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Motorola's Jha blames apps for poor battery life, says Blur can save the day
Motorola Mobility CEO Sanjay Jha took time yesterday to talk business strategy, the advantages of Android, and to take developers to task for poorly optimized apps. At several points during the 50-minute chat the topic turned to lackluster battery life, and Jha placed blame squarely at the feet of hastily tested apps -- which he said can sap between 30 and 40 percent of your phone's juice. The chairman even suggested their effect on longevity and performance were the impetus behind 70 percent of handset returns. But, the company has a solution, and (surprisingly) its name is Blur. In a moment of presumably unintentional creepiness Dr. Jha said, "MotoBlur allows us to know, with precision, what battery life you're seeing," before suggesting that future phones could warn you about power draining apps and bandwidth hogs. What wasn't clear though, was if he was talking about the existing Android battery manager or if Motorola has been collecting usage data -- since we never opted-in to such a program, we're really hoping it's the former. Hit up the source link for the entire conversation, you'll find the relevant bits at the 4- and 25-minute marks.
Honeycomb on Oak Trail gets benchmarked on prototype Compal tablet, numbers ensue
We know that Intel is gunning for ARM with its Oak Trail platform, and indeed there were a few early tablets at Computex following that very path to Honeycomb. The question on everyone's minds, of course, is how well this dual-core 1.5GHz platform can compare to the Tegra 2 competition. If you believe the results from a suite of tests that tweakers.net ran on a prototype Compal unit, then the answer is "not very well." On benchmarks like CaffeineMark, Linpak, and Quadrant the platform was largely left in the dust by ARM competition with bigger biceps, but the Oak Trail machine did clean the floor with everyone else on the SunSpider browser benchmark. What does it all mean? Not a heck of a lot at this point, we're afraid. It's far too early to be drawing performance conclusions about a platform based on a prototype fresh out of the fabricator, and we have our doubts that these benchmark apps are optimized for the new platform -- so don't give up on 'ol x86 just yet.
Robot orchestra marries music and machines (video)
It may not be the first go-round for the Karmetik Machine Orchestra, but the automated musicians, fashioned by a group of students at the California Institute of the Arts, took the stage last night to prove that robots can rock. Among the mechanized musicians scheduled to perform at the Walt Disney Modular Theater were MahaDevibot, Glockenbot, BreakBot, and NotomotoN, described as a "duel-head drum with twelve beaters and a mallet orchestra." Each of the robots was built from salvaged parts and programmed by CalArts students, who control the machines from laptops during performances. A description of the show posted to the CalArts website touts music-producing robots suspended from the ceiling that trigger sound activated light shows and animation -- now that sounds like a way to spend a Thursday night. Check out a video of the players and their masters after the break.
Samsung Galaxy S II overclocked to 1.5GHz, used to obliterate benchmarks (video)
What do you do after you've bought the most powerful smartphone to yet grace the Android universe? Some timid folks would urge you to just enjoy it, but if you're like us, you'll probably want to know just how high that dual-core Exynos 4210 birdie could fly. The processor inside the Galaxy S II started off life at 1GHz, then got sped up by Samsung to 1.2GHz just before release, and has now been taken all the way to 1.5GHz thanks to coolbho3000 over on the xda-developers forum. He's been nice enough to provide the source code and instructions necessary to reproduce this stable overclock on your Galaxy S II, but don't rush off just yet -- there's video of the GSII romping through Quadrant and Linpack after the break. [Thanks, Mike and Sam]
Earthrise patch coming soon, roadmap features delayed
Fans of Masthead Studios' Earthrise MMORPG have waited a long time between patches. According to producer Atanas Atanasov, the wait is almost over. A new post on the official Earthrise boards details what players can expect when the new version goes live toward "the end of this week, or early next week at the latest." The patch will include fixes for the inventory stacking bug and the problems with party experience gain. The game's shadow renders are also being tweaked, and AI attacks through walls and other solid objects are being addressed. Atanasov also tells us that the previously reported development roadmap has undergone a few revisions, and most of the items on that particular list are being delayed in favor of improving Earthrise's graphical performance. "Due to changes in our priority list you can expect [a] delay of some roadmap features such as vehicles, inverse kinematics, quest hints on the minimap, and item painting," Atanasov explains. "Our expectations are that you will see them in game in June/July 2011."
