Talynebear

Comic by: Derp-a-derp (via Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal)

At AMD's Financial Analyst Day earlier this month (which was actually more interesting than it initially sounds), AMD finally confirmed that it was looking to use high-bandwidth memory (HBM) in an upcoming high-end GPU product. Unfortunately, the company gave away few specifics, other than that HBM uses a form of 3D stacked memory, and that it'll (of course) vastly increase performance while still reducing power consumption.

Stacked memory itself isn't an entirely new technology, but AMD's implementation—which gives its GPUs access to much more memory bandwidth—is a big step forward for a graphics card market that's rapidly approaching the limits of GDDR5. With Nvidia also looking to incorporate a form of HBM in its 2016 Pascal architecture, you're going to be hearing a lot more about this new memory technology over the coming year.

Why do we need HBM?

A suitable replacement for the hard-working, but ageing synchronous dynamic random-access memory (SDRAM) standard has been a long time coming. While the current DDR3 memory standards—as well as offshoots like GDDR5—have been serving the CPU and GPU well, they're starting to show signs of being based on early-'90s technology. Essentially, each revision of SDRAM makes use of the same double data rate (DDR) principle as the original technology, which syncs memory to a system bus (allowing it to queue up one process while waiting for another), and also transfers data on both the rise and fall of the clock signal in order to work twice as fast.

Through years of dev kits, prototypes, and trade show demos of the Oculus Rift, we've been stuck guessing at just how much hardware power the eventual consumer version of the device would require. Now, with that consumer launch officially slated for early 2016, Oculus has announced what PC hardware it recommends for a quality VR experience.

According to Oculus, those recommended hardware specs are:

• NVIDIA GTX 970 / AMD 290 equivalent or greater
• Intel i5-4590 equivalent or greater
• 8GB+ RAM
• Compatible HDMI 1.3 video output
• 2x USB 3.0 ports
• Windows 7 SP1 or newer

That's a relatively beefy system, all things considered. A quick price check on Newegg suggests that the listed CPU, RAM, and video card would add up to just over $600. Add in a barebones tower, motherboard, and 250GB solid state hard drive, and you're looking at a nearly $900 system to run the Rift, all told. That's before you account for the (still unannounced) price of the headset itself. Upgrading from an existing gaming rig will obviously be cheaper, and component costs will come down by the Rift's early 2016 launch, but a lot of potential VR users are still going to be staring down some significant upgrade costs.

Earlier this morning, Frontier Developments released the Mac version of Elite: Dangerous to the public after about a month-and-a-half of semi-closed beta (players who had paid to participate in the game’s Alpha and Beta tests, along with Kickstarter backers, were allowed to test the Mac beta starting on its initial March 31 release). Customers who purchased Elite: Dangerous on Steam will automatically have the Mac version added to their accounts; direct customers will need to download the Mac launcher from Frontier to install the Mac version.

Earlier Mac beta versions also required the installation of the Mono framework in order to properly install and launch; the release version also appears to have this requirement.

The Mac version has undergone extensive port work, with the core rendering engine adapted fully to OpenGL. Although Elite: Dangerous will next see release on Xbox One, creator and lead designer David Braben remains cautiously optimistic that the game will also eventually be released for Linux.

Developers have published two pieces of malware that take the highly unusual step of completely running on an infected computer's graphics card, rather than its CPU, to enhance their stealthiness and give them increased computational abilities.

Both the Jellyfish rootkit and the Demon keylogger are described as proofs-of-concept by their pseudo-anonymous developers, whom Ars was unable to contact. Tapping an infected computer's GPU allows malware to run without the usual software hooks or modifications malware makes in the operating system kernel. Those modifications can be dead giveaways that a system is infected.

Here's how the developers describe their rootkit: