IBM throws more money at clouds

Posted on February 24, 2015 by - News

Screen Shot 2015-02-24 at 11.33.09IBM has already invested $1.2 billion in cloud services and has now announced it will open two cloud centres in Sydney and Montreal in the next 30 days.

In addition, Big Blue said it will build similar cloud centres in Milan, and in Chennai before the end of 2015 while it will announce further centres later on in the year.

The cloud centres are part of the company’s SoftLayer plans – it already has centres in Frankfurt, in Mexico and in Tokyo.

The idea of the cloud centres is to give its customers options to create public, private or hybrid cloud environments. It has to offer different locations because enterprises have to conform to local regulations about where data resides, as well as providing levels of security.

Jim Comfort, general managed of IBM Cloud Services, said: “With each new location, we’re not only adding more computer capacity… we’re enabling enterprises to move to the cloud at the speed and in a way that makes the most sense for them.”

In a related announcement, IBM said it had extended its partnership with CSC to speed moving their businesses to the cloud. IBM thinks that there will be a 10 fold increase in the number of cloud applications in the next four or five years, meaning the number of developers specialising in the field will triple.

US leans on Indonesia over smartphone law

Posted on February 24, 2015 by - News

page_detail_zoom_3315The US government is leaning on Indonesia to daring to set up laws that forbid foreign smartphone makers from coming into the country.

The country is one of the few where smartphone makers have not been able to penetrate, and Indonesia has insisted that companies make 40 percent of their phones locally.

This of course destroys the US model of making cheap phones in China and having them shipped to foreign parts.

From January 1, 2017, smartphone makers that sell smartphones and tablets in the fast-growing economy of 250 million people to produce 40 percent of their content locally.

We are not sure why the US Trade Representative (USTR), is involved in strong arming Indonesia to have a change of heart. If he wins, it is not as if he is protecting US jobs.  He is in fact protecting Chinese jobs and the bottom lines of big multinationals who do not pay much tax in the US.

Apparently critics of the “made in Indonesia” rule, including an influential US business group, say it could increase costs and restrict access to technology.

“The United States shares these concerns, and strongly supports ensuring that information and communications technology, which can be instrumental to economic development, be openly available in Indonesia,” said a USTR spokesman in Washington.

Less than a third of Indonesians own a smartphone, a much lower rate than China’s almost 80 percent, according to figures from research firm Canalys.

Samsung has already begun producing phones in Indonesia after opening a factory near Jakarta last year, but Apple’s supplier Foxconn has been dragging its feet as it negotiates with the Indonesian government over a proposed investment that would include manufacturing smartphones.

Microsoft used Cortina to predict the Oscars

Posted on February 24, 2015 by - News

motoring-graphics-g_844446aThis years’ Oscars were a reasonably successful test bed for Microsoft’s new predictive technology — Cortina.

Microsoft predicted 20 of the 24 Oscar winners which is not a bad average and follows its accurate prediction of almost all of the World Cup’s knockout matches – a little better than the octopus.

Cortina could not work out who would win the original screenplay, original score, animated feature and film editing categories. It got all the rest.

The software uses Bing-analysed historical data and Vole told us in advance who it thought would win.

Microsoft uses a prediction model for the Oscars that is managed by Microsoft researcher David Rothschild at the company’s New York City research lab. Rothschild correctly predicted 21 of 24 Oscar winners last year, and 19 of 24 winners in 2013.

In comparison, Vegas odds from the Wynn casino weren’t nearly as good. The Wynn predicted best picture, best actress, best actor, best supporting actress, best supporting actor, and best director, but only managed to guess four of six correctly. Microsoft predicted all six accurately.

Practically this goes beyond fortune telling for vacuous entertainment events. This is Microsoft’s chance to prove the company’s abilities to manipulate data sets is better than anyone else’s.
Its main goal is to show that Bing algorithms and data itself is pretty powerful. These things are an interesting way to show users that Bing has a lot of horsepower beyond just providing good search results, a spokesVole said.

