Since the introduction of Direct3D 12 and other low-level graphics APIs, the bulk of our focus has been on the high end. One of the most immediate benefits to these new APIs is their ability to better scale out with multiple threads and alleviate CPU bottlenecking, which has been a growing problem over the years due to GPU performance gains outpacing CPU performance gains.

However at the opposite end of the spectrum and away from the performance benefits are the efficiency benefits, and those are gains that haven’t been covered nearly as well. With that subject in mind, Intel is doing just that this week at SIGGRAPH 2014, where the company is showcasing both the performance and efficiency gains from Direct3D 12 on their hardware.

When it comes to power efficiency Intel stands to be among the biggest beneficiaries of Direct3D 12 due to the fact that they exclusvely ship their GPUs as part of an integrated CPU/GPU product. Because the GPU and CPU portions of their chips share a thermal and power budget, by reducing the software/CPU overhead of Direct3D, Intel can offer both improved performance and power usage with the exact same silicon in the same thermal environment. With Intel's recent focus on power consumption, mobile form factors, and chips like Core M, Direct3D 12 is an obvious boon to Intel.

Intel wisely demonstrated this improvement using a modern low-power mobile device: the Microsoft Surface Pro 3. For this demo Intel is using the Core i5-4300U version, Microsoft’s middle of the road model that clocks up to 2.9GHz on the CPU and features one of Intel’s HD 4400 GPUs, with a maximum GPU clockspeed of 1.1GHz. In our testing, we found the Surface Pro 3 to be thermally constrained – throttling when met with a medium to long duration GPU task. Broadwell should go a long way to improve the situation, and so should Direct3D 12 for current and future Intel devices.

To demonstrate the benefits of Direct3D 12, Intel put together a tech demo that renders 50,000 unique asteroid objects floating in space. The demo can operate in maximum performance mode with the frame rate unrestricted, as well as a fixed frame rate mode to limit CPU and GPU utilization in order to reduce power consumption. The demo can also dynamically switch between making Direct3D 11 and Direct3D 12 API calls. Additionally, an overlay shows power consumption of both the CPU and GPU portions of the Intel processor.

Intel states this demo data was taken after steady-state thermals were reached.

In the performance mode, Direct3D 11 reaches 19 frames per second and the power consumption is roughly evenly split between CPU and GPU. Confirming that while this is a graphical demo, there is significant CPU activity and overhead from handling so many draw calls.

After dynamically switching to Direct3D 12 while in performance mode, the frames per second jumps nearly 75% to 33fps and the power consumption split goes from 50/50 (CPU/GPU) to 25/75. The lower CPU overhead of making Direct3D 12 API calls versus Direct3D 11 API calls allows Intel's processor to maintain its thermal profile but shift more of its power budget to the GPU, improving performance.

Finally, in the power efficiency focused fixed frame rate mode, switching between Direct3D 11 and 12 slightly reduces GPU power consumption but dramatically reduces CPU power consumption, all while maintaining the same 19fps frame rate. Intel's data shows a 50% total power reduction, virtually all of which comes from CPU power savings. As Intel notes, not only do they save power from having to do less work overall, but they also save power because they are able to better distribute the workload over more CPU cores, allowing each core in turn to run at a lower clockspeed and voltage for greater power efficiency.

To put these numbers in perspective, a 50% reduction in power consumption is about what we would see from a new silicon process (i.e. moving from 22nm to 14nm), so to achieve such a reduction in consumption with software alone is a very significant result and a feather in Microsoft’s cap for Direct3D 12. If this carries over to when DirectX 12 games and applications launch in Q4 2015, it could help usher in a new era of mobile gaming and high end graphics. It is not often we see such a substantial power and performance improvement from a software update.

Source: Intel, Microsoft

With compact cases and SSFs being all the rage nowadays, today Corsair is launching the Carbide Air 240, a cubic Micro-ATX case designed to fit powerful PC hardware. As the name suggests, it is based on the design of the Full-ATX Carbide Air 540 that released last year. Can the smaller version make the same impact impact as its larger, older brother? We will find out in this review.

Aurich Lawson

The shift from copper landlines to fiber-based voice networks is continuing apace, and no one wants it to happen faster than Verizon.

