FallOutBoyTonto shares a report from AnandTech: Coming in the wake of last week's disclosure that their 7nm yields are roughly a full year behind schedule, Intel this afternoon has announced that they are reorganizing the technology side of the company. Key to this change is that Intel is breaking up its monolithic Technology, Systems Architecture and Client Group (TSCG) into several smaller groups, all of which will report directly to CEO Bob Swan. Meanwhile Intel's chief engineering officer, Dr. Murthy Renduchintala, who had been leading the TSCG, will be departing the company at the end of next week. The reorganization is effective immediately.

As a result of this reorganization, TSCG is being broken up into five groups focusing on manufacturing and architecture. These are:

- Technology Development: Focused on developing next-generation process nodes. Led by Dr. Ann Kelleher.
- Manufacturing and Operations: Focused on ramping current process nodes and building out new fab capacity. Led by Keyvan Esfarjani.
- Design Engineering: A recently-created group responsible for Intel's technology manufacturing and platform engineering. Led on an interim basis by Josh Walden while Intel searches for a permanent leader.
- Architecture, Software and Graphics: Developing Intel's architectures and associated software stacks. Led by Raja Koduri (continuing).
- Supply Chain: Handling Intel's supply chain and relationships with important suppliers. Led by Dr. Randhir Thakur (continuing).

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: A massive leak of apparent Nintendo source code is giving gamers a rare, unauthorized look at Nintendo's development process dating back to the Super NES era. The massive trove of files, first posted to 4chan Friday and quickly dubbed the "Gigaleak" by the community, includes compilable code and assets for Super NES, Game Boy, and N64 games in the Mario, Mario Kart, Zelda, F-Zero, and Pokemon series. Hidden among that code is a bevy of pre-release art and sound files that have never seen the light of day, as well as fully playable prototype versions of some games. Modders and homebrew developers have been digging through the trove of data over the weekend and taking to Twitter and YouTube with their discoveries. Among the most interesting findings:

- A version of Super Mario 64 including data for a 3D model of Luigi (likely for the scrapped two-player mode). Players have inserted that model into the ROM to create video of Luigi running around. The leak also includes few unused test rooms for the game.
- A Yoshi's Island prototype featuring differences in the map screen, interface, music (and including the prefix "Super Mario Bros. 5" in Japanese). The prototype also features two apparently unused mini-games (No. 1, No. 2) and some unused test levels.
- Pokemon prototypes featuring early and unused sprite designs for many monsters.
- An original prototype named "Super Donkey" featuring a Rayman-style character in a Yoshi's Island-styled world [Update: A previous version of this post mischaracterized the music in this video. Ars regrets the error].
- Sprite data for Luigi giving an apparent middle finger and Bowser outside of his clown-copter in Super Mario World. The code also contains multiple early designs for Yoshi (some of which match art previously revealed in interviews with Nintendo developers) and a completely new map screen design (which also matches previously revealed screenshots).
- A version of Star Fox 2 with previously unseen characters.
- High-quality voice samples from Star Fox 64, F-Zero X and Super Mario 64 before they were compressed to fit on relatively small N64 cartridges.
- Graphics for a Pilotwings prototype called Dragonfly, previously seen only in grainy magazine screenshots.

MojoKid writes: Word across a number of business and tech press publications tonight is that NVIDIA is reportedly pursuing a possible acquisition of Arm, the chip IP juggernaut that currently powers virtually every smartphone on the planet (including iPhones), to a myriad of devices in the IoT and embedded spaces, as well as supercomputing and in the datacenter. NVIDIA has risen in the ranks over the past few years to become a force in the chip industry, and more recently has even been trading places with Intel as the most valuable chipmaker in the United States, with a current market cap of $256 billion. NVIDIA has found major success in consumer and pro graphics, the data center, artificial intelligence/machine learning and automotive sectors in recent years, meanwhile CEO Jensen Huang has expressed a desire to further branch out into the growing Internet of Things (IoT) market, where Arm chip designs flourish. However, Arm's current parent company, SoftBank, is looking for a hefty return on its investment and Arm reportedly could be valued at around $44 billion, if it were to go public. A deal with NVIDIA, however, would short-circuit those IPO plans and potentially send shockwaves in the semiconductor market.

