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Imagination Technologies boosts GPU speeds by 50 percent with Series 6XT

Imagination Technologies While most companies are withholding their big phone and tablet-related news until Mobile World Congress next month, this year’s CES is shaping up to be a busy one for mobile chip designers. Nvidia unveiled the latest version of its Tegra SoC last night, and this morning Imagination Technologies took the wraps off of some new graphics IP for mobile chips. There are two new designs being announced today, both relatives to the PowerVR Series 6 GPUs that are beginning to ship in phones and tablets today. At the top-end is the new PowerVR Series 6XT , which promises a 50 percent performance improvement and better power consumption compared to Series 6. These improvements come entirely from architectural optimizations, not more execution resources—the new GX6250, GX6450, and GX6460 parts use two, four, and six of Imagination’s “computer clusters,” the same number available in Series 6 GPUs. There’s also a GX6240 part, which uses two clusters but is “area-optimized” to take up less space in an SoC die. Like Series 6, Series 6XT supports DirectX 10, OpenGL ES 3.0 , and OpenCL 1.x on the API side. The Series 6XT GPU. The other GPU design being announced today is the Series 6XE series, which are being targeted to especially inexpensive or small SoCs. The G6050 and G6060 are both “half-cluster” parts—the two chips are identical aside from the G6060’s PVIRC2 lossless image compression support. The G6100 and G6110 are single cluster parts, again differentiated by PVIRC2 support in the G6110. The GPUs support only DirectX 9 shader model 3, a step down from the Series 6 and Series 6XT parts, but still support OpenGL ES 3.0 and OpenCL 1.x. Read 1 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Imagination Technologies boosts GPU speeds by 50 percent with Series 6XT

Putting Windows and Android on the same PC doesn’t solve anyone’s problems

PC makers at CES may announce Windows PCs that run Android apps. But should you do something just because you can? Andrew Cunningham CES begins in just a few short days, but rumors about what we’ll be seeing there are already in full-swing. It’s a fair bet that the usual suspects will show up—phones, tablets, PCs, maybe even a Linux-powered gun or two—but the things that stick out usually end up being the Flavors of the Year. These are often technologies that are cool in theory but fail to light the world on fire in practice. Netbooks, 3D TVs, and the first run of Android tablets are all members of this illustrious group, and so far baubles like 4K TVs and smartwatches look like worthy heirs to the throne. One such upcoming flavor, according to a report from The Verge , is an Intel-backed initiative that combines Windows 8.1 and Android on the same device. Rather than combine an Android tablet with a Windows PC like Asus’ Transformer Book Trio , these computers will seamlessly run Android apps within a Windows environment, probably by way of a virtualization layer like Bluestacks . This idea is in no way new, though the report suggests that a larger push is imminent. The initiative makes some sense for Intel and the OEMs. For Intel, it’s a way to offer tablet makers something that they can’t get from ARM chips like those from Qualcomm or Nvidia: the ability to provide full Windows 8.1 app compatibility combined with Android app compatibility. For the OEMs, it’s (theoretically) a way to patch gaps in Windows 8.1’s improving-but-spotty app store by giving consumers Android tablet apps that they (theoretically) know and love. Read 7 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Putting Windows and Android on the same PC doesn’t solve anyone’s problems

Facebook sued for allegedly making private messages into public “likes”

With all the pieces of my master plan falling into place, Ars will soon be silly with Likes. Facebook is being sued by two users for intercepting the “content of the users’ communications,” including private messages, with the intent to “mine user data and profit from those data by sharing them with third parties—namely, advertisers, marketers, and other data aggregators.” The plaintiffs argue in a December 30 class action complaint that Facebook’s use of the word “private” in relation to its messaging system is misleading, given the way the company treats the info contained within those messages. Many of the allegations in this case are based on research done in 2012 by the Wall Street Journal  for a series of articles about digital privacy. Facebook is far from the first company to use private messages to mint money. Gmail continues to be dinged for creating text ads based off of the content of e-mails  ten years after the ads were first introduced. (And Gmail has been sued for that, too.) This is from 2010, but without the “with” that is no doubt just beyond the crop, it’s still relevant. MoneyBlogNewz Facebook goes to lengths to clearly distinguish its messaging feature as “private,” even calling it “unprecedented” in terms of the privacy controls, the filing alleges. “Facebook never intended to provide this level of confidentiality. Instead, Facebook mines any and all transmissions… in order to gather any and all morsels of information it can about its users.” Read 6 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Facebook sued for allegedly making private messages into public “likes”

