TechEye |  |
- Fabless outfits to command third of IC market
- Chinese "spy" caught with NASA porn
- Man wants Raspberry Pi as drone detector
- Hackers turn into dambusters
- Researcher gets to warp speed on 1,966,080 cores
- Barnes & Noble sticks Google Play on Nook tablet
- Why does everyone want to buy AMD?
- Microsoft finds a niche among the price conscious
- Intel appoints Brian Krzanich CEO
- Infineon cheers up a bit
| Fabless outfits to command third of IC market Posted: 03 May 2013 04:53 AM PDT According to a new set of figures out of IC Insights, fabless IC companies will command at least 33 percent of the total IC market by 2017. In the long run fables IC suppliers and the foundries that serve them will continue to become an ever stronger force in the total IC industry. Fears of an almighty Intel with huge 450mm fabs seem unfounded, at least if IC Insights crunched its numbers right. Fabless IC sales growth always tended to outpace IDM IC sales growth. The trend reversed only once, back in 2010, as fabless IC suppliers failed to cash in on the DRAM and NAND boom. However, fabless IC suppliers saw their growth rates rebound in 2011, with a 5 percent increase compared to a 1 percent decline for the IDM gang. The positive trend continued in 2012, as fabless IC supplier grew by 6 percent, outperforming IDMs by 14 points. In 2012 fabless companies accounted for 27.8 percent of worldwide IC sales, up from 13 percent in 2002. |
| Chinese "spy" caught with NASA porn Posted: 03 May 2013 04:49 AM PDT A Chinese man who was suspected of spying on NASA was pulled off a plane with a stolen laptop. But instead of the expected state secrets, the laptop was packed full of porn. Bo Jiang was headed for China with a NASA laptop which counterintelligence spooks expected to contain spectacular details on "huge thrusters," "rings around Uranus" and the "conquest of the outer rim". However, it is clear that someone in counterintelligence did not read the file information correctly and the files were not what they seemed. While the Face of Bo was apparently red his crime was not spying but downloading illegal porn onto his NASA laptop. According to Business Week, at the time of his arrest in March, Jiang was under federal investigation at NASA's request for a possible conspiracy involving violations of the Arms Export Control Act, according to an FBI affidavit. Spooks were trying to determine whether Jiang had taken, or was seeking to take, "secret, confidential or classified information" to China. Jiang, 31, was one of about 281 nationals from countries designated as security threats employed at NASA. He was barred from NASA facilities late last year and fired in January. In the end he decided to pop home to China and failed to tell the authorities that his laptop belonged to NASA. This might have been because he didn't want people to look too closely at it because it was packed with illegal porn. What is telling about the whole incident is the level of anti-Chinese feeling at NASA. Jiang was outted by whistleblowers but so far no evidence has surfaced that he is a Chinese spy and he claims he is the target of a witch-hunt. Jiang dealt with "generic work resulting from fundamental research with no classified sensitive or restricted information". He was going home because he had no job prospects and his student visa had expired, according to the documents. He is currently being held on a charge of lying to federal agent and could be banged up for five years. |
| Man wants Raspberry Pi as drone detector Posted: 03 May 2013 02:48 AM PDT A US engineer is trying to sell the idea of an open source drone detection system built out of shedloads of Raspberry Pi kits. The Drone Shield, which is designed by John Franklin, will cost around $60 to $70 to set up. It will combine a, a signal processor, a microphone, and analysis software to scan for specific audio signatures and compare them against what known drones sound like. Once a match is found, the Drone Shield then sends an e-mail or SMS to its owner and warns him or her to keep their head down. Franklin wants to raise funds from other "privacy-minded citizens" like himself. He wants to counter the rising use of drones not only in foreign theatres of war, but also in domestic skies, something which has not really happened just yet. He told Ars Technica that it probably would take "about $100 and two months" to figure out if the idea would work. Already there are a few anti-drone tactics and devices which you can buy off the shelf already. Franklin acknowledged that the device won't be 100 percent perfect. It will be based on some 1997 research paper from the Army Research Laboratory entitled: "Acoustic Feature Extraction for a Neural Network Classifier". But because the gear is open source, he is hopeful that the buyers will improve it. Linda Lye, an attorney with the American Civil Liberties Union of Northern California said that this project is yet another indicator of the fact that there is very strong and widespread sentiment on the ground about drones, and it's one of tremendous scepticism. |
