http://www.pcper.com/news/Graphics-Cards...DK-Planned

Quote:Essentially, AMD's Mantle API in it's "1.0" form is at the end of its life, only supported for current partners and the publicly available SDK will never be posted. Honestly, at this point, this isn't so much of a let down as it is a necessity. DX12 and GLnext have already superseded Mantle in terms of market share and mind share with developers and any more work AMD put into getting devs on-board with Mantle is wasted effort.

AMD claims to have future plans for Mantle though it will continue to be available only to select partners with "custom needs." I would imagine this would expand outside the world games but could also mean game consoles could be the target, where developers are only concerned with AMD GPU hardware.

So - from our perspective, Mantle as we know is pretty much gone. It served its purpose, making NVIDIA and Microsoft pay attention to the CPU bottlenecks in DX11, but it appears the dream was a bit bigger than the product could become. AMD shouldn't be chastised because of this shift nor for its lofty goals that we kind-of-always knew were too steep a hill to climb. Just revel in the news that pours from GDC this week about DX12.

http://techreport.com/news/27889/end-is-...ue-efforts
A sad day. They tried their best, but mobile x86 was killed by the "ARM is more efficient than x86" myth. Of course, Intel won't outright admit this, and has to hide the death under optimism.

Quote:Intel may soon stop pursuing mobile market share by offering massive discounts on Atom processors. In a press briefing about the new Atom x3, x5, and x7 CPUs last week, Aicha Evans, Corporate VP and General Manager of Intel's Communications and Devices Group, suggested that such "contra-revenue" tactics won't be necessary with some of the new chips—and that, in the future, we shouldn't expect Intel to engage in these tactics at all.

2-28-2015

Arizona charging solar users $50 a month sun fee

Starting in April, solar users across Arizona will be subject to an additional rate charge of about $50 per month.

This new “demand charge” will be based on a solar users’ peak power demand during the month and will be levied regardless of how much electricity is offset by their residential solar units.

The Salt River Project (SRP), one of the nation’s largest public power utilities, has been fighting for this and other renewable energy fees because of what the company argues is needed to cover grid infrastructure and maintenance costs. This final approval of the plan by the elected board, which also includes a 3.9 percent rate increase for all customers.

Next door in New Mexico, PNM, the state’s largest utility, is pursuing a similar track. The company recently proposed a distributed solar generation fee that could cost new solar installers $30 a month to connect to the grid.

2-27-2015



Leonard Nimoy’s final public words: ‘Live long and prosper

Actor Leonard Nimoy, best known for the role of Spock on “Star Trek,” died on Friday, according to his family.

On Monday, Nimoy shared the following with his million-plus Twitter followers:

A life is like a garden. Perfect moments can be had, but not preserved, except in memory. LLAP

http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2015...le-americ/
No.
Do not give a guy who just did his job the same award that was given to Audie Murphy for standing atop a burning tank destroyer/time bomb, getting shot at and shelled by hundreds of men, artillery, and tanks, and hosing down Germans with no cover at all.  Do not give a guy who just did his job the same award that was given to Henry Erwin for setting himself on fire to save his men.
Don't give it to him.

Edit: Also, don't give Chris Kyle the same award that was given to Jack Lucas for jumping on 2 grenades at once. Incidentally, Jack Lucas was the only person in history to jump on 2 grenades at once and survive. The f***tard who is doing this needs to be put in a stadium and have food, drinks, and dog shit flung at him for trying to debase the Medal of Honor.

http://www.dslreports.com/shownews/Googl...ble-132769
Seriously, fuck Google Fiber.

Quote:"If you make it easy, we will come. If you make it hard, enjoy your Time Warner Cable,” Google Fiber's Milo Medin told attendees of a Comptel Competition and Innovation Summit this week. Medin was speaking on a panel about network deployment, fresh off of Google's announcement that it will be expanding Google Fiber into Charlotte, Nashville, Atlanta and Raleigh/Durham.

