AMD has lost another valuable member of its team, with Phil Rogers leaving the company after a huge 21-year stint. Rogers was one of the key personnel that lead the development of Heterogeneous Computing, which is set to kick start the next era of computing.

Rogers has joined NVIDIA, where he takes the throne of the Chief Software Architect of Compute Server. He had been a Corporate Fellow of System Architecture and Performance at AMD before he jumped ship. Rogers' updated LinkedIn profile also shows that he is now with Team Green. For AMD, this isn't the first veteran to leave the company in recent months, with its CPU architect Jim Keller leaving the company last month.

Keller was responsible for its future Zen architecture, which will be unveiled next year.

I'm sure that you noticed the stunning ghostly silence in the Star Wars: Battlefront beta; there was no smack-talking, GG'ing, or any kind of team-to-team communication going on. Just dead silence. Sadly that looks to be the state of the game when it ships next month, too.

EA has confirmed that Battlefront won't have any sort of built-in voice chatting across PC and consoles. That means no VOIP chatting on PC, or default always-on proximity chatting with enemies or teammates. Console players will need to fire up a party chat to communicate with their teammates, whereas PC gamers will have to use their accustomed third-party chatting apps like Ventrilo, Teamspeak or Skype.

How will this affect the game as a whole? Well to start, playing the game with random players will be chaotic. If you're the type of gamer that likes to jump right into a game without waiting for your friends to log on, then you might want to rethink your strategy. Battlefront is much more enjoyable when you have a cohesive plan of attack that's built upon communication.

Acer has launched its new curved ultrawide monitor with NVIDIA's G-Sync adaptive refresh technology, offering a powerful display for enthusiast builds.

Acer's Predator X34 sports a 34-inch IPS LCD display with a resolution of 3440 x 1440. Touting tear-free gaming, the premium display has a super wide 21:9 aspect ratio that aims to replace multi-monitor setups, and its 60Hz refresh rate can be overclocked to 100Hz to power serious builds.

The Predator X34 is the first curved display in the U.S. that supports NVIDIA's G-Sync variable display rate tech, Acer affirms, making for "buttery smooth" gaming with zero screen-tearing and minimal stuttering. Just in case you feel like spending almost $3,000 on displays, the Predator X34 supports Acer's ZeroFrame tech, which affords for seamless multi-monitor displays. "ZeroFrame design makes multi-monitor setups more immersive. Can you handle gaming at 10k? We tried it. It's awesome."

CineFlix has turned its charmed 8-bit talent onto George Miller's beloved Mad Max: Fury Road to deliver some old-fashioned retro mashup nostalgia.

If you've ever wondered what Fury Road would look like rendered as an old-school NES game, CineFlix has you covered. The 8-bit Cinema presentation has gamified a number of popular Hollywood blockbusters into "80's arcade and NES inspired action", and is certainly a must-see for all Code Monkeys fans out there.

The video condenses Miller's magnum opus into three minutes of bit-style magic, and if you haven't seen the film you might want to steer clear as there are spoilers intact. The video showcases the memorable events of the post-apocalyptic flick, including the guitar flamethrower, the desert storm sequence, and the high-speed chases rendered into Contra-style firefights.

Despite saying that there are "no plans for a new Devil May Cry game", Capcom does indeed have a new DMC game in the works as well as a new title in the landmark Dead Rising franchise.

The news was spotted on Capcom's official Integrated Report for 2015, which is a huge breakdown of the company's financials, plans for the future, and Q&A sessions with key execs. The data is pretty massive and is a lot to sift through, but the chapter about Capcom's future games outright lists Devil May Cry and Dead Rising for a release across the fiscal year ending on March 31, 2016 and beyond.

Basically this means we can expect a possible Devil May Cry 5 and Dead Rising 4 sometime between 2016 and 2017 across consoles and PC. In the meantime, Capcom is already beginning to work on Resident Evil 7, and since the Resident Evil division is busily crafting a VR-ready engine for the new generation of gaming tech, we might even see RE7 release with virtual reality support across the Oculus Rift, HTC Vive and PlayStation VR.

