Latest News - Page 2661

It was only earlier last month that NVIDIA had reportedly taped out the GP100 process on TSMC's 16nm process, but now we're hearing that we should expect two GPUs from this, both featuring HBM2.

The first GPU will use 8-Hi stacks, while the other will have 4-Hi stacks, both featuring the Pascal architecture, 16nm process, a 4096-bit memory bus and HBM2. The 4-Hi variation of the GPU will be clocked at 1GHz, which will end up as a consumer-orientated GeForce GPU of some sort (the GeForce GTX 1080 if NVIDIA continues along its naming path) while the second variation has four HBM2 stacks at 1GHz, each with 8-Hi.

For those not in the know, the x-Hi (x representing 4 or 8) denotes the number of stacked DRAM dies, so we'll see the GP100 GPU with 8-Hi HBM2 stacks aimed at the professional market (think Quadro, Tesla), while the 4-Hi HBM2 will be the next-gen consumer GeForce card, expected in 2016.

In a move that will have most people asking "why haven't we had it sooner", Windows 10 might have a built-in screen recording feature. The latest pre-release build has some new tips throughout the OS, teasing that when you press the Windows Key + G together, it will open up a brand spankin' new recording option.

TechAU reports that when pressing WinKey + G, it "brings up a toolbar that allows you to take an image (you already had the snipping tool for the that), as well as the ability to record video. The intention, or promoted functionality for this is to capture Windows games in much the same way you can command Cortana by saying 'Xbox record that'".

The recorded videos find themselves in Videos/Capture, but the screen recording feature seems to be locked to the Xbox app, which is weird. An OS-wide recording application would be awesome, I don't see why it has to be associated with Xbox, or gaming in general. Especially considering the wide use of screen recorders for YouTubers. But, this is exciting news for Windows 10, a built-in screen recorder would be a great new feature for Microsoft's soon-to-be here operating system.

PayPal has just made its second debut on the NASDAQ this morning, with trading opening up at $41.46, reaching the heights of $42.55, before floating down to $41.03. PayPal Holdings Inc. now has a market value of just above $50 billion.

The company was founded back in 1998 under the name Confinity, with the company developing security software for early personal digital assistants (PDAs). The businesses didn't reach the success that its founders hoped, but it did inspire them to create the company that would eventually be used by tens of millions across the world; PayPal.

Confinity eventually merged with Elon Musk's X.com, where it was soon named PayPal. The company went public in 2002 under the ticker PYPL, opening at $13 per share. But with considerable tie-ins with eBay, it made sense that eBay would acquire PayPal later that year for a swift $1.5 billion. PayPal quickly turned into the electronic money transfer platform it is today, but it was activist investor Carl Icahn that urged that eBay split PayPal into a separately traded company.

The release of Intel's new Skylake-based processors is right around the corner, alongside the release of the new Z170 range of motherboards. But news has broken that the upcoming flagship Core i7-6700K has been overclocked to a huge 5.2GHz... on air cooling.

The achievement happened with an early BIOS, with the CPU hitting 5198.75MHz - an overclock of 1200MHz above its 4GHz stock clock. Better yet, just 1.35V was required to reach this, which is a damn good achievement considering you need more voltage, and watercooling to get anywhere near that on a current Core i7-4790K.

While it was sitting at 1.35V and 5.2GHz, we don't know what temperatures the overclocked Core i7-6700K was sitting at under load. We should expect many more details to arrive on the Core i7-6700K as we get closer to its launch next month.

Toshiba is in some serious trouble right now, with its CEO and President, Hisao Tanaka, leaving the company after the Japanese electronics giant is attempting to recover from its $1.2 billion in profits being discovered as being false.

Tanaka and two other executives have announced their resignations, with the three taking responsibility for the scandal. An independent investigation found that management had lied about operating profits over a six-year period so that Toshiba could meet its internal targets, all of which started in 2008, the year the GFC hit.

Masashi Muromachi, Toshiba's current Chairman, will reportedly fill the CEO role for the time being, where he'll also appoint a new management team. Toshiba has now lost a total of eight high-level executives in this scandal, with the company estimating a $442 million write down, but this estimate was very wrong, with it now ballooning out to almost triple that number.

With many Americans wanting to get their grubby mitts on Google Fiber, there are going to be many simultaneously excited and disappointed with the news that Google is set to deliver its super-fast 1Gbps service to low-income properties.

