Nvidia GeForce Now Could Undercut Stadia With $5 Subscription

Nvidia has been trying to make its GeForce Now streaming service a viable product for years, but it has yet to get all the kinks worked out. Google leapfrogged Nvidia when it launched Stadia late last year, offering cloud gaming on a limited basis to those who bought the spendy Founder’s Edition bundle. Nvidia may be close to wrapping up its latest GeForce Now beta, and rumors claim it’s targeting a subscription price that’s just half of Stadia’s. 

GeForce Now launched in 2013 as Nvidia Grid, and it remained in beta for a few years on Nvidia Shield devices. Nvidia launched a few years later with a $7.99 monthly fee. That gave you access to a library of older games, but new titles were purchased separately. This wasn’t a success, and Nvidia went back to the drawing board to develop the new GeForce Now. During this beta period, Nvidia has added integrations with Steam and Uplay and made the service compatible with more devices. 

A report from VideoCardz.com (which is reliable for gaming information despite the name) claims that Nvidia is planning on a $4.99 monthly fee for the premium GeForce Now service tier. Free users will have their gaming sessions capped at 1 hour, and they’ll have to wait longer to get a slot on Nvidia’s servers. Paying customers get priority access, longer sessions, and RTX ray-tracing support. However, the $4.99 fee might be a limited time offer for just the first year. 

GeForce NOW Free
🧽 Standard Access
🧽 1-Hour Session Length

GeForce NOW FOUNDERS $4.99/Month (For 12 Months)
🧽 Priority Access
🧽 Extended Session Length
🧽 RTX ON
🧽 Free 90-day Introductory Period
🧽 Limited Time Offer

We asked Jensen for more details 🤭

— VideoCardz.com (@VideoCardz) January 30, 2020

GeForce Now supports a few hundred games via Steam and Uplay — it used to allow testers to install “unsupported” games from Steam on the GeForce Now servers, but that ability vanished a few months back. Still, hundreds of games dwarfs Google’s Stadia lineup. Google is probably hoping that its custom features will attract developers who will make exclusive games for Stadia, but it’s too early to know if that will happen. 

Google will charge $10 per month for Stadia Pro, which includes 4K streaming and game discounts. Unlike GeForce Now, Stadia requires customers to buy games from the Stadia store. The ability to play many of the Steam games people already own, along with the lower monthly fee, could encourage gamers to use GeForce Now instead. At least, that’s probably what Nvidia hopes. Google’s free Stadia tier could be almost as good as the paid one when it launches, and that could throw Nvidia’s plans into disarray.

Now read:

• Review: Google Stadia Might Be the Future of Gaming, but We’re Not There Yet
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• Nvidia announces GeForce Now streaming service for PCs with pay-per-minute gaming

TriEye’s Infrared Camera Helps Autonomous Cars See Through Haze

The Israeli startup TriEye believes it can move cars closer to self-driving with a short-wave infrared, or SWIR, camera as part of the car’s arsenal of sensors. A SWIR camera can see better than traditional optical cameras when there’s rain, fog, dust, or smoke.

TriEye’s breakthrough isn’t the invention of SWIR technology cameras – they exist today – but in reducing the potential cost by “1,000x,” according to the company. TriEye says lower-resolution SWIR cameras can cost $20,000, so that means TriEye believes a camera, or at least its sensor, can be sold for $20. (Our estimate.) That’s in line with the sub-$100 cost of radar and fixed (not rotating) lidar modules. TriEye says it will have working cameras, called Raven, ready to sample this year.

TriEye exploded parts diagram. TriEye uses a CMOS sensor rather than InGaAs.

The company was formed in 2017 by researchers at Hebrew University. Short-wave infrared technologies already have some traction in high-value, often defense-related applications using InGaAs, or indium gallium arsenide. That’s an alloy made from indium arsenide (InAs), gallium arsenide (GaAs), indium phosphide (InP), and gallium phosphide (GaP). But it’s expensive. It’s hard to make a mass-market self-driving or assisted car if the tiny camera in your windshield costs as much as a Corolla.

