Tag: intel

Intel 730-series SSDs dogged by rumour

Posted on March 9, 2015 by - News

watchdogIntel’s 730-series SSDs, which received glowing reviews, has been dogged by a rumour that it lacks power loss data protection, a feature which was highlighted in Intel’s review guides.

The rumour was confirmed by Intel’s customer support department which made the mistake of implying that the SDD’s spec had changed.

The customer support person said that the SSD 730 was never built with the capacitor for the power loss data protection.

This means, the SSD does not have the capacitors at all, therefore the Intel’s website has the correct information of the drive.

Power data loss protection is a relatively important feature for anyone buying these drives and it puts reviewers such as Toms’ Hardware on the spot for not noticing it. The only problem is that when Toms’ reviewed the Intel 730 240GB SSD, it spotted it had two large capacitors on the PCB.

After all the fact that Intel included such technology on a mass-market drive was news.

Intel moved to kill the rumours this week. Jeff Fick, Product Marketing Engineer on the Intel SSD 730 Series insisted that the Intel SSD 730 Series incorporates power loss protection circuitry, capacitors and firmware support to help protect user data.

He said that Intel customer support got it wrong.  In fact it looks like contrary to Intel’s tech support’s statements, the capacitors do indeed exist and do provide a level of protection rarely seen on enthusiast-level SSDs.

Intel and Huawei snuggle up

Posted on March 5, 2015 by - News

cuddling-dog-catIntel and Huawei Technologies are getting closer even as their rival governments fall out over trade blocks.

According to Huawei, the pair are getting closer and will share technology and adopt Huawei branding behind the bamboo curtain to make Intel products more palatable to local buyers and the Chinese government.

The technology involved focuses on the cloud, with the pair working on a project to create new servers, a data centre, software and cyber security for a global cloud-computing network.

China’s government has been openly pushing for the use of more Chinese and less foreign-made technology, both to grow its own tech sector and as a response to Edward Snowden’s leaks about widespread US cyber surveillance.

Intel and Huawei have collaborated previously, including a server and cloud product team-up in 2012 and an agreement to cooperate on data storage last April.

Although the announcement is mostly Chinese focused it is likely that the Intel side of the deal will result in other products seen worldwide. Intel would take the lead in nations where Huawei is not trusted, and Huawei stepping forward in countries which are worried about US surveillance.

Intel loses the plot – analysts

Posted on March 3, 2015 by - News

Intel-logoA financial analyst said that an announcement made by Samsung at the Mobile World Congress (MWC) in Barcelona has thrown into sharp relief Intel’s inability to capture market share.

Mark Hibben, at Seeking Alpha, said that while the CEO of Intel, Brian Krzanich, delivered a keynote at MWC, Samsung’s announcement of the Galaxy S6 phone shows that the California company is way behind in its egregious goals.

Hibben said that Samsung is targeting Apple’s iPhone 6, “making it clear that Apple and Samsung completely dominate the mobile device world, leaving Intel with only aspirations”.

The Galaxy S6 smartphone uses a Samsung 64-bit processor, using the company’s 14 nanometre FinFET process.

He said this shows that ARM has leaped into the process lead over Intel, which only has its SoFIA on a 28 nanometre TSMC process, said Hibben. That, he thinks, makes Intel two generations behind process tech for smartphones.

He said companies like Apple and Samsung “can deploy staggering capital resources in the pursuit of non Intel Inside”.

Intel made a $4.2 billion loss in its mobile group in 2014.

 

Intel ready to release the Atom

Posted on March 3, 2015 by - News

Intel Q4_14_ResultsIntel has announced details of its new family of Atom processors, and, as we predicted it has changed its naming strategy to mirror the Core series of processors.

Intel is renaming its Atom family with x3, x5, and x7 designations.

At the low end, the 28nm Atom x3, is basically a smartphone chip with Intel Architecture (SoFIA). The Atom x3 will be available in three distinct variants; all of which will come with integrated modems. All three are 64-bit capable.

The Atom x3-C3130 tops out at 1GHz, incorporates a Mali 400 MP2 GPU, and includes an integrated 3G (HSPA+) modem. The Atom x3-C3230RK has a clock speed of 1.2GHz and has a Mali 450 MP4 GPU, and a 3G modem. The Atom x3-C3440 clocks in at 1.4GHz, features a Mali T720 MP2 graphics core, incorporates a Category 6 LTE modem, and can optionally support NFC.
After looking at its own benchmarks, Intel said that the Atom x3-C3230RK can offer up to 1.8x the media editing performance of competing SoCs from Qualcomm and MediaTek.

