Author: Eva Glass

Eva Glass first rose to prominence in The INQUIRER. She continues to work behind the scenes to dig out the best stories.

Intel releases eight core desktop CPU

Posted on September 2, 2014 by - News

Core-i7-EE-chip-538x600Chipzilla has released its first eight core desktop CPU targeted at gamers and computer users who need a little extra.

Dubbed  Core i7-5960X Extreme Edition processor, the chip has 16 computing threads which, along with support for the latest DDR4 memory.  On paper at least it should create some of the fastest desktop systems yet seen.

Lisa Graff, vice president and general manager of Intel’s Desktop Client Platform Group claimed that the whole thing was a reinvention of the desktop’ which is a mantra Intel has come up with since the beginning of the year.  After all chucking more power at desktop units has never been tried before, and Intel seems to think that doing what it always has done is going to stop people saying that the PC is dead.

To be fair, outfits like Alienware seem to think that the eight-core extreme processor is pretty good too. It has installed it under the bonnet of its new Alienware Area-51. Using new overclocking and monitoring features in Alienware Command Center 4.0, it has got the processors to go like the clappers.

Intel has released a slightly less interesting six-core version and the prices in its new range start from $389 and range to $999.

Tablet sales go slow

Posted on September 1, 2014 by - News

ipad3Market research firm IDC said it has lowered its forecast for tablet sales in 2014 almost halving its estimate of how many will ship.

The reason for that, according to the company, is that buyers in mature markets are contributing to flatness.  The estimate now is that 233.1 million units will ship – its previous estimate was a year on year 12.1 percent growth rate. It’s lowered that rate to 6.5 percent now.

But while the “mature markets” are showing a slowdown, IDC said that other regional markets will hit a 12 percent growth rate.

More use of tablets in emerging markets will sustain that 12 percent figure.

IDC estimates that average selling prices will level out at $373 in mature markets but fall in other regions to $302.

Jitesh Urbani, senior research analyst at IDC said that the world outside Western Europe and North America will account for the majority of shipments this year.  “But in terms of dollars spent, medium to large sized devices in North America and Western Europe will still produce significant revenues,” he said.

White Bull readies startup show

Posted on September 1, 2014 by - News

White BullWhite Bull Summits, which runs an annual conference aimed at connecting startups and funds each year, said it is looking for nominations for 13 awards for people that have made a difference in the field.

It has 13 new categories which it will award at its Barcelona conference next month, including best male entrepreneur, best female entrepreneur, best law firm, best in communications and PR, best angel, best corporate VC, best executive search and others.

The nominations can be made until September 15th by going to this link.

The firm will announce its 60 “Bully Award” finalists and nominees on September 15th, with winners receiving awards at Pathways 2014 on October 6th to the 8th.

Farley Duvall, co-founder of White Bull Summits, said the conference represents its fifth anniversary and will bring VCs, startups, equity companies and angels together under the same roof.

TechEye will be attending the conference.

ARM ups 64-bit hype

Posted on September 1, 2014 by - News

arm_chipChip licensing company ARM said it has signed its 50th licensing agreement for the v8-A processing technology and said 27 firms have signed up for the show.

Although it did not specify the names of the 27 companies they include the usual suspects like Samsung and we know that Intel is now a big ARM customer too.

Noel Hurley, who runs the processor division of ARM claimed that tablets and smartphones are replacing PCs for many taks and the new 64-bit tech in the v8-A series is backwards compatible with 32-bit technology too.

That means the new tech will completely support the million plus 32-bit apps that already exist for the technology.

The number 50 is important for ARM in another way too, claimed Hurley, because the company said there are now 50 billion processors using its tech.

It won’t be long until there are 100 billion processors licensing its technology, according to ARM.

Facial recognition market booms

Posted on September 1, 2014 by - News

Bhutan faces, courtesy Wikimedia CommonsA report said that the market for facial recognition is set to see 27.7 percent compount annual growth to 2018, when it will be worth around $6.5 billion.

