HP Enterprise demonstrates next-generation computing prototype as The Machine comes together

• By Joel Hruska on November 29, 2016 at 7:30 am
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Two and a half years ago, HP (now HP Enterprise after the company split) revealed a new, revolutionary computer architecture it dubbed “The Machine.” This new computing platform would combine cutting-edge and still unproven technologies like memristors, silicon photonics, and truly massive amounts of addressable memory. HPE was forced to dial back some of its ambition when it proved too difficult to bring the entire project to market all at the same time, but it refused to give up on the idea of what it calls “Memory-Driven Computing.”

Today, HPE is announcing that it has demonstrated the major components of this new type of system, albeit in prototype form. The Machine as currently constituted consists of:

• Compute nodes accessing a shared pool of Fabric-Attached Memory
• An optimized Linux-based operating system (OS) running on a customized System on a Chip (SOC)
• Photonics/Optical communication links, including the new X1 photonics module, are online and operational
• New software programming tools designed to take advantage of abundant persistent memory.

The Machine (well, one “blade” of it, anyway). The DIMM slots are filled with NAND Flash; HPE wants to transition to lower-latency memory that competes directly with DRAM in the next few years.

HPE has previously shown off some of these components, like its X1 silicon photonics module. The X1 module is capable of transferring data at up to 1.2Tbps (150GB/s of bandwidth) over a 30-50 meter distance. HPE has also demonstrated silicon photonics technology that can move data up to 50 kilometers (30 miles) at 200Gbps. HPE’s major goal with The Machine is to create a system in which non-volatile memory (NVM)serves as a true DRAM replacement, offering at least equivalent latency with drastically reduced power consumption and low-latency optical interconnects.

Customers will still have the option to deploy The Machine as a conventional system but HPE’s plan is to offer huge pools of NVM that can be shared across many SoCs. While the diagrams below only refer to CPUs, there’s no reason this model couldn’t be extended to other types of accelerators — vector processors like Intel’s Xeon Phi or GPUs from AMD and Nvidia could at least theoretically be paired with HPE’s new architecture. The following slideshow steps through some of HPE’s design elements, and the benefits it expects to offer with The Machine compared to traditional systems. Images can be clicked to enlarge them in a new window.

HPE's The Machine is built around certain key concepts. A shared pool of non-volatile memory and high-speed optical interconnects are both vital components of the system.

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When HPE announced that it would re-purpose The Machine’s design around conventional technology in mid-2015, it seemed to imply that the project’s groundbreaking potential had been largely buried beneath financial realities and the slow pace of technological innovation that characterizes modern semiconductor development. Today, I have to acknowledge that this dismissal was premature. HPE may not be planning to commercialize memristor technology in the near term, but The Machine is more than a conventional server with a huge amount of RAM, and the company’s work on low-latency non-volatile memory and optical interconnects could have significant implications for HPC and Big Data problems for years to come. The Machine won’t debut as a single system with all-new technologies but should transition to new memory standards as they become available. This might make it a touch less exciting on launch, but should lay the groundwork for a long-term virtuous cycle of improved performance and reduced power consumption, up to and including (eventually) exascale-class deployments.

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No Man’s Sky ‘Foundation’ update is live, but don’t expect a whole new game

It would be fair to say No Man’s Sky has been one of the biggest disappointments in modern gaming history. After two years of extraordinary hype, the game launched earlier this year to mostly negative reviews. Many of the features that were promised by developer Hello Games were missing, and the final game was scarcely a match for the awe-inspiring trailers, and the company’s silence after months of frantic communication went over poorly with much of the community, to the point that hackers took over the firm’s social media accounts (briefly) to apologize for the game. Hello Games is trying to redeem itself after months of silence with the “Foundation” patch, which has just launched on PC and PS4.

I’ve been playing around with the Foundation patch (AKA v1.1) to see if it fundamentally changes the experience. The headlining change in this patch is the option to build bases. Yes, in a game of exploration, you can choose a home planet. The resources you gather from around the galaxy can be used to build new sections of the base, eventually leading to complex, labyrinthine corridors. Your bases can be used to grow resources, research new technologies, and house your alien helpers.
If setting up shop on a planet doesn’t appeal to you, there are expensive freighter ships available that are essentially flying bases. These ships can move between star systems, taking all your items, grow chambers, and alien helpers along for the ride. In addition to having more space to keep things in your base and freighter, there’s a quick-access inventory system that makes it easier to find items. This is much appreciated as the clunky inventory system at launch was one of the most tedious gameplay features.

The most serious issue with No Man’s Sky at launch was just now uniform everything was. If you’d seen one planet, you’d seen them all. The random nature of the game was so random that planets lacked large scale distinctive features like mountains, oceans, and deserts. Hello Games says that changes to the landscape algorithm allows for more aesthetically pleasing planets and biome-specific resources. I don’t know that I’m seeing much difference yet, but the graphical tweaks like motion blur and antialiasing do look nicer. One big drawback here; Hello Games had to regenerate all planets in the game. Continuing a previous game might mean you character could be in a different environment than before the update.

No Man’s Sky has also been split into three game modes with the Foundation update. There’s the original game mode, creative mode, and survival mode. Creative mode grants you unlimited health and resources to build whatever you want—it’s basically sandbox mode. Survival mode is the opposite; planets are more dangerous and resources are more rare. You will die a lot in survival mode.
Admittedly, the Foundation update brings a lot of new features, but this is still No Man’s Sky. If you didn’t like it before, you probably still won’t. There’s very little story to speak of and the animals still look fairly ridiculous much of the time. If you were on the fence, some of this might entice you to give it another shot. Players at least seem to be giving No Man’s Sky 1.1 a chance. After dropping dramatically after launch, No Man’s Sky is back in the top 50 most played games on steam with a peak of about 7,700 players on Monday.

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Homeopathic solutions now have to be labeled to disclose that there’s no science behind them

The FTC is playing whack-a-mole with pseudoscience again, and this time it’s targeting homeopathy. Their latest comments contend (PDF) that the standard disclaimer isn’t enough to dissuade consumers from buying this crap, so now not only do homeopathic products have to carry the standard disclaimer, they also have to say there’s no science behind them.

I support the idea that it’s your body, so do with it what you want, and if taking homeopathic sugar pills makes you feel better, sure, keep taking them. But the only reason I can’t make a blanket statement that homeopathy provides no benefit whatsoever is the placebo effect. To paraphrase Tim Minchin’s memorable, NSFW rant on alternative medicine, Storm, without fail or exception every kind of alternative medicine has either not been proved to work, or been proved not to work. Do you know what alternative medicine is called that’s been proven to work? Medicine. Homeopathy must not be confused for medicine.

The FTC agrees, and they’re really emphatic about it. Homeopathic products don’t work: because further dilution is supposed to increase a homeopathic remedy’s strength, many homeopathic products contain no detectable traces of their title ingredients. This hilarity is a good thing for consumers, because homeopathy’s other fundamental principle of “like cures like” means the solutions could be deadly if they actually contained any of their title ingredients: among a great many other products, homeopaths prescribe nux vomica (strychnine), arsenica album (arsenic) and even teething products containing extract of belladonna, which it turns out is not great for kids. In reality, homeopathic products tend to be recalled when it’s discovered that they contain their title ingredient. Three separate times in their recent press release, the FTC maintains that the standard “has not been proven to treat or cure any condition” disclaimer is unlikely to be enough to adequately convey how completely valueless homeopathic solutions are. Homeopathy has been rejected by science, medicine and now by the FTC.