Google will be rolling its Fiber service out to low-income housing in markets where it offers its Google Fiber service, including Atlanta, Durham, Nashville, and Kansas City. Best of all, it's going to be offered for, free. Yes, $0. Nothing. Nada. The Mountain View-based giant notes that households earning under $30,000 per year, roughly 26% of those have no Internet access at all.

A recent trial program pushed more than 90% of the residents in one public housing property sign up for Google Fiber. But offering up some free 1Gbps Internet for free, is going to be huge for the service, and those in low-income housing.

Ashley Madison has been hacked, with some 37 million accounts hacked, including financial records, private details of the users, and more. Noel Biderman, the CEO of Avid Life Media, the company which runs Ashley Madison, has confirmed the site has been hacked. Biderman said: "We're not denying this happened".

A hacker group going by the name of The Impact Team has taken responsibility behind the back, with the team holding ALM ransom with the information it has. The hacking group sayd that it will release "all customer records, including profiles with all the customers' secret sexual fantasies and matching credit card transactions, real names and addresses, and employee documents and emails". The Impact Team will keep the information it has in its possession, if ALM and the other sites it runs - Cougar Life and Established Men - is taken offline in all forms.

The Impact Team has said it's taken a high moral stance, taking a stab at ALM's business practices, and the users that are on these sites by cheating on their partners. Where things get interesting, is that The Impact Team says that the "full delete" option that Ashley Madison offers for $19 - which reportedly deletes your payment and address details from their records - is a "complete lie". The hacking group says: "Full Delete netted ALM $1.7mm in revenue in 2014. It's also a complete lie. Users almost always pay with credit card; their purchase details are not removed as promised, and include real name and address, which is of course the most important information the users want removed".

One of the most exciting GM200-based video cards is nearly here, with EVGA all systems go to release their GeForce GTX 980 Ti KINGPIN video card tomorrow, priced at $850.

EVGA is offering its new card with pre-binned GPUs, which allow consumers to choose their GPU ASIC quality before the purchase is made. Inside, we have the same GM200 GPU that powers the reference GeForce GTX 980 Ti, with the 2816 CUDA cores, 176 TMUs and 96 ROPS. But the Base Clock has been increased from 1000MHz on the reference design, to 1203MHz. This results in the Boost Clock being increased from 1075MHz to 1304MHz. With these clocks, it's certainly not the fastest GTX 980 Ti out there, an award that goes to the ZOTAC GeForce GTX 980 Ti AMP! Extreme Edition.

Powering the EVGA GeForce GTX 980 Ti KINGPIN card are two 8-pin PCIe power connectors joined by a 6-pin PCIe power connector. This will provide the board with up to 450W of power, which is simply insane. EVGA has deployed an extended PCB on the card with a beautiful custom design sporting extra copper filling for smoother power delivery. 12 layers have been stacked together to form the PCB, with 14+3 phase fully digital VRM will provide the card with all of the power it needs to keep it stable during those overclocking sessions.

EA Sports has recently announced in a press release that two female players will now feature on FIFA box art for the first time. Set to showcase athletes Alex Morgan and Christine Sinclair, this US National Women's team forward and Canadian captain will both feature alongside Lionel Messi on the FIFA 16 covers in their respective countries.

Alongside this cover addition, there has also been the addition of 12 Women's National teams into the game itself, giving players the ability to compete with these teams in friendly and online matches.

Alex Morgan is excited to be a pioneer in this field, stating that she knows "people all over the world play this game and I'm really excited that FIFA 16 is putting such an important spotlight on women's soccer. And now to share the cover with today's greatest player is surreal."

A few months ago AMD launched their 'Kaveri' refresh, the A10-7870K, and today they are launching another refresh, the A8-7670K. The A8-7670K will feature 10 compute cores which consists of 4 CPU cores and 6 GPU cores.

Compared to its predecessor, the 7670K will have boosts in both CPU (100MHz turbo/300MHz base) and integrated GPU (37MHz) clock speeds. The 7670K is aimed at users who want strong performing integrated graphics at an affordable price, such as a family PC where games consist of online titles such as League of Legends.

Compared to a similarly priced Intel i3, AMD promises increased CPU and integrated GPU performance, especially when the program utilizes combined CPU and integrated GPU workloads.

The Islamic State is facing daily problems trying to keep ground in Iraq and Syria, but has had little trouble on the Internet. The group is able to use Twitter and other social networking services to recruit, spread propaganda, and terrorize opponents in a clever twist on public relations.