| Posted: 03 May 2013 02:45 AM PDT Chinese hackers have cracked a US Army database that contains information about the vulnerabilities of thousands of US dams. The database belonged to the US Army Corps of Engineers' National Inventory of Dams (NID) and could help China carry out a cyber attack on the national electrical power grid. Of course it is unlikely to do this. After all most of the Chinese economy depends on selling gear to America that need electricity so it would not make much sense to turn off the power supply. However while most US companies are manufacturing in China the US is paranoid about spying from behind the bamboo curtain. Nevertheless, according to IB Times there will be a lot of questions about how a sensitive site could be bought down by hackers. Pete Pierce, a spokesperson from the Corps of Engineers, confirmed the attack happened but was not saying how or why. He said that the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers knew that a hacker gained access to the National Inventory of Dams (NID), to include sensitive fields of information not generally available to the public on January 2013. The user didn't have the proper level of access for the information. Access was immediately blocked once discovered, and the NID is beefing up security to the database. The NID has information about 8,100 major dams in the US. The fear is that hackers could access the systems that control a dam's turbine generators. |
| Researcher gets to warp speed on 1,966,080 cores Posted: 03 May 2013 02:43 AM PDT A team of boffins has managed to create a protocol which can carry out 7.8 million MPI tasks on 1,966,080 cores of the Sequoia Blue Gene/Q supercomputer system. According to the research spec this means that the protocol can manage to process 33 trillion events in 65 seconds which is hugely faster than the 504 billion events/second carried out in the past. Researchers Peter Barnes, Christopher Carothers, David R. Jefferson and Justin M. Lapre have dubbed their protocol Time Warp and it is a parallel discrete-event simulation synchronization that automatically uncovers the available parallelism through its error detection and rollback recovery mechanism. They noticed a 97 times performance improvement when scaling from 32,768 to 1,966,080 cores thanks to cache performance improvements when running at peak scale. The system uses a new, long range performance metric, called Warp Speed, which grows linearly with an exponential increase in the PHOLD event-rate. In true Star Trek style, the machine has warp speeds. Currently it is at Warp Speed 2.7 and it will be nearly 150 years before we expect to reach Warp Speed 10.0. The paper on Warp Speed can be found by a jump to the left and then a step to the right here. |
| Barnes & Noble sticks Google Play on Nook tablet Posted: 03 May 2013 02:41 AM PDT Barnes & Noble is trying to make its Nook tablet a bit more competitive by offering unrestricted access to Google’s Play Store. The Nook launched to relatively positive reviews and it offers good value for money, but the lack of Play Store support was a turn off for many. The addition of Google Play will increase the number of apps available on the Nook from just 10,000 to 750,000. It’s quite baffling that Barnes & Noble didn’t do it a while ago, as its closed approach clearly wasn’t working well. "This deal is about plugging that gap. Consumers told us they wanted more apps," Barnes & Noble CEO William Lynch told Reuters. Amazon does not appear to be abandoning its walled garden approach. Although Kindle tablets are outselling Nooks, the lack of proper Google Play access could blunt Amazon’s edge and force it to open up the floodgates to thousands of Google Play apps. |
| Why does everyone want to buy AMD? Posted: 03 May 2013 02:39 AM PDT If you read the financial press you might be surprised to learn that AMD is about to be bought by every company under the sun. So far the outfit has been considered by pundits to be bought by Apple, Dell, Qualcomm and Intel using some fairly bizarre reasoning. Take for example the "Intel plans to buy AMD" rumour. Given that this would be subject to all sorts of antitrust actions, you have to question how this one came into being. The logic is based on a fallacy. Since the world is moving to mobile, x86 chips are less important and as a result antitrust regulators are not going to care any more that Intel would have a monopoly of making these. However, antitrust regulators are concerned about competition and giving one manufacturer total control of a market, no matter how narrow, is going to set writs flying. To buy AMD, Intel would have to act fast. AMD's share price is growing thanks to