Computed·Blg

How the Robots Lost: High-Frequency Trading's Rise and Fall

Mon, 10 Jun 2013 17:37:22 +0000

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Steve Swanson was a typical 21-year-old computer nerd with a very atypical job. It was the summer of 1989, and he’d just earned a math degree from the College of Charleston. He tended toward T-shirts and flip-flops and liked Star Trek: The Next Generation. He also spent most of his time in the garage of his college statistics professor, Jim Hawkes, programming algorithms for what would become the world’s first high-frequency trading firm, Automated Trading Desk. Hawkes had hit on an idea to make money on the stock market using predictive formulas designed by his friend David Whitcomb, who taught finance at Rutgers University. It was Swanson’s job to turn Whitcomb’s formulas into computer code. By tapping market data beamed in through a satellite dish bolted to the roof of Hawkes’s garage, the system could predict stock prices 30 to 60 seconds into the future and automatically jump in and out of trades. They named it BORG, which stood for Brokered Order Routing Gateway. It was also a reference to the evil alien race in Star Trek that absorbed entire species into its cybernetic hive mind.

Among the BORG’s first prey were the market makers on the floors of the exchanges who manually posted offers to buy and sell stocks with handwritten tickets. Not only did ATD have a better idea of where prices were headed, it executed trades within one second—a snail’s pace by today’s standards, but far faster than what anyone else was doing then. Whenever a stock’s price changed, ATD’s computers would trade on the offers humans had entered in the exchange’s order book before they could adjust them, and then moments later either buy or sell the shares back to them at the correct price. Bernie Madoff’s firm was then Nasdaq’s (NDAQ) largest market maker. “Madoff hated us,” says Whitcomb. “We ate his lunch in those days.” On average, ATD made less than a penny on every share it traded, but it was trading hundreds of millions of shares a day. Eventually the firm moved out of Hawkes’s garage and into a $36 million modernist campus on the swampy outskirts of Charleston, S.C., some 650 miles from Wall Street.

By 2006 the firm traded between 700 million and 800 million shares a day, accounting for upwards of 9 percent of all stock market volume in the U.S. And it wasn’t alone anymore. A handful of other big electronic trading firms such as Getco, Knight Capital Group, and Citadel were on the scene, having grown out of the trading floors of the mercantile and futures exchanges in Chicago and the stock exchanges in New York. High-frequency trading was becoming more pervasive.

The definition of HFT varies, depending on whom you ask. Essentially, it’s the use of automated strategies to churn through large volumes of orders in fractions of seconds. Some firms can trade in microseconds. (Usually, these shops are trading for themselves rather than clients.) And HFT isn’t just for stocks: Speed traders have made inroads in futures, fixed income, and foreign currencies. Options, not so much.

Graphic by Stamen - Graphic: Sixty Seconds of Chaos

Back in 2007, traditional trading firms were rushing to automate. That year, Citigroup (C) bought ATD for $680 million. Swanson, then 40, was named head of Citi’s entire electronic stock trading operation and charged with integrating ATD’s systems into the bank globally.

By 2010, HFT accounted for more than 60 percent of all U.S. equity volume and seemed positioned to swallow the rest. Swanson, tired of Citi’s bureaucracy, left, and in mid-2011 opened his own HFT firm. The private equity firm Technology Crossover Ventures gave him tens of millions to open a trading shop, which he called Eladian Partners. If things went well, TCV would kick in another multimillion-dollar round in 2012. But things didn’t go well.

For the first time since its inception, high-frequency trading, the bogey machine of the markets, is in retreat. According to estimates from Rosenblatt Securities, as much as two-thirds of all stock trades in the U.S. from 2008 to 2011 were executed by high-frequency firms; today it’s about half. In 2009, high-frequency traders moved about 3.25 billion shares a day. In 2012, it was 1.6 billion a day. Speed traders aren’t just trading fewer shares, they’re making less money on each trade. Average profits have fallen from about a tenth of a penny per share to a twentieth of a penny.

According to Rosenblatt, in 2009 the entire HFT industry made around $5 billion trading stocks. Last year it made closer to $1 billion. By comparison, JPMorgan Chase (JPM) earned more than six times that in the first quarter of this year. The “profits have collapsed,” says Mark Gorton, the founder of Tower Research Capital, one of the largest and fastest high-frequency trading firms. “The easy money’s gone. We’re doing more things better than ever before and making less money doing it.”

“The margins on trades have gotten to the point where it’s not even paying the bills for a lot of firms,” says Raj Fernando, chief executive officer and founder of Chopper Trading, a large firm in Chicago that uses high-frequency strategies. “No one’s laughing while running to the bank now, that’s for sure.” A number of high-frequency shops have shut down in the past year. According to Fernando, many asked Chopper to buy them before going out of business. He declined in every instance.

One of HFT’s objectives has always been to make the market more efficient. Speed traders have done such an excellent job of wringing waste out of buying and selling stocks that they’re having a hard time making money themselves. HFT also lacks the two things it needs the most: trading volume and price volatility. Compared with the deep, choppy waters of 2009 and 2010, the stock market is now a shallow, placid pool. Trading volumes in U.S. equities are around 6 billion shares a day, roughly where they were in 2006. Volatility, a measure of the extent to which a share’s price jumps around, is about half what it was a few years ago. By seeking out price disparities across assets and exchanges, speed traders ensure that when things do get out of whack, they’re quickly brought back into harmony. As a result, they tamp down volatility, suffocating their two most common strategies: market making and statistical arbitrage.

Market-making firms facilitate trading by quoting both a bid and a sell price. They profit off the spread in between, which these days is rarely more than a penny per share, so they rely on volume to make money. Arbitrage firms take advantage of small price differences between related assets. If shares of Apple (AAPL) are trading for slightly different prices across any of the 13 U.S. stock exchanges, HFT firms will buy the cheaper shares or sell the more expensive ones. The more prices change, the more chances there are for disparities to ripple through the market. As things have calmed, arbitrage trading has become less profitable.

To some extent, the drop in volume may be the result of high-frequency trading scaring investors away from stocks, particularly after the so-called Flash Crash of May 6, 2010, when a big futures sell order filled by computers unleashed a massive selloff. The Dow Jones industrial average dropped 600 points in about five minutes. As volatility spiked, most high-frequency traders that stayed in the market that day made a fortune. Those that turned their machines off were blamed for accelerating the selloff by drying up liquidity, since there were fewer speed traders willing to buy all those cascading sell orders triggered by falling prices.

For two years, the Flash Crash was HFT’s biggest black eye. Then last August, Knight Capital crippled itself. Traders have taken to calling the implosion “the Knightmare.” Until about 9:30 a.m. on the morning of Aug. 1, 2012, Knight was arguably one of the kings of HFT and the largest trader of U.S. stocks. It accounted for 17 percent of all trading volume in New York Stock Exchange (NYX)-listed stocks, and about 16 percent in Nasdaq listings among securities firms.

When the market opened on Aug. 1, a new piece of trading software that Knight had just installed went haywire and started aggressively buying shares in 140 NYSE-listed stocks. Over about 45 minutes that morning, Knight accidentally bought and sold $7 billion worth of shares—about $2.6 million a second. Each time it bought, Knight’s algorithm would raise the price it was offering into the market. Other firms were happy to sell to it at those prices. By the end of Aug. 2, Knight had spent $440 million unwinding its trades, or about 40 percent of the company’s value before the glitch.

Knight is being acquired by Chicago-based Getco, one of the leading high-frequency market-making firms, and for years considered among the fastest. The match, however, is one of two ailing titans. On April 15, Getco revealed that its profits had plunged 90 percent last year. With 409 employees, it made just $16 million in 2012, compared with $163 million in 2011 and $430 million in 2008. Getco and Knight declined to comment for this story.

Getco’s woes say a lot about another wound to high-frequency trading: Speed doesn’t pay like it used to. Firms have spent millions to maintain millisecond advantages by constantly updating their computers and paying steep fees to have their servers placed next to those of the exchanges in big data centers. Once exchanges saw how valuable those thousandths of a second were, they raised fees to locate next to them. They’ve also hiked the prices of their data feeds. As firms spend millions trying to shave milliseconds off execution times, the market has sped up but the racers have stayed even. The result: smaller profits. “Speed has been commoditized,” says Bernie Dan, CEO of Chicago-based Sun Trading, one of the largest high-frequency market-making trading firms.

No one knows that better than Steve Swanson. By the time he left Citi in 2010, HFT had become a crowded space. As more firms flooded the market with their high-speed algorithms, all of them hunting out inefficiencies, it became harder to make money—especially since trading volumes were steadily declining as investors pulled out of stocks and poured their money into bonds. Swanson was competing for shrinking profits against hundreds of other speed traders who were just as fast and just as smart. In September 2012, TCV decided not to invest in the final round. A month later, Swanson pulled the plug.

Even as the money has dried up and HFT’s presence has declined, the regulators are arriving in force. In January, Gregg Berman, a Princeton-trained physicist who’s worked at the Securities and Exchange Commission since 2009, was promoted to lead the SEC’s newly created Office of Analytics and Research. His primary task is to give the SEC its first view into what high-frequency traders are actually doing. Until now the agency relied on the industry, and sometimes even the financial blogosphere, to learn how speed traders operated. In the months after the Flash Crash, Berman met with dozens of trading firms, including HFT firms. He was amazed at how much trading data they had, and how much better their view of the market was than his. He realized that he needed better systems and technologies—and that the best place to get them was from the speed traders themselves.

