TSMC Moving To 16FF+ Soon

TSMC’s 16nm FinFET process has barely gotten off the ground, but the foundry is already talking about 16nm FinFET Plus, which is due to launch by the end of the year.

The improved 16nm FinFET Plus (16FF+) node is supposed to deliver more efficiency and performance, making TSMC’s node more competitive compared to Samsung’s 14nm node. That is the general idea, but TSMC’s first generation 16nm node has failed to impress in terms of design wins.

TSMC president CC Wei said the new 16FF+ node already has 20 tapeouts, ten of which achieved satisfactory yield performance. Wei said the company expects up to 50 tapeouts by the end of the year. TSMC expects 16FF+ to enter commercial production in the second half of the year.

16FF+ is not the only FinFET node coming from TSMC over the next year. The company plans to introduce 16FFC for compact devices sometime in the second half of 2016. In addition, 10nm FinFET is expected to enter risk production by the end of 2015, reports Digitimes.

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Can TSMC Beat Samsung?

TSMC has said that it is confident that it can beat Samsung Electronics in ramping up production on its 10nm lines.

Samsung disclosed during a recent technology forum in the US that the company plans to enter mass production of chips using its 10nm FinFET process by the end of 2016,.

But in a statement TSMC claimed it could the outfit said the way things are shaping up it could beat that time table. TSMC continued that in the 10nm FinFET race, Intel will be its major competitor.

We expect to hear a bit more about TSMC’s plans at its Taiwan Technology Symposium 2015 on May 28. At the upcoming event, the foundry is expected to talk about the progress and development of its FinFET manufacturing nodes.

TSMC chairman Morris Chang remarked earlier in 2015 that TSMC expects to gain a majority of market share in the FinFET segment in 2016.

Intel is also expected to release its first chips made using 10nm process technology as early as in the middle of 2016.

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IRS Reducing Size Of Cybersecurity Staff

The Internal Revenue Service, which confirmed rumors of a breach of 100,000 taxpayer accounts, has been consistently reducing the size of its internal cybersecurity staff as it increases its security spending. This may seem paradoxical, but one observer suggested it could signal a shift to outsourcing.

In 2011, the IRS employed 410 people in its cybersecurity organization, but by 2014 the headcount had fallen by 11% to 363 people, according to annual reports about IRS information technology spending by the U.S. Treasury Department Inspector General.

Despite this staff reduction, the IRS has increased spending in its cybersecurity organization. In 2012, the IRS earmarked $129 million for cybersecurity, which rose to $141.5 million last year, an increase of approximately 9.7%.

This increase in spending, coupled with the reduction in headcount, is an indicator of outsourcing, said Alan Paller, director of research at the SANS Institute. Paller sees risks in that strategy.

“Each organization moves at a different pace toward a point at which they have outsourced so much that the insiders do little more than manage contracts, and lose their technical expertise and ability to manage technical contractors effectively,” said Paller.

An IRS spokesman was not able to immediately answer questions about the IRS’s cybersecurity spending.

This breach is drawing congressional scrutiny. On Tuesday, U.S. Senator Orrin Hatch (R-Utah), who heads the Senate Finance Committee, called the breach “unacceptable.”

The IRS’s total IT budget in 2014 was $2.5 billion, an increase from the prior year’s $2.3 billion, with 7,339 employees last year, little change from 7,303 reported in 2013.

The agency’s IT budget has fared better than the agency overall. Congress has been cutting spending at the agency. IRS funding has been reduced by $1.2 billion over the last five years, from $12.1 billion in 2010 to $10.9 billion this year. An IRS official told lawmakers earlier this year that the budget cuts have delayed critical IT investments of more than $200 million, which includes replacing aging IT systems.

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Qualcomm Has A Plethora Of Automobile Modems

Qualcomm had an IoT event in San Francisco yesterday and the company wanted to talk a bit more about IoT, also known as Internet of Things. They started off with a catchy phrase – Internet of Hype to Internet of Everything.

Dave Aberle said that up to a billion dollars in revenue is coming from the non-mobile market. More than 10 pecent of Qualcomm revenue will come from the non-headset market. They call this market Internet of Everything, but we believe that not all of that market should be called IoT.

IoT is not just the wearable market; it is car modems, connected speakers, action cameras, some smart SanDisk storage solutions, home automation kit and more.  Aberle mentioned that Qualcomm has 40 car design wins in the market with 15 different OEMs. We saw some names including Audi on the slide, but the list of obviously much longer.

