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- Intel shows off Knights Landing
- Microsoft to kill RT
- Typeface leads to retrial
- Bletchley Park boffin's daughter was a slave
- HP enterprise sales spark recovery hope
| Intel shows off Knights Landing Posted: 27 Nov 2013 02:05 AM PST Chipzilla has provided details of its Knights Landing, up-to-72-core Xeon Phi supercomputing chip. Knights Landing be hitting the shops in 2015 and will use Intel's 14nm process. Significantly, Knights Landing will be a standalone processor, rather than a slot-in coprocessor that has to be paired with standard Xeon CPU. It will also have up to 16GB of DRAM 3D stacked on-package. This will give it up to 500GB/sec of memory bandwidth, which is not to be sneezed at and Chipzilla tells us it will manage three teraflops per socket when it is going downhill and the wind is behind it. This means that it should be easy to build a 100+ petaflop x86 supercomputer and with a bit of planning an exascale monster or two. Intel currently runs the Xeon Phi, which is dubbed the Knights Corner. This is just a PCIe expansion board with an up-to-61-core Intel MIC chip. These cores are based on the original P54C Pentium core but with a lot of modern add-ons such as 64-bit support, 512-bit vector registers, go faster stripes and spoilers. Knights Landing is a major rethink. The P54C cores are replaced with up to 72 Silvermont cores which can use AVX 3.1 instructions. This means that the beast can manage six teraflops of single precision math, or three teraflops of double precision math without having to take off its shoes and socks and counting its toes. Haswell's head explodes when it has to do 500 gigaflops of double precision math, or one Italian tax return. Knights Landing should manage between 14 and 16 gigaflops per watt which is better than the most efficient supercomputers currently max out at around 4 gigaflops per watt. |
| Posted: 27 Nov 2013 02:04 AM PST Windows has put its ARM based Windows RT on death row in favour of Windows Phone and Windows 8 Senior executive Julie Larson-Green, who is executive vice-president of Devices and Studios at Microsoft, said that the aim of Windows RT was to have a crack at creating a closed, turnkey experience similar to what Apple does on the iPad. According to the Guardian she said it was silly for Vole to have three operating systems. It has regular Windows and Mobile Windows and only having two makes sense. Word on the street has Windows RT has been pants. OEMs, PC makers and developers have spurned it as they would spurn a rabid dog. Volish loyalist Dell was the last besides Microsoft to leave the RT space, dropping its XPS 10 in September. Now only Microsoft and Nokia's handset division seriously use it. Microsoft had to write down $900 million at the end of the June quarter on unsold Surface RT devices. This means that it is unlikely that there will be a Surface 3 and no successor to the Nokia 2520 which is an eight inch tablet running Windows RT. Larson-Green said that Microsoft did not differentiate the devices well enough. They looked similar. Using them is similar. It just did not do everything that you expected Windows to do. |
| Posted: 27 Nov 2013 01:34 AM PST A convicted sex offender faces a retrial because a judge in the case did not like the fact he used Arial typeface on letters and said as much on Facebook. According to the Technology and Workplace Blog, an unnamed sex offender [John Doe] was fighting the Massachusetts Sex Offender Registry Board’s decision that he needed to register as a level three sex offender. As part of the normal administrative process, Doe’s case went to hearing examiner Tyson Lynch, who ruled against Doe. However, Lynch made some huge mistakes by posting a lot of rubbish about the case on Facebook. The list was long, but one of the more memorable was the fact that he could not trust anyone who used the Arial typeface. He ranted that the Arial font is "not appropriate for motions” followed up with “I might be biased. I think Arial is inappropriate for most things”. Other mutterings were obviously worse such as the observation, posted during working hours that “it’s always a mistake when people testify, because they get destroyed in cross examination”, In another case, the hearing examiner also posted that he “hopes this guy doesn’t show up!!” which was followed up with “Tyson Lynch says yay!! He didn’t show up!” Oh and don’t use the word ‘lascivious’ in Lynch’s court either, he does not like it. His Facebook rants tend to dub sex offenders as pervs which another court thought was a bit on the nose. When the appeal was heard and Lynch’s Facebook page shown, an appeal court said that the comments were “unquestionably inappropriate, unprofessional, troubling, and suggestive of a prejudicial predisposition”. The remarks imply Lynch made unwarranted negative presumptions against the people he evaluated and was biased against Spanish speakers, and ruled based on the fonts used in written submissions rather than legal arguments. Due to Lynch’s apparent bias, the court vacated the registry board’s ruling against Doe and granted Doe another hearing. Now every case that Lynch heard could be susceptible to similar claims of bias. Fortunately, for the US Justice System, Lynch is not working any more according to Facebook Lynch muttered that he thought his agency has been the subject of too many news exposes and he might have to should seek alternative career plans. According to Linkedin, he is now selling houses as an estate agent. |
| Bletchley Park boffin's daughter was a slave Posted: 27 Nov 2013 01:29 AM PST One of the three women allegedly held as a slave by a Maoist sect was the daughter of a Second World War codebreaker. Josephine Herivel is the daughter of John Herivel, one of the leading code breakers at Bletchley Park who deciphered the Enigma code. Slavery suspect Aravindan Balakrishnan and his wife Chanda were arrested in Brixton, south London, after Herivel raised the alarm. They have been charged with slavery related offences. John Herivel appears to have given up admitting the existence of Josephine and when he died in 2011 his obituaries only made mention of his two other daughters Mary and Susan. Josephine joined Balakrishnan's extremist collective in the 1970s after moving to London to study. Family friend Frances Presley told the Herald Scotland that attempts by her family to make contact failed. She said that John and the family tried to contact her for years but she had cut herself off from them. Josephine was prosecuted in 1978 when police raided the group's south London bookshop and headquarters. She and five fellow cult members appeared in court charged with obstructing police officers. She dubbed the judge a "Fascist lackey" which probably did not help her case much. Herivel was also with the sect when one of its members, Sian Davies died after falling from a bathroom window at a house in south London where the collective were living. Herivel lived with the group for more than 30 years before contacting the Freedom Charity and reporting that she and two other women were being held against their will. |
| HP enterprise sales spark recovery hope Posted: 27 Nov 2013 01:27 AM PST There are hopes that the maker of expensive printer ink, HP might actually be on the path to recovery after it beat revenue forecasts as sales growth in its enterprise group. Revenue from the enterprise group, which Chief Executive Meg Whitman wants to expand climbed two percent, aided by a 10 percent rise in server sales and three percent growth of the networking business. To be fair expectations were low, after HP had a miserable third-quarter performance, and after rivals such as IBM and Cisco had reported poor results. The pickup in enterprise hardware revenue in the fiscal fourth quarter was needed after after a nine percent slide in sales from the same division in the previous three months. Edward Jones technology analyst Bill Kreher told Reuters that there is some hope in HP's restructuring given that the company was able to jump over what was admittedly a pretty low hurdle. However he thought that any signs of a turnaround will remain uneven. In fact HP''s operating margins eroded and Non-GAAP operating margin slipped to 9 percent in the quarter from 10.4 percent a year earlier, reflecting aggressive competition from rivals such as Dell and Lenovo. Revenue fell across most of HP's business divisions except the enterprise group, whose sales edged up to $7.6 billion. Sales from HP's largest PC-focused unit fell another two percent to $8.58 billion while the printing division's sales dropped a percent to $6.04 billion. Still, shares in HP climbed above $27 after starting at $25.09 so everyone is feeling fairly optimistic. |
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