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Intel Goes AI
Intel has written a check for the Spanish artificial intelligence technology startup Indisys.
The outfit focuses on natural language recognition and the deal is worth $26 million. It follows Intel’s recent acquisition of Omek, an Israeli startup with specialties in gesture-based interfaces. Indisys employees have joined Intel already. Apparently the deal was signed on May 31 and the deal has been completed.
Intel would not confirm how they are using the tech: “Indisys has a deep background in computational linguistics, artificial intelligence, cognitive science, and machine learning. We are not disclosing any details about how Intel might use the Indisys technologies at this time.”
Are More Firms Moving To Tegra 4?
A curious rumor is coming out of Taiwan this morning. Nvidia is reportedly seeing more Tegra 4 orders, boosted by the Xiaomi Mi3 smartphone, Surface RT 2 and new tablets from Asus, Toshiba and HP. The source is Digitimes, or its moles in the “upstream supply chain” to be specific. Specific is not the word usually associated with such sources and we have no specific numbers to report.
However, while Nvidia is seeing a bit more interest for Tegra 4 it simply has no high-volume design wins and shipments will remain low until it is eventually phased out in favour of the Tegra 5. We wrote about Nvidia’s Tegra 4 volume woes last month, here.
The Tegra 4 still has just a handful of design wins and the fact that most of them are high-end tablets is not encouraging at all. Not much has changed since our previous report, although Nvidia did manage to land a single smartphone design win, albeit not a major one.
We still believe Tegra 4 shipments will be modest at best and new Android tablet design wins will not help much. Neither will the Shield and Tegra Note tablets.
Cyber Attacks Increasing In Middle East
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Syria’s civil war and political strife in Egypt have given birth to new battlegrounds on the Web and driven a surge in cyber attacks in the Middle East, according to a leading Internet security company.
More than half of incidents in the Gulf this year were so-called “hacktivist” attacks – which account for only a quarter of cybercrime globally – as politically motivated programmers sabotaged opposing groups or institutions, executives from Intel Corp’s software security division McAfee said on Tuesday.
“It’s mostly bringing down websites and defacing them with political messages – there has been a huge increase in cyber attacks in the Middle East,” Christiaan Beek, McAfee director for incident response forensics in Europe, Middle East and Africa (EMEA), told Reuters.
He attributed the attacks to the conflict in Syria, political turmoil in Egypt and the activities of hacking collective Anonymous.
“It’s difficult for people to protest in the street in the Middle East and so defacing websites and denial of service (DOS) attacks are a way to protest instead,” said Beek.
DOS attacks flood an organization’s website causing it to crash, but usually do little lasting damage.
The Syrian Electronic Army (SEA), a hacking group loyal to the government of President Bashar al-Assad, defaced an Internet recruiting site for the U.S. Marine Corps on Monday and recently targeted the New York Times website and Twitter, as well other websites within the Middle East.
Beek described SEA as similar to Anonymous.
“There’s a group leading operations, with a support group of other people that can help,” said Beek.
McAfee opened a centre in Dubai on Monday to deal with the rising threat of Internet sabotage in the region, the most serious of which are attacks to extract proprietary information from companies or governments or those that cause lasting damage to critical infrastructure.
Cyber attacks are mostly focused on Saudi Arabia, the world’s largest oil exporter, Qatar, the top liquefied natural gas supplier, and Dubai, which is the region’s financial, commercial and aviation hub, said Gert-Jan Schenk, McAfee president for EMEA.
“It’s where the wealth and critical infrastructure is concentrated,” he said.
The “Shamoon” virus last year targeted Saudi Aramco, the world’s largest oil company, damaging about 30,000 computers in what may have been the most destructive attack against the private sector.
“Ten years ago, it was all about trying to infect as many people as possible,” added Schenk. “Today we see more and more attacks being focused on very small groups of people. Sometimes malware is developed for a specific department in a specific company.”
Will The Tegra Processor Pay Off?
Last year Nvidia’s Tegra gamble seemed to be paying off nicely, but the insanely competitive SoC market moves fast and all it takes for things to go badly wrong is one botched generation. The Tegra 4 was late to the party and Nvidia eventually ended up with a big and relatively powerful chip that nobody wanted.
In its latest earnings call Nvidia made it clear that revenues from Tegra are expected to decline $200 to $300 million this year from about $750 million last year. Even this seems like a relatively optimistic forecast. Tegra 3 ended up in quite a few high-volume products, such as the Nexus 7, HTC One X, LG Optimus X4 and a bunch of other phones and tablets. On paper, Tegra 4 will end up with a similar number of design wins, maybe even more, but nearly all of them are low-volume products.
At the moment there are only a handful of Tegra 4 products out there. These include HP’s Slatebook 10, Toshiba eXcite Pro and eXcite Write tablets and Nvidia’s own Shield console. Nvidia’s 7-inch Tegra Tab is also on the way, along with the Surface RT 2. Some Chinese vendors like ZTE are also expected to roll out a Tegra 4 phone here and there, but the chip won’t end up in any big brand phones.