The research from ReportsnReports.com said the market is segmented into various technologies including 2D, 3D, thermal imaging, “emotion” imaging and mobile.

And the forces driving the market are big spends by governments worlwide on biometric technology.

Companies big in the field include Afix Technologies, Fujitsu, Gemalto, Nextgen and many others. Other multinational corporations surveted include NEC, Qualcomm, Toshiba, Catchroom and Hitachi.

The research company claims that the facial recognition market has come into its own because of 3D technology, better imaging, better sofware and speedier analytics.

The market was worth $1.92 billion in 2013, the company estimates.

Intel poaches Qualcomm exec

Posted on September 1, 2014 by - News

cracking-eggs-mFashion bag and bracelet maker Intel is attempting to prove that it is serious about mobile by headhunting one of Qualcomm’s gadget makers.

Amir Faintuch is a senior executive at Qualcomm’s networking and connectivity businesses Atheros, which we were surprised to discover has nothing to do with one of the three musketeers.

It is unusual for Intel to look outside its own company for senior executives and the hiring is being seen as a portent that the company is serious to sort out its struggling mobile business.

Faintuch will be an Intel a senior vice president and co-general manager of the Platform Engineering Group.

Intel spokesman Chuck Mulloy said Faintuch will  be among Intel’s dozen or so most senior executives and will co-manage the Platform Engineering Group with Josh Walden, a manufacturing technology expert who previously led the group.

Mulloy said that Faintuch brings experience designing “system on chips,” or SoCs, which combine features like modems, Wi-Fi and memory.  Chipzilla is still a little short on the expertise needed for designing SoCs.

“We want to accelerate our success rate with SoCs and get the designs aligned and the roadmaps aligned to do that. We’ve made good progress but there’s more to be done. Amir has extensive management experience and a strong resume,” he said.

Since taking over in 2013, CEO Brian Krzanich has made a number of sweeping changes designed to counteract a slump in PC sales, including opening Intel’s cutting-edge factories to other chipmakers willing to pay for access to them.

Still the traffic between Intel and Qualcomm has not been one way. In fact Qualcomm is seen as a nicer place to work. In 2012, senior executive Anand Chandrasekher, a 25-year Intel veteran, jumped over to Qualcomm to become the outfit’s chief marketing officer.

Apple loses another court battle

Posted on August 29, 2014 by - News

novità-apple-2013A federal judge has rejected Apple’s attempt to block the sale of several older Samsung smartphones that copied auto-correction feature in the iPhone’s keyboard, the method to create links for email addresses and phone numbers appearing in text and the swiping gesture for unlocking the phone’s display screen.

While that particular trial, which was spun as a victory, is starting to make Apple look a little silly.  Firstly, in this case the jury awarded Apple only $119 million in damages well below the $2.2 billion in damages that Apple wanted.

And now Apple’s demand that US District Judge Lucy Koh issued an order that would have prevented future US sales of nine Samsung phone models that it claimed infringed on the iPhone technology has been rejected.

Koh said Apple had not adequately proven Samsung’s intellectual theft had hurt its sales or diminished its reputation for innovation. She noted that Apple had licensed some of the features that Samsung infringed upon to the makers of other smartphones that competed against the iPhone.

Samsung told the court the damages awarded to Apple amounted to a royalty payment for its past and future infringements on the patents at issue.

Apple had wanted to ban the US sale of these Samsung models: the Admire, Galaxy Nexus, Galaxy Note, Galaxy Note II, Galaxy S II, Galaxy S II Epic 4G Touch, Galaxy S II Skyrocket, Galaxy S III, and Stratosphere.

 

ARM and Intel are as bad as each other

Posted on August 29, 2014 by - News

tweddle dee and tweedle dumFor years, ARM and Intel have been snarling at each other that each other’s chips are more power efficient. ARM has claimed that the reason it was more power efficient thanks to fundamental differences in the ISA (instruction set architecture).

As we reported earlier this week, however, Intel is one of ARM’s biggest fans.

ARM uses RISC and Intel’s x86 uses CISC.  ARM says that makes a big difference. However a team from the University of Wisconsin has been looking at the two architectures RISC and CISC and thinks that ARM might be wrong and that ISA is less important.