GRAPHIC:

Stamen Design's Eric Rodenbeck on Leading Creativity

Last fall the SEC said it would pay Tradeworx, a high-frequency trading firm, $2.5 million to use its data collection system as the basic platform for a new surveillance operation. Code-named Midas (Market Information Data Analytics System), it scours the market for data from all 13 public exchanges.

Midas went live in February. The SEC can now detect anomalous situations in the market, such as a trader spamming an exchange with thousands of fake orders, before they show up on blogs like Nanex and ZeroHedge. If Midas sees something odd, Berman’s team can look at trading data on a deeper level, millisecond by millisecond. About 100 people across the SEC use Midas, including a core group of quants, developers, programmers, and Berman himself. “Around the office, Gregg’s group is known as the League of Extraordinary Gentlemen,” said Brian Bussey, associate director for derivatives policy and trading practices at the SEC, during a panel in February. “And it is one group that is not made up of lawyers, but instead actual market and research experts.” It’s early, but there’s evidence that Midas has detected some nefarious stuff. In March the Financial Times reported that the SEC is sharing information with the FBI to probe manipulative trading practices by some HFT firms. The SEC declined to comment.

On March 12, the day the Futures Industry Association annual meeting kicked off at the Boca Raton Resort & Club, regulators from the U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission, and also from Europe, Canada, and Asia, gathered in a closed-door meeting. At the top of the agenda was “High-Frequency Trading—Controlling the Risks.”

Europeans are already clamping down on speed traders. France and Italy have both implemented some version of a trading tax. The European Commission is debating a euro zone-wide transaction fee.

In the U.S., Bart Chilton, a commissioner of the CFTC, has discussed adding yet more pressure. At the Boca conference the evening after the meeting took place, sitting at a table on a pink veranda, he explained his recent concern. According to Chilton, the CFTC has uncovered some “curious activity” in the markets that is “deeply disturbing and may be against the law.” Chilton, who calls the high-frequency traders “cheetahs,” said the CFTC needs to rethink how it determines whether a firm is manipulating markets.

Under the CFTC’s manipulation standard, a firm has to have a large share of a particular market to be deemed big enough to engage in manipulative behavior. For example, a firm that owns 20 percent of a company’s stock might be able to manipulate it. Since they rarely hold a position longer than several seconds, speed traders might have at most 1 percent or 2 percent of a market, but due to the outsize influence of their speed, they can often affect prices just as much as those with bigger footprints—particularly when they engage in what Chilton refers to as “feeding frenzies,” when prices are volatile. “We may need to lower the bar in regard to cheetahs,” says Chilton. “The question is whether revising that standard might be a way for us to catch cheetahs manipulating the market.”

Recently the CFTC has deployed its own high-tech surveillance system, capable of viewing market activity in hundredths of a second, and also tracing trades back to the firms that execute them. This has led the CFTC to look into potential manipulation in the natural gas markets and review something called “wash trading,” where firms illegally trade with themselves to create the impression of activity that doesn’t really exist.

In May, Chilton proposed a .06¢ fee on futures and swaps trades. The tax is meant to calm the market and fund CFTC investigations. Democrats in Congress would go further. Iowa Senator Tom Harkin and Oregon Representative Peter DeFazio want a .03 percent tax on nearly every trade in nearly every market in the U.S.

As profits have shrunk, more HFT firms are resorting to something called momentum trading. Using methods similar to what Swanson helped pioneer 25 years ago, momentum traders sense the way the market is going and bet big. It can be lucrative, and it comes with enormous risks. Other HFTs are using sophisticated programs to analyze news wires and headlines to get their returns. A few are even scanning Twitter feeds, as evidenced by the sudden selloff that followed the Associated Press’s hacked Twitter account reporting explosions at the White House on April 23. In many ways, it was the best they could do.

Touchscreens found on 10% of all notebook shipments in Q1

Mon, 03 Jun 2013 10:34:37 +0000

Via SlashGear

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Touchscreen laptops appear to be rising in popularity as the newest data from market research firm DisplayBank says that touchscreen notebook shipments have jumped 51.8% during Q1 2013 compared to the previous quarter. A total of 4.57 million touchscreen laptops were shipped during the quarter, making up 10% of all notebook shipments during Q1 2013.

Throughout the entire Q1 2013 quarter, a total of 46 million laptops were shipped, so 4.57 million touchscreen variants certainly isn’t a lot, but with a healthy increase from the previous quarter, touchscreens in laptops are becoming more popular than ever. Most likely, the number of these kinds of laptops will only increase in the future.

Specifically, manufacturers like Lenovo, Acer and ASUS have set higher targets for themselves to achieve over 20% of touchscreen market share, which could be quite achievable, but it’s really only up to consumers who want to adopt touchscreens in their laptops. We already know Apple thinks that people don’t want them, but a 51.8% increase says otherwise.

Much of the adoption of touchscreen technology in laptops is thanks to Windows 8, which includes a touchscreen-friendly start screen that you can swipe and navigate around using your fingers. Of course, the new operating system hasn’t received a lot of compliments lately, and its adoption rate is slightly slower than what Microsoft or PC makers were expecting, but most OEMs have added touchscreen laptops to their repertoire due in part to Windows 8.

Plus, as laptop prices get lower and lower, touchscreen laptops will become more affordable. Right now they’re quite on the pricey side, with a decent machine running over $1,000, but former Intel CEO Paul Otellini says that touchscreen laptops will break the $200 barrier in the near future, so the technology could eventually become the norm.

Plug into a plant: A new approach to clean energy harvesting

Thu, 23 May 2013 09:51:36 +0000

Via gizmag

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Millions of years of evolution has resulted in plants being the most efficient harvesters of solar energy on the planet. Much research is underway into ways to artificially mimic photosynthesis in devices like artificial leaves, but researchers at the University of Georgia (UGA) are working on a different approach that gives new meaning to the term “power plant.” Their technology harvests energy generated through photosynthesis before the plants can make use of it, allowing the energy to instead be used to run low-powered electrical devices.

Photosynthesis turns light energy into chemical energy by splitting water atoms into hydrogen and oxygen. This process produces electrons that help create sugars that the plant uses to fuel growth and reproduction. A team led by Ramaraja Ramasamy, assistant professor in the UGA College of Engineering, is developing technology that would interrupt the photosynthesis process and capture the electrons before the plant puts them to use creating sugars.

The technology involves interrupting the pathways along which the electrons flow by manipulating the proteins contained in thylakoids. Thylakoids are membrane-bound compartments at the site of the light reactions of photosynthesis that are responsible for capturing and storing energy from sunlight.

The modified thylakoids are immobilized on a specially designed backing of carbon nanotubes that acts as an electrical conductor to capture the electrons and send them along a wire. The researchers say that small-scale experiments of this system have yielded a maximum current density that is two orders of magnitude larger than previously reported for similar systems.

While you won’t be running your HDTV off the nearest tree anytime soon, Ramasamy says the technology has the potential to find its way into less power-intensive applications in the not too distant future.

"In the near term, this technology might best be used for remote sensors or other portable electronic equipment that requires less power to run," he said. "If we are able to leverage technologies like genetic engineering to enhance stability of the plant photosynthetic machineries, I'm very hopeful that this technology will be competitive to traditional solar panels in the future."

Ramasamy and his team are already working to improve the stability and output of the technology to get it to a stage suitable for commercialization.

"We have discovered something very promising here, and it is certainly worth exploring further," he said. "The electrical output we see now is modest, but only about 30 years ago, hydrogen fuel cells were in their infancy, and now they can power cars, buses and even buildings."

The team’s study appears in the journal Energy & Environmental Science.

Source: University of Georgia

The audacious plan to end hunger with 3-D printed food

Tue, 21 May 2013 11:58:52 +0000

Via Quartz

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Anjan Contractor’s 3D food printer might evoke visions of the “replicator” popularized in Star Trek, from which Captain Picard was constantly interrupting himself to order tea. And indeed Contractor’s company, Systems & Materials Research Corporation, just got a six month, $125,000 grant from NASA to create a prototype of his universal food synthesizer.

But Contractor, a mechanical engineer with a background in 3D printing, envisions a much more mundane—and ultimately more important—use for the technology. He sees a day when every kitchen has a 3D printer, and the earth’s 12 billion people feed themselves customized, nutritionally-appropriate meals synthesized one layer at a time, from cartridges of powder and oils they buy at the corner grocery store. Contractor’s vision would mean the end of food waste, because the powder his system will use is shelf-stable for up to 30 years, so that each cartridge, whether it contains sugars, complex carbohydrates, protein or some other basic building block, would be fully exhausted before being returned to the store.

Ubiquitous food synthesizers would also create new ways of producing the basic calories on which we all rely. Since a powder is a powder, the inputs could be anything that contain the right organic molecules. We already know that eating meat is environmentally unsustainable, so why not get all our protein from insects?

If eating something spat out by the same kind of 3D printers that are currently being used to make everything from jet engine parts to fine art doesn’t sound too appetizing, that’s only because you can currently afford the good stuff, says Contractor. That might not be the case once the world’s population reaches its peak size, probably sometime near the end of this century.

“I think, and many economists think, that current food systems can’t supply 12 billion people sufficiently,” says Contractor. “So we eventually have to change our perception of what we see as food.”