Debunking homeopathy has already been done so beautifully that nobody needs me to do it here. If you haven’t yet had a headache today, go search for “succussion” and that’ll fix that right up for ya. I present to you Munroe’s razor:

 

Image: Randall Munroe, xkcd.com/808/

This is not government overreach. This is the government intervening to put the kibosh on outright fraud. Products which definitionally cannot do what they claim to do and contain none of what they claim to contain are fraudulent. Nobody benefits from their sale but the fraudster. This is the FTC attempting to intervene in the one way it can, because the next step up would be banning homeopathic products outright and we don’t have a reason to go there yet. Consumers can buy what they want, even if it’s terribly advised. The principle of caveat emptor puts the responsibility on the buyer to not go carting off pallets of triple-distilled homeopathic 40C oleus serpentius.

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New teardown reveals Surface Studio packs ARM CPU core, upgradable storage

Microsoft’s new Surface Studio is an interesting foray into high-end premium hardware, but it’s clearly not intended as a user-expandable system. It’s always interesting to see how companies balance slim, cutting-edge hardware against basic repairability, and Microsoft’s track record in this area is pretty mixed. iFixit’s recent teardown of the Surface Studio found some expected downsides, but a few intriguing details and user-friendly options as well.

It’s not too difficult to open the bottom of the system, but there are some wire leads to watch and you’ll have to remove the midframe to access the guts of the machine. The cooling solution appears quite robust — Microsoft is using a multi-heatpipe system with dual fans, one for the CPU and one for the GPU. The larger fans are used for the GPU, while the smaller serves the CPU (the GPU also exhausts directly, while the CPU fan pushes air into a plastic channel).

The dual heatpipe. Image by iFixit

Microsoft is using a hybrid cache solution, but earlier reports that implied the system used a Seagate SSHD were apparently invalid. There are two general ways to create a hybrid SSD platform: You can use a small amount of SSD storage to accelerate both reads and writes (we’ve covered this type of solution in previous reviews), or you can deploy an SSHD. SSHD’s contain both NAND flash and conventional magnetic media in the same 2.5-inch enclosure, and they typically have different caching strategies and less total NAND than hybrid solutions that pair separate NAND and magnetic media storage pools. iFixit’s Surface Studio has 64GB of storage total and could theoretically be expanded to 128GB if you have an appropriate workbench and the necessary expertise.

Unfortunately, anyone who dreamt of upgrading the onboard RAM or other components will be disappointed — all of the onboard DRAM is soldered to the motherboard, as is the CPU. There’s no upgrading the GPU, either; the GTX 965M / 980M isn’t mounted to an MXM-compatible PCB. It might one day be possible to perform a full mainboard swap by buying a Studio on eBay and tearing it down for parts, but that’s obviously not a cost-effective solution for most people and won’t be a realistic option for several years, if at all.

The Surface Studio’s RAM, GPU, and CPU are all mounted on the same piece of silicon. Image by iFixit.

The display can be removed and replaced, but only by cutting through a glue layer and removing the rear hinge. iFixit rates this as a fairly straightforward repair if all you need to do is replace a cracked glass screen. The display includes a second motherboard with some Microsoft-branded chips, some NOR flash, and a 32-bit ARM Cortex-M7 processor. We don’t talk much about ARM’s embedded controllers, but the M7 is supposed to be a significant improvement over ARM’s previous embedded chips, as shown below:


The Cortex-M7 is used as part of Microsoft’s PixelSense display, and it’s not the first time we’ve seen ARM controllers popping up in PC hardware. For years, conventional wisdom predicted that x86 and ARM were headed for an inevitable confrontation across the smartphone, tablet, and even the laptop market. That seems much less likely to happen now, but we’re seeing some interesting trends from companies that integrate ARM and x86 silicon side-by-side, whether that’s as an on-chip security solution (AMD’s TrustZone) or using an embedded ARM controller to handle specific tasks, as Microsoft has done.

Overall, the Surface Studio wins a 5/10 score for its repairability. The 8GB limit on the lower-end Surface Studio (to the extent that any $3000+ system can be called “lower end”) could give some buyers pause, given that there’s no way to upgrade the platform. Conventional desktop users can easily get by with this, but the content creation professionals that Microsoft is targeting really could’ve used a 16GB baseline configuration.

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SpaceX blames recent rocket explosion on helium tank breach

Several weeks ago, SpaceX suffered another blow to its efforts to make private spaceflight a viable business when a Falcon 9 rocket exploded on the launchpad during a pre-flight test. The explosion resulted in the loss of the rocket and the payload, a satellite that was to be used for Facebook’s internet.org project. The firm began an investigation immediately, and has now provided an update on the cause. The explosion was reportedly a result of a breached helium containment system.

This might sound familiar, because it was also a problem with the helium storage tanks that caused the 2015 in-flight explosion that destroyed a resupply payload bound for the International Space Station. SpaceX is careful to point out that the recent anomaly had nothing to do with the 2015 explosion. In that incident, a strut that held the helium containers in place failed long before it had reached the rated tolerance levels. That caused the helium tank to rupture and lead to the breakup of the rocket.

In the September 2nd incident (which Elon musk says was not an explosion, but just a very fast fire), the helium storage system was breached in the second stage oxygen tank. Helium is used in rocket engines to maintain proper pressurization inside the tank as fuel is depleted. Because it’s stored as a supercooled liquid, a breach can lead to serious damage to the rocket.

While SpaceX knows what caused the explosion, it doesn’t yet know why. SpaceX is working with the FAA, NASA, the US Air Force, and outside industry experts to determine how the helium tank was damaged, but there’s precious little data from the vent itself. The Falcon 9 reports more than 3,000 different channels of engineering data to mission control, but from the first signs of an anomaly to complete loss of data was just 93 milliseconds. The investigation team has scoured the landscape near Launch Complex 40 to find all the debris from the rocket. It has all been cataloged, photographed, and stored in a hangar for further analysis.

Video of the anomaly (seen above) is quite dramatic, but as per regulations, no one was nearby during the fueling operation. There was substantial damage to the launchpad systems, but all the SpaceX support facilities nearby managed to get away with only minor damage. The company is still planning to launch again in November and is still building rocket components at its California facility for cargo missions and the upcoming NASA Commercial Crew Program flights. If the September 2nd incident is found to have been caused by the Falcon 9 design, SpaceX will be able to make changes to the rocket before getting back to the launchpad.

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Human skeleton found on shipwreck that held mysterious Antikythera Mechanism

• By Jessica Hall on September 22, 2016 at 1:14 pm
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In January of 1900, deep divers off the coast of a Greek island took shelter from a storm, and found a two-thousand-year-old shipwreck strewn with bones, loot, and a mysterious artifact, half-buried in the sand. Now a team of underwater archaeologists have uncovered a partial skeleton from the same wreck, in such shockingly good condition that they’re going to attempt a DNA extraction on the remains.

