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ARM

The Cortex A32.

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ARM's Cortex CPU core designs are widely used by all kinds of chipmakers who don't want to create their own ARM CPU designs from scratch, so it's important to pay attention when the company announces a new one. The ones we see the most often around here are the mainstream 64-bit cores for smartphones and tablets—the high-end Cortex A72 and A57 and the mid-end Cortex A53—but ARM produces a variety of smaller designs for ultra-low-power and embedded applications, too.

Enter the Cortex A32, a new super-small ARM core designed specifically for wearables, Internet of Things things, embedded systems, low-cost boards like the Raspberry Pi or Pi Zero, and other places where power, space, and cost savings are more important than raw performance. It uses the ARMv8 instruction set and is intended as a replacement for the older Cortex A7 and A5 architectures, both of which use the ARMv7 instruction set. However, the Cortex A32 can only run 32-bit code—to save space and power, the ability to run 64-bit code has been removed.

This is ARM's first CPU with the ARMv8 instruction set that doesn't include 64-bit support. So far, ARMv8 and 64-bit support have gone hand-in-hand. But the new instructions still give the A32 a good performance boost over the Cortex A5 and A7, particularly in cryptography performance. As we've seen in ARMv8-based smartphones, better cryptography performance can drastically reduce the performance hit you take when you encrypt a device's storage. For people who still want 64-bit support, the Cortex A35 CPU core offers similar performance and 64-bit instructions in a slightly larger package (ARM says the A32 is about 10 percent faster than the A35 at 32-bit operations, though, so there's a tradeoff either way).

Playing back a conversation, on the Windows Phone version.

You'll be forgiven for having forgotten about Skype Qik, the short video messaging service from Skype that Microsoft launched in October 2014. It offered low friction messaging—no need to create an account, merely having a phone number would do—similar to WhatsApp, SMS, or all sorts of other popular messaging services.

Well, now it's going away. The company says that the major features of Qik have been rolled into the regular Skype apps; video messaging already existed in Skype when Qik was released, and filters were added in October last year. As such, the app isn't really needed any more, and Qik will stop working on March 24.

Skype Qik was a successor to a short video messaging service called Qik that Skype bought in January 2011 for $150 million, just months before Microsoft bought Skype for $8.5 billion. The original Qik service was built around capturing video messages and sharing them with others. It was closed down in April 2014, as Skype introduced its own integrated video messaging capability. In that context, the new Skype Qik was a little strange, as it overlapped strongly with both the previously shuttered service, and the newly-added Skype capabilities.

(credit: aqua.mech)

A rose by any other name would smell as sweet. But a sweaty human by any other college-affiliation than your own might smell far more sour.

In two experiments, researchers found that college students asked to sniff sweaty t-shirts were significantly more disgusted if they thought the funk originated from someone at a rival school rather than their own. The findings, reported Monday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, highlight the importance of social groupings in our perceptions. Namely, social groups help make individuals more tolerant of personal pew—improving team work—as well as create perceived barriers to collaboration with non-group members.

“More fundamentally, the studies remind us that groups involve not only a gathering of minds but also of sweaty, smelly, tactile bodies,” the authors conclude. “It is impossible to work with people if you cannot stand their physical presence. Accordingly, understanding of how group life is possible will necessarily remain incomplete without attention to the sensual dimension.”

(credit: Soraya Okuda/EFF)

If you are in favor of Apple’s staunch resistance to the government, you may be interested to join a rally on Tuesday, February 23 at 5:30pm local time at an Apple Store near you.

Last Tuesday, Fight for the Future, an advocacy group, quickly organized a pro-Apple rally at the Apple Store on Stockton Street in downtown San Francisco. Representatives from the Electronic Frontier Foundation and a few dozen people showed up on short notice, so the groups are expanding their efforts.

The new rallies promise events in Hong Kong, Munich, London, and many cities around the United States, including Anchorage, San Diego, New York, and Minneapolis.

(credit: Shawn Morgan/Intel Corporation)

On Monday, AT&T and Intel announced that they’d be partnering to test consumer drones on AT&T’s LTE network, specifically accounting for a drone’s relatively high altitude (AT&T is testing connectivity up to 500 ft high, in accordance with federal rules). The companies will also try to minimize any potential signal interference.

The two companies said they’d be showing off Intel drones at this week’s Mobile World Congress in Barcelona.

Intel noted that the two companies would “test and define” how drones connected to an LTE network. AT&T said that such testing would allow better real-time camera footage to be streamed from the drone.

(credit: Valve)

With HTC beginning to take pre-orders for the SteamVR-powered Vive headset in just one week, you may well be wondering if your PC tower is up for running high-end VR without any distracting lag. Worry not: Valve has just released a SteamVR Performance Test Tool to determine whether you are technologically ready to shell out $799 for an HTC Vive.

Unlike Oculus' own Rift Compatibility Tool, which just seems to check your PC parts against a list without actually running a diagnostic, Valve's tool takes a few minutes to run through a small, non-interactive animation of a GLaDOS robot repair facility. The goal is to "determine whether your system is capable of running VR content at 90fps and whether VR content can tune the visual fidelity up to the recommended level," according to a Valve blog post.

Afterwards, the tool gives an average fidelity rating (on a numerical and Low/Medium/High/Very High scale). It also tells you what percentage of tested frames dipped below the recommended 90 fps for a smooth VR experience and whether any of those frames were bound by the CPU, rather than the GPU. The tool does warn that "the varying CPU cost of positional tracking and processing-intensive applications" could mean actual software runs worse than the test would suggest and warns that it doesn't test for available USB slots either.