Tag: trbc

Hon Hai ties up with Innolux

Posted on November 20, 2014 by - News

Hon-HaiHon Hai Precision Industry has tied up with flat panel maker Innolux and is investing $2.8 billion in a panel producing plant in Taiwan.

Hon Hai is desperately trying to find new revenue streams which do not depend on the fruity themed cargo cult, Apple.  Earlier this year it bought stakes in a Taiwanese mobile network provider and a South Korean IT services provider.

Under the plan, the pair will buy equipment for the facility located in the southern city of Kaohsiung and which is expected to start production in the second half of 2016.

The plant, which will make low-temperature polysilicon panels, predominantly for use in smartphones, was built in 2008, but was mothballed due to financial constraints after the 2008 global financial crisis.

The plans are still awaiting final approval from the boards of both companies, but it seems likely that Hon Hai will stump up for the majority of the cash. The Innolux representative said the investment may take the form of a new joint-venture company.

Hon Hai already holds a nine percent stake in Innolux though its various subsidiaries. It is all a little mysterious dot com.

 

Intel’s Knight’s Hill cut down to 10nm

Posted on November 20, 2014 by - News, Products

intel_log_reversedIntel is telling the world+dog that it talks to that its third-generation Xeon Phi, codenamed Knight’s Hill, will use 10nm technology and its second iteration of Omni-Path fabric. TechEye and ChannelEye are not in Intel’s good books again, so we have to sneak under the radar.

Intel is not talking to us any more. Sniff.

Knight’s Hill is a long way from being in the shops. We still have to see the 14nm Knight’s Landing which is not going to be in the shops until summer of 2015. This could mean that Knights Hill is likely for 2017.

Knight’s Landing will use the same Silvermont architecture that powers Intel’s Bay Trail but it will  support four threads per CPU — currently Silvermont doesn’t use hyper-threading marchitecture at all.

The reason we are interested in Knight’s Hill is that information on it is about as rare as a 1970s TV star who has not been investigated by operation YewTree, and we wonder why Intel is talking about it at all.

Perhaps it might because Intel is attempting to reassure customers that there’s a roadmap stretching out beyond the Knight’s Landing product and the 14nm node.

Intel’s Omni-Path scaling architecture debuts next year. Omni-Path is Intel’s next-generation networking interconnect that handles up to 100Gbps of bandwidth and uses silicon photonics technology for signalling. The new standard offers up to 48 ports per switch compared to 36 ports on other top-end standards, and is designed to lower the cost of huge build-outs by reducing the total number of switches. The long  term goal is to reduce latency and allow for effective scaling as the industry pushes forwards towards exascale. Bring back Pat Gelsinger!

Future versions of the core will likely expand both the onboard memory pool (16GB is expected for Knight’s Landing; Knight’s Hill could pack 32GB or more), add additional bandwidth, and likely increase the interconnect performance between the CPU and the associated MIC.

According to Extreme Tech  Intel might push its AVX standard up as high as 1024-bit registers, if the HPC crowd wants it. Adding wider registers is a simple way to boost performance The current AVX specification allows for extensions of up to 1024 bits in length, however, so Intel could do this. [Does anybody apart from Extreme Tech believe this Intel crap any more? Ed.]

 

Android Trojan could be bane of corporations

Posted on November 20, 2014 by - News

hitchhikers_guide_marvinOne of the longest running multipurpose mobile botnets has been updated to become stealthier and more resilient and it could be a major headache for businesses.

Dubbed NotCompatible, the botnet is mainly used for instant message spam and rogue ticket purchases, but it could be used to launch targeted attacks against corporate networks because the malware allows attackers to use the infected devices as proxies.

Researchers from security firm Lookout said that the mobile Trojan was discovered in 2012 and was the first Android malware to be distributed as a drive-by download from compromised websites.

Devices visiting such sites would automatically start downloading a malicious Android application package file. Users would then see notifications about the finished downloads and would click on them, prompting the malicious application to install if their devices had the “unknown sources” setting enabled.

A newly found version of the Trojan program, called NotCompatible.C, encrypts its communications with the C&C servers, making the traffic indistinguishable from legitimate SSL, SSH or VPN traffic.

Lookout security researchers wrote in their bog that the malware can also communicate with other infected devices directly, forming a peer-to-peer network that offers powerful redundancy in case the main C&C servers are shut down.

The Lookout researchers believe that the botnet is likely rented to other cybercriminals for different activities and the Trojan’s proxy capability makes it a potential threat to corporates.

If a device infected with NotCompatible.C is brought into an organisation, it could give the botnet’s operators access to that organisation’s network, the Lookout researchers said.

“Using the NotCompatible proxy, an attacker could potentially do anything from enumerating vulnerable hosts inside the network, to exploiting vulnerabilities and search for exposed data.”

“We believe that NotCompatible is already present on many corporate networks because we have observed, via Lookout’s user base, hundreds of corporate networks with devices that have encountered NotCompatible,” the Lookout researchers said.

Ah, the unternet of thangs ain’t what they used to be.