MojoKid writes: Today AMD took the wraps off a new line of desktop processors based on its Zen 2 architecture but also with integrated Radeon graphics to better compete against Intel with OEM system builders. These new AMD Ryzen 4000 socket AM4 desktop processors are essentially juiced-up versions of AMD's already announced Ryzen 4000 laptop CPUs, but with faster base and boost clocks, as well as faster GPU clocks for desktop PCs. There are two distinct families AMD Ryzen 4000 families, a trio of 65-watt processors that include the Ryzen 3 4300G (4-core/8-thread), Ryzen 5 4600G (6-core/12-thread), and the flagship Ryzen 7 4700G, offering 8 cores/16 threads, base/boost clocks of 3.6GHz/4.4GHz, 12MB cache, and 8 Radeon Vega cores clocked at 2100MHz. AMD is also offering three 35-watt processors -- Ryzen 3 4300GE, Ryzen 5 4600GE, and the Ryzen 7 4700GE -- which share the same base hardware configurations as the "G" models but slightly lower CPU/GPU clocks to reduce power consumption. In addition AMD also announced its Ryzen Pro 4000 series for business desktops, which also include a dedicated security processor and support for AMD Memory Guard full system memory encryption. As you might expect, specs (core/cache counts, CPU/GPU clocks) for the Ryzen Pro 4000G (65W) and Ryzen Pro 4000GE (35W) largely line up with their consumer desktop counterparts.

The New York Times ran a detailed piece (with some neat interactive graphics) arguing "cities need to plan for a future of fewer cars, a future in which owning an automobile, even an electric one, is neither the only way nor the best way to get around town..."

It asks us to imagine a world where there's suddenly more room for two-way bike lanes, wider sidewalks, and car-free bus lanes. But it also looks at our current conundrum: Automobiles are not just dangerous and bad for the environment; they are also profoundly wasteful of the land around us, taking up way too much physical space to transport too few people... And cars take up space even while they're not in use. They need to be parked, which consumes yet more space on the sides of streets or in garages. Cars take up a lot of space even when they're just looking for parking... New York's drivers are essentially being given enormous tracts of land for their own pleasure and convenience. To add to the overall misery of the situation, though, even the drivers are not especially happy about the whole deal, because despite all the roadway they've been given, they're still stuck in gridlock...

"The one thing we know for sure, because we understand geometry, is that if everyone drives, nobody moves," Brent Toderian, the former chief planner for the city of Vancouver, British Columbia, told me. Even if you're a committed daily driver, "it's in your best interest for walking, biking and public transit to be as attractive as possible for everyone else — because that means you're going to be able to drive easier..." Instead of fighting a war on cars, Toderian told me, urbanists should fight a war on car dependency — on cities that leave residents with few choices other than cars. Alleviating car dependency can improve commutes for everyone in a city...

At the moment, many of the most intractable challenges faced by America's urban centers stem from the same cause — a lack of accessible physical space. We live in a time of epidemic homelessness. There's a national housing affordability crisis caused by an extreme shortage of places to live. And now there's a contagion that thrives on indoor overcrowding.

Given these threats, how can American cities continue to justify wasting such enormous tracts of land on death machines?

Some days seem to pass very slowly while some weeks, and even months, fly by. A set of simple perception tests illustrate some factors that can distort our sense of time.

AMD has exceeded its goal to improve the energy efficiency of its mobile processors by 25 times by 2020. According to Thurrott, " The new AMD Ryzen 7 4800H mobile processor improves on the energy efficiency of the 2014 baseline measurement by 31.7 times, the firm says, while offering 'leadership performance' for portable PCs." From the report: "We have always focused on energy efficiency in our processors, but in 2014 we decided to put even greater emphasis on this capability," AMD CTO Mark Papermaster says in a prepared statement. "Our engineering team rallied around the challenge and charted a path to reach our stretch goal of 25 times greater energy efficiency by 2020. We were able to far surpass our objective, achieving 31.7 times improvement leading to gaming and ultrathin laptops with unmatched performance, graphics and long battery life. I could not be prouder of our engineering and business teams."

As AMD notes, greater energy efficiency leads to significant real-world benefits, including improved battery life, better performance, lower energy costs, and reduced environmental impact from computing. And with the focus in mobile computing hardware switching to performance-per-watt these days, AMD is trying to position itself as the traditional PC chipmaker that can rise to the ARM challenge.

