MojoKid writes “Kirk Skaugen, Senior Vice President and General Manager of the PC Client Group at Intel, while on stage, at IDF this week snuck in some additional information about Broadwell, the 14nm follow up to Haswell that was mentioned during Brian Krzanich’s opening day keynote. In a quick demo, Kirk showed a couple of systems running the Cinebench multi-threaded benchmark side-by-side. One of the systems featured a Haswell-Y processor, the other a Broadwell-Y. The benchmark results weren’t revealed, but during the Cinebench run, power was being monitored on both systems and it showed the Broadwell-Y rig consuming roughly 30% less power than Haswell-Y and running fully loaded at under 5 watts. Without knowing clocks and performance levels, we can’t draw many conclusion from the power numbers shown, but they do hint at Broadwell-Y’s relative health, even at this early stage of the game.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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Intel Shows 14nm Broadwell Consuming 30% Less Power Than 22nm Haswell
Russian startup Nettle , which is based in the Skolkovo Tech City area , is showing off a $28, 000 holographic gaming set-up at TechCrunch Disrupt SF’s Hardware Alley. The Nettlebox rig consists of a 3D plasma display, with four fisheye lens infrared cameras at the corners to track the position of the gamer who wears a pair of 3D glasses with two infrared lights onboard. The game itself is powered by a Windows PC built into the table. The set up tricks your brain into seeing a real-time holographic image of the game as you play. The holographic scenery appears sunken into the table, rather than standing out proud above the surface. Most importantly, the 3D illusion is sustained as you change your position so you can move around to get the best vantage point. “With this technology users can see a 3D screen from all viewpoints, from all angles, and see a 3D object in front of him. The brain believes that it’s a real object because the illusion is very strong, ” says co-founder Andrei Desyatov. “We are tracking the user’s position very fast.” The Nettlebox’s proprietary cameras run at 1, 000 fps. That high frame rate is required to enable a “stable illusion” when the user changes their physical position, he adds. The camera range (i.e. the distance between the user and the table) is up to around 1.5 meters in the brightly lit (“noisy”) environment of the Disrupt conference hall but can extend up to 5 meters when using the Nettlebox in darker rooms, according to Desyatov. After a brief hands on — or eyes on — I can confirm it certainly works, and that the effect is pretty immersive, though it did feel like it could become rather disorienting. And possibly end up inducing a headache/motion-sickness style nausea. But that’s likely to depend on your sensitivity to this sort of stuff (speaking as someone who had to quit playing Minecraft because mining its 3D blocks left me feeling too queasy). At $28, 000 the Nettlebox itself is not about to become the next great leap forward in home videogaming, but Nettle is targeting this device at the presentation/exhibition market. It is also working with real-estate companies on developing showroom/presentation use cases by, for instance, allowing architects to walk around a hologram of a model building. After that, it does have videogaming in its sights. ”The next step for us is gaming. We are going to create a gaming machine for amusement parks, ” says Desyatov. “And then the last step is for videogames like strategies like Starcraft and so on.” Pushing the Nettlebox into the home gaming market is going to require some serious squeezing of its price tag but Desyatov reckons it will be possible to build something that is “affordable for most users.” Nettle is bootstrapping at present and launched the Nettlebox in Russia a few months ago. It’s got five customers so far and is looking to expand that customer base internationally, eyeing the U.S. market. “We’re thinking about looking for external funding to increase the speed of entering the gaming industry, ” he adds. 
