To celebrate the 25th anniversary of Doom, there's now mobile versions in the Google Play Store, reports Android Police, "and since this is a 25th-anniversary release, it includes the fourth expansion Thy Flesh Consumed. It's the complete package folks, and it's finally available on Android as an official release."

And in addition, three Doom re-releases are now available for the Nintendo Switch, Xbox One, and PlayStation 4, reports the Verge -- though there was one little glitch: Bethesda says it'll get rid of the strange requirement that players must log into an online account before they play the newly re-released versions of Doom, Doom II, and Doom 3, which went live yesterday. Players quickly criticized Bethesda for the seemingly ridiculous limitation -- the first of these games was released more than 25 years ago, at a time when there was obviously no internet requirement. The online login will be made optional in a coming update, Bethesda said today.
The re-releases were part of QuakeCon 2019, reports IGN, noting that Bethesda also showcased Doom Eternal's multiplayer, "revealing new details about the unique 1v2 Battle Mode."

Forbes hails the re-releases as "id Software's fast-paced, ultra-violent...classic shooters," adding that "It appears the re-releases are actually Unity remakes, though whether much has changed beyond resolution support remains to be seen." But they may also have some other minor differences, Engadget reports: There have been a few other complaints as well, such as the addition of copy protection, graphical changes (such as filtering that softens those 1993-era graphics) and apparent music tempo slowdowns on the Switch. That's not including the removal of downloads for the old PS3 and Xbox 360 versions. It's not a fiasco, but these clearly weren't the straightforward ports some were expecting.

Microsoft today announced that it would invest $1 billion in OpenAI, the San Francisco-based AI research firm cofounded by CTO Greg Brockman, chief scientist Ilya Sutskever, Elon Musk, and others, with backing from luminaries like LinkedIn cofounder Reid Hoffman and former Y Combinator president Sam Altman. From a report: In a blog post, Brockman said the investment will support the development of artificial general intelligence (AGI) -- AI with the capacity to learn any intellectual task that a human can -- with "widely distributed" economic benefits. To this end, OpenAI intends to partner with Microsoft to jointly develop new AI technologies for the Seattle company's Azure cloud platform and will enter into an exclusivity agreement with Microsoft to "further extend" large-scale AI capabilities that "deliver on the promise of AGI." Additionally, OpenAI will license some of its technologies to Microsoft, which will commercialize them and sell them to as-yet-unnamed partners, and OpenAI will train and run AI models on Azure as it works to develop new supercomputing hardware while "adhering to principles on ethics and trust."

According to Brockman, the partnership was motivated in part by OpenAI's continued pursuit of enormous computational power. Its researchers recently released analysis showing that from 2012 to 2018 the amount of compute used in the largest AI training runs grew by more than 300,000 times, with a 3.5-month doubling time, far exceeding the pace of Moore's Law. Perhaps exemplifying the trend is OpenAI's OpenAI Five, an AI system that squared off against professional players of the video game Dota 2 last summer. On Google's Cloud Platform -- in the course of training -- it played 180 years' worth of games every day on 256 Nvidia Tesla P100 graphics cards and 128,000 processor cores, up from 60,000 cores just a few years ago.

Long-time Slashdot reader dnix writes: Apparently having a lot of people playing Fortnite is good for the open source community too. Epic Games' MegaGrants program just awarded the Blender Foundation with $1.2 million over the next three years...to further the success of the free and open source 3D creation suite.
It's part of the company's $100 million "MegaGrants" program, according to the announcement. "Open tools, libraries and platforms are critical to the future of the digital content ecosystem," said Tim Sweeney, founder and CEO of Epic Games. "Blender is an enduring resource within the artistic community, and we aim to ensure its advancement to the benefit of all creators."