Nvidia, Intel and AMD have announced their support for Microsoft's new effort to bring graphics processor support to the Windows 10 Windows Subsystem for Linux to enhance machine-learning training. From a report: GPU support for WSL arrived on Wednesday in the Dev Channel preview of Windows 10 build 20150 under Microsoft's reorganized testing structure, which lets it test Windows 10 builds that aren't tied to a specific future feature release. Microsoft announced upcoming GPU support for WSL a few weeks ago at Build 2020, along with support for running Linux GUI apps. The move on GPU access for WSL is intended to bring the performance of applications running in WSL2 up to par with those running on Windows. GPU compute support is the feature most requested by WSL users, according to Microsoft. The 20150 update includes support for Nvidia's CUDA parallel computing platform and GPUs, as well as GPUs from AMD and Intel. It also supports DirectML (Direct Machine Learning), Microsoft's Windows 10 API for hardware-accelerated machine learning.

Long-time Slashdot reader frootcakeuk quotes an article from Hot Hardware: Earlier this year, the Raspberry Pi Foundation hooked up with Igalia to start development on an open-sourced Vulkan graphics driver for the Raspberry Pi. However, Martin Thomas, an engineer at Nvidia, beat them to the punch.

Thomas announced yesterday via his personal Twitter that his RPi-VK-Driver is ready for primetime. The talented engineer had been working on the Vulkan driver in his spare time for more than two years.

Technically, Thomas' iteration isn't a Vulkan driver per se because it doesn't comply with the official standards established by The Khronos Group. Nonetheless, the resourceful developer produced a driver that adheres to the Vulkan parameters as much as possible, and as close as the hardware would permit it. There's just one limitation with the RPi-VK-Driver though. Unlike the official Vulkan driver that's still in the works, Thomas' version is only compatible with the Broadcom VideoCore IV GPU that's found inside the Raspberry Pi 1, 2, 3 and Zero devices.

EA Games has just released The Command & Conquer Remastered Collection on Steam, described by Hot Hardware as two of the '90s-era real-time strategy games that "were incredibly popular in their day and are still popular with retro gamers today..."

"Gamers can change between legacy and remastered 4K graphics in real-time when playing solo mode," they note, adding that "deep support for mods via the Steam Workshop is baked in."

But UnknownSoldier (Slashdot user #67,820) also writes EA has released the source code for two of their classic real-time strategy games in the Command and Conquer series: CnC: Red Alert and CnC: Tiberian Dawn on GitHub. Interesting trivia:

- Source code is around 5 MB.

- There are no art of sound assets.

- Filenames are all in capitals. This makes it easy to tell what was added for the Remaster.

- The path finding is NOT using the usual A* algorithm but the "Crash and Turn" algorithm.

- Searching the source for PETROGLYPH_EXAMPLE_MOD shows an example of how to add a mod.
And 25 years after the release of Tiberian Dawn, the remastering team even tracked down the original voice for its in-game computer system EVA -- to create new high-definition recordings.

Germany will outlaw the morphing of passport photos, in which pictures of two people are digitally combined, making it possible to assign multiple identities to a single document. Reuters reports: Morphing can trick artificial intelligence used at passport control into recognizing different individuals. The government on Wednesday backed a law requiring people to either have their photo taken at a passport office or, if they use a photographer, have it submitted in digital form over a secure connection, spokesman Steffen Seibert said. Researchers at the Fraunhofer Institute for Computer Graphics have found that it is possible to morph photos of the faces of different people who are not even related. A certain degree of similarity is sufficient, such as the eyes being aligned. Such manipulation of photos is typically invisible to the human eye, the researchers found.

South Korean phone manufacturer LG has released a security update last month to fix a vulnerability that impacts its Android smartphones sold over the past seven years. From a report: The vulnerability, tracked under the identifier of CVE-2020-12753, impacts the bootloader component that ships with LG smartphones. In March this year, US software engineer Max Thomas discovered a vulnerability in the bootloader component that had been added to LG smartphones starting with the LG Nexus 5 series. In a technical breakdown of the vulnerability published on Tuesday, Thomas says the bootloader component's graphics package contains a bug that lets attackers sneak in their own code to run alongside the bootloader's graphics under certain conditions, such as when the battery dies out and when the device is in the bootloader's Download Mode. Thomas says that threat actors who perfectly time an attack can gain the ability to run their own custom code, which could allow them to take over the bootloader, and inherently the entire device.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Wall Street Journal: Stay-home orders and the shuttering of workplaces have given corporate employees some respite from getting dragged into time-wasting water-cooler conversations. But some companies and their employees don't want to leave everything about the office behind, it turns out, and are replicating their offices in "SimCity"-like simulations online. File-transfer service WeTransfer BV opened its virtual space on May 1, almost seven weeks after closing its physical offices in New York, Los Angeles and Amsterdam as part of the global effort to slow the spread of the new coronavirus.