There will be pizza on Mars

The ultimate in molecular gastronomy. (Schematic of SMRC’s 3D printer for food.)SMRC

If Contractor’s utopian-dystopian vision of the future of food ever comes to pass, it will be an argument for why space research isn’t a complete waste of money. His initial grant from NASA, under its Small Business Innovation Research program, is for a system that can print food for astronauts on very long space missions. For example, all the way to Mars.

“Long distance space travel requires 15-plus years of shelf life,” says Contractor. “The way we are working on it is, all the carbs, proteins and macro and micro nutrients are in powder form. We take moisture out, and in that form it will last maybe 30 years.”

Pizza is an obvious candidate for 3D printing because it can be printed in distinct layers, so it only requires the print head to extrude one substance at a time. Contractor’s “pizza printer” is still at the conceptual stage, and he will begin building it within two weeks. It works by first “printing” a layer of dough, which is baked at the same time it’s printed, by a heated plate at the bottom of the printer. Then it lays down a tomato base, “which is also stored in a powdered form, and then mixed with water and oil,” says Contractor.

Finally, the pizza is topped with the delicious-sounding “protein layer,” which could come from any source, including animals, milk or plants.

The prototype for Contractor’s pizza printer (captured in a video, above) which helped him earn a grant from NASA, was a simple chocolate printer. It’s not much to look at, nor is it the first of its kind, but at least it’s a proof of concept.

Replacing cookbooks with open-source recipes

SMRC’s prototype 3D food printer will be based on open-source hardware from the RepRap project.RepRap

Remember grandma’s treasure box of recipes written in pencil on yellowing note cards? In the future, we’ll all be able to trade recipes directly, as software. Each recipe will be a set of instructions that tells the printer which cartridge of powder to mix with which liquids, and at what rate and how it should be sprayed, one layer at time.

This will be possible because Contractor plans to keep the software portion of his 3D printer entirely open-source, so that anyone can look at its code, take it apart, understand it, and tweak recipes to fit. It would of course be possible for people to trade recipes even if this printer were proprietary—imagine something like an app store, but for recipes—but Contractor believes that by keeping his software open source, it will be even more likely that people will find creative uses for his hardware. His prototype 3D food printer also happens to be based on a piece of open-source hardware, the second-generation RepRap 3D printer.

“One of the major advantage of a 3D printer is that it provides personalized nutrition,” says Contractor. “If you’re male, female, someone is sick—they all have different dietary needs. If you can program your needs into a 3D printer, it can print exactly the nutrients that person requires.”

Replacing farms with sources of environmentally-appropriate calories

2032: Delicious Uncle Sam’s Meal Cubes are laser-sintered from granulated mealworms; part of this healthy breakfast.TNO Research

Contractor is agnostic about the source of the food-based powders his system uses. One vision of how 3D printing could make it possible to turn just about any food-like starting material into an edible meal was outlined by TNO Research, the think tank of TNO, a Dutch holding company that owns a number of technology firms.

In TNO’s vision of a future of 3D printed meals, “alternative ingredients” for food include:

algae

duckweed

grass

lupine seeds

beet leafs

insects

From astronauts to emerging markets

While Contractor and his team are initially focusing on applications for long-distance space travel, his eventual goal is to turn his system for 3D printing food into a design that can be licensed to someone who wants to turn it into a business. His company has been “quite successful in doing that in the past,” and has created both a gadget that uses microwaves to evaluate the structural integrity of aircraft panels and a kind of metal screw that coats itself with protective sealant once it’s drilled into a sheet of metal.

Since Contractor’s 3D food printer doesn’t even exist in prototype form, it’s too early to address questions of cost or the healthiness (or not) of the food it produces. But let’s hope the algae and cricket pizza turns out to be tastier than it sounds.

The PC inside your phone: A guide to the system-on-a-chip

Thu, 16 May 2013 18:23:34 +0000

Via ars technica

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Pictures: Andrew Cunningham / Aurich Lawson

A desktop PC used to need a lot of different chips to make it work. You had the big parts: the CPU that executed most of your code and the GPU that rendered your pretty 3D graphics. But there were a lot of smaller bits too: a chip called the northbridge handled all communication between the CPU, GPU, and RAM, while the southbridge handled communication between the northbridge and other interfaces like USB or SATA. Separate controller chips for things like USB ports, Ethernet ports, and audio were also often required if this functionality wasn't already integrated into the southbridge itself.

As chip manufacturing processes have improved, it's now possible to cram more and more of these previously separate components into a single chip. This not only reduces system complexity, cost, and power consumption, but it also saves space, making it possible to fit a high-end computer from yesteryear into a smartphone that can fit in your pocket. It's these technological advancements that have given rise to the system-on-a-chip (SoC), one monolithic chip that's home to all of the major components that make these devices tick.

The fact that every one of these chips includes what is essentially an entire computer can make keeping track of an individual chip's features and performance quite time-consuming. To help you keep things straight, we've assembled this handy guide that will walk you through the basics of how an SoC is put together. It will also serve as a guide to most of the current (and future, where applicable) chips available from the big players making SoCs today: Apple, Qualcomm, Samsung, Nvidia, Texas Instruments, Intel, and AMD. There's simply too much to talk about to fit everything into one article of reasonable length, but if you've been wondering what makes a Snapdragon different from a Tegra, here's a start.

Putting a chip together

A very simplified look at the layout of Samsung's Exynos 5 Dual. The CPU and GPU are there, but they're just small pieces of the larger puzzle.

Samsung

There's no discussion of smartphone and tablet chips that can happen without a discussion of ARM Holdings, a British company with a long history of involvement in embedded systems. ARM's processors (and the instruction set that they use, also called ARM) are designed to consume very small amounts of power, much less than the Intel or AMD CPUs you might find at the heart of a standard computer. This is one of the reasons why you see ARM chips at the heart of so many phones and tablets today. To better understand how ARM operates (and to explain why so many companies use ARM's CPU designs and instruction sets), we first must talk a bit about Intel.

Intel handles just about everything about its desktop and laptop CPUs in-house: Intel owns the x86 instruction set its processors use, Intel designs its own CPUs and the vast majority of its own GPUs, Intel manufactures its own chips in its own semiconductor fabrication plants (fabs), and Intel handles the sale of its CPUs to both hardware manufacturers and end users. Intel can do all of this because of its sheer size, but it's one of the only companies able to work this way. Even in AMD's heyday, the company was still licensing the x86 instruction set from Intel. More recently, AMD sold off its own fabs—the company now directly handles only the design and sale of its processors, rather than handling everything from start to finish.

ARM's operation is more democratized by design. Rather than making and selling any of its own chips, ARM creates and licenses its own processor designs for other companies to use in their chips—this is where we get things like the Cortex-A9 and the Cortex-A15 that sometimes pop up in Ars phone and tablet reviews. Nvidia's Tegra 3 and 4, Samsung's Exynos 4 and 5, and Apple's A5 processors are all examples of SoCs that use ARM's CPU cores. ARM also licenses its instruction set for third parties to use in their own custom CPU designs. This allows companies to put together CPUs that will run the same code as ARM's Cortex designs but have different performance and power consumption characteristics. Both Apple and Qualcomm (with their A6 and Snapdragon S4 chips, respectively) have made their own custom designs that exceed Cortex-A9's performance but generally use less power than Cortex-A15.

The situation is similar on the graphics side. ARM offers its own "Mali" series GPUs that can be licensed the same way its CPU cores are licensed, or companies can make their own GPUs (Nvidia and Qualcomm both take the latter route). There are also some companies that specialize in creating graphics architectures. Imagination Technologies is probably the biggest player in this space, and it licenses its mobile GPU architectures to the likes of Intel, Apple, and Samsung, among others.

Chip designers take these CPU and GPU bits and marry them to other necessary components—a memory interface is necessary, and specialized blocks for things like encoding and decoding video and processing images from a camera are also frequent additions. The result is a single, monolithic chip called a "system on a chip" (SoC) because of its more-or-less self-contained nature.

Enlarge / A good example of a "package on package" design that stacks the RAM on top of the rest of the SoC.

Wikipedia

There are two things that sometimes don't get integrated into the SoC itself. The first is RAM, which is sometimes a separate chip but is often stacked on top of the main SoC to save space (a method called "package-on-package" or PoP for short). A separate chip is also sometimes used to handle wireless connectivity. However, in smartphones especially, the cellular modem is also incorporated into the SoC itself.

While these different ARM SoCs all run the same basic code, there's a lot of variety between chips from different manufacturers. To make things a bit easier to digest, we'll go through all of the major ARM licensees and discuss their respective chip designs, those chips' performance levels, and products that each chip has shown up in. We'll also talk a bit about each chipmaker's plans for the future, to the extent that we know about them, and about the non-ARM SoCs that are slowly making their way into shipping products. Note that this is not intended to be a comprehensive look at all ARM licensees, but rather a thorough primer on the major players in today's and tomorrow's phones and tablets.

Apple

Apple's chips appear exclusively in Apple's phones and tablets, and iOS is optimized specifically for them. This lets Apple get good performance with less RAM and fewer CPU cores than other companies' high-end chips.

Jacqui Cheng

We'll tackle Apple's chips first, since they show up in a pretty small number of products and are exclusively used in Apple's products. We'll start with the oldest models first and work our way up.