 

Apple Air gets Broadwell

Posted on February 24, 2015 by - News

27151_1_intel_rejects_the_idea_that_they_are_going_bga_only_fullIntel’s disappointingly delayed Broadwell chips have found a customer in the fruity cargo cult in the shape of Apple’s MacBook Air.

From Intel’s perspective this is great news.  Not only will it get a customer for its silicon, the Tame Apple Press will start chanting that the chips are brilliant, innovative and state of the art.

Sure enough ITPro talks about how the “silicon giant’s fifth Generation Core processor” promises 90 minutes extra battery life compared to Intel’s fourth generation.

What appears to be happening is that Apple will use Intel’s new Broadwell-Y Core M processors. Apple thinks that the fact they have 4.5W performance and fanless.

However Apple is not the only one to use this chip. Panasonic is also set to use the chipmaker’s latest release, revealing that the Broadwell processor powers its Toughbook 54 laptop, so has HP.  Toshiba has used the fifth generation Broadwell processors to improve the battery life of its Kira Ultrabook laptops, claiming they now have a 13 hour battery life.

What is a little odd is that the Core M is more of a business chip, being designed for Intel’s wireless offices rather than Apple’s normal consumer users.

It is also very late into the shops as Intel wrestled with the production process.  Apparently, the process took ages to fix the yields. But Intel is into high yields now, and in production on more than one product, with many more to come later this year.

 

AMD claims impressive power savings for Carrizo

Posted on February 24, 2015 by - News

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.

LG fights to make OLED more mainstream

Posted on February 24, 2015 by - News

tvLG will partner with Chinese and Japanese firms in a bid to make organic light-emitting diode (OLED) display televisions more acceptable to the great unwashed.

LG has not said who it is teaming up with or what its OLED partnership would mean for those signing up to it.

So far, its affiliate LG Display is the only panel maker that can mass-produce OLED TV panels, and Samsung and LG are the biggest proponents of the technology for the TV market.

The LG companies say OLED offers better picture quality and consumes less power than mainstream liquid crystal displays (LCD).

However, they are still more expensive than LCD televisions. Quantum dot technology, which has many of the advantages of OLED but costs less, could also undercut OLED TV sales.

Some Chinese TV makers like Skyworth Digital Holdings and Konka are using OLED, but analysts say the technology needs to be more widely used by manufacturers to take off.

Samsung has said it has no plans to make OLED TVs in the immediate future because the technology is not yet ready for mass consumption.

Sony said it would be open to using OLED displays for its televisions but nothing appears to have happened yet.

Enterprises will adopt internet of things

Posted on February 23, 2015 by - News

Internet of ThingsA report commissioned by Verizon looks today at enterprise adoption of the internet of things (IoT).

While only 10 percent of organisations currently are using IoT extensively, that picture will rapidly change.

Verizon said it saw a 45 percent increase in its IoT business last year, and a 135 percent increase in activations using 4G LTE, year on year.

The highest growth sector is manufacturing which saw a 204 percent increase in 2014, but other sectors are showing big growth figures too – finance and insurance experienced a 128 percent increase and media and entertainment 120 percent increase.

Verizon has a dedicated IoT VP. Mark Bartolomeo said: “IoT covers a multitude of solutions from wearable devices, to remote monitoring of energy management devices to industrial transportation.”

He said Verizon has seen a number of new entrants creating an IoT “roadmap”.

Currently, Verizon estimates that by 2020 there will be around 5.4 billion connections globally.

Nvidia takes lead in add in graphics

Posted on February 23, 2015 by - News

nvidia-shieldJon Peddie Research (JPR), which specialises in tracking the graphics and multimedia sectors, said that Nvidia took the lead in add in boards (AIBs) in the fourth quarter of 2014.

However, the overall shipments of AIBs fell by 17.52 percent, compared to the same quarter in 2013.

JPR puts the decline down to incursions from tablet sales and machines that use embedded graphics chips, rather than the discrete chips used in AIBs.