Macworld publishes first round of benchmark results for new iMac
Macworld posted the results of its first benchmark tests for the newly updated family of iMacs this morning. The publication's tests found Apple's latest iMacs to be generally faster than previous iMacs, although certain build-to-order (BTO) models from 2010 still outperformed the new family of iMacs in some tests. The new top-of-the-line, quad-core 3.1 GHz i5 iMac bested the previous high-end model, a quad-core 2.8 GHz i5 iMac, in every test. Notably, the 3.1 GHz iMac performed 16% faster in the Speedmark 6.5 test and 22% faster in Macworld's iTunes encode test. The results were mixed when comparing the new iMac to powerfully configured BTO models from last year. When pitted against a quad-core 2.93 GHz Core i7 BTO iMac from 2010, the new 3.1 GHz iMac performed about equivalently in the Speedmark test but fell short in applications like Cinebench and MathematicaMark. The older, i7-based iMac offered Hyper Threading, a technology that virtually doubled the number of processor cores seen by the operating system; apps that took advantage of this technology worked better on the older machine. When compared to a dual-core 3.6 GHz i5 BTO iMac from 2010, the current 3.1 Ghz iMac edged out its older relative by 14% in overall performance and finished tasks in Mathematica, an app that makes use of multiple processing cores, up to 67% faster. In many cases, however, the faster clock speed of the older machine helped it complete certain tasks more quickly. Overall, the new iMacs seem to offer generally better performance in a more affordable package. But, if you frequently use software optimized for fast clock speeds or Hyper Threading technology and don't need any of the new gadgetry in the newest machines, it may be worth tracking down a 2010 BTO iMac with a 3.6 GHz i5 or 2.93 GHz i7 inside.
Black Prophecy patch brings new missions, fixes
Black Prophecy's first monthly patch is here, and today's update brings a bit of new content to the free-to-play sci-fi title -- as well as a number of smaller improvements. The content additions take the form of 10 new missions now available in the game's open sectors, and there are a variety of mission levels ranging from four to 35 according to the patch notes. Aside from that, Reakktor has made a number of performance tweaks, HUD and graphical fixes, and adjustments to everything from damage distribution across ship components to repair kit durability. You can learn more, as well as download the game, at the official website.
Intel rolls out 10-core, 20-threaded Xeon E7s, shows everyone who's boss
Someone deep down in Intel's development dungeons must be laughing a haughty laugh of disdain at us mere mortals getting excited about dual-cores in smartphones. The old Chipzilla has just turned out its 10-core Xeon E7 processor family, which can work on 20 simultaneous computational threads courtesy of the company's Hyper-Threading knowhow. Needless to say, there aren't that many casual workloads that will ever properly harness such extremely parallelized prowess, but then Intel isn't really gunning for the Facebook crowd here anyhow. The new E7s are for those dealing with truly data-intensive tasks, meaning that Facebook itself would be a good candidate to buy up a few, provided it's tempted by such things as 40 percent performance improvements over the Xeon 7500 tied to dynamic power adjustment for increased energy efficiency. Pricing for the Xeon E7s starts at $774 and climbs up to $4,616 per 32nm chip, with the usual proviso that Intel won't sell them in batches of less than 1,000. More details follow in the press release and video after the break. [Thanks, Khan]
Qualcomm's 1.5GHz dual-core MSM8660 destroys the competition in majestic benchmark run
Take the 1GHz Scorpion core residing in Qualcomm's current flagship Snapdragon, the MSM8x55, duplicate it, overclock the resulting pair by 50 percent, and give them improved graphics in the form of Adreno 220. What do you get? A barnburner by the unsexy name of MSM8x60. Yes, the 1.5GHz Mobile Development Platform Qualcomm loosed on the world at CES earlier this year has found itself prostrate on a test bench, where it has produced some of the finest graphical performance scores yet seen on a mobile device. The taxing OpenGL ES 2.0 test you see above shows the new Snapdragon doubling the frame rates churned out by Motorola's mighty Atrix 4G (which admittedly has to work harder thanks to its higher-res display) and completely embarrassing older generation hardware like the EVO 4G. That's a theme carried on throughout AnandTech's benchmarking, which you may explore in full at the source link. If you're wondering when this world-beating dual-core chip will be coming to market, the answer is that it's already inside HTC's imminently upcoming EVO 3D and Pyramid devices, albeit running at a tamer 1.2GHz. Exciting, eh? P.S. - Do take note that the Qualcomm dev platform was plugged into the wall during these tests and was not subject to any power management software that may have otherwise restrained its performance as on the retail chips under test. Moreover, the Egypt benchmark can only run at native resolution, which is what's causing some seemingly aberrant results such as the iPhone 4 (960 x 640) ranking below the iPhone 3GS (480 x 320).
