Month: August 2016

Pokémon Go is starting to lose its buzz, with the latest tracking data seeming to suggest the game is simply a fad.

It had almost 45 million daily users in July, but this figure appears to have sunk by more than 12 million since the start of August, to just over 30 million said to be playing Pokémon Go. Further decline is expected, as downloads, engagement, and the time users spend on the app have all also visibly flopped, according to data provided by Sensor Tower, SurveyMonkey, and Apptopia.

Bloomberg, which saw the raw data, reported that other major apps such as Twitter, Facebook, and Snapchat "can breathe a sigh of relief" that Pokémon Go is finally wobbling, as the game's popularity had apparently been costing them considerable amounts of users.

COLOGNE, Germany—With shooters trending towards the modern or futuristic—see the likes of Titanfall and Call of Duty: Infinite Warfare—Battlefield 1 and its exaggerated take on the First World War is something of an anomaly. And yet, when it was unveiled in May, the first Battlefield 1 trailer became one of the most viewed and liked game trailers of all time. Who says old military technology would make for a less interesting game, eh?

More so than any other game in the series, Battlefield 1 has the potential to capture the spirit of much-loved games like Battlefield 1942 and the original Call of Duty, which were both set in WW2. Replacing guided missiles and thermal scopes with bolt-action rifles and bayonets forces you to play keener attention to the environment and, crucially, learn how to master the basics of your weapon instead of relying on gadgetry. The fundamental principles of staying alive in a war zone—checking all of your corners, keeping track of allies, only crossing an open-space when it's safe, and making best possible use of vehicles—are brought to the fore.

"I think that the response we've had so far is that people seem to like the fact that it is an analogue battlefield that we're presenting and that there's less high-tech equipment," explains Lars Gustavsson, Battlefield 1 design director. "Here we've brought in shorter engagement distances deliberately in order to expand the diversity of viable tactics, so it becomes a more accessible experience…Our analogy has been that if Battlefield 4 was Formula 1 then this is more like a rally championship. Both are great and highly competitive sports, but they work under different circumstances. There are more details in Formula 1, but rally is more brutal."

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Despite first- and second-generation High Bandwidth Memory having made few appearances in shipping products, Samsung and Hynix are already working on a followup: HBM3. Teased at the Hot Chips symposium in Cupertino, Calfornia, HBM3 will offer improved density, bandwidth, and power efficiency. Perhaps most importantly though, given the high cost of HBM1 and HBM2, HBM3 will be cheaper to produce.

With conventional memory setups, RAM chips are placed next to each other on a circuit board, usually as close as possible to the logic device (CPU or GPU) that needs access to the RAM. HBM, however, stacks a bunch of RAM dies (dice?) on top of each other, connecting them directly with through-silicon vias (TSVs). These stacks of RAM are then placed on the logic chip package, which reduces the surface area of the device (AMD's Fury Nano is a prime example), and potentially provides a massive boost in bandwidth.

The tradeoff, though, as with most fancy packaging techniques, has been price and capacity. HBM1, as used in AMD's Fury graphics cards, was limited to 4GB stacks. HBM2, as used in Nvidia's workstation-only P100 graphics card, features higher density stacks up up to 16GB, but is prohibitively expensive for consumer cards.

There are less than two months to go until the start of Formula E's third season, which kicks off in Hong Kong on October 9. One of the more interesting things about Formula E's upcoming season is the new support series, Roborace. As the name suggests, it's a series for self-driving race cars, and the organizers have just unveiled the mule—called DevBot—that teams will use to develop their control software.

All of the Roborace teams will use identical Robocars, but each will develop its own control algorithms. The race cars are fully electric—in keeping with the ethos of Formula E—and have more than a little Speed Racer about them. But DevBot will look much more familiar to fans of sports car racing; it's a Le Mans-style prototype coupe, shown in the test photos without the front and rear bodywork.

DevBot also has a cockpit for a human driver, unlike the Robocars, but it does have the same powertrain, sensor suite, processors, and communication systems as the forthcoming autonomous race cars. DevBot is also fully electric, suggesting the handiwork of Drayson Racing Technologies. Several years ago, Drayson converted its Lola B10 Le Mans Prototype racer from internal combustion to electric power and has been involved in developing the technology used by Formula E.