While there is still money to be made in the games market, JPR said AIBs tied to desktop PCs fell from 63 percent in the first quarter of 2008 to only 36 percent in this quarter.

AMD showed a drop of desktop AIBs of 16 percent, while it seems that Nvidia managed to grow its share by 5.5 percent. Nvidia now has 76 percent of this particular segment.

Total shipments in the quarter amounted to 12.4 million units.

 

Apple blows money on two data centres

Posted on February 23, 2015 by - News

Apple's CEO Tim Cook - shot from WikimediaApple has so much money swilling around in its bank account that it can easily afford to spend $2 billion on data centres in Europe.

And that’s just what it’s doing, according to a report from Reuters.

The centres will be based in Denmark and Ireland and will be powered by renewable energy and offer several hundred jobs.

The data centres will be used to support Apple’s online services such as iTunes and its App Store, and will open in 2017.

Tim Cook, Apple’s CEO, said in a statement that the investment is the company’s biggest in Europe to date.

The Irish centre will be based in Galway and will hire 300 people. Ireland is a favourite spot for US tech multinationals, largely because of the tax breaks it gives the company.

Mobile market set to change

Posted on February 23, 2015 by - News

smartphones-genericThe Mobile World Congress starts in Barcelona at the beginning of next month and Gartner has decided to give us its thoughts on changes that are afoot in this ever changing business.

What’s apparent is that it’s hard for the vendors to continue releasing phones that are very different from the competition. Gartner thinks that the smartphone manufacturers will continue to concentrate on the quality of photographs and video.

Apple, in particular, will find it hard to come up with anything that’s radically new, while so called “white box” vendors in mainland China will continue to undercut the market.

And the incumbents have more to contend with too – Wiko has entered the European market and is doing particularly well in Germany and Framce, selling its products at between 100 and 150 Euro.

Other players could well be Kodak which introduced an Android phone at a trade show in January. Kodak has expertise in the camera market, of course, but may find it hard to contend with other mid range vendors. Polaroid, too, is apparently venturing into the smartphone market.

 

Broadwell may be desktop bound after all

Posted on February 23, 2015 by - News

privacy-policy-512760_640Rumours that Intel was going to can its plans to bring its Broadwell chip to the desktop are now looking a little shaky.

The tech publication CHW.net claims  that it has confirmed the release of BDW-S and even BDW-K in a few weeks.

A recent roadmap showed showing BDW-K but no BDW-S in Q2 2015 but CHW found that  ASUS has listed support of 5th generation processors on the main spec sheets of various Z97 motherboards.

This might be a little weak evidence.  The specification of 5th generation support has been there for a long time and axing the chip has been a more recent decision.

The ASUS spec also mentions Broadwell-S too, something which has been dropped from the roadmap for ages.

But it is interesting because if BDW-S actually releases, it would mean that the launch of Skylake-S might be delayed a bit further, to allow Intel to make money on it.

 

AMD’s Zen may borrow Skylake features

Posted on February 23, 2015 by - News

zen_as_a_frogThe dark satanic rumour mill has manufactured a hell on earth yarn that AMD’s  next-generation high-performance micro-architecture code-named “Zen” might have borrowed a few ideas from Intel.

The first central processing units to use “Zen” for client PCs will be the code-named “Summit Ridge” chip that is expected to feature up to eight cores, a DDR4 memory controller, a PCI Express 3.0 controller and up to 95W thermal design power. The chip will use 14nm FinFET process technology by either  GlobalFoundries or Samsung Electronics.

WccfTech claims AMD will return to its traditional practice of introducing server processors powered by the latest microarchitectures first and then follow with chips for client PCs.

Without providing any details, the report claims that the new architecture features certain technologies found in the upcoming Intel “Skylake” processors. We are not sure how AMD could do this without a major court case, but what it could do is implement x86/x87 extensions, enhancements as well as various new instructions introduced by Intel in its central processing units.