The Apple A4 is the oldest chip still used by current Apple products, namely the fourth generation iPod touch and the free-with-contract iPhone 4. This chip marries a single Cortex A8 CPU core to a single-core PowerVR SGX 535 GPU and either 256MB or 512MB of RAM (for the iPod and iPhone, respectively). This chip was originally introduced in early 2010 with the original iPad, so it's quite long in the tooth by SoC standards. Our review of the fifth generation iPod touch shows just how slow this thing is by modern standards, though Apple's tight control of iOS means that it can be optimized to run reasonably well even on old hardware (the current version of iOS runs pretty well on the nearly four-year-old iPhone 3GS).

Next up is the Apple A5, which despite being introduced two years ago is still used in the largest number of Apple products. The still-on-sale iPad 2, the iPhone 4S, the fifth-generation iPod touch, and the iPad mini all have the A5 at their heart. This chip combines a dual-core Cortex A9 CPU, a dual-core PowerVR SGX 543MP2 GPU, and 512MB of RAM. Along with the aforementioned heavy optimization of iOS, this combination has made for quite a longevous SoC. The A5 also has the greatest number of variants of any Apple chip: the A5X used the same CPU but included the larger GPU, 1GB of RAM, and wider memory interface necessary to power the third generation iPad's then-new Retina display, and a new variant with a single-core CPU was recently spotted in the Apple TV.

Finally, the most recent chip: the Apple A6. This chip, which to date has appeared only in the iPhone 5, marries two of Apple's custom-designed "Swift" CPU cores to a triple-core Imagination Technologies PowerVR SGX 543MP3 GPU and 1GB of RAM, roughly doubling the performance of the A5 in every respect. The CPU doubles the A5's performance both by increasing the clock speed and the number of instructions-per-clock the chip can perform relative to Cortex A9. The GPU gets there by adding another core and increasing clock speeds. As with the A5, the A6 has a special A6X variant used in the full-sized iPad that uses the same dual-core CPU but ups the ante in the graphics department with a quad-core PowerVR SGX 554MP4 and a wider memory interface.

Enlarge / The "die shot" of Apple's A6, as done by Chipworks. They've highlighted the CPU and GPU cores, but there are lots of other components that make up an SoC.

Chipworks

Apple SoCs all prioritize graphics performance over everything else, both to support the large number of games available for the platform and to further Apple's push toward high-resolution display panels. The chips tend to have less CPU horsepower and RAM than the chips used in most high-end Android phones (Apple has yet to ship a quad-core CPU, opting instead to push dual-core chips), but tight control over iOS makes this a non-issue. Apple has a relative handful of iOS devices it needs to support, so it's trivial for Apple and third-party developers to make whatever tweaks and optimizations they need to keep the operating system and its apps running smoothly even if the hardware is a little older. Whatever you think of Apple's policies and its "walled garden" approach to applications, this is where the tight integration between the company's hardware and software pays off.

Knowing what we do about Apple's priorities, we can make some pretty good educated guesses about what we'll see in a hypothetical A7 chip even if the company never gives details about its chips before they're introduced (or even after, since we often have to rely on outfits like Chipworks to take new devices apart before we can say for sure what's in them).

On the CPU side, we'd bet that Apple will focus on squeezing more performance out of Swift, whether by improving the architecture's efficiency or increasing the clock speed. A quad-core version is theoretically possible, but to date Apple has focused on fewer fast CPU cores rather than more, slower ones, most likely out of concern about power consumption and the total die size of the SoC (the larger the chip, the more it costs to produce, and Apple loves its profit margins). As for the GPU, Imagination's next-generation PowerVR SGX 6 series GPUs are right around the corner. Since Apple has used Imagination exclusively in its custom chips up until now, it's not likely to rock this boat.

Qualcomm

Enlarge / Qualcomm CEO Paul Jacobs introduces the Snapdragon 800 series SoCs at CES 2013.

Andrew Cunningham

Qualcomm is hands-down the biggest player in the mobile chipmaking game right now. Even Samsung, a company that makes and ships its own SoCs in the international versions of its phones, often goes with Qualcomm chips in the US. With this popularity comes complexity: Wikipedia lists 19 distinct model numbers in the Snapdragon S4 lineup alone, and those aren't even Qualcomm's newest chips. So we'll pick four of the most prominent to focus on, since these are the ones you're most likely to see in a device you could buy in the next year or so.

Let's start with the basics: Qualcomm is the only company on our list that creates both its own CPU and GPU architectures, rather than licensing one or the other design from ARM or another company. Its current CPU architecture, called "Krait," is faster clock-for-clock than ARM's Cortex A9 but slower than Cortex A15 (the upside is that it's also more power-efficient than A15). Its GPU products are called "Adreno," and they actually have their roots in a mobile graphics division that Qualcomm bought from AMD back in 2009 for a scant $65 million. Both CPU and GPU tend to be among the faster products on the market today, which is one of the reasons why they're so popular.

The real secret to Qualcomm's success, though, is its prowess in cellular modems. For quite a while, Qualcomm was the only company offering chips with an LTE modem integrated into the SoC itself. Plenty of phones make room for separate modems and SoCs, but integrating the modem into the SoC creates space on the phone's logic board, saves a little bit of power, and keeps OEMs from having to buy yet another chip. Even companies that make their own chips use Qualcomm modems—as we noted, almost all of Samsung's US products come with a Qualcomm chip, and phones like the BlackBerry Z10 use a Qualcomm chip in the US even though they use a Texas Instruments chip abroad. Even Apple's current iPhones use one or another (separate) Qualcomm chips to provide connectivity.

Enlarge / Qualcomm's modems are key to its success. Here is the standalone MDM9615M modem that enables the iPhone 5's 4G connectivity.

iFixit

Add these modems to Qualcomm's competitive CPUs and GPUs, and it's no wonder why the Snapdragon has been such a success for the company. Qualcomm will finally start to see some real challenge on this front soon: Broadcom, Nvidia, and Intel are all catching up and should be shipping their own LTE modems this year, but for now Qualcomm's solutions are established and mature. Expect Qualcomm to continue to provide connectivity for most devices.

Let's get to the Snapdragon chips themselves, starting with the oldest and working our way up. Snapdragon's S4 Plus, particularly the highest-end model (part number MSM8960), combines two Krait cores running at 1.7GHz with an Adreno 225 GPU. This GPU is roughly comparable to the Imagination Technologies GPU in Apple's A5, while the Krait CPU is somewhere between the A5 and the A6. This chip is practically everywhere: it powers high-end Android phones from a year or so ago (the US version of Samsung's Galaxy S III) as well as high-end phones from other ecosystems (Nokia's Lumia 920 among many other Windows phones, plus BlackBerry's Z10). It's still a pretty popular choice for those who want to make a phone but don't want to spend the money (or provide the larger battery) for Qualcomm's heavy-duty quad-core SoCs. Look for the S4 Plus series to be replaced in mid-range phones by the Snapdragon 400 series chips, which combine the same dual-core Krait CPU with a slightly more powerful Adreno 305 GPU (the HTC First is the first new midrange phone to use it. Others will likely follow).

Next up is the Snapdragon S4 Pro (in particular, part number APQ8064). This chip combines a quad-core Krait CPU with a significantly beefed up Adreno 320 GPU. Both CPU and GPU trade blows with Apple's A6 in our standard benchmarks, but the CPU is usually faster as long as all four of its cores are actually being used by your apps. This chip is common in high-end phones released toward the end of last year, including such noteworthy models as LG's Optimus G, the Nexus 4, and HTC's Droid DNA. It's powerful, but it can get a little toasty: if you've been running the SoC full-tilt for a while, the Optimus G's screen brightness will automatically turn down to reduce the heat, and the Nexus 4 will throttle the chip and slow down if it's getting too hot.

The fastest, newest Qualcomm chip that's actually showing up in phones now is the Snapdragon 600, a chip Qualcomm unveiled at CES back in January. Like the S4 Pro, this Snapdragon features a quad-core Krait CPU and Adreno 320 GPU, but that doesn't mean they're the same chip. The Krait in the Snapdragon 600 is a revision called "Krait 300" that both runs at a higher clock speed than the S4 Pro's Krait (1.9GHz compared to 1.7GHz) and includes a number of architectural tweaks that make it faster than the original Krait at the same clock speed. The Snapdragon 600 will be coming to us in high-end phones like the US version of Samsung's Galaxy S4, HTC's One, and LG's Optimus G Pro. Our benchmarks for the latter phone show the Snapdragon 600 outdoing the S4 Pro by 25 to 30 percent in many tests, which is a sizable step up (though the Adreno 320 GPU is the same in both chips).

Finally, look ahead to the future and you'll see the Snapdragon 800, Qualcomm's next flagship chip that's due in the second quarter of this year. This chip's quad-core Krait 400 CPU again introduces a few mild tweaks that should make it faster clock-for-clock than the Krait 300, and it also runs at a speedier 2.3GHz. The chip sports an upgraded Adreno 330 GPU that supports a massive 3840×2160 resolution as well as a 64-bit memory interface (everything we've discussed up until now has used a 32-bit interface). All of this extra hardware suggests that this chip is destined for tablets rather than smartphones (a market segment where Qualcomm is less prevalent), but this doesn't necessarily preclude its use in high-end smartphones. We'll know more once the first round of Snapdragon 800-equipped devices are announced.

