Linked List: March 19, 2019

Tuesday, 19 March 2019

Google Announces Stadia, Streaming Video Game Service 

Phil Harrison, vice president and GM of Google Stadia:

Using our globally connected network of Google data centers, Stadia will free players from the limitations of traditional consoles and PCs.

When players use Stadia, they’ll be able to access their games at all times, and on virtually any screen. And developers will have access to nearly unlimited resources to create the games they’ve always dreamed of. It’s a powerful hardware stack combining server class GPU, CPU, memory and storage, and with the power of Google’s data center infrastructure, Stadia can evolve as quickly as the imagination of game creators.

They have a custom game controller too, which from the outside looks a lot like a Sony Dualshock. The innovation is that the controller isn’t a peripheral to a local device — it connects by Wi-Fi to the Stadia cloud.

Streaming high-performance games over the internet sounds like something that could never compete with a local device, but no less an authority than John Carmack vouches for it in principle.

It’s worth pointing out too that this is a very Google-like strategy, where your device doesn’t really matter, only the cloud service.

Apple’s M68 Prototype Board for the Original iPhone 

A fascinating bit of computing history. I sure am curious about the person who owns this, though — seems like it would be a hard thing for most engineers to walk out of the building with.

Jason Snell on the Updated iMac Lineup 

Jason Snell, writing at Six Colors:

What this means is that these new iMacs have closed a bit of the gap between the highest-end iMac and the lowest-end iMac Pro. You’ll need to pay extra in configurable options, but the highest-end eight-core iMac should creep close to iMac Pro territory in terms of processor and graphics performance.

Nice (Non-Pro) iMac Speed Bumps 

Nothing radical here — no T2 chip* or anything that makes them look new. Just faster CPUs from Intel and faster GPUs (including Vega options) from Radeon. This is an industrial design that deserves to last years. It still doesn’t seem possible to get displays of this caliber at these prices in the PC world — or at any price for 5K in an all-in-one. These speed bumps are just what the doctor ordered.

* If there’s one disappointment for me with these updated iMacs, it’s that the low-end configurations still ship with spinning hard drives — either as the sole storage device or as part of a Fusion drive. I get it — SSDs cost a lot more than hard drives. But SSDs are just so much better in every regard other than price. I think this decision goes hand-in-hand with the lack of a T2 subsystem, though — no iOS device has ever shipped with support for hard drives. The iMac Pro can have a T2 because the iMac Pro is SSD only, so the T2 can depend on solid state storage for its boot partition. I’d wager heavily that non-Pro iMacs won’t get T-whatever security subsystems until they go SSD-only.