The first spacecraft from a private company is going to the ISS soon. The Dragon space cargo ship is ready for launch on the top of a Falcon 9 rocket and will then travel to the ISS for docking at the station. The launch is converted by NASA TV and SpaceX own live stream right now, the lift-off is sheduled for 8:56 UTC.

*edit* Due a failure of engine 5, the start was aborted right after ignition. The on-board computer system detects an engine malfunction and instantly shuts down all engines. The next lauch window will be on 22. May.

Free desktop streaming application by Ustream

The Japanese JAXA is ready to launch the SHIZUKU climate observation satellite on board of a H-IIA rocket. The launch is live streamed right now.

Live broadcasting by Ustream

A Soyuz-FG rocket is going to launch at 0301 UTC today to tranport the Soyuz TMA-04M with 3 new astronauts to the ISS. *edit* The launch was successful.

THIS IS AN IMPORTANT CALL TO ALL CITIZENS OF NORTH RHINE-WESTPHALIA! VOTE FOR KAETZCHEN!

The Radeon 7700 GPU class graphic cards will be the new bottom line up for gaming PCs from AMD. There are two flavors of the GPU available, the Radeon 7770 and Radeon 7750 with slightly different specifications and prizes.
Both in common is the Cape Verde GPU, fabbed in a 28 nm bulk silicon process by TSMC.
The GPU packs 1.5 * 10^9 transistors on 123 mm² die size. It has up to date interfaces; HDMI 1.4a, Display Port 1.2b on the display side and PCIe 3.0 on the motherboard side.
The memory interface is 128 bit wide and supports standard GDDR5 memory.
The GPU has 10 computing units, organisized in groups up to 4 units with a shared L1 cache and 16 ROPs. Additional there is a common shared 512 KiB L2 cache on die.

On the software side the GPU supports OpenGL 4.2 and OpenCL 1.2 with double precision floating point support.

Some parts of the GPU are disabled for the 7750 cards, there is what you will get with 7770 and 7750:

AMD Radeon 7770:

* 1000 MHz graphic clock speed

* 640 Stream Processors

* 40 Texture Units

* 1.28 TFLOPS theoretical computing power

* 1 GiB GDDR5 with 72 GB/s bandwidth

* ~80 watt typical power usage

* 159 $ starting prize

AMD Radeon 7750:

* 800 MHz graphic clock speed

* 512 Stream Processors

* 32 Texture Units

* 0.819 TFLOPS theoretical computing power

* 1 GiB GDDR5 with 72 GB/s bandwidth

* ~50 watt typical power usage

* 109 $ starting prize

AMD did not mentioned when their Catalyst Linux drivers will support the Radeon 7700.

AMD's Radeon HD 7770 GHz Edition ...and the Radeon HD 7750, too. @ TheTechReport.com

Driven by the great success of the first online education course last year (Introduction to Artificial Intelligence), the new started company Udacity will start their education program next week. You can still sign up for the first two courses Computer Science 101: Building a Search Engine and Computer Science 373: Programming a Robotic Car. Entering is total free of fees, the course is going over six weeks with a final online exam.
They are done by Prof. David Evans and Prof. Sebastian Thrun.

Google's WebM project team has recently launched version 1.0.0 "Duclair" of the VP8 codec SDK. The build has added some new features for streaming and promised a further little performance enhancement. So it's time to have a quick look at the state of the VP8 video encoding performance.

The benchmarks were done with the Oil Rush gameplay video (1280x720, 30 fps), if you want to compare your own system, you can just download it.

The video was re-encoded with ffmpeg 0.7.8 with single pass VP8 encoding and a target video bitrate of 5 Mbit/s. The following command was used:

time ffmpeg -benchmark -i oilrush10_mphd.webm -vcodec libvpx -threads x -b 5M -acodec copy -f webm -y foo.webm

There after the total number of frames was divided due the total run time to get the average number of frames per seconds. Note, the run time also includes the processing time for demuxing, decoding, copying, muxing and file operations.

