According to the Wall Street Journal, Epic Games is working on an mobile app store to compete with the Google Play app store for Android users in 2019. As a consequence of competing with Google, Epic Games will also be competing with Apple and its App Store for iOS. The Epic Games app store will take a 12% cut of revenue generated from sales compared to the 30% cut that Google and Apple take. The first phase of the Epic Games store went live for the PC and Mac earlier this month. The U.S. Supreme Court is already looking at the fee structure and the monopoly that Apple has created with its App Store.



Epic says it will start selling games for Android devices sometime next year. It already distributes “Fortnite” this way, bypassing Google’s Play store. No such move is possible within Apple’s ecosystem, as the company retains tight control over the apps that can be distributed to its devices. But Ben Schachter of Macquarie Capital believes that if Google reduces its own take on apps in response to competition, Apple would be pressured to follow.

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Source: [H]ardOCP – Epic Games to Launch an App Store to Compete with Google and Apple

Researchers from Tohoku University in Japan say they’ve developed a 128mb MRAM test chip that can achieve a write speed of 14 nanoseconds. The researchers say that’s “currently the world’s fastest write speed for embedded memory application with a density over 100Mb.” The title of the associated paper also mentions that the memory has an endurance “greater than 1010,” and that it can retain data for 10 years at 85 degrees Celcius, and the press release says it only need 1.2V to operate. As we’ve noted before, MRAM has the potential to replace specific uses cases for SRAM, eDRAM, and significantly slower non-volatile storage in the near future, and Intel is supposedly shipping products with 14nm MRAM right now. Thanks to cageymaru for the tip.



STT-MRAM is capable of high-speed operation and consumes very little power as it retains data even when the power is off. Because of these features, STT-MRAM is gaining traction as the next-generation technology for applications such as embedded memory, main memory and logic. Three large semiconductor fabrication plants have announced that risk mass-production will begin in 2018… The current capacity of STT-MRAM is ranged between 8Mb-40Mb. But to make STT-MRAM more practical, it is necessary to increase the memory density. The team at the Center for Innovative Integrated Electronic Systems (CIES) has increased the memory density of STT-MRAM by intensively developing STT-MRAMs in which magnetic tunnel junctions (MTJs) are integrated with CMOS. This will significantly reduce the power-consumption of embedded memory such as cache and eFlash memory.

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Source: [H]ardOCP – Researchers Allegedly Break Write Speed Record With MRAM Test Chip

Following the likes of World of Warcraft, Planetside 2, and other MMOs, Wargaming.net announced that the World of Tanks engine is set to get a multi-threading overhaul. In their recent dev diary, developers note that most of their userbase tends to upgrade CPUs relatively infrequently compared to GPUs, and that most cores sit idle while a single core runs at relatively inefficient turbo clocks in the current incarnation of the engine. In addition to performance increases from the overhaul, the devs noted that the extra CPU power could allow them to implement features that were previously performance-prohibitive. Check out the dev diary below:



The new version of the Core engine will support multi-threading. What is it? How does it work? And what does it mean for players? Watch this to find out and leave your comments!

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Source: [H]ardOCP – World of Tanks to Get Better Multithreading Support