For nearly two years Samsung was the only manufacturer with an SSD that utilized TLC NAND. Most of the other manufacturers had talked about TLC SSDs in one way or another, but nobody had come up with anything retail worthy until now. A month ago SanDisk took the stage and unveiled the Ultra II, the company's first TLC SSD and the first TLC SSD that is not by Samsung. Read on for our full review.

Greetings, Arsians! Our partners from LogicBuy are back with a ton of deals. We have a just-released Lenovo Erazer X315 gaming computer as this week's top deal, available for just $649.99. At that price, you get a 3.1GHz AMD A8 processor, 8GB of RAM, and a Radeon R9 255 graphics card.

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Desktops and All-in-one PCs

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Steven Michael

Massachusetts’ highest court has dismissed a lawsuit filed by the Massachusetts State Automobile Dealers’ Association against Tesla Motors. The ruling paves the way for direct-to-consumer Tesla sales in the Bay State.

The Supreme Judicial Court decision, which was handed down on Monday and upheld a lower court’s ruling, found that existing car dealers lacked standing. The plaintiffs had claimed that Tesla was in violation of state law that prevents a car manufacturer from also owning a car dealership—so because Tesla could sell directly, it had an unfair advantage. But that law was intended to protect dealerships from abuse by their own brand manufacturers and distributors, not unrelated manufacturers.

"Contrary to the plaintiff’s assertion, however, the type of competitive injury they describe between unaffiliated entities is not within the statute’s area of concern," Justice Margot Botsford wrote in the unanimous decision.

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Scientists in New Zealand have thawed and started to examine a rare colossal squid caught in a fisherman's net.

Scientists in New Zealand have thawed and started to examine a rare colossal squid caught in a fisherman's net.

Update: NASA has announced that both the Boeing team and SpaceX will move forward on the commercial crew program. See John Timmer's report for details.

NASA is scheduled to make an announcement today about the competition for the Commercial Crew program, the space vehicle that will handle the delivery and return of crew members to the International Space Station and other orbital destinations. According to a report by The Wall Street Journal, Boeing and partner Blue Origin LLC have the inside track on a contract win. The Washington Post, however, reports that both the Boeing team and SpaceX will be awarded contracts for a demonstration launch.

Blue Origin had been a relatively low-profile space startup. Founded and funded by Amazon.com CEO Jeff Bezos, the company has been focused on developing spacecraft with a vertical takeoff-vertical landing first stage—similar to the technology that SpaceX has been working on with its Grasshopper and Falcon 9 launchers. But Blue Origin hasn’t published any information on further developments of its “New Shepard” suborbital vehicle for nearly two years while the company focused on development of its BE-3—a low-cost, reusable liquid hydrogen rocket engine.

It is the engine technology that attracted the attention of Boeing. In July, a Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) announcement said that Blue Origin was part of a Boeing team that entered a competition for an unmanned “space plane” launch system. Its low-cost engine addresses the competition's focus of dropping the cost of putting large satellites into orbit to under $5 million per launch. SpaceX was not included in the teams selected for the first phase of the program, called XS-1, by DARPA.

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There has been a lot of confusion going on over the last few weeks on what exactly Samsung's Exynos 5433 is. Joshua and I were pretty much convinced that it was a standard big.LITTLE A15/A7 chip configuration due to naming consistencies and evidence in firmware. Even though the Note 4 was already announced with region-specific models employing this chip, Samsung S.LSI has yet to divulge any kind of official information on the matter or even publicly announce the chip.

