Why Asia's technology giant Tencent is delighting investors with a striking increase in first half profits.

One of the main features Intel was promoting at the launch of Haswell was TSX – Transactional Synchronization eXtensions. In our analysis, Johan explains that TSX enables the CPU to process a series of traditionally locked instructions on a dataset in a multithreaded environment without locks, allowing each core to potentially violate each other’s shared data. If the series of instructions is computed without this violation, the code passes through at a quicker rate – if an invalid overwrite happens, the code is aborted and takes the locked route instead. All a developer has to do is link in a TSX library and mark the start and end parts of the code.

News coming from Intel’s briefings in Portland last week boil down to an erratum found with the TSX instructions. Tech Report and David Kanter of Real World Technologies are stating that a software developer outside of Intel discovered the erratum through testing, and subsequently Intel has confirmed its existence. While errata are not new (Intel’s E3-1200 v3 Xeon CPUs already have 140 of them), what is interesting is Intel’s response: to push through new microcode to disable TSX entirely. Normally a microcode update would suggest a workaround, but it would seem that this a fundamental silicon issue that cannot be designed around, or intercepted at an OS or firmware/BIOS level.

Intel has had numerous issues similar to this in the past, such as the FDIV bug, the f00f bug and more recently, the P67 B2 SATA issues. In each case, the bug was resolved by a new silicon stepping, with certain issues (like FDIV) requiring a recall, similar to recent issues in the car industry. This time there are no recalls, the feature just gets disabled via a microcode update.

The main focus of TSX is in server applications rather than consumer systems. It was introduced primarily to aid database management and other tools more akin to a server environment, which is reflected in the fact that enthusiast-level consumer CPUs have it disabled (except Devil’s Canyon). Now it will come across as disabled for everyone, including the workstation and server platforms. Intel is indicating that programmers who are working on TSX enabled code can still develop in the environment as they are committed to the technology in the long run.

Overall, this issue affects all of the Haswell processors currently in the market, the upcoming Haswell-E processors and the early Broadwell-Y processors under the Core M branding, which are currently in production. This issue has been found too late in the day to be introduced to these platforms, although we might imagine that the next stepping all around will have a suitable fix. Intel states that its internal designs have already addressed the issue.

Intel is recommending that Xeon users that require TSX enabled code to improve performance should wait until the release of Haswell-EX. This tells us two things about the state of Haswell: for most of the upcoming LGA2011-3 Haswell CPUs, the launch stepping might be the last, and the Haswell-EX CPUs are still being worked on. That being said, if the Haswell-E/EP stepping at launch is not the last one, Intel might not promote the fact – having the fix for TSX could be a selling point for Broadwell-E/EP down the line.

For those that absolutely need TSX, it is being said that TSX can be re-enabled through the BIOS/firmware menu should the motherboard manufacturer decide to expose it to the user. Reading though Intel’s official errata document, we can confirm this:

We are currently asking Intel what the required set of circumstances are to recreate the issue, but the erratum states ‘a complex set of internal timing conditions and system events … may result in unpredictable system behaviour’. There is no word if this means an unrecoverable system state or memory issue, but any issue would not be in the interests of the buyers of Intel’s CPUs who might need it: banks, server farms, governments and scientific institutions.

At the current time there is no road map for when the fix will be in place, and no public date for the Haswell-EX CPU launch.  It might not make sense for Intel to re-release the desktop Haswell-E/EP CPUs, and in order to distinguish them it might be better to give them all new CPU names.  However the issue should certainly be fixed with Haswell-EX and desktop Broadwell onwards, given that Intel confirms they have addressed the issue internally.

Source: Twitter, Tech Report

 

A GIF-ified version of the key part of the P.T. reveal of Silent Hills SunhiLegend / NeoGAF

Amid all the announcements at Sony's pre-Gamescom press conference today, one stood out as particularly baffling: the brief mention of an immediately downloadable PS4 "playable teaser" for a horror game simply being called P.T, from unknown studio 7780s. The mystery has now been solved, with P.T. revealed as a stealth announcement for a new Silent Hill game from Metal Gear Solid creator Hideo Kojima.