The Atom x5 and x7 are Cherry Trail-based and the first Atom SoCs to be built using a 14nm manufacturing process. Both processor families support 64-bit processing, incorporate eighth generation Intel graphics, and support Windows and Android. They also support RealSense, True Key, and Pro WiDi. They don’t feature integrated modems but support Intel’s next generation XMM 726x and 7360 LTE modems.

Intel insists that the x7 offers two times the graphics performance of the existing Atom Z3795 in the GFXBench 2.7 T-Rex HD benchmark and 50 percent greater performance on the 3DMark Ice Storm Unlimited benchmark.
Intel has already announced that the Atom x3 and Bay Trail-based Atom x5 and x7 processors are shipping, and that products using the processors should be available during the first half of 2015.

China irritates tech firms

Posted on February 27, 2015 by - News

chinaflagA law set to be passed by Chinese authorities would make tech vendors provide the government with encryption keys and put backdoors in systems.

According to Reuters, the law relates to counter terrorism and the legislation is likely to be passed into law in the near future.

Other elements of the counter terrorism law include a reqirement for companies to locate their servers and user data in China, as well as forcing vendors to censor content that China believes is related to terrorism.

China already forces banks to buy from home grown vendors, rather than buying abroad.

Reuters said that the implications of this new piece of legislation would be to forbid secure VPNs, to send financial information securely, and to hide any detail of a commercial business.

Google might find itself thanking its lucky stars that it doesn’t do business in mainland China, but other vendors including Apple, Intel and Microsoft will certainly be hit by the legislation.

Apple copies Intel and drinks milk and honey

Posted on February 27, 2015 by - News

Apple's Tim CookFruity cargo cult Apple is set to copy Intel’s success by shifting an ever increasing amount of development work to Israel.

Chief Executive Tim Cook was in Israel on Thursday to visit the company’s new research and development offices in Herzlyia.

Jobs’ Mob also has an R&D center in Haifa, in the country’s north, which is Apple’s second largest research and development hub outside of the US.

Jobs’ Mob recently bought two Israel outfits – Anobit Technologies and PrimeSense which both make microprocessor chip designs.

Apple has also hired most of the Israeli employees of a chip-design division that Texas Instruments decided to shut down in 2013 in Ra’anana, some 10 miles north of Tel Aviv and has been hiring like crazy for its chip design center in Haifa.

On its current jobs posting site for Israel, Apple is advertising for a range of hardware and software positions, including silicon and semiconductor design and testing engineers who will be required to work in labs.

The Wall Street Journal quoted Shlomo Gradman, chairman of the Israeli Semiconductor Club as saying that Apple’s Israeli acquisitions and its expanding local workforce show that the company is becoming more and more independent on the chip level, where it once had to rely on external suppliers.

Cook said in the meeting with Israeli president Reuven Rivlin that Israel and Apple have got much closer together over the last three years than ever before

AMD does not think Chromebooks are worth it

Posted on February 27, 2015 by - News

AMD, SunnyvaleAMD chief technical officer Mark Papermaster has dismissed Chromebooks as “not worth it” and explained why his outfit is not behind the technology.

He said that it was important to look at Chromebook and what Google’s grand plan with it is.

“For us, it’s just a business decision, when you need our type of CPU and graphics technology that can make a difference.”

Chromebook sales are tiny. IDC estimated that 4.6 million Chromebooks were sold in 2014, compared to 304 million PCs for the year.

Intel has come to dominate Chromebook sales with Celeron and Atom chips, although some models also feature third-party ARM chips inside.

But Chromebooks are generally considered low-cost productivity machines and AMD is trying to place itself as a graphics and media chipmaker. Carrizo, dedicates four “Excavator” CPU cores against eight Radeon graphics cores and16 percent of the die is dedicated to CPU cores.
“For us, it’s when do you need our CPU and graphics capability that can make a difference,” Papermaster said. “Again, you’ll see that there’s these rock-bottom markets… so those don’t have our value proposition.”

“We play in the whole range of the market. We’ll play in the low-cost value” market, Papermaster added. “You have to at least get paid for that value when you’re working on graphics. You go below that, and you’re looking at $7 chips.”

Intel buying its way into China

Posted on February 27, 2015 by - News

Intel Q4_14_ResultsMegachip maker Intel has decided that the only way to get around the inscrutable Chinese is to invest in shed loads of scrute and buy its way into the market.