With the release of new source code, we can now confirm that the Exynos 5433 is indeed the first Cortex A57/A53 SoC to market. We see a 4x Cortex A57, 4x Cortex A53 big.LITTLE CPU configuration employed in the part, here's a little overview of what we currently know: 

Samsung Exynos 5 Octa 2014 lineup SoC Samsung
Exynos 5422 Samsung
Exynos 5430 Samsung
Exynos 5433 CPU

4x Cortex A7 r0p5 @ 1.3GHz

4x Cortex A15 r2p4 @ 1.9GHz

4x Cortex A7 r0p5 @ 1.3GHz

4x Cortex A15 r3p3 @ 1.8GHz

4x Cortex A53 @ 
1.3GHz

4x Cortex A57 r1p0 @
1.9GHz

Memory
Controller

2x 32-bit @ 933MHz

14.9GB/s b/w 

2x 32-bit @ 1066MHz

17.0GB/s b/w 

2x 32-bit @ 825MHz

13.2GB/s b/w 

GPU Mali T628MP6
@ 533MHz  Mali T628MP6
@ 600MHz Mali T760MP?
@ 700MHz Mfc.
Process Samsung
28nm HKMG Samsung
20nm HKMG Samsung
  20nm HKMG

The big question is why Samsung choose to name this chip Exynos 5433 and not market it as a 64-bit chip in a new product lineup? The answer could be simply that we won't ever see the 5433 running in AArch64 mode. The chip's firmware and drivers are running on a "CAL" / Chip-Abstraction-Layer on the lowest level of the driver stacks. In fact, beyond the CPU cores (and GPU), the Exynos 5433 looks very similar to the Exynos 5430 which employs A15/A7 cores. 

While we won't be seeing the Exynos 5433 running 64-bit code any time soon, it still takes advantage of the architectural improvements of ARM's Cortex A57 and A53 cores and their ARMv8 instruction set (running in AArch32 mode). Power consumption should also be improved due to the new A50's power management and new retention features. The silicon, similarly to the 5430, is manufactured on Samsung's new 20nm process.

Atlas (A57) and Apollo (A53) cores in the power management drivers

Also employed for the first time is ARM's new Mali T760 GPU running at 700MHz. We already published an architectural dive into the T760 detailing what's new. I wasn't able to determine the number of cores on this GPU due to ARM's transparent and scalable driver architecture in regards to shader cores, this is something we'll have to wait for in the eventual official announcement or in a hands-on investigation.

While the Exynos 5433 seems nothing more than a "brain-transplant" in terms of SoC design, the newer Exynos 7 chip is a genuinely new part. Over the last 3 weeks Samsung has been busy submitting patches to the Linux kernel mailing lists adding support for their new SoC lineup. The Exynos 7420 seems to be on track for Samsung's next flagship lineup, this time in full 64-bit AArch64 mode with Android L. The details of the chip are still sparse, but we'll be seeing the same A57/A53 CPU combination together with an Mali T760, powered by an LPDDR4-capable memory controller.

The Exynos 5433 is definitely a surprise that many didn't expect. Qualcomm's Snapdragon 810 isn't officially due until Q1 2015, and we don't know yet when we'll be seeing it in consumer devices. Here Samsung has quite a lead as the Note 4 variants with the 5433 are shipping in the coming weeks. While I'm still a bit perplexed at Samsung's silence and lack of announcements, the fact that many regions are supplied a Snapdragon S805 in the Note 4 may have to do something with it, as they wouldn't want to cause buyer's remorse. 

The view of Salyut 7 from Soyuz T-13 after undocking and beginning the journey home. spacefacts.de

The following story happened in 1985 but subsequently vanished into obscurity. Over the years, many details have been twisted, others created. Even the original storytellers got some things just plain wrong. After extensive research, writer Nickolai Belakovski is able to present, for the first time to an English-speaking audience, the complete story of Soyuz T-13’s mission to save Salyut 7, a fascinating piece of in-space repair history.

