par with an average game console, and at a more affordable price tag of $199. What's interesting, however, is that it's powered by NVIDIA's Tegra X1 SoC which features a Maxwell-derived GPU and eight CPU cores; four ARM A57 cores and four A53s. The A57 cores are 64-bit, out-of-order designs, with multi-issue pipelines, while the A53s are simpler, in-order, highly-efficient designs. Which cores are used will depend on the particular workload being executed at the time. Tegra X1 also packs a 256-core Maxwell-derived GPU with the same programming capabilities and API support as NVIDIA's latest desktop GPUs. In standard Android benchmarks, the SHIELD pretty much slays any current high-end tablet or smartphone processor in graphics, but is about on par with the octal-core Samsung Exynos in terms of standard compute workloads but handily beating and octal-core Qualcomm Snapdragon. What's also interesting about the SHIELD Android TV is that it's not only an Android TV-capable device with movie and music streaming services like Netflix etc., but it also plays any game on Google Play and with serious horsepower behind it. The SHIELD Android TV is also the first device certified for Netflix's Ultra HD 4K streaming service.
73238537
submission
MojoKid writes:
Android M, reportedly known internally as Macadamia Nut Cookie, is on the horizon. Google I/O kicked off this afternoon and the first topic of discussion was of course Google's next generation mobile operating system. For those that were hoping for a huge UI overhaul or a ton of whiz-bang features, this is not the Android release for you. Instead, Android M is more of a maintenance released focused mainly on squashing bugs and improving stability/performance across the board. Even though Android M is about making Android a more stable platform, there are a few features that have been improved upon or introduced for this release: App Permissions, Chrome Custom Tabs for apps, App Links (instead of asking you which app to choose when clicking a link, Android M's new Intent System can allow apps to verify that they are rightfully in possession of a link), NFC-based Android Pay, standardized fingerprint scanning support, and a new "doze" mode that supposedly offers 2X longer battery life when idle.
