Push your Ryzen system to the max with AMD’s detailed memory tweaks

Why it matters to you

AMD Ryzen systems don’t just offer overclocking options for the processor. You can take the memory to new heights too, using modern motherboard options.

AMD has pushed its technical marketing executive front and center to explain just what the recent Agesa motherboard updates for its Ryzen platform actually do, especially with regards to memory tweaking. To get a little deeper into them, he’s joined by in-house overclocker and fellow technical marketer Sami Makinen.

The Agesa 1.0.0.6 update for Ryzen motherboards was sent out to AMD partners back in March and resulted in a bevvy of new motherboard BIOS updates in the following months. They added a number of memory tweak options which some have found confusing and opaque. Makinin details just what they do in a new AMD blog post and it could help you achieve the best from your Ryzen system.

For starters, Geardown mode is more of a stability feature than one aimed at hardware enthusiasts. While it can deliver a couple of performance points in the right setting, for aggressive overclocks it’s actually a detriment, so its use should be carefully considered (thanks Hexus).

BankGroupSwap can benefit synthetic benchmark results, so AMD’s Makinin suggests leaving it on for testing. When it comes to games, though, it is more beneficial to turn it off, so consider that as well, based on your own usage patterns.

When it comes to dual-rank versus single-rank memory options, things aren’t quite so clear cut. While there certainly are benefits to both, single-rank offers greater headroom in certain overclocking scenarios. Your mileage of each may vary.

Ryzen boards have, much like Intel alternatives, detailed options for tweaking memory timings. While these have not seen as much attention from enthusiasts in recent years as they have risen along with available bandwidth, Makinin’s testing and explanation suggest that tweaking them can have a real benefit. You will need to balance frequencies and timings against one another though, as pushing for a maximum in either often requires hamstringing the other.

Memory tuning isn’t for every overclocker out there, but for those that love to get into the nitty gritty of BIOS settings, this new guide from AMD shows that you can achieve significant performance gains from memory tweaks alone. It won’t be quite as effective as pushing up processor and graphics card speeds, but it’s certainly worth considering if you want to eke out a little more performance from your Ryzen system.

Mechanical ‘smart stairs’ provide assistance with each step

Why it matters to you

Smart steps could be a useful rehab tool for people with reduced mobility.

Have you ever used one of those assisted pull-up machines at the gym, which use counterbalanced weights to help you more easily lift your body up and down? Researchers at Georgia Tech and Emory University have used a similar principle to build a set of mechanical spring-loaded, energy-recycling smart stairs.

According to its creators, the project started out with the goal of creating prosthetic shoes for helping users lift their feet, but evolved into a smart staircase — where pressure sensor-equipped steps raise or sink to aid people either ascending or descending.

“When going down these stairs, the springs support you and slow your descent against the pull of gravity, while getting stretched and storing energy in them,” Yun Seong Song, who built the device as a postdoctoral researcher at Georgia Tech, told Digital Trends. “When you go up these stairs, the springs release the stored energy and give you a push to help you with the ascent. We showed that the users need to work less on our stairs by up to 37 percent at the knee going up, and 26 percent on the ankle going down, compared to using normal stairs.”

There are a number of potentially useful applications for the technology. A big one relates to human movement rehabilitation, since the smart stairs encourage — through their ease of use — people to continue using them, and therefore retain or regain their stair-climbing ability. By contrast, escalators or elevators may be easier, but they also lead to greater degradation of people’s ability to negotiate a staircase on their own.

Incorporating a set of the smart stairs into the home of a person with reduced mobility could mean that they are able to stay in the house they are used to living in, rather than having to pack up and move to a place without stairs.

“Our stairs are energy-efficient and low-cost, meaning they can be cheap to obtain and maintain,” Song continued. “Because our stairs do not use complex machinery, the building cost could go down to $100 per step. [They also] use very little electricity to manage the sensors and latches, which can even run with batteries. [Finally,] our stairs are easy to install and remove, thanks to the modular design.”

A paper describing the work is published in the journal Public Library of Science PLOS ONE.

According to Song, the immediate next step for the project is to build a complete set of the smart stairs, and conduct comprehensive user studies on both healthy young adults and also older people. After that, the team is interested in finding partners to commercialize the technology. We think these would totally be a good addition to any self-respecting smart home.

Atari’s latest release isn’t a console or a game — it’s a ridiculously high-tech hat

Atari is on a roll lately. The company made a splash at E3 last month with the announcement of its new Ataribox connected console, and now the classic brand is entering the wearables market with perhaps its oddest product yet: Atari Speakerhats, powered by Audiowear technology.

