Xen | KitGuru https://www.kitguru.net KitGuru.net - Tech News | Hardware News | Hardware Reviews | IOS | Mobile | Gaming | Graphics Cards Tue, 24 Dec 2019 14:22:01 +0000 en-US hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=6.4.3 https://www.kitguru.net/wp-content/uploads/2021/06/cropped-KITGURU-Light-Background-SQUARE2-32x32.png Xen | KitGuru https://www.kitguru.net 32 32 Half-Life remake ‘Black Mesa’ releases Xen Chapters https://www.kitguru.net/gaming/matthew-wilson/half-life-remake-black-mesa-releases-xen-chapters/ https://www.kitguru.net/gaming/matthew-wilson/half-life-remake-black-mesa-releases-xen-chapters/#respond Tue, 24 Dec 2019 14:22:01 +0000 https://www.kitguru.net/?p=443678 This has been an exciting year for Half-Life fans, not just because of Valve’s return to the series with Half-Life: Alyx, but also thanks to Black Mesa, which officially began wrapping up content development over the summer. The full version of Black Mesa’s ‘Xen Chapters’ went into public beta just two weeks ago and now, …

The post Half-Life remake ‘Black Mesa’ releases Xen Chapters first appeared on KitGuru.]]>
This has been an exciting year for Half-Life fans, not just because of Valve’s return to the series with Half-Life: Alyx, but also thanks to Black Mesa, which officially began wrapping up content development over the summer. The full version of Black Mesa’s ‘Xen Chapters’ went into public beta just two weeks ago and now, the full, polished version is rolling out to all owners, not just those who have opted in to the beta.

In an announcement today, the Crowbar Collective revealed that the “polished and tested version of all Black Mesa” is now rolling out on Steam ‘mainline’, meaning you don’t have to opt-in to the Public Beta build to play all of the content. As the developers put it, “if you have been holding out for Xen, this is what you have been waiting for”.

With this update, the full version of Black Mesa is now available outside of the beta channel. This update also implements feedback to improve the game’s difficulty, increase player guidance, fix bugs and increase performance in some areas that were proving troublesome before.

Black Mesa is still technically in Early Access and this latest build is listed as version 0.9. Over the next little while, the developers will continue collecting feedback and squashing any remaining bugs. By the time the 1.0 ‘release’ version rolls around, the Crowbar Collective hopes to implement the groundwork for a future multiplayer mode, make any necessary improvements to alien AI, implement Steam Workshop support and add in additional refinements and fixes throughout the entire game.

You can read the full update and see the development roadmap on Black Mesa’s latest Steam Community Update, HERE.

KitGuru Says: Black Mesa is wrapping up content development at the perfect time, leaving a nice window to get through Gordon’s original 15-hour journey ahead of Half-Life: Alyx, which takes place between Half-Life 1 and Half-Life 2. Are many of you planning on jumping back into Black Mesa now that it is content complete, or will you be waiting for the 1.0 release in the near future?

The post Half-Life remake ‘Black Mesa’ releases Xen Chapters first appeared on KitGuru.]]>
https://www.kitguru.net/gaming/matthew-wilson/half-life-remake-black-mesa-releases-xen-chapters/feed/ 0
Half-Life remake ‘Black Mesa’ set to get Xen chapters very soon https://www.kitguru.net/gaming/matthew-wilson/half-life-remake-black-mesa-set-to-get-xen-chapters-very-soon/ https://www.kitguru.net/gaming/matthew-wilson/half-life-remake-black-mesa-set-to-get-xen-chapters-very-soon/#respond Tue, 25 Jun 2019 12:00:11 +0000 https://www.kitguru.net/?p=416469 The Crowbar Collective has been working on Black Mesa for years now. Originally a free mod, the Half-Life 1 remake has now been available on Steam for quite some time, although it has remained in an early access state. Now, we are closer than ever to a full launch, with the Xen chapters finally set …

The post Half-Life remake ‘Black Mesa’ set to get Xen chapters very soon first appeared on KitGuru.]]>
The Crowbar Collective has been working on Black Mesa for years now. Originally a free mod, the Half-Life 1 remake has now been available on Steam for quite some time, although it has remained in an early access state. Now, we are closer than ever to a full launch, with the Xen chapters finally set to be released.