Atrix 4G's 4.1.57 update spruces up a few things, patches known root methods
The HSUPA-enabling update? No, not yet. The voice call quality fix? In the pipeline. The mission-critical Bluetooth multimedia experience improvements? Oh yes, we've got those right here! Motorola is preparing to deliver an imminent OTA update to its Atrix 4G super phone, which will fix up battery performance, overall software stability, and car dock, headphone jack, and fingerprint reader performance, but will regrettably leave the two major drawbacks to the AT&T-riding phone untouched. Alas, if you've rooted your Atrix, you'll have to pay a dear price to benefit from these upgrades as users over at xda-developers, who've obtained the pre-release build, report the new 4.1.57 update disables their previous superuser privileges. C'est la vie. Update: Word is this update will be released to the general public tomorrow. Sit tight. [Thanks, Daniel]
Kinect Hacks: A dancer in the machine
1n0ut, an artist collective specializing in multimedia performance-based art, has created a Kinect hack both beautiful and inspiring to behold. Titled "Versus," it sees a real-life dancer giving lessons to a digital model. Just imagine: Here's a future where we can teach our computers how to Dougie.
NVIDIA's dual-GPU GeForce GTX 590 emerges, can't slay the Radeon HD 6990 titan
1,024 total CUDA cores, 94 ROPs, and 3GB of GDDR5 RAM on board. Yup, the NVIDIA GeForce GTX 590 is indeed a pair of GTX 580 chips spliced together, however power constraints have meant that each of those chips is running at a tamer pace that their single-card variant. The core clock speed is down to 607MHz, shaders are only doing 1.2GHz, and the memory clocks in at 3.4GHz. Still, there's a ton of grunt under that oversized shroud and reviewers have put it to the test against AMD's incumbent single-card performance leader, the Radeon HD 6990. Just like the GTX 590, it sports a pair of AMD's finest GPUs and costs a wallet-eviscerating $699. Alas, after much benchmarking, testing, and staring at extremely beautiful graphics, the conclusion was that AMD retains its title. But only just. And, as Tech Report points out, the GTX 590 has a remarkably quiet cooler for a heavy duty pixel pusher of its kind. Dive into the reviews below to learn more, or check the new card out on video after the break. Read - AnandTech Read - HardOCP Read - Tech Report Read - PC Perspective Read - Guru 3D Read - X-bit labs Read - Hot Hardware Read - techPowerUp! Read - TechSpot
CCP acquires new FCP hardware to fight EVE Online lag
Insomnia can be dealt with in different ways. Some people count sheep. Others pop pills. For those of us whose eyes are prone to glazing over upon hearing computer-related techno-babble, reading a dev blog such as the new network performance-related piece from CCP might be just the thing we need to start nodding off. All kidding aside, though, EVE Online is continually waging a war against lag, and unlike multi-shard MMOs with servers spread across different physical locations, CCP's sci-fi sandbox is beset with numerous technical challenges stemming from its one-server setup. Making matters worse for the IT nerds at the Icelandic development studio is the fact that tons of people like EVE, and those people are constantly setting new concurrent user records and pounding the heck out of Tranquility. CCP Mort's blog entry details the company's newly purchased Flow Control Platform (FCP), which "ties in closely with our Edge routers; it monitors all traffic to and from the game cluster, has a BGP peering relationship with the Edge routers, and monitors the pipes to our providers for bandwidth and errors." The short version is that FCP is CCP's latest offensive in the ongoing lag wars saga, and the company remains committed to perfecting the EVE Online experience going forward.
