A few days ago, we reported on AMD's newest expansion plans for Serbia. The company opened two new engineering design centers with offices in Belgrade and Nis. We were invited to join the opening ceremony and got an exclusive interview with one of AMD's top executives, Andrej Zdravkovic, who is the senior vice president and Chief Software Officer. Previously, we reported on AMD's transition to become a software company. The company has recently tripled its software engineering workforce and is moving some of its best people to support these teams. AMD's plan is spread over a three to five-year timeframe to improve its software ecosystem, accelerating hardware development to launch new products more frequently and to react to changes in software demand. AMD found that to help these expansion efforts, opening new design centers in Serbia would be very advantageous.

We sat down with Andrej Zdravkovic to discuss the purpose of AMD's establishment in Serbia and the future of some products. Zdravkovic is actually an engineer from Serbia, where he completed his Bachelor's and Master's degrees in electrical engineering from Belgrade University. In 1998, Zdravkovic joined ATI and quickly rose through the ranks, eventually becoming a senior director. During his decade-long tenure, Zdravkovic witnessed a significant industry shift as AMD acquired ATI in 2006. After a brief stint at another company, Zdravkovic returned to AMD in 2015, bringing with him a wealth of experience and a unique perspective on the evolution of the graphics and computing industry.Here is the full interview:

Team Asobi's Astro Bot was released for PlayStation 5 on September 6, 2024, and it received many positive reviews and critics from fans. Recently, Team Asobi president Nicholas Doucet explained that he directly approached God of War's Cory Barlog and Eric Williams about getting Kratos' cameo for the game. And was surprised to see they were excited about what he was going to do with Kratos in Astro Bot.

Cory Barlog explained that for a dramatic game like the God of War IP, you have to be very careful with the world, and he was excited to see what Team Asobi would do with Kratos in Astro Bot, something different from the way it is in God of War at least. Nicholas said their expectations were to get 50 cameos, but they were shocked that they almost got everyone. The PlayStation partners expressed their support for Astro Bot and were excited to see their characters used in the game.

When it appeared in last month's Xbox Games Showcase, Xbox Wire spoke with creative director Mike Chapman about how The Legend of Monkey Island came to be and what it was setting out to do. But was that enough? Of course not - there's so much more to talk about in this landmark crossover between Sea of Thieves and the Monkey Island series.

With that in mind, here's a whole new interview, digging deeper into the three-part expansion's storyline, how it uses Monkey Island as an inspiration for a whole new gameplay experience within Sea of Thieves, and, yes, whether there will be Insult Sword Fighting.

Today we showed Bungie fans worldwide a glimpse of our future at the PlayStation Showcase, in the forms of two major game announcements. First up, we officially announced Marathon to the world! This is the first completely new project from Bungie in more than a decade. Marathon is a sci-fi PvP extraction shooter where players will embody cybernetic mercenaries known as Runners. Exploring a lost colony on the mysterious planet of Tau Ceti IV, Runners - working solo or as part of three-person crews - will fight for survival, for riches, and for fame.

We're incredibly excited to announce the game and to share our vision for the future. We know that you are curious to know more, and we will have much to say in the future. For now, know that Marathon is currently in development on PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X|S, and PC, featuring cross save and cross play. Check out the Marathon site to learn more about the game and follow Marathon on social media (Twitter, Facebook, YouTube) to stay up to date. Below, don't miss a Q&A with Marathon General Manager Scott Taylor and Game Director Christopher Barrett, where they discuss debuting Marathon to the world.

Phil Spencer, CEO of Xbox Game Studios, appeared on the popular (Xbox-themed) Kinda Funny Games podcast earlier this week for a video interview (Xcast Episode 137). The almost 45-minute long conversation touched upon several topics relating to gaming matters at Microsoft, with the hosts managing to corner Spencer about the recent (not so good) launch of Bethesda and Arkane's horror FPS Redfall. Gaming community feedback has not exactly been encouraging in the wake of the game's release two days ago, and Spencer admits that he shares similar sentiments: "I'll just say all up, there's nothing that's more difficult for me than disappointing the Xbox community. I've been a part of it for a long time. I obviously work on Xbox, head of the business, have a lot of friends, get a lot of feedback. And just to watch the community lose confidence, be disappointed, I'm disappointed. I'm upset with myself. I revisit our process - I think back to the announcement of 60 FPS and then we weren't shipping 60 FPS, that was our punch in the chin, rightfully, a couple of weeks ago. And then seeing the game come out and the critical response was not what we wanted, and it's disappointing."

