Tag: chip

Oracle dumps Solaris 12 for a cloudy future

oracle_sparc_solaris_roadmapIt would appear that Donald (Prince of Orange) Trump’s favourite database maker has dumped Solaris 12 from its roadmap as part of its cloud initiatives.

Oracle published a new roadmap and Solaris 12 is absent. A new blueprint dated January 13, 2017 expunges any mention Solaris 12 in the places where Oracle had included it in the 2014 edition. There is a mention of “Solaris 11.next” as due to debut during this year or the next complete with “Cloud Deployment & Integration Enhancements”.

You can’t find any mention of “Solaris 11.next” anywhere on the worldwide wibble.

Oracle does mention SPARC Next appearing this year in 2020 SPARC Next+. It also hints of plans to launch SPARC infrastructure-as-a-service, probably under the brand “@Customer” with services in “Dedicated Metered & Non-Metered” form.

It appears that there will not be a full new version of SPARC but the existing flavour will be enhanced and will be supported for many years to come.

While it is not the end of Solaris which some have predicted, it does seem to indicate that Oracle has not much will to push through a full version.

MediaTek wants to sort out China rules

mediatek-generic-chipMediaTek has slammed Taiwan’s rules regarding its domestic semiconductor companies investing and merging overseas, particularly in mainland China,.

MediaTek chief executive MK Tsai said the rules are too strict and should be reconsidered.

He said that Taiwan risks falling behind in the global race to develop the best chips if it does not invest more overseas to recruit talent and access large markets like China’s.

Rivals like Qualcomm and Intel have ploughed billions into China, Tsai said, but Taiwan’s rules prohibiting the export of advanced chip technology to the mainland risked its business prospects there.

“China is such a huge market … if everyone else is going and you have to stay on the sidelines, you’re in a weaker position,” Tsai said.

Taiwanese regulations prohibit chip design firms like MediaTek from investing any funds in China for research and development purposes, let alone for mergers and acquisitions, according to the company.

Tsai moaned about Taiwan’s “passive” stance amid a recent wave of mergers in the chip world.

“You have to keep up with the technological advancements or you’ll become irrelevant,” he said.

MediaTek-designed chips are doing well among Chinese phone vendors like Xiaomi.

Unlike chip design, investment in chip manufacturing in China is allowed, though heavily regulated..

Skylake desktop launch set for August

IMG0045566The dark satanic rumour mill has manufactured a hell on earth yarn claiming that that the silicon monster Intel is about to drop a clutch of Skylake desktop chips in August.

The rumour is based on the idea that every year Intel holds its Developers Forum in Mid-September but for reasons known only to the Gods has decided to change the date to Mid-August.

Fudzilla is certain that Intel plans to launch the desktop Skylake-S between August and October, while the production of dual-core and quad-core Skylake parts will start between June and July.

Skylake-S will launch as an unlocked desktop processor that will have TDPs from 65W to 95 W, but there will also be some 35W parts for All-in-One computers coming time (presumably in time fo Apple’s new iMacs).

For Fudz’ prediction to work, Broadwell 65W parts will have to be here in June and be announced at Computex. This will mean that the top Core i7 5775R SKU has a base clock of 3.3GHz, with a max turbo frequency of 3.8GHz, 6MB of cache, DDR3L 1600 MHz support and Iris PRO 6200 graphics.

Intel’s current Core i7 4790K is based on Haswell refresh core and it works at 4GHz and am 8MB cache, as well as Intel HD Graphics 4600. The Core i7 4790K has a TDP of 88W which is significantly more than 65W.

For Intel to make much impact with Skylight it will have to launch a Core i7 5770K variant that will works faster than the Core i7 4790K.

It also seems that Intel will go back on its word and bring in a new socket set based around 1364 pins. Intel was fond of saying that that Skylake will use the same LGA 1150 socket and this has lead some to suspect that there will be a socket 1150 version and an LGA 1364 version of the Skylake-S.

Car industry can’t do computer security

jalopyWhile every tech company and its dog is trying to slam their technology into cars, it is starting to look like the automotive industry can’t cope with the need for security.