its gains in consoles and low-power computers. The other consideration is what Intel would have to gain from buying its rival. The only thing AMD has which Intel lacks is the considerable graphics know-how of AMD's ATI business. Although Chipzilla's graphics knowledge is building, it is still a long way behind AMD on that score. However, it is a lot better at integrating that knowledge into a single chip. This becomes important as the next trend in PC building is towards integrated chips and graphics cores. But this problem might be solved not by Intel buying AMD, but something no less radical – AMD and Intel could actually bury the hatchet and team up. This would mean the sharing of technology which both need but would stop short of an antitrust writ landing on anyone's door. While it would appear that such a deal would favour the much bigger Intel, in fact it would also assist AMD assert itself in the market and take the pressure off Chipzilla from regulators. If the future really is mobile chips, then the loss of market share in this arena is less important, but the access to better graphics technology is a worthy pay off. Besides, the spin off technology might also help Intel and AMD match ARM in the mobile market. But it is about as likely to happen as it was that the Nazis would team up with Stalin to defeat the US during World War II. The Apple rumour is even weirder. The idea is that Apple could immediately move from Intel chips in its Macs to similar AMD processors, and, under its roof, Apple could tailor-make the processors to best fit its needs. Somehow these rumours are also tied to Apple wanting to drop Samsung as its chipmaker. Buying AMD would not help it resolve that problem - AMD has not manufactured chips for a long time. Even if buying AMD would give Apple the ability to create better chips, it would still have to come up with a way of building them. Besides, Apple does have enough inhouse chipmaking ability to adapt ARM designs at the moment and there are also rumours that it will let its PC business quietly die off. Again, the only reason why Apple would want AMD is that it would gain control of AMD/ATI's graphics products. But at the moment ATI technology is not the flavour of the month at Cupertino. While Apple might want AMD graphics processors in the near future, it is more likely to be happy with the way things are between the two. If Apple bought AMD it would get back its former chief CPU architect Jim Keller, who left for AMD earlier this year, as he is known for his work as A4/A5 designer and K8 lead architect at Apple. On the downside it would also get back senior vice president of devices hardware engineering at Apple, Mark Papermaster, who Apple probably would not want back. The Qualcomm rumour is silly. An ARM fabless chipmaker buying a x86 fabless chipmaker makes sense only if it were buying a market leader in the x86 market. AMD's former CTO, Eric Demers, who now works for Qualcomm, would find himself in charge of his former company. While the combined outfits could provide some good engineering products, there are few compelling business reasons for such a deal to take place. Dell can be ruled out because it lacks the money and has other problems. Based on this, all these rumours can be safely ignored for now. What is likely to happen is that AMD will end up with closer ties with one of the companies which is rumoured to buy it and from a practical point of view there will be nothing to see here, so move on please. |
| Microsoft finds a niche among the price conscious Posted: 03 May 2013 02:35 AM PDT While software giant Microsoft has been touting its software at the top end of smartphone land, it is actually Steve Ballmers' considerable bottom end where the dosh is likely to be made. The new Nokia Lumia 521 is a much lower-priced smartphone launching with Windows on board, and is being seen as Microsoft's boldest move to win mass market share. The new model will go on sale at Walmart at an unsubsidised price under $150. This is good value for a phone running up-to-date software without a long-term contract. Terry Myerson, head of the Windows Phone unit at Microsoft's campus near Seattle, told Reuters that it was an opportunity for it to offer a very high quality device in the mainstream. It is starting to look like the Vole is right. The Nokia Lumia 521 went on sale on the Home Shopping Network (HSN) last week, where it has already sold out. The 4G phone which we know across the pond as the Nokia 520 is a mid-range device with some high-end features, such as a four-inch touch screen, five megapixel camera and high-definition video display. What is surprising is that Android, which is open source, is supposed to be a lot cheaper for the likes of Samsung to put in the shops. Microsoft phones with their Vole Tax should be much more expensive. So far Microsoft has done better overseas with its phones. It has 20 percent of the market in Mexico and Poland, and almost seven percent in Britain. Myerson said that outside the US, Microsoft was doing better because there was not the influence of the carriers such as AT&T and Verizon Wireless. US phone retailers pay heavy up-front subsidies from AT&T and Verizon, in return for long-term service contracts, which mean that mean US customers can afford the most expensive hardware from Apple and Samsung. This has made it hard for Microsoft to get its foot in the door. Myerson says Microsoft has to differentiate on more than just price and introduce some "killer hardware" to use Microsoft's Office and Xbox products to turn the phone into a work tool or advanced toy. |