Close-up of prototype TriEye Raven camera. Note inscription on the coin

SWIR cameras work in the wavelength spectrum of 1.0-1.9um (micrometers) where traditional optical cameras operate at 0.4-0.75um. TriEye says its big advance, the one making short-wave infrared commercially viable, is the adaptation of the SWIR technology to use CMOS – complementary metal-oxide semiconductor – technology that is far cheaper.

The TriEye Raven camera would initially be offered with 1280 x 960 resolution, have a field of view of 17 x 12 degrees or 46 x 34 degrees in a 4:3 aspect ratio, and a frame rate of 30fps. Including the lens, the camera measures 3 x 3 x 2.5 cm, or 1.2 x 1.2 x 1.0 inches.

TriEye will target both autonomous cars and today’s cars with advanced driver-assistance systems, or ADAS, technology: adaptive cruise control, lane centering assist, and blind-spot detection. On cars coming out in the next few years, a TriEye camera would be better able to make out pavement markers to keep the car centered in its lane – a requirement of Level 2 and higher autonomy – as well as make out people and animals in or near the roadway. TriEye says its sensor also improves low-light image sensing.

TriEye says radar and lidar, even working together, have issues detecting and identifying objects on the road in murky visibility conditions, while the TriEye SWIR CMOS can see objects in bad visibility situations. How much and how well will await real-world testing.

TriEye is not alone in seeking new tools for autonomous driving. For establishing a car’s exact location on the roadway, the MIT-spinoff WaveSense proposes using ground-penetrating radar to create an exacting map. The soil and rock types, cavities, and utility pipes create a unique image that can locate the car to within a few inches. WaveSense would require initial mapping (and update mapping); cars would carry the map data and have their own downward-facing radars. WaveSense tech would need to work with other technologies to identify other cars, blocked lanes, and pedestrians and animals.

TriEye has raised more than $22 million in funding, not much by Amazon-Apple-Microsoft standards, but enough to develop prototypes to show automakers and suppliers this year. The big win was a large investment in August 2019 by Porsche Investment, both for the money and for the name of the world’s best-known sports car company. Intel Capital provided initial funding; Grove Ventures and Israeli businessman Marius Nacht also were early investors. Porsche’s investment doesn’t mean the camera would be restricted to Porsches.

Now read:

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8-Core x86 CPU From China Goes Up for Sale

In 2013, VIA Technologies created a joint venture with the Shanghai Municipal Government and created Zhaoxin, a fabless semiconductor company. Zhaoxin (meaning “million-core,” according to Wikipedia) launched a series of chips based on the old VIA Isaiah core. Over the years, the company has evolved the original Isaiah architecture into a higher-performing CPU core, with more cores, higher clocks, and a lower process node. The current CPU family’s code name is Lujiazui and it’s used in the KX-6000 series of products.

Image by WikiChip

To be clear, Zhaoxin is entirely distinct from Thatic, the joint venture that AMD formed a few years ago. The pedigree for Zhaoxin flows back through VIA through the acquisition of companies like Cyrix and Centaur Technology, as well as through VIA’s own legal settlements with Intel. While I’m cutting through a lot of x86 history here, Centaur’s general design philosophy from the VIA acquisition through the present day has been an emphasis on low-power, efficient computing. There was a brief time, around the turn of the millennium, when VIA was building low-power fanless products for passive, silent SFFs (Small Form Factor systems).

THG has more details on the first Zhaoxin parts to turn up for retail sale in China. The KX-U6780A is an 8C/8T CPU clocked at 2.7GHz, with an 8MB L2 cache and a 70W TDP. There is no L3. The CPU appears to have an integrated GPU with DX11.1 support, along with support for standards like AVX and SSE4.2, PCIe 3.0, M.2 slots, and USB 3.1. While the CPU is only offered in BGA format, there’s going to be a supported mITX motherboard, the C1888.