Internet users nationwide are clamoring for fiber, as well, hoping it can free them from slower DSL service or the dreaded cable companies. But not everyone wants fiber, because, when it comes to voice calls, the newer technology doesn’t have all the benefits of the old copper phone network. In particular, fiber doesn’t conduct electricity, where copper does. That means when your power goes out, copper landlines might keep working for days or weeks by drawing electricity over the lines, while a phone that relies on fiber will only last as long as its battery. That's up to eight hours for Verizon’s most widely available backup system.

Thus, while many customers practically beg for fiber, others—particularly those who have suffered through long power outages—want Verizon to keep maintaining the old copper lines. But Verizon continues pressuring customers to switch, and it’s getting harder to say no.

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The day was Tuesday, August 12th 2014. I arrived home, only to find an almost unusable internet situation in my home. Some sites such as AnandTech and Google worked fine, but large swaths of the internet such as Microsoft, Netflix, and many other sites were unreachable. As I run my own DNS servers, I assumed it was a DNS issue, however a couple of ICMP commands later and it was clear that this was a much larger issue than just something affecting my household.

Two days later, and there is a pretty clear understanding of what happened. Older Cisco core internet routers with a default configuration only allowed for a maximum 512k routes for their Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) tables. With the internet always growing, the number of routes surpassed that number briefly on Tuesday, which caused many core routers to be unable to route traffic.

BGP is not something that is discussed very much, due to the average person never needing to worry about it, but it is one of the most used and most important protocols on the internet. The worst part of the outage was that it was known well in advance that this would be an issue, yet it still happened.

Let us dig into the root cause. Most of us have a home network of some sort, with a router, and maybe a dozen or so devices on the network. We connect to an internet service provider through (generally) a modem. When devices on your local network want to talk to other devices on your network, they do so by sending packets upstream to the switch (which is in most cases part of the router) and then the switch forwards the packet to the correct port where the other device is connected. If the second device is not on the local network, the packets get sent to the default gateway which then forwards them upstream to the ISP. At the ISP level, in simple terms, it works very similarly to your LAN. The packet comes in to the ISP network, and if the IP address is something that is in the ISP’s network, it gets routed there, but if it is something on the internet, the packet is forwarded. The big difference though is that an ISP does not have a single default gateway, but instead connects to several internet backbones. The method in which internet packages are routed is based on the Border Gateway Protocol. The BGP contains a table of IP subnets, and lists which ports to transfer traffic based on rules and paths laid out by the network administrator. For instance, if you want to connect to Google to check your Gmail, your computer will send a TCP connection to 173.194.33.111 (or another address as determined by your DNS settings and location). Your ISP will receive this packet, and send the packet to the correct port to an outbound part of the internet which is closer to the subnet that the address is in. If you then want to connect to Anandtech.com, the packet will be sent to 192.65.241.100, and the BGP protocol of the ISP router will then send to possibly a different port. This continues upstream from core router to core router until the packet reaches the destination subnet, where it is then sent to the web server.

With the BGP tables being overfilled on certain routers in the chain, packets send to specific routers would then be dropped at some point in the chain, meaning you would not have any service.

The actual specifics of what happened seemed to be that Verizon unintentionally added approximately 15,000 /24 routes into the global routing table. These prefixes were supposed to be aggregated, but this didn’t happen, and as such, the total number of subnet prefixes in the table spiked. Verizon fixed the mistake quickly, but it still caused many routers to fail.

Although you could be quick to jump and blame Verizon for the outage, it has to be noted that Cisco issued a warning to customers explaining that the memory which is allocated for the BGP table would be very close to being full, and gave specific instructions on how to correct it. This warning came several months ago. Unfortunately not all customers of Cisco heeded or received the warning, which caused the brief spike to cripple parts of the internet.

Newer Cisco routers were not affected, because the default configuration for the TCAM memory which is designated for the BGP table allows for more than 512,000 entries. Older routers from Cisco have enough physical memory for up to 1,000,000 entries, assuming the configuration was changed as outlined by Cisco.

The effects of outages like this can be quite potent on the internet economy, with several online services being unavailable for large parts of the day. However this outage doesn’t need to happen again, even though the steady state number of entries in the BGP table will likely exceed magic 512,000 number again. Hopefully with this brief outage, lessons can be learned, and equipment can be re-configured or upgraded which will prevent this particular issue from rearing its head again in the future.