He continues his thought about reacting to feedback this early on in the process: "What can we learn? What can we get better? One thing I'll fight is what went wrong. There's clearly quality and execution things we can do, but one thing I won't do is push against creative aspirations of our teams. Then a lot of people will say, hey, you've got teams, teams know how to do one kind of game, just force them to go do the one kind of game they have a proven track record for. I'm just not a believer in that. Maybe that means I'll under deliver for some of our fans out there. But when a team like Rare wants to do Sea of Thieves, when a team like Obsidian wants to do Grounded, when Tango wants to go do Hi-Fi (Rush) when everybody probably thought they were doing The Evil Within 3, I want to give the teams the creative platform to go and push their ability, push their aspirations."

We have brought you the potential perils of the upcoming UEFI Forum-implemented - www.uefi.org - Windows 8 secure boot feature here, here and here. However, it appears that it may not be so 'secure' after all, since there appears to be a surefire way to circumvent it, at least for the moment, while it's in development.

Softpedia has scored an exclusive interview with security researcher Peter Kleissner, who has created various Windows (XP, Server 2003 etc) "bootkits", which allow OS infection at the highest privilege level, giving unrestricted access to the whole of the PC. His latest one, called Stoned Lite, shows how the Windows 8 secure boot process, still in development, can be subverted, as it stands. He is planning to release details of how the code works at the upcoming International Malware Conference (MalCon) - malcon.org - that will take place in India on November 25th. It appears that the real vulnerability exists in the legacy BIOS boot procedure, not in Microsoft's implementation of secure boot, as Kleissner said:

The problem with the legacy startup is that no one verifies the MBR, which makes it the vulnerable point. With UEFI and secure boot, all the boot applications and drivers have to be signed (otherwise they won't be loaded). You can compare it to TPM, although Arie van der Hoeven from Microsoft announced that the secure boot feature is mandatory for OEMs who want to be UEFI certified. It is a good message that security is not an option.

EVGA keeps growing its visual-computing product lineup by the day, and has made its first major product in the PC display a reality. The InterView 1700 is a dual-panel display that holds two LCD panels side-by-side. The two panels are suspended on a central frame with joints that allow them to individually turn 180 degrees, and fold 90 degrees, so the viewer can customise the viewing experience. What's more, the frame itself bends 180 degrees.

Each panel is 17 inch widescreen LCD, with native resolution of 1440 x 900 pixels, response time of 8 m, and 500:1 static contrast ratio. The central frame holds a 1.3 megapixel web-cam built in. It takes input from dual-link DVI and HDMI. At US $650, the EVGA InterView 1700 is targeted at financial analysts, accountants, scientific installations, medical imaging, and other professionals.

ChileHardware has posted an interesting interview with Ageia's CEO, Many Hedge. As all of you are surely aware, Ageia is the company behind separate PhysX add-in cards.

In the interview, Mr. Hedge says that several AAA titles supporting PhysX are in the works, but the two to look out for are definitely Cellfactor: Revolution and Warmonger: Operation Downtown Destruction, which will make heavy use of in-game physics. Also, it it good to hear that Ageia is up to date with its drivers, ensuring a pleasant gaming (or should I say PhysX ?) experience to those already running Windows Vista. Overclocking is as popular as ever - yet Many Hedge states that, at the current moment, they will not support the overclocking of their PhysX cards, as they are not deemed to be the bottleneck in any current game. Lastly, there is an invitation to CeBIT - so maybe it will be worth a visit this year, after all?

Read the whole interview in English here.

The CEO of Micrsoft, Steve Balmer, admits that predicted Vista sales were 'overly optimistic'. When faced with the current Vista sales, he blames them on a high amount of pirated copies being cracked in developing nations such as Russia and China. In response to this, Balmer promises that WGA (Windows Genuine Advantage) will get much tougher to combat the recent piracy. It seems that Mr.Balmer does not think that there are possible issues with Windows Vista preventing people from buying it, let alone pirating it. A lack of driver support, a lack of advantages over Windows XP, and a hate of WGA all could be reasons people are not buying Windows Vista. An increase of WGA may very well shoot back in Microsoft's face.