Categorie
HardwareSoftware

Tim Willits descrive Quake Champions

Annunciato allo scorso E3, il nuovo Quake Champions ha colto di sorpresa molti dei fan storici del noto franchise di sparatutto in prima persona. Si tratta, infatti, di una sorta di declinazione di Quake in salsa MOBA, un incrocio tra lo storico sparatutto e l’impostazione scelta anche da Blizzard per Overwatch.

In questo video, Tim Willits, direttore di id Software, spiega un po’ meglio cosa dobbiamo aspettarci da Quake Champions e descrive i quattro Campioni fin qui rivelati, ovvero Ranger, Visor, Nyx e Scalebearer.

Ulteriori informazioni su Quake Champions saranno rivelate al QuakeCon di quest’anno (4-7 agosto).

Autore: Le news di Hardware Upgrade

Categorie
HardwareSoftware

Pascal based quadro mobile spotted

Pascal goes mobile

Today on the expo floor at SIGGRAPH 2016, Nvidia was showing off its new but unannounced Pascal based mobile Quadro thing.

Nvidia’s Quadro mobile workstation product family offers, or so the company claims,  a complete range of graphics for the  professionals  under pressure.

The main announcements were Pascal based P6000 and P5000 cards but the company had a mobile based Pascal Quadro too.

Although there were no official announcements this week from Nvidia on an updated mobile Quadro line, the working silicon was being shown publicly on the Siggraph expo floor. The demo that was on the showcase is quite good looking,  and with a realistic demo, and a person can change her or his viewpoint.

As soon as you move the viewpoint, Mobile Quadro will render the pixels and shading again, giving you an accurate approximation of the light in what is a  good looking room. The performance seemed OK but right now there is no official information about OEM pricing or even a launch date for the product. We did ask.

Autore: Fudzilla.com – Home

Categorie
HardwareSoftware

Apple Announces Q3 FY 2016 Results: App Store Up, Hardware Down

Today Apple announced their third quarter results for their fiscal year 2016. Much like last quarter, Apple has struggled to maintain the sales pace of the iPhone 6s, compared to the iPhone 6. For the quarter, Apple had revenues of $ 42.358 billion, which is down 11% from a year ago. Gross margin was $ 16.106 billion, down from $ 19.681 billion in Q3 2015, and percentage wise it is 38.0%. Operating income was $ 10.1 billion, down from $ 14.1 billion last year, and net income was down almost $ 3 billion to $ 7.8 billion. Diluted earnings per share were $ 1.42, down from $ 1.85 a year ago. Despite the lower quarter, Apple did beat expectations which has helped their share price in after-hours trading.

Apple Q3 2016 Financial Results (GAAP)
  Q3’2016 Q2’2015 Q3’2015
Revenue (in Billions USD) $ 42.358 $ 50.557 $ 49.605
Gross Margin (in Billions USD) $ 16.106 $ 19.921 $ 19.681
Operating Income (in Billions USD) $ 10.105 $ 13.987 $ 14.473
Net Income (in Billions USD) $ 7.796 $ 10.516 $ 10.677
Margins 38.0% 39.4% 39.7%
Earnings per Share (in USD) $ 1.42 $ 1.90 $ 1.85

Apple announced a dividend of $ 0.57 per share payable on August 11th to shareholders of record as of August 8th. They also returned over $ 13 billion during Q3 through share buy-backs and dividends, and they have completed almost $ 177 billion of their $ 250 billion capital return program.

iPhone sales are far and away the largest part of the company, and this quarter Apple sold 40.4 million handsets. That is down from the 51.2 million last quarter, and 47.5 million in Q3 2015, meaning iPhone sales were down 15% year-over-year. This resulted in revenue of $ 24 billion, down 23% from a year ago. It’s certainly a noticeable drop, and it shows just how successful the iPhone 6 was when it launched.

Moving on, iPad sales continued their slow and steady decline. Sales of the tablet were just a hair under ten million for the quarter, which is a drop of 9% year-over-year. Revenue was $ 4.9 billion, which is up 7%. A year ago, the average selling price of the iPad was $ 415, but this quarter, average selling price for the iPad rose $ 85 to $ 490. Declining sales of the iPad Mini, as well as new sales of the higher priced iPad Pro are certainly the case, but Apple doesn’t break out the numbers for individual models to know just how much each was a factor.

The Mac didn’t fare very well either, with unit sales of 4.25 billion, which is down 11% year-over-year. This resulted in revenue of $ 5.24 billion, down 13%. With basically no Mac refreshes in a long time, they are no longer outperforming the PC market as a whole, which was the case for the last while.

Apple’s “Other Products” includes Apple TV, Apple Watch, Beats, iPods, and accessories, and while none of this is broken down by sub-category, the Other Products as a whole also fell 16% in revenue compared to Q3 2015, with revenues for this quarter of $ 2.22 billion.

