Weekend tech reading: AMD aims for 25x efficiency gain in 6 years, SSD endurance experiment hits 1PB

AMD claims it can deliver 25x energy efficiency improvement in the next six years According to AMD, it's got a roadmap to deliver a 25x improvement in performance-per-watt over the next six years -- and it's going to deliver this platform by 2020. That's the pitch that arrived in my inbox today -- and I'll admit, my first response was to blink, read it again, and fire back a polite 'No you won't" at my hapless PR contact. This kicked off a bit of email back-and-forth, and led to a conversation with Senior AMD Fellow, Sam Naffizger. ExtremeTech

The SSD Endurance Experiment: Casualties on the way to a petabyte I feel for the subjects of our SSD Endurance Experiment. They didn't volunteer for this life. These consumer-grade drives could have ended up in a corporate desktop or grandma's laptop or even an enthusiast's PC. They could have spent their days saving spreadsheets and caching Internet files and occasionally making space for new Steam downloads. Instead, they ended up in our labs, on the receiving end of a torturous torrent of writes designed to kill them. The Tech Report

E3 2014: A week in the woods Around ten AM I shove my only possessions in the back of the silver Mazda under the flat yellow air and duck into the back seat. I'm hungover. Tim and Swampy in front murmur greetings; I murmur mine back and the car lurches into the road from Oakland to Los Angeles, tarmac stretching out towards E3 in the head like a dirt flat into a Dodongo's gaping mouth. I slump surrounded by a PS4 devkit and two Carebears (the Carebears are permanent residents.) Swamp puts a CD named "J-Pop #3" into the CD player. Paste

Is coding the new literacy? In the winter of 2011, a handful of software engineers landed in Boston just ahead of a crippling snowstorm. They were there as part of Code for America, a program that places idealistic young coders and designers in city halls across the country for a year. They'd planned to spend it building a new website for Boston's public schools, but within days of their arrival, the city all but shut down and the coders were stuck fielding calls in the city's snow emergency center. Mother Jones

The history of Android Android has been with us in one form or another for more than six years. During that time, we've seen an absolutely breathtaking rate of change unlike any other development cycle that has ever existed. When it came time for Google to dive in to the smartphone wars, the company took its rapid-iteration, Web-style update cycle and applied it to an operating system, and the result has been an onslaught of continual improvement. Ars Technica

Tech industry job ads: Older workers need not apply Young tech workers fill office parks and corporate cafeterias across Silicon Valley with few if any grey-haired colleagues in sight. It's a widely accepted reality within the technology industry that youth rules. But at least part of the extreme age imbalance can be traced back to advertisements for open positions that government regulators say may illegally discriminate against older applicants. Fortune

The Supreme Court doesn't understand software, and that's a problem Patent litigation has become a huge problem for the software industry. And on Thursday, the Supreme Court could have solved that problem with the stroke of a pen. Precedents dating back to the 1970s place strict limits on software patents. The court could have clearly reiterated that those old precedents still apply, and that they rule out most patents on software. Vox

Ex-NSA chief pitches banks costly advice on cyber-attacks As the four-star general in charge of U.S. digital defenses, Keith Alexander warned repeatedly that the financial industry was among the likely targets of a major attack. Now he's selling the message directly to the banks. Joining a crowded field of cyber-consultants, the former National Security Agency chief is pitching his services for as much as $1 million a month. Bloomberg

How an FBI informant helped orchestrate the hack of an FBI contractor Weeks after he started working quietly as an FBI informant, Hector Xavier Monsegur, known by his online alias "Sabu," led a cyber attack against one of the bureau's very own IT contractors. In July 2011, at Monsegur's urging, members of AntiSec, an offshoot of the hacking collective Anonymous, took advantage of compromised log-in credentials belonging to a contractor with a top secret security clearance employed at the time by ManTech International. Vice

The history of mana: How an Austronesian concept became a video game mechanic On January 17, 2007 the dimensional ship Exodar crash-landed on Azuremyst Isle, just off the northwest coast of Kalimdor. Amidst the suffering and wreckage, the survivors took stock of the new world they had found: a land which was, like them, part of the online video game World of Warcraft. They were draenei, an uncorrupted race of Eredar that had been added to the game as part of its Burning Crusade expansion pack. The Appendix

Will 7nm and 5nm really happen? As leading-edge chipmakers continue to ramp up their 28nm and 20nm devices, vendors are also updating their future technology roadmaps. In fact, IC makers are talking about their new shipment schedules for 10nm. And GlobalFoundries, Intel, Samsung and TSMC are narrowing down the options for 7nm, 5nm and beyond. Semiconductor Engineering

Trying out Nouveau GPU reclocking on Linux 3.16 With the Linux 3.16 kernel comes the ability to re-clock select Nvidia GeForce GPUs when using the open-source, reverse-engineered Nouveau driver. Here's my first impressions with trying out this option to maximize the performance of Nvidia graphics cards on open-source drivers. Phoronix