 

Sources

DSLReports

Renesys

BGPMon

Ana Luiza Cunha

A group of five Muslims (four of whom are United States citizens) have sued top American government officials, alleging that their constitutional rights have been violated for having been put on a federal watch list.

The plaintiffs' lawsuit, which was filed on Thursday in federal court in Detroit, accuses numerous leaders—including the attorney general, the directors of the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security, and others—of violating their constitutional rights to due process and the right to be free from religious discrimination.

In the complaint, each person outlines a similar story: being detained at the border, often having digital devices seized, and being subject to prolonged physical searches. One was told that he was on the no-fly list and was later offered a chance to work on behalf of federal law enforcement in exchange for removal. He seems to have declined.

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Microsoft has had "passionate" discussions about renaming Internet Explorer to distance the browser from its tarnished image, according to answers from members of the developer team given in a reddit Ask Me Anything session today.

In spite of significant investment in the browser—with the result that Internet Explorer 11 is really quite good—many still regard the browser with contempt, soured on it by the lengthy period of neglect that came after the release of the once-dominant version 6. Microsoft has been working to court developers and get them to give the browser a second look, but the company still faces an uphill challenge.

Renaming the browser could be seen as a way of breaking from the past and distancing the new, actively maintained, standards-driven browser from this legacy. The team was asked if it had considered such a renaming, and the answer was yes. The browser developers didn't completely rule out the possibility for the future, either, noting that the discussion was "very recent" and asking rhetorically "Who knows what the future holds :)"

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In a high-profile civil case involving a disgraced ex-Texas sheriff, a judge has prohibited the plaintiff's attorneys from tweeting the deposition of the defendant as it happens.

Earlier this summer, former Hidalgo County Sheriff Lupe Treviño was sentenced to five years in prison for a money laundering scheme that involved taking campaign contributions from drug trafficker Tomas "El Gallo" Gonzalez. Treviño, however, is still facing several civil lawsuits, including one from a former contender for the sheriff's position, Republican candidate Robert Caples.

In a deposition on August 1, Caples' attorney, Javier Peña, questioned Treviño, and members of Peña's law firm tweeted Treviño's responses. Although the session was supposed to last six hours, Treviño's defense attorney, Preston Henrichson, shut down the session after a little more than four hours, objecting to the questioning and the tweeting. On Wednesday, Judge Rudy Delgado of the Texas State District Court said that the deposition would be allowed to continue on Friday for the one hour and 48 minutes left to Peña's firm, but that tweeting details would be out of the question.

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Former Microsoft programmer Allen Murray took credit this week for pushing banner ads on the Xbox 360's dashboard, including these that he says he helped design.

The Xbox 360 may have blazed a trail in connecting console players via online gaming, but with that service came an unpopular side effect: banner ads, designed to be downloaded and updated on a regular basis by all of those online players. As the 360 tiptoes toward its tenth anniversary, Allen Murray, a former Xbox programmer, used his own 10-year mark in the games industry to get something off his chest. Banner ads are his fault, he said, and they came after he argued with coworkers who actually didn't want them on Xbox 360.

In a Gamasutra post on Monday, Murray described his start with Microsoft in 2004 as a Web services layer programmer, where he became intimately acquainted with the Xbox Live Arcade initiative—and realized how hard its games were to find for players unaware of a console-specific game-download shop. "It was several clicks down in the UI, hidden from the player," Murray complained, so he asked for a meeting with an unnamed boss to discuss adding promotional content to the in-development dashboard.

According to Murray, he was met with immediate resistance—"Banner ads? Like on websites?"—and was told that "gamers would hate ads." Murray used the post to recall why his sales pitch failed at first: "My choice of language, using terms like ‘advertising’ and 'banner ads,’ conveyed a tone of corporate soullessness. This was games! We were supposed to be cool and 'fuck the man' and all that shit."

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Sony

This week's gaming news has been dominated by Microsoft's controversial decision to buy timed Xbox exclusivity for the next Tomb Raider game. While this is not an unusual practice historically, a Sony executive is trying to make some hay by saying the PlayStation 4 doesn't need to buy exclusive games. Except when it does...

In an interview with CVG, PlayStation Europe's Jim Ryan said that Sony's stable of first- and second-party exclusives, as well as exclusive and early content in games like Destiny, is enough to make the PlayStation 4 compelling.