| Intel appoints Brian Krzanich CEO Posted: 02 May 2013 08:56 AM PDT Intel has named its next CEO, chief operating officer Brian Krzanich, 52, who will take over from Paul Otellini 16 May. Krzanich has been COO since January 2012 but has previously held technical and executive positions at the company since he joined in 1982. He will be Intel's sixth CEO. Intel chairman Andy Bryant said in a prepared statement that after a "thorough and deliberate selection process, the board of directors is delighted that Krzanich will lead Intel as we define and invent the next generation of technology that will shape the future of computing". "Brian is a strong leader with a passion for technology and deep understanding of the business," Bryant said. Paul Otellini announced his resignation in late 2012 after almost 40 years at Intel. At the time Intel also engaged in a bit of executive reshuffling, promoting Stacy Smith, Krzanich and Renee James. Both Smith and Krzanich were considered good candidates for CEO, though Krzanich was tipped to be the favourite. Under Otellini's leadership, Intel spearheaded technologise like High-K/Metal gate and 3D tri-gate transistors. And although the chip firm was considerably late to the party, Otellini managed to wrangle tablet and smartphone contract wins. Krzanich said in a statement that he is "deeply honoured" by the opportunity. "We have amazing assets, tremendous talent, and an unmatched legacy of innovation and execution". He noted that the company plans to move "even faster into ultra-mobility" to "lead Intel into the next era". So far Ultrabooks and Intel-powered mobile devices have not been as successful as the company would have liked. Among other things, Krzanich will be tasked with getting the company up to speed against competitors such as ARM. The board of directors also elected software head Renee James, 48, to be Intel's president. James will also begin on 16 May. James was previously chief of staff for ex-CEO Andy Grove and serves on the board of directors for Vodafone and VMware. |
| Posted: 02 May 2013 08:31 AM PDT German chip maker Infineon appears to have finally cheered up a bit after its revenue did not drop as much as it expected. The highly precise chip maker had expected its revenue to drop by nine percent, but actually it only fell by five. The reason for the better than expected results was that carmakers were buying a lot of chips hoping higher-spec models in China will offset flagging demand in Europe. Infineon's chips activate airbags, enable cruise control and cut emissions and apparently carmakers are trying to push them on China's newly wealthy. Infineon said it expected its 2013 revenue to come in at the high end of its previous target range of €3.56-3.71 billion. The company also said its 2013 core operating profit margin would reach the upper end of its five to nine percent range. Chief executive Reinhard Ploss said that things were finally getting better. His order books were filling up although there was a little too much short term business for him to be truly at peace with his inner child and its wallet. His enthusiasm is similar to statements made by other chip makers. Texas Instruments forecast growth for the current quarter on improving demand for its chips. The automotive industry is still more depressed than Robert Smith at a Justin Bieber concert, particularly in Europe. But Infineon said revenue levels had recovered at its automotive unit, which accounts for about half of its revenue. This was mostly because the cars on the road need a ton of chips to be safer, cleaner and more energy efficient. This is even more important in the premium cars which auto makers are selling to Chinese Communist party leaders. Reuters pointed out that a Credit Suisse survey last month showed sales by Chinese luxury car dealerships increased 17-22 percent during the first quarter and the analysts said they expected luxury brands in China to maintain strong sales in 2013. Infineon also said it expects revenue for the current fiscal third quarter to be around €1 billion, with an operating margin of around 10 percent. |
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