Most of Black Mesa has been available for a while now but ‘Project Xen', a restoration of the Xen sections of the game, has been kept out. There have been several delays to the Xen chapters but a beta is due for “imminent public release” according to IGN's preview.

Once the beta is out, the Black Mesa team can work out any final bugs and bring the game out of early access, possibly before the end of 2019. At that point, you will be able to play the entirety of Half-Life 1 in remastered/remade form.

Black Mesa first launched into Steam early access back in 2015. The Xen chapters were initially due out in 2017 but were pushed back a couple of times while the team continued additional work.

KitGuru Says: I've been looking forward to Black Mesa's full release for a long time now. It has been a long journey but it looks like we are finally near the end of it. Have any of you picked up Black Mesa while it is in early access? Are you looking forward to the Xen chapters finally dropping?

The post Half-Life remake ‘Black Mesa’ set to get Xen chapters very soon first appeared on KitGuru.]]>
https://www.kitguru.net/gaming/matthew-wilson/half-life-remake-black-mesa-set-to-get-xen-chapters-very-soon/feed/ 0
AMD: 50% of revenue will come from non-PC sector by late 2015 https://www.kitguru.net/components/anton-shilov/amd-50-of-revenue-will-come-from-non-pc-sector-by-late-2015/ https://www.kitguru.net/components/anton-shilov/amd-50-of-revenue-will-come-from-non-pc-sector-by-late-2015/#comments Thu, 04 Dec 2014 22:15:12 +0000 http://www.kitguru.net/?p=224926 In the coming quarters Advanced Micro Devices will continue to shift its focus from personal computers to other devices. By the end of 2015 about half of the company’s revenue will come from products that are not related to personal computers, in line with the company’s plans. For many years Advanced Micro Devices earned its …

The post AMD: 50% of revenue will come from non-PC sector by late 2015 first appeared on KitGuru.]]>
In the coming quarters Advanced Micro Devices will continue to shift its focus from personal computers to other devices. By the end of 2015 about half of the company’s revenue will come from products that are not related to personal computers, in line with the company’s plans.

For many years Advanced Micro Devices earned its revenue by selling microprocessors and, more recently, graphics processing units and core-logic sets for personal computers. However, it became increasingly hard for AMD to maintain its revenue in the recent years due to tougher competition, shrinking PC market and inability to address high-end of the desktop and server markets with its central processing units. As a result, the company decided to change its strategy and shift its focus to different markets where competition is not that strong, but which present opportunities for AMD.

At some point AMD proclaimed a goal to increase the share of its non-PC business to around 50 percent of the corporate revenue. Apparently, the company is on-track to derive half of its sales from high-growth businesses by the end of 2015.

“Our next target point is by the time we get to the end of 2015 to have at least 50 per cent of our business coming from the non-PC, non-traditional, sector, and then we will see what happens after that,” said Devinder Kumar, chief financial officer of Advanced Micro Devices, during his presentation at the Credit Suisse 18th Annual Technology Conference.

amd_revenue_projection

In the third quarter of fiscal 2014 the company earned $1.43 billion, of which $781 million (54.6 per cent) came from its computing and graphics (CG) segment business, whereas $648 million (45.4 per cent) came from its enterprise, embedded and semi-custom (EESC) system-on-chip business unit. Given that the EESC includes sales of Opteron processors for servers and the fact that Microsoft Corp. and Sony Corp. increase purchases of console chips in the Q3, it is likely that the share of non-PC products in AMD’s revenue should approach 40 per cent this year.

At present, semi-custom system-on-chips for Microsoft Xbox One as well as Sony PlayStation 4 game consoles account for a significant chunk of AMD’s EESC business. Back in October AMD announced two more semi-custom design wins, which will bring the company combined total lifetime revenue of approximately $1 billion over approximately three years starting 2016. According to AMD, these new semi-custom SoCs are not for game consoles or similar devices.

Discuss on our Facebook page, HERE.