The first three baseball cap styles will debut at San Diego Comic Con this week, and special edition Blade Runner 2049 Atari Speakerhats will be available in conjunction with the much-anticipated sequel’s release this fall, along with other wearables.

Michael Artz, COO of the new Atari Connect division of the iconic brand, told Digital Trends that a variety of these hats will launch later this year. The ones debuting at Comic Con include a New Era-style baseball cap with the name “Atari” on the front, available in blue and black, as well as a black-on-black verision featuring the company’s “Mt. Fuji” symbol.

“…a cool and badass hat that will look like it belongs in the 2049 world”

“In addition to the Blade Runner limited edition we’re doing, which is a cool and badass hat that will look like it belongs in the 2049 world, we have a bunch of others we’re involved with,” Artz said. “We’ll have hats based on some classic Atari franchises.”

The Audiowear Speakerhat is designed to be ultra-thin and lightweight, with all the fancy tech seamlessly integrated into the form factor of a cap, an Audioware representative told Digital Trends. Under the hood you’ll find a set of proprietary high-fidelity stereo speakers, a microphone, and a rechargeable lithium ion battery to keep it all running.

The hat can also connect to any Bluetooth-enabled device (smartphone, tablet, personal computer, etc.) to play music or other audio, initiate or accept phone calls, receive voice commands, and more. Audiowear’s Social Synchronous Broadcast technology will allow multiple Speakerhat users to simultaneously listen to a single audio stream in perfect sync, which Artz said provides a fundamentally new social audio experience. “Gamers can hear the same thing at the same time and also communicate and hear each other through the hats,” Artz added.

But of course, there’s still some work to be done. Audiowear says the hats are a work-in-progress, and the company plans to continuously improve the design and engineering until the technology is completely invisible.

While no official release date has been revealed yet, Atari is offering fans a chance to win one of the hats (link) and participate in the beta testing phase.

Artz said Comic Con was chosen for the global debut of these Speakerhats because the Atari brand is loved by so many creators of pop culture, including TV producers, filmmakers, and musicians.

“We’re constantly getting approached to have our brand and games involved in projects,” Artz said. “The Atari brand has a great nostalgic value for people who’ve grown up with it. Everyone has a favorite Atari story of opening a console under the Christmas tree or friends getting together to play games in the family room. Today we have the hipsters in SoHo wearing the faded Atari t-shirt. We’ve transcended the gaming-only positioning and aim to be a friendlier digital lifestyle brand.”

This is all just part of the company’s larger comeback plan.

This is all just part of the company’s larger comeback plan. In addition to the Speakerhats, there’s the At Games collection of Atari Flashback plug-and-play consoles with up-rezzed versions of Atari 2600 and 5200 games packed in. A new collection featuring Activision classics is heading to retail this fall. Atari classic games from Centipede to the more recent Rollercoaster Tycoon are making their mark on mobile devices.

“And then spinning off that is a very robust licensing campaign with everything from t-shirts and hats to plastic centipedes and classic posters,” Artz explained. “That carries a tremendous chunk of the business forward because there’s a lot of love for the franchises and the brand.”

There’s also movement in Hollywood for Atari’s library of over 200 games. Media Fusion is developing “Game On,” a reality game show challenging contestants to navigate life-sized sets based on classic Atari Games in South Africa. They’re also turning “Codebreakers” into a TV series with Discovery in Europe.

“We have a number of projects in development with producers looking to turn Missile Command or Centipede into movies or TV shows,” Artz said. “We’re also talking to a number of different partners about new games and new things we can do in that space, where we might do a co-branded iteration of our classic games. Some of those deals are not announced yet.”

And the last piece of the business is the hardware.

“Going back 45 years, Atari was not just a game and software developer but also a hardware manufacturer with arcade games, consoles and computers,” Artz explained. “That’s been left behind for a long time. The decision was made to reinvigorate that and get back into hardware. The Ataribox project we teased prior to E3 got a tremendous amount of attention, and when people start seeing more of that they’ll be very excited.”

Artz also said that Atari isn’t going to compete directly with the established giants of the video game business like Sony, Nintendo and Microsoft.

“The hardware philosophy I’m building is this ‘connected lifestyle’ concept,” he explained. “We don’t need to be the bleeding-edge hardware guys. With the Ataribox, we’ll play a bit more casual in keeping with the types of franchises we have. It’s more about being accessible and presenting products that have that fun element to them.”

