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Submission + - Surface Pro 3 Performance And Thermal Tests Show Tablet Competes With Ultrabooks (hothardware.com)

Submitted by MojoKid
MojoKid writes: Last week, Microsoft unveiled the third iteration of its Surface Pro tablet, the aptly named Surface Pro 3. Unlike previous revisions to the product, the new Surface Pro 3 can be considered a major overhaul. Not only does the new device feature more powerful internal components and offer a handful of new features, but its form factor is a complete departure from the previous version, thanks to its screen's 3:2 aspect ratio. The particular model tested here is built around an Intel Core i5-4300U processor with integrated Intel HD 4400 series graphics, 8GB of DDR3-1600 RAM, and a 256GB SSD. For users that care about performance, the Surface Pro 3's unique cooling solution with its cylindrical-shaped fansink could be what sets this device apart, offering up to a an Intel Core i7 processor in a tablet form factor but with near silent acoustics and comfortable exterior temperatures. Performance-wise, even the Core i5-based Surface Pro 3 competes or sometimes exceeds the performance of some full-sized Ultrabooks on the market.

Submission + - Test-Driving NVIDIA's GRID GPU Cloud Computing Platform (hothardware.com)

Submitted by MojoKid
MojoKid writes: NVIDIA recently announced that it would offer a free 24-hour test drive of NVIDIA GRID to anyone who wanted to see what the technology could do. Taking the company up on its offer, it turns out to be pretty impressive technology. NVIDIA's GRID is a virtual GPU technology that allows for hardware acceleration in a virtual environment. It's designed to run in concert with products from Citrix, VMWare, and Microsoft, and to address some of the weaknesses of these applications. The problem with many conventional Virtual Desktop Interfaces (VDIs) is that they're often either too slow for advanced graphics work or unable to handle 3D workloads at all. Now, with GRID, NVIDIA is claiming that it can offer a vGPU passthrough solution that allows remote users to access a virtualized desktop environment built around a high-end CPU and GPU. The test systems the company is using for these 24-hour test drives all use a GRID K520. That's essentially two GK104 GPUs on a single PCB with 8GB of RAM.NVIDIA's Test Drive is designed to give anyone a chance to see how the program works generally, but GRID is designed for corporate deployments across high-speed networks, not for cross-country Internet connectivity from a home account. The TD program is still in beta, the deployment range is considerable, and the test drives themselves are configured for a 1366x768 display at 30 FPS and a maximum available bandwidth cap of 10Mbit.

Submission + - Amazon Awarded Patent For Photos Shot With White Backgrounds (hothardware.com)

Submitted by MojoKid
MojoKid writes: A big shout out goes to Amazon for forever changing the way we think about photography. You see, Amazon was recently granted a patent that, in short, describes taking photos of subjects and/or or objects against a white background. Brilliant! Wait, what's that? Photographers far and wide have long known about this technique and used it extensively in the past? Well, it appears Amazon's legal team somehow worded the patent application in such a way that the USPTO thought this was a brand new idea worthy of patent No. 8,676,045. "A subject can be photographed and/or filmed on the elevated platform to achieve a desired effect of a substantially seamless background where a rear edge of the elevated platform is imperceptible to an image capture device positioned at the image capture position," part of the patent's abstract reads.

Submission + - ARM Unveils New Server Architecture And Next-Gen 64-Bit Mobile Performance (hothardware.com)

Submitted by MojoKid
MojoKid writes: ARM recently held a tech day in Austin, TX and during the three-day session, the company covered a wide range of topics, with a primary focus on server ecosystems and next-generation mobile hardware. ARM gave an in-depth exploration of its new CCN-508 server interconnect. AMD and Intel don't really have an analogous chip to this. Think of the CCN-508 as the hub that all other CPUs, GPUs, ethernet, CPU cache, and other components connect to. The "cache coherent network" architecture ARM is introducing here offers a 128-bit bus that provides a total of 230GB/s of sustained bandwidth with up to 360GB/s burst bandwidth available. Representatives from Red Hat and Canonical also discussed their respective efforts in bringing up the software stacks required to make ARM an equal player with x86 in the server world, and HP was on-hand to discuss Project Moonshot, its initiative to build a dense server product around ARM and x86 cores. Finally, ARM also noted that 2014 will be the year that Android starts to seriously make an effort in 64-bit evolution as well. Benchmark data was offered, claiming impressive boosts for various workloads in tests like Geekbench, with the Cortex-A57 expected to deliver between 12 — 33% faster performance in 64-bit mode.