It’s getting dark, and Vladimir Dzhanibekov is cold. He has a flashlight, but no gloves. Gloves make it difficult to work, and he needs to work quickly. His hands are freezing, but it doesn’t matter. His crew’s water supplies are limited, and if they don’t fix the station in time to thaw out its water supply, they’ll have to abandon it and go home, but the station is too important to let that happen. Quickly, the sun sets. Working with the flashlight by himself is cumbersome, so Dzhanibekov returns to the ship that brought them to the station to warm up and wait for the station to complete its pass around the night side of the Earth. [1]

He’s trying to rescue Salyut 7, the latest in a series of troubled yet increasingly successful Soviet space stations. Its predecessor, Salyut 6, finally returned the title of longest manned space mission to the Soviets, breaking the 84-day record set by Americans on Skylab in 1974 by 10 days. A later mission extended that record to 185 days. After Salyut 7’s launch into orbit in April 1982, the first mission to the new station further extended that record to 211 days. The station was enjoying a relatively trouble-free start to life. [4]

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Megan Geuss

Apple is planning on using its iPhone 6 and iPhone 6 Plus to dominate mobile payments in North America—something that no company has really managed yet despite the popularity of phone-based payments in other markets. This is being made possible by the inclusion of NFC chips in the upcoming iPhone models, which gives newer iPhones a capability that has been a regular feature in other device ecosystems for some time now.

However, developers excited to take advantage of NFC on iOS devices are going to be disappointed. In an e-mail exchange with Cult of Mac, Apple confirmed that usage of the iPhone 6 and 6 Plus NFC chip will be restricted to Apple Pay only.

As explained by Cult of Mac, this restriction (or omission, depending on how you want to look at it) is similar to Apple’s rollout of its fingerprint-sensing TouchID technology with the iPhone 5S—a year after the device’s release, third-party developers are only now being granted access to the TouchID APIs in their apps with the imminent release of iOS8.

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Micron/Crucial has been one of the go-to manufacturers for value client SSDs during the past couple of years, but the one thing that the company has lacked is a higher performing solution. The M600 that is being released today is Micron's answer to the demand for a more high-end SSD with better performance. 

The M600 is positioned in the client segment above the M550, making it the highest-end drive that Micron offers for client workloads. Note that the M600 is a Micron-only product and is only available for OEMs and SIs, meaning there is not going to be a Crucial branded retail counterpart and you will not be seeing the M600 on the store shelves. Micron and Crucial have separated some parts of their product development because the needs of the OEM and retail markets are a bit different, so from now on the difference between Micron and Crucial SSDs will more than just the label. The engineering core should still be the same, though, and some of the features that are introduced in the M600 will find their way to Crucial branded SSDs too.

Micron M600 Specifications Capacity 128GB 256GB 512GB 1TB Controller Marvell 88SS9189 NAND Micron 128Gbit 16nm MLC Form Factors 2.5" 7mm, mSATA & M.2 2260/2280 2.5" 7mm Sequential Read 560MB/s 560MB/s 560MB/s 560MB/s Sequential Write 400MB/s 510MB/s 510MB/s 510MB/s 4KB Random Read 90K IOPS 100K IOPS 100K IOPS 100K IOPS 4KB Random Write 88K IOPS 88K IOPS 88K IOPS 88K IOPS Idle Power (DevSleep/Slumber) 2mW / 95mW 2mW / 100mW 2mW / 100mW 3mW / 100mW Max Power 3.6W 4.4W 4.7W 5.2W Encryption TCG Opal 2.0 & eDrive Endurance 100TB 200TB 300TB 400TB Warranty Three years

The M600 is available in four form factors: 2.5" 7mm, mSATA and both 2260 and 2280 flavors of M.2. The 2260 is double-sided, whereas the 2280 is single-sided, which explains why both max out at 512GB and the 1TB model is only available as a 2.5" 7mm drive.

The controller remains unchanged from the M550, but the M600 switches to Micron's latest 128Gbit 16nm NAND like the MX100 did a few months ago. Despite the same hardware as the MX100 has, the M600 is a different product. The most important new feature in the M600 is what Micron calls Dynamic Write Acceleration.