Atari is also developing additional wearables, as well as some connected home products that will link to the upcoming Ataribox and other entertainment devices. So don’t be surprised if you start seeing a lot more stuff from Atari rolling out over the next year, as the once-giant video game company reinvents itself with new IOT devices and wearables alongside connected consoles, fashion, and merchandise.

AI is helping scientists decode the behavior of fruit flies, neuron by neuron

Why it matters to you

Unpicking the secrets of the brain will help us do all kinds of crazy things — like better replicate them.

While the eventual goal of artificial intelligence is to develop computers that can exhibit intelligence equal or greater than that of the human brain (quite possibly the latter), there are a few benchmarks we’ll need to achieve first. One of these is to be able to replicate the less complex brains of other creatures inside a computer. Achieving this means first being able to understand exactly how the brains of said creatures work on a cellular level — including how neural circuitry triggers specific behavior.

That’s what researchers at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute are helping contribute to with a new project, with the stated goal of creating a brain-wide “atlas” of fruit fly behavior.

“While the fruit fly brain is much simpler than the human brain, it still contains about 100,000 interconnected neurons that combine in complex ways to produce behavior,” project lead Dr. Kristin Branson told Digital Trends. “Our study made use of a few very new technologies. We used recently developed genetic techniques to activate sparse populations of neurons. We also made use of new machine vision and learning algorithms for analyzing the data we collected.”

Robie et al./Cell 2017

The results the team has achieved are the most in-depth neural map of fruit fly behavior yet. The project involved studying 2,204 populations of flies to find the neurons involved with 14 different behaviors, ranging from wing-flicking to attempted copulation. Were humans to have had to do the project’s “behavior labeling” work instead of machine learning algorithms, the task would apparently have taken 3,800 years. Even in the field of long-term research projects, that’s considered excessive!

“We have mapped the regions of the fly brain that are involved in a variety of locomotion and social behaviors,” Branson continued. “We have done this at the resolution of individual neurons across the entire brain. We hope that the behavior-anatomy maps resulting from our study will enable other biologists to understand the precise computations that the brain performs to produce these behaviors.”

The researcher’s work isn’t just limited to fruit flies, however. “As we start to decipher the ways that the fruit fly brain implements behavior, we hope to find common principles and motifs of neural computation that generalize beyond fruit flies,” she noted. “Understanding circuit computations does involve simulating our models of those circuits in the computer to prove to ourselves that we understand the system, and may enable us to understand why that particular implementation of behavior is advantageous.”

While currently artificial neural networks are only an approximation of how the brain works, hopefully research like what has been conducted by the Howard Hughes Medical Institute will help brain-inspired computation advance to the next level. A paper on the research was published in the journal Cell.

Amazon Pay Places expands to more brick-and-mortar stores

Why it matters to you

Amazon wants you to be able to pay with your Amazon account almost anywhere.

Amazon, one of the world’s largest and most profitable stores, wants your Amazon account to pay for more than just towels and toiletries. On Wednesday, it launched Amazon Pay Places, a new service lets Amazon customers place an order ahead in brick-and-mortar stores.

“One of the things we’ve been doing the last couple of years is thinking about how to connect merchants with the Amazon customer base, knowing they are very active connected shoppers whether online or on mobile,” Patrick Gauthier, vice president of Amazon Pay, told Pymnts.com. “With what we are taking the lid off today — we are enabling merchants to instantly reach people who are highly mobile and very desirable as customers — without having to worry about app distribution.”

Amazon Pay Places works a little like PayPal. Next time you are planning to pick up an order at a store or restaurant that is partnered with Amazon, you will be able to launch the Amazon smartphone app, make your selection from the Programs & Features section of Amazon’s mobile app, and save it to your cart. Once you have finished shopping, you will see an option to pay with one of the debit, credit, or checking numbers associated with your Amazon account.

Amazon sees Pay Places as a solution to what it calls the “app problem” — a majority of people do not bother to download merchants’ apps. According to ComScore, about 30 percent of Americans downloaded fewer than zero apps in 2016. That is opposed to the Amazon app’s install base, which Gauthier said stands at about three out of four phones in the U.S.

It’s a slow rollout, though. Pay Places, which launched in beta earlier this year in luxury clothing merchant Moda Operandi, will work only at select TGI Friday’s locations in Boston, Philadelphia, Baltimore, Washington D.C., Richmond, Virginia, and Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania starting later this year. But Amazon intends to take Amazon Pay Places beyond restaurants, according to TechCrunch.

Pay Places is an expansion of Amazon Pay, the digital payments platform the online retailer launched in 2007. Since then, Amazon’s brought it to France, Italy, and Spain, and opened it to global partners including PrestaShop, Shopify, Future Shop, and more than 50 others.