Apple today announced updates to the MacBook Air and 13-inch MacBook Pro. The MacBook Air price is being lowered to $1,099, but it will be offered to college students for $999. From a report: It will be sold in the same configurations as before, starting with 128GB of storage, but Apple updated the screen with new TrueTone technology. That means it sets the colors on the screen to match the lighting of the room for a more comfortable viewing experience. It also includes the updated keyboard design that Apple first launched in updated MacBook Pros back in May. It should help to prevent some of the sticky key problems experienced in Apple's MacBooks. But this is not the full keyboard refresh that's rumored to ship with an entirely new keyboard configuration. The new 13-inch Retina MacBook Pro starts at $1,299 (or $1,199 for college students.) and includes a quad-core processor in the entry-level model for the first time and improved graphics performance. Like the refresh in May, the entry-level models now also come with new keyboard materials to help prevent sticking keys.

"AMD is unleashing an arsenal of products today," writes Slashdot reader MojoKid.

Hot Hardware writes: The Zen 2-based AMD Ryzen 3000 series is easily one of the most anticipated product launches in the PC space in recent memory. AMD has essentially promised to address virtually all of the perceived shortcomings of the original Zen-based Ryzen processors, with the Ryzen 3000 series, while continuing to aggressively challenge Intel on multiple fronts -- performance, power, price, you name it.
MojoKid summarizes their analysis: In the benchmarks, performance has been improved across the board. The AMD Ryzen 9 3900X and Ryzen 7 3700X offered superior single and multi-thread performance versus their second-gen counterparts, and better latency characteristics, that allowed them to occasionally overtake processors with more cores / threads in a few multi-threaded tests. On a couple of occasions, the 12-core / 24-thread Ryzen 9 3900X even outpaced the 16-core / 32-thread Threadripper 2950X. Performance versus Intel is more of a mixed bag, but the Ryzen 3000 series still looks strong. Single-thread performance is roughly on-par with Intel's Coffee Lake based Core i9-9900K, depending on the workload. Multi-threaded scaling is a dogfight strictly in terms of absolute performance, but because AMD offers more cores per dollar, the Ryzen 3000 series is the clear winner here.

Meanwhile, AMD's Radeon RX 5700 and Radeon RX 5700 XT Navi-powered graphics cards are set to take on NVIDIA's GeForce RTX offerings in the midrange
There's more details in the original submission, and PC World writes that AMD's Radeon RX 5700 and Radeon RX 5700 XT graphics cards "represent a fresh start and a bright future for AMD, brimming with technologies that have never been seen in GPUs before." But they're not the only site offering a detailed analysis.

Forbes tested the chips on five high-workload games (including World of Tanks and Shadow of the Tomb Raider) and shared their results: As usual, things are very title and resolution dependent, but in general, [AMD's] RX 5700 XT proved to be a slightly better option at 1080p with the RTX 2060 Super mostly matching it above this... However, the 2060 Super was cooler-running and much quieter than its AMD counterpart, plus I'd argue it's better-looking too... You also get the option of Ray Tracing and DLSS, but even discounting those, the Nvidia card is a slightly better buy overall.
But CNET argues that AMD's new graphics cards "are very quiet. They are bigger and do require more power than the RTX 2060...but the 2060 Super has increased power requirements as well."

TL:DR: There's a chip war going on.

According to Thurrott's Brad Sams, Microsoft is still developing a low-cost, cloud-based Xbox console. "Sams suggests the low-power box will be just capable enough to allow a player to 'move around in a virtual environment,' but crucially, game elements like NPCs, interactables, text and even graphics won't be there," reports VG247. From the report: This is obviously not playable, but the idea is that having movement calculations run locally reduces input lag compared to a 100% streamed game. Though this might make technical sense, it's hard to imagine the company pushing this hard unless the difference is really perceptible. Of course, there's a lot we still don't know about the streaming market, and some segment of that audience may opt to pay $80 or so to get an experience better than running the game through a web browser.

MojoKid writes: NVIDIA just launched three new GeForce RTX gaming GPUs to battle against AMD's forthcoming Radeon RX 5700 series. The GeForce RTX 2080 Super, GeForce RTX 2070 Super and GeForce RTX 2060 Super will all be shipping this month. GeForce RTX 2070 Super and RTX 2060 Super cards are out making the rounds in benchmark reviews, while the RTX 2080 Super will arrive in a couple of weeks. The GeForce RTX 2070 Super is more than just an overclocked RTX 2070 but actually based on the GeForce RTX 2080's TU104 NVIDIA Turing GPU with 40 active SMs, for a total of 2,560 CUDA cores at 1,605MHz and 1,770MHz base and boost clocks, respectively. The RTX 2060 Super is still based on the original TU106 GPU, but it has four additional SMs enabled, which brings the CUDA core count up to 2,176 (from 1,920) at a somewhat higher 1470MHz base clock and boost clock 30MHz lower at 1,650MHz.