"So do we feel the need to go out and buy outright exclusivity? Probably not," Ryan said. "You saw last night [at Sony's press conference] that before the media briefing we showed updated videos of games that we had revealed at E3. That's because we wanted to keep the show itself full of new, fresh things. We think that gave us a good, strong, convincing portfolio of exclusive stuff, and we're happy with that."

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Greetings, Arsians! Our partners at LogicBuy are back with a ton of deals for this week. Have you backed up your files lately? The featured deal today is a 1TB portable hard drive from Toshiba for just $59.99. Nobody likes backing up files, but with USB 3.0, your backups should go just a little bit faster. The drive and a ton of other deals are below. Enjoy!

Featured deal

• Toshiba Canvio Basics 1TB USB 3.0 Portable Hard Drive for $59.99 with free shipping (list price $119.99)

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Lenovo's smartphones are primarily sold overseas, but it's making moves that could significantly expand its presence. Lenovo

Lenovo posted its first-quarter financial results last night (PDF), and overall the news was good. Revenue was up 11 percent compared to the same quarter last year, and profit after operating expenses was up to $283 million from $202 million. These aren't huge numbers if you're used to looking at results from, say, Apple or Google or Microsoft. But overall Lenovo seems to be doing a good job of keeping its head above water and growing share in a time when that's hardly guaranteed for old-guard PC companies. In fact, Lenovo has been one of the few companies to grow faster than the wider PC industry over the last three-or-so years, as tablets and smartphones have taken a sizable chunk out of the traditional PC market.

Even more interesting was the information Lenovo presented about its smartphone sales—the company says it is now the largest seller of smartphones in its home market of China, though worldwide it's still a fairly distant fourth. Lenovo doesn't have a presence in the US market, but increasing share in China has become a major goal for other smartphone makers of late. Apple was very enthusiastic about its partnership with China Mobile earlier this year, and Apple's earnings drive home the extent to which China and other non-US markets are driving the company's continuing growth. Lenovo also says that 20 percent of its smartphone sales are coming from other countries, up from five percent a year ago—it's slowly beginning to expand outside of its home country, something that Xiaomi, Huawei, and other Asian phone companies are also looking to do.

Lenovo

From that perspective, Lenovo's pending purchase of Motorola from Google makes a lot of sense. Why fight to expand your market share when you can buy a ready-made smartphone manufacturer for relatively little money (at least, compared to what Google paid for it in 2011)? Motorola has lost money so consistently under Google's leadership that Lenovo's purchase might seem odd, but it gets the company a foothold in established Western markets and will help Lenovo expand its presence in other markets, too.

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Via Tsuji

The National League of Cities, a group of municipalities from across the United States, announced Thursday that it was forming a new network of startups, cities, and academics to “identify the regulatory challenges posed by the disruptive technologies that power the sharing economy.”

The aptly named “Sharing Economy Advisory Network” comes as many of its member cities have conducted sting operations and issued citations against companies like Lyft and Uber, which allow users to summon cars with the tap of a smartphone app. These cities say that such firms operate as illegal taxis and should be subject to relevant legislation. Both Lyft and Uber have previously fought and won similar battles in some jurisdictions: California formalized rideshare operations in September 2013.

For now, Gregory Minchak, a spokesman for the National League of Cities, underscored that while the umbrella group is a founding member, no individual cities have specifically joined the Sharing Economy Advisory Network to date.

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Radioman Sanya Sotkin wants you to send him WebMoney to help him out of his fix, so to speak. http://instagram.com/sanya_sotkin

Alexander “Sanya” Sotkin, the Russian soldier who posted a self-portrait of himself to Instagram from within Ukraine, is now using his social media following to beg for money. Apparently a sergeant in the Russian Army’s signal corps, Sotkin has posted pleas on Instagram and Twitter for “financial aid,” giving two WebMoney accounts for donations.

“Hello! Black PR created a big problem for me! Now I need financial aid,” Sotkin posted on Twitter on August 12. He posted a screenshot of the tweet on his Instagram account, as well as an image of him holding a piece of paper with two WebMoney account numbers. The Twitter account includes links to his VKontakte account, which lists his Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, and Skype accounts along with his mobile number.