It's no surprise to see huge tech companies follow competitor's methodologies quite closely or even go so far as to "borrow" ideas and patents. But it looks like Apple has outright infringed on technology owned by the University of Wisconson for the A-series CPU chips in modern iDevices, and will face a substantial fine.

Cupertino-based tech giant Apple may have to shell out a whopping $862 million in damages after a jury ruled Apple infringed on a patent owned by the Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation. The patent, which was filed all the way back in 1998, is specifically used to boost processor efficiency. Apple used this process to optimize a slew of chips including the A7, A8 and A8X CPUs found in devices like the iPhone 5S, iPhone 6, iPhone 6S Plus and iPad models like the iPad Air and iPad Mini.

The jury has ruled that the patent is indeed valid and is currently working out how much in damages Apple will pay to the university. The global company argues that it didn't infringe on the patent and that the patent itself isn't valid, and even tried to convince the United States Patent and Trademark Office to re-evaluate the patent in question. As decreed by U.S. District Judge William Conley, the preceedings will move forward in three parts--liability, damages, and determining whether Apple willfully violated the patent, where it could face even more severe fines.

It's been long known that the Android platform isn't nearly as secure as it should be, but we haven't really had a concrete answer as to how vulnerable the OS actually is. A recent study from the University of Cambridge delivers the answer, and it's pretty surprising.

"We find that on average 87.7% of Android devices are exposed to at least one of 11 known critical vulnerabilities," the university writes in the study's conclusion. "In our data, Nexus devices do considerably better than average with a score of 5.17; LG is the best manufacturer with a score of 3.97."

The study also lays the blame on device manufacturers, citing that most modern smartphones receive few security updates thereby leaving them open to a number of vulnerabilities like the TowelRoot, Gingerbreak, and FakeID exploits. "We showed that the bottleneck for the delivery of updates in the Android ecosystem rests with the manufacturers, who fail to provide updates to fix critical vulnerabilities."

The new "Removed" photography series by American photographer Eric Pickersgill aims to illustrate our addiction to technology, and the ironic social disconnection it produces. Perhaps the most disturbing of the series is pictured below; the rest can be found on his website below.

Pickersgill paints a stark picture of his inspiration: "The joining of people to devices has been rapid and unalterable. The application of the personal device in daily life has made tasks take less time. Far away places and people feel closer than ever before. Despite the obvious benefits that these advances in technology have contributed to society, the social and physical implications are slowly revealing themselves. In similar ways that photography transformed the lived experience into the photographable, performable, and reproducible experience, personal devices are shifting behaviors while simultaneously blending into the landscape by taking form as being one with the body. This phantom limb is used as a way of signaling busyness and unapproachability to strangers while existing as an addictive force that promotes the splitting of attention between those who are physically with you and those who are not."

Over the weekend, the land down under saw its biggest CS:GO tournament to date with international powerhouse teams Cloud 9 and Virtus Pro making the trip to Australia in order to play in the $55,555 Crown Casino invitational. With Australia's Renegades and Team Immunity qualifying to play against these top-tier teams, hopes weren't too high for the first draw of Immunity versus Cloud 9.

After choosing the maps and Cloud 9 goofing around on stage, the teams went to work on a digital battlefield. After a back and forward tussle, the first map went the way of Immunity on De_Cache, seeing a 16-12 victory. Next up was De_Dust 2 which saw Cloud 9 steamroll through at a 16-7 scoreline and finally a massive 16-3 win to Immunity on De_Overpass secured the series to the Aussie underdogs.

This victory not only saw them secure second place at the Crown tournament and push them into the grand finals to play against Virtus Pro, it also meant that Team Immunity cracked hltv's top 20 team rankings. Now sitting at number 19, the only other Australian team on this list is Renegades at 17th, a team which Immunity beat 2-0 in its last tournament.

Now that the open beta of Star Wars Battlefront is over, EA has announced that it was the biggest beta in its history, with over 9 million gamers participating.

Senior Producer on Star Wars Battlefront, Sigurlina Ingvarsdottir, said it was the latest beta in EA history. The development team at EA DICE will now use all of the information and feedback from the beta to "to tune and balance the game" for its big launch next month. It was only a day ago that we found out that EA will be offering a $50 season pass with the game, a week after we heard there would be no microstransactions in Star Wars Battlefront.