Apple Q3 2016 Device Sales (thousands)
  Q3’2016 Q2’2016 Q3’2015 Seq Change Year/Year Change
iPhone 40,399 51,193 47,534 -21% -15%
iPad 9,950 10,251 10,931 -3% -9%
Mac 4,252 4,034 4,796 +5% -11%

The one segment in which Apple had strong growth was their Services segment. Services grew by 19% compared to Q3 2015, with revenue of $ 5.976 billion, which is up almost a billion or 19% year-over-year. Q2 2016 revenue was pretty much the same at $ 5.991 billion, meaning services have once again outpaced both Mac and iPad sales, and now represent the third largest segment at Apple.

Apple Q3 2016 Revenue by Product (billions)
  Q3’2016 Q2’2016 Q3’2015 Revenue for current quarter
iPhone $ 24.048 $ 32.857 $ 31.368 56.8%
iPad $ 4.876 $ 4.413 $ 4.538 11.5%
Mac $ 5.239 $ 5.107 $ 6.030 12.4%
iTunes/Software/Services $ 5.976 $ 5.991 $ 5.028 14.1%
Other Products $ 2.219 $ 2.189 $ 2.641 5.2%

Overall, it’s the second consecutive quarter of revenue loss, and last quarter was the first time that happened since Q1 2003, so Apple is in somewhat unfamiliar territory. Their guidance for next quarter is $ 45.5 to $ 47.5 billion, and margins between 37.5% and 38%. That guidance is also for a loss of revenue, since Q4 2015 had the company coming in at $ 51.5 billion, and 39.9% margins. It will be interesting to see if hardware refreshes in the fall can stop the drop in sales.

Source: Apple Investor Relations

Autore: AnandTech

Categorie
HardwareSoftware

10nm Snapdragon is taped out

Qualcomm’s CEO confirmed it

Last week Qualcomm’s CEO  confirmed to its investors that the company has taped out its 10nm system on a chip (SoC).

This news kind of went unnoticed and we have decided to revisit this. A few months back Fudzilla was talking with a few industry sources about 10nm and it was the general impression that Apple and Qualcomm would get to 10nm quite  soon.

When David Wong from Wells Fargo asked Steve Mollenkopf when we could expect a tape out of 10 nanometers and samples, Steve answered that it had already happened.

We expect to see the successor of Snapdragon 820 being introduced this year and shipping in phones in late Q1 early Q2 2017. This has been the course of things for a while at Qualcomm. The timing also mateches a normal phone refresh lifecycle as most companies –  including Samsung – will launch their next generation phones at the Mobile World Congress that takes place in Barcelona on February 27 2017.  

This might be the 10nm that Mollenkopf mentioned and confirmed that it has been sampled to customers. We can call it Snapdragon 830 but there are no real guarantees that this will be the final branding. Steve also said that Qualcomm will continue its multi-sourcing strategy for 10nm and beyond.

Multi-sourcing is always a good strategy, as having more than one supplier is definitely better and safer. After 10nm, Samsung, TSMC, GlobalFoundries and Intel will use 7nm and then 5nm.

From what we’ve heard, we will be stuck at 10nm for a while probably through 2017 while we might see some of the first 7nm products in 2018. After 7nm comes 5nm and then it becomes very interesting as the semiconductor manufacturing industry can’t work out how to get smaller than that. It’s the end of Moore’s Law.

So the next generation phones that we expect in early 2017, powered by the next generation 10nm Snapdragon will definitely get faster on a CPU, DSP and GPU side, probably getting more processing power and performance at the same time. This has been the case since the introduction of the smartphone, and won’t change anytime soon. 

Qualcomm will also have a server ARM based product in 10nm, as we exclusively reported too

Autore: Fudzilla.com – Home

Categorie
HardwareSoftware

Apple Car più vicina: si farà l’auto che si guida da sola

Apple continua ad investire sulle attività di ricerca e sviluppo per la realizzazione di una vettura autonoma, capace di “guidarsi da sola”.
Google e Tesla sono le aziende maggiormente impegnate nella messa a punto di soluzioni per la guida autonoma, parzialmente o completamente gestita dall’intelligenza artificiale.

Stando alle indiscrezioni, la Apple Car potrebbe debuttare sul mercato nel 2021.

Apple Car più vicina: si farà l'auto che si guida da sola

Alla guida del Project Titan – questo l’appellativo del progetto che porterà la società di Tim Cook, in questi anni, a realizzare un’auto capace di districarsi autonomamente nel traffico – è stato appena posto Bob Mansfield.

Si tratta di un ingegnere che per ben 14 anni ha lavorato per Apple sul settore hardware e che nel 2013 aveva lasciato il suo ruolo storico per “dedicarsi a progetti speciali”.
Da allora Mansfield fu “avvistato” molto di rado nel campus di Apple. Solo di recente molti dipendenti della Mela si sono accorti del suo ritorno apprendendo contestualmente della nomina di Mansfield a capo dell’ambizioso progetto Titan.

Elon Musk, “padre” di Tesla, si è sempre dichiarato poco preoccupato della “discesa in campo” di Apple: Elon Musk (Tesla) critica Apple ed i suoi prodotti.
Anzi, Musk aveva messo alla berlina Apple commentando che la società di Cupertino stava assumendo persone che in Tesla non erano riuscite ad eccellere.

Autore: IlSoftware.it