Nvidia does not release any Tegra unit shipment info, so we can only guess how many Tegra 3 and Tegra 4 chips are out there, but it doesn’t take much to realise Tegra 4 is a flop. Shipments of the original Nexus 7, powered by the Tegra 3, are estimated just north of six million units. Surface RT shipments were abysmal. Earlier this year analysts put the figure at just 900,000 units after a full quarter of sales. Microsoft eventually took a massive write-down on its Surface RT stock. LG and HTC didn’t reveal any shipment figures for the Optimus 4X and HTC One X, either. HTC shipped about 40 million phones last year, while LG managed about 27 million. We can’t even begin to estimate how many of them were flagship products powered by Tegra, but the number was clearly in the millions.
This time around Nvidia can’t count on strong smartphone sales, let alone the Nexus 7 and Surface RT. Even if it scores high-end tablet design wins, the truth is that high-end Android tablets just aren’t selling well. Nvidia needed high-volume design wins and Android tablets just won’t do the trick. Qualcomm is in the new Nexus 7 and the HTC One. Back in May analysts reported that HTC One sales hit the 5 million mark in the first two months of sales, although shipments have slowed down since then. Millions of Snapdragons found a home in the HTC One and millions more will end up in the new Nexus 7.
Nvidia’s talk of a $200 to $300 million hit this year doesn’t exactly paint the full picture. Tegra 3 shipments in the first two quarters of 2013 were modest, but relatively good. However, nothing took its place and the true extent of the Tegra 4 flop will only become visible in the first quarter of 2014 and beyond. The big hope is that the Tegra 4i and Tegra 5 will start to come online by then, so the numbers for the full year won’t be as terrible, but it is abundantly clear that Nvidia cannot afford another Tegra 4.
As for Nvidia’s Tegra Tab and Shield, they might do well. Nvidia knows a thing or two about hardware, but even if they prove successful, they just won’t be enough, at least not in this cycle.
Microsoft Slashes Surface Pro
Microsoft on slashed the price of its Surface Pro tablet by $100, or between 10% and 11%, dropping the 64GB model to $799 and the 128GB to $899.
The cuts came three weeks after much more dramatic discounts to Microsoft’s Surface RT, which was reduced by up to 30% to prices starting at $349.
Microsoft said that the price cuts would be valid in the U.S. and Canada until August 30, or while supplies last. Discounts were also offered to customers in China, Hong Kong and Taiwan.
U.S. electronics retailer Best Buy — a key Microsoft partner — also was selling the Surface Pro tablets at the lower prices Sunday, as was Staples.
The Surface Pro tablets rely on Windows 8 Pro and Intel processors, rather than the stripped-down Windows RT and lower-powered ARM processors of the Surface RT devices. Surface Pro tablets can run traditional Windows software like the full-featured Office 2013 productivity suite.
While the price cuts were reminiscent of the more aggressive Surface RT discounts, their much smaller size could simply be part of Microsoft’s back-to-school marketing: August is the biggest month for that selling season, which is second only to the end-of-the-year holidays for retailers pushing consumer electronics, personal computers and tablets.
Microsoft is expected to refresh its Surface tablet lines this fall, a notion reinforced by company executives, who have repeatedly pledged that the company is in the tablet business for the long haul. The Surface Pro discounts could be part of the usual push to empty inventory prior to the launch of new models.
The 10% to 11% price cuts were also in line with other hardware makers’ recent discounting. Last month, Best Buy ran a short-term deal that chopped prices of the MacBook Pro by as much as 17%, and for college students, up to 25%.
Is nVidia Working On A Tablet?
August 12, 2013 by admin
Filed under Around The Net
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According to a report over at Tabtech.de that managed to spot an unknown device in the result page of the GFXBench, Nvidia might be gearing up to release a phablet or tablet.
The device is listed as Nvidia Tegra Note Premium and scores just slightly lower than the Nvidia Shield in GFXBench. It feature Tegra 4 clocked at 1.8GHz and has a resolution of 1280×800 which probably points out to a tablet rather than phablet but everything is possible. It was running Android 4.2.2 Jelly Bean when it was tested.
At Computex 2013 back in June, Nvidia showcased a rather unique device that was used to demonstrate pressure-sensitive functions of a stylus and which might be the device that showed up in the GFXBench results. The 1280×800 resolution is not impressive and far off from what the competition currently has to offer, but then again Nvidia might want a cheaper tablet or phablet on the market.
In any case we will surely keep an eye out for Nvidia’s Tegra Note Premium, whatever it turns out to be.
Intel Launches 530 Series SSD
Intel’s new SSD 530 series was detailed a while ago, but now it is finally official. Intel has formally announced the new drives in three form factors: mSATA, M.2 and 2.5-inch.
The drives will be available in a wide range of capacities, starting at 80GB, through 120GB, 180GB, 240GB, 360GB and 480GB for 2.5-inch drives. As for M.2 and mSATA drives, they will be available in 80GB, 120GB, 180GB and 360GB capacities.
