Month: October 2017

Specs at a glance: Nvidia GTX 1070 Ti
CUDA CORES	2432
TEXTURE UNITS	152
ROPS	64
CORE CLOCK	1607MHz
BOOST CLOCK	1683MHz
MEMORY BUS WIDTH	256-bit
MEMORY BANDWIDTH	256GB/s
MEMORY SIZE	8GB GDDR5
Outputs	3x DisplayPort 1.4, 1x HDMI 2.0b with support for 4K60 10/12b HEVC Decode, 1x dual-link DVI
Release date	November 2
PRICE	Founders Edition: £419/$449/€469

Following weeks of leaks and rumours Nvidia has made the GTX 1070 Ti graphics card official. A Founders Edition version launches on November 2 for £419/$449/€469, with partner cards from the likes of Asus, MSI, and Zotac expected to launch shortly after.

More powerful than a GTX 1070, but less powerful than a GTX 1080, the GTX 1070 Ti is Nvidia's response to AMD's RX Vega 56 graphics card. Vega 56 proved a potent competitor for the GTX 1070, with better performance for around the same price. Theoretically, the GTX 1070 Ti should be a better performer than Vega 56, but with GPU prices still all over the place thanks to the Ethereum mining craze, it remains to be seen whether retailers will stick close enough to the £419 recommended price to make it a viable competitor.

Enlarge / Ryzen processor with Vega graphics. The blue part on the right is the GPU; the dark, complicated bit on the left is the CPU. Around the edge are memory controllers, multimedia engines, power management, and other bits and pieces. (credit: AMD)

AMD announced today its first two processors to combine its new Zen CPU architecture with its Vega graphics. The new chips, aimed at lightweight mobile systems, go head to head with Intel's U-series processors, and for the first time in many years, AMD is going to have competitive chips in the thin-and-light laptop market.

AMD's Ryzen and Threadripper processors re-established AMD's chips as competitive with Intel's. While the AMD parts gave up a bit of performance to their Intel rivals, especially in single-threaded tasks—a result of the combination of slightly lower clock speeds and slightly inferior instructions-per-cycle (IPC)—they shine in multithreaded tasks, with AMD often offering many more cores and threads than Intel for the same or less money.

In the mainstream desktop space, Intel's Coffee Lake chips have reasserted that company's dominance; Skylake-X does the same in the high-end desktop space, too, albeit at a high price.

Enlarge / "May you be as joyful as a Mario in boxer shorts and an oversized boxing glove hat" -Ancient proverb

A few weeks ago, I got dragged down a rabbit-hole discussion of what defines a "core" Mario game. One proposed definition relied on Mario trying to reach an explicit "goal point" or exit at the end of the level.

While a core Mario game could have secondary goals (like collecting red coins or one-ups) and while there might be multiple exits in a single level, getting from the start to the end has always been a defining characteristic of his adventures. Even more open 3D games like Super Mario 64, Super Mario Sunshine, and Super Mario Galaxy have retained this model to some extent, ending with a run through the level and putting Mario back to the start after he collects a star (or "shine").

By this strict definition, Super Mario Odyssey can't really be considered a core Mario game at all. The game's wide-open "Kingdoms" don't have any set end points, instead they exist more as spaces to run and jump around at your leisure. When you stumble on one of the many power moons that are Mario's most explicit goals within these levels, the exploring continues on from that same point after a short animation. On top of that, you only need to collect a small handful of these available moons before you're allowed to move on to the next Kingdom (and back) at your leisure.

(video link)

Chromebooks may be most popular in the classroom, but Google wants to ride that train out of schools and into the next phase of students' lives. The Pixelbook is the manifestation of that idea, the piece of hardware that combines Google's revamped design aesthetic and Internet-based software with the needs and wants of a younger generation.

Google stopped selling the original Chromebook Pixel, but seemingly only because the company wants to shine the spotlight on its new Chrome OS laptop. No distractions, no other (potentially) cheaper options: if you're someone who grew up using Chrome OS in school, this $999 convertible is the one you should get if you want to continue using Chrome OS later in life.

Enlarge / Uber's office in Queens, New York. (credit: Photo by Spencer Platt/Getty Images)

A new lawsuit claims Uber pays female engineers, and some engineers of color, less than male, white, and Asian-American counterparts.

The complaint (PDF) claims that Uber's biannual "stack ranking" system is invalid, arbitrary, and forces different outcomes between employees "regardless of whether there are meaningful performance differences between individual employees within a particular peer group."

The plaintiffs state that female employees and employees who are African-American, Latino, or American Indian get, on average, lower rankings than male, white, and Asian-American workers, "despite equal or better performance."