A Dallas law firm has filed a lawsuit against three major automakers claiming they have failed to take basic measures to secure their vehicles from hackers.

The lawsuit, filed in the US District Court for the Northern District of California by attorney Marc Stanley, is on behalf of three vehicle owners and “all others similarly situated”. It alleges that the cars are open to hackers who can take control of basic functions and endanger the safety of the driver and passengers.

“Toyota, Ford and GM have deliberately hidden the dangers associated with car computer systems, misleading consumers,” Stanley said in a statement.

But the case is bringing to light problems which may bedevil the car industry in the future. After all if they are having problems with the security on cars now, how are they going to manage when autodriven vehicles are in charge.

Modern cars and light trucks contain less than 50 separate electronic control units (ECUs) — small computers connected through a controller area network (CAN) or other network such as Local Interconnect Networks or Flexray.

New high tech cars will contain shedloads of them, and if hacked could be driven by hackers into walls or other cars.

The court case claims that the car companies are also habitually secretive about these sorts of problems – something that does not bode well if you are sitting in the back of a self drive taxi.

“Disturbingly, as defendants have known, their CAN bus-equipped vehicles for years have been (and currently are) susceptible to hacking, and their ECUs cannot detect and stop hacker attacks on the CAN buses. For this reason, defendants’ vehicles are not secure, and are therefore not safe,” the lawsuit states.

Last year, at the Black Hat security conference in Las Vegas, two industry experts released a 92-page report revealing “the 20 most hackable cars.”

DARPA reported that the defect represents a “real threat to the physical well-being of drivers and passengers.” Before releasing its study, DARPA shared its finding with car manufacturers so they could address the vulnerabilities, “but they did nothing,” the lawsuit states.

Nvidia adds a new Agent of Shield

Agents of SHIELD returnsNvidia might not have had many nibbles for its Shield concept, but today it released a TV console to the range for lots of people to ignore.

In this case it has released an Android-based living room device capable of 4K playback and capture.

During its Game Developers Conference 2015 press event, Nvidia CEO Jen-Hsun Huang insisted that the world wanted an Android based console TV.

“First, it’s based on the most popular OS in the world. Second, the richness of the Google Play store, with it huge range of applications,” Nvidia CEO Jen-Hsun Huang said. “Third, it syncs with all my other devices. Finally, it has an incredible voice search capability,” he said.

He claimed it was the the “world’s irst Android 4K TV” and it could receive and capture 4K at up to 60 fps video “very soon.” The living room entertainment device also packs Android TV functionality so users can access a library of movies, TV and more.

Nvidia Shield is part of the GPU makers cunning plan to make gear away from its traditional markets.

The Nvidia Shield can run both local, and streamed games via its Nvidia Grid subscription based game streaming service, up to 1080p at 60fps. The gaming-centric device will launch with more than 50 games on the Grid store.

The set-top box and console hybrid is based around a Tegra X1 processor, with a 256-bit Maxwell GPU with 3GB of memory. Its body features a MicroSD slot, a Micro USB 2.0 port, two USB Type-A 3.0 ports, gigabit Ethernet port, and HDMI port.

The device will ship bundled with the Shield Controller for USD$199.

AMD claims impressive power savings for Carrizo

AMD-Technician-Poses-With-Chip-WaferAMD has been talking up its upcoming Carrizo chip for notebooks and low-power desktops claiming that it will cut power significantly over Kaveri.

Although AMD still is not saying what the actual power consumption or the performance of the Carrizo chip will be it hinted that will offer double-digit improvements in performance and battery life compared to Kaveri.

Since AMD positioned it as competitive to Intel’s midrange Core i5 chips in January 2014 it is likely that Carrizo will be heading towards the same place.

This has led some people to suggest that AMD is skipping on performance improvements to improve battery life – which is a good way to reduce battery consumption without having to make many changes.

Sam Naffziger, an AMD fellow claimed AMD was just as concerned with performance, it was just that it was more interested in performance per watt. “But most of the form factors that are in the market today are power constrained.”

