Month: February 2017

If you've looked at some of our reviews in the last couple of days, you may have noticed a few different benchmarks and some new charts that we weren't using before. We don't usually do this, but behind the scenes we've just given our benchmark suite a comprehensive update for the first time since 2013. In the interest of keeping you all informed and letting you know what we're thinking here on the Ars Orbiting HQ, this is a good opportunity to run through the tests we do, why we do them, and why we care about benchmarks in the first place.

Charts

These colors may look a little wonky compared to our old ones, but they're more legible to people with different types of color blindness.

First, you'll notice that we're using some new colors in our charts. As much as we liked the bright colors in our previous charts—colors chosen to match the Ars color palette, incidentally—we got semi-regular feedback from colorblind folks that they were hard to read. Ars Creative Director Aurich Lawson chose our new chart colors to be easily legible by people with all common forms of color blindness.

What we're using: CPU and GPU compute benchmarks

Geekbench 4 is our primary benchmark for CPU performance and GPU compute performance. (credit: Andrew Cunningham)

We may use benchmarks other than these when we're doing in-depth component reviews of the latest flagship processors or graphics cards, but generally speaking in phone and laptop reviews these are the standard benchmarks we'll be running on everything.

Enlarge / A quantum many-body spin system, visualizing the complicated interactions among the particles. (credit: Gorshkov Group, Johns Hopkins)

It's notoriously difficult to make sense of Quantum mechanics, and it's equally difficult to calculate the behavior of many quantum systems. That's due in part to the description of a quantum system called its wavefunction. The wavefunction for most single objects is pretty complicated on its own, and adding a second object makes predicting things even harder, since the wavefunction for the entire system becomes a mixture of the two individual ones. The more objects you add, the harder the calculations become.

As a result, many-body calculations are usually done through methods that produce an approximation. These typically involve either sampling potential solutions at random or figuring out some way to compress the problem down to something that can be solved. Now, though, two researchers at ETH Zurich, named Giuseppe Carleo and Matthias Troyer, have provided a third option: set a neural network loose on quantum mechanics.

Getting spooky

This additional method could be useful, because there are a lot of cases where the existing methods fail. Random sampling is used in a variety of fields (it's technically called Monte Carlo sampling, after the games of chance played in the famous casino there). But random sampling is only effective if the number of likely possible solutions isn't too large. If it is, then you're unlikely to randomly sample the relevant ones. The alternative, called compression, relies on cases where it's possible to represent the wavefunction in a computationally efficient form. Not every quantum system is amenable to that approach.

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Washington DC's city council has unanimously approved the terms of a test deployment of sidewalk-crawling delivery “drones” within the District, scheduled to begin in September. The regulations, part of an amendment to the district's budget bill, paves the way for tests with robotic delivery vehicles from Starship Technologies, a London-headquartered robotics company with engineering operations based in Estonia.

Amazon and other companies have been working on technology for flying delivery drones, but Starship's more pedestrian approach is at least theoretically a better fit for Washington, which is a no-fly zone for drones. The regulations aren't restricted to Starship—any company could participate in the trial period, but there are some ground rules, so to speak: the robots can't weigh more than 50 pounds without their payload, they must travel no faster than 10mph, and they're restricted to sidewalks. Any robots that fail must be retrieved within 24 hours. The pilot period is set to run from September 15 until the end of the year.

While the test period is open, Starship is clearly positioned as the first mover. Founded by Ahti Heinla and Janus Friis (the cofounders of Skype), the company's robots are the only contenders that currently fit the bill and are already being tested in Europe. Intended for deliveries within a three-mile radius, the six-wheeled electric robots can be monitored in transit by customers with a smartphone, and they weigh less than 40 pounds even when loaded. At that weight, the biggest concern may be how Starship prevents people from snatching its robotic minions off the DC streets.

Enlarge / A Surfboard modem. (credit: Arris)

Last year, Charter was punished by the Federal Communications Commission because it had spent two years preventing customers from using their own modems. As a result, the nation’s second-biggest cable company must now follow a shortened testing procedure to verify third-party modems and file compliance reports every six months detailing its efforts to let customers attach their own modems to its network. The company also had to pay a $640,000 fine.