There is an additional 2GB of GDDR6 memory on the card too for a total of 8GB now. Performance-wise, both cards are significant upgrades over the originals, with roughly 10 -- 23 percent gains, depending on the resolution or application. The GeForce RTX 2070 Super is often faster than the pricier AMD Radeon VII, especially at 1440p. At 4K, however, the Radeon VII's memory bandwidth advantage often gives it an edge. The new GeForce RTX 2060 Super is faster than a Radeon RX Vega 64 more often than not. It will be interesting to see how these cards compete with AMD's Radeon RX 5700 Navi-based card when they arrive later this month. NVIDIA could have just thrown a wrench in the works for AMD.

"Linux frontman Linus Torvalds thinks he's 'more self-aware' these days and is 'trying to be less forceful' after his brief absence from directing Linux kernel developers because of his abusive language on the Linux kernel mailing list," reports ZDNet.

"But true to his word, he's still not necessarily diplomatic in his communications with maintainers..." Torvalds' post-hiatus outburst was directed at Dave Chinner, an Australian programmer who maintains the Silicon Graphics (SGI)-created XFS file system supported by many Linux distros. "Bullshit, Dave," Torvalds told Chinner on a mailing list. The comment from Chinner that triggered Torvalds' rebuke was that "the page cache is still far, far slower than direct IO" -- a problem Chinner thinks will become more apparent with the arrival of the newish storage-motherboard interface specification known as Peripheral Express Interconnect Express (PCIe) version 4.0. Chinner believes page cache might be necessary to support disk-based storage, but that it has a performance cost....

"You've made that claim before, and it's been complete bullshit before too, and I've called you out on it then too," wrote Torvalds. "Why do you continue to make this obviously garbage argument?" According to Torvalds, the page cache serves its correct purpose as a cache. "The key word in the 'page cache' name is 'cache'," wrote Torvalds.... "Caches work, Dave. Anybody who thinks caches don't work is incompetent. 99 percent of all filesystem accesses are cached, and they never do any IO at all, and the page cache handles them beautifully," Torvalds wrote.

"When you say the page cache is slower than direct IO, it's because you don't even see or care about the *fast* case. You only get involved once there is actual IO to be done."
"The thing is," reports the Register, "crucially, Chinner was talking in the context of specific IO requests that just don't cache well, and noted that these inefficiencies could become more obvious as the deployment of PCIe 4.0-connected non-volatile storage memory spreads."

Here's how Chinner responded to Torvalds on the mailing list. "You've taken one single statement I made from a huge email about complexities in dealing with IO concurrency, the page cache and architectural flaws in the existing code, quoted it out of context, fabricated a completely new context and started ranting about how I know nothing about how caches or the page cache work."

The Register notes their conversation also illustrates a crucial difference from closed-source software development. "[D]ue to the open nature of the Linux kernel, Linus's rows and spats play out in public for everyone to see, and vultures like us to write up about."

In honor of FreeDOS's 25th birthday, project founder and coordinator Jim Hall agreed to answer the 10 best questions submitted by Slashdot readers. You asked and he answered! Read on for Jim's interview.

