AMD announces Carrizo and Carrizo-L, next-gen APUs for H1 2015 Today AMD is announcing the long anticipated upgrade to Kaveri, codenamed Carrizo. Carrizo is the natural successor to Kaveri, featuring x86 'Excavator' cores alongside a Radeon-class GPU and promising an increase in performance all around. The second part of today's announcement is for Carrizo-L, an SoC pairing "Puma+" (upgraded Beema) cores also with AMD's R-series GCN GPUs and a FCH into a single package. Both Carrizo and Carrizo-L will feature ARM Trustzone, giving potential hardware-based built-in security when used by developers. AnandTech

The man who made 'Tetris' I'm at the wheel of a Tesla with a license plate that reads, simply: Tetris. Alexey Pajitnov, the creator of that legendary video game, rides shotgun. "Push the gas, push the gas!" whoops Pajitnov, bearded and jean jacketed. "Faster!" Earlier that day, after lunch at a mutual friend's house, Pajitnov, 58, was eager to have us take turns driving his Tesla through the placid suburbs of Bellevue, Washington, where he lives, urging us on to bursts of acceleration that left momentary feelings of weightlessness in my chest every time the road dipped. Vice

Wil Wheaton: Anonymous trolls are destroying online games. Here's how to stop them. "On the internet," says the iconic New Yorker cartoon, "nobody knows you're a dog." It's a joke, but it's also a problem. More venom than ever before is flowing from behind the cloak of anonymity, where people remain entirely unaccountable for their words and deeds. Recently, random men used the anonymity of a huge city like New York to harass actor Shoshana Roberts while she walked the streets of Manhattan. The Washington Post (and a response)

DreamWorks reveals glimpse of 360 degree 'super cinema' rendering for VR Films On stage at Samsung's 2014 developer conference last week, Warren Mayoss, Head of Technology Product Development at DreamWorks Animation, spoke about the company's initial work with virtual reality on the Oculus Rift and Gear VR. Though they've produced several real-time VR experiences, the studio's bread and butter is high-fidelity pre-rendered CGI. But how to bring that level of quality to virtual reality? Road to VR

Microsoft now has robot security guards Robots are increasingly replacing humans in a variety of mundane tasks, like bolting a car together or making lollipops, but now they are moving into the security business. Microsoft recently installed a fleet of 5-feet-tall, 300-pound robots to protect its Silicon Valley campus. The robots are packed with HD security cameras and sensors to take in their organic, protein-based surroundings. The Daily Dot (also, I spent a weekend on a cruise ship staffed by robot bartenders)

'Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare' and the problems of the modern first-person shooter Imagine attempting to write a nuanced, emotionally rich story about a protagonist who kills, like, several hundred people over the course of his or her hero's journey. That gives you an idea of how hard it is to write for the first-person shooter genre of video games. Effective storytelling requires empathy, which is not an emotion you necessarily want to employ... Grantland

In a self-driving future, we may not even want to own cars Personal transportation is on the cusp of its greatest transformation since the advent of the internal combustion engine. With the rise of self-driving vehicles, ride-sharing, traffic congestion and environmental regulation, we may not even own cars in the future, much less drive them. A glimpse of the coming revolution can be seen in the models debuting this week at the Los Angeles Auto Show. LA Times

Alienware's knockoff Steam Machine finally ships, but it's not the gaming PC you're looking for There was a lot of hype surrounding the impending launch of Valve's Steam Machine platform, but much of the excitement dissipated when thefirst wave of machines were delayeduntil 2015. Now, Alienware is going in alone, and shipping its own consolized gaming PC with an Xbox 360 controller and a custom 10-foot interface. ExtremeTech


Metacritic "all but obsolete" - Double Fine Metacritic has been a contentious subject in the industry, from those who say the review aggregator has too much influence, to those who use it to make hiring decisions. But in a session at the Montreal International Game Summit today, Double Fine Productions COO Justin Bailey suggested the site doesn't actually matter all that much. GamesIndustry.biz

Finally light bulb's Tesla tech gives LEDs a worthy rival Ever since I improbably started blogging occasionally about light bulbs, I've been waiting impatiently to get a look at the first product from The Finally Light Bulb Company. This start-up company from Cambridge, Massachusetts has decided to bring a Tesla-era lighting technology into the consumer space. The Tech Report

Tracking a bitcoin thief For the last two years the crypto currency scene had exploded in size as people began learning about and participating in Bitcoin and its alternate currencies. Altcoins as people call them are smaller projects that can be mined and often traded directly for Bitcoin by miners who can not afford to mine Bitcoin directly. BitComSec (part II)

MythBusters vs. Gorilla Glass: Adam and Jamie have a smashing time The latest generation of phone-protecting Gorilla Glass is here, and who better to test it out than the MythBusters. Here comes the pane! CNet