Intel is pouring billions of dollars into expanding its influence in China, where fewer than half the country’s roughly 500 million mobile phone users have smartphones and the market is ruled by Qualcomm.

Intel is apparently trying to use its relationship with PC clients in China as a foot in the door to mobile devices. It is chummy with Lenovo, the No. 1 global PC seller, and its hardware powers a handful of Lenovo smartphones. It is also mates with Chinese internet giant Tencent, which includes a joint research centre, helps ensure that the WeChat maker’s software works smoothly with Intel chips.

Intel paid $1.5 billion in September for a 20 percent stake in state-run Tsinghua Unigroup, which controls two domestic mobile chipmakers. It did not need to spend that much, in some observers thought that it was double the outfit’s value. In December, Intel said it would pay $1.6 billion to upgrade its factory in the central Chinese city of Chengdu, which cost $300 million to build a decade ago. The plant, designed for back-end testing, will absorb some of the work previously done in a shuttered Costa Rican facility.

That appears to suggest that Chipzilla is shifting a lot of its tech to China. The idea being that it will intergrate itself into the local supply chain and impress the Chinese officials, who are having a few problems with Qualcomm. Intel may be more favorably treated by Chinese regulators because of its stake in Tsinghua Unigroup—as well as its willingness to build high-end local labs. So far, Intel hasn’t been touched in China’s crackdown on foreign companies.

The next battle is believed to be for wearable tech and if Intel has invested in Chinese start-ups it might have a leg-up and a way to make these as cheap as possible.

US tech economy suffering because of paranoia

Posted on February 26, 2015 by - News

Senator McCarthy On 'Face The Nation'The US economy is officially suffering because its government is not reigning in its paranoid security services.

One of the world’s biggest markets, China, has said that it is no longer using high-profile US technology brands for state buys, amid ongoing revelations about mass surveillance and hacking by the US government.

That means that key brands, including Cisco, Intel, Apple and McAfee — among others — have been dropped from the Chinese government’s list of authorised brands.

The number of approved foreign technology brands fell by a third, based on an analysis of the procurement list. Less than half of those companies with security products remain on the list.

Chinese companies were said to offer “more product guarantees” than overseas rivals. Some claim it has cost the US government many billions of dollars figure on the impact of the leaks.

US companies have been moaning that the activities by the NSA are harming their businesses in crucial growth markets, including China. However, the US government has claimed that its aggressive spying plan meant that Americans were safer and spying on everyone was the only way to catch terrorists.

This included backdoors being placed in US products sold overseas. Those revelations sparked a change in Chinese policy by forcing Western technology companies to hand over their source code for inspection. That led to an outcry in the capital by politicians who accused Chinese companies of doing exactly the same thing, when they hadn’t.

Microsoft said its fourth-quarter earnings that China “fell short” of its expectations, which chief executive Satya Nadella described as a “set of geopolitical issues” that the company was working through.

HP said its fiscal first-quarter earnings had “execution issues” in China thanks to the “tough market” with increasing competition from the local vendors approved by the Chinese government.

However Cisco has been suffering the most. Earlier this month at its fiscal second-quarter earnings, the networking giant said it lost 19 percent of its revenue in China, amid claims the NSA was installing backdoors and implants on its routers in transit.

Intel brings the Joy of X to the Atom

Posted on February 26, 2015 by - News

atomIntel has finally woken up to the fact that its esoteric branding of Atom chips is leading to a lot of confusion amongst suppliers and customers.

Historically Intel has thought that customers and suppliers would instinctively know the difference between the Atom Z3735F or the Atom Z3735G.

Now Intel has decided to bring in naming designations which are similar to its Core brands and Xing up Atom at the same time.

New Atom chips will have the X3, X5 and X7 designations. An Atom X3 will deliver good performance, X5 will be better and X7 will be the best, an Intel rep said.

Faster X7 chips for high-end tablets may have better graphics and more wireless connectivity options than X5 chips and will cost more.

Intel’s name change comes ahead of the Mobile World Congress trade show, where Intel is expected to announce new mobile chips. It’s likely that X3 will be the formal name for Atom smartphone chips code-named Sofia, while the Atom X5 and X7 will be names for tablet chips for Cherry Trail.

In 2009, Intel similarly renamed its Core processors, a move met with some opposition among chip enthusiasts. The resistance quickly crumbled as the new names caught on.  It is likely that the Atom name changes will be greeted with the same enthusiasm.

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.

 

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.

 

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.