Deep diving is dangerous; divers breathe a different mix of gases while they’re underwater, and nitrogen in their air tanks can cause narcosis, which Jacques Cousteau called the “rapture of the deep.” On the first exploration of the wreck, which is 150 feet down, when the first diver surfaced with reports of bodies and artifacts and even submerged horses, the captain didn’t believe a word of the story: he thought it was nitrogen narcosis making the diver spin such tales. But the diver was fine. By 1901, those deep divers had brought to the surface a hoard of buried treasure, including a mysterious clockwork artifact, corroded and crushed, with a gearwheel sticking out of it and markings that nobody understood. They called it the Antikythera device, after the island near which it was found. They fished out everything they could get off the ocean floor, every amphora and coin they could find, and called it done.

Cousteau heard of the Antikythera device shortly after the first publication about it, by bespectacled British historian Derek de Solla Price. Incredibly, the device had just been mothballed in museum storage for half a century because nobody believed the people of the shipwreck’s era could have built it. When scientists finally took an interest and started imaging it, everyone was stunned at the complexity of the mechanism. Once Cousteau heard of the device, he himself came to investigate the wreck in the 1970s, and excavated a buried tableau beyond anyone’s expectations: dated to the first century BC, Cousteau found statues, jewelry, money, weapons — and several sets of barely recognizable human remains.

Decades later, we’re doing better with diving tech. The crew doing the underwater excavation is breathing something called “trimix,” which is a cocktail of helium, nitrogen, and oxygen better suited to spending time at depth. We’ve got pressure suits, too, and hyperbaric chambers if something should go wrong. We’re still sifting through the site and finding buried artifacts, but every detail we find raises more questions. The skeleton we just found is no exception. It isn’t the only human remains from the Antikythera wreck. It’s just the best preserved, by a long shot — well enough so that Hannes Schroeder and his team are going to try to get DNA out of it.

The jawbone. Image: Brett Seymour, EUA/WHOI/ARGO, via Nature News

The remains consist of a partial skull with teeth, two thighbones, two arm bones, and some ribs. “It doesn’t look like bone that’s 2,000 years old,” says Schroeder, an expert in ancient-DNA analysis who’s personally working on the DNA extraction. Because the skull is in such great condition, Schroeder can finesse DNA out of the dense bits of bone behind the ear called petrous bone; it preserves DNA better than other parts of the skeleton, even the teeth. “It’s amazing you guys found that,” Schroeder says of the partial skull. “If there’s any DNA, then from what we know, it’ll be there.”

DNA from the remains could add a valuable data point to our genetic history and the movement of haplogroups through time. Who was the person these remains came from? Would he (we think it’s a he) have looked “more Greek-Italian or Near Eastern”?  How will the DNA we find inside them change our understanding of population movements through history? And why, after two thousand years underwater, are there still so many bones?

To the latter question, there exists an answer, even if it’s a little grim. The wreck site is positioned at the foot of Antikythera’s steep cliffs. The ship could have been caught in a storm and dashed against the rocks — just the kind of storm from which those divers originally tried to take shelter. Co-director of the excavation team Brandon Foley explains, “We think it was such a violent wrecking event, people got trapped below decks.” When the ship went down, the wreck was rapidly buried under the sand, and so too were the bodies.

Based on the richness of debris from the ship, and how they’re distributed, researchers think it was a large merchant ship with multiple decks, possibly toting spoils of war looted from Athens or Asia Minor. It could have been inbound as swag for a victory parade for Julius Caesar. In this era, Greek and Roman merchant ships often carried well-to-do passengers, or at least those who could pay, and sometimes slaves. British underwater archaeologist Mark Dunkley points out that a crew of a dozen or so chained-up slaves in the cargo hold would be SOL in a sinking ship. “The crew would be able to get off relatively fast. Those shackled would have no opportunity to escape.” The bones just uncovered were surrounded by pieces of corroded iron, still unidentified; the iron oxide has stained the bones amber red.

Image: Nature

As for the device, scholars and tinkerers have been poring over the fragments of the Antikythera mechanism for years, analyzing its function and gearing. CAT scanning and repeated radiographs of the fragments have told us about its purpose: the Antikythera device was an orrery, a planetarium that would predict the diurnal movements of the sun and the five known planets. It had explicit, detailed instructions on the inside covers: you can just picture a hoary Grecian geometer yelling “RTFM!” The device could also predict eclipses, and — I’m not making this up — it had bloatware a built-in feature that could also give the dates of the Greek Olympic games, which happened every four years.

A device that complex, historians agree, probably wasn’t the work of a lone innovator. It was a masterwork, easily the most technologically advanced device we’ve recovered from antiquity. It could have been the work of Hipparchus, with his mentor and probably his apprentices. Scientists are using the markings on the device to suss out the latitude at which it was meant to be used.

Schematic of the whole Antikythera mechanism, with pins and gears labeled. Via Wikipedia

Naturally, there are some enterprising folks who have taken the data from existing studies of the device, often called the world’s first analog computer, and done reconstructions trying to find the answers. The artifact itself is on display at the National Archaeological Museum in Athens, several people have done elegant working models, and there’s even a project to release CAD files for the device. But its gearing ratios present a problem: the device appears to have a “fast zone” and a “slow zone” where the gear teeth are differently spaced to account for the varying speed of the planets. The varying gear ratio could be the nuanced application of Greek geometrical theory to Babylonian astronomy, and in fact the Greeks were really into geometry at the time of the wreck, and the inscriptions inside the intricately geared device are thoroughly Babylonian. Or it could be sloppy craftsmanship that made some teeth larger than others. Forensic imaging is our best bet now.

Nobody knows who made the Antikythera device, nor how it came to be on the ship that sank. But if we can narrow down a few lineages, some information on who was where and when — if we can figure out who made it and why the gears are spaced the way they are — the DNA results from that partial skeleton stand to throw light on the whole affair. It’s amazing what you can find in the data.

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China’s first space station will fall back to Earth in 2017

China launched its first space station in 2011, and managed to successfully use it intermittently for several years longer than originally planned. Now, the Tiangong-1 module is heading for a crash landing on Earth. However, China doesn’t know exactly when it’s coming down. That has fed speculation that all communication with the module has been lost, meaning it could come down almost anywhere.

The best estimate of reentry China has given is sometime in the second half of 2017. That would indicate a slowly decaying orbit. China announced in March that it had lost telemetry and guidance control of the satellite, but it had not played host to astronauts since 2013, so there was no immediate danger. However, some astronomers worried aloud that Tiangong-1 was completely inoperable and could be dropping out of the sky at any moment.

China’s statement (delivered by the government-backed Xinhua news agency) says that the module is intact and orbiting at an altitude of 230 miles (370 kilometers). This at least implies that it knows exactly where the station is, and will be able to predict its landing closer to the event. When it hits the atmosphere, much of Tiangong-1 will break up into tiny fragments. There may still be some segments as large as 100 kilograms, which could cause real damage if it fell on a populated area. However, the odds of it actually getting close to anyone or anything important are slim. Statistically, it’s likely the debris will just impact the ocean. China says it will monitor reentry for and dangerous objects.