AMD is expected to release a Carrizo paper to International Solid-State Circuits Conference in San Francisco this week.

AMD’s Carrizo APU is made up of an undisclosed number of “Excavator” CPU cores and eight AMD Radeon cores that serve as an integrated graphics chip.

It measures 250.04 square mm. AMD said and the Excavator cores execute five percent more instructions per clock than  Kaveri, consuming 40 percent less power across 23 percent less die area—3.1 billion transistors in all.

Most of Carrizo’s power savings are due to optimising the chip’s voltage, using adaptive voltage and tuning the GPU portion for low power.

The voltage optimisations eliminated the need to overcompensate for unexpected voltage drops in the chip. Adaptive voltage and frequency scaling (AVFS), also includes proprietary speed sensors, that allows each APU to “adapt” to its own environment, and scale power accordingly.

Carrizo will be fully HSA 1.0 compliant, meaning that it will deliver on the Heterogenous Systems Architecture that AMD has talked about for some time.

Using HSA, the GPU can also be used to perform compute functions, which the company claims will deliver far more performance than the speed increases from moving to finer CPU manufacturing technologies alone.

HSA integration will help the chip reach 3.5 times the transcode performance of Kaveri, AMD said. It will support H.265 video encoding.

Bohr lays law on Moore

moores-920x460-mooreIntel is working out a way of using Moore’s law beyond the 10  nanometre (nm) node.

Mark Bohr, senior fellow for logic technology development at Intel, told hacks he will take part in a panel discussion on the move beyond 10nm and the many challenges it poses soon.

Per the existing roadmap, the company expects to move to 10nm in 2016 and to 7nm in 2018.

“I still believe we can do 7nm without EUV [Extreme Ultraviolet Lithography] and deliver improved cost per transistor. I’m not going to say exactly how, because our competitors watch what we do closely,” Bohr said.

Intel has published papers on III-V [three-five] devices and that is one of the new materials that CHipzilla is looking at to move to 7nm.  As always Intel is worried about balancing performance against manufacturability .

However all this flags the fact that EUV, for long considered the best bet to replace current 193-nm lithography and extend Moore’s law beyond 10nm, isn’t ready.  In fact it has been half-backed for nearly a decade.

“Scaling does continue to provide lower cost per transistor, and it is Intel’s view that cost reduction is needed to justify new generations of process technology,” he said.

“Going forward, heterogeneous integration will become increasingly important, but we may not be able to do it all on one chip, so you will see more use of SoC solutions such as 2.5D integration, where two are mounted side by side on a substrate, or full 3D integration, stacking chips on top of each other, each one tuned for a different [manufacturing] process to perform different functions, Bohr said.

New chips put Qualcomm on top for now

qualcomm-snapdragonQualcomm has released four Snapdragons 415, 425, 618, and 620 which tighten its grip on the mobile chip maket.

All the SoCs support 64-bit, they all connect to 4G LTE networks—the 425, 618, and 620 and can support super-fast 300 megabit per second networks. The last two chips are based around ARM’s new Cortex A72, instead of a more in-house chip design.

The Snapdragon 618 supports a “next generation Adreno GPU,” an integrated category 7 LTE-Advanced modem (300 Mbps download/100 Mbps upload) and dual image signal processors which support 21 megapixel cameras. It also supports HEVC/H.265 video encode and decode.

The Snapdragon 620 is more of the same but with four Cortex A72 cores instead of two word on the street is that it has a better GPU too.

All the chips should be in the shops in the second half of 2015 where they might rule the mid-range market.

Qualcomm has been snuggling up to ARM lately so that it can focus on the other components of the chip, particularly graphics and the various wireless radios. This has meant that it can churn out chips just as the world wants faster, next generation LTE-Advanced networks.

It is clearly in the lead for now, but that is set to change. Samsung’s upcoming Galaxy S6 will have its own designed and manufactured chip under the bonnet. This is because it said it did not like what Qualcomm was doing. Sony and HTC are also dissatisfied and are flirting with chips from MediaTek.
LG’s already working on its own “NUCLUN” chip and there is mutterings that even Intel might have something better.