Dynamic Write Acceleration (DWA) is Micron's implementation of a pseudo-SLC cache. Instead of being static with a predetermined amount of NAND set in SLC mode, DWA is dynamic and can switch between SLC and MLC on the fly. In other words, an empty SSD will run nearly all of its NAND in SLC mode to increase performance and the size of the SLC cache decreases as the drive is filled. At 95% full, most of the NAND will now be running in MLC to meet the advertised user capacity, but the size of the SLC cache is still comparable to competitors' static SLC caches. DWA is transparent to the user so the shown capacity of the drive will not change -- the drive itself manages the change between SLC and MLC in the background.

For small drives the increased capacity and dynamic nature of the SLC cache can be beneficial. With only 128GB or 256GB of NAND and with each die being 16GB, the lower program and read latencies of pseudo-SLC will make a big difference to especially write performance. As a result even the 128GB model achieves  peak speeds of 410MB/s sequential write and 88K random write IOPS. The 512GB and 1TB 2.5" models do not use DWA at all because they have enough NAND to provide the same performance without the need for an SLC cache, but all mSATA and M.2 models utilize DWA (including the 512GB ones).

Aside from the increased performance, the benefit of the pseudo-SLC cache is increased endurance. The 128GB model is rated at 100TB, which is a fair increase over the 72TB rating that Micron's previous drives have had. The rating also scales linearly with capacity now, so the 1TB is good for up to 400TB. Keep in mind that the M600 is only validated for typical client usage, which allows for higher ratings because the write amplification will be lower due to a lighter workload.

In addition the M600 features the usual Micron/Crucial feature set. There is DevSleep, TCG Opal and eDrive support as well as power loss protection. The warranty is three years similar to Micron's other client SSDs.

The M600 is available now (though only for OEMs/SIs) and we already have samples, but there is a separate embargo for the reviews, so look out for the review in the next couple of weeks.

NVIDIA's SHIELD Tablet arrived earlier this year and it was one of the first devices to use NVIDIA's Tegra K1 platform with 4 Cortex A15 cores and a single SMX GPU based on NVIDIA's Kepler architecture. It was a major departure from NVIDIA's previous mobile GPU designs, and it came with a level of GPU performance that was unheard of in an ARM tablet. For the whole story you can take a look at the SHIELD Tablet review. What you may notice on the first page is the listing of a version with LTE support and 32GB of storage. At launch, the SHIELD Tablet was only available in its 16GB WiFi configuration. Today NVIDIA is opening pre-orders for the that model with 32GB of storage and LTE.

At $399, the SHIELD Tablet with LTE and 32GB of storage is $100 more expensive than the base model. This pricing is roughly in line with the cost of upgrades to other popular Android tablets like the Nexus 7, and much less expensive than upgrading an iPad to a 32GB model with LTE. The increased amount of storage and the addition of LTE are packaged together with NVIDIA's pricing; you can't just get one upgrade or the other.

In addition to the new model of the SHIELD Tablet, NVIDIA is announcing three new games optimized for Tegra K1 that are coming soon. The first is Beach Buggy Racing which is a kart racing game that is a sequel to Beach Buggy Blitz. The second is BombSquad which features various mini-games like capture the flag and hockey, with the addition of explosive weapons to blow up the other players. The last new title is Broadsword: Age of Chivalry which is a turn-based strategy game where the player assumes the role of the French or the British and builds their empire.

Customers in the United States on AT&T can also receive a special offer when buying the SHIELD Tablet with LTE. When activating it on a qualifying AT&T plan with a 2 year agreement, users will receive a $100 bill credit which effectively covers the cost of upgrading from the WiFi only model.

The SHIELD tablet with LTE and 32GB of storage can be pre-ordered now and it will ship on September 30th in the United States and Europe. Pre-orders can be made at Nvidia's official SHIELD website as well as retailers like Amazon, Best Buy, Fry's Electronics, GameStop, Micro Center, Newegg, and Tiger Direct. Information about where to buy in a specific region can be found in the "Where to Buy" section on NVIDIA's website.