Qualcomm is in a good position. Its chips are widely used, and its roadmap evolves at a brisk and predictable pace. Things may look less rosy for the company when competing LTE modems start to become more common, but for now it's safe to say that most of the US' high-end phones are going to keep using Qualcomm chips.

Samsung

Samsung usually uses its own chips in its own phones and tablets, but not in the US.

Andrew Cunningham

Samsung has three-or-so chips that are currently shipping in its phones and tablets. The first (and oldest) of the three is the Exynos 4 Quad, which powers the Galaxy Note 10.1, Galaxy Note 8.0, Galaxy Note II, and international versions of the Galaxy S III. This particular variant includes four Cortex A9 CPU cores and an ARM Mali-400 GPU. Neither is cutting edge, but the GPU performance is better than Nvidia's Tegra 3 and the CPU performance is fairly similar (given similar clock speeds, anyway).

The other chips are both from the Exynos 5 series, but they're both quite different from each other. The first is the relatively straightforward Exynos 5 Dual, which powers both the Nexus 10 tablet and Samsung's $249 ARM Chromebook. This chip combines two ARM Cortex A15 cores with ARM's Mail-T604 GPU, and the result is the fastest GPU performance in any Android tablet at the moment and the fastest CPU performance in any ARM-based device, period. (This will quickly stop being the case as other A15-based devices start hitting the market this year). The chip is a bit more power-hungry than its Cortex A9-based predecessor and other designs from Apple and Qualcomm, but manufacturing process advancements absorb most of this penalty and Exynos 5 Dual devices still end up with decent battery life overall.

Finally, we have the Exynos 5 Octa, which is coming to market first in the international version of the forthcoming Galaxy S 4. This SoC is generally said to have eight CPU cores, and while this is not technically untrue, we've already pointed out that not all of these cores are created equal. The SoC combines four Cortex A15 cores for performance and four Cortex A7 cores that can run all of the same code, but much more slowly. Tasks that don't need a ton of CPU power can execute on the A7 cores, and tasks that do can execute on the A15s, but it's unlikely that all eight cores can be active at the same time. This chip's maximum CPU performance, then, will be more in line with a quad-core Cortex A15 chip like Nvidia's Tegra 4.

The Octa also ditches ARM's GPU designs for one by Imagination Technologies, a triple-core PowerVR SGX 544MP3. This is nearly identical to the 543MP3 used in Apple's A6, and the performance should be very similar. The only difference is that the 544MP3 supports Direct3D, a necessity if the Octa is to make its way into Windows phones or Windows RT tablets. Apple's competitors in the chip space are finally beginning to catch up with their GPU performance, something we couldn't have said of many chips even a year ago.

Samsung's Exynos 5 Octa uses a CPU core arrangement called "big.LITTLE" to save power.

ARM

Samsung's chips have been known to appear in products from other companies, but they ship most frequently in Samsung's own phones, tablets, and (more recently) laptops. Samsung has the advantage of being a more integrated company than many of its competitors—not only does it make and sell its own phones and tablets, it also manufactures many of the components that appear in those devices, including the screens and the chips themselves. Nvidia and Qualcomm both typically outsource their chip production to TSMC, a company that also handles GPU production for AMD and Nvidia. Meanwhile, Apple (Samsung's biggest competitor in the mobile market) relies on Samsung for the production of the A5 and A6 chips that power its iOS devices.

Texas Instruments

Texas Instruments is an odd duck in this discussion. On the one hand, it provides chips for many prominent devices past and present, including Amazon's entire Kindle Fire, Samsung's Galaxy S II (and several other pre-Galaxy S III Samsung devices), and the international version of the BlackBerry Z10. On the other hand, TI has announced that it is exiting the market for smartphone and tablet SoCs and will be focusing on less-competitive, higher-margin markets—think embedded systems and factories. That doesn't mean it will be leaving the consumer market all of a sudden, just that it won't be devoting resources to new chips, and its existing chips will become more and more rare as time goes on.

The most common TI chips you'll find in products today belong to the OMAP4 series, which consists of three chips: the OMAP4430, the OMAP4460, and the OMAP4470. All use a dual-core Cortex A9 CPU (the higher the model number is, the higher the clock speed) alongside a single-core Imagination Technologies PowerVR SGX540 (in the 4430 and 4460) and a single-core PowerVR SGX544 (in the 4470). Two low-power ARM Cortex M3 cores are also included to help process background tasks while eating less battery.

The OMAP4's CPU performance is lower than the newer chips from Qualcomm or Nvidia, but like Apple's A5 it's generally good enough, especially when paired with Jelly Bean (or something like BlackBerry 10, which is optimized for it). The GPU performance, however, often lags behind not just newer chips, but also contemporaneous chips like the A5 or Nvidia's Tegra 3 (especially in the lower-end chips).

TI has one more consumer-targeted design in its pipeline, and it will probably be its last: the OMAP5. It uses the same basic setup as OMAP4, but everything has been upgraded: the two Cortex A9s have been exchanged for A15s, the Cortex M3s have been exchanged for M4s, and the GPU has been bumped to a dual-core PowerVR SGX544MP2 rather than the single-core version (the GPU's clock speed has also been increased to 532MHz, a little less than twice as fast as the PowerVR SGX544 in the OMAP4470). This should all add up to a GPU that's between three and four times as fast as its predecessor, always a welcome improvement.

OMAP5 is reportedly due in the second quarter of this year—so any day now. Even so, we haven't heard much about devices that will be using it. This silence may be because the product isn't actually on the market yet, but it may be the case that TI's anticipated withdrawal from the market has killed any chance this chip had to succeed. TI will probably be willing to cut buyers some pretty good deals, but if I had the option to buy a chip from a company with a well-charted roadmap (like Qualcomm or Nvidia) and a company that has announced its intent to completely abandon the consumer market, I know which one I'd choose.

Nvidia

Enlarge / Nvidia's "Kayla" platform is a Tegra-equipped motherboard aimed at developers.

Andrew Cunningham

The Tegra 3 is Nvidia's current SoC, and though it's getting a bit long in the tooth, it's still showing up in some relatively high-profile products. The chip uses four ARM Cortex A9 CPU cores and a custom-designed GPU made by Nvidia, which makes sense given its history as a graphics company. The SoC also includes a fifth low-power CPU core called a "companion core" designed to perform background tasks when your phone or tablet is idle, allowing the main CPU cores to power down and save your battery. There are a few different Tegra 3 variants, and they differ mostly in clock speed and memory bandwidth rather than core count.

The Tegra 3's CPU performs reasonably well, though at this point a quad-core Cortex A9 is going to feel slower than a dual-core CPU based on a newer architecture like the Cortex A15 simply because there aren't that many heavily threaded apps on phones and tablets these days. The GPU has also been surpassed by other offerings from Qualcomm, Apple, and Samsung, though the games actually available for Android today can usually be played without issue.

The Tegra 3 isn't as prevalent in phones and tablets as Qualcomm's chips, but it still powers plenty of Android and Windows RT devices. The Nexus 7, HTC One X+, Microsoft Surface, Asus VivoTab RT, and Asus Transformer Prime are all prominent devices using Nvidia silicon. The Ouya game console also uses a Tegra 3.

Tegra 3's successor is (unsurprisingly) called the Tegra 4, and the first devices to use it will be coming out in the next few months. Nvidia's own Project Shield gaming console will be one of the earliest to use it, but Vizio and Toshiba have both announced tablets that will use the chip as well. Tegra 4 uses the same basic configuration of CPU cores as Tegra 3—four cores, plus a low-power "companion core"—but trades the Cortex A9s for much more powerful Cortex A15s. The GPU is also much-improved and should go toe-to-toe with the GPU in Apple's iPad 4.

Enlarge / Tegra 4i is a smaller, more smartphone-centric version of Tegra 4.

Nvidia

Tegra 4 is aimed at tablets and the very highest-end smartphones, but Nvidia is going a different route for mainstream smartphones. The Tegra 4i, due toward the end of this year, has the same basic GPU architecture as Tegra 4, but it uses a narrower memory interface (32-bit as opposed to 64-bit) and fewer cores (60 instead of 72). The CPU is also a little weaker—like Tegra 3, it's comes with four Cortex A9 CPU cores and one "companion core," but it's based on a revision of Cortex A9 called "Cortex A9 R4." The R4 promises higher performance than Cortex A9 at the same clock speed. Maximum clock speeds have also been increased significantly over Tegra 3, from 1.7GHz to 2.3GHz.

What will help Tegra 4i the most is the presence of an integrated LTE modem, the Icera i500. We've already talked about the benefits of having a modem integrated directly into the SoC itself, but this one has some unique aspects. The i500 is a "soft modem," which means that instead of having bits and pieces dedicated to communicating over specific bands or with specific standards, it has some general-purpose hardware that can be programmed to communicate over any of them as long as the rest of the hardware supports it. In theory, this would remove the need to build different models of a phone to serve different markets or different carriers. Both Tegra 4 and Tegra 4i also include a new imaging technology called "Chimera" that allows for always-on, real-time HDR photographs without the lag and blurriness that affects current HDR implementations.

Neither Tegra 4 variant is here yet, but that hasn't stopped Nvidia from talking about its plans for the more distant future. "Logan," a successor to Tegra 4 due in 2014, will use the same "Kepler" GPU architecture as Nvidia's current GeForce GPUs. Aside from the accompanying performance increases, this opens the door to GPU-assisted computing, which can be quite useful in workstation and server applications. Finally, 2015's "Parker" will incorporate Nvidia's first custom-designed ARM CPU, marking a move away from ARM's stock designs.

