Intel announced a set of new enterprise products today aimed at furthering its strengths in the TOP500 supercomputing market. As of today, the Chinese Tiahne-2 supercomputer (aka Milky Way 2) is now the fastest supercomputer on the planet at roughly ~54PFLOPs. That's double the speed of the...Read more...
In the week since word of the NSA's Boundless Informant and Prism programs leaked online, there's been a great deal of concern over to what degree various companies cooperated with the NSA's requests. Some companies, like Google, have pointed...Read more...
In the wake of the Washington Post leaks, there's been a great deal of discussion over how, exactly, companies like Google share data with the government. The original report implied that the NSA has direct datacenter access and either grabs...Read more...
It's been a good few weeks for AMD. The semiconductor design firm's products are everywhere at E3, even if they aren't always front-and-center on display. AMD's Jaguar CPU core is baked into both the PS4 and Xbox One and its FirePro graphics...Read more...
Yesterday, we talked about PRISM, the NSA's tool for spying on all foreign Internet traffic routed through the United States. Today, we've got news a fresh leak and another troubling aspect of the NSA's spying capabilities. The newly revealed...Read more...
There have been two major leaks this past week that we want to talk about. First, news that Verizon turns over all phone call metadata -- the numbers called, dialed, and the duration of the phone call in question -- to the NSA. Second, news...Read more...
Once upon a time, there was an entire genre of space combat titles. Origin took an early lead with 1990's Wing Commander, but Lucas Arts followed a few years later with the hugely popular X-Wing and Tie Fighter series. In 1998, Volition gave us...Read more...
Major questions have been asked about how the Xbone handles user privacy, game authentication, used games, and online check-ins -- questions that you'd think Microsoft would answer directly. Instead, the company has opted to release a new...Read more...
The big news of the day, based on a leaked Intel roadmap, is that Broadwell won't launch in 2014. Instead, we'll see a Haswell refresh with unknown performance characteristics (slightly higher clocks are the best bet) and, late in the year, a...Read more...
If Haswell's debut on the desktop has left you feeling a bit flat, the company's mobile efforts may be the pick-me-up you've been hoping for. If you step back and think about the entire CPU market, the last two years have been marked by tremendous shifts in consumer buying habits, as tablet sales skyrocketed and desktop/laptop sales have...Read more...
It's Computex time again in Taipei, which means it's time for a whole lot of companies to unveil/launch a whole lot of products, all at once. With Haswell waiting in the wings, NVIDIA has jumped all over that bandwagon -- the GTX 770 launched earlier today, the 780 launched last week, and the...Read more...
On any given day in the United States you will find a number of really, really terrible ideas being floated as smart decisions. Flying to Hawaii to give birth in the ocean surrounded by dolphins. A drunk man repeatedly directing traffic in...Read more...
In a world in which its corporate communication team wasn't apparently being run by two monkeys and a sack of hammers, Microsoft executives would've taken the stage yesterday and delivered a concise, official explanation as to whether or not...Read more...
Dell has been in the news quite a bit of late as major investors like Michael Dell and Carl Icahn battle over the plan to take the company private. The contested plan company CEO Michael Dell proposed several months ago was a reaction to...Read more...
Google, NASA, and the Universities Space Research Association have announced that they'll collaborate in purchasing the second $10 million dollar D-Wave Two quantum computing system on the market. The system will deploy to NASA's Ames Research...Read more...
AMD is announcing its Radeon HD 8970M today. We say "announcing" instead of launching because this chip is essentially a rebadged HD 7970. It wasn't initially clear if this would be the case -- the HD 7790, which the company launched back in March, is based on a new design has a few small...Read more...
For the past decade, AMD and Intel have been racing each other to incorporate more components into the CPU die. Memory controllers, integrated GPUs, northbridges, and southbridges have all moved closer to a single package, known as SoCs...Read more...
Blizzard released Patch 1.0.8 for Diablo III yesterday, but the only topic of conversation has been a gold dupe bug that was inadvertently introduced into the game. The problem was devious -- cancel a gold auction, and you received double your...Read more...
AMD has been marketing its own brand of memory for several months, and selling its own Ramdisk software as a performance-boosting option to customers to boot. That program has apparently been at least modestly successful, as the company is stepping up the campaign with a new type of Radeon...Read more...
One of the apparent casualties of Disney's decision to hand EA the reins of Star Wars development is the Wii U. DICE is one of the studios that EA confirmed would be working on Star Wars property, alongside Bioware and Visceral. The Battlefield developer has previously stated that the next...Read more...
Bethesda Softworks is prepping a new title in the Wolfenstein series that pits the franchise's hero, B.J. Blazkowicz, against an alternate-history version of the post World War II era in which the Nazis, not the Allies, were ultimately...Read more...
When Disney closed LucasArts earlier this year and canceled all of the games under development, it left the future of video games within Star Wars franchise in serious doubt. Now we know what that future is going to look like -- it's got a...Read more...