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.

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Are CCTV Cameras Hackable?

When the nosy British bought CCTV cameras, worried citizens were told that they could not be hacked.

Now a US security expert says he has identified ways to remotely attack high-end surveillance cameras used by industrial plants, prisons, banks and the military. Craig Heffner, said he discovered the previously unreported bugs in digital video surveillance equipment from firms including Cisco, D-Link and TRENDnet.

They could use it as a pivot point, an initial foothold, to get into the network and start attacking internal systems. Heffner said that it was a significant threat as somebody could potentially access a camera and view it. Or they could also use it as a pivot point, an initial foothold, to get into the network and start attacking internal systems.

He will show how to exploit these bugs at the Black Hat hacking conference, which starts on July 31 in Las Vegas. Heffner said he has discovered hundreds of thousands of surveillance cameras that can be accessed via the public internet.

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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.

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nVidia’s CUDA 5.5 Available

Nvidia has made its CUDA 5.5 release candidate supporting ARM based processors available for download.

Nvidia has been aggressively pushing its CUDA programming language as a way for developers to exploit the floating point performance of its GPUs. Now the firm has announced the availability of a CUDA 5.5 release candidate, the first version of the language that supports ARM based processors.

Aside from ARM support, Nvidia has improved supported Hyper-Q support and now allows developers to have MPI workload prioritisation. The firm also touted improved performance analysis and improved performance for cross-compilation on x86 processors.

Ian Buck, GM of GPU Computing Software at Nvidia said, “Since developers started using CUDA in 2006, successive generations of better, exponentially faster CUDA GPUs have dramatically boosted the performance of applications on x86-based systems. With support for ARM, the new CUDA release gives developers tremendous flexibility to quickly and easily add GPU acceleration to applications on the broadest range of next-generation HPC platforms.”

Nvidia’s support for ARM processors in CUDA 5.5 is an indication that it will release CUDA enabled Tegra processors in the near future. However outside of the firm’s own Tegra processors, CUDA support is largely useless, as almost all other chip designers have chosen OpenCL as the programming language for their GPUs.

Nvidia did not say when it will release CUDA 5.5, but in the meantime the firm’s release candidate supports Windows, Mac OS X and just about every major Linux distribution.

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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.

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Intel Shows More Ivy Bridge

Last week Intel officially released Haswell, but there’s still life in good old Ivy Bridge. The chipmaker has announced a range of low-end Ivy parts and even a Sandy Bridge based Celeron.

The Celeron G470 is possibly the last consumer Sandy Bridge we will ever see. It is a single-core 35W part clocked at 2GHz and it’s priced at just $37.

However, Ivy Bridge parts are a bit more interesting. They include the Celeron 1017, a dual-core, dua-thread chip clocked at 1.6GHz, with a TDP of just 17W. It costs $86 and should be a nice part for low-end laptops and nettops. The Celeron 1005M also costs $86, but it has a 35W TDP and a 1.9GHz clock.

There are four new G2000 Pentiums as well. The G2140 and G2030 are 55W parts, clocked at 3GHz and 3.3GHz respectively. The G2120T and G2030T are 35W chips, clocked at 2.6GHz and 2.7GHz. They cost $64 and $75 respectively. Of course, Pentiums don’t feature Hyperthreading and all four of them are dual-core parts.

The Core i3 line-up also got some speed bumps. The Core i3-3245 and 3250 are clocked at 3.4 and 3.5GHz and both have a TDP of 55W. The 3245 features HD 4000 graphics and costs $134, while the 3250 ends up with HD 2500 graphics and a price tag of $138. Lastly, the Core i3-3250T is a 3GHz part with a 35W TDP, it costs $138, just like its 55W sibling.

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McAffee See Sure In Spam

The first three months of 2013 have seen a surge in spam volume, as well as a growing number of samples of the Koobface social networking worm and master boot record (MBR) infecting malware, according to antivirus vendor McAfee.

After remaining relatively stable throughout 2012, spam levels rose during the first quarter of 2013, reaching the highest volume seen in the past two years, McAfee said in a report released Monday.

The amount of spam originating from some countries rose dramatically, McAfee said. Spam from Belarus increased by 540% while spam originating in Kazakhstan grew 150%.

Cutwail, also known as Pushdo, was the most prevalent spam-sending botnet during the first quarter, McAfee said.

The increased Pushdo activity has recently been observed by other security companies as well. Last month, researchers from security firm Damballa found a new variant of the Pushdo malware that’s more resilient to coordinated takedown efforts.

On the malware front, McAfee has also seen a surge in the number of Koobface samples, which reached previously unseen levels during the first quarter of 2013. First discovered in 2008, Koobface is a worm that spreads via social networking sites, especially through Facebook, by hijacking user accounts.

The number of malware samples designed to infect a computer’s master boot record (MBR) also reached a record high during the first three months of 2013, after increasing during the last quarter of 2012 as well, McAfee said.