After wandering through a dark, creepy house lit primarily by a flashlight, the P.T. demo culminates with a cut scene showing a rain-soaked street. The name Hideo Kojima pops up alongside noted film director Guillermo Del Toro as the camera pans up to show a character modeled after The Walking Dead star Norman Reedus.

The game name Silent Hills then appears against a white background, followed by a disclaimer warning "This game is a teaser. It has no direct relation to the main title."

Read 3 remaining paragraphs | Comments

Indian school students have had Sanskrit classes introduced to their curriculum in an attempt by the new government of Narendra Modi to boost interest in the ancient language.

Amadou Fatoumata Ba is an unconventional Senegalese artist who uses old tyres as raw material for his sculptures.

That nice orange disk? Get rid of it, and the black hole can eat much faster. NASA

As far as we can tell, nearly every galaxy out there has a supermassive black hole at its core. And when these black holes are actively ingesting matter, they create quasars, the brightest objects we've ever detected. Quasars appear to be present in some of the earliest galaxies we can detect, from when the Universe was only six percent of its current age.

That's a bit of a problem. The radiation a black hole emits while swallowing matter places a speed limit on the amount of matter it can ingest. Currently, we simply don't know how black holes got big enough to power a quasar less than a billion years after the birth of the Universe. But a paper from last week's edition of Science suggests that the stars present at the galaxy's core might cause gravitational instabilities that let the black hole overcome the speed limit on its growth.

Black holes are famous for having a point of no return, a distance where even photons cannot escape their gravitational draw. But beyond that point, the infalling matter can form what's called an accretion disk, where its interactions with the intense magnetic and gravitational fields send copious amounts of matter and energy flowing away from the black hole.

Read 8 remaining paragraphs | Comments

The UN Human Rights Council has appointed an independent commission to investigate allegations of war crimes by both sides in the Israel Gaza conflict. Orla Guerin reports.

Language and math have always been part of the core public school experience in the US; science, by contrast, has often been considered an optional topic. But the combination of a push for greater standards and a recognition of science's increasing role in our high-tech economy has resulted in the adoption of science requirements by many states. Now, an analysis of US census data suggests that the increased push for science may have a negative effect: an increase in the dropout rate in states that have adopted science requirements.

This isn't to say that science is bad for students. "That there is positive impact of rigorous coursework when chosen by students is not controversial," researchers based at the Washington University School of Medicine wrote in a recent study, "but there has been ongoing debate over the effects of requiring a more difficult high school curriculum for everyone."

The authors relied on data obtained by the US Census Bureau, through the actual census and annual surveys the Bureau performs. (For data junkies, it's worth noting that all of the data is publicly available from the Integrated Public Use Microdata Series website.)

Read 10 remaining paragraphs | Comments

The 15 states in which the ACLU knows that police use cell phone tracking devices. ACLU

The Federal Communications Commission said it will investigate the “illicit and unauthorized use” of cell phone tracking and interception devices, commonly known as IMSI catchers or stingrays.

A newly published letter from FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler to Rep. Alan Grayson (D-FL) states that Wheeler has created a task force that recently took “immediate steps to combat the illicit and unauthorized use of IMSI catchers. The mission of this task force is to develop concrete solutions to protect the cellular networks systemically from similar unlawful intrusions and interceptions.”

Relatively little is known about how stingrays are used by law enforcement agencies nationwide, although documents have surfaced showing how they have been purchased and used in some limited instances. Worse still, cops have lied to courts about the use of such technology. Not only can stingrays be used to determine location, but they can also intercept calls and text messages. Grayson seems primarily concerned with stingray use by criminals, terrorists, and foreign government agents.

Read 15 remaining paragraphs | Comments

A designer and cartoonist in Pakistan has created a female superhero who fights terrorists, traffickers and gangsters in Karachi.

Flickr user: Intel Free Press

Lean operations and a lack of technical staff make non-governmental organizations a prime, and relatively soft, target for well-funded adversaries, according to an academic study of a four-year campaign targeting one such group.

In a paper to be delivered at the USENIX Security Conference next week, six academic researchers analyzed nearly 1,500 suspicious e-mail messages targeting the World Uyghur Congress (WUC). The team found that, while the malware managed to reliably evade detection by many antivirus programs, the attacks were relatively unsophisticated, using known vulnerabilities that had already been patched. The social engineering tactics, however, were very targeted and convincing, with the majority written in the native language, referring to events of interest to the NGO and appearing to come from known contacts, said Engin Kirda, a professor of computer science at Northeastern University and a co-author of the paper.