EchoSign is a system for managing electronic signatures on agreements, contracts, and other documents that can be transmitted electronically. The product was acquired by Adobe in 2011 to supplement their existing document services. The service allows consumers and businesses to obtain legally binding e-signatures in situations where distance or timing makes signing an agreement on an actual piece of paper impractical. With the rise of mobile devices in the workplace, including tablets, it would make sense for Adobe to offer an EchoSign app for mobile operating systems in addition to their web interface. Until now, Adobe has only offered an iOS application for iPhone, iPad, and iPod Touch. Today Adobe announced the launch of their EchoSign application for Android.

The layout of the app is essentially the same as its iOS counterpart, but with a design that goes along with Android design conventions rather than iOS ones. You can see above how documents can be sent to be signed by a single person or multiple users. The signing can be done right on a device's touchscreen.

The application also integrates with Google Drive, Box, Sharepoint, Saleforce, Evernote, and of course, Adobe Reader and Adobe Acrobat. This covers most of the cloud storage services for documents in use today, although it's notable that Dropbox is missing from the list. While this app isn't going to do much for ordinary consumers, for small businesses and large corporations alike it may make the lives of Android users in the corporate world easier. If you are someone who has to use EchoSign for your job or your business, you can download the Android version from Google Play here.

Today we're looking at the two latest mechanical keyboards from Rosewill, the Apollo RK-9100 and the ten-keyless RGB80. Each targets a different group of users, but both have been designed with value in mind. Can they hold their own against the relentless competition? We'll find out in this review.

Police investigating the deaths of two Britons in Thailand say they are focussing on the Burmese migrant community, reports Jonathan Head on Koh Tao.

Although DisplayPort-equipped 4K monitors are still relatively new, the DisplayPort 1.2 standard underlying those devices is anything but. The long lead time between standards and products means that just as 4K monitors turn a year old, the DisplayPort 1.2 standard driving them will turn 5 years old later this year. This gap means that the VESA working group responsible for DisplayPort needs to aim well ahead of the curve, and all the while DisplayPort 1.2 adoption was ramping up, the VESA was already working on the next iteration of DisplayPort. Now after about 2 years of development the VESA has finalized their next standard, and this week they are releasing the DisplayPort 1.3 standard to their members for inclusion in their next-generation products.

Like DisplayPort 1.2 before it, DisplayPort 1.3 is a combination signaling and feature update intended to support new products and ultimately enable DisplayPort to push more pixels. The single biggest aspect of this is the introduction of High Bit Rate 3 (HBR3) mode, which increases the per-lane bandwidth rate from 5.4Gbps to 8.1Gbps, allowing for a 50% increase in bandwidth over DisplayPort 1.2’s HBR2. For a full 4 lane DP connection, this means the total connection bandwidth has been increased from 21.4Gbps to 32.4 Gbps, for a final data rate of 25.9Gbps after taking encoding overhead into account.

DisplayPort Supported Resolutions Standard Max Resolution
(RGB, 60Hz) Max Resolution
(4:2:0, 60Hz) DisplayPort 1.1 (HBR1) 2560x1600 N/A DisplayPort 1.2 (HBR2) 3840x2160 N/A DisplayPort 1.3 (HBR3) 5120x2880 7680x4320

At a hardware level the introduction of HBR3 is being made entirely at the controller level, with new controllers utilizing HBR3 signaling over existing hardware. The DisplayPort/mDP connector itself and the physical cabling remains unchanged, meaning HBR3 is fully backwards compatible with existing cabling and should work on any DP 1.1a/1.2 cable that’s built to spec. Built to spec being a key phrase in this case, as in practice HBR3’s higher clock rate will likely expose inferior cables, similar to what happened with the HBR2 earlier this decade.

By incrementally improving DisplayPort’s available bandwidth in this manner the VESA is looking to bring about support for the generation of monitors beyond today’s 4K monitors that DP 1.2 was designed for. This includes both 5K displays – such as the recently announced Dell 5K UltraSharp – and even farther in the future 8K displays.