KitGuru Says: The main problem for AMD is not that it is increasing the share of the EESC business in its revenue, but the fact that sales of its microprocessors and graphics processors are dropping very fast (which is a reason why the share of EESC is growing). The company is on-track to report its third consecutive year-over-year revenue decline for FY2014 in early 2015.

The post AMD: 50% of revenue will come from non-PC sector by late 2015 first appeared on KitGuru.]]>
https://www.kitguru.net/components/anton-shilov/amd-50-of-revenue-will-come-from-non-pc-sector-by-late-2015/feed/ 5
AMD to boost energy efficiency of APUs by 25 times by 2020 https://www.kitguru.net/components/cpu/anton-shilov/amd-boost-energy-efficiency-of-apus-by-25-times-by-2020/ https://www.kitguru.net/components/cpu/anton-shilov/amd-boost-energy-efficiency-of-apus-by-25-times-by-2020/#comments Sat, 29 Nov 2014 15:35:28 +0000 http://www.kitguru.net/?p=224135 Advanced Micro Devices recently set a goal to improve energy efficiency of its accelerated processing units by 25 times by 2020. To achieve this goal, AMD will have to outpace historical energy efficiency trend by over 70 per cent, but the company claims it knows what to do and even outlined a roadmap about features …

The post AMD to boost energy efficiency of APUs by 25 times by 2020 first appeared on KitGuru.]]>
Advanced Micro Devices recently set a goal to improve energy efficiency of its accelerated processing units by 25 times by 2020. To achieve this goal, AMD will have to outpace historical energy efficiency trend by over 70 per cent, but the company claims it knows what to do and even outlined a roadmap about features it needs to implement.

There are several trends in the personal computing industry (note that PCs today are largely mobile PCs in different form-factors). First, devices need to get thinner, slimmer and lighter. Second, devices need to gain battery life. Third, user interfaces need to get more intuitive and user friendly. Fourth, overall performance and feature-set of devices need to improve. While the first two trends require consistent decrease of power consumption by PC components, another two require increase of compute performance. Unfortunately, it is impossible to improve processing speed at a rapid pace and lower power consumption significantly at the same time, which is why developers of devices and their components have to balance between the two.

amd_energy_efficiency

When it comes to compute units, the balance between the amount of processing work they can do and their power consumption is called energy efficiency. The general term itself is very broad, abstract and does not exactly consider use cases. For example, if a 35W notebook processor offers two times higher performance than a 35W processor released a year ago, one could say that its energy efficiency improved by two times, but the problem is that 35W processors no longer fit into modern notebooks. As a result, in the real world one has to find ways to reduce power consumption slowly while gradually improving compute performance. In many cases, chip designers take step-by-step approach and focus on either performance or power consumption.

amd_energy_efficiency_1

Historically power consumption and performance (and the balance between the two, energy efficiency) were determined by manufacturing technologies, micro architectural peculiarities as well as various hardware tweaks. For a number of years now AMD has been saying that in order to improve energy efficiency going forward, software needs to use the right hardware for particular tasks. Paralleled tasks need to be computed on highly parallel GPU cores (since it takes them less time to get the work done, they also consume lower amount of energy than genera-purpose cores), whereas serial tasks have to be performed on general-purpose CPU cores. AMD believes that as software starts to use heterogeneous processing capabilities of modern processing units through OpenCL application programming interface, energy efficiency of PCs will improve over time.

amd_energy_efficiency_6

But while AMD pins a lot of hopes on its accelerated processing units and future software, it does not plan to give up improvements on the hardware level. Among the things AMD intends to implement in its next-generation APUs and CPUs are integrated voltage regulation, ability to scale voltage per every part of a chip, inter-frame power gating, voltage adaptive operation and so on, according to a presentation by the company. Among other things, AMD proposes to dynamically boost performance in certain applications to get the job done quicker and save power on the system level. At the same time, AMD plans to implement an intelligent technology that does prevents dynamic increase of clock-rates for apps that do not benefit significantly from higher frequencies. In general, AMD intends to enable its chips to fine-tune their performance based on workload and environment contexts.

