Sign up for our Technology Newsletter 
Is Ubuntu Linux Spyware?
Richard Stallman has asked a South American free software association not to promote Ubuntu Linux at its events because it “spies on its users” by collecting its users’ desktop search activity and selling the data to Amazon.
Canonical released Ubuntu 12.10 last October with Amazon search integrated into its Dash desktop search function.
Although Ubuntu users can opt out and Canonical claims it anonymises users’ search information before sending it to Amazon, the change resulted in Ubuntu users being shown Amazon ads in response to desktop search queries.
The ‘feature’ has attracted a lot of criticism and might have led some users to defect to other Linux distributions.
When Stallman’s request was denied by the FLISOL event organiser with the excuse that it would limit user freedom of choice, Stallman fired off a response to the organisation’s entire mailing list on Sunday. Parts of his email are quoted below, as translated by Groklaw.
“The issue I raise is about what should happen at FLISOL events. Give away copies of Ubuntu or not? Promote Ubuntu or no? I asked the organisers of the event that they, as a policy, not distribute or promote Ubuntu.
“Freedom of users is something else, and there isn’t a conflict between a user’s freedom and my request. If someone decides to install Ubuntu, I would consider it a mistake, but it’s his own choice to do it. What I ask is that you don’t participate, help or suggest that he do it. I didn’t request that you block him from doing so.
“As a matter of principle, I don’t believe anyone has a right, morally, to distribute proprietary software, that is, software that deprives the users of freedom. When the user controls his own software, he can install what he wants and no one can stop him. But today’s issue isn’t about him, what he does, but rather what you do with him.”
As Stallman sent his email only yesterday, it’s not yet known whether FLISOL has reconsidered promoting Ubuntu at its free software events.
These points might seem like splitting hairs, but apparently Richard Stallman – the author of the GNU General Public Licence (GPL), as well as the founder and president of the Free Software Foundation – is serious about them.
TSMC And Imagination Team Up
TSMC and Imagination Technologies announced the next step in their tech collaboration in an effort to develop Imagination’s next generation PowerVR 6-series GPUs.
The new GPUs are still not ready for prime time, but they should be used in future SoC designs, including those stamped out using TSMC’s 16nm FinFET process. The two companies will work to create new reference system designs, utilizing high bandwidth memory standards and TSMC’s 3D IC technology.
As GPU muscle becomes more important for next generation SoCs, designers need more advanced and more complex processes, such as TSMC’s 16FinFET.
“Through advanced projects initiated under this partnership, Imagination and TSMC are working together to showcase how SoCs will transform the future of mobile and embedded products,” said Hossein Yassaie, CEO of Imagination.
TSMC VP Cliff Hou argued that the need for high performance mobile GPUs will drive silicon processes in the future, much in the same way CPU development pushed new processes in the nineties.
Dual Core 35w Haswell Coming In Q3
We found out peculiar fact that some members of Intel’s M Processor line, 35W dual-core products, won’t get the Haswell upgrade until Q4 2013. Haswell starts in very late Q2 2013 and is still scheduled to launch in late May or early June, but most of the parts are aimed at the very expensive quad core MX line and MQ line edition parts.
When it comes to dual-core 35W Core i7 and Core i5 Haswell parts they won’t come at least until Q4 2013, at least this is the current part. Core i7 3540 launched in this quarter, Q1 2013, and it is a 3GHz dual-core with four threads and a top turbo frequency set at 3.7 GHz. It is a 35W, 22nm Ivy Bridge part with 4MB of cache memory. A replacement part might be on the way with a slightly higher clock in Q3 2013, but the Haswell based replacement is set for Q4 2013. With an official price of $348 it is not really the cheapest kid on the block.
Core i5 3380 remains the fastest dual-core 35W Pentium part until Q4 2013 Haswell reinforcement. The 2.7GHz / 3.4GHz turbo clocked dual-core will remain the fastest in this league at least until Q3 2013, when it might get slightly faster version of the Ivy Bridge based core, but it won’t be replaced by Haswell 35W dual-cores before Q4 2013.
Intel definitely wants to prioritize the quad-core 55W i7-3940XM $1096.00 replacement called Core i7 4930MX and Core i7-3840QM replacement in $568 market segment, branded as Core i7 4800 MQ, as it can simply make more money on these pricey these parts. These quad-core Haswell parts start selling in Q2 2013, followed by 17W Ultra low voltage dual-cores in Q3 2013 and only after these two lines rolls out, Intel will introduce the rest of the Haswell line-up.
Are CUDA Applications Limited?
Acceleware said at Nvidia’s GPU Technology Conference (GTC) today that most algorithms that run on GPGPUs are bound by GPU memory size.