Many official and semi-official revelations indicate that Skylight Intel will support AVX 3.2 (512-bit instructions), SHA extensions (SHA-1 and SHA-256, secure hash algorithms), MPX (memory protection extensions), ADX (multi-precision add-carry instruction extensions) and other innovations.

If AMD does run AVX 3.2, it will have to come up with a new floating-point unit (FPU) to run 512-bit instructions. AMD’s FPU currently features two 128-bit FMAC (fused multiply–add capability) pipelines that can be unified into one large 256-bit-wide unit if one of the integer cores dispatches an AVX instruction.

What this means is that if AMD’s “Zen” supports AVX 3.2, will need an all-new FPU that will be different from Bulldozer and will need a fully-fledged 512-bit FPU. Otherwise, execution of 512-bit AVX 3.2 instructions will be slower than an asthmatic ant with a heavy load of shopping.

 

Iran turns blind eye to VPNs

Posted on February 23, 2015 by - News

Nelson at the Battle of CopenhagenAlthough Iran makes a big deal of its censorship policies and is even talking about building its own internet to keep the western riff-raff out, it seems to be ignoring a booming anti-censorship market.

Apparently there is so much money involved that the same government authorities that do the censoring then turn around and allow the sale of censorship-beating software to make a bit of cash.

Anti-censorship technology is illegal in Iran, but many VPNs are sold openly, allowing Iranians to bounce around censorship and seemingly render it ineffective.

According to the Daily Dot nearly 70 percent of young Iranians are using VPNs and a Google search for “buy VPN” in Persian returns two million results.

Ironically Iran’s Cyber Police (FATA) have waged a high-volume open war against the VPNs, but this seems to be for show.

In fact, that you can use Iran’s government-sanctioned payment gateways (Pardakht Net, Sharj Iran, Jahan Pay & Baz Pardakht) to buy the tools that’ll beat the censors.

Independent Iranian media have reported that “elements within the government and the Revolutionary Guard provide support to a number of VPN sellers,” according to a 2014 report from Small Media.

“Reports hypothesise that this is a mutually profitable arrangement; lining the pockets of officials at the same time as it allows VPN sellers to continue in their work without the threat of state interference.”

 

Bohr lays law on Moore

Posted on February 23, 2015 by - News

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.

Stevenson made a rocket for Intel’s bottom line

Posted on February 23, 2015 by - News

lal303543Digging among the rubble of Intel’s financial results you can’t help be struck by the ability of CIO Kim Stevenson whose department managed to make the company an absolute fortune in 2014.

Stevenson’s global IT budget was just over $1 billion to provide IT for more than 106,000 denizens – which would be expected to be a black hole on Intel’s balance sheet.   However she managed to generate over $351 million in revenue for the semiconductor maker.

What she did was explain to the accounts department, how her department saved the company money by using the technology that it did.  Speaking to CIO Journal she said that it was important to let the company see behind the curtain and understand how value is generated.

Last year, Intel cut IT spending to 2.3% of revenue from 2.5% in 2012. The company also reduced the number of data centres globally down to 61 in 2014 from 87 in 2011.

Stevenson built several analytics projects which were designed to make the company more efficient, for example the first one involved helping salespeople become more efficient in outbound calls to resellers. The IT team got input about what a sales win looked like and created a probability model based on machine learning. It told the salespeople which resellers to call, in which order.

In 2013, Intel moved a few salespeople over to the new system and after the first quarter, they discovered that those people were five times more productive than their peers, she said.

Then her team helped the sales people change the conversation to tailor specific discussions to the reseller’s interest. In 2014, this initiative accounted for $76.2 million in revenue for Intel.

The company also used analytics to help business management teams make critical decisions related to pricing, such as when to raise or lower product prices and when to use rebates. The IT organization worked for two years to create a data model to help the company better manage prices and inventory. Part of that included a recommendation engine that helped salespeople bundle and cross sell products. Intel has set a $1 billion goal over four to five years to increase revenue.

It all paid off. In 2014, the first year, Intel increased revenue by $264 million. “We did a little better than we thought,” said Stevenson.