amd_energy_efficiency_5

It should be noted that reduced power consumption is only a part of the equation in the energy efficiency metrics. Performance is an important thing since low-performance chips will not able to compute next-generation workloads. Therefore, it is tremendously important that AMD's microprocessors based on the code-named “Xen” (x86) and “K12” (ARMv8) micro-architectures deliver higher performance compared to today's general-purpose cores; it is equally important that AMD's future graphics processing units also deliver significantly better performance than today's GPUs. Regrettably, AMD said no word about how it plans to increase performance of its central processing and graphics processing units or, at least, what kind of increases should we expect.

Traditionally, AMD sets goals, but does not reveal exact plans. It is unknown which technologies will be incorporated into next-generation Carrizo processor and which will be integrated into its successors. The only thing we do know is that AMD has a technology roadmap for many years to come and that plan will be gradually executed.

amd_energy_efficiency_4 amd_energy_efficiency_3 amd_energy_efficiency_2

Discuss on our Facebook page, HERE.

KitGuru Says: While AMD sets pretty ambitious goals in terms of improving energy efficiency of its platforms, one should keep in mind that a lot of things depend on third-party PC components, software, workloads and use scenarios. As a result, expect AMD (and others’) compute platforms to gain energy efficiency going forward, it is just a natural process. Still, when it comes to commercial products, they need to hit actual performance and power consumption targets to be successful, not just feature abstract energy efficiency.

The post AMD to boost energy efficiency of APUs by 25 times by 2020 first appeared on KitGuru.]]>
https://www.kitguru.net/components/cpu/anton-shilov/amd-boost-energy-efficiency-of-apus-by-25-times-by-2020/feed/ 22
AMD delays financial day event as it rethinks its roadmap https://www.kitguru.net/components/graphic-cards/anton-shilov/amd-delays-financial-day-event-as-it-rethinks-its-roadmap/ https://www.kitguru.net/components/graphic-cards/anton-shilov/amd-delays-financial-day-event-as-it-rethinks-its-roadmap/#comments Wed, 26 Nov 2014 02:56:18 +0000 http://www.kitguru.net/?p=223526 Advanced Micro Devices traditionally holds its Financial Day for investors and financial analysts in November, just like Intel Corp. However, it will not host the event this year as it is reshaping its roadmap and reconsiders its goals going forward. A spokesperson for AMD has confirmed KitGuru that the company will not host its Financial …

The post AMD delays financial day event as it rethinks its roadmap first appeared on KitGuru.]]>
Advanced Micro Devices traditionally holds its Financial Day for investors and financial analysts in November, just like Intel Corp. However, it will not host the event this year as it is reshaping its roadmap and reconsiders its goals going forward.

A spokesperson for AMD has confirmed KitGuru that the company will not host its Financial Day this year. Traditionally the chipmaker reveals its roadmap and future plans at the event, but as a result of the fact that it will delay the Financial Day to next year it will not unveil any details concerning its future products other than those it revealed last week.

AMD already delayed its Financial Day event in 2011, when Rory Read became chief executive officer in August and began to reconsider the company’s plans and strategy. As a result the company simply had nothing to present in November.

Given that AMD recently appointed Lisa Su on the position of chief executive officer, it is obvious that the company is again reconsidering its roadmap, strategies and product plans. At present, Ms. Su and her new team are shaping AMD’s short-term and long-term roadmaps as well as rethinking the future of the company in general.

amd_headquarters

For example, earlier this week it transpired that AMD decided not to introduce any new system-on-chips for tablets next year, but will continue to rely on the code-named Mullins accelerated processing unit for Microsoft Windows-powered slates. Since the company’s tablet chips have never been popular, it makes no sense to invest in the segment.

In addition, AMD signed a chipset development agreement with Asmedia Technology this week. While core-logic sets no longer play a key role in PC performance and functionality, they remain a vital piece of PC platform. As a result, the agreement clearly affects the future of AMD and its products.

