Saturday, April 14th, 2018

Time	Event
12:30a	AMD Makes 2nd Gen Ryzen Processors Official With Availability Starting Next Week MojoKid writes: Today AMD announced official details regarding its new mainstream second-generation Ryzen family of processors. Pricing and detailed specs show some compelling new alternatives from AMD and a refined family of chips to give Intel even more competition, especially considering price point. These new AMD CPUs are all based on the 12nm Zen+ architecture and, at least initially, include four SKUs. The Ryzen 7 family features 8 cores and 16 threads along with 20MB of cache. Ryzen 7 2700 (65W) has a base clock of 3.2GHz and a turbo frequency of 4.1GHz. The top-of-the-line Ryzen 7 2700X (105W) ups the stakes with clocks of 3.7GHz and 4.3GHz respectively. The new Ryzen 5 family features six physical cores capable of executing 12 threads and 19MB of cache. The Ryzen 5 2600 (65W) has a base clock of 3.4GHz and a max boost frequency of 3.9GHz. The Ryzen 5 2600X (95W) ups those speeds to 3.6GHz and 4.2GHz respectively. AMD says that the Ryzen 5 2600, Ryzen 5 2600X, Ryzen 7 2700 and Ryzen 2700X will be available starting April 19th, priced at $199, $229, $299 and $329 respectively. Read more of this story at Slashdot. (Comment on this)
1:00p	Apple's Stumbling HomePod Isn't the Hot Seller It Wanted The recently-released Apple HomePod smart speaker is not selling very well. According to Bloomberg, "By late March, Apple had lowered sales forecasts and cut some orders with Inventec, one of the manufacturers that builds the HomePod for Apple." From the report: At first, it looked like the HomePod might be a hit. Pre-orders were strong, and in the last week of January the device grabbed about a third of the U.S. smart speaker market in unit sales, according to data provided to Bloomberg by Slice Intelligence. But by the time HomePods arrived in stores, sales were tanking, says Slice principal analyst Ken Cassar. "Even when people had the ability to hear these things," he says, "it still didn't give Apple another spike." During the HomePod's first 10 weeks of sales, it eked out 10 percent of the smart speaker market, compared with 73 percent for Amazon's Echo devices and 14 percent for the Google Home, according to Slice Intelligence. Three weeks after the launch, weekly HomePod sales slipped to about 4 percent of the smart speaker category on average, the market research firm says. Inventory is piling up, according to Apple store workers, who say some locations are selling fewer than 10 HomePods a day. KGI Securities analyst Ming-Chi Kuo says Apple is "mulling" a "low-cost version" of the HomePod that may help short-term shipments. However, even if the product materializes, he predicts it will only provide a short-term boost to sales. Read more of this story at Slashdot. (Comment on this)
4:34p	Robots Replace Soldiers In First of Its Kind Obstacle-Breaching Exercise Long-time Slashdot reader cold fjord writes: U.S. and British troops have completed a first-of-its-kind exercise using robots for breaching a complex anti-tank/anti-personnel obstacle as part of what was titled the "Robotic Complex Breach Concept demonstration" at the Grafenwoehr training area in Germany. The exercise included a number of robotic systems, including remotely controlled British Army Terrier engineering vehicles (five cameras, including thermal imaging), UAVs for reconnaissance and chemical agent detection, and the M58 Wolf under remote control and used to provide smoke screens... British Warrant Officer Robert Kemp stated that breaching enemy obstacles is one of the most dangerous tasks on a battlefield, and that, "Any breach like this will have enemy weapons trained in on the area... Roboticizing breach operations takes away the risk of life and makes clearing enemy obstacles much safer." U.S. Army officer 1st Lt. Felix Derosin said, "As an engineer, this means a lot to me... The casualty rate for a breach is expected to be 50 percent. Being able to take our guys away from that, and have some robots go in there, is a very positive thing for us. In the future, this can save engineers' lives." The engineer added later that "Being able to see it, eyes on, shows me what the future is going to be like, and it's pretty good." Read more of this story at Slashdot. (Comment on this)

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