Raspberry Pi today introduced a new version of its popular line of single-board computer. The Raspberry Pi 4 Model B is the fastest Raspberry Pi ever, with the company promising "desktop performance comparable to entry-level x86 PC systems." The specifications are: A 1.5GHz quad-core 64-bit ARM Cortex-A72 CPU (~3x performance); 1GB, 2GB, or 4GB of LPDDR4 SDRAM; full-throughput Gigabit; Ethernet; dual-band 802.11ac wireless networking; Bluetooth 5.0; two USB 3.0 and two USB 2.0 ports; dual monitor support, at resolutions up to 4K; VideoCore VI graphics, supporting OpenGL ES 3.x; 4Kp60 hardware decode of HEVC video; and complete compatibility with earlier Raspberry Pi products. It starts at $35.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from VentureBeat: At the International Supercomputing Conference (ISC) in Frankfurt, Germany this week, Santa Clara-based chipmaker Nvidia announced that it will support processors architected by British semiconductor design company Arm. Nvidia anticipates that the partnership will pave the way for supercomputers capable of "exascale" performance -- in other words, of completing at least a quintillion floating point computations ("flops") per second, where a flop equals two 15-digit numbers multiplied together. Nvidia says that by 2020 it will contribute its full stack of AI and high-performance computing (HPC) software to the Arm ecosystem, which by Nvidia's estimation now accelerates over 600 HPC applications and machine learning frameworks. Among other resources and services, it will make available CUDA-X libraries, graphics-accelerated frameworks, software development kits, PGI compilers with OpenACC support, and profilers. Nvidia founder and CEO Jensen Huang pointed out in a statement that, thanks to this commitment, Nvidia will soon accelerate all major processor architectures: x86, IBM's Power, and Arm. "As traditional compute scaling has ended, the world's supercomputers have become power constrained," said Huang. "Our support for Arm, which designs the world's most energy-efficient CPU architecture, is a giant step forward that builds on initiatives Nvidia is driving to provide the HPC industry a more power-efficient future."

Long-time Slashdot reader jrepin writes: The KDE community has released Plasma 5.16, the newest iteration of the popular desktop environment. It features an improved notification system, Not only can you mute notifications altogether with the Do Not Disturb mode, but the system also groups notifications by app.

Developers also focused on user's privacy. When any application accesses the microphone, an icon will pop up in your system tray, showing that something is listening. Vaults, a built-in utility to encrypt folders, are easier and more convenient to use.

Dolphin file and folder manager now opens folders you click on in new tabs instead of new windows. Discover software manager is cleaner and clearer as it now has two distinct areas for downloading and installing software. The Wallpaper Slideshow settings window displays the images in the folders you selected, and lets you select only the graphics you want to display in the slideshow.

For a more comprehensive overview of what to expect in Plasma 5.16, check out the official announcement or the changelog for the complete list of changes.

The System76 Gazelle laptop is finally available. From a report: What makes this laptop so special (besides its pre-installed Linux-based operating System), is its impressive specifications. You see, System76 has supercharged it with a 9th generation Intel Core i7 Processor (9750H) and NVIDIA GTX 16-Series Graphics. It even has something the pricey MacBook Pro doesn't -- the ability to be configure with up to 64GB. Yeah, Apple's laptop can only have a maximum of 32GB. The Gazelle can be configured with additional top specs, such as an NVMe SSD up to 2TB. Actually, it can accommodate two such drives, so you can theoretically have 4TB of speedy storage. You can opt for either a 15 or 17-inch display, both of which have a 1080p resolution. Regardless of screen size, you get a full keyboard too, meaning it has a number pad on the right. It ships with Ubuntu or Pop!_OS pre-installed and starts at $1099.

At the Electronic Entertainment Expo (E3) on Wednesday, Netflix shared details of its plans to develop its original shows into video games. Hollywood Reporter reports: Among the program of upcoming games, Stranger Things 3: The Game was highlighted, described by Netflix as "an adventure game that blends a distinctively retro art style with modern gameplay mechanics to deliver nostalgic fun with a fresh new twist." Playing as a character from the show, the user will be tasked with solving puzzles and battling the Mind Flayer. Dave Pottinger, CEO and co-founder of BonusXP, shared that the game will feature old-school graphics.

Two characters from the game were revealed at the panel: Max, who will exhibit karate kicks and the ability to add fire damage to those kicks; and Eleven, described by Chris Lee, director of Interactive Games at Netflix, as "the most powerful character in the game" -- she will have psychic push power. The game will launch on July 4 and be available on Nintendo Switch, Playstation 4, Xbox One and other consoles. In addition, a special announcement was made at the panel about a Stranger Things mobile hybrid RPG/puzzle game that will launch in 2020. The game is a collaboration with Next Games, which is based out of Helsinki, Finland. Stranger Things isn't the only show that's planning to have its own game. "Netflix show The Dark Crystal: Age of Resistance Tactics is also set to become a 'turn-based tactics' game challenging fans to recruit an army and act as their commander in a series of campaign battles," the report adds. "No specific date was mentioned, but the game will launch this year on various consoles."

