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Epic is taking over a dozen games offline, including Rock Band and Unreal titles
Epic Games is shutting down "out-of-date online services" and servers for several of its older games starting today. Most affected titles will still be available offline, but others will no longer work.
Intel price hikes could make PCs more expensive
Intel has told customers that it will raises prices on most of its processors and other chips by up to 10-20 percent later this year.
The Nintendo Wii and DSi stores have been down for days with no explanation
Nintendo's DSi and Wii stores have both shut down for days with no explanation from the company.
Intel and Apple may be first to use TSMC's 3-nanometer chips
Apple and Intel are reportedly testing chip designs with TSMC's 3-nanometer process and could be first to market with the technology.
Walmart's Amazon attack plan could put 5G antennas, servers in stores
Now that Walmart and others are chasing Amazon's convenience with shipping that's nearly instantaneous, deep discounts for third parties and convenient in-store pickup of online orders, what's next? According to a report in the Wall Street Journal, Walmart might use its stores to go after AWS. Yes, you read that correctly. Apparently CEO Doug McMillon's pitch is that the large footprint and locations of Walmart's superstores gives it an advantage in "edge computing," where servers are physically closer to where the data is needed. That could be crucial for services like autonomous cars and drones that need information with less lag, or maybe even for something like cloud gaming. The plan doesn't sound like it's a certain thing, but it is surprising, and strikes Amazon in the heart of a business that brought in $25 billion last year. Other business opportunities include selling shopper data to digital advertisers. Your phone may not be listening to you, Walmart -- and anyone willing to pay for access -- could track exactly which products you stopped and looked at, or what you typically buy using a credit card. It could also follow Amazon in providing delivery services for other companies, and has reportedly looked into leasing space on its roofs for telecom companies to install 5G antennas. The one thing that apparently isn't included in future plans? Digital video store Vudu, backing an earlier report from The Information that it's up for sale -- if Walmart can find an interested buyer.
New DoS attack exploits algorithms to knock sites offline
Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks have caused their share of online chaos in the past, from being used to target messaging service Telegram during the Hong Kong unrest to crippling emergency communication systems in the US. Now, researchers have described a new vulnerability which could affect sites all over the internet.
Original 'Burnout Paradise' servers shut down August 1st
All good things must come to an end, and that includes multiplayer support for the original Burnout Paradise. Emails sent to players and a tweet from Criterion confirm that the game's servers -- which have been in operation since it launched in 2008 on Xbox 360, PS3 and PC -- will shut down on August 1st. There's still offline play, but getting every trophy, even using backwards compatibility, will be impossible unless you make the jump to the Remastered edition that launched last year for newer platforms.
Audit backs Apple's denial of Chinese spy chips in servers
If there have been any Chinese spy chips on Super Micro servers, they haven't been easy to find. The company has told customers that an independent audit has found no evidence of malicious hardware on its current motherboards as well as those from the generation sold to Amazon and Apple (and thus the heart of the Bloomberg claims that sparked the concern). There was also no evidence of unapproved designs or rogue software, the auditors said.
Intel's 48-core Xeon will go head-to-head with AMD in 2019
Intel has unveiled its fastest server processors yet, the Xeon Cascade Lake series with up to 48 cores. Its current top-of-the-line server chips, the Xeon Scalable Processors, pack up to 28 cores and 56 threads, but all are contained on a single, monolithic die. However, the Cascade Lake models have multiple dies in a single "package," or socket, much like AMD's latest EPYC server processors. Up to two chips could be installed on a multi-processor motherboard, giving you 96 cores in total, but Intel has yet to say if the chips will be hyperthreaded.
Samsung now has an 8TB SSD thanks to 3D memory tech
Data centers are about to get a lot more storage efficient. Samsung has launched the industry's highest capacity NVMe solid state drive (SSD) that packs an 8TB punch in an ultra-small footprint of just 11cm x 3.05cm -- twice the capacity of SSDs commonly used in hyper-scale server designs and slim line laptops.
'PUBG' developer considers region locking for smoother gameplay
PlayerUnknown's BattleGrounds came out of beta last December, and earlier this month creator Brendan Greene promised a much slicker game going forward. It's no secret the game has suffered from hacking problems in its short lifespan, so now the team -- despite earlier rebuttals -- says it's considering region locking after all.
Intel admits Spectre patch problems also affect newer Core chips
Intel has revealed that even its newer CPUs are affected by the frequent reboot problems brought about by the Spectre/Meltdown patches. The chipmaker previously said that the reboot issue affects systems running Broadwell and Haswell. Now that it has managed to reproduce the problem internally in an effort to fix it, the company found that a similar behavior can occur in platforms powered by Skylake and Kaby Lake, which are newer than Haswell and Broadwell. Ivy Bridge- and Sandy Bridge-based systems, both older cores, are also susceptible to the bug. Thankfully, Intel VP Navin Shenoy said that they're close to identifying the problem's root issue. "In parallel," he added, "we will be providing beta microcode to vendors for validation by next week."
