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- Intel makes 14nm ARM bits for Altera
- Microsoft to act to save XP
- AMD plans launch of Kaveri for December
- Oculus Rift CTO slams AMD's upcoming API
- IEEE enthuses about new cache memory management
| Intel makes 14nm ARM bits for Altera Posted: 30 Oct 2013 03:12 AM PDT Altera's plan to use Intel's 14 nm FinFET process look even stranger now that it has been revealed that the chip will use ARM's 64-bit cores. That means Intel will fabricate ARM cores starting in 2014 in the new high-end Altera Stratix 10 parts that use four ARM Cortex-A53 cores. According to EETimes, The Stratix 10 devices, with their embedded DSPs and other logic, is Altera's best performance parts to date. They will be aimed at apps from search engine accelerators to communications data plane processors and radar guidance and security processing. However it puts Intel in the strange strategy of making its rival's chips inside its own buildings something it probably didn't plan on when it started to push its outsourcing plans. The chip giant is experimenting with offering its leading-edge fab processes as foundry services to chip designers, Altera being one of its largest customers so far. . However it will be interesting to see what happens when you mix ARM's 64-t cores with Chipzilla's leading-edge process and if anything catches fire. Altera claims the Stratix 10 parts in Intel's 14nm process will provide FPGA "performance over one gigahertz, two times the core performance of current high-end 28-nm FPGAs." |
| Posted: 30 Oct 2013 02:46 AM PDT Software giant Microsoft is considering a plan to automatically switch on Windows Defender for those customers who insist on not running any system protection on old XP machines. According to Microsoft’s own site, the Volish goal has been focused on getting as many of its customers off of the older Windows XP operating system onto something more modern and protected—Windows 8.1, if at all possible. But Microsoft will discontinue support for Windows XP in April 2014, which means that if anyone continues to run the OS any holes will exist, unpatched, forever. The idea is that as a customer goes into an unprotected state, Microsoft wants antivirus vendors to be installed as the first upgrade source. If the licence has expired, the first thing Microsoft asks them to do is to go upgrade. If they have not got any AV products then Microsoft will automatically install its Defender product. Vole said it will not nag, but at the same time to tell people that they’re not protected, and move them back into a protected state without them really knowing. Windows XP makes up 22 percent of the worldwide user base, and in developing countries it can be under the bonnet of a third of machines. It is possible that there could be a lot of machines which are suddenly protected by Windows Defender. |
| AMD plans launch of Kaveri for December Posted: 30 Oct 2013 02:44 AM PDT The dark satanic rumour mill has manufactured a hell on earth yarn that AMD is planning a launch for its Kaveri desktop APUs)in December. According to Bit-Tech, the launch will take place ahead of channel availability of at least three models by February 2013. It is all part of AMD's heterogeneous systems architecture (HSA) platform, which will include unified CPU and GPU address spaces for improved cooperation. AMD claims that Kaveri will bring significant improvements over current-generation APUs. The GPU is based on the Steamroller microarchitecture, and will include cores based on the Graphics Core Next architecture. Some selected models will be Siamese twinned to an ARM Cortex-A5 core, which will form a security sub-system. It had been believed that Kaveri would launch before the year is out, but other rumours said that AMD had pushed it back to early 2014. With a paper launch in December, and going to the channel in February, this explains both rumours. A roadmap seen by VR-Zone claims that AMD is planning to announce three stock-keeping units (SKUs) at an event in early December. These will be two flagship A10 chips, and a cost-reduced A8. The A8 will be built from dies which were not good enough for A10 use. Engineering samples for all three SKUs have already been completed, with production-ready samples scheduled for December. Channel availability of the new APUs will begin in February 2014 to be followed by retail availability later in the year. |
| Oculus Rift CTO slams AMD's upcoming API Posted: 30 Oct 2013 02:43 AM PDT Oculus Rift CTO John Carmack has slammed AMD for pulling back from Mantle for all its three platforms and sending apparently setting it just for PCs. According to VR-Zone, Carmack said that Mantle would be a good thing for AMD if all three platforms support the API. He said that if Mantle is just for the PC then he was not personally interested. "But if I was still doing the entire major tech coding, I probably would not be embracing Mantle right now. But there would be days where it would be extremely tempting." Previously, wording provided by AMD led to the assumption that the Mantle API would address not only many Graphics Core Next-based GPUs and APUs on the "metal" level, but the GCN-based APUs found in the Xbox One and PlayStation 4. This would, in theory, allow developers to create games for all three platforms more easily, and implement similar AMD-driven features across all three versions. But Microsoft said the Xbox One wouldn't support Mantle, and AMD quickly followed up saying that the API was strictly for PC gaming development. To be fair, Carmack is pretty much an Nvidia man. In early October he tweeted that he believes Nvidia's OpenGL extensions can provide a similar number of draw calls as Mantle. The ability to do nine times more draw calls is one of Mantle's major selling points. |
| IEEE enthuses about new cache memory management Posted: 30 Oct 2013 02:42 AM PDT The IEEE is getting excited about a new process for managing the fast-access memory inside a CPU which it claims can lead to as much as a twofold speedup and to energy-use reductions of up to 72 percent. According to its inhouse mag, the idea fixes several important problems. At the moment, control is hard-wired into the CPU’s circuitry, but the substantial speedup came when the designers let the operating system do the job. According to an IEEE paper, the idea, dubbed Jigsaw, is the brainchild of two MIT researchers Daniel Sanchez and his graduate student Nathan Beckmann. They realised that as computers and portable devices accumulate more memory and CPU cores, it makes less sense to leave cache management entirely up to the CPU. Instead, they say, it might be better to let the operating system share the burden. The idea is not new, it was first seen in IBM’s Cell processors, as well as Sony’s PlayStation 3, but what is new about the MIT technology, called Jigsaw, is that it allows software to configure some on-chip memory caches but without requiring so much control that programming becomes a memory-management nightmare. This solves many of the problems that people had with the PS3. It was a bugger to programme because of the memory management requirement. On-chip caches must be designed to handle every job, from pure floating-point number crunching to intensive searches and queries of a computer’s memory banks. CPUs have no higher-level knowledge of the kinds of jobs they’re doing. This means a self-contained numerical simulation with complex equations but little need for memory access would run with exactly the same cache resources as would a graph search, a memory-hogging hunt for relationships between stored data. But using the Sanchez and Beckmann plan you give a percent of the CPU’s footprint to a simple piece of hardware that could monitor in real time the cache activity in each core. Hardware cache monitors would give Jigsaw the independent oversight it would need to play air traffic controller with the CPU’s caches. It means that the OS’s kernel needs at most a few thousand more lines of code which is not that much considering that the lighter weight Linux’s kernel in 2012 weighed in with 15 million lines. One of Jigsaw’s features is a software module, to be folded in with the OS, that the researchers call Peekahead which computes the best configuration of CPU caches based on the upcoming jobs it expects the cores to do in the coming clock cycles. However IEEE has warned that the technology is not baked yet. It is proven to work well on one chip, but might not be effective on other processors with a different hardware design. It also means that every time the processor changes, you have to redo your software. But Sanchez thinsk that software applications and utilities would remain unaffected by Jigsaw. The only thing that needs to be done is the operating system code needs to be aware of that intimate knowledge of the hardware, like the topology of the different portions of the cache. |
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