Graphics reminiscent of early "Tomb Raider" videogames depict a version of the company's Dutch headquarters, adapted to include pool tables, techno music and in-jokes such as a "memorial" library named for the very- much-alive chief creative officer. Staff roam around in the form of avatars such as robots and panda bears. Gordon Willoughby, the chief executive of WeTransfer, said the platform helps provide the social experience of office life in the way that Zoom calls and Slack have replaced business meetings and desk-side chats. That is particularly valuable for recent hires, he said. [...] Although clients can use Breakroom to create their office utopia, the platform also enables real-world elements such additional privileges for senior staff. In Sine Wave's own virtual world, senior members can lock the boardroom, which is located on top of a hill overlooking the rest of the office.

Microsoft is starting to release the latest twice-annual update to Windows 10, featuring enhancements to the longstanding Notepad app and a way to find your cursor in a sea of text. Some of the other features include: Faster and easier connections: We're making it easier and faster to pair your Bluetooth devices to your compatible Windows 10 PC. Now you can take care of everything in notifications (instead of Settings) with fewer steps.
Go passwordless: Did you know -- for improved security and a simple sign-in experience, you can sign in with your face, fingerprint, or PIN? It's easier than ever to enable passwordless sign-in for your Microsoft accounts: just go to Settings > Accounts > Sign-in options on your Windows 10 PC and select 'On' under 'Make your device passwordless.' Note that this is hardware dependent.
Name your desktops: Now instead of "Desktop 1" or "Desktop 2" you can give your Virtual Desktops more descriptive, clever, or amusing names. Using Virtual Desktop in Windows 10 allows you to expand your desktop beyond the physical limitations of the space, organize groups of related tasks, and easily switch between them. Tackling what you want to -- when you want to -- just got a whole lot easier. Visit this post to learn more on how to access Virtual Desktop in Windows 10.
See gaming in a whole new light: New DirectX 12 Ultimate features provide smoother graphics with increased detail -- all without sacrificing framerate.
Customization and utility at your fingertips: Xbox Game Bar now supports third-party widgets, helping you customize the overlay experience to fit with the way you game.

Looking Glass is now shipping its 8K holographic display, which utilizes 33.2 million pixels and 45-element light field to provide a 3D effect. TechCrunch reports: The target markets here are medical imaging, mapping, automotive, architecture and engineering. A press release tied to the announcement features a handful of folks in these categories who are excited at what such a technology could mean, going forward. Here's Epic Games CTO Kim Libreri: "Having access to a glasses-free holographic display is a massive breakthrough, and presents an exciting prospect for teams working in immersive computer graphics, visualization and content creation. The Looking Glass holographic display provides a stunning level of realism, and we look forward to seeing the innovations that emerge with the support of Unreal Engine generated content."

The company is only offering pricing quotes by request through its site -- which means it's pretty likely to be cost prohibitive for those just looking to augment a remote working setup. As noted in the earlier piece, the company is targeting enterprise users with early applications -- organizations that generally have money to spend on state of the art hardware. More consumer-focused applications, including gaming, could be coming a ways down the road.

Google has released today version 83 of its Chrome web browser, one of the most feature-packed Chrome updates released since the browser's initial launch back in 2009. From a report: Today's v83 release includes a slew of new features. These include enhanced privacy controls, new settings for managing cookie files, a new Safety Check option, support for tab groups, new graphics for web form elements, a new API for detecting barcodes, and a new anti-XSS security feature, among many many others. The reason why Chrome 83 includes so many features is because Google canceled the Chrome 82 release due to the ongoing coronavirus pandemic. As a result, some of the Chrome 82 features were pushed into Chrome 83, while others were rescheduled for later this year.

The Epic Games Store has been down for several hours as people flood the service to snap up GTA V for free. "We are currently experiencing high traffic on the Epic Games Store," Epic acknowledges in a tweet. "We are aware that users may be encountering slow loading times, 500 errors, or launcher crashing at this time and we are actively working to scale. We'll provide an update as soon as we can." ExtremeTech reports: The surge in traffic for the Epic Game Store has apparently been intense enough that it has actually created issues for related Epic services like Epic Battle Breakers and Fortnite.