NVIDIA's next flagship graphics card to be unveiled at 9AM on Thursday, bring your own popcorn
In NVIDIA's own words, this Thursday will bring us the company's "next generation, highest performance graphics card." If that has you thinking GeForce GTX 590, you're not alone. The dual-GPU solution was expected to arrive at the PAX East get-together this month but seemed to shyly dodge the limelight, though now there's no escaping its date with destiny. Just make sure to be up nice and early tomorrow, say around 9AM US Eastern Time, for the inevitable barrage of reviews. An unsatisfyingly brief teaser video, featuring Crysis 2 slyly running in the background, can be found after the break. Update: Whoa, Nelly! Looks like it may end up being the GeForce GTX 590, as evidenced by these leaked images here. [Thanks, Abdulmalik]
Apple confirms some WebKit optimizations unavailable to iOS Apps
The web performance enhancements included in Apple's latest mobile operating system, iOS 4.3, are exclusively available to the Mobile Safari web browser, an Apple spokesperson has confirmed. The optimizations, which double JavaScript performance in Mobile Safari, are not available to the underlying web view framework that powers the embedded browsers in other apps. "The embedded web viewer does not take advantage of Safari's web performance optimizations," Trudy Muller, a spokesperson for Apple, told The Register. Apple's statement comes as a response to controversy started earlier this week when developers first recognized the notable performance gap between Mobile Safari and the embedded web views in their own applications. The debate deepened yesterday when Blaze Software released the results of a study that implied Android loaded web pages 52 percent faster than the iPhone 4. Apple refuted Blaze's results, citing the differences between Safari and the embedded web viewer. Many developers voiced concerns about Apple's decision to exclude third-party apps from taking advantage of the Nitro JavaScript engine included in iOS 4.3. One anonymous developer suggested Apple purposefully omitted the enhancements to subtly degrade the web experience in non-Apple browsers and web apps launched from the home screen. "Apple is basically using subtle defects to make web apps appear to be low quality - even when they claim HTML5 is a fully supported platform," the developer claimed in The Register. Matt Asay, vice president of business development for Strobe, indicated that Apple filed the performance gap as a bug but marked it "not to be fixed by exec order." On Twitter, Asay called the scenario "slimy" and suggested it's partly a tactic for convincing developers to focus on the development of native apps. The real reasons for the performance gap may not be so sordid. Ars Technica observes the Nitro JavaScript engine uses a technique called "just-in-time [JIT] compilation" to transform dynamic JavaScript code into machine code optimized for the ARM processor architecture. Nitro's ability to dynamically generate and execute code enables it to process JavaScript much faster than its predecessors. Unfortunately, for security reasons, other applications developed for iOS aren't typically granted permission to execute dynamically generated native code. Miguel de Icaza, a lead developer for both GNOME and Mono, said he suspects the issues are legitimate technical problems and not a conspiracy. "It seems that people are attributing to malice what can easily be explained by history - iOS has never allowed user code to generate code on demand, and this has for years prevented JIT compilation from taking place," Icaza told Ars Technica. "Third parties have never been able to get access to this - not Mono, not Java, not Lua, not JavaScript, or any other runtime, compiler, or library that generates native code dynamically." As a result, applications that use the UIWebView framework, including web apps launched from the home screen, will not enjoy the performance optimizations available to Apple's Mobile Safari web browser. Despite the technical challenges in adapting Nitro to work safely within the UIWebView framework, developers like Icaza are optimistic Apple will enable the new JavaScript engine for apps with embedded web views. "Since this is the first OS release with Nitro on the Mobile Safari browser, it is probably safe to assume that this is merely a bug or limitation," he said. Is this a conspiracy worth dubbing "browser-gate," or simply a small speed bump in this tale of two JavaScript rendering engines? Please use the comments below to discuss. [via The Mac Observer]
AMD's quad-core Llano APUs pegged for Q3 2011 release, Computex unveiling
X-bit labs has a (pretty massive) scoop of AMD info to share with us this week, as it has put together the above chart detailing what it expects the company's APU roadmap will look like for the remainder of the year. Published a couple of days ago, this data has now been partially corroborated by the snoops over at DigiTimes, who confirm a couple of the model names and agree that AMD is planning an initial Q3 rollout of five Llano chips, to be followed by even more processors coming in Q4 of 2011. Llano represents AMD's play for the performance crown, coming as it does with dual- or quad-core processing units, DirectX 11-capable Radeon HD 6000-series graphics, and a dual-channel DDR3 memory controller, all bundled up inside the same warm and toasty package. More E-series APUs for power-conscious users are also said to be on the cards, and AMD itself should be making these plans official at Computex in Taipei come early June. It's a bit of a wait, but we've got a feeling it'll be worth it.
