Mike Mozart

The Federal Trade Commission has sued AT&T for promising unlimited data to wireless customers and then throttling their speeds by as much as 90 percent, the FTC announced Tuesday.

All major carriers throttle certain customers during times and places of congestion, as we've reported previously. AT&T seems to have earned the FTC's wrath by throttling customers regardless of whether they were trying to use their phones in congested areas, however. As we've also written, AT&T was throttling unlimited subscribers regardless of network conditions until July, when it changed its policy. Throttling was enforced once users hit 3GB or 5GB of data per month. AT&T still throttles customers but now says it only does so in congested areas.

The FTC's lawsuit in US District Court in San Francisco alleges that AT&T hit unlimited data customers with an "unfair mobile data throttling program" and that AT&T committed a "deceptive failure to disclose [the] mobile data throttling program."

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Public cloud services have become critical to much of our digital lives, but the privacy and security of these services has always been suspect. And today, the Snowden leaks and the revelations of NSA and GCHQ spying on cloud services have created a backlash internationally for US cloud providers.

How big of a concern is the privacy of the public cloud? And what can we do to make it more privacy-friendly and secure? Join us today at 2:30pm ET for a live discussion on those questions and others regarding the future of cloud computing.

Joining us for the live conversation will be:

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A new report was published today noting a drop-off in recent patent lawsuits. The data released by Unified Patents is the second recent indication that there may be a decline in suits following this summer's US Supreme Court decisions.

The Unified Patents data shows that the third quarter of 2014 saw 23 percent fewer patent cases overall. When looking only at litigation from patent trolls, which Unified calls "non-practicing entities" or NPEs, one sees a 35 percent drop.

Unified Patents

As with the earlier Lex Machina data, it's too early to determine the decline is necessarily tied to the Alice v. CLS Bank decision from this summer. In that decision, the US Supreme Court said that "do it on a computer"-style patents should be knocked out as too "abstract" for patenting.

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Duncan C

Federal authorities have identified and recently searched the home of a suspected “second leaker”—in other words, not Edward Snowden—who has been providing sensitive surveillance-related documents to journalists for months now, according to Yahoo News.

In particular, this second leaker is allegedly the source for documents discussing the Terrorist Identities Datamart Environment, first published by The Intercept in August 2014. This leaker may have also provided the National Security Agency’s Tailored Access Operations catalog to the German magazine Der Spiegel in December 2013.

Yahoo News, citing anonymous sources, reported that Justice Department officials “may now be more reluctant to bring criminal charges involving unauthorized disclosures to the news media,” a likely reference to the resulting public relations backlash against the prosecutors of WikiLeaks-leaker Chelsea Manning and the ongoing case of investigative New York Times reporter James Risen, who may face jail time for not revealing a source.

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When Disney bought Lucasfilm for over $4 billion nearly two years ago to the day, we lamented the uncertain publishing future of the company's stable of classic LucasArts games. The fear was that these classics would be lost in corporate shuffling indefinitely. Thankfully, digital distribution site GoG isn't letting that happen. This week, GoG published its first games from the Lucasfilm/Disney catalog as DRM-free downloads playable on modern machines.

While the digital distribution site says its partnership with Disney Interactive allows for the release of 20+ classic LucasArts games, today's offerings include the following six titles:

• Star Wars: X-Wing Special Edition - Windows - $9.99 - first downloadable release
• Star Wars: TIE Fighter Special Edition - Windows - $9.99 - first downloadable release
• Sam & Max Hit the Road - Windows, Mac, Linux - $5.99 - first downloadable release
• The Secret of Monkey Island: Special Edition - Windows - $9.99 (temporary 20 percent off sale price)
• Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis - Windows, Mac, Linux - $5.99
• Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic - Windows - $9.99 (temporary 20 percent off sale price)

More LucasArts games will be "popping up frequently" on GOG.com in the coming months according to the site. A number of LucasArts classics are also available on Steam, if that's more your speed. [Update: Reviews Editor Lee Hutchinson reminds me that even the Windows-only retro games might work on a Mac through a tool like Boxer]

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A mobile phone app that recognises which species of bird is singing is being developed by a researcher at Queen Mary University in London.

Comcast last week applied for a trademark on the phrase "True Gig" to describe extremely fast Internet service.