GOG’s managing director: Gamer resistance to DRM is stronger than ever

GOG.com’s Guillaume Rambourg giving Jenga advice. Digital games distribution site GOG (Good Old Games) has spent the last five years offering classic videogame titles DRM-free to its customers. Earlier in 2013, the site launched an indie publishing platform which allowed independent developers to submit their games for sale through GOG—an alternative to Steam’s contentious Greenlight initiative . Wired.co.uk spoke to Guillaume Rambourg, managing director of GOG.com, to discuss DRM, anti-sales, and why exactly the site was offering the original Fallout games free of charge. Wired.co.uk: What was the story behind setting up the GOG.com website? Rambourg: It all began in the mid-90s, when friends Marcin Iwinski and Michal Kicinski started their business as retail distributors in Poland. Back then, Poland was a very highly pirated market, with most gamers using outdated hardware and not having too much money to spend on games. That’s a tough market to break into: one where people aren’t used to paying for games. Read 32 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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GOG’s managing director: Gamer resistance to DRM is stronger than ever

Why NSA spied on inexplicably unencrypted Windows crash reports

The National Security Agency’s X-KEYSCORE program gives the spy agency access to a wide range of Internet traffic. Any information that isn’t encrypted is, naturally, visible to passive Internet wiretaps of the kind the NSA and other intelligence agencies use. This in turn will typically expose such things as e-mails, online chats, and general browsing behavior. And, according to slides published this weekend by Der Spiegel , this information also includes crash reports from Microsoft’s Windows Error Reporting facility built in to Windows. These reports will tell eavesdroppers what versions of what software someone is running, what operating system they use, and whenever that software has crashed. Windows also sends messages in the clear whenever a USB or PCI device is plugged in as part of its hunt for suitable drivers. Read 3 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Why NSA spied on inexplicably unencrypted Windows crash reports

Wii U gamepad hacked, reverse engineered to stream from a PC

Reverse engineering the Wii U gamepad was non-trivial. libdrc The Wii U’s tablet controller isn’t moving as many consoles as Nintendo might like, but the technology itself is still interesting enough to draw the attention of the hacker community. Engadget reports that the libdrc team gave a presentation at the Chaos Communication Congress explaining how it managed to hack the Wii U’s gamepad to communicate with and stream content from a standard Linux PC. The full talk is available in video form here . The 64-slide deck describes the many, many hoops the team had to jump through to get the gamepad working—dumping the gamepad’s firmware helped the team reverse-engineer the Wi-Fi encryption system, at which point the team also needed to reverse-engineer the protocols Nintendo is using to stream video, audio, and input data. The team included a screenshot of an emulated  Final Fantasy VII  in its deck to prove that the software works and was also able to get the GameCube version of The Legend of Zelda:  Wind Waker working live onstage. While the project is, at this point, “very buggy” and “not meant for end users,” the team thinks that the project is “a good prototype that can be improved on.” The team also wants to add the ability to pair other tablets with the Wii U, to port the project to Windows and to OS X, and to make it possible to stream things to the gamepad over the Internet. It may be some time before the layperson can take advantage of the libdrc team’s work, but even as an early alpha the project is an interesting proof-of-concept. Read on Ars Technica | Comments

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Wii U gamepad hacked, reverse engineered to stream from a PC

Apple’s incremental 2013—and what to expect in 2014

The trouble with the Apple beat is that everyone wants it to be as exciting and newsworthy as it was in 2007 when Apple announced the iPhone, or in 2010 when the original iPad dropped. Among both the tech press and enthusiasts, Apple is a victim of its own success—every year that the company doesn’t redefine a product category, the pundits get a bit more bored. In 2013, almost every one of Apple’s new hardware and software releases refined something that came before. While that might seem boring to early adopters, Apple continues to be a master of iteration, improving its products in noticeable and useful ways every single year. Here, we’ll look back at everything Apple has put out this year—and what we might expect in 2014. The iPhone Apple put a whole lot of marketing muscle behind the iPhone 5C, which is essentially a year-old phone. Andrew Cunningham In the strictest sense, Apple actually delivered two new iPhones this year: the iPhone 5S and the  iPhone 5C . The 5S was the only truly new one, though—it delivered the expected improvements to the SoC and the camera while introducing a new hardware feature in the form of the TouchID fingerprint sensor. In contrast, the 5C is just an iPhone 5 with slightly upgraded cellular hardware and some colorful plastic. Read 21 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Apple’s incremental 2013—and what to expect in 2014