The FCC's rules are clear: cable companies must let customers use their own equipment (including modems) unless it isn’t compatible with the network, or unless it would cause some kind of harm or was designed to let customers obtain services they didn't pay for. But if you’re a customer of a company that simply refuses to let you use a third-party modem, getting what you want is not easy.

Elbert Davis of Crown City, Ohio is a customer of Armstrong, a much smaller cable company with about 800,000 subscribers. He owns a Motorola/Arris Surfboard SB 6121 modem that he'd like to use instead of the Arris CM820 supplied by Armstrong. But the cable company won't allow it, despite offering no proof that it would harm the network or is incompatible. (The Surfboard is a DOCSIS 3.0 device certified by CableLabs, the cable industry's equipment testing body.)

(credit: Derek K. Miller)

Patients, advocates, and care providers are growing increasingly frustrated that new and often very pricey cancer drugs do little to improve patients’ survival, Kaiser Health News reports.

For instance, the 72 cancer therapies approved between 2002 and 2014 only bought patients an extra 2.1 months of life compared with older drugs, researchers have found. And there’s no evidence that two-thirds of the drugs approved in the last two years improve survival at all.

Yet, that doesn’t keep some of those drugs from coming with heavy price tags and concerning side-effects. Among cancer drugs approved in 2016, the average cost for a year’s worth of treatment was $171,000. And like survival, side-effects aren’t always improved with the higher prices. For example, among thyroid cancer patients, those taking the most expensive drug, cabozantinib, had the worst reports of side effects, including diarrhea, fatigue, sleep disturbance, distress, and difficulty remembering.

In the last console generation, Valve expanded on its PC focus with Xbox 360 and PS3 ports of hit games like The Orange Box, Portal 2, and the Left 4 Dead series. In a wide-ranging media roundtable this week, however, Valve's Gabe Newell said the consoles' "walled garden" isn't a place he's eager to revisit. Some of his complaints, though, seem a little outdated now that we're well into a new console generation.

Newell suggested that people he's worked with on the console side seemed a bit retrograde in their thinking on business models. "We get really frustrated working in walled gardens," he said, as reported by Eurogamer. "So you try to talk to someone who's doing product planning on a console about free-to-play games and they say, 'Oh, we're not sure free-to-play is a good idea' and you're like, 'The ship has left.'"

That console free-to-play resistance may have been truer in 2012, when Valve last ported a game to home consoles (Counter-Strike: GO). In the years since, though, both Sony and Microsoft seem much more willing to embrace full games that can be played without paying a cent. Popular free-to-play PC titles like World of Tanks, Hawken, and Smite are all doing well on both the PS4 and Xbox One. Both console makers have also invested in a few free-to-play exclusives in recent years: Gigantic and Happy Wars on the Xbox One and Planetside 2 and Let It Die on the PS4, to name some examples.

Enlarge / The Xiaomi Mi Mix. (credit: Ron Amadeo)

According to a report from The Wall Street Journal, Chinese smartphone manufacturer Xiaomi is looking to join the ranks of Apple, Samsung, and Huawei by developing its own smartphone chips. The report says the move is part of "aspirations to join the top tier" of smartphone manufacturers and an attempt to stand out from the slew of other OEMs.

For now, Xiaomi's processor is apparently called "Pinecone," and it will be released "within a month" according to the report. This might be talking about the processor of the Xiaomi Mi 6, which, if Xiaomi keeps to the usual yearly release cycle, should be out sometime in March. Xiaomi's chip design division isn't coming from nowhere—using a shell company called "Beijing Pinecone Electronics," Xiaomi paid $15 million to acquire mobile processor technology from Datang subsidiary Leadcore Technology Ltd.

Today, every Android OEM that isn't Samsung or Huawei relies on Qualcomm for high-end phone processors. Sometimes Qualcomm drops the ball, like with 2015's hotter-than-usual Snapdragon 810, and when that happens, most OEMs have no alternative. Samsung has its in-house Exynos SoC division, but most years it still ships Qualcomm devices to the US market. In 2015, Samsung used its chip diversity to its advantage and shipped Exynos in the Galaxy S6, dodging the Snapdragon 810 problems and creating the best-performing smartphone of the year.