Islamic State wasn't the first group to spread propaganda and expand extremism using the Internet, but its savvy social media abilities caught Western intelligence officials off-guard. There are thousands of Twitter users posting and retweeting extremist material - and resources simply outmatch that of the State Department's Center for Strategic Counterterrorism Communications, for example.

"Online, we move too slowly and know too little to combat this generation of Web-native jihadists," said Jane Harman, former Democratic member of the House of Representatives, in a Washington Post op-ed. "We've failed to mobilize tech and messaging talent to counter the Islamic State on social media. This country built Silicon Valley, we shouldn't need computer lessons from 7th-century thugs. It's past time to bring our counter-narrative up to date."

TSMC will be ramping up its 10nm volume production in 2016, something that will see the Taiwanese semiconductor manufacturer overtaking Intel when it comes to 10nm. Intel will not be shifting to 10nm until 2017, but that's just on the surface. Things are much more complicated when you begin to peel layers away.

Especially when it comes to 7nm, where TSMC will be using "10nm elements" in its 7nm note, which leads us to believe TSMC's implementation of 7nm will heavily borrow from 10nm. Intel on the other hand, should have a true 10nm node in 2017, and when it scales down to 7nm, we should expect it to not be borrowing much from its delayed 10nm process.

KitGuru reports that President and co-CEO of TSMC, C.C. Wei, said: "We ramp up 10nm in the Q4 2016 next year, but the real product shipment will be in Q1 2017". Mark Liu, President and co-CEO of TSMC added: "The recent progress of our 10 nanometer technology development is very encouraging and on track with our plan. Technology risk start qualification is targeted at the end of this year, followed by many customer's product qualifications. Our volume production is planned to start from the end of 2016".

The latest v1.07 patch rolled out to The Witcher 3 a couple of days ago, and while there are some improvements and bug fixes for the most part, there seems to be lowered performance on the Xbox One and PS4 versions of the game, when compared to v1.05.

In the video above from DigitalFoundry, you can see that the frame rate dips into the (in my opinion) very unplayable levels of around 20FPS. Eurogamer explains: "Essentially, gameplay on Xbox One now appears to rely on a similar double-buffer v-sync set-up to the PS4 game, locking its frame-rate to 20fps during these lulls in performance. This means that the reading on our graph is consistently lower on patch 1.07 as compared to 1.05, where it was free to waver between 20-30fps freely. On a matching route through the bog, frame-rate can be up to 8fps slower on the latest version of the game".

They continue: "That said, patch 1.07 comes with an exhaustive changelog that impacts more than just frame-rate, but overall image quality remains static. A cursory glance suggests the visual settings remain the same between the two, up to and including foliage and shadow LODs. Xbox One's curious dynamic resolution also shows no gains in holding a genuine 1080p during open-world travel or combat - it continues to upscale from a lower resolution".

To celebrate this week's release of the acclaimed Paul Thomas Anderson 'Inherent Vice' on Blu-ray HD, DVD and Digital, we have copies of the Blu-ray to give away to five readers.

When private eye Doc Sportello's (Joaquin Phoenix) ex-old lady suddenly out of nowhere shows up with a story about her current billionaire land developer boyfriend whom she just happens to be in love with, and a plot by his wife and her boyfriend to kidnap that billionaire and throw him in a loony bin... well, easy for her to say. With a cast of characters that includes surfers, hustlers, dopers and rockers, a murderous loan shark, LAPD Detectives, a tenor sax player working undercover, and a mysterious entity known as the Golden Fang, which may only be a tax dodge set up by some dentists... Part surf noir, part psychedelic romp - all Thomas Pynchon.

To go into the running to take a Blu-ray home, simply answer the following question in 50 words or less:ss:

Director Duncan Jones has not just been hard at work with the long awaited feature film from the 'Warcraft' universe, but he's bent over backwards to prove to fans that the movie won't disappoint, at this year's San Diego Comic-Con.

Speaking to io9, Duncan Jones (son of the legendary David Bowie) explained that with a universe rich with backstory made the film not easier, but harder, which is why perhaps it's taken so long to get to the screen. "Warcraft has 20 years of storytelling to pick from... the obvious choice was to go right to the beginning of that story when Orcs first met Humans. That was kind of our initial set up. And then a lot of things fall into place from that... working with the guys at Blizzard, using their creativity and our own, I think we were able to refine and pair down what it is that would make a good core story for a film because a film is always going to be different from a game".

With a budget well north of $100m, there's a lot riding on 'Warcraft', not least expectations and the inbuilt cynicism of years of terrible game to screen adaptations. Still, we'll get our first look at 'Warcraft' when the first teaser hits in November.

