Crytek's CryEngine Embraces Linux

Linux gaming is starting to catch on and build up some momentum. Following in the footsteps of Valve’s Source engine, Epic’s Unreal Engine 4, and Unity 5, Crytek's CryEngine supports Linux. This also means that it will have support for SteamOS. This also means that it will be way easier for developers who are currently making games on these engines to add support for Linux.

Even with this, developers will still have to go a little out of their way and do some work in order to add Linux support to their Steam games, so every game that comes out won't have it. So don't get your hopes up on that. But either way, there will be a lot of titles coming out in the future and the technology will become more widely adopted. It reduces the effort needed by a lot.

This might not be huge news to all of the indie game players out there. Smaller companies might not want to invest the extra time into adding support for Linux, but for the huge, new AAA games the cost of porting them to Linux goes way down, and because SteamOS is a really promising, big new platform, it's starting to look like a much better idea to these big gaming companies. When the core engine of the game already supports that platform, everything else is pretty simple because all the hard work is already done.

On top of all that, engines that already support Linux should get a huge improvement in the quality of ports. Some of the Linux games currently on Steam use a lot of Windows coding and Direct3D, which makes performance a little bit problematic for Linux users. This new change will mean that developers can do away with whatever tricks they were using to make Windows code run (badly) on top of Linux.

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Avago Acquiring Broadcom for $37 Billion

According to Avango Technologies, they are ready to buy out Broadcom for a whopping $37 billion. That is a huge amount of money that you could probably buy anything you ever wanted with, and Bloomberg says it is the biggest tech deal to ever be made. Avango said that after the deal is done, the combined worth of the companies will be $77 billion.

The new company is going to be called Broadcom LTd, and it will be headed by Hock Tan, the CEO of Avango. Right behind companies like Intel, Samsung, TSMC, Qualcomm, and Micron, Broadcom would be the 6th largest semiconductor company in the world.

Many people don't really know about Avango, but they started out as a division of Hewlett-Packard before they split off into their own company years later. And everyone is pretty familiar with HP. Avango specializes in offering products for wireless communications, wired infrastructure, enterprise storage, and industrial applications. Broadcom is mainly known for their chips for communications devices and for their video solutions. They also make the chips for the popular Raspberry Pi computers.

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The chip industry has already been privy to big moves like this. Just a couple of months ago NXP announced that it was planning on acquiring Freescale for just under $17 billion. It's too soon to see how the chip industry will be affected or what's to come from this new acquisition but as soon as details drop you'll find them here on A Computer Blog.

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Google Holding Ubiquitous Computing Summit This Fall

The Google I/O developers conference is what most people look forward to from Google every year. Even though that event has already come and gone, that doesn't mean there isn't anything left to look forward to from the company for the rest of the year. Google just announced that it will be holding a Ubiquitous Computing Summit this fall in San Francisco, California.

Just basing an idea off the name of the event won't get you anywhere as it isn't very descriptive. But the event will focus on the idea of making it easier to use software across a lot of different devices and form factors. The idea is that software should be universal across different things like smartphones, tablets, TVs, smartwatches, a car, etc....

On the developers end of the idea, they are trying to make all of these devices run the same universal software without having to change any of the code. A Google developer has also said that the summit will also focus on working on context-aware apps that will know which device is running them, where it is running them, how it is using them, and all kinds of other stuff. It is pretty interesting. They are now working on setting up guidelines for developing the software as well.

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The idea isn't so new. Google has been talking about doing this type of thing for years now. All of the different versions of Android, like Lollipop and Jelly Bean, were all said to be steps toward unifying the Android experience across all of the different devices. Over the past year, Google has brought together all of their Android development kits for all of the different form factors. Even Microsoft is jumping on the bandwagon, and they are making Windows 10 to run not only on PCs, but on all of their smartphones and tablets, and even on the Xbox One.

The Ubiquitous Computing Summit doesn't have an exact date yet, just that the summit will be held this Fall in San Francisco. But as there is more information surfacing, you will be sure to find it here.

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