Nvidia's biggest challenge with all of these chips is going to be breaking into a market that others have largely cornered. Tegra 3 has made some inroads for them, but the biggest smartphone and tablet manufacturers (Apple and Samsung) already make their own chips, and (in the US at least) Qualcomm tends to be the go-to choice for most others. Still, with Texas Instruments leaving the market, we may soon see prominent companies that use its OMAP chips (Amazon, among many others) looking for an alternative. Nvidia can capitalize on this opening, especially if it can undercut Qualcomm on price (and according to Nvidia representatives I've spoken with, this is indeed the case).

Intel and AMD: x86 struggles to make the jump

Enlarge / Intel hasn't made a perfect tablet chip yet, but systems like the ThinkPad Tablet 2 show promise.

Andrew Cunningham

We've talked almost exclusively about ARM-based products so far, but Intel, the 500-pound gorilla of the PC market, is still fighting to establish a reputation for making good tablet chips. Intel's current-generation products, the Ivy Bridge CPU architecture on the high end and the Clover Trail Atom platform on the low end, can't quite hit that necessary sweet spot between performance and power efficiency. Ivy Bridge tablets like Acer's Iconia W700 are still a little hot, a little heavy, a little expensive, and get only OK battery life. Clover Trail devices like Lenovo's ThinkPad Tablet 2 address all of these concerns, but their CPU and GPU performance is relatively low (GPU performance is especially bad) and the platform doesn't support Android.

Intel gets more interesting this year. Its Haswell chips should enable thinner, lighter tablets with better battery life than the Ivy Bridge models, while both the Clover Trail+ and Bay Trail Atom platforms look to deliver substantial gains in both CPU and GPU performance (Intel's cellular modems are also steadily improving, which helps). Intel's long-established relationships with the PC OEMs will ensure that both of these chips' architectures find their way into plenty of tablets, but we're still waiting for an Intel-powered smartphone to make its way to the US—so far, most Intel phones have been targeted toward "emerging markets."

AMD has also made a few moves in this direction: it has adapted its Bobcat netbook architecture into something called Hondo, which combines a dual-core CPU with an integrated Radeon GPU. By all reports, the CPU is in the same ballpark as Clover Trail's (the architecture is faster clock-for-clock, but Hondo runs at a lower clock speed than Clover Trail), while the GPU is a substantial step up. One of our main issues with Clover Trail tablets is that their GPUs deliver sometimes choppy UI and gaming performance, so improvements on this front are more than welcome.

Enlarge / AMD's "Hondo" chip checks most of the important boxes, but not many tablet makers are using it.

AMD

No matter what the chip's virtues, though, its main problem is that most OEMs just aren't picking up what AMD is putting down. At our first Hondo briefing back in October of 2012, AMD played coy when asked about which devices Hondo would appear in. Since then, only two have been announced: one Windows 8 tablet apiece from Fujitsu and TV-turned-PC-maker Vizio. Bigger names are conspicuous in their absence, and unless AMD can develop a more convincing roadmap and get more people on board, it seems unlikely that its chips will amount to much.

AMD's first ARM processors are also coming in 2014, but they're targeted toward servers and not the consumer market. This (plus a number of recent hires) suggests that AMD could be looking to get into the ARM SoC game (and it could certainly handle the GPU despite selling its last mobile GPU division to Qualcomm, a move that seems short-sighted in retrospect). For now, its efforts remain focused squarely on the server room.

All of these chips have one potential trump card over the ARM chips we've talked about: x86. How important this architecture is to you will depend entirely on what you do: if you're a heavy user of Windows 8 or Windows desktop applications, x86 is a must-have because the ARM-based Windows RT can't run any of that stuff. If you prefer your tablets to be Android-flavored, Intel in particular has done a lot of work with Google to optimize Android for x86, and every Intel-powered Android phone or tablet we've seen has indeed performed pretty smoothly. Intel has also created something called "binary translation" to run most apps from the Google Play store without requiring much (if any) extra work on the part of the developers. Still, Android doesn't need x86 like Windows does, and if you're trying to build something on the cheap, Intel probably isn't your best option.

On Intel's end, the theory is that its manufacturing expertise will eventually outstrip its competitors' by so much that it will enable it to cram more performance into a smaller, more power-efficient chip. This is one possible outcome, though I think that companies like Apple and Samsung are going to be slow to move away from using their own chips in most of their mobile devices. If they can keep with performance that's "good enough," sticking with their own products might still be preferable to paying Intel for tablet and phone chips as they have for desktop and laptop chips for so long.

Where the market is going

There are other chipmakers in the world, but this has been a reasonably comprehensive look at the current offerings that you're most likely to see in most mid-to-high-end smartphones or tablets within the next year or so. Now that we've covered the products and their performance relative to each other, let's look at the market itself and the direction things seem to be going.

First, despite the number of players, the market for third-party chips is deceptively small. Look at Apple and Samsung, by far the most successful smartphone and tablet companies—Samsung often uses Qualcomm chips in its US phones, but otherwise both companies build and ship their own chips in their own products. Especially in Apple's case, this keeps a large, lucrative chunk of the market out of reach for companies that make only chips. Qualcomm, Nvidia, and the others have to fight it out for the rest.

As we've already discussed, Qualcomm is by far the largest third-party chipmaker in this game, and it has arrived at that position by delivering chips with good performance and versatile modems. It's the go-to choice for most Android and Windows Phone handset makers—currently, its quad-core chips are popular in the highest-end phones, while midrange phones like the HTC First can go with the slightly older, cheaper, but still dependable dual-core models. If you want to get your chips in your phones, Qualcomm is who you're fighting, if only because it's the biggest company you can fight.

That's exactly what Nvidia is trying to do with the Tegra 4i and its integrated Icera i500 modem: present a cheaper, all-in-one competitor to Qualcomm's mid-range and high-end products. Nvidia's biggest issue is actually similar to AMD's—it may be having some trouble convincing OEMs to use its new products. With Tegra 2 and Tegra 3, there's an impression that the company over-promised and under-delivered on things like performance and power consumption. Though it's early days yet for Tegra 4, we're still looking at a pretty short list of products that are confirmed to be using it, and they're all from pretty minor players. Everything I've seen so far about Tegra 4 (though admittedly seen through PR's rose-colored glasses) has been good, and TI's withdrawal from the market could be Nvidia's chance to snap up some new business.

Ultimately, TI's withdrawal shows how rough this market can be for any company that isn't Qualcomm. If the company that provides chips for the Kindle Fire—one of the highest-profile, most successful Android tablets, even if our reviews of them have always been middling—can't make enough to justify continuing on, that's probably a bad sign for anyone else who's looking to break in. One reason that SoCs have gotten so much faster so quickly is because the competition has been fierce and the potential rewards have been big. For now, this continues to be true—let's hope it stays that way.

Wikipedia Recent Changes Map

Thu, 16 May 2013 11:39:34 +0000

Via hatnote

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Wikipedia is constantly growing, and it is written by people around the world. To illustrate this, we created a map of recent changes on Wikipedia, which displays the approximate location of unregistered users and the article that they edit.

Unregistered Wikipedia users

When an unregistered user makes a contribution to Wikipedia, he or she is identified by his or her IP address. These IP addresses are translated to the contributor’s approximate geographic location. A study by Fabian Kaelin in 2011 noted that unregistered users make approximately 20% of the edits on English Wikipedia [edit: likely closer to 15%, according to more recent statistics], so Wikipedia’s stream of recent changes includes many other edits that are not shown on this map.

You may see some users add non-productive or disruptive content to Wikipedia. A survey in 2007 indicated that unregistered users are less likely to make productive edits to the encyclopedia. Do not fear: improper edits can be removed or corrected by other users, including you!

How it works

This map listens to live feeds of Wikipedia revisions, broadcast using wikimon. We built the map using a few nice libraries and services, including d3, DataMaps, and freegeoip.net. This project was inspired by WikipediaVision’s (almost) real-time edit visualization.

The Wikipedia Recent Changes Map is open source and available on github.

If you are interested in visualizing Wikipedia, check out the other data resources that are available.

Researchers track megacity carbon footprints using mounted sensors

Wed, 15 May 2013 16:46:29 +0000

Via SlashGear

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Researchers with the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory have undertaken a large project that will allow them to measure the carbon footprint of megacities – those with millions of residents, such as Los Angeles and Paris. Such an endevour is achieved using sensors mounted in high locations above the cities, such as a peak in the San Gabriel Mountains and a high-up level on the Eiffel Tower that is closed to tourist traffic.

The sensors are designed to detect a variety of greenhouse gases, including methane and carbon dioxide, augmenting other stations that are already located in various places globally that measure greenhouse gases. These particular sensors are designed to achieve two purposes: monitor the specific carbon footprint effects of large cities, and as a by-product of that information to show whether such large cities are meeting – or are even capable of meeting – their green initiative goals.

Such measuring efforts will be intensified this year. In Los Angeles, for example, scientists working on the project will add a dozen gas analyzers to various rooftop locations throughout the city, as well as to a Prius, which will be driven throughout the city and a research aircraft to be navigated to “methane hotspots.” The data gathered from all these sensors, both present and slated for installation, is then analyzed using software that looks at whether levels have increased, decreased, or are stable, as well as determining where the gases originated from.

