Joel Hruska
Opinions and content posted by HotHardware contributors are their own.
Recent posts
AMD is launching its first tablet-optimized APU today, in a bid to challenge Intel's de facto dominance of the Windows 8 tablet market. Dubbed Hondo, the new Z-60 draws less power than any Brazos-based part AMD has launched before. Some of...
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The backlash against Windows 8 from various developers continues, but this time the creator in question isn't just expressing discontent. Notch, the developer behind smash hit Minecraft, a game that's torn up sales charts on both the Xbox and PC, has declared that he won't be working with...
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Intel's four beat, three second jingle has become synonymous with the company's brand, despite the fact that it contains no spoken words or associated text. To date, Santa Clara has reserved the sequence for its desktop, laptop, and server...
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Recent job postings at Valve and comments by the company have sparked a great deal of speculation on the company's long-term plans for a Linux-powered gaming console. In a recent interview, Jeri Ellsworth, one of Valve's R&D engineers...
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The original Borderlands was a surprise smash hit, selling millions of copies more than its developer, Gearbox, ever thought it would. The first game's randomized weapon generation, unique cell-shaded graphics, steep difficulty, and...
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It takes serious guts to try and remake Half-Life. Valve's 1998 first-person shooter didn't change FPS gaming, it redefined it. Before Half-Life, blockbusters like Quake and Quake II were lone gunman affairs with little to no interaction with non-hostile NPCs (Non-Player Character). Half-Life...
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Intel's next-generation CPU, codenamed Haswell, was the major star of IDF. One aspect of the chip we haven't talked about at length, however, is its emphasis on reduced power consumption. When Intel announced that its Ivy Bridge mobile products would target 17W for mainstream systems, it made...
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Last winter, Intel made waves by demonstrating a number of cutting-edge technologies it believed could drive the next-generation of lower power devices. In addition to its pioneering work with Near Threshold Voltages, the company showed off Rosepoint -- a prototype SoC that combined a...
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Intel's Developer Forum (IDF) starts on Tuesday, and the chip manufacturer is expected to discuss its Ivy Bridge refresh, Haswell, talk about its upcoming 32nm tablet platform, Clover Trail, and possibly share a few details on its 22nm...
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Working in game development isn't for the faint of heart. The industry is notorious for poor work/life balance, with some projects left on "crunch time" -- 12-16 hour days, 6-7 days a week -- for months. Visibility into why such situations...
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Google has been granted a patent on a system for real-world object identification scanning that will allow the company to survey and tag images and videos. The abstract for patent 8,254,699 (hereafter referred to as the '699 patent) covers...
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Guild Wars 2 Developer Slows Digital Sales, Takes High Road As Server Load Affects Player Experience
It takes real guts to pull the plug on your game sales when you're concerned about server stability, but that's exactly what Arena.net has done with its just-launched game, Guild Wars 2. According to company spokesperson Rubi Bayer...
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Earlier this summer, AMD launched its HSA (Heterogeneous System Architecture) foundation with a number of core partners. Now Samsung has joined the collaborative effort as well. This could be the beginning of an unprecedented level of...
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Three major publishers announced today that they'd agreed to settle a price-fixing case brought by the Department of Justice rather than face trial. The original lawsuit brought against the publishing houses alleged that they illegally...
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Last month, TSMC's CEO Morris Chang made waves when he suggested that it could make sense for the company to dedicate fabs to particular customers. Fresh reports today, however, suggest that both Apple and TSMC made major bids for exclusivity on future TSMC production facilities, and both were...
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Today at the Hot Chips Symposium, AMD's CTO Mark Papermaster is taking the wraps off AMD's upcoming CPU core, codenamed Steamroller. Steamroller is the third iteration of Sunnyvale's Bulldozer architecture and an extremely important part...
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Guild Wars 2 has finally hit store shelves and the game, according to just about everyone, is a lot of fun. The full sequel to the popular game Guild Wars has been in development for a full five years; Guild Wars originally debuted in...
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A few weeks ago, in early August, AMD launched a new line of FirePro cards aimed at the high end of the workstation market. Today, it's introducing a new product family focused on server virtualization and thin client functionality. The...
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Most phone carriers these days are doing everything they can to hop off the unlimited data bandwagon. Both AT&T and Verizon have rolled out penalties for refusing to upgrade to their new shared plans; AT&T won't let you use FaceTime unless you've got a shared data plan, while Verizon...
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Marvell is launching a new line of SSD cache accelerators for enterprise storage arrays that it believes could dramatically reduce the cost of deployment and significantly improve performance. The two new devices, dubbed the DragonFly...
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We've been wondering how AMD would respond to Nvidia's new GTX 660 Ti and Team Red has given us our answer. AMD is slashing prices across the entire Radeon HD 7000 family. The HD 7950 should start showing up as low as $319 by the end of the week, compared to current prices in the $349-$369...
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Diablo III's launch and first few weeks were a complete disappointment. Even once these problems were ironed out, a number of players complained about major balance problems at the Inferno difficulty level and the static, boring nature of...
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