Their new research paper, which was reviewed in detail by Extreme Tech examines these claims using a variety of ARM cores as well as a Loongson MIPS microprocessor, Intel’s Atom and Sandy Bridge microarchitectures, and AMD’s Bobcat.

The report suggests that ISA can matter in certain, extremely specific cases where die sizes must be 1-2mm2 or power consumption is specced to sub-milliwatt levels.  At those rare times, RISC microcontrollers can still have an advantage over their CISC brethren.

But the report suggests that those who claim RISC still has enormous benefits over x86 at higher performance levels are ignoring the fact that RISC and CISC describe design strategies and which fixed technological limitations of years ago and are not important today.

The report said that in the good old days RISC chips could run at significantly higher clocks than their CISC counterparts thanks to reduced complexity, but that’s no longer true.

Now it is process technology controls clock speed, not one’s choice of RISC vs. CISC. Today a Core i7 and Cortex-A57 have far more in common due to decades of experience have led designers to adopt strategies and structures that work, even if the underlying ISA is different.

They concluded that the RISC vs. CISC argument should be cast into the dustbin of history even if it still has some relevance in the microcontroller realm. Basically an x86 chip can be more power efficient than an ARM processor, or vice versa but it has nothing to do with the instruction set.

Amazon Fire Phone fails to rage

Posted on August 28, 2014 by - News

quo_vadis_poster-nero-plays-while-rome-burns-w450Amazon’s Fire Phone was launched in July to a great fanfare over its 3D-effect maps and multiple front-facing cameras.

But apparently it has been greeted with a collective yawn by actual users and there are signs that Amazon priced itself out of the market.

The Fire Phone cost $200 for a 32GB version on an AT&T contract – the same price range as the iPhone 5S or Samsung GS5.

According to a release from Chitika, looking at activity on its ad network in the 20 days after the Fire Phone’s release, the Fire Phone accounted for 0.015 per cent of activity.

This sounds a low number, but it is possible to work out how many phones that might represent. Using data from ComScore for the three months to the end of June 2014 there were 173m smartphones in use in the US.

That figure is rising by between a million or two a month so two months later, by mid-August, when the Chitika data was collected, there would be about 177 million smartphones in use in the US. .015% of 177 million means 26,550 Fire phones in use.

Of course, you have to assume that Amazon’s Fire Phone will show up on Chitika’s network as often as any other phone, but even allowing for errors, does seem that the Fire sold only 35,000 Fire Phones during those 20 days.

Amazon said that it was in the phone game for the long play and it intends to be patient. That might work in the long term, but we would have thought Amazon would go for a cheaper more popular product, as it did successfully with its tablets.

Seagate releases 8TB hard drive

Posted on August 27, 2014 by - News

Seagate  has decided that the world needs hard drives which can store 8TB.

The 8TB HDD comes five months after Western Digital had released the first ever 6TB HDD, so the company clearly thinks we are running out of space.

Apparently the 8TB HDD comes in the 3.5-inch form factor and  features a SATA 6Gbps interface and multi-drive RV tolerance which makes it suitable for data centres.

At this point it is not clear if the drive uses PMR (Perpendicular Magnetic Recording) or low-resistance helium technology was employed.

Seagate vice president of marketing Scott Horn said that as the world becomes more mobile, the number of devices we use to create and consume data is driving an explosive growth in unstructured data.

“This places increased pressure on cloud builders to look for innovative ways to build cost-effective, high capacity storage for both private and cloud-based data centres,” he said.

He thinks the new drive will support the demand for high capacity storage in a world bursting with digital creation, consumption and long-term storage.

Unfortunately, Seagate did not announce the retail price for its 8TB HDD though the company claims that the new hard drive has “the lowest total cost of ownership in the industry.” In otherwords while the drive is expensive it will be cheaper than owning two 4 TB machines.