Amazon’s efforts have paid dividends. In February, Amazon announced that more than 33 million customers used Amazon Payments to make a purchase, up from 23 million in April 2016, and that payment volume doubled in the same period.

It is a lucrative business. Amazon charges 2.9 percent plus 30 cents per transaction — less than the 27 percent it charges eateries on its Amazon Prime Now Restaurants food delivery platform, and on par with PayPal’s fees.

But Amazon’s overtures could threaten its relationship with a would-be partner: PayPal. In January, the retailer discussed letting shoppers pay for Amazon purchases using their PayPal accounts, according to Bloomberg.

These are the exclusive games for PlayStation VR

Which games are exclusive to PlayStation VR?

PlayStation VR is here and its library of games continues to grow. We love that a lot of our favorite titles from other platforms are also available on PSVR, but the real meat lies in the exclusive stuff.

What are the exclusive games, you ask? Here are all the titles that you’ll only be able to play if you own a PS4!

Read more at VR Heads!

Android team explains how Project Treble will (and won’t) improve Android

Googlers confirm most of what we knew (and had guessed) about Project Treble.

Members of the Android engineering team at Google are participating in a Reddit AMA (Ask Me Anything) today. Find a list of the team members participating here.

One of the questions was about Project Treble and was wondering if thinking it could fix Android fragmentation was too optimistic. The response from the Android team explains most of what we need to know about Treble, and affirms many of the guesses crafted from the information we did have.

Devices launching with Android O will come Treble-enabled out of the box. Project Treble will make it easier, faster and less costly for device maker partners when these devices are updated in the future. In addition to the engineering changes, which enable Project Treble on all new devices launched with Android O and beyond, we’re working closely with device makers and silicon manufacturers to both get required Android customizations (such as carrier-specific requirements) into AOSP, and reduce their cost and complexity when updating to the new version of Android. For example, Sony and Qualcomm have already contributed dozens of features and hundreds of bugfixes into AOSP so they no longer need to rework these patches with each new release of Android.

We’ll publish more information about Project Treble on source.android.com soon.

Read the comment thread in its entirety

We know from Google I/O 2017 that many companies who make the components were asking for something like Project Treble, and seeing Qualcomm already taking advantage is a great sign. Further confirmation that smartphone makers have to incorporate Project Treble in new models is also good to hear.

We want Treble to make a significant difference. The existing way is obviously broken, so we can’t help but hope the next step is better. These early indications keep us hopeful.

Android O

• Everything new in Android O
• Should you put Android O on your phone?
• How to get the Android O Beta on your Pixel or Nexus
• Join the Discussion

There’s been a lot of work on Bluetooth in Android O, but we haven’t seen it yet

Tricks learned writing the software for the Pixel can hopefully make Bluetooth faster, stronger, and better.

In their Reddit AMA (Ask Me Anything) session today, the Google team takes on Bluetooth. Specifically, if Android O can make it suck less.

The team is aware of all the Bluetooth errors and inconsistencies evident on many Android phones and have used a trick they learned while writing the new system elements for Android N on the Pixel.

Tim Murray: The Android Bluetooth, audio, and performance teams actually did a lot of work to improve BT audio in O. We flipped the switch internally since the most recent developer preview because we needed a little more time to make sure that things were stable, so you haven’t seen the fruits of that labor quite yet.

What’d we do: back during Pixel development, the perf team guessed that it’s probably a good idea to make the UI-critical parts of the system as deterministic as possible to avoid random scheduler delays. Turns out yes, that’s a good idea, and removing scheduler delay from the UI pipeline fixes a ton of random jank. You can see the details of all the stuff we did at https://source.android.com/devices/tech/debug/eval_perf.
It worked so well for UI that we decided to do the same thing for BT audio. We could see cases where random scheduler delay would cause BT audio artifacts, so we tried working our way through the entire BT pipeline to figure out exactly what guarantees were needed where to ensure that audio quality was perfect. This removed tens of milliseconds of possible jitter per BT packet and required fixes throughout the stack, from the framework down to kernel drivers.

Our testing shows that BT audio reliability is drastically better vs N because of these changes. We’re happy with how it’s turned out, and we hope you see the same kind of improvements.

Read the comment thread in it’s entirety

In “regular” speech, they simplified code for the critical UI elements so that it was more linear and the system didn’t have to wait for a task to get scheduled and have it’s turn. Cutting out the unnecessary delay and processing is much of what makes the UI on the Pixel as fluid and lag-free as it is. Using these same techniques on Bluetooth should mean more data gets sent in the same amount of time, and less time is being spent processing it at the source. This makes for a better connection and uninterrupted stream.

