Paramount Pictures announce first 4K UltraHD Blu-ray titles

Ben Gourlay | Celebrities & Entertainment | Apr 5, 2016 6:52 PM CDT

With Warner Bros, Twentieth Century Fox and Sony Pictures already launching their first wave of titles for the 4K UltraHD Blu-ray format, Paramount Pictures has now decided to dip their toes in the water and have announced their first two titles.

To celebrate the 50th anniversary of 'Star Trek' and to help promote the upcoming 'Star Trek Beyond', Paramount have announced plans to release the first two films third film in the rebooted franchise 'Star Trek' and 'Into Darkness' in 4K. Both titles will feature upscaled 4K video with High Dynamic Range passes, newly remixed immersive Dolby Atmos soundtracks and a bonus disc of Blu-ray supplements. Both titles will be released in the United States on June 14th, ahead of 'Star Trek Beyond's theatrical release at the end of July.

Disney is now the sole holdout of the major studios who have not yet announced titles in the format, but are expected to firm up plans by the end of the year.

Continue reading: Paramount Pictures announce first 4K UltraHD Blu-ray titles (full post)

WhatsApp enables end-to-end encryption

Sean Ridgeley | Hacking, Security & Privacy | Apr 5, 2016 5:04 PM CDT

One month after publicly supporting Apple in its fight for encryption, chat app company WhatsApp now features end-to-end encryption in its client. In essence, whether you're calling someone, sending a file, messaging, hosting a group chat, or anything else, you can be rest assured it's completely private from hackers, WhatsApp, and anyone else you might be paranoid about.

"We live in a world where more of our data is digitized than ever before," company CEO and founder Jan Koum says of the change. "Every day we see stories about sensitive records being improperly accessed or stolen. And if nothing is done, more of people's digital information and communication will be vulnerable to attack in the years to come. Fortunately, end-to-end encryption protects us from these vulnerabilities."

"Encryption is one of the most important tools governments, companies, and individuals have to promote safety and security in the new digital age," he continues. "Recently there has been a lot of discussion about encrypted services and the work of law enforcement. While we recognize the important work of law enforcement in keeping people safe, efforts to weaken encryption risk exposing people's information to abuse from cybercriminals, hackers, and rogue states."

Continue reading: WhatsApp enables end-to-end encryption (full post)

AMD shipping 7th-gen Bristol Ridge APU's way ahead of schedule

Jeff Williams | CPU, APU & Chipsets | Apr 5, 2016 4:07 PM CDT

Today isn't just about NVIDIA and their GTC event, AMD too has something new going on today as well. The 7th generation of the APU, based on the Excavator core and codenamed Bristol Ridge, are shipping far ahead of schedule. They're already shipping the new 28nm APU's in an updated HP Envy x360 2-in-1 laptop.

We were able to take a look at some Geekbench scores that inadvertently showed up yesterday in their online database and those seem to be just in time to announce the launch of their new processors that'll take the place of Kaveri based systems, and be along side of Carrizo based systems that also have the same Excavator cores.

Full specifications haven't quite been given yet, but we do know that the various 28nm processors will come in two and four core configurations with either Radeon R5 or R7 class GPU's with 8-10 compute units attached and support for DDR4. They're saying that compared to Kaveri, we should see a 50% increase in general performance. Gaming performance itself should definitely experience a nice boost. These processors are a stopgap until we see the Zen-based Summit Ridge APU's and CPU's later on. We're expecting more detailed information to come during Computex 2016, with the full break-down of clock speeds and all the other innovations that come along with it.

Continue reading: AMD shipping 7th-gen Bristol Ridge APU's way ahead of schedule (full post)

HP revives minimalist logo for premium laptops only

Sean Ridgeley | Laptops | Apr 5, 2016 3:12 PM CDT

Back in 2011, HP hired marketing company Moving Brands to redesign its logo and "brand identity." The result -- a minimalist logo featuring just four 'slashes' -- was scrapped...until now. HP will be using the once-dead logo for its premium laptops only going forward, starting with the just-launched Spectre 13.

HP split into two companies in 2014: it would appear the PC and printer side (HP Inc.) is willing to take risks like this as a result, as opposed to the safer management side (Hewlett-Packard Enterprise) which last year decided on possibly one of the most boring logos of all-time.

Continue reading: HP revives minimalist logo for premium laptops only (full post)

Gears of War 4 to have a filter for gore and explicit language

Jeff Williams | Gaming | Apr 5, 2016 2:00 PM CDT

We already knew that the Gears of War series is a very violent foray into the human (and alien) condition, and Gears of War 4 will be no exception. To that end, The Coalition is going to have a filter for excess gore and for explicit language, another mainstay of a successful deep look into humankind.

Rod Fergusson, the head developer that's working on Gears of War 4, spoke to Game informer about how the darker theme that we'll see from the story will contribute to a much more explicit experience. That is, it'll be more real in how it presents language and when things perish. Even with game ratings systems that tend to give guidance on what to censor in order to reach certain levels, it was difficult for The Coalition to determine what exactly they wanted to cut out, or if they wanted to simply cut them out or censor them.

"Gore is important for obvious reasons and swearing too." Rod continued, "I think the tricky part for us is, and it's been one of the funny things about the mature language flag, is that there's no standard, so we've had to set the bar," he explained." In essence he didn't want to detract from the character development, of which even explicit language is actually quite important. In the end, they've found a good balance between what's acceptable and what'll detract from the game. It wouldn't do to have a completely cus laden game that contradicts what you're trying to teach your own children, should you happen to have children around that you don't want to hear such things.