For 5K displays DisplayPort’s 32.4Gbps provides enough bandwidth to cover a single 5K@60Hz monitor with traditional 24bit uncompressed color. In that case the physical interface can support either SST or MST operation – DisplayPort is merely a data transport layer – however we may still see MST operation used by 5K monitors due to the fact that 5K would require a pixel clock in excess of 1GHz, which will take time for GPUs and display controllers to catch up with.

Meanwhile the 50% increase in bandwidth also offers just enough of an improvement that DisplayPort 1.3 can even drive a pair of uncompressed 4K@60Hz monitors over a single connection, so long as VESA reduced blanking timings are used to minimize the signaling overhead. In that case you can technically even get a 4K@60Hz monitor over a 2 lane connection if desired, which would be useful for any situations where DisplayPort lanes are being taken for other uses (e.g. DockPort). Alternatively the additional bandwidth can be used to drive a single 4K@60Hz monitor at higher bit depths, such as 30bit and 36bit color.

However for 8K displays, while DisplayPort 1.3 is designed to support them the available bandwidth falls well short of the 45Gbps+ an 8K@60Hz 24bit uncompressed display would require. As such the VESA will be doing the next best thing and supporting Y'CbCr 4:2:0 subsampling, which reduces the bandwidth requirements by only transmitting ¼ of the color (chroma) data.

We’ve already seen 4:2:0 put to use in HDMI, allowing first-generation 4K TVs to support 4K@60Hz over HDMI 1.4 data rates by reducing the color data rate to the same 4:2:0 rate that most media is distributed in, and the idea would be the same for DisplayPort 1.3 and 8K displays. 4:2:0 support in this case is a consumer electronics focused feature and is meant to drive high resolution displays handling video and other content mastered at 4:2:0, whereas lower resolution uncompressed modes would still be preferred for workstations and general computer displays.

Wikipedia: diagram on chroma subsampling

4:2:0 support is also necessary for better HDMI interoperability, which is the other major aspect to DisplayPort 1.3. 1.3 will introduce the features necessary to allow DP-to-HDMI 2.0 conversion, and among HDMI-centric additions will be support for HDCP 2.2, which is the minimum version of HDCP required for DRM’d 4K media. Also being added for HDMI interoperability is Consumer Electronics Control (CEC) functionality, which allows HDMI devices to issue commands to other HDMI devices. This will allow DisplayPort to participate in that ecosystem, particularly having DisplayPort devices issue commands to other HDMI devices.

Finally there are a couple of features in development at the VESA that are notably absent in some form or another. Support for Display Stream Compression (DSC) apparently did not make the cut, as it is not in the 1.3 specification. DSC is the VESA and MIPI’s visually lossless (i.e. limited lossy) compression format designed to reduce bandwidth requirements, and based on the VESA’s work we expect it’s still under development and would be surprised if we didn’t see it later on. Meanwhile to no surprise (but always good for clarification), DisplayPort Active-Sync remains an optional part of the specification, so Adaptive-Sync availability will continue to be on a monitor-by-monitor basis as a premium feature.

Not In DP 1.3: Display Stream Compression

Wrapping things up, like most VESA standards announcements today’s announcement is more of a beginning than an end for the process. Now that DisplayPort 1.3 is standardized manufacturers can begin developing controllers (and GPUs) around it, which traditionally takes several months. This would put the release of the first DP 1.3 devices in 2015, which we would expect to be further aligned to the product refresh cycles for the necessary GPUs and monitors.

The president of Ghana calls for the easing of restrictions on West African countries fighting the Ebola epidemic.

Version:next-20140916 (linux-next) Released:2014-09-16

Hurricane Odile causes devastation in the beach resorts of Mexico's Baja California peninsula, triggering looting in some areas.

Hurricane Odile causes devastation in the beach resorts of Mexico's Baja California peninsula, triggering looting in some areas.

Jim Muir reports from the front line near IS-controlled Zumar, near Mosul, where Kurdish forces are fighting Islamic State militants.