It looks like there are some very exciting things to expect from DirectX 12, but Forza Motorsport 6 on the Xbox One will not be making use of Microsoft's next generation API.

Executive Producer on Forza 6, Ryan Cooper, said during a chat with Gaming Bolt: "Yes, we're really excited about DX12 and I think there is going to be a ton of potential with that. However we're not utilizing Dx12 in Forza Motorsport 6 on Xbox One. We're always looking to push the boundaries. Take our Forza Tech engine for example; that's an engine that has been in development for over 10 years and with every version of the game we're always trying to push the technology boundaries of what that engine can do. With the addition of night racing and racing in the rain and the ability to present that to players at 1080p/60 fps is really a technical achievement we're proud of".

Interestingly, Forza 6 will be running at 1080p 60FPS without DX12. But, with the Forza Tech engine being in development for 10 years now, Turn 10 Studios must know all of the optimizations required on the Xbox One to hit 1080p 60FPS, without DX12. We should see a DX12-powered version of Forza 6 in the future, but what could it deliver over the DX11-powered version? Prettier graphics? With 1080p 60FPS, we shouldn't see any increased performance, so it could just be eye candy.

It looks like Samsung is reportedly preparing to unveil its new Galaxy Tab S2 tomorrow, according to Tabletmonkeys. The outfit is reporting that there will be two models; the Galaxy Tab S2 9.7 (SM-T810) and Galaxy Tab S2 8.0 (SM-T710).

The new Galaxy Tab S2 will reportedly rock a new Super AMOLED display, a 4:3 aspect ratio, a new processor, and it'll be thinner than previous models. The new screen sizes are a change from current Galaxy tablets, which are 10.5- and 8.4-inch, to 9.7 and 8-inch. This means we'll see Samsung adopting the same resolution display that the iPad Air 2 rocks: 2048x1536.

Inside, the new Galaxy Tab S2 should feature the 64-bit, 8-core Exynos 7420 processor, and 3GB of RAM. We should also see the Galaxy Tab S2 9.7 weigh just 407g, while the 8-inch model will reportedly weigh only 260g. We should expect Samsung to unveil these new slates in the next day or so.

Windows 10 is right around the corner with its July 29 release, but an interesting new tidbit is that Acer is preparing a seriously cheap Windows 10-powered notebook, the Cloudbook, at just $169.

While Chromebooks might not have ignited the smaller notebook market, a Windows 10-powered offering might be a low-end enough market that has people interested. Acer is set to release two models; an 11-inch and 14-inch model with the 11-inch model starting from $169. There's no pricing on the 14-inch model, but we should expect the Cloudbooks to launch next month, just after Windows 10 flies out..

So where Microsoft can't compete against Chromebooks in the super-cheap market, it will compete against them at the interface level. Microsoft's operating system is much more known than Google's, and has a far bigger feature set. At just $169, Acer could quickly secure itself some serious Windows 10 market share, especially when it comes to the education and low-end markets.

There's a big reason why the remastered versions of Prototype and Prototype 2 launching on the Xbox One and PS4 didn't get much marketing, because it seems like the remastered versions of the game are piles of crap, that run worse than their previous generation counterparts.

Eurogamer's Digital Foundry has done some digging, discovering that the Xbox 360 version of Prototype and its 2012 sequel runs better than the new Xbox One version. The remastered versions of Prototype and Prototype 2 run at 1080p, but the in-game performance is quite subpar, especially in combat sequences, according to Eurogamer. The cutscenes even feature lowered performance, but the in-game performance reaches just 20-25 FPS, which a bunch of screen tearing, and in battles it gets even worse.

Eurogamer notes: "Worse still is the fact PS3 completely overshadows Xbox One in playability. Throughout our tests, Sony's last-gen machine runs with no tearing at all, and yet still manages to consistently best both Xbox machines in frame-rate, both old and new".

Something that first leaked onto Reddit and was later confirmed by Newegg, is that NVIDIA will soon be bundling Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain with various GeForce video cards.

MGS V will replace Batman: Arkham Knight as NVIDIA's new GeForce promotional deal, and rightfully so, since Arkham Knight won't be back on the PC until later this year. Newegg support confirmed the deal, saying: "Hi everyone! We had a little slip up and posted this deal ahead of schedule. It is not currently available, but stay tuned, it will be soon!"

We should see NVIDIA bundle Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain with its GeForce GTX 970, GTX 980, GTX 980 Ti and Titan X video cards.