AMD’s Richland Shows Up

Kaveri is coming in a few months, but before it ships AMD will apparently spice up the Richland line-up with a few low-power parts.

CPU World has come across an interesting listing, which points to two new 45W chips, the A8-6500T and the A10-6700T. Both are quads with 4MB of cache. The A8-6500T is clocked at 2.1GHz and can hit 3.1GHz on Turbo, while the A10-6700T’s base clock is 2.5GHz and it maxes out at 3500MHz.

The prices are $108 and $155 for the A8 and A10 respectively, which doesn’t sound too bad although they are still significantly pricier than regular FM2 parts.

Source

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.”

Source

FCC To Auction Spectrum

The U.S. Federal Communications Commission will sell 10 megahertz of spectrum in the 1900MHz band for commercial mobile services in an auction set to start on Jan. 14, the agency announced.

The agency on last  Friday set a minimum price for licenses in the so-called H block of $1.56 billion, with some of the money funding the First Responder Network Authority (FirstNet), a government board building a nationwide broadband network for public safety agencies.

The auction will help mobile providers address a predicted spectrum shortage, said Mignon Clyburn, the FCC’s acting chairwoman. The auction “will help close the spectrum gap as well as contributing to the goal of making mobile broadband available to our nation’s first responders,” she said in a statement.

Congress, in the Middle Class Tax Relief and Job Creation Act of 2012, required the FCC to license 65 megahertz of spectrum, including the 10 megahertz in the H block, by February 2015.

The FCC has considered auctioning the 1915-1920MHz and 1995-2000MHz spectrum in the past, but concerns about interference with a nearby PCS block kept the commission from moving forward. An FCC order adopted in June created technical rules to keep the H block from interfering with PCS signals.

Commissioner Ajit Pai praised Clyburn for scheduling the auction. The spectrum “will help deliver bandwidth-intensive mobile services and applications” over mobile networks, he said in a statement.

Source

Does The Cloud Need To Standardize?

Frank Baitman, the CIO of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), was at the Amazon Web Services conference  praising the company’s services. Baitman’s lecture was on the verge of becoming a long infomercial, when he stepped back and changed direction.

Baitman has reason to speak well of Amazon. As the big government system integrators slept, Amazon rushed in with its cloud model and began selling its services to federal agencies. HHS and Amazon worked together in a real sense.

The agency helped Amazon get an all-important security certification best known by its acronym, FedRAMP, while Amazon moved its health data to the cloud. It was the first large cloud vendor to get this security certification.

“[Amazon] gives us the scalability that we need for health data,” said Baitman.

But then he said that while it would “make things simpler and nicer” to work with Amazon, since they did the groundwork to get Amazon federal authorizations, “we also believe that there are different reasons to go with different vendors.”

Baitman said that HHS will be working with other vendors as it has with Amazon.

“We recognize different solutions are needed for different problems,” said Baitman. “Ultimately we would love to have a competitive environment that brings best value to the taxpayer and keeps vendors innovating.”

To accomplish this, HHS plans to implement a cloud broker model, an intermediary process that can help government entities identify the best cloud approach for a particular workload. That means being able to compare different price points, terms of service and service-level agreements.

To make comparisons possible, Baitman said the vendors will have to “standardize in those areas that we evaluate cloud on.”

The Amazon conference had about 2,500 registered to attend, and judging from the size of the crowd it certainly appeared to have that many at the Washington Convention Center. It was a leap in attendance. In 2012, attendance at Amazon’s government conference was about 900; in 2011, 300 attended; and in 2010, just 50, Teresa Carlson, vice president of worldwide public sector at Amazon, said in an interview.

Source

AMD’s Kaveri Coming In Q4

AMD really needs to make up its mind and figure out how it interprets its own roadmaps. A few weeks ago the company said desktop Kaveri parts should hit the channel in mid-February 2014. The original plan called for a launch in late 2013, but AMD insists the chip was not delayed.

Now though, it told Computerbase.de that the first desktop chips will indeed appear in late 2013 rather than 2014, while mobile chips will be showcased at CES 2014 and they will launch in late Q1 or early Q2 2014.

As we reported earlier, the first FM2+ boards are already showing up on the market, but at this point it’s hard to say when Kaveri desktop APUs will actually be available. The most logical explanation is that they will be announced sometime in Q4, with retail availability coming some two months later.