Microsoft wins PR blitz over cloud

Posted on August 27, 2014 by - News

Clouds in Oxford: pic Mike MageeMicrosoft’s several-hour outage of the cloud-based Visual Studio Online services might have been a PR disaster, but Redmond appears to have won the hearts and minds of its customers by actually doing the right thing.

Computer World spend the day ringing around hoping to find a “moaning customers” story but was surprised to find hat Microsoft’s customers were happy at the way that the outage was handled.

Apparently Redmond did something radical – it did not spin, it did not pretend that nothing happened, and it provided customers with the information they really needed.

The genius behind this strategy was, Brian Harry, a Microsoft Technical Fellow, corporate vice president, and product unit manager for Team Foundation Server.

Writing in his bog, Harry said detailed the August 14 outage of Visual Studio Online, the cloud service designed to help development teams manage complex projects.

Visual Studio Online was offline in some regions late Wednesday and early Thursdaybut troubles mounted Thursday morning until they became a total outage that lasted five-and-a-half hours.

“This duration and severity makes this one of the worst incidents we’ve ever had on VS Online,” Harry admitted.

Harry apologised for the outage dove into a technical explanation of what triggered the blackout, and laid out some steps the team planned to take to stymie a repeat.

“We’ve gotten sloppy. Sloppy is probably too harsh. As with any team, we are pulled in the tension between eating our Wheaties and adding capabilities that customers are asking for,” said Harry. “In the drive toward rapid cadence, value every sprint, etc., we’ve allowed some of the engineering rigor that we had put in place back then to atrophy — or more precisely, not carried it forward to new code that we’ve been writing. This, I believe, is the root cause.”

Customers loved this approach and in the comments they praised his candour. “Let me simply say: nice analysis write-up, that was refreshingly direct,” said Benjamin Treynor in a comment appended to Harry’s piece.

“A perfect template for no BS straight talking. Well done, very impressed,” added someone identified only as “Craig” in a latter comment. “Lots of good lessons in there, too, that we can all benefit and learn from.”

Harry’s admission that Microsoft’s push for a faster pace was behind the outage might have won him the support of customers, but it does not bode well for his internal political future. Microsoft is on a mission to accelerate development and its release “mobile-first, cloud-first” strategy.

Still there cannot be many in Microsoft who can see their product fail and still get their customers to support them. At this rate, Harry should be made PR manager.

 

EU watchdog bites Qualcomm’s rump

Posted on August 27, 2014 by - News

AnubiIt looks as if the EU is going to back Nvidia’s complaint against Qualcomm and investigate the chipmaker for alleged anti-trust shenanigans.

Nvidia has been moaning about Qualcomm for nearly four years and the investigation coincides with a similar case in China into the chipmaker’s monopoly practices.

If found guilty of breaching EU rules, the company could face a fine of up to $2.5 billion.

Reuters said that the Commission may open a case after the summer.

The case centred on the British mobile phone chipmaker Icera which was bought by Nvidia in 2011.

While no one said what happened to Icera, it appears that the company accused Qualcomm of using patent-related incentives and exclusionary pricing of chipsets to discourage customers from doing business with it.

No one seemed to care that much and the issue appeared to have faded from the Commission’s agenda. However, a recent case where Europe’s second-highest court in June upheld a record 1.1 billion euro EU fine against Intel for abuse of its dominant market position made the regulators realise that they were sitting on a nice little earner.

Companies can be fined as much as 10 percent of their global revenues for breaching EU antitrust rules.

But the case is a long way off being resolved and anything could happen. In 2010, the EU competition authority scrapped a four-year probe into Qualcomm after Ericsson and Texas Instruments withdrew their objections against the company.

Cloud teaches teaches robots

Posted on August 26, 2014 by - News

robby the robotResearchers at Cornell, Stanford and Brown universities and the University of California have come up with a method of teaching robots using the cloud.

Dubbed Robo Brain , the system is a large-scale computational system that learns from publicly available Internet resources. The data is translated and stored in a robot-friendly format that robots can draw on when they need it.
Ashutosh Saxena, assistant professor of computer science at Cornell University said that since  laptops and mobile phones don’t have access to all the information we want, the robot can query Robo Brain in the cloud.

