Month: August 2018

Enlarge / A Kaby Lake refresh die. (credit: Intel)

Intel has launched its latest mobile processors: six new chips designed for Ultrabooks and other thin-and-light systems. Three 15W U-series chips are codenamed Whiskey Lake, and another three 5W Y-series parts are codenamed Amber Lake.

The CPU parts of these new processors are the same Kaby Lake Refresh parts as Intel launched a year ago—just with slightly tweaked clock speeds. The i7-8565U, for example, at 1.8/4.6GHz, is just a slightly uprated replacement for the i7-8550U at 1.8/4.0GHz. Due to this similarity, the new parts retain the "8th generation" branding of last year's parts. This similarity also means that the new chips don't include hardware fixes for the Meltdown or Spectre issues.

The differences lie in the on-package chipset. The U-series and Y-series processors integrate the chipset onto the processor package: the CPU is connected to the chipset by an interface that's comparable to a PCIe 3.0 x4 connection. The chipsets provide USB, audio, network, SATA, and other connectivity.

Enlarge / Samsung's experimental "The Wall" TV. (credit: Samsung)

Certain Panasonic and Samsung TVs just became some of the first to support the new HDR10+ HDR standard thanks to a new firmware update. The update was rolled out to "select 2018 television models," according to a press release that was sent out today.

HDR10+ was developed by HDR10+ Technologies—a joint venture by 20th Century Fox, Panasonic, and Samsung—to offer an improvement to the existing HDR10 standard and compete directly with Dolby Vision. Like Dolby Vision, HDR10+ allows content creators to include dynamic metadata in each frame rather than simply applying the same approach to every frame in the scene.

Samsung, which is the leading driver of the HDR10+ standard, has argued that HDR10+ will allow film directors' visions to be more accurately represented on HDR TVs, because filmmakers who master their films in HDR can fine-tune each scene to their hearts' content. Dolby has made similar claims about Dolby Vision.

Enlarge / That's a bit of that Maji-magic right there. (credit: Sega)

Yakuza 2 is a slightly strange chapter in Sega’s charming crime drama series. It doesn’t quite capture the accidental magic of the first game or the blend of soap-opera drama and zany side quests that were perfected when Yakuza went HD with its third chapter.

It drags series lead Kazuma Kiryu—the lovable, titular criminal—into a more straightforward action-movie plot. There’s a car chase, ticking time bombs, a lady love interest (the only one in the series), and enough revenge schemes to fuel a whole season of television.

But now Yakuza Kiwami 2’s slightly forgettable bombast has been cleaned up for the PlayStation 4. And it cleans up pretty well! Like the previous Kiwami, this is a full-on remake of the PS2 original. This time, it’s all running in Yakuza 6’s Dragon Engine—bringing with it the graphical bells and mechanical whistles of that most recent release. Combat is more physics-driven than most other games in the series, and the progression system forces you to engage with Kiwami 2’s fictional cities of Sotenbori and Kamurocho more than usual in order to level up. Oh, and it can get really hard.

Enlarge (credit: Michelle Grewe / Flickr)

Laws regarding marijuana use are changing even as scientists are still trying to understand why people use it and the overall effects of using it. Now, a study is wading in by examining how genetics influences people's tendency to try pot. But the study raises nearly as many questions as it answers, and the overall effect of genes appears to be extremely small.

Genes and weed

This isn't the first study to look at marijuana use, but the history here is a bit murky. Many of the past studies are small, and they've looked at different things: some at whether a person has ever tried the drug and others at factors that influence whether a person becomes a heavy user. Still, twin studies have indicated that genetics plays a large role in determining whether someone is likely to try the drug at some point in their lives.

The new work is largely a follow-up on that, involving a search for the specific genetic factors that influence what's termed "lifetime use"—the decision to try pot at least once in someone's life. The researchers behind it are a mix of 23andMe staff and members of the International Cannabis Consortium (which is less interesting than it sounds). Both groups focus on scanning the entire genome for variations linked to specific traits. For this, they combined 23andMe data with several public genetics resources that have asked their participants about cannabis use. Combined, these data sources included about 185,000 individuals, making this the largest study of its kind.