The Chinese community enthusiasts who benchmarked the board were able to compare it against the previous Zhaoxin product, the KX-C4580. The KX-C4580 is a 4C/4T CPU at 1.83Hz — but it’s clear that there’ve been some substantial additional architectural improvements. If we start from the 228 baseline and assume perfect scaling, we’d expect the U6780A to provide 2x performance based on core count and a 1.47x improvement based on clock. That only takes the R20 score up to ~670, implying the new CPU’s IPC is roughly 1.26x higher in Cinebench on top of the core count and clock gains.

According to CPU-Z’s single-thread rankings, a score of 171 puts this chip in the same ballpark as the Core 2 Duo E7400 (178) or the Core i5-5200U (168). A CB20 score of 845 puts the KX-U6780A in the same range as the Intel Pentium G4600 at 838 (2C/4T, 3.6GHz), or the AMD FX-6300 at 854 (6C/12T, 3.5GHz – 4.1GHz). While it’s obvious that the per-core performance from the Zhaoxin CPU is much lower than the Intel equivalent, the Pentium G4600 does have a 1.33x clock speed advantage.

Anyone looking for a reason to dismiss the KX-U6780A will find reason to do so. Best-case, you’d be buying performance similar to what you could get from Intel or AMD 6-8 years ago. Focusing on that issue, however, misses the rapid rise of China’s manufacturing and semiconductor industry. Zhaoxin has evolved its product line rapidly, moving from Isaiah-derived parts directly based on the old VIA architecture to newer chips that have significantly improved the performance of the underlying CPU. While the new chip may not pack much performance compared with a top-end part from AMD or Intel, the KX-U6780A is still much faster relative to AMD or Intel than previous CPUs the company or country has fielded.

China has set aggressive targets for itself in terms of semiconductor self-sufficiency, and ramping up the performance and production of its home-grown products is part of that. While the company’s current manufacturing capabilities can’t build 7nm hardware, mainland China’s largest foundry, SMIC (Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corporation) announced volume production of 14nm wafers as of last November. We don’t know anything about yields, so we can’t speculate there, but China is catching up to the United States, Korea, and Taiwan in terms of advanced semiconductor manufacturing capabilities.

Now Read:

• AMD Denies Report It Gave China ‘Keys to the Kingdom.’
• Zhaoxin Shows Off 8-Core x86 CPU at 3GHz, Built on 16nm FinFET
• VIA Technologies Subsidiary Zhaoxin Announces New x86-64 CPUs

Phone Call Recording May Come to Pixel Phones Soon

Google’s Pixel line of smartphones never have the best hardware of any Android phone, but Google makes up for it with software. Previous Pixels have debuted features like Call Screen and Google Assistant. Now, the long-rumored call recording feature may be on the verge of release. Over at XDA, they’ve managed to coax the Google dialer app to activate the unreleased call recording feature, giving us a glimpse at how it’ll work. 

XDA used a beta build of the Google Phone app, and the feature appears to be almost completely done. To start a recording, you’ll just have to tap the new “record” button on the call screen. It captures audio from both sides of the conversation and saves it for later review. 

This all varies greatly from the myriad “call recording” apps you’ll find in the Play Store. Those almost invariably just record from the phone’s microphone, which produces poor results. The apps were even more hamstrung by privacy changes implemented in Android 9. So, it’s up to phone makers to add call recording as a feature, and most don’t. 

An example of the call recording feature as it currently exists, via XDA.

There are legal restrictions on call recording that vary from state to state and country to country. To cover all (or at least most) of its bases, the Google feature will announce to both parties that recording as started. Google will also leverage its voice transcription capabilities to make the recordings into text that can be searched. For privacy reasons, this will probably take place on the device like Google’s Live Transcription feature. 

We don’t know when this feature will roll out. It’s possible Google will save it for the Google I/O conference in a few weeks. We can, however, safely assume that it will be exclusive to Pixel phones for a while at least. Other Pixel exclusives like Call Screen eventually expanded to a handful of non-Google devices from Motorola and Nokia. Call recording will likely be the same. Xiaomi might also have a role here — the call recording code popped up in the Phone app just after the Chinese company announced that it would start pre-installing Google’s Phone app instead of its own custom app.