Kaveri is a much bigger deal than Richland, which was basically Trinity done right. Kaveri is based on new Steamroller cores, it packs GCN graphics and it’s a 28nm part. It is expected to deliver a significant IPC boost over Piledriver-based chips, but we don’t have any exact numbers to report.

Source

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.

Source

MIT Develops Inflatable Antenna

Satellites the size of shoe boxes, which are expected to one day allow researchers to explore space more efficiently, will soon have greater range.

MIT researchers have built and tested an inflatable antenna that can fold into such a satellite, then inflate in orbit to enable long range communications — from seven times the distance possible today.

The technology will let the small satellites, called CubeSats, move further into space and send valuable information to scientists back on earth.

“With this antenna, you could transmit from the moon, and even farther than that,” said Alessandra Babuscia, a researcher on the inflatable antenna team at MIT, in a statement. “This antenna is one of the cheapest and most economical solutions to the problem of communication. But all this research builds a set of options to allow the spacecraft … to fly in deep space.”

The MIT effort comes as engineers at the University of Michigan work on ways to propel such small spacecraft into interplanetary space. The team is building a plasma thruster that could fit in a 10-centimeter space and push a small satellite-bearing spacecraft into deep space.

The university researchers using superheated plasma that would push through a magnetic field to propel a CubeSat.

The MIT researchers are seeking to solve the communications problems and enable far-afield CubeSats to send data to and receive instructions from Earth.

The CubeSat devices cannot support radio dishes that are used today to let spacecraft communicate when far from Earth’s orbit.

The inflatable antennas significantly amplifies radio signals, allowing a CubeSat to transmit data back to Earth at a higher rate, according to the university.

MIT engineers have built two prototype antennae, each a meter wide, out of Mylar, which is a polyester film known for its strength and use as an electric insulator. One antenna was a cone shape, while the other looks more like a cylinder when inflated. Each fits into a 10-cubic-centimeter space within a CubeSat.

Each prototype contains a few grams of benzoic acid, which can be converted to a gas to inflate the antenna, MIT noted.

In testing, the cylindrical antenna performed “slightly better” than the cone shaped device, transmitting data 10 times faster, and seven times farther than existing CubeSat antennae.

Source

Dell Bets On Windows 8

Demand for Windows 8 may be still somewhat lukewarm, but Dell is maintaining its stance that it is the best operating system for business tablets and plans to roll out more Windows 8-based products later this year, according to a senior executive at the computer maker.

“Our Windows tablets are more secure and easier to manage than Android-based products and iOS-based products [because Windows is] on our tablets,” said Jeff Clarke, vice chairman and president of global operations at Dell. “And we are not going to change that.”

Windows-based devices accounted for just 4.5% of tablet sales in this year’s second quarter, according to research firm IDC. In comparison, Android-based devices had 62.6% of the tablet market and Apple’s iPad had 32.5%.

The slow adoption of Windows 8 tablets is partly due to their high prices, and to the operating system’s lack of mobile apps, analysts say. Windows 8 has also received mixed reviews, with some people citing its lack of a Start button in the desktop mode as a major problem.

But Dell expects demand for Windows 8 devices to pick up with the availability of Windows 8.1, which Microsoft will release in October.

Source

Cyber Attacks Increasing In Middle East

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.”

Source

HTC Exec Leaks Trade Secrets

Three HTC Corp design executives were arrested on suspicion of illegally sharing trade secrets, sending the Taiwanese smartphone maker’s shares tumbling as its troubles deepened amid a wave of senior staff departures and disappointing sales.

Taipei prosecutors confirmed that HTC vice president of product design Thomas Chien, research and development director Wu Chien-Hung and senior manager of design and innovation Justin Huang were arrested on Friday.

Chien and Chien-Hung remain in custody, while Huang was released on bail, prosecutors office spokesman Mou Hsin Huang said.

The executives were also accused of making false commission fee claims totaling around T$10 million ($334,200). No further details about the allegations were immediately available.

The arrests came in response to a complaint filed by HTC last month accusing the executives of leaking trade secrets.

HTC declined to comment except to say the investigation had no impact on its operations. Chien and Chien-Hung could not be reached and Huang was not immediately available to comment.

Media reports citing the police said the executives were planning to use stolen new interface technology to set up a new mobile design company aiming at Chinese vendors.

Rocked by internal feuding and executive exits, and positioned at the high end of a smartphone market that is close to saturation, HTC has seen its market share slump to below 5 percent from around a quarter five years ago.

Source

« Previous Page — Next Page »