In computer engineering, out-of-order execution (OoOE or OOE) is a standard used in most high-performance microprocessors to make use of instruction cycles that would otherwise be wasted by a certain type of costly delay. With this standard, the processor executes instructions in an order assigned by the availability of input data rather than by their original order in a program. It’s not just the Bobcat cores that are superior to Atom, so is the GPU....

A car owner recently posted a video showing that this philosophy could be bleeding over into the automotive industry. On the r/mildlyinfuriating subreddit, the user posted a video showing how at least one button on the dash of his Audi Q4 E-Tron does not work because he had not paid for it. The control in question is labeled “Sync” and is tied to the air conditioning system. It is used to toggle Audi’s tri-zone climate control....

Malware-based campaigns are turning into increasingly complex threats capable of targeting multiple devices and operating systems. New techniques and “tricks” are added on a constant basis, while already known solutions tend to resurface every now and then. Steganography, while being neither a novel nor a popular technique to hide data inside images, is indeed being used in a new espionage campaign by a group known as Witchetty. The signature trait of Backdoor....

“On 3rd July, 2022, Bandai Namco Holdings Inc. confirmed that it experienced an unauthorized access by third party to the internal systems of several Group companies in Asian regions (excluding Japan),” the company said in a statement issued to Eurogamer. The publisher added that it has since taken measures to block access to the servers to prevent further attacks. Notably, Bandai Namco didn’t rule out the possibility that customer information related to its toys and hobby business in Asian regions was compromised....

The bigger differences from my perspective seem to be texture and lighting quality. For larger, more detailed images click on any of the pictures for a 2560x1600 version of it. Comparing the high and medium quality screenshots above do not really give us many clues as to what is better about the high quality setting. The textures look much the same, as does the lighting and detail levels. Perhaps the only thing we’ve been able to spot is that on high quality there appears to be an improved draw distance as the trees in the background appear to be more detailed....

We used Fraps to measure frame rates during a minute of gameplay from the single-player mission Go Hunting. The performance was measured from the beginning of the mission which features a walkthrough on an aircraft carrier. This is an excellent scene as it allows for accurate testing of an outdoor environment. Battlefield 3 was tested at three resolutions: 1680x1050, 1920x1200 and 2560x1600 using the Ultra and High quality presets. When set to Ultra every setting is maxed out, the anti-aliasing deferred setting is set to 4xMSAA, while anisotropic filtering is set to 16x....

Frostbite 3 enables more realistic environments with higher resolution textures and particle effects. Part of this includes a “networked” water system that ensures all players in a game see the same wave at the same time. Beyond the networking voodoo happening behind the scenes, Battlefield 4’s waves are an incredible spectacle. Water battles in small vessels are exciting as your vision can be blocked by passing waves. DICE also says it has overhauled the engine’s Tessellation support to enable greater realism, including improved destruction....

Below is a compilation of what we consider are the best options either currently available or announced so far, complete with metascores from our Product Finder engine and review links where available. Full-size Tablets Click on the arrow to the right to view the full comparison chart (7 tablets) Seven and Eight Inchers Making your pick The same advice we’ve offered before applies today: If you mostly care about specs or price, it shouldn’t be hard picking out a winner....

Speed is also the cornerstone of the Hub, BlackBerry’s unified notification center. The Hub shows notifications from social media apps, texts, BBM, email, and calls. Users can access the notification center from anywhere by swiping up and to the right, so they can quickly check on incoming notifications to know if it’s worth leaving their current activity. The Hub also enables actions like responding to messages directly or filtering between specific types of notification....

YouTuber Lance McDonald first noticed the deleted tweets last week, sparking speculation that the game was canceled. In response, Blue Box posted a tweet saying that the cancelation rumors are false. The developer is currently working on a reveal that will come via its “Realtime Experience” app. It is also working on a “Prologue.” The Prologue is stated to be “coming soon,” while the full game is scheduled for an unspecified 2022 release date....

Last September, Blizzard agreed to a settlement with the EEOC that included an $18 million victim relief fund and measures to stop the harassment and end the toxic workplace culture. Even before the settlement, CEO Bobby Kotick began making changes to the company to address the issues raised by the EEOC and others. Less than a month after the ruling, the DFEH filed to intervene in the settlement, saying that the consent decree would release Activision Blizzard from its ongoing lawsuit and potentially open the door for the company to destroy evidence that the DFEH could use in its case....

The South China Morning Post reports that output of ICs was down 24.7% year-on-year to 24.7 billion units in August, the single largest monthly fall recorded since records began in 1997. Production volume was the lowest on record since October 2020. This is the second month in a row that Chinese IC production has fallen; it was down 16.6% to 27.2 billion units in July. There had been a slight rebound in May and June, the result of lockdowns easing in Shanghai, where many assembly plants are located....

Initial rollouts are already underway and will continue through 2025 at which time more than 50 million homes and businesses will have access to the speedy service. Comcast is also boosting upload speeds for select customers. As illustrated in the diagram below for Colorado Springs residents, upload speeds will now be between 2x and 10x faster than before. The company started prepping for the upgrade earlier this year with the launch of its WiFi 6E Gateway....

We then planned to revisit the comparison with overclocking results. However making good sense of the numbers and the processors that brought the best value, we decided to make a more straightforward shootout – this was also the most demanded by readers – putting an overclocked Ryzen 5 1600 against the Core i5-8400 instead. Carried over from the previous article are the results for stock Ryzen 5 1600X and Core i7-7700K which will be compared to the Core i5-8400 and Ryzen 5 1600, the last of which will be overclocked to 4GHz....

That said, for our build we went with the Asrock Z97 Extreme9, a Core i5-4690K, 16GB of RAM and the Radeon R9 295X2, which fit with plenty of room to spare. We also tried a pair of GeForce GTX 980s and those managed to look small in the 600C. We used the Gigabyte R9 290X OC, for the photos but unfortunately at the time we only had a single card on hand....

Those seeking a quad-core processor – and we suspect many of you are – the Athlon II X4 630 is a godsend. If we were to break the $100 budget, its higher end Athlon II X4 635 sibling is roughly $5 more and carries a 100MHz speed bump which doesn’t pose a meaningful difference. An obvious take in from our tests is that any software program capable of utilizing four cores will place the Athlon II X4 630 at a significant advantage....

As you likely know, while manufacturers claim impressive peak I/O performance out of the box, this performance can diminish over time. Unlike a conventional hard drive, any write operation made to an SSD is a two-step process: a data block must be erased and then written to. Obviously if the drive is new and unused there will be nothing to erase and therefore the first step can be bypassed, but this only happens once unless the drive is trimmed....

At its default clock frequency of 3.50GHz, the Core i7-3770K drove the GTX 680 to a silky smooth 64fps, but if you wanted to overclock, 4.0GHz yields 8% more frames and 4.50GHz nets a 17% increase for a total of 75fps. We saw similar trends with the FX-8350, but since the chip already comes clocked at 4.0GHz, it doesn’t leave as much headroom. Still, we managed to increase the average frame rate by 10% from 61fps to 67fps....

Those targeting a minimum of 30fps and willing to use the Medium quality settings can get by with relatively inexpensive hardware, such as the new Radeon RX 460. This is the first game we’ve seen where a pair of GTX 1080 graphics cards won’t suffice when playing maxed out. Does this make Deus Ex the new Crysis? Older cards such as the HD 7970 GHz Edition and GTX 780 work well also....