Now read:

• Google Ends Regular Updates for 2016 Pixel Phones, Promises One Last OTA in December
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• Report: Google Phone Sales Up Dramatically Thanks to Pixel 3a

The F-35 Is Still Broken and the F-35A Can’t Shoot Straight

Credit: US Air Force

Americans don’t agree on much these days, but thankfully there’s one fact coming out of government reports that’s pretty incontrovertible: However awesome the F-35 might be in theory — whatever heights of achievement it might one day achieve — the plane as it exists today is in pretty sorry shape. Bloomberg’s Anthony Capaccio recently got a chance to preview the annual report prepared by Robert Behler, the DoD’s director of operational test and evaluation. While the latest version of the report doesn’t identify any fundamentally new failings, continued operational problems in the existing categories are more than enough to have stymied the effort to bring the aircraft to full readiness.

Behler’s office has identified 13 Category 1 “must fix” issues directly impacting safety and combat capability before the $22B Block 4 phase of the program commences. The problems detailed by Behler are separate from the announcement on January 22, 2020, that the aircraft’s Autonomic Logistics Information System (ALIS) would be scrapped and replaced with a brand-new software project. ALIS was supposed to be a revolutionary parts and logistics management system, but it’s never worked properly (we’ve covered ALIS problems in years past at ET). Now that system will be replaced by a new, cloud-based solution designated ODIN (Operational Data Integrated Network). Like ALIS, ODIN will be created in partnership with Lockheed-Martin.

The big problem of Behler’s most recent report, according to Bloomberg, is that the Air Force version of the F-35 has a major problem with its 25mm cannon. The GAU-22/A cannon used by the Air Force is mounted internally. Structural cracking has been a problem for the F-35 for years, and it continues to be an issue today. The report states that “The effect on F-35 service life and the need for additional inspection requirements are still being determined.”

The externally-mounted versions of the gun used by the Marines and Navy doesn’t have the same problem, but the USAF variant has unacceptably low accuracy when used against ground-based targets. Yes, the F-35A has such poor accuracy, it can’t even hit the ground… accurately. Being made of steel and under the influence of gravity, it’s thoroughly capable of hitting the dirt at any other point. It just might do so a few feet to the left or right of where you thought it would.

No significant portion of the F-35 fleet in service with any branch of the US military was capable of achieving what then-Defense Secretary James Mattis promised to achieve in 2018: Namely, that the aircraft be mission-capable, on average, 80 percent of the time. The report doesn’t give percentages but states that all branches lagged the goal “by a large margin,” with the Air Force scoring best, the Marines ranking “roughly midway,” and the Navy’s performance being described as “particularly poor.” The gun issue is unique to the F-35A, but most of the other issues are cross-branch.

Over the years I’ve written about the F-35, there’s been a lot of back-and-forth about whether it’s the “right” design to fight against America’s enemies in the engagements we will face in the future. The more practical question seems to genuinely be whether this aircraft can ever achieve the expectations that have been placed on it. It’s not the most tortured vehicle to ever move through the Pentagon procurement process — I’m pretty sure that dubious honor still belongs to the Bradley Fighting Vehicle — but the cost of the F-35’s development blows the BFV’s price tag out of the water. At least, it blows the BFV out of the water if you have the good sense to aim with a missile. Nineteen years after Lockheed’s X-35 beat Boeing’s X-32 to win the JSF program, that whole “gun” thing is looking a little sketchy.

The F-35 undergoing wind testing.

Every time I look at the F-35, I wonder how the Air Force’s drone programs are coming along. Even if we eventually fix the plane, how long it will be before its replaced in many roles by drone fighters? I’m not claiming that’s going to happen in the next year or two, but the F-16 first entered service in 1980. Forty years later, it’s one of the most popular (and least expensive) fighter jets to operate in the world. There seems little chance of the F-35 achieving the same recognition.

