AMD FX-8370E

AMD rejigs old hardware in an attempt to compete with Intel.

AMD has ceded the CPU high ground to Intel’s all-conquering i7 chips, but the firm still reckons it can fight in the mid-range – and that’s exactly where the new FX-8370E hunkers down.

This chip is different from the rest of AMD’s FX parts thanks to its ‘E’ suffix. It stands for ‘energy efficient’, and means it has a TDP of 95W. That’s a reduction from the 125W and 220W TDPs used by other AMD FX chips, but it’s still 11W more than Intel’s Core i5 parts require. That’s because the FX-8370E still relies on the toasty 32nm Piledriver architecture, rather than the 28nm Steamroller cores found in the firm’s APUs.

Sherlock Holmes: Crimes and Punishments

The game is at hand.

Call me the king of wrongful imprisonment. The big ‘hook’ with the latest Sherlock Holmes title from Frogwares is that you get to both accuse and suggest the punishment for the perpetrators of the Crimes being investigated. At this I failed.

Despite my careless dooming of innocents to their fate, the investigative side of the game is surprisingly robust affair, especially when compared to the usual fare that claims to include detection as a feature. While the actual means to an end sometimes feels like a bizarre attempt to shoehorn in mini games, the actual process of evidence collection and deduction is quite slickly done, and requires both a thorough approach and some decent thought processes.

How algorithms control your life

Algorithms are choosing the movies we watch, the people we date and the news we read. Stuart Turton investigates how they’re taking everyday decisions out of our hands.

Imagine a shotgun blast scattering birds from the trees, their indignant squawks fading into the clear blue sky. That’s pretty much what happens when you toss the word “algorithm” at major tech companies. In happier times, they paraded their algorithms before us like proud parents, explaining how their little bundles of decision-making joy improved Google searches, filtered the boring from Facebook and made memories on OkCupid. Unfortunately, it turns out that the kids have a wild streak. In the past few months, they’ve been accused of censoring newsfeeds and tampering with our emotions - oh, and rigging the stock market.

Here, we reveal how far the algorithmic tendrils have spread through society, investigating whether companies are neglecting their ethical responsibilities, or whether we’ve simply misunderstood the technology underpinning this brave new world.

What is the cloud?

You hear a lot about ‘the cloud’, but how does it actually work?

The term ‘cloud’ implies something that’s above your head, but in reality the data that you upload is likely to be stored very much at ground level or even underground, and probably thousands of miles away from your location. A cloud service is actually a cluster of computers: more accurately, a huge number of servers with vast amounts of hard drive storage attached. It’s a natural evolution of the technology behind the internet itself and has come about largely thanks to rapid improvements in global bandwidth and the plummeting price of storage capacity.

Unreal worlds. Beyond level design

Rick Lane steps into some surreal game worlds that attempt to go beyond the usual fantasy and sci-fi escapism.

The aim of so many popular games is to provide escapism, a way to escape to a fantasy land or science-fiction universe that often looks and acts in a very realistic way. Achieving that realism an understandable ambition, but it's also a limiting one. After all, games can also symbolically depict our own world, visually realising abstract ideas and concepts that our own world and civilisation generate.

Moreover, when level design is decoupled from escapism, it can be used to create worlds that are truly alien, going beyond the logical constraints of realism. In this article, we’ll explore a couple of games that challenge the notion of environmental design and how it’s used.