63996025
submission
MojoKid writes:
Intel has officially launched their Core i7-5960X Haswell-E desktop processor today. Unlike Sandy Bridge-E and Ivy Bridge-E, which maxed out at 6 cores (12 threads), Haswell-E is an 8-core machine (16 threads), featuring execution units based on Intel's latest desktop microarchitecture. The Core i7-5960X has a base clock of 3GHz with Turbo Boost speed to 3.5GHz and will have up to 20MB of shared L3 cache. It also features an integrated quad-channel memory controller with official support for DDR4 memory at speeds up to 2133MHz, although higher speeds are possible through overclocking. Haswell-E based processors also feature up to 40 integrated lanes of PCI Express Gen 3.0 connectivity. The chip has a 140W TDP, which is slightly higher than the 130W of Ivy Bridge-E based processors. Although it has the same number of pads (2011) as previous-gen Ivy Bridge-E processors, Haswell-E based processors will require new motherboards equipped with LGA 2011 v3 sockets and support for DDR4 memory. Cooler designs from the previous generation are compatible, however. In general, the Core i7-5960X is faster overall than the previous-gen Ivy Bridge-E based 6-core Core i7-4960X. In single threaded tests, where the Core i7-5960X's additional cache and memory bandwidth aren't fully utilized, the 4960X's higher clocks usually push it ahead. In multi-threaded tests though, the 5960X's two additional cores make it significantly faster. Gaming was also much better on the 5960X.
63973191
submission
MojoKid writes:
Twitch streamer and YouTuber Jordan "Kootra" Mathewson is the latest victim in a trend called "Swatting." People who tuned into The Creatures' Twitch channel this past Wednesday to watch Mathewson play Counter-Strike: Global Offensive witnessed SWAT officers enter the room and arrest Mathewson in response to a false report of an active shooter. Mathewson was live-streaming on The Creatures, a group of gamers who create content for YouTube, Twitch channel at the group's office building when SWAT busted in. Police received an anonymous call, via landline, that claimed there was an active shooter. Streamers watched for about six minutes as the police officers arrested Mathewson, searched him, and briefly questioned him before the stream was turned off. Police are still investigating the call that was made, which led to Mathewson's arrest, and are looking for the party responsible. In the meantime, a person that goes by @ScrewPain on Twitter has claimed responsibility on his account for the swatting prank.
63837497
submission
MojoKid writes:
The Entertainment Software Association has just released its 2014 report on the state of the video game industry, and as the title of this post suggests, there have been some significant shifts since the last report. Let's tackle the most interesting one first: Females have nearly become the dominant gamer, claiming 48% of the pie currently. That's impressive, but perhaps more so is the fact that women over the age of 18 represent 36% of the game-playing population, whereas boys aged 18 and under claim a mere 17%. Statistics like these challenge the definition of "gamer". Some might say that it's a stretch to call someone who only plays mobile games a "gamer" (Candy Crush anyone?). Mental hurdle aside, the reality is that anyone who plays games, regardless of the platform, is a gamer.
63512905
submission
MojoKid writes:
Intel's latest processor design and manufacturing effort marks a first for the semiconductor industry. No other semiconductor manufacturer in the world is building chips at the level of Intel's 14nm process node. Today, Intel has offered more details on the processor they're rolling out for a first volume production vehicle at 14nm, code named "Broadwell," and now known officially as Core M. Broadwell and the Intel Core M family is what Intel refers to as a "tick" in their product design cadence, where a 'tick" generally marks a die shrink optimization. Intel is unveiling their first Broadwell-Y platform variant that will be available in a range of tablets and other ultra-mobile devices in time for the Q4 holiday shopping season. For reference, Broadwell-Y is the lowest power Broadwell processor, with a 3.5 Watt to 4.5 Watt TDP. There will be higher powered versions for all-in-ones and small form factor desktop designs, but these version won't start arriving until the first half of 2015. At a high level, Broadwell will offer a 5 percent IPC improvement at the CPU core, along with up to 20 percent more GPU resources on chip for better graphics performance. However, Broadwell-Y, with its ultra-low power operation, will be able to hit a 3.5 — 4.5 Watt TDP with 25-percent reduction in package area, making it suitable for tablet designs, as well as ultra-light 2-in-1 products. This chip could really put Intel on the map in tablets, where previously Intel Atom-based designs have had a hard time competing with the likes of Qualcomm, Samsung and NVIDIA.
63243233
submission
MojoKid writes:
Last week, NVIDIA officially announced the SHIELD tablet (powered by the Tegra K1 SoC) and its companion SHIELD wireless controller. The SHIELD tablet's specifications include NVIDIA Tegra K1 SoC (clocked at up to 2.2GHz), paired to 2GB of RAM and an 8", full-HD IPS display, with a native resolution of 1920x1200. There are also a pair of 5MP cameras on the SHIELD tablet (front and rear), 802.11a/b/g/n 2x2 MIMO WiFi configuration, GPS, a 9-axis motion sensor, and Bluetooth 4.0 LE. As it turns out, early units are shipping now to the press and initial benchmark testing shows the SHIELD Tablet and NVIDIA's Tegra K1 performance to be very strong. In fact, it could very well be the fastest Android tablet on the market currently, hands down, especially with respect to gaming.