The trademark application filed with the US Patent and Trademark Office (and reported yesterday by The Donohue Report) says that True Gig describes "Internet service provider services; providing high speed access to the Internet, mobile networks, and other electronic communications networks; wireless broadband communication services; provision of telecommunication access to video and audio content via cable, fiber optics, the Internet, mobile networks, and other electronic communications networks."

Comcast is also using True Gig to describe online video streaming, specifically "provision of non-downloadable films, movies, and television programs via an online video-on-demand service; providing entertainment information via television, cable, telephone, wireless broadband, fiber broadband, and via the Internet."

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Razer has traditionally been a gaming peripheral company, which started with the Boomslang mouse in 1998. Over the years, they have expanded their portfolio to cover more of a gamer’s needs, adding keyboards, keypads, mouse mats, and headphones as well as complete systems. Today, Razer has expanded their product family again with the launch of the Razer Leviathan sound bar.

The Leviathan is able to produce 5.1 virtual surround sound using Dolby Virtual Speakers and accepts Dolby Digital and Pro Logic II multichannel audio. The bar itself contains four tuned drivers, with two 2.5” full range and two 0.74” tweeters, which are powered by a 30 watt RMS amplifier. Frequency response is quoted as 180 Hz to 20 KHz on the sound bar itself. Complementing the bar and filling in the remainder of the audio range is a 5.25” 30 watt RMS subwoofer with a downward firing driver, which has a quoted response of 20 Hz to 180 Hz.

The sound bar supports analog, optical, or Bluetooth inputs, with the Leviathan supporting any Bluetooth 4.0 device streaming over A2DP, and Razer has also made sure to include aptX audio codec support for higher quality A2DP streaming. To make the connection to the sound bar as easy as possible the Leviathan also includes NFC to configure the Bluetooth pairing. The bar also supports several tilt angles (0°, 15°, and 18°) to ensure it works well in a variety of situations.

If the idea of virtual surround sound through the use of a sound bar seems like something you might be interested in, the Razer Leviathan will be available for pre-order on razerzone.com with worldwide availability starting in November. Prices are USA: $199/EUR: €199.

Source: Razer

OPEN SESAME iFixit

There’s new Apple hardware out, and the people at iFixit are once again doing what they do best: disassembling the living crap out of it and posting pictures. This time, they’ve carefully torn down a new Retina iMac into its component pieces, and the images are illuminating.

The Retina iMac’s construction is essentially identical to the previous non-Retina iMac. There are no screws here: the thin aluminum body is glued to the display with a long strip of custom-cut adhesive. Prying that away gives you access to the machine’s internals, but then you’re left with the conundrum of how to get the machine back together when you’re done—the factory adhesive strip isn’t very reusable once it’s been removed.

Once inside, there are plenty of user-replaceable parts—the iMac’s CPU isn’t soldered and can be swapped out if desired, as can the hard disk drive, PCIe SSD, and RAM (the RAM is actually designed to be replaced through a small external port, so you don’t have to tear the computer apart to add more memory). The Radeon R9-class GPU is attached directly to the logic board, so upgrading that after the fact is out of the question.

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Aurich Lawson / Thinkstock

Welcome to Ars UNITE, our week-long virtual conference on the ways that innovation brings unusual pairings together. Today, a look at how everyone involved with the modern cloud is looking to improve its security. Join us this afternoon for a live discussion on the topic with article author Sean Gallagher and his expert guests; your comments and questions are welcome.

When the technology industry embraced “cloud computing” and made it part of our daily lives, we all made a Faustian bargain. They gave us a way to break free from the expense of owning all the hardware, making computing and storage capacity dirt cheap and available on demand. On the other side, we promised not to worry too much about the fine print.

“In the 2000s we had this wild cloud party,” said Peter Eckersley, technology projects director at the Electronic Frontier Foundation. “That party ended—Edward Snowden crashed that party. And we’ve woken up with a massive privacy and security hangover that companies are now trying to shake.”

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The idea of an external PCI-Express chassis for video cards is practically as old as PCI-Express itself. However over the years the idea has failed to reach the consumer market as a complete product, even with the introduction of standardized external PCIe interfaces such as Thunderbolt. Various prototypes have been shown, but in practice the only way to acquire such a rig has been to build it yourself, combining an ExpressCard slot and its pokey PCIe 2.0 x1 link with an external PCIe chassis.

