Wednesday, March 26, 2014

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Intel buys another wearable computer maker

Posted: 26 Mar 2014 03:39 AM PDT

Fashion bag maker Intel is looking for something with a little more technology inside it to complement its fashion bag range.

The company has written a cheque to buy the fitness-tracking band maker Basis Science.

Chipzilla is not saying how much it paid for Basis, which is one of the few to make a bob or to from digital watches that capture data such as heart rate, activity, and sleep.

Information is synched wirelessly to a smartphone which reads the data.

Wearable computing gear has become the latest thing thanks to inexpensive sensors and increasingly powerful smartphones that can be used to analyse data collected. As yet the health market is been one of the few areas that can find a use for the technology.

Mike Bell, general manager of Intel's New Devices Group said that the acquisition of Basis Science provides immediate entry into the market with a leader in health tracking for wearable devices.

"We will build upon this foundation to deliver products that bring people greater utility and value," he said.

Buying Basis speeds up Intel's move into wearable computing, according to the chipmaker. Basis bands will continue to be sold at shops, but it was not clear if they would get Intel branding. 

Samsung has some production problems

Posted: 26 Mar 2014 03:38 AM PDT

Samsung's iPhone destroying Galaxy might be too late to steal the march on its rival.

Word on the street is that the Galaxy S5 might be late and there is some concern that it might arrive at the same time as the iPhone this year, rather than just before it.

Last month, one of Samsung's partner factories caught fire and there was a warning that this might affect initial availability of the Galaxy S5.

Samsung mentioned that the fire would not cause a big delay but now it appears that something else has gone wrong.

The South Korean manufacturer is said to be facing production problems with the 16 MP ISOCELL camera sensor. The sensor itself is OK but the coating process for the lens module is slowing everything down.

Samsung is said to be making headway in resolving the issue, but it is looking like it can't meet its initial estimates of five to seven million units.

To make matters worse, regulators in South Korea have slapped the country's mobile carriers with a 45 day ban. During the ban, carriers cannot enroll new customers, sell devices or even upgrade phones for existing subscribers.

This means that while the Galaxy S5 will go out in time, Samsung will only be able to sell four to five million units.

The ban has been imposed due to carriers subsidising phone costs more than they were allowed to. SK Telecom, the country's largest carrier, serves the ban between April 5th and May 19th. If Samsung launches the Galaxy S5 in South Korea on April 11th, the carrier won't be able to sell it.

Samsung is also said to be considering launching the Galaxy S5 before April 5th in South Korea to work around the carrier ban. It is unclear as to whether the manufacturer will have enough units available in time.

It could just say, "sod it" and ship as many of the phones as it can to foreign parts and delay a release in the lucrative Korean market. At least that way it will allow its four to five million phones to rain on the Apple's parade somewhere in the world. 

Nvidia gives the world a new road map

Posted: 26 Mar 2014 03:36 AM PDT

Nvidia has announced a new roadmap for its GPU families at the GTC conference and it appears to have carried out some major surgery.

Pascal, Nvidia's latest GPU architecture, is being introduced in between Maxwell and Volta. It has absorbed old Maxwell's unified virtual memory support and old Volta's on-package DRAM, integrating those feature additions into a single new product. We always thought that Pascal was a rubbish name for a GPU, after all, who wants a chip which breaks because you forgot to put a semi-colon in the middle of a nest.

Volta was supposed to follow Maxwell in 2014. Volta's marquee feature would be on-package DRAM, using Through Silicon Vias (TSVs) to die stack memory and place it on the same package as the GPU.

What appears to have changed is Nvidia's definition of Maxwell and Volta. Maxwell has lost its promised unified virtual memory feature which will now be under the bonnet of the chips after Maxwell. All users can hope for from Maxwell will get is the software based unified memory feature being rolled out in CUDA 6.

Nvidia is not telling anyone about its second generation Maxwell GPUs and how those might be integrated into professional products.

Maxwell's best feature will be DirectX 12 support and will ship in 2014 as scheduled.

Meanwhile Volta has been pushed back and stripped of most of what people will find interesting, Its on-package DRAM will be promoted to the GPU before Volta, and while the name Volta still exists, all anything knows about the chip is that will come after the 2016 GPU.

Nvidia has not said anything else directly about the unified memory plans that Pascal has inherited from old Maxwell. Pascal will get NVLink which is an attempt to supplant PCI-Express with a faster interconnect bus.