As noted, this was done since the last developer beta was released, so we haven’t seen it in action yet. We look forward to seeing it, along with all the other final tweaks and refinements when Android O is officially released.

Android O

• Everything new in Android O
• Should you put Android O on your phone?
• How to get the Android O Beta on your Pixel or Nexus
• Join the Discussion

Britain’s taxi industry will use Uber’s playbook against it

My adopted city is pretty forward-looking, but it was still a surprise when local taxi operations, as one, began offering their own Uber-style apps. It’s a phenomenon that’s occurring across the UK, with smaller outfits suddenly adopting app- and cloud-based booking systems. But the company that’s pushing the change isn’t doing so just to make it easier for folks in far-flung cities to book a ride home. Instead, it’s the first step in a plan to unite the taxi industry in building a credible, singular rival to Uber.

Autocab is a British company that has produced specialist equipment for the taxi industry since 1991. It began with the crude radios that connected drivers to their dispatch office and grew from there. It now provides technology to more than 1,500 fleets across the globe, including 60 percent of the UK market.

In response to the looming threat of Uber, Lyft and the rest, Autocab began developing a passenger app. Seamlessly integrating with Autocab’s booking and dispatching system, Ghost, it essentially does the same job as Uber, connecting paying customers with nearby cars from a specific business. Companies simply buy into the system, skin the app with their own identity and branding, and hey, presto. But beneath the surface, all of these companies are using the same cloud-based platform to run their business.

That is what makes the iGo Everywhere network such an exciting prospect, since it can connect every company using Autocab’s systems. Let’s imagine that your local cab company is based in Nottingham and you use its app during your day-to-day life. If you traveled to another major town or city in the UK, that app would be useless, giving you an incentive to download a competitor’s product. That’s a lose-lose situation both for the business that’s local to you and the one in the city you’re traveling to.

But if both firms have signed up to iGo, then you’ll be able to book a ride from inside the same app that you use in Nottingham. You won’t have a reason to stray to a different platform, and it creates a virtuous cycle of back-scratching for these otherwise small businesses. You get the same ease of use, and your local taxi company gets a tiny commission for the referral.

Recruitment advert used by Autocab in the UK trade press

Right now, the iGo Everywhere network is in its infancy, having launched on July 18th, and Autocab is still reaching out to cab firms, encouraging them to sign up. But if it is successful, then it could quickly extend its reach to every part of the UK, and potentially beyond. It could prove problematic for Uber, which still has to expend enormous amounts of time and resources entering new locations.

That’s important, because iGo can operate anywhere Autocab has contracts, which is a lot of the UK. For sure, there are other taxi apps, like Gett and Kabbee, as well as apps that serve specific providers, like the transport giant Addison Lee. But those platforms are mostly London-centric, and Uber’s reach only covers the major cities. iGo Everywhere’s reach is about aggregating all the smaller players nationwide.

When a business fails, there is often talk about its lack of a moat, a unique business method that others can’t easily copy. Ridesharing’s moat is, or was, the ability to schedule trips in the cloud that didn’t require the cost of a human dispatcher answering the telephone. The idea was that saving could then be passed on to the consumer, making it cheaper and faster than a taxi company. That, coupled with Uber’s ability to raise vast sums of capital that it could use to put the local players out of business.

But Uber’s troubles and the glacial pace of its rollout beyond the UK’s most dense metropolitan areas have given its enemies a window — one that companies like Autocab and its partners are, potentially, well-placed to take advantage of.

Source: iGo Everywhere

Stream ‘Glee,’ ‘NYPD Blue’ and older Fox shows on Hulu

Hulu’s close connection to Fox just got a little closer. The streaming service has unveiled a deal with Fox that adds every episode of dozens of well-known (if also well-worn) shows, including some that aren’t necessarily obvious picks. Relatively recent hits like Glee and How I Met Your Mother are available alongside shows that have been off the air for a while, such as NYPD Blue, M*A*S*H and The Mary Tyler Moore Show. Thankfully, there are a few outliers — you can watch both seasons of Joss Whedon’s Dollhouse, for instance.

The full selection (“nearly” 3,000 episodes) will roll out over the next few weeks, so you might not see your favorite series right away. Staggered expansions notwithstanding, this is good news if you’re a Hulu subscriber — you now have more chances to dig deep into shows that might be hard to watch in their entirety without a stack of DVDs, or at least some expensive purchases at an download store.

Source: Hulu