Version:next-20141028 (linux-next) Released:2014-10-28

Divers have discovered cargo from an ancient Greek shipwreck near the Aeolian Islands off the coast of Italy.

The polio vaccination programme in Pakistan has been described as ''a disaster'' by monitors reporting to the World Health Organization.

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.

The BBC's Gabriel Gatehouse reports from Monrovia, the capital of Liberia, on the devastating impact of Ebola upon its people.

An introduction to the 2014 US mid-term election through the eyes of "you", a hypothetical senator running for re-election.

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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Kenya's schoolgirls are fighting back against sexual violence - by learning how to box in self-defence classes.

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

One of Project Free TV's domains has dropped in traffic since Google's algorithm change. se

Video streaming and torrent sites have dropped precipitously in Google rankings after the company altered its algorithm last Monday, according to reports from Searchmetrics. One of Project Free TV's main operating domains, free-tv-video-online.me, fell 96 percent in Searchmetric's rankings, one of the biggest drops alongside torrentz.eu and thepiratebay.se.

Google committed to fighting piracy by decrementing search results that allow users to access illegal streams or torrents back in 2012. The first round of changes didn't help much, according to interested parties like the Recording Industry Association of America and the Motion Picture Association of America.

Google complies with takedown requests, of which it received 224 million in the last year, according to its own report. The company responded to these within six hours on average, but industry parties pushed for Google to make content sites less visible overall. Even with its new solution, Google notes that this won't be the same as removing domains from search entirely: "the number of noticed pages is typically only a tiny fraction of the total number of pages on the site," the company said.

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abc7.com

A Los Angeles International Airport flight bound for London was cancelled Sunday when a passenger's phone picked up the Wi-Fi signal "al-Quida Free Terror Nettwork" (sic) that was emanating from a fellow flier's hotspot minutes before the United Airlines flight was set to liftoff.

After a concerned passenger notified a flight attendant of the network at about 9:30pm, the plane taxied to a remote section of the Los Angeles airport and was held there for three hours. The plane was searched as passengers of Flight 136 were ordered to power off electronic devices, local media said.

"After an hour, (the captain) said there was a security threat and that we didn't have clearance to take off," passenger Elliot Del Pra told ABC7.com. The person responsible for the hotspot was not discovered, LaWeekly said.

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Brookhaven National Lab

If there is a “holy grail” to be found in modern astrophysics, it probably has something to do with finding out what’s going on inside of black holes. Since no light escapes from their event horizons, studying their insides directly is impossible. As if that wasn’t bad enough, our best theories tend to break down inside the event horizon, limiting our ability to study them even theoretically with present models.

Despite all that, there are ways to get at the behavior of black holes. A recent line of work is approaching the problem in a different way—by analogy. Rather than trying to observe real black holes or trying to simulate them mathematically, researchers are constructing analogs of black holes. These constructions can be observed in a lab, right here on Earth.

Of course, scientists have no way of creating an actual gravitational singularity on a table-top, so they had to rely on the next best thing. The essence of a black hole is that it has an event horizon—a point of no return from which no light can escape. By analogy, in a fluid, there can be a point of no return for sound waves. If, for example, the fluid is moving faster than the speed of sound, no sound can outrun the fluid to escape in the opposite direction. That’s the basic idea behind a new experiment published in the journal Nature Physics—an experiment that apparently makes a Hawking radiation laser out of a sonic black hole.

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Mac? Only if it's a vim macro. more>>

Today Amazon has announced their foray into the market for small HDMI streaming dongles. The Fire TV Stick competes with Google's Chromecast, the Roku Streaming Stick, and the Microsoft Wireless Display Adapter. Amazon notes in their advertising that the Fire TV Stick has more powerful hardward and faster WiFi than the Google Chromecast. I'm not quite sure how effective this will be at swaying buyers, as I would imagine many buyers don't care about the hardware inside of their HDMI streaming stick as long as it can stream their 1080p content. I've put Amazon's comparison image between the different streaming sticks below. Notably missing is the Microsoft Wireless Display Adapter

The real appeal of the Fire TV Stick is for buyers in Amazon's ecosystem. The Fire TV Stick supports popular streaming services like Netflix and Hulu, and includes expected features like streaming content from mobile devices. On top of all that, it includes the wealth of content available for Amazon Prime subscribers. Anyone who wants to try out Amazon Prime will receive a 30 day trial along with their Fire TV Stick.