Chinese crew aboard the Tiangong-1.

If China has completely lost contact with the station, at least Tiangong-1 is on the small side. At just just 18,753 pounds, it provided crews 15 cubic meters of space. The International Space Station has over 900 cubic meters of pressurized space, not including the new experimental Bigelow inflatable module. Unlike the ISS, Tiangong-1 didn’t have the facilities for constant habitation. It was originally used to test docking systems in 2011; then crews were able to return to the module for 11 days in 2012 and 14 days in 2013.

China successfully launched the Tiangong-2 station into orbit last week. It’s considerably larger than Tiangong-1, and will host two astronauts next month. They’ll stay on board for a month to do research. The Tiangong-3 station will follow this one in a few years, and will serve as a platform to test the final technologies China needs to perfect before launching a permanent orbital station in the early 2020s.

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Missing MH370 pilot conducted suicide flight simulations over Indian Ocean

Last week, we covered how the search for Malaysia Flight MH370 is set to end in the near future, as the last of the 46,300 square-mile search area is due to be mapped shortly. With less than 10% of the search area left still to examine, the chances of finding the plane within its boundaries is very small. But a crucial new piece of information, not previously known, is that the plane’s captain, Zaharie Ahmad Shah, appears to have conducted a simulated suicide flight scenario that ended with an aircraft disappearing in the Indian Ocean.

The evidence for the simulation run was uncovered in March 2014, when Malaysian officials gave the FBI the hard drives Shah used as part of an “elaborate” flight simulator in his home. The FBI was able to recover six deleted data points that had been stored in Microsoft Flight Simulator X. The FBI document (as reported by New York magazine) reads:

Based on the Forensics Analysis conducted on the 5 HDDs obtained from the Flight Simulator from MH370 Pilot’s house, we found a flight path, that lead to the Southern Indian Ocean, among the numerous other flight paths charted on the Flight Simulator, that could be of interest, as contained in Table 2.

These deleted points show a flight plan that departed Kuala Lumpur, headed northwest over the Malacca Strait, then banked and headed out over the Indian Ocean. Once the fuel tanks were exhausted, the aircraft would’ve plunged into the sea. While rumors that the captain may have been involved have always run around the Internet, there are several factors to note here.

First, while Shah’s flight simulator contained records that he’d plotted such a course, the path MH370 is believed to have followed based on analysis of its satellite pings does not match the route Shah planned in simulation. In the image below, Shah’s simulated flight is in red, while the believed path of the aircraft is in yellow.



Second, Shah’s home and work life were both positive to the best knowledge of anyone around him. He had suffered no recent losses, had no history of depression, and no expressed interest in religious or political extremism. The vast majority of terrorists leave some record of their activities, even if such records only emerge posthumously. No evidence linking Shah to any religious or political extremists has ever been found. And a single deleted flight path, absent any kind of documentation, doesn’t prove anything. (I must note that I’d be mortified if I ever ran for city government and someone submitted my activities on SimCity as evidence against me. I have a known weakness for nuclear power plants, giant monsters, and earthquakes.)

Conscious or unconscious?

As Popular Mechanics discusses, one reason the search teams chose to focus where they did is because Shah’s southern suicide route does share general characteristics with the route MH370 is believed to have taken. It also complicates the situation. Virtually all of our assumptions about the aircraft’s final moments rest on the idea that it hit the water very near to the time when it lost power.

If it didn’t — if Shah was conscious and able to glide the craft — it would mean the aircraft could be almost anywhere. The problem is, our analysis of where the aircraft was depended heavily on assumptions about its altitude, trajectory, and autopilot status. A conscious pilot also raises a host of other questions. If Shah hijacked the plane, what happened to its crew? Who would have had potential access to an emergency radio and other means of signaling the ground, as well as full oxygen masks and oxygen bottles? While I don’t present this Quora post as providing guaranteed data, the general consensus seems to be that while a pilot could potentially take action to vent cabin pressure and compromise the aircraft, doing so while simultaneously incapacitating the crew and guaranteeing he himself remained conscious would have been difficult, if not impossible. If Shah took actions that resulted in his own incapacitation or death, that means the plane wouldn’t have had a pilot to land it six hours later, which means the search area should’ve still been accurate.

Knowing that Shah plotted a suicide course on a flight simulator is interesting evidence that suggests he might have taken his own life. But the complete lack of corroborating evidence means it could also be little more than coincidence. Without the plane — and possibly even with it — we’ll never know.

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Multiple Galaxy Note 7 snapshots leak ahead of Samsung announcement

The Samsung Galaxy Note 5 was a fine device, though fans of the Note series were irked by the smallish battery and lack of expandable memory. Samsung didn’t even give the Note 5 a full release in Europe, leading many to question its commitment to the stylus-packing phablet form factor. Rumors are swirling as we approach the August 2nd unveiling of the Note 7 — yes, Samsung is skipping a number to bring the Note series naming in-line with the Galaxy S phones. Skipping a number seems somewhat appropriate here. The Note 7 is getting leaky ahead of the announcement, and it looks like a big change for Samsung’s flagship phablet.

The latest and best look we’ve gotten of the Note 7 comes from the Chinese social media service Weibo, by way of French tech blog NowhereElse. This international connection reveals a device that looks like a slightly blown up Galaxy S7 Edge. From the front, the phone has almost no bezel on the left and right of the screen. That’s because the Note 7 will use one of Samsung’s curved Super AMOLED displays. This will be the first time the Note series has gone with such a panel, but Samsung has seen huge interest in the Edge variants of other phones. They vastly outsell the standard phone in many markets, even with the higher price tags.

Leaks points to a 5.7-inch 1440p display on the Note 7, but with the curved edges the usable space is slightly smaller. The curve in the leaked images looks like it might be less severe than the GS7 Edge, though. Samsung has always attempted to graft some features into the software to take advantage of curved displays, but they’ve never been very useful. The curved area will probably prove even less useful when using the Note 7’s built-in stylus (which hopefully doesn’t get stuck this year). Beneath the screen in the leaked photos are Samsung’s usual physical home button (with fingerprint reader) flanked by capacitive back and overview buttons.



Aside from the stylus, the Note 7 is expected to include a Snapdragon 820 (or possibly 821), 4-6GB of RAM, and the same 12MP main camera as the GS7. The battery capacity is reportedly 3,600mAh, substantially higher than the 3,000mAh found in the Note 5. Rumors have long pointed to an iris scanner coming to Samsung’s phones, and again some are expecting the Note 7 to include this feature. The idea is that it would be able to look at the phone and it would unlock after identifying you via the unique patterns of your iris. That sounds nice and all, but it might not work very well in practice.

The Note 7 is expected to launch not long after the announcement on August 2nd with software based on Android 6.0. Android 7.0 Nougat is just around the corner, but that will have to wait until later for the Note 7. It will at least come with a slightly revamped version of Samsung’s TouchWiz UI layer.