Thankfully it looks like the PC industry is finally going to turn the corner on the concept thanks to Alienware. Today Alienware is introducing their own PCIe video card chassis, the Alienware Graphics Amplifier.

Alienware’s amplifier is a fairly typical take on the concept – there are only so many ways to build an external PCIe chassis – however Alienware has been able to put together something that is clearly tuned for video cards. The chassis itself houses a PSU and a single x16 PCIe slot for a video card, along with a quartet of USB 3.0 ports for any other I/O needs. Notably, Alienware has designed the amplifier to be able to handle double-wide video cards up to 375W, which is quite a bit more power than professional grade external PCIe chassis, and this means it can conceivably run just about any self-contained video card on the market. That said, like many small form factor computers the amplifier is also clearly designed for video cards with fully exhausting blowers, so it’s going to be best paired with reference model video cards since blowers are nearly non-existent in custom cards these days.

Alienware's Graphics Amplifier Opened (Image Courtesy Gizmodo)

More interesting perhaps is the PCIe interface, which up until now has always been the sticking point in getting a video card chassis to market. The good news is that Alienware has more or less solved the problem, but the bad news is that the interface is a proprietary Alienware/Dell design that is only available on their laptops. Alienware notes that the interface is actually a PCIe + USB interface – apparently carrying USB over from the host rather than using PCIe to power a separate controller – and in the meantime we’re still working to determine just how many PCIe lanes the interface is carrying. Even if it’s not a full 8 lanes (the Haswell U series CPUs don’t support 16 lanes), given the severe bandwidth limitations of ExpressCard and Thunderbolt, even a 4 lane setup would represent a significant improvement in bandwidth. Like Thunderbolt however this interface does appear to use active cabling (it would be very difficult to carry that much bandwidth externally without it), in which case the cable is going to be an expensive part of the entire setup.

On the host side, the amplifier is being launched alongside the Alienware 13, which will be the first of what will presumably be a series of Alienware laptops to support the amplifier’s interface. Rather than hanging off of spare PCIe lanes, we suspect some kind of MUX is in play here, as Alienware has noted that the 13’s internal dGPU (a GeForce 860M) has to be shut off to use the amplifier interface. Most likely Alienware is rerouting the GPU’s lanes to the interface when it’s in use. Activating or deactivating the interface does require a reboot, which although not especially convenient bypasses some very messy issues that could occur when hot-plugging an active GPU, and we suspect would otherwise be a show-stopper.

Alienware's Graphics Amplifier Up Close (Image Courtesy Gizmodo)

Meanwhile it’s interesting to note that in their development process Alienware has been able to solve some of the technical issues around an external video card in the process to better integrate it with the host. The video card in an amplifier can be used to drive both external and internal displays, meaning that it’s possible to use the amplifier to drive the 13’s built-in display and still reap the benefits, even without an external monitor. The overall non-portability of the 7lb+ amplifier and the USB ports strongly drives the amplifier towards being used as a docking station with an external monitor, but if you want to use it to drive the internal display that is going to be a viable option.

Moving on, Alienware is taking a vendor agnostic approach with the amplifier and will be supporting NVIDIA as well as AMD GPUs. There are still some additional technical details we’re chasing down on how this will work with the internal display capabilities, but ultimately it means the amplifier can be used with a wide range of cards from both vendors. That said, since the amplifier is going to be best paired with a blower type video card, NVIDIA’s cards are going to be the more natural fit at this time. Alienware has been showing the amplifier off with the GTX 980, and next to being the most powerful single-GPU video card on the market it also has a reference blower that is an excellent match for the amplifier’s cooling capabilities.

Finally and perhaps most importantly, Alienware has made it clear that the amplifier isn’t a prototype and won’t be vaporware, and that we’re looking at an external video card chassis that is actually going to ship. Alienware will begin taking orders for the amplifier today alongside the Alienware 13 laptop, with the hardware shipping in November. Even the price is decent (especially compared to DIY attempts), with the amplifier set to cost $299. This is on top of the price of the Alienware 13 laptop and the video card to fill the amplifier with, so the total cost of a setup is still going to be significant, but despite being the first shipping consumer solution it’s not priced through the roof.

