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Submission + - Vivante Mobile GPU Architecture Gains Traction (hothardware.com)

Submitted by MojoKid
MojoKid writes: Over the past few years, a handful of mobile graphics companies have emerged but the top dog, by far, has been Imagination Technologies, with Qualcomm, Nvidia and ARM all picking up significant businesses of their own as well. But now, there's a new kid on the block — a company with a tiny, highly customized GPU, a number of recent design wins, and a strong product portfolio. Vivante got started in 2004 and started licensing its GPU designs in 2007. The company's early wins have been in Eastern markets, but this past year, it's begun to show up in devices intended for the West, including the Samsung Galaxy Tab 3 and Google's Chromecast. Vivante has taken a different approach to core design from most of the other companies that play in this space. All modern GPUs are explicitly designed to be modular and scalable. Typically what that means is that a company like Nvidia or AMD defines a single compute unit that can be duplicated throughout the GPU design. Vivante's GPUs are modular as well, but with a much finer level of granularity. Each of the three shaded blocks (3-D Pipeline, Vector Graphics Pipeline, 2-D Pipeline) can be segmented or stacked into various configurations. A GPU core, in other words, could contain more ultra-threaded shaders, or additional vector graphics engines, up to 32 cores in total. One of the advantages of this tiny, modular architecture is that you can clock the cores like gangbusters. According to Vivante, the 28nm high performance silicon variant of the Vivante architecture can clock up to 1GHz at full speed, but fall back to 1/64th of this in power saving mode, or roughly 16MHz.

Submission + - Google Offers Cash for Updates to Linux and Other FOSS (arstechnica.com)

Submitted by jrepin
jrepin writes: Google is offering rewards as high as $3,133.70 for software updates that improve the security of OpenSSL, OpenSSH, BIND, and several other open-source packages that are critical to the stability of the Internet. The program announced Wednesday expands on Google's current bug-bounty program, which pays from $500 to $3,133.70 to people who privately report bugs found in the company's software and Web properties.

Comment Re:Kindergarten mentality? (Score 4, Funny) 85

by Nikhil Mahajan (#45080153) Attached to: How DirecTV Overhauled Its 800-Person IT Group With a Game

That's because you're an insecure 40-something programmer/engineer who wasn't capable of moving into a management position before he hit his peak. The only difference between managing children and managing adults is how you speak to them. You might find this condescending, but it's the truth.

And we have a manager amongst us.

Comment Re:And this is surprising? (Score 2) 56

by Nikhil Mahajan (#44983291) Attached to: <em>The Circle</em> Skewers Google, Facebook, Twitter

A "lifestyle" of undeservedly vain and attention-hungry pleas consisting of banal, vapid, and meaningless drivel on a stage of everybody chattering and nobody listening. Those of you who participate in social media (personally, as opposed to having to do it for P.R. gig at work) are indeed sad, desperate, and even masochistic...or just dumb. Hey everybody, look at me! Validate me, respond to my pictures and comments and tell me what an interesting person I am! Tell me I am good-looking and that my fat ugly girlfriend and I are cute together! Please? Pretty-pleeeease? :3

-- Ethanol-fueled

Talk about over simplification. :)

Submission + - NSA Posts Opening For 'Civil Liberties & Privacy Officer' (thehill.com)

Submitted by cold fjord
cold fjord writes: The Hill reports, "The National Security Agency has posted a job opening for a privacy and civil liberties officer. The position was first mentioned last month, when President Obama outlined his plans to bring more transparency to the NSA surveillance programs. A White House press release said the agency was “taking steps to put in place a full time Civil Liberties and Privacy Officer.”" — From the NSA job posting: "The NSA Civil Liberties & Privacy Officer (CLPO) is conceived as a completely new role, combining the separate responsibilities of NSA's existing Civil Liberties and Privacy (CL/P) protection programs under a single official. The CLPO will serve as the primary advisor to the Director of NSA for ensuring that privacy is protected and civil liberties are maintained by all of NSA's missions, programs, policies and technologies. This new position is focused on the future, designed to directly enhance decision making and to ensure that CL/P protections continue to be baked into NSA's future operations, technologies, tradecraft, and policies. The NSA CLPO will consult regularly with the Office of the Director of National Intelligence CLPO, privacy and civil liberties officials from the Department of Defense and the Department of Justice, as well as other U.S. government, private sector, public advocacy groups and foreign partners. "

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