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Crypto-heist threatens to tank blockchain-based future

The DAO stands for the “Distributed Autonomous Organization,” and while that could very well refer to anything from a blockchain car-share app to a hive of honey bees, this rather boring title stands for something truly remarkable: the first unmanned investment portfolio. It is a proof of concept for what many believe will be the future of finance, with software organizing and overseeing an investment strategy developed through semi-democratic input from the collected investors. It’s secured by the much-ballyhooed Ethereum platform, using a cryptocurrency called Ether as its trading currency, and at first everything seemed to be proceeding according to plan. It was a confirmation of the promise of the blockchain, and proof that the future really is near at hand!

Then, just days after that DAO’s public launch, a lone hacker managed to digitally make off with more than $50 million-worth of Ether, or roughly a third of the overall capital the DAO had raised. More than a setback, this was an existential problem: This was the one, specific thing that was supposed to be impossible under the supervision of the blockchain. Despite all the efforts detailed below, make no mistake: the DAO is dead. What’s important now is containing the damage, and stopping it from tanking Ethereum as a whole.

The blockchain-based smart city might not be far away.

Reports indicate that this hack took the form of a recursion glitch, which allowed infinite repetition of the otherwise legitimate command to ‘split’ your Ether out of shared wallet that’s gearing up for investments you don’t support, and into a different DAO account — or potentially a wallet of your own. The recursion algorithm was used to call on the donating fund for this Ether, over and over, without updating the balance after each withdrawal. This allowed the target accounts to be completely drained, in maximum increments of the thief’s own investment in DAO. At the time of the hack, the attacker got control of about 3.6 million Ether, out of about eight million overall.

As you might imagine, the response from both current and potential DAO investors has been strong — so strong that many are wondering whether the DAO or even Ethereum itself might have been struck a fatal blow. Ethereum is an almost absurdly ambitious idea, and at this early stage it’s buoyed almost entirely by public and investor interest; if public opinion begins to sour, and its early wins don’t lead to better, more ambitious projects to follow, Ethereum is still very capable of folding under its own weight.
Now, the worst part: it’s possible to undo this transaction, but a large proportion of the DAO and blockchain community think the cure could end up being worse than the disease. If all the participants in the DAO agree, they can collectively implement a “hard fork” in the software, in principle forcing a new reality into existence. This isn’t quite the same as hitting rewind, since the stolen funds don’t end up back in victims’ wallets directly, but are all deposited into a publicly accessible fund where investors can withdraw the amount they lost.

None of this saves the DAO. By de-legitimizing such a huge transfer of funds, the organization knowingly cut its own throat. Other DAO’s and DAO-like entities will spring up, but they will be second shots at a previously tried and failed mission: to prove that the blockchain is both useful and safe for our most sensitive jobs and information.

We should take a moment to go over just what actually had to occur to make this “fix” possible: the users hosting the blockchain software all had to download and run the new, “forked” version of the blockchain. By the time it the change was ready to go, polling of investors had made clear their preference for reimbursement, but there was still always a chance of disaster. If some non-trivial portion of the hosts decided to keep running the old version of the blockchain, the result would be two identical versions of the software. The thief’s ability to trade or redeem his or her ill-gotten Ether for cash would then be dependent on which of these versions of the blockchain the other user or currency exchange happened to be using — which obviously introduces all kinds of cascading problems as the recipients of those sometimes-respected coins then go out and try to do more business.

Graph of Ether remaining in the withdrawal account. Source: Ether.camp

One interesting facet of this reimbursement: a lot of people have yet to collect their funds, totaling millions of dollars of unclaimed money. Some of this could be investment by the DAO team itself, and almost certainly some of it belongs to clueless investors who remain blissfully unaware of all this, but some users have also expressed frustration with the length of the withdrawal process. Since the blockchain-based wallet containing these funds can and will outlive (has outlived) the DAO itself, an investor could withdraw their funds five or 10 years from now, and it ought to make little difference. Assuming that crypto-investment is here to stay, it will take economists a while to fully wrap their heads around just how the peculiarities of digital currency affect how it flows through society.

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FBI, cybersecurity experts investigating potential Russian ties to DNC email leak

On Friday, WikiLeaks posted a trove of 20,000 emails procured in a hack of the Democratic National Committee. Today, the FBI announced that it was investigating the hack and the circumstances surrounding it.

The hack was first reported last month, by the Washington Post, which said hackers affiliated with the Russian government had breached DNC servers and gathered opposition research on Trump as well as access to “other material.” That report claimed the hackers so thoroughly penetrated the DNC’s servers that they gained complete access to email and chat traffic. At the time, the Post reported that the hackers might have had access to the DNC’s servers for up to a year.

The Post claimed that no personal information on any donors had been seized in the attack, but the WikiLeaks email trove proved that false. Included in the leaked emails were full names, addresses, phone numbers, passport and social security numbers, credit card payment details, and full card numbers.
Security experts from CrowdStrike claim to have uncovered forensic evidence suggesting that two competing teams of Russian hackers penetrated the DNC’s servers, and that the information leaked to WikiLeaks may have come directly from Russian intelligence. If true, this would raise significant questions about Russia’s attempted interference in US elections. The Trump campaign has been accused of adopting positions that favor Vladimir Putin, though Trump has denied all such allegations.

Thomas Rid, a professor at Kings College London, told the Post that he communicated with the hacker, Guccifer2, who leaked the DNC’s emails to WikiLeaks. “I quizzed him two times in a Twitter direct message back and forth and he very clearly indicated he gave the emails to WikiLeaks,” Rid told the Post. These early findings have been backed up by multiple additional firms: Mandiant (part of FireEye) and Fidelis have confirmed CrowdStrike’s initial analysis. The hackers that penetrated the DNC used tools, practices, and trade craft that’s been previously linked to Russian groups, including hardcoded IP addresses to command-and-control servers that have conclusively been linked to Russian military intelligence, the GRU.

The leaked documents have also been modified by users with Russian language default settings, Motherboard reports, and there were hyperlink errors in Cyrillic in the document metadata. While Guccifer2 has denied being Russian or affiliated with Russia and claimed to be Romanian, he was unable to respond colloquially and without errors when asked to explain his hacks in Romanian. Russian involvement has not been conclusively proven, but there are multiple arrows pointing in the same direction.

Not this Gru.

The other major issue related to the leak is the alleged favoritism shown to Hillary Clinton during the Democratic primary season. Supporters of Bernie Sanders often alleged that Debbie Wasserman Schultz, who headed the Democratic National Committee, scheduled debates at times that favored Clinton and generally worked behind the scenes to disadvantage Sanders. As of this writing, none of the emails show evidence of the voter suppression or deliberate disenfranchisement that some Sanders’ supporters allege took place, but there has been at least one email chain that discussed attempting to paint Sanders as an atheist. Wasserman Schultz has agreed to step down as a result of the leaks and will no longer speak at the Democratic National Convention.

Just to make this perfectly clear: While some have talked about this leak as a second Clinton email scandal, Hillary Clinton herself is not a direct party to this leak, nor responsible for it. The investigation into Clinton’s own email practices and the FBI decision not to indict her for said practices was an entirely separate affair.