Sotkin drew worldwide attention on Instagram when it was discovered that two posts he made showed up on Instagram’s Photo Map as being taken within Ukraine. However, there is some dispute over whether the photos were actually taken within Ukrainian territory. Depending on the location service used and distortion from the vehicle he was in when he posted the picture, his position could have been miles from where the location data shows, across the border to the north or south of the strip of eastern Ukraine he appeared to be in. The photos appear to have been taken inside a Russian BTR-90 wheeled armored vehicle equipped as a communications vehicle.

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Michael Rubenstein, Harvard

There is something magical about seeing 1,000 robots move when humans are not operating any of them. And in a new study published in Science, researchers have created just that. This swarm of 1,000 robots can assemble themselves into complex shapes without the need for a central brain or a human controller.

Self-assembly of this kind can be found in nature—from molecules forming regular crystals and cells forming tissues, to ants building rafts to float on water and birds flocking to avoid becoming prey. Complex forms emerge from local interactions among thousands, millions, or even trillions of limited and unreliable individual elements.

These self-organized systems have interesting features. First, they are decentralized—that is, they don't need a central brain or leader. Second, they are scalable, so you can add large numbers of individuals. Third, they are robust—individuals that are unreliable don't break the system.

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When I first started reading Ars Technica, performance of a processor was measured in megahertz, and the major manufacturers were rushing to squeeze as many of them as possible into their latest silicon. Shortly thereafter, however, the energy needs and heat output of these beasts brought that race crashing to a halt. More recently, the number of processing cores rapidly scaled up, but they quickly reached the point of diminishing returns. Now, getting the most processing power for each Watt seems to be the key measure of performance.

None of these things happened because the companies making processors ran up against hard physical limits. Rather, computing power ended up being constrained because progress in certain areas—primarily energy efficiency—was slow compared to progress in others, such as feature size. But could we be approaching physical limits in processing power? In this week's edition of Nature, The University of Michigan's Igor Markov takes a look at the sorts of limits we might face.

Clearing hurdles

Markov notes that, based on purely physical limitations, some academics have estimated that Moore's law had hundreds of years left in it. In contrast, the International Technology Roadmap for Semiconductors (ITRS), a group sponsored by the major semiconductor manufacturing nations, gives it a couple of decades. And the ITRS can be optimistic; it once expected that we would have 10GHz CPUs back in the Core2 days. The reason for this discrepancy is that a lot of hard physical limits never come into play.

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Facebook

Facebook has added the ability for marketers to track customers across devices when a displayed ad is followed by a purchase, according to a blog post from the company Wednesday. "Cross-device reporting" will allow advertisers to track users' activity across multiple devices, including smartphones, tablets, and computers, to better understand how their ads convert viewers into customers.

Facebook writes that it has long offered "conversion measurement," a metric to show how often a displayed ad results in a successful sale, on a per-device basis. If a user clicked an ad on his or her phone and bought the product it was showing, Facebook would be able to tell that advertiser about it. Now, if a user views an ad on his or her phone and then later gets on a computer to buy the product shown, Facebook will be able to know about those actions and report them back to advertisers, too, all thanks to the ubiquitous Facebook login.

In an infographic accompanying the post, Facebook pointed out that cross-device conversion rates can be as high as 32 percent for a clicked ad within a time span of 28 days. While the new metric does give a new concrete dimension to marketers, it has another benefit: showing how effective Facebook advertising can be on Facebook users.

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T-Mobile

An internal T-Mobile memo published by TmoNews says the company will begin enforcing rules against peer-to-peer (P2P) file sharing and unauthorized tethering from August 17 onward.

The terms and conditions of T-Mobile US have contained restrictions on P2P and tethering since 2008, but enforcement appears to be new. The memo says that "only customers with Unlimited High-Speed Data" will be affected, and they will be given warnings before their data speeds are reduced.

“T-mobile has identified customers who are heavy data users and are engaged in peer-to-peer file sharing, and tethering outside of T-Mobile’s Terms and Conditions (T&C)," the leaked memo states. "This results in a negative data network experience for T-Mobile customers. Beginning August 17, T-Mobile will begin to address customers who are conducting activities outside of T-Mobile’s T&Cs.”

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Today, HTC is finally launching their Zoe application. Normally, such an announcement is rolled into a smartphone launch, but the launch of this application is one of the first to stand alone. In fact, this is the first application launched by HTC Creative Labs. As a result, the vision and strategy behind this application is dramatically different from HTC's existing hardware and software divisions.