One of the key things that Dr. Su will have to do is to make AMD profitable again, something that her predecessor Rory Read has not managed to do. Given technical background of Lisa Su, expect her to cease or investments in non-growing low-margin product areas while increasing spending on products that either provide good margins (e.g., high-end graphics processors) or promise to enable stable revenue streams (e.g. SoCs for game consoles).

While the whole picture of the future AMD will be revealed only in the coming months, it is pretty obvious that the company will continue to invest in development of fundamental technologies, including high-performance x86 and ARM cores as well as Radeon graphics processing units. The question is whether AMD will have enough money to design competitive products.

AMD did not reveal when does it plan to hold its Financial Day next year, but it is likely that the company will host an event for financial community in January or February.

AMD did not formally confirm any changes in its 2015 roadmap (which remains confidential).

Discuss on our Facebook page, HERE.

KitGuru Says: In general, Lisa Su will unlikely make radical changes at AMD. The new CEO will not cease development of desktop microprocessors, but will rather try to optimize the company’s product line further even despite possible market share losses. In general, the details about the plans are very important, but precise plans is something that AMD simply does not have at the moment.

The post AMD delays financial day event as it rethinks its roadmap first appeared on KitGuru.]]>
https://www.kitguru.net/components/graphic-cards/anton-shilov/amd-delays-financial-day-event-as-it-rethinks-its-roadmap/feed/ 3
Black Mesa mod to go on sale on Steam officially https://www.kitguru.net/gaming/jon-martindale/black-mesa-mod-to-go-on-sale-on-steam-officially/ https://www.kitguru.net/gaming/jon-martindale/black-mesa-mod-to-go-on-sale-on-steam-officially/#comments Wed, 20 Nov 2013 08:39:35 +0000 http://www.kitguru.net/?p=163334 Mods are one of the best selling points of PC gaming. Not only can they add elements to gameplay that weren't there before, but they can improve the graphics and fix problems that the original developers never saw coming; or in the case of Black Mesa, it can completely remake its source material from scratch. …

The post Black Mesa mod to go on sale on Steam officially first appeared on KitGuru.]]>
Mods are one of the best selling points of PC gaming. Not only can they add elements to gameplay that weren't there before, but they can improve the graphics and fix problems that the original developers never saw coming; or in the case of Black Mesa, it can completely remake its source material from scratch. Lauded by fans of the series, the Black Mesa mod showed us what years of dedication can do but now the developers are set to be rewarded far more than with just fan adoration. Valve has given permission for it to go on sale on Steam.

Of course we knew the mod was going up on Steam at some point, since it was one of the first games to be given the green light, by Valve's Greenlight procedure, but the fact that you'll be able to pay for it – that makes it sound like a treat for us too – is all new.

Discussing the move in a Steam community update, the developers said: “Black Mesa has been given the opportunity to be sold as a retail product on Steam! This is an incredible honour – one we never expected – but also one we found hard to accept.”

blackmesa

They then go on to say that nobody made the mod with money in mind but there are some benefits to it. On top of improving their individual financial situations, it will also mean they can afford to spend the time on making the mod even better with the full version of the Source engine.

“Soon you'll see Black Mesa available on Steam for a relatively low price. But we aren't dropping all support for the free version. In fact shortly after the Steam release there will be a completely new free version of the game. We also plan to open source our maps and some game assets to the modding community,” continues the post.

Buying the commercial Black Mesa version will give you access to a few features that the free version doesn't have, though the team hasn't announced what those will be yet, describing it as more of a way of supporting the devs than getting yourself much in the way of extra content.

In a tack-on update at the end, the team also lets us in on the progress of Xen, the final chapter from the original Half Life that's currently missing from the mod. It's in thee works, but is still not that close to completion.

KitGuru Says: This is pretty cool news and makes sense for everyone. The developers can now make a little money to help give them more time to work the mod going forward and Valve gets a little taste from its Steam sales cut. Not bad considering its original game is 15 years old now.

[Cheers Eurogamer]The post Black Mesa mod to go on sale on Steam officially first appeared on KitGuru.]]>
https://www.kitguru.net/gaming/jon-martindale/black-mesa-mod-to-go-on-sale-on-steam-officially/feed/ 1