There were two different systems used:

* Intel Core i7 920, 2667 MHz, 4 cores, 8 threads, 8 GiB DDR3 RAM, unknown memory speed, MSI X58 Pro-E (MS-7522) BIOS 8.6, 3.2.1-gentoo-r2 x86_64, preemptive, 1000 Hz, GCC 4.5.3

* AMD Phenom II X4 955 BE, 3200 MHz, 4 cores, 4 threads, 8 GiB DDR3 10600, ASRock M3N78D BIOS 1.61, 3.1.0-gentoo x86_64, preemptive, 1000 Hz, GCC 4.5.3

The results are composed into the following graph.

You can see, that the Intel and AMD processor have both a similar performance, but keep in mind, the AMD processor needs a over 500 MHz higher clock speed to catch up.

The VP8 encoder utilizes multi-threading, but the performance enhancement from 1 thread to 4 threads is far away from the theoretical optimum of 4 times faster, which proves the encoder still has a lot of room for future improvements. You see constant performance gains with every new build.

Note: the result of version 0.9.6 with 8 threads on the Phenom processor is surprisely low and can be reproduced. There was some bug causing a huge system overhead in that build. Also the result with 3 threads and version 0.9.7 on the i7 is a little lower than expected. When doing the benchmark series, I first forgot this setting and after downgrading back to 0.9.7, it runs a little slower. A reason for this behavior couldn't be found yet.

The Unigine Corp. is finally releasing their debut game Oil Rush today. The game is build around their own in-house Unigine game engine, featuring latest OpenGL 4 eye-candy graphic effects with decent performance.

In the game you will command your troops between different platforms to capture or defend them. The platforms are also your unit construction sites. You will have different kinds of boats and airplanes, but no ground forces, because the hole planet is flooded with water.
New units are build on the captured production platforms, oil rigs are generating your income to buy special enhancements and units. If you move out with all your units, you can still defend your platforms with added gun and missile towers.

Oil Rush features a 16 mission campaign as well as a multiplayer mode. The game can be bought at Desura, Ubuntu Software Center, Unigine Store and in some countries also in a retail DVD box for 20 petro dollars.

The Desura game management and shopping client got a little open brother now. The open brother is called Desurium and it comes with a GPLv3 license. The project will be kept in sync with the official Desura client and patches will be up- and down-streamed.

AMD has running a cashback promotion in some european states. If you bought an AMD FX processor in Austria, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Italy, Netherlands, Norway, Portugal, Sweden or the UK from one of the partnered e-tailers, you can get back between 10€ and 20€, depending on the number of cores of your processor.
You will find all the deal details on the AMD promotion webpage. The promotion is running until the end of the month.

Planet 64Bit wishes all readers a Happy New Year 4710!

Have a healthy and successful year of the water dragon and good luck to put all your dreams into reality!

The Humble Introversion Bundle will end in about 20 hours. If you are interested in Uplink, darwinia, DEFCON or Multiwinia, you should grab it now.

For a bonus price, you will also get Aquaria from Bit Blot and Crayon Physics Deluxe from Kloonigames.

After years of hard engineering work, the new Mars Science Laboratory is ready to launch today on the top of an Atlas V rocket from Cape Canaveral. The Lift Off is scheduled for 15:02 UTC on 26th November and will be covered live by NASA TV. The launch preparations can be also followed in the launch blog.

Photo: NASA

The world largest LAN party is ongoing this week in Jönköping, Sweden. During DreamHack Winter 2011 there are a bunch of tournaments running. The first rounds were done in the past two days and today is the large Final Saturday.

At 9:00 UTC the Hereos of Newerth finals will start, casted live by Honcast.

The Quake Live TDM finals will be played on the main stage, but the time isn't given yet.

The Russian Soyuz spacecraft is ready for the 29th expedition to the International Space Station. The Soyuz TMA-22 will transport two Russian and one American astronaut and also some regular supply stuff. The Lift-Off of the Soyus rocket is planned for 4:14 UTC from Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan. A life coverage is streamed by NASA TV.

*edit*

The launch was successful and the Soyuz is now in space on the way to meet the ISS in two days. The docking manoeuvre will also be life coveraged by NASA TV.

Second before the engine starts.

The first stage of the rocket is powered by 5*4 rocket engines.

The empty launch pad in Baikonur after the Lift-Off. The snow on the right side below the pad is burned away.

Inside the TMA-22 spacecraft. The third astronaut is on the left side.