Qualcomm is the leader in connected car and 4G LTE market, while Nvidia is the leader in Infotainment car systems, having some huge customers behind it, including the Volkswagen Group.

Qualcomm wants to expand its presence in IoT, including automotive solutions, and we expect more IoT designs from them in the near future.

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Will A.I. Create The Next Industrial Revolution?

Artificial Intelligence will be responsible for the next industrial revolution, experts in the field have claimed, as intelligent computer systems replace certain human-operated jobs.

Four computer science experts talked about how advances in AI could lead to a “hollowing out” of middle-income jobs during a panel debate hosted by ClickSoftware about the future of technology.

“It’s really important that we take AI seriously. It will lead to the fourth industrial revolution and will change the world in ways we cannot predict now,” said AI architect and author George Zarkadakis.

His mention of the “fourth industrial revolution” refers to the computerization of the manufacturing industry.

If the first industrial revolution was the mechanisation of production using water and steam power, followed by the second which introduced mass production with the help of electric power, then the third is what we are currently experiencing: the digital revolution and the use of electronics and IT to further automate production.

The fourth industrial revolution, which is sometimes referred to as Industry 4.0, is the vision of the ‘smart factory’, where cyber-physical systems monitor physical processes, create a virtual copy of the physical world and make decentralized decisions.

These cyber-physical systems communicate and cooperate with each other and humans in real time over the Internet of Things.

Dan O’Hara, professor of cognitive computing at Goldsmiths, University of London, explained that this fourth industrial revolution will not be the same kind of “hollowing out” of jobs that we saw during the last one.

“It [won’t be] manual labour replaced by automation, but it’ll be the hollowing out of middle-income jobs, medium-skilled jobs,” he said.

“The industries that will be affected the most from a replacement with automation are construction, accounts and transport. But the biggest [industry] of all, remembering this is respective to the US, is retail and sales.”

O’Hara added that many large organisations’ biggest expense is people, who already work alongside intelligent computer systems, and this area is most likely to be affected as companies look to reduce costs.

“Anything that’s working on an AI-based system is bound to be very vulnerable to the replacement by AI as it’s easily automated already,” he said.

However, while AI developments in the retail space could lead to the replacement of jobs, it is also rather promising at the same time.

Mark Bishop, professor of cognitive computing at Goldsmiths, highlighted that AI could save businesses money if it becomes smart enough to determine price variants in company spending, for example, scanning through years of an organisation’s invoice database and detecting the cheapest costs and thus saving on outgoings.

While some worry that AI will take over jobs, others have said that they will replace humans altogether.

John Lewis IT chief Paul Coby said earlier this year that the blending of AI and the IoT in the future could signal the end of civilisation as we know it.

Coby explained that the possibilities are already with us in terms of AI and that we ought to think about how “playing with the demons” could be detrimental to our future.

Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak added to previous comments from Stephen Hawking and Elon Musk with claims that “computers are going to take over from humans”.

Woz made his feelings on AI known during an interview with the Australian Financial Review, and agreed with Hawking and Musk that its potential to surpass humans is worrying.

“Computers are going to take over from humans, no question. Like people including Stephen Hawking and Elon Musk have predicted, I agree that the future is scary and very bad for people,” he said.

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ARM Sets New mBed Standard

ARM has bought in a new assurance standard to work with embedded devices.

The ARM mbed Enabled program aims to increase the deployment rate of Internet of Things (IoT) products and supporting technologies by giving partners the ability to label them as interoperable mbed-based devices.

Arm said that the accreditation program will cover solutions entering a broad range of developer markets; from silicon and modules to OEM products and innovative cloud services. Accreditation will be free of charge.

ARM Zach Shelby, vice president of IoT business marketing, said that ARM mbed Enabled accreditation will assure the diverse IoT ecosystem that they are using technologies backed up by an expert community of innovators,.

“This will also instill confidence in end markets where interoperability, trust and security standardisation is required to unlock commercial potential.”

Since the ARM mbed IoT Device Platform was announced in October 2014, the mbed Partner ecosystem has continued to grow from the initial 24 launch partners. Today, 8 new partners are being announced including Advantech, Athos, Captiva, Espotel, Maxim Integrated, MegaChips, SmeshLink, and Tieto.

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Russia Banking On Home Grown CPUs

A Russian firm announced its intention to build its own homegrown CPUs as part of a cunning plan to keep the Americans from spying on the glorious Empire of Tsar Putin and oil oligarchs.