"What's gaming like on the retina iMac, Mother?" "PRODUCING 4K SCREENSHOT TO DEMONSTRATE."

A few weeks ago, Apple updated its iMac desktop line with "Retina" displays—an Apple marketing term used to denote LCDs with a pixel density high enough that individual display elements are invisible to the unaided eye at typical viewing distances. On Apple’s iPhones, the "Retina" moniker means a PPI of at least 300; for MacBook Pro portables, it means about 220. The new iMac’s 27" 5120x2880 LCD panel has a PPI of 218, putting it just below the 15" MacBook Pro’s 220 PPI.

Those numbers translating into a stunning screen is unsurprising, and now that I’ve got one on my desk to play with, I’ll absolutely add my voice to the chorus of other reviewers saying that the new iMac looks amazing. I haven’t yet attached a colorimeter to the display and gone to town—that’s coming in the next few days—but here’s the color space information right out of the box:

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Alienware teased the new, smaller version of their gaming laptop in August. Available today, the Alienware 13 is the 4.5 pound little brother to the Alienware 14, but this gaming laptop has a twist. Alienware is offering an add-on Alienware Graphics Amplifier, which lets you plug a desktop GPU into this portable machine to dramatically increase performance.

Let us take a quick look at the new Alienware 13 though. While not as small as an ultrabook, it is significantly thinner than the 14 inch model, coming in at just under 1 inch thick. This, coupled with the two pounds less weight than the larger model, should make it a lot more portable.

The CPU will be Intel i5 and i7 Haswell U series parts, and the GPU offerings will be up to the NVIDIA GTX 860M. This will power a display, which at the default configuration is a lowly 1366x768 IPS panel, but luckily the display can be upgraded significantly with 1920x1080, and 2560x1440 options, as well as optional touch.

The base $999 model also comes with a 5400 rpm 1 TB hard drive as the base option, however the laptop can be outfitted with SSDs as well. In late 2014, it seems hard to believe that a $999 computer can still come with a slow mechanical hard drive, so hopefully the upgrade to SSD storage does not break the bank.

The star or the show though is the Alienware Graphics Amplifier, which is a first for this segment. Ryan will be covering this in full, but this $300 add-on is certainly a unique offering from Dell. With a dedicated 460 watt power supply just for the GPU, the amplifier should help the Alienware 13 with thermals when gaming on the discrete GPU. However, you can fall back to the GPU built into the laptop when you are on the go. Hopefully this adapter gets added to the entire Dell laptop line.

Unfortunately, details are light on this launch, with Alienware not releasing any press releases at the time of this writing. Check in to www.alienware.com starting today to check out all of the available pricing and options for the Alienware 13.

Sources: Gizmodo Hexus

Funding has been confirmed for a £97m supercomputer to improve the Met Office's weather forecasting and climate modelling.

Conservationists are warning that some of Britain's endangered plants are being put under even greater threat, because thieves are stealing them to order.

At its European TechEd conference today, Microsoft announced a range of new and improved features for its Linux-loving Azure cloud platform, Office 365, and management tools.

Chief among these was a set of new Office 365 APIs (and corresponding SDKs for iOS, Android, and Windows) exposing mail, calendars, contacts, and documents to developers.

One early adopter of these new APIs is IFTTT ("if this then that"), a popular service for cobbling together a wide range of online services. With IFTTT, it's easy to set up simple triggered actions, and now with Office 365 support, Office events will be able to trigger these actions. For example, users will be able to send themselves an SMS alert every time they receive an e-mail from a particular person.

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Due to a lack of total vertical integration and heavy focus on IP licensing, one of the more interesting aspects of the SoC development pipeline is that we get to see the architectures and chips developed and announced in a very decoupled fashion. As opposed to the PC industry where there is heavy vertical integration and architectures are usually announced close to (if not at the same time as) the first silicon and even the first finished products, in the SoC space we will frequently see the complete development cadence in public – architectures, chips, and finally finished products. This has its own ups and downs, and while it means we’ll potentially hear about a new architecture long before it’s available in a product, on the other hand we get a lot more visibility into what’s coming down the development pipeline, at least for companies that develop IP for licensing or purchase it for use in their SoCs.