MojoKid writes: AMD let loose today with a number of high profile launches at the E3 2019 Expo in Los Angeles, CA. The company disclosed its full Zen 2 Ryzen 3000 series microarchitecture, which AMD claims offers an IPC uplift of 15% generation over generation, thanks to better branch prediction, higher integer throughput, and reduced effective latency to memory. Zen 2 also significantly beefs up floating point throughput with double the FP performance of the previous generation. AMD also announced a 16-core/32-thread variant, dubbed Ryzen 3950X, that drops at $750 -- a full $950 cheaper than a similar spec 16-core Intel Core i9-9960X. On the graphics side, AMD's RDNA architecture in Navi will power the company's new Radeon RX 5700 series, which is said to offer competitive performance to NVIDIA's GeForce RTX 2070 and 2060 series. The Navi-based GPU at the heart of the upcoming Radeon RX 5700 series is manufactured on TSMC's 7nm process node and features GDDR6 memory, along with PCI Express 4.0 interface support. Versus AMD's previous generation GCN (Graphics Core Next) architecture, RDNA delivers more than 50% better performance-per-watt and 25% better overall performance. Greater than 50% of that improvement comes from architecture optimizations according to AMD; the GPU also gets a boost from its 7nm process and frequency gains. Radeon RX 5700 and 5700 XT cards will be available in market on July 7th, along with AMD Ryzen 3000 chips, but pricing hasn't been established yet for the Radeon GPUs.

PC gaming platform BlueStacks has launched BlueStacks Inside that enables mobile game developers to publish their games on Steam with no porting to the PC required. From a report: BlueStacks inside has a one-step software development kit (SDK) that lets developers take existing mobile games to Steam and Discord. The initial launch will include several high-profile developers like KOG, Funplus, Fabled Game Studio, and many others whose games will be available directly on Steam. Mobile developers have started allocating large budgets to game development, and that means mobile games can be competitive on Steam without a ton of modification.

With games like Lineage 2: Revolution and PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds, graphics and gameplay push the limits of what a mobile device can do. On the other hand, gamers are caught in a struggle to maintain devices that can keep up with demanding games. BlueStacks Inside gives developers an opportunity to reach a much wider and valuable PC-based audience without the need to hire a separate PC development team. Players can use their PCs to do the heavy lifting for games their phones would otherwise not be able to run well.

The long-awaited Mac Pro is here. From a report: The new Intel Xeon processor inside the Mac Pro will have up to 28 cores, with up to 300W of power and heavy-duty cooling, "so it can run unconstrained at full power at all times." System memory can be maxed out at an eyebrow-raising 1.5TB, says Apple. There are eight internal PCI Express slots, with four of them being double-wide. Two USB-C and two USB-A ports will grace the front of the system, which is at least one more USB-C port than you'll find on a majority of desktop PC systems and cases today. With this Mac Pro, Apple is launching a custom expansion module it calls an MPX Module. This is a giant quad-wide PCIe card that fits two graphics cards, has its own dedicated heatsink, and also has a Thunderbolt 3 connector on the bottom for extra bandwidth / power / display connectivity. Apple says you can spec that out with AMD's Radeon Pro Vega 2 or Radeon Pro Vega 2 Duo, the latter of which would get you four GPUs in total. The power supply of the new Mac Pro maxes out at 1.4kW. Three large fans sit at the front, just behind the new aluminum grille, blowing air across the system at a rate of 300 cubic feet per minute. It starts at $5,999.