Robo Brain will process images to pick out the objects in them, and by connecting images and video with text, it will learn to recognize objects and how they are used, along with human language and behaviour.

It speeds up the development time that a robot needs to work out what to do. If a robot sees a teacup, it can learn from Robo Brain not only that it is a teacup and not a coffee mug. It also can learn that liquids can be poured into or out of it, that it can be grasped by the handle, and that it must be carried upright when it is full.

The system employs what computer scientists call “structured deep learning,” where information is stored in many levels of abstraction. An easy chair is a member of the class of chairs, and going up another level, chairs are furniture. Robo Brain knows that chairs are something you can sit on, but that a human can also sit on a stool, a bench or the lawn.

The robot stores the information in a mathematical model, which can be represented graphically as a set of points connected by lines. The nodes could represent objects, actions or parts of an image, and each one is assigned a probability – how much you can vary it and still be correct.

This means that the robot’s brain makes its own chain and looks for one in the knowledge base that matches within those limits.

 

Intel talks up wi-fi cunning plans

Posted on August 22, 2014 by - News

cunning-planChipzilla is telling the world about its cunning plans to move to “wire-free” computing by 2016.

Writing in the company bog, Intel is apparently developing a smart dock through which laptops can wirelessly connect to monitors and external peripherals.

Intel said that this will remove the need to plug HDMI or DisplayPort display connectors directly into laptops. The wireless dock will provide USB 3.0-like speeds to transfer data to external peripherals.

“When you walk in the office with your laptop, it will automatically link with your wireless-enabled monitor or projector to deliver an HD streaming experience without the hassle of plugging into your HDMI or DisplayPort,” Intel said.

Intel is developing technology so wireless monitors automatically start and link up when laptops are within a specific distance. Intel calls this “proximity-based peripheral syncing” technology.

People could also log on with face recognition, without the need to touch the keyboard.

Most of Intel’s wire-free computing is based on WiGig, which is faster than the latest Wi-Fi technology. Intel is also considering WiGig to connect wireless keyboards and mice to laptops.

Power adapters will also become outdated in Intel’s wireless world. It is developing wireless charging technologies for laptops. So far we have already seen charging pads based on A4WP’s Rezence magnetic resonance technology.

Intel is expected to explain its wire-free computing for business PCs plans at the Intel Developer Forum next month in San Francisco.

But it will have to move fast. Rivals bought Wilocity, which develops WiGig technology, last month and will put WiGig in its Snapdragon mobile chipsets so smartphones and tablets can wirelessly stream 4K video to external displays.

 

Oregon wakes up to deal with Intel devil

Posted on August 22, 2014 by - News

satanic pactIt seems that people are starting to add up the cost of their tax sweeteners with Intel and they are not liking the numbers they are seeing.

Blue Oregon  has reported that Chipzilla has  asked for, and may well get their second dose of 30 year “tax certainty”,

This means that Intel does not have to pay Oregon income taxes for 30 years. But that was not enough, it is negotiating with Washington County Commissioners and the Hillsboro City Council on getting the same low property taxes they’ve had for the last 20 years as well.

There were a few people who do not think this a good idea and the Washington County Commission’s and the Hillsboro City Council’s open comment periods saw tax payers ask elected representatives a few questions about why Intel  was being allowed nearly a tax free life.

Of course, the elected representatives are unlikely to agree with the taxpayers, and seem certain to pledge Intel 30 years’ worth of tax breaks. They will say that Intel is promising to keep at least 17,500 Oregon employees for the next 30 years and will invest $100 billion in the region during that time.

However, those pesky tax payers with their slide rules point out that Intel is not promising anything as part of the deal and even if it was, it stinks for local tax payers who will have to fund Intel.

Intel said that it needs all these tax breaks to fund new equipment because their equipment costs are rising. However, the taxpayers point out that money really should be spent on public services and not giving Intel some state supported gear.

All up it is fairly likely that Intel will get its way and the tax payers will not even get a discount on the State backed products they made.