Samsung not long ago elected to use its in-house Exynos chip over Qualcomm's Snapdragon 810 in its Galaxy S6 and S6 Edge; today it confirms it has begun manufacturing Snapdragon 820 mobile processors utilizing its new 14nm LPP process for the semiconductor company. The new process is said to deliver up to 15 percent faster speeds and 15 percent less power consumption over its 14mn LPE process (found in the Exynos 7 Octa chip).

Samsung wouldn't say whether the new chip would find its way into its future phones, but rumors indicate a Galaxy S7 is on the horizon and will indeed contain the 820. Patrick Moorhead, president and principal analyst at Moor Insights & Strategy (and formerly of AMD), says, "I do believe Samsung must use the 820 to be more competitive with Apple. 820 hits performance per watt levels Exynos just can't hit."

The slow rollout of Skype Translator began about 14 weeks ago following its creation nearly two years ago; now it's finally public for everyone.

Translator lets you converse with others who don't speak your language, translating what each of you says with text so you can both understand each other. This works with video or text chats, although far fewer languages are supported for video at the moment (more will come).

To try it out, bring up a conversation window in Skype and click the globe icon just below the call button. If you don't see it, click Help > Check for Updates in the same window.

The Academy of Motion Picture Arts have announced the nominees for this year's Oscars, with Alejandro G. Iñárritu's 'The Revenant' and George Miller's 'Mad Max: Fury Road' leading the pack.

Eight films vie for Best Picture this year, including 'The Big Short', 'Bridge of Spies', 'Brooklyn', 'Mad Max: Fury Road', 'The Martian', The Revenant', 'Room' and Spotlight', with many of those films directors including Adam McKay, George Miller, Alejandro G. Iñárritu, Lenny Abrahamson and Tom McCarthy are also up for the Best Director category.

One surprise that the nomination of Michael Fassbender as Best Actor for his role as Apple founder Steve Jobs in the film of the same name, as well as Sylvester Stallone in the exceptionally well received 'Creed'. Oscar winners will be announced at the 88th Academy Awards ceremony in Hollywood on February 28th.

Twitter now has its own gaming focused Twitter feed, but we're not entirely sure why they've done this. As we understand it, it's just a feed to tweet and retweet other gaming related topics and memes. So in other words, it's very similar to any other gaming site or other related feed, except super official and from Twitter themselves.

But this is an initiative to help gamers find what they're looking for in an easy to find package. "There are thousands of gaming-related Tweets sent on Twitter each day," Twitter said in a statement about their new venture. "Whether folks are discovering a new game, Tweeting at a gaming personality, keeping up with gaming news or following their favorite esport, we want want to make it easy for gaming fans to find and join the most vibrant conversations about games."

It's similar to their other official feeds about other topics, such as Twitter Music, Twitter Government and others, but it's a strange thing given that the search function is very useful and effective at finding the topics you want, with or without hashtags, which aren't really required anymore.

In a week which has already seen the loss of legend David Bowie, tributes are also flowing in for veteran character actor Alan Rickman, who passed away yesterday aged 69 following a battle with cancer.

Best known to audiences as Snape in the 'Harry Potter' series, Rickman had a long career in film, with memorable roles in 'Die Hard', 'Galaxy Quest', Love, Actually' and 'Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves'.

'Harry Potter' luminaries, such as creator J.K. Rowling and star Daniel Radcliffe have taken to social media to mourn the actor's passing.

CES 2016 - Leading up to CES 2016, I had plans to try out the new HTC Vive Pre as many times as I could. I booked a meeting with HTC themselves, but then I had a meeting with both AMD and NVIDIA where I could try it out, too.

So during the entire show, we had a chance to use the Vive Pre three times, which was enough to give me a great foundation to write on. I have a larger piece covering the Vive Pre that I'll write once I land back in Australia, but the impressions versus the original Vive are nothing but stellar.

The newly refreshed Lighthouse controllers feel lighter, the triggers feel better, and the entire controller feels more balanced in the hand. The original controllers felt a little top heavy, but HTC has redesigned the Lighthouse controllers with a strange circle at the top of them. We chatted with a few of our industry friends including the guys at Hardware Canucks, trying to figure out why they're designed like that.

World of Tanks, the free-to-play online armored vehicle mayhem simulator, is completing it's console infiltration by releasing on the PlayStation 4 on January 20th 2016.

The Xbox 360 was the first foray into consoles for Wargamin.net's World of Tanks, and it was a rousing success. The Xbox One was next, and in it they added cross-play functionality between the two consoles so that you didn't have to leave your friends behind. Now the PS4 is the next to be blessed with what might be arguably the most fun free-to-play MMOTPS (massively multiplayer tank person shooter).

On PC and Xbox One alone there are around 12 million daily users that log-in, far more than the amount of concurrent Steam users on at any one time on an average day. The micro-transactions in-game aren't required by any means, and you can play, successfully, without spending a dime.

CD Projekt RED is extremely confident that The Witcher 3's final expansion, Blood and Wine, will be an amazing experience.

The upcoming Blood and Wine expansion isn't like your average DLC: CDPR says that it's actually like its own separate game. The content features a huge 20-hour story that's entirely separate of The Wild Hunt, featuring nothing but fresh gameplay experiences. Blood and Wine will conclude the epic journey of Geralt of Rivia, and CDPR is sending the legendary witcher out with a bang. While many regard The Witcher 3 as a perfect magnum opus, CDPR notes that they felt they could improve, and Blood and Wine will be the fruits of their improvements.

How can you top something like The Witcher 3? To start, the Polish devs have created a new "charismatic enemy" that players won't soon forget, and tied that devious antagonist with a winding, sprawling story that arcs across the new region of Toussiant. The result is something that CDRP says is "even better than the main game".

The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess is getting it's very own amiibo exclusive dungeon to compliment the already large selection of difficult dungeons in the classic Gamecube game.

The name of the new dungeon was revealed on the French Amazon site as "La Cave du Crepuscule" which translates, through Google Translate of course, to The Cave of Twilight. Ominous sounding, to be sure, and a good fit for the revival of Twilight Princess. Amazon France posted the details in error, though it seems that even Amazon US has followed and you can take a look at the unreleased amiibo, which is Wolf Link.

We've known about Wolf Link for some time, though what we didn't know is that Wolf Link would come with a special dungeon to complete. Other amiibo's will also have other cool effects and should give you in-game boosts and other incentives when you use them. You'll be able to replenish your health or arrows or some such. The listing also says that you'll be able to use these amiibo's with the upcoming Zelda title for the Wii U. The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess HD comes out on March 16th, which isn't too far off. And the other Zelda game is still slated for a general "2016" release date.

Storage titan Seagate has just revealed its first helium-filled hard drive aimed at the cloud datacenter market.

Seagate's new helium-filled hard drive is set in a 3.5" form factor and features 10 terabytes of storage capacity. The drives specifically target cloud datacenters that need extensive storage space as well as memory efficiency, both of which helium-filled drives can accommodate. Traditional hard drives are filled with air, but filling the drives with helium allows manufacturers to fit more platters to increase capacity, improve power usage, and maximize accuracy of the actuator arm.

The new hermetically-sealed enterprise-class hard drives feature seven platters at 1.43 TB a piece, along with 14 heads. Speeds have yet to be determined, and are assumed to be 7200RPM. Seagate affirms that the helium-filled drives utilize the company's PowerChoice technology to help manage power consumption during idle times. Thanks to the benefits of helium gas, the new 10TB drives have a Mean Time Between Failure (MTBF) rate of 2.5 million hours, which is significantly better than existing enterprise drives.