Continue reading: Gears of War 4 to have a filter for gore and explicit language (full post)

Apple stores switching to environmentally friendly bags

Sean Ridgeley | Business, Financial & Legal | Apr 5, 2016 1:07 PM CDT

Starting April 15, Apple retail outlets will be moving away from their well-liked plastic drawstring bags to new paper bags made out of 80 percent recycled materials, according to a note sent to retail employees. The note also instructs employees to give out the old bags until they're all gone and to ask customers if they want a bag or not, in order to potentially further cut down on waste.

Apple VP of environment, policy, and social initiatives Lisa Jackson last month discussed environmental efforts at the company's press event, noting 93 percent of its operations around the globe are powered by renewable energy, and that its new robot 'Liam' can disassemble iPhones for recycling. As well, Jackson declared all of Apple's packaging would eventually be paper.

Continue reading: Apple stores switching to environmentally friendly bags (full post)

NVIDIA announces DGX-1, the world's first Deep Learning supercomputer

Anthony Garreffa | Video Cards & GPUs | Apr 5, 2016 12:42 PM CDT

GTC 2016 - NVIDIA just unveiled its next-generation Pascal architecture at GTC 2016, showcasing its new Tesla P100 video card - with an insane amount of power. The Tesla P100 has 16GB of HBM2, with an insane amount of horsepower behind it.

Well, NVIDIA also announced its new DGX-1 - the world's first Deep Learning supercomputer. DGX-1 packs 8x Tesla P100 video cards, each with 16GB of HBM2. DGX-1 has 7TB of SSDs, 2 x Intel Xeon processors, 170 TFlops of performance, Quad IP 100Gbps and dual 10GbE connectivity. It uses just 3200W of power (3.2kW) which might sound like a lot to you and I, but this is a supercomputer... not a traditional rackmount PC.

NVIDIA's new Pascal-based DGX-1 is priced at $129,000.

Continue reading: NVIDIA announces DGX-1, the world's first Deep Learning supercomputer (full post)

NVIDIA unveils its Tesla P100 GPU, with 150 billion transistors, HBM2

Anthony Garreffa | Video Cards & GPUs | Apr 5, 2016 12:25 PM CDT

GTC 2016 - NVIDIA's GPU Technology Conference kicked off today, where the company talked about its work with AI and deep learning were a large focus, as well as VR being a large part of NVIDIA's opening keynote at GTC 2016. But the star of the show was the new Tesla P100.

NVIDIA unveils its Tesla P100 GPU, with 150 billion transistors, HBM2

We have the new Tesla P100, which is "the most advanced hyper scale datacenter GPU ever built". The Pascal chip itself is 600mm2 and built on the incredible 16nm FinFET process with the Tesla P100 packing a how-did-they-do-it 150 billion transistors (150,000,000,000), with the super-fast HBM2 memory included. The new Pascal-based Tesla P100 is in volume production right now, which is incredibly exciting news as it means HBM2 is ready right now - and NVIDIA has it.

Now, the 150 billion transistors sounds absolutely mind-blowing - as its 1775% more than the 8 billion that the GM200 includes (the GPU that powers the GTX 980 Ti and Titan X). We chatted with Rob and Fudo from Fudzilla, who say that the Tesla P100's 150 billion transistors, is made up from 17 billion on the GPU - with the rest of the transistors coming from the HBM2. This makes much more sense.

Continue reading: NVIDIA unveils its Tesla P100 GPU, with 150 billion transistors, HBM2 (full post)

Radeon 16.4.1 driver fixes DirectX 12 framerate capping issues

Sean Ridgeley | Video Cards & GPUs | Apr 5, 2016 12:04 PM CDT

AMD has today released its Radeon Software Crimson Edition 16.4.1 drivers.

With it comes up to 35% better performance in Quantum Break with the R9 Fury X, a fix for framerate capping issues in some DirectX 12 apps, and a fix for flickering in Hitman when using DirectX 11 mode and high shadow settings; support for HTC Vive and Oculus Rift is listed again for some reason (it was introduced last week in the 16.3.2 drivers).

If you're experiencing any other issues, AMD has some workarounds while they work on fixes:

Continue reading: Radeon 16.4.1 driver fixes DirectX 12 framerate capping issues (full post)

HP unveils VR content creating powerhouse, the new $4363 Z workstation

Jeff Williams | Computer Systems | Apr 5, 2016 11:08 AM CDT

VR is really taking off now that the two major players have finally released their headsets into the wild. There just remains one issue for those content creators that wish to make pretty things in VR for us to consume; the system to use for that creating. HP is helping to make that decision easier with their new Z series of workstations, make especially for creating highly demanding VR content, which might need a bit more horsepower than usual.

These new workstations are built around two of Intel's newest Broadwell-EP Xeon E5-2600 v4 processors so you can have up to 44 actual cores and 88 threads to process those difficult to render high-resolution scenes. On the graphics front they went with up to dual NVIDIA Quadro M6000's with 24GB of VRAM. That means you can basically keep all your assets in memory and not have to worry about slow load times in whatever engine or program you're working with. For system RAM, you can configure it to have up to 256GB of DDR4 or up to 1TB of LRDDR4 if need be. Storage can e equally as monstrous with a massive six STA ports, eight different SAS ports and up to two PCIe 3.0 NVMe capable m.2 ports.

This can be one monster machine if you want it to be to handle just about any rendering or creation task you want it to. Some might ask why one would want to buy anything premade, and the answer is the support that comes with it. That is, the technical and warranty support that might come in handy from running these systems hard for many hours on end. The new Z840 from Hp starts at $4366, a hefty price tag but for a system that packs a mighty punch. Keyboard and monitor are sold separately, as are the VR HMD's of choice.

Continue reading: HP unveils VR content creating powerhouse, the new $4363 Z workstation (full post)