Acceleware is partly funded by Nvidia to provide developer training for CUDA to help sell the language to those that are used to traditional C and C++ programming. The firm said that most CUDA algorithms are now limited by GPU local memory size rather than GPU computational performance.
Both AMD and Nvidia provide general purpose GPU (GPGPU) accelerator parts that provide significantly faster computational processing than traditional CPUs, however they have only between 6GB and 8GB of local memory that constrains the size of the dataset the GPU can process. While developers can push more data from system main memory, the latency cost negates the raw performance benefit of the GPU.
Kelly Goss, training program manager at Acceleware, said that “most algorithms are memory bound rather than GPU bound” and “maximising memory usage is key” to optimising GPGPU performance.
She further said that developers need to understand and take advantage of the memory hierarchy of Nvidia’s Kepler GPU and look at ways of reducing the number of memory accesses for every line of GPU computing.
The point Goss was making is that GPU computing is relatively cheap in terms of clock cycles relative to the time it takes to fetch data from local memory, let alone loading GPU memory from system main memory.
Goss, talking to a room full of developers, proceeded to outline some of the performance characteristics of the memory hierarchy in Nvidia’s Kepler GPU architecture, showing the level of detail that CUDA programmers need to pay attention to if they want to extract the full performance potential from Nvidia’s GPGPU computing architecture.
Given Goss’s observation that algorithms running on Nvidia’s GPGPUs are often constrained by local memory size rather than by the GPU itself, the firm might want to look at simplifying the tiers of memory involved and increasing the amount of GPU local memory so that CUDA software developers can process larger datasets.
Will Tegra 4 Help nVidia’s Financials?
Comments Off on Will Tegra 4 Help nVidia’s Financials?
Trefis analysts believe Nvidia’s Tegra business is likely to grow over the next few years, although Nvidia won’t become a mobile chip company anytime soon.
In a note published a couple of days ago, Trefis concluded that Nvidia has managed to offset the impact of the PC slump thanks to mobile revenue. The PC market took a massive hit in 2012, and although things are looking up, Tegra could still come in handy.
Nvidia currently earns about 18 percent of its revenue from Tegra processors, which is not bad for a product that was on the drawing board just a few years ago.
“We estimate Tegra sales to grow at a CAGR of 17% until 2016. While we believe that Nvidia will manage to expand its footprint in mobile computing, we think that the increasing competition will keep its growth rate lower than the industry average,” said Trefis.
However, Trefis went on to conclude that Nvidia had more lack with tablets than smartphones. Last year it scored several big tablet design wins, but relatively few phone wins. The Tegra 4i, with integrated LTE, should lend a helping hand, but it won’t be ready for much of 2013. In addition, Nvidia is facing more pressure from Qualcomm and Samsung, while at the same time it was forced to push back the introduction of Tegra 4 due to technical issues.
Trefis believes Tegra’s contribution to Nvidia’s overall revenue could reach over 25 percent by 2019, which means the Tegra business won’t expand much in a mature smartphone market.
Nvidia has Tegra, AMD has consoles, so both outfits have something to fall back on in a slow PC market, at least for the time being.
Is Apple Really Security Conscious?
Is Apple proving how clueless it is about security by backing a method of replacing passwords with fingerprint readers?
Just days after a scandal where a South American hospital was staffed by phantom doctors who used silicon fingers of their colleagues to convince administrators’ finger print readers that they were working, Apple has decided that they are the perfect form of security.
Word on the street is that Apple is said to be planning to introduce an iPhone that can be unlocked by the owner’s fingerprint. Speculation about Apple’s plans for fingerprint recognition began last summer when the iPhone maker bought bio-metric security firm AuthenTec for $335 million.
It is believed that the iPhone 5S will have a fingerprint chip under the Home button, to “improve security and usability.” Meanwhile in an engineering journal, two Google security experts outlined plans for an ID ring or smartphone chip that could replace online passwords, which is a lot sexier than fingerprint scanning.
AMD’s Richland Coming In June
Richland is set to replace AMD’s Virgo platform, powered by Trinity processors, and this change will happen in June 2013, most likely coinciding with Computex 2013.
AMD has just launched the first batch of Richland mobile APUs and we still have to see some notebook designs hitting the market. We wrote about mobile Richland APUs.
As of late last year Desktop Richland was always set to launch in June 2013 and the fastest of them is the A10 6800K, clocked at 4.1GHz and 4.4 with Turbo. It also features Radeon HD 8670D graphics that run at 844 MHz. This is the fastest Richland part and it comes unlocked, ready to replace the current AMD A10 5800K. In Europe, the A10 5800K currently sells for 112, while in US the same CPU sells for $129.00 (boxed).