This brings us to the matter of ARM and today’s announcements. As a massive ISA, CPU, and GPU licenser, ARM’s product lineup is the textbook case for early visibility. At a time when the first high-end 20nm SoCs are just now hitting consumer devices in products such as the Samsung Galaxy Note 4 International and Apple iPhone 6, ARM’s development pipeline and product marketing teams are already looking at next year’s products and what processor designs to prepare for them. For ARM’s GPU group in particular, whom now functionally operates on a yearly release cadence, the roll-out of Mali 700 equipped devices means that it’s time to announce the designs for next year’s GPUs.

To that end, today ARM is announcing the Mali 800 series. Designed for inclusion in 2015+ SoCs, the Mali 800 series is the immediate successor to the current Mali 700 series. From an architectural standpoint Mali 800 is still based on the same common Midgard architecture that the Mali 600 and Mali 700 series are based on, and as a result from an architectural standpoint there isn’t much to discuss. Midgard and its unusual all-ILP/no-TLP architecture is still a modern GPU architecture that supports up to OpenGL ES 3.1, the Android Extension Pack, and Direct3D 11.1, so from that standpoint ARM has little reason to change.

Consequently while still based on Midgard, the 800 series is a successive round of optimization for the Midgard designs. For this generation ARM has focused on further improving Midgard’s area and power efficiency while adding a handful of new features not found in the existing Mali 700 series. This refresh spans from ARM’s highest-end designs to lowest-end designs, and coupled with Mali’s multi-core scalability spans the SoC GPU market from top to bottom.

The Midgard Shader Core

ARM Mali 800 Series   T860 T830 T820 Core Configurations 1-16 1-4 1-4 ALU Pipes Per Core 2 2 1 Texture Units Per Core 1 1 1 FLOPs (FP32 MAD) 20 - 320 FLOPs 20 - 80 FLOPs 10 - 40 FLOPs OpenGL ES ES 3.1 + AEP ES 3.1 + AEP ES 3.1 + AEP Direct3D FL 11_1 FL 9_3 FL 9_3 10-Bit YUV Yes Optional Optional

 

Mali-T860

We’ll start off with ARM’s new high-end Mali design, the Mali-T860. With ARM reforming their product naming with the Mali 700 series ARM’s lineup is now much easier to follow, and as given away by the T860’s design it’s the immediate successor to the T760.

Like T760 before it, T860 is ARM’s most feature packed and most powerful Mali design. The underlying design uses the more common Midgard 2 arithmetic pipelines per core configuration, with the overall design being scalable to up to 16 cores. Coupled with the single texture unit per core, the throughput of a T860 design can scale from 20 FLOPs (10 MADs) and 1 texel per clock up to 320 FLOPs and 16 texels per clock. As a result this design can also be scaled up and down as needed to cover both phones and tablets just by varying the number of cores.

From a functionality standpoint, T860 will be the only Mali 800 part to support the 800 series’ fullest feature set. Specifically, support for Direct3D feature level 11_1 is limited to T860. Otherwise common to the entire 800 series, T860 also supports OpenGL ES 3.1, the Android Extension Pack, and OpenCL 1.2.

Meanwhile one notable feature addition for the Mali 800 family is support for native (and full speed) 10-bit YUV input and output. At the moment this feature addition is going to be of limited value, but HEVC is expected to make significant use of 10-bit YUV, so adding support here is laying the groundwork for HEVC in future products, and for that matter will go hand-in-hand with ARM’s new video processing block and display controller block, which are also being announced today.

Elsewhere from a performance standpoint ARM is offering the usual high level performance estimates. However it should be noted that these are compared to the two-generation old T628, and there aren’t similar numbers to work from for T760. In any case, compared to T628 ARM expects an equal configuration T860 to be some 45% more energy efficient on the same process node. And seeing as how mobile performance gains are almost entirely an exercise in energy efficiency, this would represent a very significant increase in energy efficiency (and ultimately sustainable performance) for their designs.

ARM Frame Buffer Compression - From Our Look at Midgard Earlier This Year

That said, by making a two-generation old comparison ARM also gets to roll up the benefits of their AFBC frame buffer compression technology, which was first introduced on the Mali 700 series. AFBC is something the company is significantly banking on due to the high bandwidth savings, and ARM considers one of their greatest feature advantages for the 800 series as well as the 700 series.