According to Medin (who longtime readers may remember from his @Home days), cities can do a lot to improve their area's chances when it comes to next-gen broadband deployment:

Quote:Medin cited byzantine permission processes (including a fetish for faxes) and an inability to provide accurate information about infrastructure as prime reasons that hurt some cities’ chances to attract new broadband services...Medin, who was speaking on a panel about network deployment, added that some markets in the U.S. are simply uneconomic for internet providers to enter, and that local telephone companies are reluctant to grant access to key telephone pole infrastructure.

http://www.neowin.net/news/despite-a-bil...ero-profit

Quote:YouTube is without a doubt one of the most popular websites in the world, but despite having over a billion viewers the site still has zero profit.

According to a report from the Wall Street Journal, citing people familiar with the matter, the giant video service is barely breaking even despite its $4 billion in revenue. YouTube only accounted for 6% of Google’s ad sales, which is surprising considering how ubiquitous video content and YouTube links are.

But that may be the actual problem. According to research, most people access the website via shared links and embedded videos instead of visiting its homepage daily like they do for Facebook and Twitter.

In fact, most users are occasional viewers, and only 9% of viewers account for 85% of the views on the site, and most of those regular viewers are teens and “tweens”. What this adds up to is a not very successful bid for advertising dollars which are, seemingly, much better spent on traditional TV spots as well as YouTube’s competitors who offer stronger stats.

Google has been trying to turn this around though. The company has paid bonuses to creators in an effort to retain talent, while also investing hundreds of millions of dollars in original content.

http://vr-zone.com/articles/asrock-lga-1...87658.html

Quote:ASRock-Motherboard

Intel’s Skylake based desktop CPUs may still be a few months away from release, but the first motherboard with support for the 6th Generation Intel Skylake processors was spotted at the ongoing Embedded World 2015 exhibition being held in Nuremberg.

ASRock showed off an industrial motherboard at the event with the LGA1151 socket with support for Intel Skylake processors. The motherboard includes two DDR3L-1600 SO-DIMM slots that can take up to 16GB of memory. We also see the presence of three HDMI ports and four USB 3.0 ports on the motherboard. Other ports include 1 eDP, Gigabit LAN, and four USB 2.0 ports.

In case you’re wondering why the motherboard includes DDR3 memory support instead of the DDR4 memory that Skylake will support, it is due to the fact that Skylake retains support for DDR3 memory as well. So not every LGA1151 based motherboard is likely to come with DDR4 SO-DIMM slots.

2-25-2015

Lil' Led Zeppelin Xylophonists Get A Rockin' Thumbs-Up From Jimmy Page



The student musicians of Louisville Leopard Percussionists already wowed YouTube with their xylophone-driven Led Zeppelin performance.

Now they have a rock god to count among their fans.
Led Zeppelin guitarist Jimmy Page posted the ensemble's video to his Facebook account on Friday, writing, "Too good not to share. Have a rocking weekend!"

The kids' performance, posted in November, hooked listeners from the first few notes of "Kashmir," which is followed by "The Ocean" and "Immigrant Song." Their video's been viewed nearly a million times.

2-25-2015

AMD Unveils Carrizo APU With Excavator Core Architecture

When it was first announced, AMD detailed support for next generation Radeon Graphics (DX12, Mantle, and Dual Graphics support), H.265 decoding, full HSA 1.0 support, and ARM Trustzone compatibility. But perhaps one of the biggest advantages of Carrizo is the fact that the APU and Southbridge are now incorporated into the same die; not just two separates dies built into and MCM package.


This not only improves performance, but also allows the Southbridge to take advantage of the 28SHP process rather than older, more power-hungry 45nm or 65nm process nodes. In addition, the Excavator cores used in Carrizo have switched from a High Performance Library (HPL) to a High Density Library (HDL) design. This allows for a reduction in the die area taken up by the processing cores (23 percent, according to AMD). This allows Carrizo to pack in 29 percent more transistors (3.1 billion versus 2.3 billion in Kaveri) in a die size that is only marginally larger (250mm2 for Carrizo versus 245mm2 for Kaveri). When all is said and done, AMD is claiming a 5 percent IPC boost for Carrizo and a 40 percent overall reduction in power usage.