I don’t expect the drone aircraft of 2022 to be punching holes in the F-35’s raison d’etre, but I’d be downright surprised if it’s still flying sorties in 2050. The plane is already scheduled to spend an extra year in testing trying to iron out these bugs, but the number of software flaws has only fallen slightly in 14 months, from 917 in September 2018, to 873 in November 2019.

At this point, has anyone considered a seance to contact Wilbur and Orville Wright?

Now Read:

• The US Just Grounded the Entire F-35 Fighter Fleet
• New Report Finds Pentagon Weapon Systems Riddled With Vulnerabilities
• US Air Force Considers Cutting F-35 Orders By a Third

Scientists Snap Closest-Ever View of the Sun

Image by NASA

Researchers have snapped the best-resolution view of the sun ever, courtesy of the Daniel K. Inouye 4-meter solar telescope. The image, which resolves features as small as 18 miles wide (30km), is an unprecedented glimpse of what the surface of the sun really looks like.

Typical images of the sun look like this, as captured by NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO), in geosynchronous orbit above Earth.

Image by NASA, via Wikipedia

This sort of image shows us a certain amount of detail, but it’s missing a lot — partly as a consequence of being shot from 93 million miles away. Then again, the SDO is also in orbit, which we know typically allows for much better viewing conditions than any ground-based telescope.

What allows the Inouye Solar Telescope to see in such detail compared with the SDO? Adaptive optics, location, and sheer size. At four meters (technically 4.24), the Inouye is the largest solar telescope on Earth and its location at Hawaii is one of the best-known locations for clear-sky viewing during the day. The situation appears to be analogous to the relationship between Hubble and some of our largest ground-based telescopes. Hubble has a 2.4-meter lens, while the European Extremely Large Telescope currently under construction in Chile will have a 39.3-meter lens upon completion. Hubble isn’t important because it presents us with the largest window on the heavens, but because the specific characteristics of space-based observation give us an additional level of bit-depth in areas other than the additional light-gathering capability from scaling up a lens. The Inouye Solar Telescope is expected to cooperate on observations with the already in-orbit NASA Parker Solar Probe and the joint ESA/NASA Solar Orbiter (currently prepping for launch).

In this case, the 4-meter telescope was able to make out what looks a lot like peanut brittle.

Image by AURA/NASA/NSO

Here’s how NASA/AURA/NSO describe the image:

The cell-like structures – each about the size of Texas – are the signature of violent motions that transport heat from the inside of the sun to its surface. Hot solar material (plasma) rises in the bright centers of “cells,” cools off and then sinks below the surface in dark lanes in a process known as convection. In these dark lanes we can also see the tiny, bright markers of magnetic fields. Never before seen to this clarity, these bright specks are thought to channel energy up into the outer layers of the solar atmosphere called the corona. These bright spots may be at the core of why the solar corona is more than a million degrees!

These images have been lightly processed to remove noise and enhance the shape of the structures; the full data set is still undergoing scientific analysis. Still, seeing the fine-scale structure of the sun is a reminder that it isn’t actually “just” a ball of burning gas. The science of how heat is theorized to move through a star and the large-scale structures we observe has implications for stellar theory. It could tell us something about how our own sun is evolving over its own lifespan, and might even have implications for our attempts to create sustainable fusion power generation on Earth. A better understanding of solar dynamics might also enable us to predict coronal mass ejections in the future — and that could be critically important, given the risk they pose.

I’m downright curious to see what kind of new data we’ll learn once the Parker Solar Probe, Solar Orbiter, and the Inouye Solar Telescope are online simultaneously.

Now Read:

• NASA Working to Fix Voyager 2 From 11.5 Billion Miles Away
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ET Deals: 14-inch AMD Ryzen 3 1080p Laptop Just $199, $440 Off Dell Precision 3431 SFF Desktop, Onn 32-Inch 75Hz 1080p Monitor Only $89

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