Android vs. iPhone in 'flawed' mobile browser performance test
Post edited to clarify that the browser testing is not representative of Safari performance, and included Blaze response to CNET. –Ed. Blaze Software, a Canadian software company, today released the results of what it calls a "definitive" research effort to discover "which [mobile] browser is really faster from a user's point of view." The study concluded that Android's browser is 52% faster than the iPhone's. Before you trade in your iPhone for a device powered by Android, The Loop suggests Blaze's study is "flawed." According to its report, Blaze's testing methodology relied on "custom apps, which use the platform's embedded browser. This means WebView (based on Chrome) for Android, and UIWebView (based on Safari) for iPhone." As we've been hearing from developers of iPhone web apps over the past few weeks, Apple's improvements to the Mobile Safari JavaScript engine and other rendering speedups have not been extended to the internal browser tool used by apps, nor to standalone web apps that are pinned as icons to the home screen. It's not yet completely clear if or when the Safari performance boost will make it to the embedded browser view; John Gruber cites some security-related concerns that may be involved. The tests don't reflect performance of the official web browsers included with each platform. UIWebView did not include this performance boost; it may be "disingenuous" to conclude Android beat Safari, according to The Loop. Using an embedded browser is not the same as using the official browser where customers spend the most time interacting with websites. "Obviously someone is looking to make a mountain out of a molehill," Gartner analyst Michael Gartenberg told The Loop. "It's not an apples to apples test." Apple's Natalie Kerris was equally dismissive, speaking to CNET: "Their testing is flawed. They didn't actually test the Safari browser on the iPhone. Instead they only tested their own proprietary app, which uses an embedded Web viewer that doesn't actually take advantage of Safari's Web performance optimizations." Kerris also noted that even without the true Safari match-up, the testing only showed about a second of difference browsing pages. Blaze's CTO Guy Podjarny admitted to CNET that the testing methodology made an invalid assumption that the embedded browsers would work as fast as Safari: "This test leveraged the embedded browser which is the only available option for iPhone applications. Blaze was under the assumption that Apple would apply the same updates to their embedded browser as they would their regular browser. If this is not the case and according to Apple's response, it's certainly possible the embedded browser might produce different results. If Apple decides to apply their optimizations across their embedded browser as well, then we would be more than willing to create a new report with the new performance results." Even so, the results of Blaze's research should still disappoint Apple's fans. Apple touted significant web technology performance gains in its latest iOS release. It seems reasonable to expect these gains to appear simultaneously in both the Safari browser and the underlying UIWebView framework used in nearly any app that relies on web technologies like JavaScript. Blaze's researchers built custom apps to compare the iPhone 4 and Google Nexus S using websites from Fortune 1000 companies. Each site included in the test was loaded multiple times over several days using a Wi-Fi connection. The final results reflect a median benchmark from over 45,000 page loads. "Android 2.3 was 52% faster than iPhone 4.3, with a median load time of 2.144 seconds vs. iPhone's median load time of 3.254 seconds," Blaze reports on its blog, adding, "Android was faster than iPhone in 84% of the tested websites, and iPhone beat Android in 16% of the races. Android...provided a faster browsing experience 4 times out of 5."
OCZ buys Indilinx, probably has designs on building its own SSD controllers
Indilinx, the company responsible for designing the Barefoot SSD controller, has today agreed to hand its future over to the capable lads and ladies of OCZ Technology in exchange for $32 million in common OCZ stock. The companies have announced a definitive agreement for the chipmaker's acquisition, which OCZ is performing in order to gobble up a set of 20 yummy patents and patent applications while also expanding its presence in embedded, hybrid storage and industrial markets. Indilinx will continue its current operations, including providing controllers and firmware to other OEMs, and OCZ too will continue to use others' wares, namedropping its long-term partner SandForce as among the outside companies that will be supplying it with SSD goodies. So it's business as usual unless and until this partnership spawns some lightning-fast combination of software and hardware that forces us to hear that cursed "exclusive" word again. Ah well, best of luck of luck to them.
Masthead adds exploration rewards to Earthrise, hints at player-crafted vehicles
It's patch time for Earthrise, and the sci-fi sandbox from indie developer Masthead Studios is looking to put the hurt on a few of its early-release gremlins. The patch notes for version 17045 indicate that players should notice a substantial reduction in lag and an overall increase in server and client performance. The patch has also added keybinding functionality to the world of Enterra as well as animation tweaks for strafing and walking. Exploration rewards have also arrived in Earthrise, and players "will now be able to salvage materials and use them for either crafting or personal advantage." The dev team isn't stopping there, though, and producer Atanas Atanasov drops a couple of tasty hints regarding upcoming updates. "We are actively taking player feedback and requests into consideration for future releases, and have extensive developments planned for completion in the next few months, including the addition of territorial conquests and player crafted vehicles," he said via press release. %Gallery-48760%
Visualized: NVIDIA's dual-Fermi card that never was
PAX East 2011, which kicks off tomorrow, is widely expected to finally deliver a dual-GPU solution from NVIDIA's Fermi family of graphics chips, a PCI Express-saturating single-card workhorse to be known as the GTX 590. While we wait for its arrival, however, here's a sentimental look back upon 2010 and another little prototype that NVIDIA had kicking around its labs back then. Emerging over in a Chinese forum, this dual-GPU board features two GF104 chips (the same that made the GTX 460 such a winner) and a snow white PCB paintjob that makes it look utterly irresistible. We're loving the four DVI outputs and, just like you, have no idea why this card never came out, but that shouldn't obstruct the enjoyment of looking at the darn thing. More pics after the break.