One of the examples given is vehicle emissions, with scientists being able to determine (using this data) the effects of switching to green vehicles over more traditional ones and whether its results indicate that it is something worth pursuing or whether it needs to be further analyzed for potential effectiveness. Reported the Associated Press, three years ago California saw 58-percent of its carbon dioxide come from gasoline-powered cars.

California is looking to reducing its emissions levels to a sub-35-percent level over 1990 by the year 2030, a rather ambitious goal. In 2010, it was responsible for producing 408 million tons of carbon dioxide, which outranks just about every country on the planet, putting it about on par with all of Spain. Thus far into the project, both the United States and France have individually spent approximately $3 million the project.

Graphene paint could power homes of the future

Tue, 07 May 2013 10:09:23 +0000

Via The Telegraph

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Photo: The University of Manchester

Scientists at the University of Manchester used wafers of graphene, the discovery of which won researchers a Nobel Prize, with thin layers of other materials to produce solar powered surfaces.

The resulting surfaces, which were paper thin and flexible, were able to absorb sunlight to produce electricity at a level that would rival existing solar panels.

These could be used to create a kind of “coat” on the outside of buildings to generate power needed to run appliances inside while also carrying other functions too, such as being able to change colour.

The researchers are now hoping to develop the technology further by producing a paint that can be put onto the outside of buildings.

But the scientists also say the new material could also allow a new generation of super-thin hand-held devices like mobile phones that can be powered by sunlight.

Professor Kostya Novoselov, one of the Nobel Laureates who discovered graphene, a type of carbon that forms sheets just one atom thick, said: “We have been trying to go beyond graphene by combining it with other one atom thick materials.

“What we have been doing is putting different layers of these materials one on top of the other and what you get is a new type of material with a unique set of properties.

“It is like a book – one page contains some information but together the book is so much more.

“We have demonstrated that we can produce a very efficient photovoltaic device. The fact it is flexible will hopefully make it easier to use.

“We are working on paints using this material as our next work but that is further down the line.”

Graphene was first discovered in 2004. Andrew Geim and Professor Novoselov won the 2010 Nobel Prize in Physics for demonstrating its remarkable properties – that it was harder than diamond, transparent and could conduct electricity while only being one atom thick.

Professor Novoselov and colleagues at the University of Singapore found that if they combined layers of graphene with single one atom thick layers of a material known as transition metal dichalcogenides, which react to light, they could generate electricity.

Their findings are published in the journal Science.

Professor Novoselov added: “We are taking about a new paradigm of material science.

“We can make sandwiches of materials and produce any kind of functionality so we can put transistors and photovoltaics to produce power for them.

“The implementations would go much further than simple solar powered cells.”

UN Reports on Killer Robots

Fri, 03 May 2013 12:23:24 +0000

Via InventorSpot

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How serious is the threat of killer robots? Well, it depends on whom you ask. Some people will tell you that the threat is very real, and I don’t mean the guy with the tinfoil hat standing on the street corner. A new draft of a report coming out of the U.N. Human Rights Commission looks to negate the possible threat of the use of unmanned vehicles with the ability to end human life without the intervention of another human being. As you can guess the UN is anti-killer robots.

In the 22-page report, which was released online as a PDF, the Human Rights Commission explained the mission of the document in the following terms:

“Lethal autonomous robotics (LARs) are weapon systems that, once activated, can select and engage targets without further human intervention. They raise far-reaching concerns about the protection of life during war and peace. This includes the question of the extent to which they can be programmed to comply with the requirements of international humanitarian law and the standards protecting life under international human rights law. Beyond this, their deployment may be unacceptable because no adequate system of legal accountability can be devised, and because robots should not have the power of life and death over human beings. The Special Rapporteur recommends that States establish national moratoria on aspects of LARs, and calls for the establishment of a high level panel on LARs to articulate a policy for the international community on the issue.”

So it looks like you may just have to watch the sky’s after all.

Driving Miss dAIsy: What Google’s self-driving cars see on the road

Thu, 02 May 2013 09:33:24 +0000

Via Slash Gear

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We’ve been hearing a lot about Google‘s self-driving car lately, and we’re all probably wanting to know how exactly the search giant is able to construct such a thing and drive itself without hitting anything or anyone. A new photo has surfaced that demonstrates what Google’s self-driving vehicles see while they’re out on the town, and it looks rather frightening.

The image was tweeted by Idealab founder Bill Gross, along with a claim that the self-driving car collects almost 1GB of data every second (yes, every second). This data includes imagery of the cars surroundings in order to effectively and safely navigate roads. The image shows that the car sees its surroundings through an infrared-like camera sensor, and it even can pick out people walking on the sidewalk.

Of course, 1GB of data every second isn’t too surprising when you consider that the car has to get a 360-degree image of its surroundings at all times. The image we see above even distinguishes different objects by color and shape. For instance, pedestrians are in bright green, cars are shaped like boxes, and the road is in dark blue.

However, we’re not sure where this photo came from, so it could simply be a rendering of someone’s idea of what Google’s self-driving car sees. Either way, Google says that we could see self-driving cars make their way to public roads in the next five years or so, which actually isn’t that far off, and Tesla Motors CEO Elon Musk is even interested in developing self-driving cars as well. However, they certainly don’t come without their problems, and we’re guessing that the first batch of self-driving cars probably won’t be in 100% tip-top shape.

Cern re-creating first web page to revere early ideals

Thu, 02 May 2013 09:24:44 +0000

Via BBC

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Lost to the world: The first website. At the time, few imagined how ubiquitous the technology would become

A team at the European Organisation for Nuclear Research (Cern) has launched a project to re-create the first web page.

The aim is to preserve the original hardware and software associated with the birth of the web.

The world wide web was developed by Prof Sir Tim Berners-Lee while working at Cern.

The initiative coincides with the 20th anniversary of the research centre giving the web to the world.

According to Dan Noyes, the web manager for Cern's communication group, re-creation of the world's first website will enable future generations to explore, examine and think about how the web is changing modern life.

"I want my children to be able to understand the significance of this point in time: the web is already so ubiquitous - so, well, normal - that one risks failing to see how fundamentally it has changed," he told BBC News

"We are in a unique moment where we can still switch on the first web server and experience it. We want to document and preserve that".

The hope is that the restoration of the first web page and web site will serve as a reminder and inspiration of the web's fundamental values.

At the heart of the original web is technology to decentralise control and make access to information freely available to all. It is this architecture that seems to imbue those that work with the web with a culture of free expression, a belief in universal access and a tendency toward decentralising information.

Subversive

It is the early technology's innate ability to subvert that makes re-creation of the first website especially interesting.

While I was at Cern it was clear in speaking to those involved with the project that it means much more than refurbishing old computers and installing them with early software: it is about enshrining a powerful idea that they believe is gradually changing the world.

I went to Sir Tim's old office where he worked at Cern's IT department trying to find new ways to handle the vast amount of data the particle accelerators were producing.

I was not allowed in because apparently the present incumbent is fed up with people wanting to go into the office.

But waiting outside was someone who worked at Cern as a young researcher at the same time as Sir Tim. James Gillies has since risen to be Cern's head of communications. He is occasionally referred to as the organisation's half-spin doctor, a reference to one of the properties of some sub-atomic particles.

Amazing dream

Mr Gillies is among those involved in the project. I asked him why he wanted to restore the first website.

"One of my dreams is to enable people to see what that early web experience was like," was the reply.

"You might have thought that the first browser would be very primitive but it was not. It had graphical capabilities. You could edit into it straightaway. It was an amazing thing. It was a very sophisticated thing."

Those not heavily into web technology may be sceptical of the idea that using a 20-year-old machine and software to view text on a web page might be a thrilling experience.

But Mr Gillies and Mr Noyes believe that the first web page and web site is worth resurrecting because embedded within the original systems developed by Sir Tim are the principles of universality and universal access that many enthusiasts at the time hoped would eventually make the world a fairer and more equal place.

The first browser, for example, allowed users to edit and write directly into the content they were viewing, a feature not available on present-day browsers.

Ideals eroded

And early on in the world wide web's development, Nicola Pellow, who worked with Sir Tim at Cern on the www project, produced a simple browser to view content that did not require an expensive powerful computer and so made the technology available to anyone with a simple computer.

According to Mr Noyes, many of the values that went into that original vision have now been eroded. His aim, he says, is to "go back in time and somehow preserve that experience".

Soon to be refurbished: The NeXT computer that was home to the world's first website

"This universal access of information and flexibility of delivery is something that we are struggling to re-create and deal with now.

"Present-day browsers offer gorgeous experiences but when we go back and look at the early browsers I think we have lost some of the features that Tim Berners-Lee had in mind."

Mr Noyes is reaching out to ask those who were involved in the NeXT computers used by Sir Tim for advice on how to restore the original machines.

Awe

The machines were the most advanced of their time. Sir Tim used two of them to construct the web. One of them is on show in an out-of-the-way cabinet outside Mr Noyes's office.

I told him that as I approached the sleek black machine I felt drawn towards it and compelled to pause, reflect and admire in awe.

"So just imagine the reaction of passers-by if it was possible to bring the machine back to life," he responded, with a twinkle in his eye.

The initiative coincides with the 20th anniversary of Cern giving the web away to the world free.

There was a serious discussion by Cern's management in 1993 about whether the organisation should remain the home of the web or whether it should focus on its core mission of basic research in physics.