'Demon's Souls' servers are shutting down for good February 28th
One of the coolest things about From Software's original, brutally difficult Demon's Souls was the in-game messaging system. No, you weren't able to pen letters to your friends, but you could drop hints anywhere you wanted in the game — before a nasty drop or difficult set of enemies, for example — that other players would then see as they made their way through the virtual wastelands. Such a system required servers, however. Those holding Demon's Souls' messages have been maintained for years with various reprieves from threatened shutdowns. Now, however, it appears that publishers Sony and Atlus are shutting down the servers for good as of February 28th, 2018.
Watch the highlights of NVIDIA's GPU Technology Conference keynote
Under NVIDIA founder Jensen Huang's iconic leather jacket is one of the tech industry's sharpest CEOs -- a man who can not only talk eloquently about GPU architecture, machine learning and the limits of Moore's Law, but do so for hours without a strict script. It's an impressive feat, but if you're not well versed in the technology of server GPUs, his talks can be a little hard to digest. That's why we cut Huang's two hour GTC keynote into an easily digestible clipshow.
NVIDIA's first Volta-powered GPU sits in a $149k supercomputer
If you've been waiting for NVIDIA to finally take the lid off of Volta, the next generation of its GPU technology, your day has finally come. Today at its GPU Technology Conference, the company announced the NVIDIA Tesla V100 data center GPU, the first processor to use its seventh-generation architecture. Like the Tesla P100 the processor it's replacing, the Volta-powered GPU is designed specifically to power artificial intelligence and deep learning so, naturally, it's flush with power. Built on a 12nm process, the V100 boasts 5,120 CUDA Cores, 16GB of HBM2 memory, an updated NVLink 2.0 interface and is capable of a staggering 15 teraflops of computational power. It's also the GPU that drives the company's updated DGX-1 supercomputer, too.
The tech that makes MMO development easy for indies
SpatialOS is the technical foundation that makes massive, persistent, online world-building possible, even for small video game studios. Think of large, mainstream games like Destiny or Elder Scrolls Online: These are huge universes that support thousands of players at a single time. It typically takes millions of dollars and hundreds of people multiple years to make one of these games -- let alone support it post-launch -- which is one reason it's notoriously difficult to secure funding for the development of massively multiplayer online games. However, SpatialOS puts a spin on this standard. Improbable's computational platform offers cloud-based server and engine support for MMO games, allowing developers to easily create and host online, multiplayer experiences with persistent features. SpatialOS first made a splash at GDC 2015, when it promised to power MMO games with a swarm-like system of servers that switch on as they're needed in locations around the world.
'Titanfall 2' multiplayer tech test is now open to all
Jon Shiring, the lead engineer for Titanfall 2 at Respawn Entertainment, announced via Twitter on Friday that the game's first "Multiplayer Tech Test" session is now live. The open event (no pre-orders or game codes necessary) which runs through the weekend will give players the chance to try out the game's first two mechs (Ion and Scorch). Players will also be treated to five new competition styles: Bounty Hunt, 5v5, Pilots vs. Pilots and 8v8.
Google tag-teams with Facebook on eco-friendly servers
Google recently friended arch-rival Facebook's Open Compute Project (OCP) to help it with power-sucking data centers, and that relationship is already paying off. Google revealed its first contribution to the project, Open Rack 2.0, a design for shallow, 48V racks that fit into data centers with limited space. Google has used a similar spec since 2010, and "saved millions of dollars and kilowatt hours" compared to 12V systems, it said.
Server capacity delayed Japanese 'Pokémon Go' launch
Pokémon Go may be a smash hit in the US, Canada, UK, New Zealand and about 20 other countries -- but did you know that nobody is playing the game in the Japan? It's not for want of trying. Despite being the franchise's homeland, Pokémon Go still isn't available to Japanese users. What's the deal? According to Niantic's CEO, Japan's servers just aren't good enough to handle the game.
Jury awards HP $3 billion in damages from Oracle
In yet another legal tussle between HP and Oracle, a jury has decided to award HP $3 billion in damages. The case stems from Oracle's decision to stop developing software for HP's Intel Itanium-powered servers in 2011, which HP says is a breach of contract between the two companies. Oracle's argument has been that the Itanium processor was nearing end of life and it didn't think there was a contract requiring it to support the hardware indefinitely.