Submission + - AMD Announces ARM-based "K12" Custom Core, Pin-Compatible x86/ARM Chips Coming (hothardware.com)

Submitted by MojoKid
MojoKid writes: AMD just offered a major update on its product roadmap, which now includes ARM-based core technology. This year, AMD will debut its first Cortex-A57 based server platform (codenamed Seattle), which leverages technology from their SeaMicro acquisition. In 2015, AMD will launch a 20nm SoC family around the new Puma+ core and a second-gen Cortex-A57 chip. Those two CPUs will be drop-in compatible with each other (codenamed Project Skybridge). In 2016, AMD will follow up with its own custom ARM architecture implementation. One of the major changes coming next year is that both the ARM and x86 chips will apparently be HSA-compatible. Right now, AMD's Puma+ SoC on 28nm isn't. These changes imply that AMD will do some major fabric upgrades in-between the 28nm and 20nm dies to integrate HSA functions and standardize the GPU IP across both chips. As for the 16nm ARM core, codenamed K12, AMD was cagey about its benefits or capabilities beyond noting that it's a clean, ground-up design based on the ARM architecture. The company's custom architecture will be ready by 2016, and will likely debut on either TSMC's 16nm FinFET or GlobalFoundries' 14nm process nodes. Finally, there's word that AMD has also built a new x86 architecture under Jim Keller. Keller stated that the new architecture will be "from scratch," but gave no other details on its design.

Submission + - New Report Notes Over 99 Percent Of Mobile Threats Target Android (hothardware.com)

Submitted by MojoKid
MojoKid writes: Google's open source Android platform has the distinction of being the most popular mobile operating system in the world. That's great in terms of dominating the market and reaping the rewards that come with it, but it's also for that very reason that Android finds itself the target of virtually every new mobile malware threat that emerges. According to data published in F-Secure's latest Mobile Threat Report, over 99 percent of the new mobile threats it discovered in the first quarter of 2014 targeted Android users. To be fair, we're not taking about hundreds of thousands, tens of thousands, or thousands of malware threats — F-Secure detected 277 new threat families, of which 275 honed in on Android.

Submission + - Intel Integrated Iris Pro Graphics Closes The Performance Gap Vs. AMD (hothardware.com)

Submitted by MojoKid
MojoKid writes: Over the years, Intel's integrated graphics engine in their Core series processor haven't exactly been known to be very robust. Before Intel's Haswell series processors arrived, it could be argued that Intel integrated graphics weren't good for much more than some video rendering and maybe some low resolution, entry-level gaming at best. However, with Intel's recent Haswell release with Iris Pro 5200 Graphics on board, the company appears to have dramatically closed the gaming and graphics performance gap between their solutions and competitive integrated solutions from AMD and even entry level discrete graphics performance. In the benchmarks with the new Gigabyte BRIX Pro small form factor system, Intel's Core i7-4770R with Iris Pro 5200 Graphics on board, is actually able to maintain very playable frame rates in recent DX11 titles, right up to 1080p resolution, even with a bit of AA turned on. It will be interesting to see what Intel's follow-on Broadwell chip can do at 14nm. If Intel can maintain consistent driver updates the future looks bright for Intel integrated graphics.

Submission + - Google Project Ara Design To Employ Electro-Permanant Magnets To Lock In Modules (hothardware.com)

Submitted by MojoKid
MojoKid writes: Google's Project Ara, an effort to develop a modular smartphone platform, sounded at first as much like vaporware as anything but Google is actually making it happen. In a whimsical upbeat video, Dave Hakkens (the guy who created the Phonebloks design that appears to be the conceptual basis for Project Ara) visited the Google campus to see what progress is being made on the project. The teams working on Project Ara have figured out a key solution to one of the first problems they encountered, which was how to keep all the modules stuck together. They decided to use electro-permanent magnets. In terms of design, they've decided not to cover up the modules, instead making their very modularity part of the aesthetic appeal. 3D Systems is involved on campus, as they're delivering the 3D printing technology to make covers for the modules.

Submission + - 500GB To 1TB On An mSATA Stick - Samsung SSD 840 EVO mSATA Tested (hothardware.com)

Submitted by MojoKid
MojoKid writes: Shortly after 2.5-inch versions of Samsung's SSD 840 EVO drives hit the market, the company prepared an array of mSATA drives featuring the same controller and NAND flash. The Samsung SSD 840 EVO mSATA series of drives are essentially identical to their 2.5" counterparts, save for the mSATA drives' much smaller form factor. Like their 2.5" counterparts, Samsung's mSATA 840 EVO series of drives feature an updated, triple-core Samsung MEX controller, which operates at 400MHz. The 840 EVO's MEX controller has also been updated to support the SATA 3.1 spec, which incorporates a few new features, like support for queued TRIM commands. Along with the MEX controller, all of the Samsung 840 EVO mSATA series drives feature LPDDR2-1066 DRAM cache memory. The 120GB drive sports 256MB of cache, the 250GB and 500GB drive have 512MB of cache, and the 750GB and 1TB drives have 1GB of cache. Performance-wise, SSD 840 EVO series of mSATA solid state drives performs extremely well, whether using synthetic benchmarks, trace-based tests like PCMark, or highly-compressible or incompressible data.