 

Freescale about to sell itself

slave-auction-virginia-PIf anyone wants to buy a second hand chipmaker, Freescale has indicated that it might be selling itself off.

According to the New York Post, Freescale has hired investment bankers to explore a possible sale, and it has an unnamed buyer in mind.

It is pretty likely to be Samsung as this has been rumoured for a while. Freescale makes chips used in automobiles, consumer products, telecommunications infrastructure and industrial equipment and this is an area Samsung wants to expand into. Samsung Electronics has $63 billion in cash which could be spent on acquisitions,

Of course no one is saying anything at the moment and it is unlikely to be confirmed for a while.

Freescale went public in 2011 after being taken private in 2006 for $17.6 billion in a leveraged buyout by a group of private equity firms that included Blackstone, Carlyle and TPG Capital.

On January 27, the company reported strong results for the fourth quarter — with revenue up 11 percent and increased margins — as well as a forecast for the current quarter that exceeded Wall Street expectations. Since then, Freescale shares have jumped 32 percent.

South Korea snaps on Qualcomm antitrust dragon

qualcomm-snapdragonSouth Korea’s Fair Trade Commission is investigating Qualcomm, adding to more antitrust woes for the US chipmaker.

The outfit had a record fine it agreed to pay in China, and claimed that other antitrust authorities would see its actions differently.

South Korea’s Maeil Business newspaper, without citing direct sources, reported that the commission will look into whether Qualcomm is abusing its dominant market position.

As part of its investigation, the commission plans to send inquiries to domestic smartphone makers such as Samsung and Intel.

Qualcomm is also dealing with antitrust probes in Europe and the United States. In their investigation of Qualcomm, Chinese antitrust officials had met with their South Korean counterparts.

In 2009, South Korea’s Fair Trade Commission fined Qualcomm more than $200 million for abusing its dominant market position, so it will be especially interested because the outfit has previous form.

ARM does better than expected

ARM-Cortex-A15-chipIt seems that the British chip designer ARM has done a lot better than the cocaine nose-jobs of Wall Street have predicted.

ARM posted a 25 percent rise in fourth-quarter profit, ahead of expectations, helped by a strong year end in companies licensing its technology and growing royalty revenues.

The Tame Apple press  claims that the ARM success has all been down to Apple’s iPhone 6, although ARM powers most of the world’s smartphones.

ARM reported pre-tax profit of 118.9 million pounds on revenue of 225.9 million pounds, up 19 percent.

Licensing revenue was up 27 per cent on the year mainly based on 53 licences signed for processors.

“We anticipate that total group dollar revenues for Q1 will be up about 10 percent year on year, based on strengthening royalty revenue growth, and our expectation of the profile of license revenue through the year,” the company said.

Analysts were predicting pre-tax profit of £113 million, according to a consensus compiled by Thomson Reuters.

 

Amazon sells fake AMD CPUs

FireOnTheAmazonPosterAMD chip buyers using Amazon’s service have found themselves buying fake AMD A8-7600s.

When they receive the chips, the CPUs aren’t working and when they looked at the bottom of the chips they twigged that someone was taking older or less expensive CPUs and delidding them.

They were then taking newer CPUs that have more value, delidding those, and then putting the IHS from the new CPUs on the old CPUs. Unless you look at the pins before you buy, you would never spot the difference.

The cores being used are the AM2 Athlon X2 cores.

The scam is exclusive to the AMD A8-7600, and the situation appears to be limited to Amazon in the United Kingdom.

The danger is that this could spread over to other products if the scam is successful. c’t magazine said it would be a doddle to do with Haswell products, switching the IHS of a Celeron with a Core i7, because both products are LGA1150.

Amazon have not commented but AMD is furious and while refusing to confirm the scam it said:

“It is apparent that this isolated incident is not related in any way to AMD’s manufacturing or packaging, however AMD takes any reports of product tampering very seriously. As part of our ongoing efforts to help ensure consumers and businesses are sold only genuine AMD processors, we thoroughly investigate these extremely rare incidents in an effort to determine the source of the altered products, and consider all available legal remedies – including both civil and criminal prosecution – against persons found to have engaged in fraudulent actions affecting AMD products.”