Sir Tim and his colleagues on the project argued that Cern should not claim ownership of the web.

Great giveaway

Management agreed and signed a legal document that made the web publicly available in such a way that no one could claim ownership of it and that would ensure it was a free and open standard for everyone to use.

Mr Gillies believes that the document is "the single most valuable document in the history of the world wide web".

He says: "Without it you would have had web-like things but they would have belonged to Microsoft or Apple or Vodafone or whoever else. You would not have a single open standard for everyone."

The web has not brought about the degree of social change some had envisaged 20 years ago. Most web sites, including this one, still tend towards one-way communication. The web space is still dominated by a handful of powerful online companies.

A screen shot from the first browser: Those who saw it say it was "amazing and sophisticated". It allowed people to write directly into content, a feature that modern-day browsers no longer have

But those who study the world wide web, such as Prof Nigel Shadbolt, of Southampton University, believe the principles on which it was built are worth preserving and there is no better monument to them than the first website.

"We have to defend the principle of universality and universal access," he told BBC News.

"That it does not fall into a special set of standards that certain organisations and corporations control. So keeping the web free and freely available is almost a human right."

In a Cyber War Is It OK to Kill Enemy Hackers?

Tue, 23 Apr 2013 09:47:41 +0000

Via Big Think

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The new Tallinn Manual on the International Law Applicable to Cyber Warfare, which lays out 95 core rules on how to conduct a cyber war, may end up being one of the most dangerous books ever written. Reading through the Tallinn Manual, it's possible to come to the conclusion that - under certain circumstances - nations have the right to use “kinetic force” (real-world weapons like bombs or armed drones) to strike back against enemy hackers. Of course, this doesn’t mean that a bunch of hackers in Shanghai are going to be taken out by a Predator Drone strike anytime soon – but it does mean that a nation abiding by international law conventions – such as the United States – would now have the legal cover to deal with enemy hackers in a considerably more muscular way that goes well beyond just jawboning a foreign government.

Welcome to the brave new world of cyber warfare.

The nearly 300-page Tallinn Manual, which was created by an independent group of twenty international law experts at the request of the NATO Cooperative Cyber Defense Center of Excellence, works through a number of different cyber war scenarios, being careful to base its legal logic on international conventions of war that already exist. As a result, there's a clear distinction between civilians and military combatants and a lot of clever thinking about everything -- from what constitutes a "Cyber Attack" (Rule #30) to what comprises a "Cyber Booby Trap" (Rule #44).

So what, exactly, would justify the killing of an enemy hacker by a sovereign state?

First, you’d have to determine if the cyber attack violated a state’s sovereignty. Most cyber attacks directed against the critical infrastructure or the command-and-control systems of another state would meet that standard. Then, you’d have to determine whether the cyber attack was of sufficient scope and intensity so as to constitute a “use of force” against that sovereign state. Shutting down the power grid for a few hours just for the lulz probably would not be a “use of force,” but if that attack happened to cause death, destruction, and mayhem, then it would presumably meet that threshold and would escalate the legal situation to one of "armed conflict." In such cases, warns the Tallinn Manual, sovereign states should first attempt diplomacy and all other measures before engaging in a retaliatory cyber-strike of proportional scale and scope.

But here's where it gets tricky - once we're in an "armed conflict," hackers could be re-classified as military targets rather than civilian targets, opening them up to military reprisals. They could then be targeted by whatever "kinetic force" we have available.

For now, enemy hackers in places like China can breathe easy. Most of what passes for a cyber attack today – “acts of cyber intelligence gathering and cyber theft” or “cyber operations that involve brief or periodic interruption of non-essential cyber services” would not fall into the “armed attack” category. Even cyber attacks on, say, a power grid, would have to have catastrophic consequences before it justifies a military lethal response. As Nick Kolakowski of Slashdot points out:

"In theory, that means a nation under cyber-attack that reaches a certain level—the “people are dying and infrastructure is destroyed” level—can retaliate with very real-world weapons, although the emphasis is still on using cyber-countermeasures to block the incoming attack."

That actually opens up a big legal loophole, and that's what makes the Tallinn Manual potentially so dangerous. Even the lead author of the Tallinn Manual (Michael Schmitt, chairman of the international law department at the U.S. Naval War College) admits that there's actually very little in the manual that specifically references the word "hacker" (and a quick check of the manual's glossary didn't turn up a single entry for "hacker").

Theoretically, a Stuxnet-like hacker attack on a nuclear reactor that spun out of control and resulted in a Fukushima-type scenario could immediately be classified as an act of war, putting the U.S. into "armed conflict." Once we reach that point, anything is fair game. We're already at the point where the U.S. Air Force is re-classifying some of its cyber tools as weapons and preparing its own rules of engagement for dealing with the growing cyber threat from China. It's unclear which, if any, of these "cyber-weapons" would meet the Tallinn Manual's definitional requirement of a cyber counter-attack.

The Tallinn Manual’s recommendations (i.e. the 95 rules) are not binding, but they will likely be considered by the Obama Administration as it orchestrates its responses against escalating hacker threats from China. Rational voices would seem to tell us that the "kinetic force" scenario could never occur, that a state like China would never let things escalate beyond a certain point, and that the U.S. would never begin targeting hackers around the world. Yet, the odds of a catastrophic cyber attack are no longer microscopically small. As a result, will the day ever come when sovereign states take out enemy hackers the same way the U.S. takes out foreign terrorists abroad, and then hide behind the rules of international law embodied within the Tallinn Manual?

A new way to report data center's Power and Water Usage Effectiveness (PUE and WUE)

Fri, 19 Apr 2013 17:33:12 +0000

Via Open Compute Project

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Today (18.04.2013) Facebook launched two public dashboards that report continuous, near-real-time data for key efficiency metrics – specifically, PUE and WUE – for our data centers in Prineville, OR and Forest City, NC. These dashboards include both a granular look at the past 24 hours of data and a historical view of the past year’s values. In the historical view, trends within each data set and correlations between different metrics become visible. Once our data center in Luleå, Sweden, comes online, we’ll begin publishing for that site as well.

We began sharing PUE for our Prineville data center at the end of Q2 2011 and released our first Prineville WUE in the summer of 2012. Now we’re pulling back the curtain to share some of the same information that our data center technicians view every day. We’ll continue updating our annualized averages as we have in the past, and you’ll be able to find them on the Prineville and Forest City dashboards, right below the real-time data.

Why are we doing this? Well, we’re proud of our data center efficiency, and we think it’s important to demystify data centers and share more about what our operations really look like. Through the Open Compute Project (OCP), we’ve shared the building and hardware designs for our data centers. These dashboards are the natural next step, since they answer the question, “What really happens when those servers are installed and the power’s turned on?”

Creating these dashboards wasn’t a straightforward task. Our data centers aren’t completed yet; we’re still in the process of building out suites and finalizing the parameters for our building managements systems. All our data centers are literally still construction sites, with new data halls coming online at different points throughout the year. Since we’ve created dashboards that visualize an environment with so many shifting variables, you’ll probably see some weird numbers from time to time. That’s OK. These dashboards are about surfacing raw data – and sometimes, raw data looks messy. But we believe in iteration, in getting projects out the door and improving them over time. So we welcome you behind the curtain, wonky numbers and all. As our data centers near completion and our load evens out, we expect these inevitable fluctuations to correspondingly decrease.

We’re excited about sharing this data, and we encourage others to do the same. Working together with AREA 17, the company that designed these visualizations, we’ve decided to open-source the front-end code for these dashboards so that any organization interested in sharing PUE, WUE, temperature, and humidity at its data center sites can use these dashboards to get started. Sometime in the coming weeks we’ll publish the code on the Open Compute Project’s GitHub repository. All you have to do is connect your own CSV files to get started. And in the spirit of all other technologies shared via OCP, we encourage you to poke through the code and make updates to it. Do you have an idea to make these visuals even more compelling? Great! We encourage you to treat this as a starting point and use these dashboards to make everyone’s ability to share this data even more interesting and robust.

Lyrica McTiernan is a program manager for Facebook’s sustainability team.

Google Mirror API now available

Wed, 17 Apr 2013 16:12:47 +0000

Google Mirror API for developing "Glassware"

Oculus Rift finally gets the reaction virtual reality always wanted

Tue, 16 Apr 2013 09:52:36 +0000

Via Slash Gear

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We’ve already heard plenty about the Oculus Rift virtual reality headset, and while we youngsters are pretty amazed by the technology, nobody has their mind blown more than the elderly, who could only dream about such technology back in their younger days. Recently, a 90-year-old grandmother ended up trying out the Oculus Rift for herself, and she was quite amazed.

Imagimind Studio developer Paul Rivot ended up grabbing an Oculus Rift in order to play around with it and develop some games, but he took a break from that and decided to give his grandmother a little treat, by strapping the Oculus Rift to her head in order to experience a bit of virtual reality herself.

The video is quite entertaining to watch, and we can’t imagine what’s going on inside of her head, knowing that she never grew up with such technology as the Oculus Rift, let alone 3D video games. She even gets to the point where she thought the images being displayed were actual images taken on-location, when in fact it’s all 3D-rendered on a computer.

Currently, the Oculus Rift is out in the wild for developers only at this point, and there’s no announced release date for the device, although the company has noted that it should arrive to the general public before the 2014 holiday season. In the meantime, it’s videos like this that only excite us even more.