Tag: zen

Which? blasts telecoms firms for price hikes

Posted on January 11, 2024 by - News

Which? has told telecom firms to stop any plans to go ahead with ‘unconscionable’ broadband and mobile price hikes in April, even after the industry watchdog found the practice hurts consumers and set out plans to ban it.

Ofcom recently planned to ban the practice of inflation-linked mid-contract price rises, saying that they cause ‘big consumer harm’, but this will not happen before the next wave of expected hikes in April 2024.

Many providers seem ready to shamelessly go on – with next week’s CPI inflation news set to start the announcements of the latest round of shocking hikes for consumers. Many may have already suffered increases of up to 17 per cent last year.

Which? Has written an open letter to big broadband and mobile providers – BT, EE, O2, PlusNet, Shell Energy Broadband, TalkTalk, Tesco Mobile, Three, Virgin Media and Vodafone – telling them to cancel any unfair and unpredictable price hikes planned for April this year. The letter has been published as a full-page national newspaper ad this morning.

Zen deals with Inclarity

Posted on April 27, 2018 by - News

zen_as_a_frogZen – that’s a company – not a practice based on Sahaja, has struck an agreement to extend its service provision to Channel partner Inclarity Communications, a London based provider of cloud-based hosted and VoIP telephony services.

As a result of the agreement, Inclarity – already a consumer of Zen broadband services – will see its broadband service expanded and its PSTN services migrated to Zen. Using Zen’s Partner Portal will result in better self-service and more streamlined and efficient service for Inclarity customers.

Inclarity’s Operations Director Andrew Sett said: “Zen’s portal gives us better control in that it enables end-to-end service control. It also allows us to carry out simultaneous provide orders with minimal disruption to a user’s business.”

Zen’s Channel MD Steve Warburton said: “It is pleasing to work with a partner that shares our ethos regarding the importance of customer relationships,” he says. “Our relationship with Inclarity not only offers improved delivery and servicing tools through the portal but also gives them full access to ultrafast FTTP and G.fast as it rolls out throughout the UK. These are exciting times for the Zen and Inclarity relationship.”

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.