"You read about sophisticated attacks, but the malware that we analyzed was pretty standard," Kirda said. "It was not some ground breaking obfuscation or malware."

Read 9 remaining paragraphs | Comments

When the Blackphone team arrived at Def Con last week, they knew they were stepping into a lion’s den. In fact, that's exactly why they were there. The first generation Blackphone from SGP Technologies has been shipping for just over a month, and the company’s delegation to DefCon—including Silent Circle Chief Technology Officer Jon Callas and newly hired SGP Technologies Chief Security Officer Dan Ford—was looking to both reach a natural customer base and get help with further locking down the device.

Ask and you shall receive. Jon “Justin Case” Sawyer, the CTO of Applied Cybersecurity LLC, walked up to the Blackphone table at Def Con and told them he rooted the phone. And those who followed him on Twitter received an abbreviated play-by-play.

What followed, however, was not what Sawyer or the Blackphone team counted on: a BlackBerry blogger at N4BB leapt on one of Sawyer’s tweets and wrote a story with the erroneous headline, “Blackphone Rooted Within 5 Minutes.” By the time Sawyer was presenting on Sunday at Def Con with Tim Strazzere, the story had been picked up by a number of blogs and websites—and nearly all of them didn’t bother getting further details from Sawyer or Blackphone.

Read 19 remaining paragraphs | Comments

Since the announcement and revocation of Microsoft's "Family Sharing" features on Xbox One, we've been waiting for someone to come up with a fair and logical way of sharing generalized gameplay experiences with friends over the Internet. Steam's library-wide Family Sharing features were a step in the right direction, but Sony's newly announced Share Play feature sounds like the Internet game sharing we've been waiting for.

Announced at Sony's pre-Gamescom press conference today, Share Play is being sold as a "virtual couch" that lets you in effect "pass the controller" to friends online even if they don't own a copy of the game. That means you'll be able to play simultaneous cooperative and competitive games with your PSN friends, even if the game is only designed for local multiplayer. Alternatively, an online friend can take over for you in single-player games to help with a particularly difficult section.

It all happens without the need for the second online player to buy or download anything, Sony said, although both players will need to have a PlayStation Plus account. While Sony didn't get technical at the press event, it seems the feature works through the same kind of Gaikai-fueled game-streaming/screen-sharing technology that powers PlayStation Now and PS4 Remote Play on the Vita.

Read 5 remaining paragraphs | Comments

Apple's ethnicity numbers in the US may be more diverse than other giant tech companies, but today's charts don't explain how Apple Store employees fit into sub-categories like "tech" and "leadership." Apple

On Tuesday, Apple joined a growing list of tech companies issuing diversity reports about hiring practices, and like its peers, Apple's report broke down ethnicity and gender percentages in the categories of "tech," "non-tech," and "leadership." Taken at face value, the report paints Apple as a company with a higher percentage of underrepresented groups among its tech and leadership ranks.

However, unlike companies like Facebook, Google, and Yahoo, Apple counts a massive number of retail employees among its ranks—today's report listed a total of 98,000, and retail included more than 32,000 employees in 2012 (a number that has assumedly expanded since). Tuesday's report failed to clarify exactly how Apple Store employees fit into the new statistics. A Re/code report alleged that the "leadership" category included Apple Store management, but Apple's own report didn't indicate either way.

According to the report compiled internally by Apple human resources, Apple's worldwide tech hiring includes 20 percent women, as opposed to Google's 17 percent. In the US, Apple's tech category includes seven percent Hispanic and six percent black employees; those ethnicity numbers are each at least four percent higher than all other companies who've reported thus far. Apple's leadership percentages also outpace the others in diversity, including 28 percent women worldwide (topping Facebook and Yahoo at 23 percent), along with an American count of six percent Hispanic and three percent black.

Read 2 remaining paragraphs | Comments

Our contribution to the bad jokes. Sorry. Aurich Lawson

Steve Ballmer, former CEO of Microsoft, is officially the new owner of the NBA's Los Angeles Clippers, according to a league announcement.