Finally, something to also keep in mind though is that while ARM’s same-node comparison is the fairest way to look at architectural efficiency, you’re highly unlikely to see T628 manufactured on 20nm+ processes. So on top of the architectural gains over the years, the real world performance gains for T860 should be better still due to the newer process node.

Mali-T830 & Mali-T820

Also being announced today alongside the T860 and rounding out the new Mali 800 family are the T830 and T820. These parts are best described as ARM’s low-end and mainstream designs, and are the successors to the T720. With Mali T860 essentially scaling down to cover most of the mid-range, the T820 and T830 are intended to be lower performance, lower power consuming parts that are optimized around power and die size needs.

For the Mali 800 series ARM is bifurcating the T720’s market a bit to offer different blends of die size and performance. The T720’s immediate successor is the T820, and like its predecessor is a one arithmetic pipeline design that is focused first and foremost on die size. Meanwhile new to the 800 series, though still a successor of sorts to the T720, is the Mali-T830. This is a more powerful design that while still focused on die size efficiency brings the number of pipelines to two per core (like T860), offering better performance in exchange for a slightly larger die size.

Other than the difference in the number of pipelines, the T820 and T830 designs are extremely similar. Both of them can be scaled up to 4 cores, allowing for some performance scaling. This puts the throughput of T820 designs at a range of 10 FLOPs and 1 texel per clock to 40 FLOPs and 4 texels per clock, while T830 will scale from 20/1 to 80/4 respectively.

From a feature standpoint, as previously mentioned only T860 gets the fullest Mali feature set while the other Mali 800 parts will be a bit more modest. T830 and T820 only support Direct3D up to feature level 9_3, while for the more mobile-centric world they will be on par with the T860 and support OpenGL ES 3.1 and the Android Extension Pack. Meanwhile 10-bit YUV support is present here, however for T820 and T830 it is an optional feature that will depend on which specific version of the core is licensed, so we will likely see a mix of retail products that do and do not include it.

Finally from a performance standpoint ARM is once again offering some high level guidance compared to the Mali 600 series, specifically the Mali-T622 in this case. Depending on the 800 design used, ARM tells us that performance should be up to 55% better or area efficiency will be 50% better. Presumably the area efficiency comparison is for T820 while the performance comparison is for T830.

Closing Thoughts

Launching alongside the new Mali GPUs today are a series of updates for the rest of ARM’s graphics stack, which will see the Mali-V video block and Mali-DP display controllers updated respectively. Along with the general strength of the Mali GPUs, expect to see ARM focus heavy on the synergy between these parts, including their common support for AFBC and of course the benefits of having all graphics components developed together. We’re covering these in another article, but we wanted to quickly point out where the Mali GPUs fit in the bigger picture of ARM’s announcements today.

Finally, while ARM doesn't have complete control over consumer devices (since they only sell designs to chipmakers) they are providing a rough estimate of when to expect Mali 800 GPUs to begin appearing in devices. According to ARM we should expect to start seeing Mali 800 devices starting in late 2015, or roughly a year from now. This is consistent with the Mali 700 series, which having been announced almost a year ago to this day has started to show up in consumer devices very recently. To that end we would expect to start seeing Mali 800 SoC designs announced in the first half of next year, with consumer designs to follow as per ARM's timetable.

As part of ARM’s fall refresh of their Mali graphics product lineup, today ARM is announcing refreshes and new products in a number of product segments. All told ARM is releasing new GPUs, a new video process, and a new display processor. Having already taken a look at the new Mali 800 series GPUs separately, let’s dive into the other part of today’s announcements from ARM, focusing on the video processor and the display processor.

As ARM seeks to be a nearly top-to-bottom processor IP vendor, alongside their well-known Cortex CPU designs and Mali-T GPU designs the company also offers the other processors needed to complete the graphics stack. Alongside the GPU designs these are the Mali-V video processors for real-time video encode and decode, and the Mali-DP display processors. In the scope of today’s announcements both parts are receiving feature updates to add new functionality and to keep them up to par with the capabilities of the new Mali GPUs. Overall ARM is making a significant emphasis on 4K this year, lining up the hardware necessary to decode and render to 4K, and to do so within the bandwidth constrains of an SoC.