The alpha dog A10 6800K is followed by A10 6700, A8 6600K (Unlocked) and A8 6500. AMD has a mix of 100W and 65W quad-core Richland desktop SKUs. There will be a single A6 6400K (Unlocked) SKU and the A4 6300, both dual-cores with 65W TDP.
Production ready samples were churned out in late January, while volume production is scheduled for late March 2013. The announcement was always scheduled for June 2013 and Richland last through most of 2013, until Kaveri with 28nm Steamroller comes on line.
3G And 4G Modems Pose Security Threats
Researchers Nikita Tarakanov and Oleg Kupreev analyzed the security of 3G/4G USB modems obtained from Russian operators for the past several months. Their findings were presented Thursday at the Black Hat Europe 2013 security conference in Amsterdam.
Most 3G/4G modems used in Russia, Europe, and probably elsewhere in the world, are made by Chinese hardware manufacturers Huawei and ZTE, and are branded with the mobile operators’ logos and trademarks, Tarakanov said. Because of this, even if the research was done primarily on Huawei modems from Russian operators, the results should be relevant in other parts of the world as well, he said.
Tarakanov said that they weren’t able to test baseband attacks against the Qualcomm chips found inside the modems because it’s illegal in Russia to operate your own GSM base station if you’re not an intelligence agency or a telecom operator. “We’ll probably have to move to another country for a few months to do it,” he said.
There’s still a lot to investigate in terms of the hardware’s security. For example, the SoC (system on a chip) used in many modems has Bluetooth capability that is disabled from the firmware, but it might be possible to enable it, the researcher said.
For now, the researchers tested the software preloaded on the modems and found multiple ways to attack it or to use it in attacks.
For one, it’s easy to make an image of the USB modem’s file system, modify it and write it on the modem again. There’s a tool available from Huawei to do modem backup and restore, but there are also free tools that support modems from other manufacturers, Tarakanov said.
Malware running on the computer could detect the model and version of the active 3G modem and could write an image with malicious customizations to it using such tools. That modem would then compromise any computer it’s used on.
The researchers also found a possible mass attack vector. Once installed on a computer, the modem application — at least the one from Huawei — checks periodically for updates from a single server, Tarakanov said. Software branded for a specific operator searchers for updates in a server directory specific to that operator.
An attacker who manages to compromise this update server, can launch mass attacks against users from many operators, Tarakanov said. Huawei 3G modems from several different Russian operators used the same server, but there might be other update servers for other countries, he said.
Research in this area is just at the beginning and there’s more to investigate, Tarakanov said. Someone has to do it because many new laptops come with 3G/4G modems directly built in and people should know if they’re a security threat.
Intel’s Pentium Getting Updated
Intel is going to update its desktop Pentium family with several slightly faster Ivy Bridge-based processors.
According to CPU World the chips should hit the shops in the second quarter of 2013 which is a quarter after January’s refresh of budget desktop families, and one quarter before the launch of Haswell. The new chips have the original titles of Pentium G2030, G2030T, G2120T and G2140. They will have two cores, but lack Hyper-Threading technology, and can run two threads before getting all confused.
Both the G2000 and G2100 series CPUs support only basic features, like Intel 64 and Virtualization. They do integrate HD graphics which are clocked at 650 MHz and dual-channel memory controller, that supports DDR3-1333 on the G2030 and the G2030T, and up to DDR3-1600 on the G2120T and the G2140.
Pentium G2030T and G2120T are low-power models, replacing G2020T and G2100T but are clocked 100 MHz higher, that is at 2.6GHz and 2.7GHz respectively. However they still fit into 35 Watt thermal envelope. Pentium G2030 and G2140 mainstream microprocessors will be faster than “T” SKUs, and they will have 57 per cent higher TDP. Intel expects these to replace the G2020 and G2130 SKUs. The G2030 will run at 3 GHz. The G2140 will operate at 3.3 GHz. No word on prices yet.
Ivy Bridge E Delayed Until Fall
y Bridge E, Intel’s ultra-high end chip that is set to replace the Core i7 3970X, has been delayed. It doesn’t look like it was anything major. Our sources tell us that the decision was made by Intel server guys who did not want to launch this chip in Q3 as originally indented.
Since Q3 starts in July, a relatively slow month for IT, the normal time to launch products is late August or September, but at this time there is no confirmation that this will happen at this time.
Sandy Bridge E, or Core i7 3960X, was launched in Q4 2011, November 14th to be precise. This can give you a clue on when to expect the successor.
Originally Ivy Bridge E was supposed to launch in Q3, one quarter after the launch of quad-core Desktop Haswell processors. Ivy Bridge E works in X79 motherboards but we do expect that a few key motherboard vendors will have their newer versions ready for the launch of the new $999 flagship processor.
If Intel continues at this pace, it will take quite a while before we see Haswell E in action.