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Paypal Ranks Nigeria 3rd In Mobile Shopping

PayPal Holding, Inc. ranked the most populous black nation and the largest African economy Nigeria as the 3rd highest mobile shopper worldwide.

The online payment giant is the most popular medium among Nigerian cross-border shoppers, and estimated 55 percent of all oversea online purchases in the past 12 months were done via PayPal.

Nigerian mobile shoppers reportedly spent N128.1 billion ($610 million) in 2015 using PayPal, and on target for N172 billion ($819 million) this year.

The General Manager of PayPal Africa and Israel, Efi Dahan, said Nigerian online shoppers have realized the world is their shopping mall and as such shop wherever and whenever using their mobile devices.

It should be recalled that Facebook Inc. in February also affirmed Nigeria as its biggest market in Africa, with 97 percent of its 16 million Nigerian users accessing the platform through their mobile devices.

“Nigerians are generally sophisticated mobile users and this sophistication is aiding small businesses,” said Nunu Ntshingila, head of Africa for Facebook.

While China still remains the global leader of mobile shopping nations, with 86 percent of all its online shoppers using smartphone. Nigeria’s 72 percent is third after India’s 82 percent.

Since PayPal commenced business in Nigeria, Nigerians are no longer limited to what they can purchase locally, but they now search the globe for better deals.

The current mobile trend is predicted to continue to pave the way for entrepreneurs and boost their global business reach.

PayPal (PYPL) shares rose 3 percent on Wednesday amid takeover speculation.

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Moore’s law scaling dead by 2021, to be replaced by 3D integration

Over the past few years, we’ve chronicled the transformation of Moore’s Law. Originally coined as a way to explain ongoing improvements in transistor scaling, Moore’s law has been redefined and extended to include long-term trends in semiconductor performance and the integration of new chip features. Now, the International Technology Roadmap for Semiconductors (ITRS) has released a new update on the future of semiconductor technology that states conventional 2D transistor density scaling will likely end by 2021 — to be replaced by new and different types of integration and scaling.

Much of the ITRS’ recently released executive report focuses on the way the meaning of Moore’s law has changed over the years. We discussed this back in 2015 when we noted the need for a Moore’s law 3.0, as the focus of the semiconductor industry shifted from shrinking individual chips to an SoC or device-centric model, which emphasized capability integration and power consumption reductions. The modern cell phone is an example of this third type of integration, which combines a high-definition screen, high-speed cellular and wireless network, a touchscreen interface, high-quality cameras capable of capturing both photos and video, a short-range flashlight (thanks to an integrated flash), and 16-128GB of internal storage. All of this capability is combined with a high-speed system-on-chip that operates well above 1GHz.

The benefits of 3D stacking.

The shift from 2D to 3D structures is going to be much simpler for some technologies than others. One of the major challenges of adopting 3D construction for logic circuits, like CPUs, is that stacking memory transistors on top of logic transistors could melt one or both layers if too much heat is trapped within the die. We’ve already seen NAND flash make the shift to 3D manufacturing, but 3D CPUs aren’t expected until the 2021 – 2024 timeframe. Between now and then, manufacturers are expected to integrate other materials, like silicon-germanium (SiGe) or III-V semiconductors (semiconductors from groups III and V of the periodic table) to improve on current performance.



One point the ITRS reiterated that we’ve also covered before at ET is that the nature of what constitutes advancement and how we characterize that performance improvement will continue to emphasize low power over strict clock advances. This is partly due to the nature of what the market is demanding, and partly due to the limited ability of current materials to hit higher clock rates. As the graph above shows, only van der Waal FETs are expected to even match high-power CMOS in terms of absolute performance, albeit at significantly reduced power consumption. In thermally constrained environments, the vdWFETs and exFETs are significantly faster when constrained to a power envelope of 10W/cm².

One alternative floated by the ITRS is that we may see improvements in the usage of highly specialized heterogeneous cores that utilize either unique function blocks or are highly tuned to particular applications. This has been a proposed solution to the so-called dark silicon problem that we’ve covered before, and it’s relatively easy to explain. Instead of building multi-core blocks with an increasing number of similar chips, manufacturers would use some of that space to build processors dedicated to specific tasks. Conceptually, this would mean that your camera might have one dedicated processor, while other applications could run on other cores. Some research projects have explored building small cores to handle tasks at an application level, but the ITRS report doesn’t delve into this detail.

Here’s how NAND and DRAM compare across a variety of metrics. Image included mostly for being interesting.

One point that the ITRS report makes, but doesn’t necessarily come right out and say, is that we’re going to see this kind of integration and envelope-pushing in the heart of IoT development before it comes to desktops, laptops, and the like. The reason is simple, and as inferred above: Right now, the silicon industry is pushing hard to create chips that can run on less and less power while simultaneously improving power consumption. If you want to build a next-generation wearable, cutting power consumption from 1W to 0.75W is a huge improvement. But the technologies that allow you to cut that 0.25W of power may not translate well to devices in the 15W-140W laptop and desktop range. Similarly, building 3D chips with integrated CPUs requires appropriate thermal dissipation, which means the first chips to rely on these methods will probably be extremely low-power devices — not the kind of cores in your laptop or desktop.

In fact, it’s somewhat telling that while the ITRS’ executive summary makes extensive predictions regarding future device frequencies, bandwidths, and operating characteristics at the data center, mobile, and Internet of Everything (the proposed successor to the Internet of Things), it does not attempt to predict the future of conventional desktops and laptops. The closest it comes is predicting that by 2029 the average mobile processor will contain 25 application processors and 303 GPU cores, with a max single-component frequency of 4.7GHz (presumably burst frequency).

The implications of the report are clear: Those who seek significantly improved CPU performance will do best to seek it via new computing architectures, improved multi-threading, or improved memory performance in general — not via improvements to raw clock speed. With Intel stuck in the doldrums when it comes to providing architectural improvements, we wouldn’t hold our breath on this front.

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Japan’s SoftBank offers ARM a $32 billion buyout

UK-based ARM Holdings has dominated the cell phone industry for decades, with an estimated 50 billion ARM processors built by the year 2014. Now the company has been acquired by Japan’s SoftBank in a deal worth $32 billion (£24.3 billion). ARM will retain its Cambridge, UK headquarters and SoftBank has pledged to double the company’s headcount over the next five years. SoftBank has also stated it intends to retain ARM’s existing senior management, brand, and partnership-based business model and culture.
On the one hand, this looks like it could be a huge win for ARM, which gets a vast boost in resources and capabilities. SoftBank is offering a 50% premium on ARM’s current share price, which makes the deal a great option for shareholders, and SoftBank owns other technology companies that might benefit from closer relationships with ARM.
On the other hand, those closer relationships could also become a significant problem for ARM’s business model.

Tenuous neutrality

ARM dominates the mobile and embedded industries partly because it operates a tiered business model that doesn’t prioritize any single customer. ARM doesn’t sell finished CPUs the way that Intel or AMD does. Instead, it offers multiple types of design and product licensing. Customers who want a complete, standardized solution can license a specific CPU, GPU, or other ARM product. AMD’s Seattle, for example, is based on ARM’s Cortex-A57 processor and built on 28nm technology.