Sony has named a new flagship in its Android-powered Xperia smartphone line up which focuses on beefing up camera capabilities. The 4G Xperia Z1, roundly leaked under the moniker ‘Honami’ but officially confirmed today at Sony’s IFA press conference in Berlin, is a follow up to the 5-inch, quad-core Xperia Z unboxed at the start of the year at CES. The Xperia Z1 has a 20.7MP camera on its rump (vs the 13.1MP on the Xperia Z) coupled with a 1/2.3-inch Exmor RS CMOS image sensor, Sony’s G Lens (27mm wide angle, f2.0 aperture) and Bionz image processing engine which Sony users in its standalone cameras. There’s also 3x “clear image zoom” — with Sony claiming its optical zoom delivers “zero distortion”. Sony is making big boasts for this lens combo — claiming it offers “best in class imaging” and is the “ world’s leading camera in a smartphone ” (Nokia may however disagree; its Lumia 1020 smartphone has a 41MP lens ). NB: Sony’s odd wording here — “camera in a smartphone” — can be explained by its simultaneous attempts to extend phone camera smarts via a hardware add-on lens system that clips onto any phone , including the Xperia Z1. Sony is preloading a series of camera apps onto the Z1 to extend its camera capabilities on the software side — including Social Life, a camera streaming app to broadcast what’s going on around you to Facebook; a Timeshift burst mode to take multiple images so you can choose the best shot from several; a visual search app called Info-Eye to get more info on snapped products/landmarks; and an augmented reality app called AR Effect to overlay customised animations onto images. Sony is clearly following in the footsteps of rivals’ strategy here, including Nokia (with its PureView imaging push) and Samsung , which has also focused on making its own suite of imaging apps for flagship devices such as the Galaxy S4. But as well as making its own apps, Sony’s hoping to get developers working for it on the camera front too. “It’s built with an open SDK and we’re already working with a talented group of app developers that will extend its capabilities, ” it said today. Elsewhere, the Xperia Z1 looks to be a slightly beefed up version of its earlier sibling, with the same size 5-inch 1080p display — albeit this time including newer Sony screen tech that it has also brought to the Xperia Z Ultra phablet. Sony’s Triluminos screen tech apparently supports a greater range of colours with natural shades. The Z1 also features Sony’s X-Reality technology for improving the viewing experience of low res video. The Xperia Z1 runs Android 4.2 Jelly Bean at launch. Under the hood it has a 2.2Ghz quad-core Qualcomm Snapdragon 800 chipset. There’s also 2GB RAM, 16GB internal storage –expandable via a microSD card slot — and a 3, 000mAh battery. Design wise, the Xperia Z1 shares the look and feel of the rest of Sony’s Xperia range — with clean lines and blunt edges, although Sony says it’s evolved the design, most notably by adding a one piece aluminium casing to all the plastic. Oh and the Z1 is also waterproof, as is its predecessor. To ram that point home, Sony apparently thought it was a good idea to entertain IFA attendees by getting some ladies to cavort with some phones in some water . As sexist displays go, it’s pretty impressive — even by tech industry ‘booth babe’ standards — so well done Sony for alienating ~50% of potential buyers. It better hope the other 50% gets so distracted they end up buying two phones apiece. On the size front, neither the Xperia Z1 or its numeral-less sibling is the largest handset Sony makes, although their five inch displays sits on the cusp of phablet territory. The Sony enormo-phone award goes to its palm-stretching Xperia Z Ultra : a 6.4 inch phablet that’s so large Sony sells a Bluetooth handset accessory for it so you can comfortably take calls. Sony said the Xperia Z1 is due to hit shelves “starting this month”. 
George Maschke writes “In a case with serious First Amendment implications, McClatchy reports that federal prosecutors are seeking a prison sentence for Chad Dixon of Indiana, who committed the crime of teaching people how to pass or beat a lie detector test. Some of his students passed polygraphs and went on to be hired by federal agencies. A pleading filed by prosecutors all but admits that polygraph tests can be beaten. The feds have also raided and seized business records from Doug Williams, who has taught many more people how to pass or beat a polygraph over the past 30 years. Williams has not been criminally charged. I’m a co-founder of AntiPolygraph.org (we suggest using Tor to access the site) a non-profit, public interest website dedicated to exposing and ending waste, fraud, and abuse associated with the use of lie detectors. We offer a free e-book, The Lie Behind the Lie Detector (1 mb PDF) that explains how to pass a polygraph (whether or not one is telling the truth). We make this information available not to help liars beat the system, but to provide truthful people with a means of protecting themselves against the high risk of a false positive outcome. As McClatchy reported last week, I received suspicious e-mails earlier this year that seemed like an attempted entrapment. Rather than trying to criminalize teaching people how to pass a polygraph, isn’t it time our government re-evaluated its reliance on the pseudoscience of polygraphy?” Read more of this story at Slashdot.