Intel’s new 530 drives are based on 20nm MLC flash and the brains behind the brawn come from LSI, in the form of the SandForce SF-2281 controller. Although transfer speeds will vary depending on capacity, the fastest 530-series drives will deliver read speeds of up to 540MB/s and write at 490MB/s. As for random performance, they boast 41k IOPS in random read and 80k IOPS in random write.
Intel also says the 530-series is its most power efficient storage product to date, which is hardly surprising, but it is good news for notebook vendors who will use mSATA units.
Intel Invests In Tablet Business
Intel has invested in E La Carte, a firm that designs tablets for restaurants.
Intel Capital, the chipmaker’s investment arm, has bought into in all sorts of companies outside of semiconductors in a bid to diversify the firm’s income. Now the chipmaker has invested in E La Carte, a firm that designs tablets for use in restaurants.
E La Carte raised a total of $13.5m in second round funding for its niche tablet business, with Intel Capital leading the investment. The firm said it would use the capital injection to grow the firm and to try to increase the number of restaurants that use its tablets.
Christine Herron, director of Intel Capital said, “E La Carte offers the most innovative and reliable guest tablet solution in the industry. We’re thrilled to further accelerate the company’s growth with not only capital, but also our significant resources and expertise in manufacturing, operations, and media.
“As E La Carte transforms the dining experience, we are creating a new market for both restaurant and guest services.”
E La Carte claims to have sold thousands of tablets to restaurants and cites a month on month growth rate of 35 percent. For Intel it is one way of getting a foothold in the tablet market, even if its Clovertrail+ tablets have yet to take the market by storm.
Rajat Suri, CEO of E La Carte said, “We are excited to work with Intel to grow our footprint to more restaurants across the country. With more than 200,000 casual-dining restaurants in the US, we see an enormous opportunity to make full service and fast casual restaurant experiences more enjoyable for guests, and more profitable for restaurant operators.”
Aside from the cash, Intel Capital will also provide advice in manufacturing, operations and media to E La Carte, presumably with the hope of taking the firm public in the future.
Intel Releases 16GB Xeon Phi
Intel has announced five Xeon Phi accelerators including a high density add-in card while upping memory capacity to 16GB.
Intel has managed to get its Xeon Phi accelerator cards to power the Tianhe-2 cluster to the summit of the Top 500 list, however the firm isn’t waiting around to bring out new products. At the International Supercomputing show, Intel extended its Xeon Phi range with five new products, all of which have more than one TFLOPS double precision floating point performance, and the Xeon Phi 7120P and 7120X cards, which have 16GB of GDDR5 memory.
Intel’s Xeon Phi 7120P and 7120X cards have peak double precision floating point performance of over 1.2 TFLOPS, with 352GB/s bandwidth to the 16GB of GDDR5 memory. The firm also updated its more modest Xeon Phi 3100 series with the 3120P and 3120A cards, both with more than one TFLOPS of double precision floating point performance and 6GB of GDDR5 memory with bandwidth of 240GB/s.
Intel has also brought out the Xeon Phi 5120D, a high density card that uses mini PCI-Express slots. The firm said that the Xeon Phi 5120D card offers double precision floating point performance of more than one TFLOPS and 8GB of GDDR5 memory with bandwidth greater than 300GB/s.
That Intel is concentrating on double precision floating point performance with its Xeon Phi accelerators highlights the firm’s focus on research rather than graphics rendering or workstation tasks. However the firm’s ability to pack 16GB into its Xeon Phi 7100 series cards is arguably the most important development, as larger locally addressable memory means higher resolution simulations.
Intel clearly seems to believe that there is significant money to be made in the high performance PC market, and despite early reservations from industry observers the firm seems to be ramping up its Xeon Phi range at a rate that will start to give rival GPGPU accelerator designer Nvidia cause for concern.
Haswell Refresh Coming Next Year
Intel has been executing its tick tock strategy flawlessly since January 2006 and now there is some indication that we might see the first slip in 8 years come 2014. Intel’s latest roadmap claims that in 12 months from now, in Q2 2014 Haswell will be replaced by a “Haswell refresh”.
Haswell is a tock, a 22nm new architecture and Broadwell is supposed to be based on Haswell fundamentals, but shrunk to 14nm like a proper “tock”. In case that the Haswell refresh is a tweaked 22nm core, this would mean that after 7 years of execution and billions of investments in cutting edge fabrication processes, Intel would have to slow things down.
It is not certain what would happen to 2015 Skylake, a new 14nm architecture, or the 10nm Skymont that is supposed to be the shrink, but in case Broadwell gets pushed back by a year there is a big possibility that the whole roadmap would slip a year.
When it gets ready the Haswell refresh (possibly a disguise name for Broadwell ed.) is replacing Core i7, Core i5, Core i3, Pentium and Celeron based Haswell chips, some sooner rather than later.
The chipset responsible for Haswell refresh is already branded as Z97 and H97 in desktop versions replacing the Z87 and H87 boards proving that the socket are likely to continue existing at least through 2014. It will be interesting to see the developments and if Broadwell is really delayed or this is just game of words on Intel’s part.