Submission + - NVIDIA Unveils Next Gen Pascal GPU With Stacked 3D DRAM And GeForce GTX Titan Z

Submitted by MojoKid
MojoKid writes: NVIDIA's 2014 GTC (GPU Technology Conference) kicked off today in San Jose California, with NVIDIA CEO Jen-Hsun Huang offering up a healthy dose of new information on next generation NVIDIA GPU technologies. Two new NVIDIA innovations will be employed in their next-gen GPU technology, now know by its code named "Pascal." First, there's a new serial interconnect known as NVLink for GPU-to-CPU and GPU-to-GPU communication. Though details were sparse, apparently NVLink is a serial interconnect that employs differential signaling with embedded clock and it allows for unified memory architectures and eventually cache coherency. It's similar to PCI Express in terms of command set and programming model but NVLink will offer a massive 5 — 12X boost in bandwidth up to 80GB/sec. The second technology to power NVIDIA's forthcoming Pascal GPU is 3D stacked DRAM technology.The technique employs through-silicon vias that allow the ability to stack DRAM die on top of each other and thus provide much more density in the same PCB footprint for the DRAM package. Jen-Hsun also used his opening keynote to show off NVIDIA's most powerful graphics card to date, the absolutely monstrous GeForce GTX Titan Z. The upcoming GeForce GTX Titan Z is powered by a pair of GK110 GPUs, the same chips that power the GeForce GTX Titan Black and GTX 780 Ti. All told, the card features 5,760 CUDA cores (2,880 per GPU) and 12GB of frame buffer memory—6GB per GPU. NVIDIA also said that the Titan Z's GPUs are tuned to run at the same clock speed, and feature dynamic power balancing so neither GPU creates a performance bottleneck.

Submission + - At RSA Conference, Android security chief discusses how Google fights malware (networkworld.com)

Submitted by smaxp
smaxp writes: @ the Black Hat Conference last year and Android vulnerability was the center of the presses attention — This year it was Apple.

Android Security chief discussed new big data and app behavior technology that "looks for the malware needle in the haystack" that might no show up in AV scans during a retrospective of the Android Masterkey Vulnerability.

Submission + - Bitcoin-exchange CEO found dead (thestar.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: SINGAPORE—The CEO of a virtual-currency exchange was found dead near her home in Singapore.

A police spokesman said Thursday that initial investigations indicated there was no suspicion of “foul play” in the Feb. 26 death, meaning officers do not suspect murder.

The spokesman said police found 28-year-old Autumn Radtke, an American, lying motionless near the apartment tower where she lived.

Police have so far classified the death as “unnatural,” which can mean an accident, misadventure, or suicide.

Submission + - Microsoft Confirms DirectX 12 Is Alive And Well, Demo Coming At GDC (hothardware.com)

Submitted by MojoKid
MojoKid writes: Buzz has been building for the last week that Microsoft would soon unveil the next version of DirectX at the upcoming Games Developer Conference (GDC). Microsoft has now confirmed that its discussion forums at the show won't just be to discuss updates to DX11, but that the company is putting a full court press behind DirectX 12. The company responded sharply over a year ago, when an AMD executive claimed that future versions of the API were essentially dead, but it has been over four years since DX11 debuted. To date, Microsoft has only revealed a few details of the next-generation API. Like AMD's Mantle, it will focus on giving developers "close-to-metal" GPU resource access and reducing CPU overhead. Like Mantle, the goal of DirectX 12 is to give programmers more control over performance tuning, with an eye towards better multi-threading and multi-GPU scaling. Unlike Mantle, DirectX 12 will undoubtedly support a full range of GPUs from AMD, Intel, Nvidia and Qualcomm. Qualcomm's presence is interesting. With Windows RT all but moribund, Qualcomm's interest in that market may have seemed incidental. However, the fact that the company is involved with the DX12 standard could mean that the handset and tablet developer is serious about the Windows market in the long term.

Submission + - Staples Announces Closing of 225 Stores in 2014 (bloomberg.com)

Submitted by damn_registrars
damn_registrars writes: In the wake of falling retail sales, Staples has announced plans to close 225 stores nationwide. No announcement has been made yet to where these stores are, or how many jobs will be lost as a result. Staples predicts to save $500 million this year by closing these stores.

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