Month: November 2017

Enlarge / Sen. Al Franken (D-Minn.). (credit: Getty Images | Justin Sullivan)

Sen. Al Franken (D-Minn.) wants the US to impose net neutrality rules on Google, Facebook, Amazon, Twitter, and other Web companies.

Net neutrality rules today apply only to Internet service providers, such as cable companies and mobile carriers. ISPs are not allowed to block, throttle, or demand payments to prioritize delivery of lawful Internet traffic. The rules are meant to give all websites—both the established players and startups—a fair shot at reaching Internet users.

But Franken argues that similar non-discrimination rules should apply to the most dominant websites.

Enlarge / Sen. Al Franken (D-Minn.). (credit: Getty Images | Justin Sullivan)

Sen. Al Franken (D-Minn.) wants the US to impose net neutrality rules on Google, Facebook, Amazon, Twitter, and other Web companies.

Net neutrality rules today apply only to Internet service providers, such as cable companies and mobile carriers. ISPs are not allowed to block, throttle, or demand payments to prioritize delivery of lawful Internet traffic. The rules are meant to give all websites—both the established players and startups—a fair shot at reaching Internet users.

But Franken argues that similar non-discrimination rules should apply to the most dominant websites.

(credit: Intel)

One might have thought that with Monday's announcement that Intel is going to produce processors with embedded AMD GPUs that the two processor companies were on good terms. That's looking a little less likely now. On Tuesday, AMD announced that Raja Koduri, its chief GPU architect, was to leave the company. Where was he going? That question was resolved on Wednesday: Intel. And what's he going to do at Intel? He's going to be the senior vice president of a new group—Core and Visual Computing—that will expand Intel's graphics reach both into the low-end, with integrated graphics reaching into the Internet-of-Things space, and more excitingly, at the high end, with discrete GPUs.

Koduri led AMD's Radeon Technologies Group, responsible for both AMD's discrete and integrated GPUs. Before that, he was director of graphics technology at Apple.

Intel has dabbled with discrete GPUs before; its 740 GPU, released in 1998, was a standalone part using the then new AGP port. A second attempt to build a standalone GPU was the Larrabee project, but that never shipped as a GPU. In 2009 Larrabee was repositioned with Intel deciding to make it a massively multicore accelerator—the predecessor to the current Xeon Phi chips—rather than a graphics processor.

Thus far in the Nintendo Switch's short life, we've seen games like The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild and Super Mario Odyssey prove that strong art design can create engaging, good-looking 3D worlds even with the system's relatively low-powered hardware. But we have yet to see how a high-end game created with more powerful consoles and PCs in mind holds up when ported to the Switch (ports like Minecraft and FIFA don't really push modern consoles to their limits, after all).

So we were eager this week to try out an early copy of Bethesda's Switch port of the 2016 Doom reboot, which hits Nintendo's newest console tomorrow. After a few hours with the game, we found a port that's surprisingly playable, although noticeably scaled down from its preceding versions.

Enlarge / This artist rendering shows an aerial view of the liftoff of the SLS rocket during Exploration Mission 1. (credit: NASA)

The US Congress championed the creation of NASA's Space Launch System rocket in 2010, at which time its members also successfully beat back an effort by the Obama administration to end support for the Orion spacecraft. Since then, Republicans and Democrats in the House and Senate have patiently spent $3 billion to $4 billion annually for continued development of these deep space vehicles.

However, in recent years the projected launch date of the first flight of the SLS rocket and Orion spacecraft has slipped to the right, from 2017 to 2018 and now likely into mid-2020. While overall support remains strong for these space vehicles, delays in their development may have begun to break the almost uniform congressional approbation for these exploration programs.

During a hearing Thursday before a House subcommittee over NASA, some of those concerns spilled into the public. "It is very disappointing to hear about delays caused by poor execution when the US taxpayer has invested so much in these programs," said Rep. Lamar Smith (R-Texas), chairman of the House Science, Space, and Technology Committee. "NASA and the contractors should not assume future delays and cost overruns will have no consequences."

Enlarge / Ying Jianren, chairman of Tech-New Group Ltd. and board director of Zotye Auto, and Peter Fleet, Ford group vice president and president, Ford Asia Pacific. (credit: Ford)

Ford and Chinese automaker Zotye will partner up on a new line of electric vehicles, we learned Wednesday. The pair is creating a joint venture—Zotye Ford Automobile Company—that they say will offer "a range of stylish and affordable electric vehicles for consumers in China." It's a 50/50 partnership, with the pair investing roughly $756 million (RMB 5 billion). The as-yet unnamed brand will get its own dedicated R&D center, and a new factory in Zhejiang Province will build the EVs for domestic consumption.

The Chinese market is especially coveted by Western automakers, which see lots of untapped potential—and the chance to make lots of money. It's a particularly important market for EVs; even though only 1.5 percent of Chinese vehicle sales are electric, in 2016 that figure accounted for 40 percent of global EV sales. And that's only going to grow as the country plans to phase out the internal combustion engine in the coming decades.

But tapping that market requires compromises on the part of foreign car companies. China levies a hefty 25 percent import duty on imported vehicles, so cars need to be built locally to remain competitive on price.