If you can't get on the EGS to pick up your copy of the game, don't worry -- it's going to be free through May 21. It isn't clear which edition of the game Epic is giving away, however, because nobody can log in to check. Rumors ran wild on this point, with some implying Epic would give away the "latest premium edition with additional content." At the very least, the rumor is that this represents the complete title, not just a front-end for accessing either the single-player campaign or GTA Online. Epic is having something of a banner week. "First, Tim Sweeney's company wowed the internet with the new PS5 demo built on Unreal Engine 5," reports ExtremeTech. "Now the EGS has broken down under the weight of Grand Theft Auto, which puts Epic news front-and-center before PC gamers who might not have cared about the console announcement."

Also worth mentioning is the company on Wednesday launched Epic Online Services, giving developers free access to the same kinds of tools used to support Epic Games' massive Fortnite player base.

Alienware has announced the second generation of its flagship Area-51m gaming laptop, the Area-51m R2. It's largely similar on the outside to the original Area-51m, but the specs are almost completely overhauled on the inside, with 10th Gen Intel processors, new Nvidia GPUs, faster RAM, and better display options. From a report: All of those upgrades will be limited to the new R2 model, though. Despite Alienware's goals for future-proofed upgradable parts, the Area-51m has failed to live up to its potential. One of the biggest draws of the Area-51m was the option for user-replaceable parts. Most modern laptops have nearly all of their internal components sealed in place in an effort to cut down on size. But the Area-51m took a different approach. It was big, easy to disassemble, and made it simple to replace nearly every internal component, from RAM to the CPU to the GPU to even the thermal cooling components. The idea was to make something more portable than any other desktop but more customizable than any laptop. Alienware's parent company, Dell, even built its own system for replaceable GPUs in laptops, called DGFF (Dell Graphics Form Factor) to make it easier to upgrade in the future.

Epic Games' Unreal is already one of the most widely used game engines on the planet, utilized by game developers, advertisers and filmmakers alike. And it's ready to take the next step. From a report: Epic Games announced its new Unreal Engine 5 today and we finally have an idea of what graphics will look like on next generation hardware. The first gameplay footage from Microsoft's Xbox Series X was underwhelming, but the first run of games on new hardware typically is. The nine minutes of footage from Epic, which is running a tech demo on PlayStation 5 hardware, offered our first real glimpse of what may be the future of video game visuals. The clip features a video game protagonist exploring a cave system then skysurfing through a mountain pass as ruins crumble around her. Epic designed it to showcase two new features of Unreal Engine 5 -- nanite and lumen. Epic Games says that nanite allows game designers to render an incredible amount of polygons on screen, leading to photo-realistic environments. Lumen is a new lighting engine that renders light and fills space similarly to Nvidia's RTX tech.

In the demo, the two new technologies add up to a beautiful scene with complicated textures, animation, and lighting. Epic Games is selling these new technologies, and Unreal Engine 5 in general, as tools developers can use to save time in the development process. According to Epic Games, Unreal Engine 5 comes with a suite of tools that allow developers to rely less on hand crafting environments and animations. The demo is gorgeous, but it doesn't show off the developer's version of the software and it's hard to know what the software will look like for its target audience -- people making video games.

The Python Software Foundation and JetBrains collected over 24,000 responses for the third annual Python Developer's Survey. Among its findings: 59% said they used Python for data analysis, "followed by web development at 51%, and machine learning at 40%," reports ZDNet: Other major applications of Python include DevOps and system administration (39%), programming web tools like crawlers (37%), software testing (31%), education (26%), software prototyping (25%), network programming (21%), desktop development (18%), computer graphics (14%), embedded system development (8%), game development (7%) and mobile development (6%).

However, at 28%, web development remains the top purpose when respondents were asked what they used Python for the most. It is followed by data analysis (18%), machine learning (13%), and DevOps, and system administration (9%).

Good news given that the final version of Python 2 was just released, the survey found that 90% are using Python 3, up from 84% in 2018. Of those still on Python 2, 45% are using it for web development, and 41% are using it for DevOps and system administration. PSF speculates that web development's dominance in Python 2 is because of legacy code...

Some 68% of Python developers are building on Linux, followed by Windows at 48%, while macOS has a 29% share...

The PyCharm integrated development environment (IDE) from JetBrains is once again the top IDE with a 33% share, followed by Microsoft's open-source cross-platform editor VS Code with a 24% share.

Python adoption is often attributed to its moderate learning curve. The survey found that 44% of users have just two years' experience and 30% had three to five years' experience.