Daily Archives: 2019-11-21

Google Will Cancel Google Cloud Print in 2020

Source: Hacker News

Article note: The regularly scheduled "any google product that is more useful than intrusive will be canceled" news has struck. This time: cloud print service.
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Half Life Alyx hits PC VR headsets in March 2020 [Updated]

Source: Ars Technica

Article note: It's set between 1 and 2, so no resolution of the HL2:E2 cliffhanger we've all been waiting 15 years for. I am excited to see if they've finally come up with something compelling to do with a VR set, because that hasn't happened yet.
  • Whoa! I have hands!

After a tease earlier this week, Valve has revealed more details and a new trailer for the first new Half-Life content in over a decade. The "full-length" Half Life: Alyx will hit Steam in March 2020, Valve says, with support for "all PC-based VR headsets." Pre-orders are already available for $59.99, though the game will be free if you own a Valve Index headset.

The game, which Valve says is "set between the events of Half-Life and Half-Life 2," has been "designed from the ground up for Virtual Reality" (i.e. you can stop hoping for a 2D monitor release). "Everyone at Valve is excited to be returning to the world of Half-Life," Valve founder Gabe Newell said in a statement. “VR has energized us."

"We’ve invested a lot of ourselves in the technology," Newell's statement continues. "But we're also game developers at heart, and to be devoting ourselves to a VR game this ambitious is just as exciting. For that to come in the form of Half-Life feels like the culmination of a lot of things we care a lot about: truly great games, cutting edge technology, and open platforms. We can’t wait for people to experience this."

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SC Exciting find: Whitebox Switches?!

Oddly, one of the most exciting things I’ve seen at SC19 is whitebox switch hardware. Innovium’s Teralynx Ethernet fabric silicon smells like the end of Broadcom’s near-monoply (and associated deep partnership with high-end switch vendors with their proprietary environments) in that space, and the coming of whitebox 100+ GBE (and frankly, even 40+GBE) switches. I chatted with some folks from Innovium and Cameo, who were hosted in the Gigabyte booth because apparently they’re partnering, where they were showing serious enterprise switches that are open to the bones running Open Network Linux booted from Coreboot instead of proprietary lock-in vendor OS. Even their baby product in the line, the ESCC600-32Q (PDF warning) is pretty damn exciting.

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Intel’s Xe for HPC: Ponte Vecchio with Chiplets, EMIB, and Foveros on 7nm, Coming 2021

Source: Published articles

Right on the heels of burning the shit out of DOD's HPC spending with the collapse of the Phi stuff right after DOD jumped in at scale, DOE is trusting intel's absolutely-no-public-details unified GPU plan for Aurora. I really, really do hope it pans out (because GPUs are bullshit and Intel commodizing them and bringing decent drivers and toolchains would make the world better) but the degree to which they're being cagey at this stage is a cause for suspicion.

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Intel’s ‘One API’ Project Delivers Unified Programming Model Across Diverse Architectures | Intel Newsroom

Source: Published articles

Even the press release can't make it look like something other than Khronos' SYCL C++ extensions with a bulky coat of paint. It could be uglier, and Intel with open washing might be enough to unseat CUDA, so ...OK?

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