Mali-V550

Starting things off we have ARM’s new video processor, the Mali-V550. With the V550 ARM is introducing full HEVC support into their video processor, building off of the H.264 support present in the earlier V500. Like the V500 the V550 is a video decode and encode processor, so with today’s update ARM’s product stack gains the ability to do both HEVC decoding and encoding.

Overall V550 retains V500’s basic architectural design, which not unlike ARM’s GPUs is based around the concept of cores. In this case the number of cores can be scaled up to support additional streams or higher resolutions/framerates, with ARM supporting 1080p60 on a single core and scaling up to 2160p120 on the largest 8 core configuration. This of course goes for both encode and decode performance.

Along with the addition of HEVC support, V550 also introduces a couple of other new features to the Mali video processor. ARM can now process 10-bit YUV video, which is expected to see significant usage with HEVC and goes hand-in-hand with the 10-bit YUV support added to the Mali 800 GPUs.

Meanwhile ARM is introducing a new video encoding feature for V550 dubbed Motion Search Elimination, which is intended to reduce video latency and power requirements. MSE borrows heavily from ARM’s transaction elimination technology, which was introduced on the Mali 700 series and reduced memory bandwidth by using CRCs to identify unchanged screen tiles and to avoid writing those redundant tiles out to the frame buffer. In the case of MSE the idea is quite similar, only this time ARM applies the tile principle to video encoding instead of rendering. By identifying unchanged tiles, ARM can then skip the motion estimation step of H.264 video encoding for those tiles, which saves on time and power doing what would otherwise be a redundant encoding step.

Eliminating motion estimation should have an immediate impact on power consumption, as it’s generally considered the most time consuming step of the encoding process. However along with the power savings from skipping motion estimation, ARM is also touting this as a means of reducing encoding latency, something which would be very important for wireless display technologies such as Miracast. The benefits would be variable at best, but for transmitting desktops and other semi-static content it should have an impact on encode latency and therefore overall input lag on such setups.

One thing to note though is that like 10-bit YUV, MSE will require the rest of the processing pipeline to support this feature. In this case the display processor (which is piping the display output back to the video processor) needs to support the technology.

Mali-DP550

And speaking of the display processor, we have ARM’s final announcement of the day, which is the Mali-DP550 display controller. Like the V550 video processor, the DP550 is an ecosystem play that sees some general feature enhancements along with reciprocal support for other new features introduced on ARM’s latest GPUs and video processors.

From a high level overview, ARM’s display processors serve as both a display controller and a sort of simple GPU of their own, handling basic operations such as scaling and layer composition along with interfacing with the display itself. By doing this in fixed function hardware as opposed to the more flexible but power hungry GPU, ARM is able to save some power by avoiding sending off this simple work to the GPU.

For DP550, ARM has scaled up its performance to handle 4K resolutions along with more complex composition tasks. Whereas DP500 could only composite up to 3 layers and work with sub-4K panels, DP550 can drive 4K panels while compositing up to 7 layers. From a phone and tablet perspective it seems questionable if we’re going to see 4K in those devices any time soon, but for ARM’s secondary TV market, being 4K capable on DP550 will be a big deal.

Meanwhile DP550 adds reciprocal support for other features added to the Mali 800 GPUs and Mali-V550 video processor, including motion search elimination and 10-bit YUV for video. Also of note, ARM has added a co-processor interface to DP550 to allow it to directly interface with 3rd party processor blocks, though ARM hasn’t gone into detail on what they expect those 3rd party blocks to be.

Finally, like the Mali 800 GPUs, ARM is releasing these designs to SoC integrators today. Which means we should start seeing the V550 and DP550 appear in retail products by the end of next year.

Ron Amadeo

Update: For those of you that want a transcript of our conversation it's right here.

MOUNTAIN VIEW, CA—In just a few weeks, Google will be pushing out one of its largest Android releases ever: Android 5.0, Lollipop. The update changes nearly every aspect of the OS—a new design for every app, a new runtime, lots of new features, and a focus on battery life. The company is also launching a pair of new Nexus flagships, the Nexus 6 and Nexus 9, aiming for a more premium market, and the first Android TV device, the Nexus Player. Together with the release of Google Inbox and a new Wear update, we're in the middle of a very busy few weeks.