Nvidia thinks that the 16GB/sec made available by PCI-Express 3.0 is not enough when compared to the 250GB/sec+ of memory bandwidth available within a single card. PCIe 4.0 will bring higher bandwidth yet but Nvidia wants to push its own bus to achieve the kind of bandwidth it wants.

According to the roadmap, the result is a bus that looks a whole heck of a lot like PCIe but uses tighter requirements and a true point-to-point design. NVLink uses differential signalling, with the smallest unit of connectivity being a "block."

A block contains eight lanes, each rated for 20Gbps, for a combined bandwidth of 20GB/sec. In terms of transfers per second this puts NVLink at roughly 20 gigatransfers/second, as compared to an already staggering 8GT/sec for PCIe 3.0.

Nvidia has knocked up a Pascal prototype and it will be put on a motherboard parallel to the board with each Pascal card connected to the board through the NVLink mezzanine connector. This allows GPUs to be cooled with CPU-style cooling methods in a server rack. 

Gay developers boycott Mozilla over new CEO

Posted: 26 Mar 2014 03:34 AM PDT

A gay developer couple is calling for a boycott of Firefox after it appointed Brendan Eich as its CEO.

According to developer Hampton Catlin, Eich was a key opponent of those who wanted to allow homosexual marriages in the United States.

They point to his $1,000 donation in 2008 to help Prop 8, which would have prevented civil partnerships going ahead. Eich responded on Twitter when the donation was revealed "Mozilla has no say in employees' contributions. CA law requires donors to list employer". In other words, this is his view and nothing to do with the company.

Writing in his bog, Catlin said that there are great people at Mozilla, and that lots of people there want the org to be open and supportive.

"The board could have chosen any of those other, awesome people at Mozilla to be CEO. Out of all the possible candidates they could have chosen, they chose Brendan Eich. CEO's are extremely important to an organisation. Their ideas, beliefs, philosophies, and personalities drive organisations. And, when it's an organisation that I'm personally investing in, it's even more important," he said.

Eich was probably chosen by the board because he was the inventor of JavaScript, and developer hero and it did not take into account his thoughts on sexuality, which it probably thought were none of anyone's business.

Catlin insists that he is not judging people who use Firefox, work at Mozilla, or even support Brendan's right to his opinions.

"It's fine that you think I shouldn't judge his opinion. (This is getting confusing). However, this particular subject is not one that is negotiable to us. We are personally affected by his actions," Catlin said.

Catlin said that it was not Eich's belief that hurts him, was that he did something about them and donated to a cause that directly negatively affected Catlin, personally.

"It's not abstract. It is not a witch-hunt. He's certainly allowed to have his opinion, of course, but I'm allowed to judge his actions of supporting the cause financially," he said.

They want a boycott until Eich is fired.

 

Apple TV is not happening

Posted: 26 Mar 2014 03:32 AM PDT

The Atlantic magazine has found evidence that the Tame Apple press is making up stories about Apple's TV plans.

All last week the press was all a flutter about how Apple is talking to Comcast about building a new streaming service for TV is fascinating. There was serious debate about how Apple was supporting a two tiered internet and other matters connected to the product.

However the Atlantic said that Apple TV is vapourware even though everyone is talking about it.

The source of Apple TV was Steve Jobs' comment to biographer Walter Isaacson, made shortly before he died, that he'd "finally cracked" the secret to disrupting the cloistered TV market.

Jobs did not say what he cracked, but implied it was definitely broken now. What happened next was Apple fanboys, fleshed out his mysterious comment with their own fantasies. Gene Munster, the widely cited Apple analyst at Piper Jaffray, interviewed his own head and dreamed up a voice-activated "40 or 50-inch iPad" to debut "in late 2012 or early 2013".

It never happened. There was Apple TV that slings iTunes, Netflix, Hulu and other online services onto the big screen. Atlantic said it is clear that if any negotiations are happening with Comcast, then it is not clear what Comcast gets out it.

It would have to invest in new network equipment to make this partnership work, it would tempt net-neutrality restrictions by giving Apple preferential treatment along its pipes just as its Time Warner Cable acquisition faces accusations of a law-breaking monopoly. Then it would have to give Apple a share of its pay-TV profits in exchange for popularizing a device that is partially seen as a replacement for pay-TV.

Therefore, this deal is not happening either. So why is everyone talking about it? Because Apple realises that being talked about gives the impression of it being innovative and doing things, when it is really sitting on its hands and churning out the same iPhone and iPad combo without much in the way of innovation. Rumours like this give it the image that something is really happening when nothing is and the company is sliding. 
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