The MBR is a special section on a hard disk drive that contains information about its partitions and is used during the system startup operation. “Compromising the MBR offers an attacker a wide variety of control, persistence, and deep penetration,” the McAfee researchers said in the report.

The MBR attacks seen during the first quarter involved malware like StealthMBR, also known as Mebroot; Tidserv, also known as Alureon, TDSS and TDL; Cidox and Shamoon, they said.

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Does Haswell Need A Separate GPU?

Nvidia actually has a person with the catchy title of Chief Blogger and this person managed to get “an interview” with Rene Haas a VP and GM of computing products that currently takes care of Geforce mobile among other things.

Rene was asked to explain “why Gamers still need a discrete GPU with Haswell” and the answer is as logical as why do you use a seatbelt. Rene expects that Intel will continue to suck in graphics (our words not his ed.) and that that most popular games won’t play well on Haswell at standard resolution.

It seems that history really does repeat itself, as Intel had big claims for both Ivy Bridge and Sandy Bridge had been struggling to run new games of their time. Any serious gamers know that the answer is a proper discrete GPU. Haswell won’t change that, claims Rene.

It looks like Nvidia will have at least as many design wins as with Ivy Bridge, and Ivy Bridge was the record number or design wins for Nvidia. Rene claims that with this refresh Nvidia will have as much as 95 per cent of the gaming notebook which is nothing short of spectacular.

Rene also attacks Intel boldly claiming that “Their (Intel) comparison is misleading on a number of fronts.” Commenting the fact that Intel claims that GT3e will be faster than Geforce GT 650M. Intel based its claims on synthetic benchmarks, something that can be optimised, while Nvidia prefers real games, and even if GT3 wins again Geforce GT650, the new Geforce GT 750 is much faster than its predecessor and will have double the performance of GT3e in games.

Rene reminds us that GT3e is only available in top quad core mobile cores such as Core i7 4880QM that usually find their place in $3,000 notebooks. Rene tells customers that getting a Core i5 of Core i3 notebook with a better discrete GPU is the right way to get better gaming performance, although the vast majority of consumers already know that.

We remember that the last time we sat down with Rene, he said that when Intel gets faster with Integrated, Nvidia will simply gets even better with its corresponding low-end products and offers something faster. The cat and mouse game never ends.

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Intel Releases More Celeron CPUs

Intel added three curious ultra-low voltage chips to its official price list and their official designations is strange.

All three are 22nm parts and their product numbers are N2805, N2810 and N2910, which seems to indicate that they are Atoms, but they are listed in the ULV Celeron M section, reports CPU World. The top SKU features four cores with no hyperthreading, which means that it is probably based on the new Valley View M core.

The N2805 is a dual-core clocked at 1.46GHz, with a single megabyte of cache. The N2810 is also a dual-core, but it’s clocked at 2GHz, while the N2910 is the previously mentioned quad-core, with 2MB of cache and a clock speed of 1.6GHz. All of them are priced at $132, which sounds like way too much for Atom branded parts.

With Temash and Kabini just around the corner, Intel needs to step up its game in the low-end low-voltage market fast, but at this point it seems that AMD be the first to market and it will enjoy at least a few months on top. Even when Intel launches its first 22nm Atoms, it won’t have an easy time matching AMD’s price or performance.

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Is This A Mobile First World?

Judging from the number of people engrossed in activities with their smartphones on the sidewalk, in their cars and in public places, mobile seems to have stolen our attention away from the wired Internet and traditional TV.

However, there is a ways to go before mobile platforms become the primary place where consumers turn for entertainment and getting things done, players at  CTIA Wireless trade show said.

Nokia Siemens Networks announced new capabilities in its network software to make video streams run more smoothly over mobile networks. Among other things, the enhancements can reduce video stalling by 90 percent, according to the company. But even Sandro Tavares, head of marketing for NSN’s Mobile Core business, sees “mobile-first” viewing habits as part of the future.

“Now that the networks are providing a better capacity, a better experience with mobile broadband, mobile-first will come,” Tavares said. “Because the experiences they have with the devices are so good, these devices … start to be their preferred screen, their first screen.

“This is a trend, and this is something that will not change,” Tavares said. But he thinks it’s too early to build networks assuming consumers will turn to tablets and phones as their primary sources of entertainment. “Do you have to be prepared for mobile-first now? Probably not. You have to be able to keep the pace.”

For AT&T, mobile-first is a top priority for its own internal apps, ensuring employees can do their jobs wherever they are, said Kris Rinne, the carrier’s senior vice president of network technologies. But to make it possible over the network, a range of new technologies and relationships may have to come together, she said.

For example, giving the best possible performance for streaming video and other uses of mobile may require steering traffic to the right network if both cellular and Wi-Fi are available. AT&T is developing an “intelligent network selection” capability to do this, Rinne said. When AT&T starts to deliver voice over LTE, it will stay on the cellular network — at least in the early days — because the carrier has more control over quality of service on that system, she said.

Other issues raised by mobile-first include security of packets going over the air and rights for content that subscribers are consuming primarily on mobile devices instead of through TV and other traditional channels, Rinne said.

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