Graph by Recode

ARM’s other major license tier is an architectural license. Let’s say you want to build a chip that’s ARMv8 compatible, but designed to your own specifications. ARM’s business model allows for this. All of Apple’s current products are based on its own custom implementation of ARM’s CPU architecture, as are Qualcomm’s Krait and Kryo-based SoCs. By offering these two licenses’ ARM has cultivated a position as the neutral performance provider to anyone who wants it.

SoftBank, on the other hand, already owns one US wireless carrier (Sprint) and another in Japan. Carriers don’t design their own devices, but it’s not hard to see how SoftBank might be interested in pairing with another company to create a Sprint-specific device that leveraged its own custom silicon. Any such product could disrupt the balance ARM has maintained for years. Over at PCMag, Sascha Segan has delved into more detail on how this could change the mobile market. Recode is reporting that Apple and Intel might be interested in buying ARM as well, but an acquisition by either company would create an enormous and immediate conflict of interest in a way that SoftBank’s wouldn’t. Apple already captures the vast majority of profit in the smartphone business (Samsung scrapes up most of what’s left) and Intel just announced its intent to exit smartphones and tablets. Any move by Apple or Intel to acquire ARM would almost certainly trigger a great deal of scrutiny from government regulators, since any significant change to ARM’s license model could disrupt the entire wireless industry.

The SoftBank acquisition isn’t expected to change anything in the smartphone industry in the short term and any movement away from ARM designs would take years to come to fruition. Imagination Technologies might be salivating at the thought of a resurgent MIPS, but ecosystems take time to build. Given that ARM is an attractive acquisition target because of its position at the center of the mobile Internet, SoftBank is unlikely to make any changes that would upset this status quo

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Hackers claim DDoS knocked Pokémon GO offline last weekend

Pokémon GO has been an unbridled success since it launched about two weeks ago, and that comes amid sometimes crippling server issues. Developer Niantic was forced to slow its global rollout so it could add server capacity, and there are still some days that the game just won’t connect. This past weekend was particularly bad, and now a hacking group called OurMine is claiming responsibility for the downtime.

If you have not heard of Pokémon GO, I can only assume you’ve been living under a rock sans internet access for the last few weeks. Announced last year, the game grew out of a 2014 April Fools prank at Google that scattered all the original 151 Pokémon around Google Maps. It was a big hit, and Niantic (owned by Google at the time) started working with The Pokémon Company to make it into a real game.

Pokémon GO lets you wander the real world, hunting Pokémon and locating gyms in which to do battle.
The number of people playing the game is almost beyond belief — you’ll encounter people out playing the game almost everywhere. Niantic rolled the game out to 26 additional countries over the weekend, which many blamed for the problems. The game was inaccessible most of Saturday, throwing up server errors whenever most players tried to connect. OurMine says it carried out a DDoS attack on Niantic’s servers, and that was to blame for the outage, not an influx of new players.



According to a representative of OurMine, the group only wants to “protect” Niantic’s servers. So, obviously the best way is to flood them with traffic and ruin everyone’s Saturday. OurMine says it will stop attacking Pokémon GO if someone from Niantic contacts the group so they can “teach them how to protect their servers.” That does not seem likely to happen. This situation is very reminiscent of the Lizard Squad hacks of several years ago that targeted popular gaming services like Xbox Live and PSN.

So what now? Since it’s not likely Niantic’s engineers are going to come crawling to some internet pranksters for security tips, the attacks will probably continue until they get bored. A separate group, PoodleCorp, says it has a Pokémon GO DDoS scheduled for August 1st. Hopefully Niantic can at least get its regular server load under control before it’s hit again. You might want to get working on catching ’em all now just in case.

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SpaceX sends major science payload to the ISS

SpaceX has now made five successful rocket landings. As part of the ninth Commercial Resupply Services flight, the SpaceX team recovered a booster from a successful launch Monday — the second stage touched down, in accordance with the mission plan, at 12:53 AM EDT. CRS-9 is due at the ISS on Wednesday morning, with a several-ton payload of supplies and experiments in tow. Dragon is also bringing an international docking adapter which will make it easier for future manned missions to dock with the ISS. This includes future crewed Dragon flights, as well as the Boeing Starliner. While CRS missions aren’t manned (yet!), that doesn’t mean today’s mission didn’t bring any life to the party. This time, in addition to the crew supplies and science hardware, the CRS-9 flight will bring microbes from Chernobyl to the International Space Station.

Much of the science payload is equipment to be tested, including a machine for testing whether we can sequence DNA in microgravity. It’s not that we think it’s impossible — DNA sequencing just requires electrical current, but the way we currently do sequencing also relies on Earth’s familiar gravity, so we need another method if we’re going to do sequencing in space. There’s also an experiment called OsteoOmics that looks at which genes are transcribed in bone that’s been kept in mag-lev weightlessness on Earth versus bone cells kept in freefall weightlessness, which is what occurs aboard Station.

NASA also sent up a phase-change heat exchanger that they’re alpha testing. It could make heating and cooling in space easier by providing thermal inertia. The test build will compare water and wax to see which works better.  Wax’s thermal properties and overclocking potential has actually been explored for use in smartphones and other technology platforms, though we’ve yet to see shipping systems that used the technique.

The fungus comes from locations within and around the Exclusion Zone at Chernobyl. Originally gathered by Lawrence Berkeley National Lab as part of a different experiment, these eight species have been living in culture, so they aren’t themselves radioactive. But two of the species, Cladosporium sphaerospermum and C. cladosporioides, actually seem to have a taste for radiation. They grow toward it with a decisive preference.

Cladosporium cladosporioides, one of the fungi 

from Chernobyl that’s heading into space. Image: Medmyco via Wikimedia Commons

Clay Wang and colleagues hope the radiophilic microbes will provide some clue that will help humans survive in space. These special-snowflake fungi have many tactics that they employ to soak up and mitigate the dose of radiation they receive, including producing a lot of melanin, which can scavenge free radicals from the ambient fluid bath.

While the radiation environment aboard the ISS station is nothing like the radiocontamination surrounding the ruined nuclear plant, astronauts still experience elevated levels of radiation exposure while they’re in space. Wang hopes that the elevated dose will convince these fungi to start showing off their repertoire of radiation compensation tricks, explaining to Popular Science, “Microorganisms only make certain things when they need to. We want to see if they actually make new compounds in space.”

“From an overall perspective, this is just part of the rich stream of research going on on the space station, from human research, biology, physical sciences investigations and things for exploration technology,” said Julie Robinson, chief ISS program scientist, during a briefing Saturday. Falcon 9 is due back from the ISS in about a month, and we’ll keep you updated on its next endeavors.

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Microsoft will give you a new laptop if it can’t upgrade your system to Windows 10

 

 

There’s less than two weeks before Microsoft’s free upgrade offer for Windows 10 expires and the company is pulling out all the stops to encourage people to update. The company’s latest offer is that they’ll give you a free Inspiron 15 laptop from Dell if they can’t update your laptop to Windows 10 with same-day service.