The newly unemployed Ballmer has paid $2 billion for the team (which, as I understand it, plays a variant of the popular game netball). The price is a record sale for an NBA team.

Ballmer's efforts to buy the team have been delayed by a court case between the team's former owners, Donald Sterling and his estranged wife, Shelly. Donald Sterling attempted to block the sale negotiated by Shelly Sterling, but a California probate court allowed the sale to go through.

Read 2 remaining paragraphs | Comments

US Patent and Trademark Office in Alexandria, Virginia. Alan Kotok

Recently, the US Patent and Trademark Office concluded an internal investigation that it began about two years ago. The investigation resulted in a bruising 32-page report, finding that a significant fraction of the roughly 7,900 patent examiners at the US Patent and Trademark Office routinely lie about their hours worked. About half of those examiners work from home, but even the half in the office have proven hard to supervise.

But that strongly worded report didn't end up on the desk of the inspector general. Instead, Commerce Department Inspector General Todd Zinser was given a 16-page scrubbed-up version of the report with inconclusive findings. The potentially incendiary quotes and cases in the original report were all gone.

Eventually, Zinser got the original report when it was given to him by an unnamed patent office worker. Now The Washington Post has published both versions, along with an article highlighting some of the worst abuses. The original suppressed report paints a portrait of dysfunction at a large government office that's rarely in the spotlight.

Read 25 remaining paragraphs | Comments

The Xbox One Digital TV Tuner. Microsoft

The Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 aren't just games consoles; a succession of software updates has made them into rich media boxes, capable of playing all manner of video and audio on your TV. The Xbox One and PlayStation 4, by contrast, have thus far offered a rather sad and limited media experience. On the Xbox One, at least, that experience is about to get a whole lot better, as Microsoft revealed today at Gamescom in Germany.

A new media player app for the console is being released with support for playback from USB devices and, later in the year, DLNA streaming from other devices on the home network, including Windows PCs. This is in addition to its existing ability to have content pushed by network devices.

On its own, this would merely bring the Xbox One's media capabilities up to the same level as those found in the older Xbox 360, but Microsoft is going a step further with substantially wider format support. The company has published a full list of supported codecs, but one stands out: support for MKV containers. While MKV is a rarity in the world of explicitly authorized video, it's quite abundant in the murky world of pirated TV shows. Native MKV support will make watching this content substantially easier on the Xbox One.

Read 6 remaining paragraphs | Comments

At its pre-Gamescom press conference today, Sony Computer Entertainment Europe President and CEO Jim Ryan announced that the PlayStation 4 has sold over 10 million units worldwide since its launch late last November. "Just to be clear, that's 10 million PS4s sold through to consumers," Ryan clarified.

Sony last shared official PS4 sales numbers in April, when it confirmed seven million PS4s sold through that point. Last month, Sony noted in its earnings report that strong PlayStation sales were responsible for a rise in the company's overall profits.

Microsoft last announced that it shipped five million Xbox One units to retailers worldwide back in April, though it stated that sales had more than doubled in the US following the unbundling of the included Kinect camera. Last week, Ryse developer Crytek said it was "not 100 percent happy" with sales of Microsoft's system so far when considering where to place a possible sequel to the Xbox One launch exclusive.

Read 2 remaining paragraphs | Comments

The USB Type-C cable and its various connector designs. USB-IF

The USB Promoter Group announced today that it has finalized the design of the USB Type-C plug, a new type of USB plug that's designed to completely replace every size of all current USB connectors. Like Apple's Lightning cables, the new connector is reversible so that it can be used in any orientation.

According to the USB-IF's press release (PDF), the new connector is "similar in size" to current micro USB 2.0 Type-B connectors (the ones you use for most non-Apple phones and tablets). It is designed to be "robust enough for laptops and tablets" and "slim enough for mobile phones." The openings for the connector measure roughly 8.4mm by 2.6mm.

As we've reported previously, cables and adapters for connecting Type-C devices into older Type-A and Type-B ports will be readily available—the prevalence of these older ports will make any industry-wide shift to USB Type-C an arduous, years-long process.

Read 2 remaining paragraphs | Comments

There has been a second night of unrest in St Louis, Missouri, following the fatal shooting of an unarmed black teenager killed by a police officer.