Month: April 2017

Enlarge / AMD's new Radeon Pro Duo GPU. (credit: AMD)

A little over a year after launching the last Radeon Pro Duo graphics card, AMD is back with an all-new version that has the same name but makes a whole bunch of changes. The new Radeon Pro Duo mashes two separate 14nm Polaris GPUs with 2,304 stream processors, 128 texture units, 32 ROPs, and 16GB of graphics RAM apiece (for a total of 32GB) into a single card. As the name implies, the card is being aimed primarily at professional users rather than gamers. It's based on the Radeon Pro WX 7100 workstation GPU, which uses one GPU with most of the same specs as the Radeon Pro Duo but with 8GB of RAM instead of 16GB.

You can find the full spec list for the card here, which will launch at "the end of May" for $999.

The card is quite different from last year's Radeon Pro Duo—that card launched at $1,499 and featured a pair of 28nm Fiji GPUs with 4,096 stream processors and 4GB of RAM each; it was also a power-hungry monster, requiring its own closed-loop liquid cooler, three external PCIe power plugs, and as much as 350W of power. The new card only needs two power plugs, uses an air blower typical of most GPUs, and has a rated TBP (typical board power) of 250W.

Enlarge (credit: Ore Huiying/Bloomberg via Getty Images)

A former Lyft driver sued Uber on Monday in a proposed class-action lawsuit over its recently evealed "Hell" software, which allowed Uber to spoof fake Lyft drivers through a flaw in Lyft’s own design.

In turn, those faux accounts gave Uber confidential location information about the eight nearest Lyft drivers. Not only did this program provide secret information about Lyft, its largest rival, but it also allowed Uber to target its own drivers who also drive for Lyft. Uber could then present them with enticing offers to make sure that they would stay loyal to Uber.

The "spyware," according to the lawsuit, which reportedly ran from 2014 to 2016, "enabled Defendants to remotely and surreptitiously access, monitor, intercept, and/or transmit personal information as well as electronic communications and whereabouts." The ex-driver, Michael Gonzales, who never drove for Uber, claims violations of federal and California state privacy laws, and unfair business practices.

Enlarge / One of the earliest self-driving trial families pose with Waymo's minivan. (credit: Waymo)

Waymo—Alphabet's self-driving car division—is launching a "trial" of a self-driving taxi service in the Phoenix, Arizona metropolitan area. The Google spinoff's fleet of self-driving cars is descending on Phoenix and offering free rides to anyone in its "early rider program," which is currently accepting new members.

The taxi service is not totally "self-driving." Waymo notes that "as part of this early trial, there will be a test driver in each vehicle monitoring the rides at all times." While the car will handle most of the driving duties, a driver will ensure nothing goes wrong if the car runs into a situation it can't handle. While the trial will offer free rides to Phoenix residents, it will also serve as a research program for Waymo. The company's blog post say it wants to "learn things like where people want to go in a self-driving car, how they communicate with our vehicles, and what information and controls they want to see inside."

To handle the load of a city-wide taxi service, Waymo is building 500 more of its self-driving Chrysler Pacifica Hybrid minivans, bring the total minivan fleet to 600. The minivans represent the latest in Waymo's technology. In a recent talk at the North American International Auto Show, Waymo CEO John Krafcik said the vehicles would be the launch platform for Waymo's "full-stack approach," which combined Waymo's software with a "fully integrated hardware suite" that is "all designed and built, from the ground up, by Waymo." Most self-driving car programs stick to developing software using Velodyne's LiDAR hardware.

Boeing

Last October, during a White House Frontiers Conference in Pittsburgh, President Obama sat down in a simulator of Boeing's Starliner spacecraft, which will begin transporting astronauts to the International Space Station within a couple of years. The commander-in-chief wanted to try his hand at a task astronauts would eventually have to perform. After taking the controls and cleanly docking to the station, Obama gleefully exulted, “Your ride is here, baby."

So when I sat down in the same simulator on a recent Friday morning, at the FIRST Robotics Competition in Houston, I felt a little pressure to match the president's success. Even though this simulator has been "dumbed" down for the general public from the real thing, it still wasn't trivial to guide the Starliner, nose first, into a docking port on the station's Node 2 module.

Enlarge (credit: Soylent)

Those swigging Soylent are in for another hiccup—but, it seems, no belly aches this time.

The high-profile meal-replacement company issued a voluntary recall Monday after finding that a small amount of milk product may have slipped into some batches of its Soylent 1.8 powder, which is supposed to be free of lactose and milk products. Soylent fans with an allergy or severe sensitivity to milk face serious or even life-threatening allergic reactions if they chug any of the contaminated product.

In an announcement of the voluntary recall on the Food and Drug Administration’s website, the company noted that it has not received any reports of illnesses related to the offending dairy. The company also said it has figured out what went wrong and identified the batches contaminated, and the problem won’t affect future products or interrupt supply.