Samsung and AMD announced today a new multi-year strategic partnership between the two companies, where Samsung SLSI will license graphics IP from AMD for use in mobile GPUs. From a report: The announcement is a major disruptive move for the mobile graphics landscape as it signifies that Samsung is going forward with the productization of their own in-house GPU architecture in future Exynos chipsets. Samsung is said to have started work on their own "S-GPU" at its research division back around in 2012, with the company handing over the new IP to a new division called "ACL," or Advanced Computing Lab in San Jose, which has a joint charter with SARC (Samsung Austin R&D Center, where Samsung currently designs its custom mobile CPU & memory controller IP). With today's announced partnership, Samsung will license "custom graphics IP" from AMD. What this IP means is a bit unclear from the press release, but we have some strong pointers on what it might be.

Samsung's own GPU architecture is already quite far along, having seen 7 years of development, and already being integrated in test silicon chipsets. Unless the deal was signed years ago and only publicly announced today, it would signify that the IP being talked about now is a patent-deal, rather than new architectural IP from AMD that Samsung would integrate in their own designs. Samsung's new GPU IP is the first from-scratch design in over a decade, in an industry with very old incumbents with massive patent-pools. Thus what today's announcement likely means is likely that Samsung is buying a patent-chest from AMD in order to protect themselves from possible litigation from other industry players.

Synthetic events remain a big security hole for macOS in spite of Apple's recent efforts to prevent malicious applications from abusing this feature. From a report: Speaking at the second edition of the Objective by the Sea security conference that was held in Monaco over the weekend, Patrick Wardle, a well-known Apple security expert, has revealed a zero-day impacting Apple's macOS operating system, including the new version launched today. The zero-day is a bypass of the security protections that Apple has put in place to prevent unauthorized access to synthetic events. Synthetic events are a macOS mechanism that allows applications to automate mouse clicks and keyboard input. It was created for the sake of automation and can be used via either the Core Graphics framework or the AppleScript scripting language. [...]

For almost two years now, Wardle has been looking at Apple's countermeasures aimed to prevent the abuse of synthetic events. He previously showed two methods[1, 2] of bypassing Apple's synthetic events protections, so much so that Apple decided last year to block access to synthetic events by default. But over the weekend, Wardle disclosed a new way of bypassing these latest protections, once again. "It's the gift that keeps giving," Wardle told ZDNet via email. "And actually gets more and more valuable as Apple adds more protections (privacy and security mechanisms) that can be 'allowed' by a single synthetic click." The new technique is possible because of the Transparency Consent and Control (TCC) system. Wardle says the TCC contains a compatibility database in the form of a file named AllowApplications.plist. This file lists apps and app versions that are allowed to access various privacy and security features, including synthetic events.

The NLNet Foundation is a non-profit supporting privacy, security, and the "open internet". Now the group has approved funding for the hybrid Libre RISC-V CPU/VPU/GPU, which will "pay for full-time engineering work to be carried out over the next year, and to pay for bounty-style tasks."

Long-time Slashdot reader lkcl explains why that's significant: High security software is irrelevant if the hardware is fundamentally compromised, for example with the Intel spying backdoor co-processor known as the Management Engine. The Libre RISCV SoC was begun as a way for users to regain trust and ownership of the hardware that they legitimately purchase.

This processor will be the first of its kind, as the first commercial SoC designed to give users the hardware and software source code of the 3D GPU, Video Decoder, main processor, boot process and the OS.

Shockingly, in the year 2019, whilst there are dozens of SoCs with full source code that are missing either a VPU or a GPU (such as the TI OMAP Series and Xilinx ZYNQ7000s), there does not exist a single commercial embedded SoC which has full source code for the bootloader, CPU, VPU and GPU. The iMX6 for example has etnaviv support for its GPU however the VPU is proprietary, and all of Rockchip and Allwinner's offerings use either MALI or PowerVR yet their VPUs have full source (reverse engineered in the case of Allwinner).

This processor, which will be quad core dual issue 800mhz RV64GC and capable of running full GNU/Linux SMP OSes, with 720p video playback and embedded level 25fps 3D performance in around 2.5 watts at 28nm, is designed to address that imbalance. Links and details on the Libre RISC-V SoC wiki.

The real question is: why is this project the only one of its kind, and why has no well funded existing Fabless Semiconductor Company tried something like this before? The benefits to businesses of having full source code are already well-known.