As you might imagine, there are some caveats to the offer. First of all, your PC needs to be compatible with Windows 10 in the first place. If you don’t have a compatible system, you can earn $150 to the purchase of a new PC. PCs must be turned over to the company by noon on the day the service is to be performed, and apparently not all retail outlets are participating, so check with your local Windows Store beforehand.

“We’re not this stupid.” — Microsoft

Those of you thinking of walking in with an ancient Compaq Presario and claiming $150 to the purchase of a new Dell should be advised that there are additional caveats attached to this as well. Microsoft’s fine print reads:

To be eligible for trade-in, you must own the qualifying device, device must power on, battery must hold charge and not be required to be plugged in to operate, and be in fully functional, wor king condition without broken/missing components, cracked display/housing, liquid damage, modification(s) or have device warranty seal broken to be considered working. Cannot be password protected, and include original chargers/accessories. Must contain hard drive. Devices must be running Windows 8 or newer. (Emphasis added).

This last requirement is going to ensure that the majority of customers can’t qualify for upgrades on older systems. The only Windows 8 laptops that wouldn’t qualify for Windows 10 would be some old Athlon 64 and Athlon 64 X2 designs that didn’t implement the CMPXCHG16B instruction, which performed an atomic compare-and-exchange between 16-byte values; systems that lack this instruction would have failed a Windows 8.1 upgrade with a “You can’t install Windows 8.1 because your processor doesn’t support CompareExchange128” message. AMD’s share of the notebook market at this time was extremely small, however, which means very few systems of this era were built. Similarly, some older Intel Core 2 Duo motherboards didn’t support CMPXCHG16B, either (the CPUs of the era supported it, the motherboards didn’t). Again, these systems would predate Windows 8 itself by several years.

Finally, Microsoft will give you a $20 discount on Office 365, which doesn’t make Office 365 any less of a terrible deal compared to buying a copy of Office in the vast majority of circumstances. And apparently there’s an opportunity at some stores to win an Xbox One, though you have to inquire about the details at the store, in-person.

It’s not clear if Microsoft’s offer applies only to laptops, or if desktops are also eligible. The text of the offer refers only to “PCs,” but the fine print notes that the battery must hold a charge and the system can’t require a wall plug to operate. This would seem to imply that the offer is mobile-only. If you decide to take Microsoft up on the option, let us know how it goes in the comments below.

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Nvidia’s GTX 1060 GPU: Fast, cool, and potent competition for AMD’s RX 480

• By Joel Hruska on July 19, 2016 at 3:43 pm
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When AMD announced its RX 480 would launch in late June, it was virtually inevitable that Nvidia would follow suit with a midrange challenger of its own. Until now, the two companies have pursued different strategies with their 14nm refreshes — Nvidia chose to do a standard top-down refresh cycle, while AMD rolled out a midrange competitor first. The RX 480 proved to be potent competition for Nvidia’s previous-generation Maxwell products with competitive power consumption, more VRAM, and better overall performance.

Nvidia obviously wasn’t willing to risk losing sales in the larger mass market, even if its GTX 1080 and 1070 have locked down the high-end GPU space. As a result, we have the GTX 1060 — a 6GB Pascal GPU with 1,280 CUDA cores, 80 texture units, and 48 ROPS. Total memory bandwidth is 192GB/s, courtesy of a 192-bit memory bus.



Sample allocation on the GTX 1060 launch was extremely tight, which means our inbound Gigabyte sample hasn’t quite arrived yet. We’ve rounded up a number of GTX 1060 reviews from across the web, including TechSpot, TechPowerUp, THG, Hot Hardware, and Forbes. The major question on everyone’s mind: How does the GTX 1060 compare with the RX 480?

The short answer is: Pretty well — but it’s not the knockout blow that Nvidia wanted.
The GTX 1060 is generally faster than the RX 480, but the gap between the two cards shifts dramatically depending on the benchmark. Of the 23 distinct titles benchmarked by the various websites above, the GTX 1060 wins 14 of them, while the RX 480 takes nine. Pascal is extremely well-positioned against Polaris, with lower power consumption and superior overclocking. THG calculates its overall performance advantage over RX 480 at 13.5% while TechPowerUp reports a 7% difference in overall performance at 1080p.

The GTX 1060’s first problem is its cost. The GPU debuting today is the Founder’s Edition, priced at $299. Partner cards starting at $250 are already on the way, but the $300 version of the GPU is 25.5% more expensive than the RX 480 while offering 7 – 13.5% better performance. That gives the 8GB edition of the RX 480 a clear value advantage. The $250 version of the GTX 1060 will be far more competitive, but AMD has the 4GB RX 480 sitting at the $200 price point. Given that the performance difference between the 4GB and 8GB cards is minimal, a $200 4GB RX 480’s performance-per-dollar will compare extremely well against the GTX 1060.

Second, there’s the matter of which games the RX 480 wins. Four of its nine wins are in games that use new, low-latency APIs. Specifically, the RX 480 wins against the GTX 1060 in Hitman, Ashes of the Singularity, Doom, and even Gears of War: Ultimate Edition (according to Forbes the game is much improved). The GTX 1060 wins Rise of the Tomb Raider and the new DX12 version of the Total War: Warhammer title.

If we segregate the list into DX11 versus DX12, AMD wins 21.7% of the DirectX 11 comparisons and 67% of the DirectX 12 / Vulkan comparisons. That’s a non-trivial difference, and it could speak to the long-term strengths of GCN versus Pascal.

In the past I’ve cautioned readers against assuming that early DirectX 12 performance figures would be valid over the long term. We’re just shy of Windows 10’s one-year anniversary, and I have to say that the titles we’ve seen thus far have tended to favor AMD. There are a variety of explanations for this, including the argument that the reason Nvidia’s performance is flat in DX12 is because it did a far better job than AMD at maximizing performance under DirectX 11. Regardless of the reason, AMD is building a potent narrative about its own DirectX 12 performance — and Nvidia has yet to offer much in the way of an API counter-argument. The 1060 also gets a few dings for lacking SLI — the RX 480 supports Crossfire and comes in at a lower price target to boot.

Conclusions

The general opinion on the GTX 1060 is that it’s a very good GPU with lots of overclocking headroom and excellent power consumption characteristics. Reviewers are split on whether or not it qualifies as “better” than the RX 480. TechSpot declares AMD the overall winner thanks to superior performance-per-dollar and ongoing availability concerns about the GTX 1060, while TechPowerUp thinks the GTX 1060 will be the superior solution in the long term. Hot Hardware gave the overall nod to the GTX 1060 as well, as well as an Editor’s Choice award.

Critically, no one seems to think the Founder’s Edition of the card is a good buy; THG calls the $50 premium on the 1060 a “killer in any discussion of value.” If you care about maximum power efficiency and minimal noise, the GTX 1060 is a clear winner over the RX 480. If you’re more concerned with performance in DX12/Vulkan or care about maximizing your game performance per dollar, the situation is murkier and the  RX 480 is still quite compelling. Multiple reviewers recommend waiting for less expensive partner boards and evaluating the card on their characteristics before making a final decision.

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