But before we dive into what this means for HTC, it's important to see what this application is. In short, Zoe is the culmination of multiple pieces of HTC Sense, packaged into a single application. It integrates the video highlights feature first introduced in Sense 5, and effectively brings back the HTC Share application which disappeared with the launch of the One (M8). For those that haven't kept up with what these features are, video highlights was an extension of the gallery application in HTC Sense, which allowed for automatic creation of ~30 second highlight reels. These highlight reels were automatically set to music with specific cuts and animations based upon the theme selected. HTC Share was simply a method to present highlight reels and all of the photos/Zoes used in a highlight reel over social media. Both of these were well-received when they first launched, and even now they're good features to have.

There's definitely more to Zoe though, as HTC has integrated a social network aspect with the ability to collaborate and remix other people's videos. While viewing highlight reels from friends using the Zoe network is expected, HTC has also integrated a discovery feature to see highlight reels from other people. In summary, the Zoe application brings HTC's video highlights feature and HTC Share to smartphones running Android 4.4 and adds a social network aspect on top.

In practice, it works just as expected in theory. HTC has done a surprisingly good job of bringing the Sense 6 UX to devices like the Galaxy S5, although some aspects like the status bar don't carry over perfectly. HTC has done a good job of providing a small taste of the well-designed HTC Sense 6 UI without removing major selling points from HTC devices. HTC emphasized that the major goal for this application was to become widely adopted, as while these features were good selling points for HTC hardware there was no real way to add a social network on top without making these features available to non-HTC devices.

In discussions with HTC, it seems clear that they are prioritizing user experience first over a monetization strategy. This is made clearer by the fact that there aren't any in-app purchases at this point in time. Of course, there are plenty of possibilities in this area once Zoe becomes widely adopted. Premium themes and music, along with in-app advertising were all mentioned as ways that HTC could bring in revenue. While HTC wasn't clear on how this would drive hardware sales, it wouldn't be surprising to see features exclusive to HTC devices in the future. It's surprising how far HTC has come in their software design, and I wouldn't be surprised to see this take off. Even if people aren't interested in the social networking aspect, the ability to create highlight videos and share them on pre-existing social networks is quite compelling. The social features also have great potential in situations where multiple people attend an event and take photos and videos on multiple devices. However, it's not quite clear whether this will gain the popularity of applications like Instagram and Twitter, and even if that happens it's currently hard to see the benefits to HTC's hardware division.

As of publication, the HTC Zoe Beta is available on the Play Store. HTC has stated that Android 4.4 devices should be compatible with this application although there may be additional restrictions.

Unusual weather in the Western US has caused an apparent "swap" in weather systems between Arizona and Washington State.

Motorola is getting ready to unleash a wave of new hardware, if rumors are to be believed. Motorola

Fans of the Moto X and those drooling over early previews of the Moto 360 smartwatch have been waiting for months for official launch information, and it looks like we might finally have it. Motorola began sending out invitations to an event happening on September 4 in Chicago, and the company's teaser site for the event shows pictures of a watch, what appears to be a Bluetooth headset, and the Moto X and G. The Moto 360 was said to be launching in the summer of 2014, a promise that Motorola would just barely be keeping since the autumnal equinox happens on the 23rd, and rumors about a "Moto X+1" and a "Moto G2" have been swirling for several months now.

A telltale teaser from Motorola's site. Motorola

The Moto 360 watch was the first Android Wear device to be announced, but it's launching behind less-interesting entries from both Samsung and LG. It will be the first Android Wear device to use a round screen instead of a square one, even though the face is broken up by a small black bar across the bottom (likely used for the rumored ambient light sensor). The watch is also said to use a wireless charging dock, where Samsung's and LG's use micro-USB docks with pogo pins. The Moto 360 will be sent out to all Google I/O attendees for free—attendees were already given the opportunity to take home either Samsung's or LG's watch to help with developing Android Wear apps.

As for the phones, current rumors suggest that the Moto X+1 and the Moto G2 (assuming those are their names) are upgraded, refined versions of the phones that launched in 2013. This means both should have customizable backs, relatively clean Android installations that are updated quickly, and competitive pricing compared to other phones with similar specs. High-quality, low-cost phones like the Moto G and E have helped Motorola boost its sales significantly after years of losses, and even though Google is preparing to sell Motorola to Lenovo, we wouldn't expect either parent company to mess with a successful formula.

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