Month: January 2016

(credit: AT&T)

AT&T will stop offering phone subsidies with two-year contracts this Friday, requiring customers to purchase phones at full price or on device installment plans.

AT&T has offered the option to buy devices under monthly installment plans since mid-2013. This newer model adopted by all major carriers lets customers trade in their devices for new ones every year or so or eventually pay off the full price and keep the phone. Installment plans let customers avoid signing contracts that have early termination fees, although a customer generally must pay off the full price of the phone in order to switch carriers.

Device subsidies—in which a $650 phone might cost just $200 upfront—are still offered on AT&T's website today. But that option will go away on January 8, Engadget reported last week, citing an internal document sent to AT&T employees. AT&T confirmed the change to Ars, saying that both new and existing customers will have to either pay full price for phones up-front, bring their own, or opt for "AT&T Next" installment plans. There is an exception for business customers.

Windows 10 is now in use on more than 200 million active device after about five months on the market, according to figures released by Microsoft today. This makes it the fastest growing version of Windows: 140 percent faster than Windows 7 at the same stage in its life, and a remarkable 400 percent faster than Windows 8.

Some 22 million of these devices are part of enterprise and education roll-outs, with Microsoft claiming that more than 76 percent of its enterprise customers are piloting the operating system.

Windows 10 of course has an advantage over Windows 7 and 8 when it comes to adoption: it's a free upgrade for existing Windows 7 and 8 users. Traditionally the only way most consumers would get a new Windows version is through buying a new PC with the new version preinstalled. With that no longer the case, wider adoption is to be expected. This is likely to accelerate as the operating system is pushed out as a recommended update later this year.

The rumours were true: AMD's new graphics architecture is called Polaris (it previously went under the codename Arctic Islands), it's based on a 14nm FinFET process, and it'll ship in "mid-2016." Given that AMD's GPUs—and indeed Nvidia's—have been stuck at the larger 28nm process node for several years, the move to 14nm should bring huge improvements in power consumption and performance per watt.

Details are thin on the ground—AMD has promised to go into much greater detail at a later date—but for now the company has confirmed that Polaris is the fourth generation of its Graphics Core Next (GCN) architecture. The current GCN architecture, GCN 1.2, is used by the likes of the Radeon R9 285 and R9 Fury. Improvements to the command processor, geometry processor, L2 cache, memory controller, multimedia cores, and display engine are promised in fourth-gen GCN, as well as to the all important compute units at the heart of the GPU.

Polaris will support hardware 4K h.265 encoding and decoding at 60 FPS, DisplayPort 1.3, and, at long last, HDMI 2.0a. The latter was missing from AMD's recent Fury and 300-series of GPUs, which instead featured HDMI 1.4a that limited 4K signals to 30 FPS at 60Hz, making them less than ideal for use in the living room with 4K TVs.

Major League Gaming, the once mighty American e-sports organisation, has been bought by Activision Blizzard in a $46 million (£31 million) deal. MLG will be dissolved as part of the deal, with Activision Blizzard picking up most of its remaining assets.

MLG has struggled in recent years following its early success organising tournaments for the likes of StarCraft 2 and Call of Duty, and has had to seek debt financing to the tune of $6 million (£4 million) to meet its financial obligations. In October, MLG also lost the hosting rights to the Call of Duty World League's Pro Division to rival ESL (Electronic Sports League).

According to a report from eSports Observer, which claims to have obtained documents detailing the sale, the majority of the $46 million will go towards paying off MLG's debts, leaving little for stockholders. Unsurprisingly, many shareholders are disappointed with the deal, which went ahead without their consent thanks to a legal loophole in Delaware General Corporation Law.