At $39 the Fire TV Stick essentially matches the Chromecast on price and provides Amazon users a good alternative to other HDMI sticks. Amazon is also running a promotion for today and tomorrow that allows current Amazon Prime subscribers to purchase the Fire TV Stick for only $19. At less than $20, I can expect many prime users may purchase one simply to try it out.

An Estonian man who US authorities said was a leader in one of the world's "most sophisticated" illegal hacking organizations was handed an 11-year prison sentence in connection to a scheme that got away with $9.4 million from ATMs across the globe.

The sentence handed to Sergei Nicolaevich Tšurikov on Friday is among the largest ever given a hacker in the US. The biggest term, 20 years, was first given to Albert Gonzalez in 2010 for being the ringleader of the hack of retail outlet TJX.

"A leader of one of the most sophisticated cybercrime rings in the world has been brought to justice and sentenced," United States Attorney Sally Quillian Yates of Atlanta said about Tšurikov's sentencing. "In just one day in 2008, an American credit card processor was hacked in perhaps one of the most sophisticated and organized computer fraud attacks ever conducted."

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Our weeklong virtual conference, Ars UNITE, kicked off today with an examination of how city and town governments are going the extra mile to improve residential broadband.

After our feature on the topic—“Fed up, US cities take steps to build better broadband”—we hosted a live discussion with four experts: Blair Levin, a former FCC official who oversaw the development of the National Broadband Plan under President Obama and now the executive director of the Gig.U fiber initiative; Christopher Mitchell, director of the Community Broadband Networks Initiative at the Institute for Local Self-Reliance; Will Aycock, operations manager of Greenlight Community Broadband in Wilson, North Carolina; and Ted Smith, chief of the Civic Innovation office in Louisville, Kentucky.

To wrap up day one, let’s take a look at what readers and experts had to say. After a summary, we’ll post a lightly edited transcript of the live discussion.

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All in all, FTDI's counter-counterfeit maneuvers are just another brick in a wall that pirates will bypass and customers will run into. Autopilot

A driver update from the Scottish electronics firm FTDI that intentionally “bricked” USB devices with counterfeit FTDI chips has been removed from Windows Update by the firm. The move follows an uproar from users who found devices they thought used the company’s chips disabled without warning. However, the company plans on re-releasing the update with code that “will still uphold our stance against devices that are not genuine, but do so in a non-invasive way that means there is no risk of end user’s hardware being directly affected,” the company’s CEO said in a statement.

While the changes made in the firmware of chips affected by the driver’s counter-counterfeiting code can be reversed, there are questions about whether what FTDI did in the name of protecting the company’s intellectual property was ethical—or even legal. Commenting on FTDI’s driver tactics through Twitter, American Civil Liberties Union principal technologist Christopher Soghoian said, “It isn’t a stretch to view FTDI’s intentional bricking of chips as an unfair business practice.” Others were concerned that the move undermined the security of Windows’ automatic update system, possibly discouraging users from applying security updates in the future.

In a post to the company’s blog, FTDI CEO Fred Dart apologized for the move.

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The new floating castle where Microsoft is going to hold all the money it makes from Minecraft Lee Hutchinson

When Microsoft laid down a cool $2.5 billion to purchase Minecraft-maker Mojang last month, the company was quick to stress that it would continue to make the ultra-popular building game available on a wide variety of non-Microsoft platforms. That announcement, of course, led to instant speculation among some that there might be an unannounced, Microsoft-exclusive Minecraft 2 in the works that would serve as the big payday for the game's new owner.

Microsoft Head of Xbox threw some cold water on that idea in a recent interview with IGN's Podcast Unlocked, saying "I don't know if Minecraft 2 is the thing that makes the most sense."

Responding to a series of questions about Microsoft's plans for the Minecraft license, both in and out of games, Spencer remained focused on the idea of making good with the game's current fans before doing anything crazy. "The community around Minecraft is as strong as any community out there," he said. "We need to meet the needs and the desires of what the community has before we get permission to go off and do something else.

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Egypt's foreign minister Sameh Shukry talks to the BBC's Frank Gardner about the fight against so-called Islamic State and the convictions of three Al-Jazeera journalists.