AMD said it’s been on the blower to Amazon and the local enforcement authorities to fix this incident quickly and “ensure that the rigorous quality and reliability standards that AMD is known for are maintained.

“AMD already implements extensive security measures to ensure the authenticity of our products, we are currently evaluating further measures to implement additional security measures for maximum future support,” a spokesperson said.

AMD has a guide listed on its website to help verify the legitimacy of CPUs.

 

Intel thinks it has Apple by the short and curlies

Intel Q4_14_ResultsIt is rare that a company claims to have control of Apple, but it seems that Intel believes that it has Jobs’ Mob wrapped around its little finger.

After ten years working with Apple, there are rumours that Jobs’ Mob is considering ditching Chipzilla and will start making its own Mac chips.  After all Apple already creates its own chips for the iPhone and iPad based on designs from ARM and then has manufacturers like Samsung build them.

The Tame Apple Press thinks that eventually Apple’s ARM chips will be so powerful, Apple won’t need Intel anymore.

But in an interview with Business Insider, Intel’s CFO Stacy Smith brushed off those concerns and  claimed that Intel is so far ahead of the competition when it comes to PC processors that Apple – and just about every other PC maker – has no choice but to use Intel chips.

Smith said that Apple was a  “great partner of ours” and like Intel they like bringing really cool stuff to the market.

Intel’s leadership over the rest of the industry is extending. We’re not delayed relative to the industry. Intel is ahead of the industry, Smith said.

For Jobs Mob that means that if it abandons Intel it will have to lose lots of performance in its new Macs.

Intel thinks that Apple customers would have to take such a big step off performance if Jobs’ Mob abandoned Intel it is not worth it.

Of course, Smith fails to understand that if Apple decided to walk away from Intel, it would simply tell its customers its solution was better and the Tame Apple Press would agree with it. Apple has never been about performance, it has always been about the design and the Apple logo.

 

 

ARM buys OffSpark

lightningBritish chip designer ARM has bought Dutch firm Offspark, which is an open source security software outfit.

It is all part of ARM’s cunning plan to make chips for the internet of things.  It seems that the move by Intel to buy McAfee is starting to make some sense and ARM is seeing the wisdom of having inhouse security software.

Offspark’s PolarSSL technology is designed for sensor modules, communication modules and smartphones.

ARM said buying the group would add its security and software cryptography to its IoT platform, designed to link billions of devices online.

It is not clear how much ARM paid for the security outfit. ARM has promised that the  technology will remain open source and will be made available to developers for commercial use.

It complements ARM’s Cryptobox technology of mbed OS that enables secure execution and storage.

Apparently ARM is to  release mbed OS under an Apache 2.0 licence which will include mbed TLS, Thread, and other key technologies toward the end of 2015.

The release of mbed TLS 1.3.10 is now available under GPL and to existing PolarSSL customers on polarssl.org.

 

TSMC reports record profits

tsmcTSMC has reported record quarterly net profit and revenue thanks to strong sales of smartphones from its clients.

TSMC earned about $3 billion in net profit in October-December which doubles the results posted at the same time last year and slightly more than the last quarter.

Demand for increasingly feature-rich gadgets has led to a burst in growth for companies such as TSMC and local peer United Microelectronics, whose chips power features from fingerprint sensors to fourth-generation (4G) LTE receivers.

In the fourth quarter, TSMC’s profit margin decreased to 35.9 percent from 40.4 percent in the third quarter in October-December revenue.

However, things are not looking that good for TSMC’s future. Analysts are divided about whether Apple will select TSMC to produce chips for its next-generation smartphones. There are questions as to whether it can create the next generation chips Apple wants .

Samsung, which is TSMC’s main competitor for Apple custom, has previously said it is seeing increased demand for chips made with 14 nanometre technology, the likes of which could power the successor to the iPhone 6.

Now that the war between Apple and Samsung is cooling, it appears that Jobs’ Mob might return to its old chipmaker ally and leave TSMC high and dry.