Moscow Centre of SPARC Technologies (MCST) has announced it’s now taking orders for its Russian-made microprocessors from domestic computer and server manufacturers.

Dubbed the Elbrus-4C, it was fully designed and developed in MCST’s Moscow labs. It’s claimed to be the most high-tech processor ever built in Russia. They claim it is comparable with Intel’s Core i3 and Intel Core i5 processors, although they do not say what generation as one spec we found claimed it could manage a blistering 1.3 GHz which is slightly less than an average mobile phone.

MCST unveiled a new PC, the Elbrus ARM-401 which is powered by the Elbrus-4C chip and runs its own Linux-based Elbrus operating system. MCST claimed it can run Windows and Linux distributions. Yhe company has built a data centre server rack, the Elbrus-4.4, which is powered by four Elbrus-4C microprocessors and supports up to 384GB of RAM.

MCST said the Elbrus-4.4 is suitable for web servers, database servers, storage systems, servers, remote desktops and high-performance clusters.

Sergei Viljanen, editor in chief of the Russian-language PCWorld website said that the chip was at least five years behind the west.

“Russian processor technology is still about five years behind the west. Intel’s chips come with a 14nm design, whereas the Elbrus is 65 nm, which means they have a much higher energy consumption.”

MCST’s Elbrus-4C chips are powered by a 4-core processors, and come with an interface for hard drives and other peripherals. The company finalized development of Elbrus-4C in April 2014, and began mass production last autumn.

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Chipmakers Advocating MIPS Open Source Moves

Qualcomm Atheros, Lantiq (part of Intel) and Broadcom have joined the Prpl Foundation.

For those who came in late Prple is the organisation set-up by Imagination Technologies to support open-source software on the MIPS architecture.

The big names follow CUPP Computing, Elliptic Technologies, Imperas Software, Kernkonzept and Seltech joined the foundation at lower levels.

In a statement the Foundation said that the newcomers to the prpl Foundation’s board of directors will participate at the executive level and appoint representatives to the technical steering committee and to engineering groups including the security.

So in other words the key players will be advocating an open source approach to MIPS.

Prpl, is open to other architectures, and focuses on “datacenter-to-device portable software and visualized architectures”, it said. Initial domains oem its hit list are: datacenter, networking, storage, connected consumer, embedded and IoT.

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FitBit Files IPO As Sales Double

Fitbit, the maker of wearable activity trackers, has filed to go public and has reported some strong sales numbers in its presenation.

The company seeks to raise as much as US$100 million, according to a regulatory filing, though the amount is subject to change. Fitbit plans to list its stock on the New York Stock Exchange under the symbol “FIT.”

The filing reveals what seems to be a healthy business. The company sold roughly 10.9 million devices in 2014,more than double what it sold in 2013 and more than eight times as many as it sold in 2012.

Fitbit also more than doubled its revenue between 2013 and 2014, to more than $745 million. Sales in 2012 were about $76 million.

The company posted net income of nearly $132 million in 2014, up from a loss of roughly $52 million the year before.

Meanwhile, the company’s paid active users grew from 2.6 million in 2013 to 6.7 million in 2014.

Fitbit, founded in 2007, makes a number of activity-measuring bracelets and trackers that can be synced with an online dashboard and mobile apps. The company also provides premium services like virtual coaching and customized fitness plans.

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Intel Talks More About Skylake

A new Intel roadmap suggests the first Broadwell LGA parts will launch in Q2, while Skylake-S parts will come in Q3.

The roadmap was published by PC Online and points to two Broadwell LGA launches this quarter – the Core i7-5775C and Core i5-5675C. These two parts will be joined by a total of four Skylake-S products in Q3, the Core i7-6700K, Core i7-6700, Core i5-6600K, Core i5-6600 and the Core i5-6500.

Both Skylake-S and Broadwell LGA will replace the current crop of Haswell parts, including Devil’s Canyon products. However, Broadwell LGA sits one tier above Skylake-S and Haswell-based products.

Starting in Q4, we should see more Broadwell LGA parts, but we don’t have any names yet. In the first quarter of 2016, we can also expect new Skylake-S parts.

Speaking of 2016, Intel plans to unleash the Broadwell-E in the first quarter of 2016. Little is known about Broadwell-E, but the new 14nm flagship is expected to sport eight cores. Clocks remain unknown, although the 14nm node promises substantial gains.

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