We sat down with a few high-ranking members of the Android Team to get a better idea of what this new wave of Android devices will bring. At building 43 at Google's headquarters, Dave Burke, VP of engineering for the Android platform and Nexus devices; Brian Rakowski, VP of product management, and Gabe Cohen, the team's group product manager, were all gracious enough to talk to us about the future direction of Android.

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It was only four months ago that Microsoft increased the available OneDrive storage for Office 365 subscribers to one terabyte, and apparently there was still room for improvement. Today, on the OneDrive blog, Microsoft announced that Office 365 subscribers will now be offered unlimited OneDrive storage. The last year or two have seen a dramatic shift in the Cloud Storage segment, with the major providers like Google, Amazon, Microsoft, and others all jockeying for position. Microsoft had already thrown down the gauntlet in June by offering up to 5 TB (1 TB x 5 users) for $99.99 per year with Office 365 Home, but no longer willing to rest on their laurels they announced what will be the final storage increase for Office 365.

Consumer Cloud Offerings   OneDrive Google Drive iCloud Drive DropBox Box Amazon Cloud Drive Free Storage 15 GB 15 GB 5 GB 2 GB 10 GB 5 GB Paid Storage (USD/year) 100 GB - $24
200 GB - $48
Unlimited - $70 (With Office 365 Personal)
Unlimited x 5 users - $100 (Office 365 Home) 100 GB - $24
1 TB - $120
10 TB - $1200
20 TB - $2400
30 TB - $3600 20 GB - $12
200 GB - $50
500 GB - $120
1 TB - $240 1 TB - $100 100 GB - $120 20 GB - $10
50 GB - $25
100 GB - $50
200 GB - $100
500 GB - $250
1 TB - $500 Versioning Office files (30 days) Yes (30 days) No Yes (30 days)
Unlimited with PackRat addon No (Personal Tier) No File Restore Yes (1 year) Yes (30 days) No Yes (30 days)
Unlimited with PackRat addon Yes (30 days) Yes Operating System Support Windows
OS X
Android
iOS
Windows Phone Windows
OS X
Chrome OS
Android
iOS Windows
OS X
iOS Windows
OS X
Linux
Android
iOS
BlackBerry
Kindle Fire Windows
OS X
Android
iOS
Windows Phone
BlackBerry Windows
OS X
Android
iOS
Kindle Fire

That is not to say that there is still not room for improvement with OneDrive. In September, Microsoft announced an increase in the maximum file size for OneDrive, which now sits at 10 GB per file. That is a great increase over the relatively tiny 2 GB file size limit that was imposed before, but when you offer unlimited file space, it would be nice if unlimited file size was offered as well.

When you are talking about allowing users to store all of their data forever, I believe some more work needs to be done on the Recycle Bin as well. The increase in Recycle Bin time from thirty days to one year is a good step, but OneDrive only supports versioning for Office Files, which may leave someone stuck if they accidentaly save over their original photos as an example. More emphasis needs to be placed on the recovery tools now that cloud storage is offering so much capacity.

Still, Microsoft has a very tempting offer, and you can see why their transition to Office 365 on both the consumer and business end have seen such large gains in their quarter end results. For less than 60% of the cost of 1 TB of Google Drive, Office 365 personal gives unlimited storage as well as the full Office Suite for both the desktop and tablet. For the household, Office 365 Home allows the same benefits but expands it to five users.

There are still advantages to other platforms though. Some people love the ease of use and API features available in Dropbox, whereas others live and work in the Google ecosystem and would therefore be more likely to opt for Google Drive. Apple, though late to the Cloud Drive party, now offers iCloud Drive as well for those in the Apple ecosystem.

It will be interesting what happens next. Many of the cloud drive solutions leverage third party data storage (AWS, Rackspace, Azure, and the like) and they will have difficulty competing on price alone.

The new storage caps will increase from the current 1 TB limit over the next couple of months for all users, but if you want to jump in as quick as you can you can visit this link to get on the wait list. Office 365 for Business customers will need to wait a bit longer to move past 1 TB, with rollout expected starting in 2015.

Competition in this space has been intense, and while I do not see anyone competing any longer on price, features and api support may well be the next battleground for your cloud storage dollars.

Update: One of our readers let us know that the Recycle Bin has changed from 30 days to 1 year, so the story and table have been updated to reflect this. Thanks deeksterjay!

Source: OneDrive blog