Game of Thrones illegal downloads exceed TV viewers for second year

The most-torrented shows of 2013, according to Torrent Freak. Torrent Freak Game of Thrones again turned out to be the most-pirated TV show of 2013, according to a report from Torrent Freak. The show was downloaded an estimated 5.9 million times, besting its proportion of conventional television viewers, which clocks in at 5.5 million. That is a 37 percent increase from 2012, when Torrent Freak estimated Game of Thrones was downloaded 4.28 million times. As the New York Times points out , illegal downloads grew about 10 percent in 2013, with 327 million unique users navigating 13.9 billion webpages that handle pirated movies and TV. The shows Breaking Bad, The Walking Dead, The Big Bang Theory , and Dexter contributed another 14.3 million downloads between them. 2013 also saw plenty of industry leaders endorsing illegal downloading in one way or another. Game of Thrones director David Petrarca said the show thrives on “cultural buzz” in part generated by pirates; Time Warner CEO Jeff Bewkes said that Game of Thrones ’ status as the most pirated show was “ better than an Emmy ;” Netflix stated that it uses piracy statistics to determine what types of shows to produce or license; Breaking Bad creator Vince Gilligan said piracy ” helped… in terms of brand awareness .” The Walking Dead executive producer Gale Ann Hurd disagreed , calling the idea that piracy does good for content a “mistaken belief” and saying the activity is not something “we should encourage.” Read 1 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Game of Thrones illegal downloads exceed TV viewers for second year

Efficient set-top boxes to save $1 billion on energy annually by 2017

Today, the US Department of Energy announced an agreement with a diverse group of NGOs that would see significant improvements to a poorly recognized energy sink: the set-top box that receives and controls TV programming. The agreement, while voluntary, commits service providers to using more efficient hardware through to 2017. Although the individual savings will be small, the cumulative impact is massive: a billion dollars in electricity saved by consumers and five million fewer metric tons of carbon dioxide emissions in the atmosphere. The agreement, brokered by the EPA, brings together a diverse coalition of groups. On the environmental side, we have the Natural Resources Defense Council and the Appliance Standards Awareness Project. Representing industry are the Consumer Electronics Association and the National Cable & Telecommunications Association. The American Council for an Energy-Efficient Economy, which gets its funding from a variety of sources (including utilities), was also at the party. The standards they’ve developed will cover all existing delivery methods: telecom, cable, and satellite. It won’t be written into legislation, but an independent third party will verify that hardware meets the agreement’s specifications each year between now and 2017. The exact details of the energy-saving changes aren’t specified in the announcement , but the electronics in the devices can get quite hot, and statements made by Senator Dianne Feinstein (D-CA) suggest that they often remain active even when the television is off. Read 1 remaining paragraphs | Comments        

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Efficient set-top boxes to save $1 billion on energy annually by 2017

Scientists make exotic chemicals with high-pressure salt

Everything around you is made of elements that scientists have studied in quite some detail over the last 200 years. But all that understanding breaks down when these elements are subjected to high pressure and temperature. Now, using an advanced theoretical understanding and extreme conditions, researchers have converted table salt into exotic chemicals. Salt is made from one part sodium (Na) and one part chlorine (Cl). If somehow salt were transported to the center of the Earth, where the pressure is three million times that on the surface, its crystalline structure would change but the ratio of those two elements would remain the same. Vitali Prakapenka at the University of Chicago and his colleagues wanted to find out what would happen if there were an excess of either sodium or chlorine at such high pressures. Would the ratio between the elements change? “It might,” said Prakapenka, “because chemistry completely changes in such conditions.” If it did, the result would not just be formation of a new compound, but a serious revision of what we think about chemistry. Read 11 remaining paragraphs | Comments        

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Scientists make exotic chemicals with high-pressure salt