62320077
submission
Dputiger writes:
It has been almost two years since AMD launched the FirePro W9000 and kicked off a heated battle in the workstation GPU wars with NVIDIA. AMD recently released the powerful FirePro W9100, however, a new card based on the same Hawaii-class GPU as the desktop R9 290X, but aimed at the professional workstation market. The W9100’s GPU features 2,816 stream processors, and the card boasts 320GB/s of memory bandwidth, and six mini-DisplayPorts, all of which support DP1.2 and 4K output. The W9100 carries more RAM than any other AMD GPU as well, a whopping 16GB of GDDR5 on a single card. Even NVIDIA's top-end Quadro K6000 tops out at 12GB, which means AMD sits in a class by itself in this area. In terms of performance, this review shows that the FirePro W9100 doesn’t always outshine its competition, but its price/performance ratio keep it firmly in the running. But if AMD continues to improve its product mix and overall software support, it should close the gap even more in the pro GPU market in the next 18-24 months.
62082203
submission
MojoKid writes:
One of the great universal truths of modern gaming is that preorders suck. The term refers to the practice of ordering a title at some point before it actually ships in order to get access to a variety of minor outfit tweaks, a few starting weapons, or boosts to early game play. Today, some publishers take this practice to truly ridiculous levels; the recent game Watch Dogs has no fewer than nine pre-order options. GameStop, perhaps sensing that there's pressure building against the model, wants to turn the dial up to 11 — and create preorder-locked, GameStop-specific content. According to financial analyst Colin Sebastian, "[GameStop] indicates that software publishers are more enthusiastic about partnering with it. For example, by offering exclusive content on each major game release and longer term, future models may include GameStop offering exclusive gameplay." GameStop is enjoying something of a renaissance at the moment. The company has captured a greater share of the Xbox One and PS4 market than it held at this point in the console cycle last time around and it's clearly looking to increase the attractiveness of its own business. That's fine but this kind of arbitrary lopping off of content to boost sales at particular shops simply isn't going to sit well with most gamers.
62029755
submission
MojoKid writes:
Normally, the question of whether a game runs better on the PC or a console is a no-brainer, at least for PC users. Watch Dogs, however, with its problematic and taxing PC play, challenges that concept. And since the gap between consoles and PCs is typically smallest at the beginning of the console generation, HotHardware decided to take the Xbox One out for a head-to-head comparison against the PC with this long-awaited title. What was found may surprise you. Depending on just how much horsepower your PC has, the Xbox One (and possibly the PS4 though that wasn't compared) might be the better option. There's no question that the PC can look better, even before you factor in the mods that have been released to date, but unless you've spent $300 or more on a fairly recent GPU, you're not going to be able to run the game at sufficiently high detail to benefit from the enhanced image quality and resolution. If you have a Radeon HD 7950 / R9 280 or an NVIDIA card with greater than 4GB of RAM or a GeForce GTX 780 / 780 Ti, you can happily watch Watch Dogs make hash out of the Xbox One — but statistically, only a minority of gamers have this sort of high-end hardware.
61749941
submission
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.
61705597
submission
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 benchmark numbers in a variety of benchmarks, besting many other drives in its class, but they also carry a long 10 year warranty.
61502325
submission
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.
61475413
submission
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.
61340673
submission
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.
61314827
submission
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.
61234209
submission
MojoKid writes:
Over the past few weeks, I've spent a significant amount of time with Watch Dogs. The game is infamous for not running very well on PCs. After some legwork, I've figured out a hefty chunk of the reason why. Ubisoft royally screwed up its suggested VRAM (graphics card frame buffer) settings. Watch Dogs sucks down far more frame buffer memory than many modern PC games currently. In the past, VRAM usage in games like Guild Wars, Battlefield 4, and Total War: Shogun 2, with all detail levels maxed out, was about 1.5GB. BF4 will break 2GB if you use the supersampling option to render the game internally in 4K mode. Ubisoft claims that Watch Dogs' "High" texture detail setting requires a 2GB frame buffer while its "Ultra" textures need 3GB of frame buffer memory. That might technically be true, but these figures should be treated as a minimum, not a max. Playing the game through with High Textures and "Ultra" details systems stutter repeatedly with jerky slowdowns while running a mid range GeForce GTX 770. Switching to "High" Details improved the situation, but didn't resolve it. Unfortunately, the best way to improve performance in Watch Dogs is to ignore Ubisoft's recommendations altogether and opt for lower detail levels, depending on your configuration and monitor resolution. Ubisoft has said that a patch is coming that may address some of these issues. In the mean time, this article covers suggested settings with various graphics card frame buffer sizes, for better performance.
