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Intel Wins Patent Case
Intel has had a previous decision upheld by the US International Trade Commission (ITC), which decided it did not infringe several X2Y chip manufacturing patents.
X2Y had claimed that Intel’s chip manufacturing technology infringed five of its patents and requested an injunction to stop the chips from entering the US. Previously Judge David Shaw ruled that Intel did not infringe X2Y’s patents, a decision that has been upheld by the ITC, which said it will “terminate the investigation with a finding of no violation”.
X2Y’s patents relate to the shielding of electromagnetic interference that is a significant problem in electronics manufacture. The firm has sold licenses to other chipmakers including Samsung, however Intel decided to develop its own techniques, which are now deemed not to infringe X2Y’s patents.
Intel has had a previous decision upheld by the US International Trade Commission (ITC), which decided it did not infringe several X2Y chip manufacturing patents.
X2Y had claimed that Intel’s chip manufacturing technology infringed five of its patents and requested an injunction to stop the chips from entering the US. Previously Judge David Shaw ruled that Intel did not infringe X2Y’s patents, a decision that has been upheld by the ITC, which said it will “terminate the investigation with a finding of no violation”.
X2Y’s patents relate to the shielding of electromagnetic interference that is a significant problem in electronics manufacture. The firm has sold licenses to other chipmakers including Samsung, however Intel decided to develop its own techniques, which are now deemed not to infringe X2Y’s patents.
While Intel had the most to lose, X2Y also went after Apple and HP, two of Intel’s highest profile customers. Intel even argued that an injunction on its chips would hurt American jobs.
Not only did X2Y lose its patent battle with Intel, but two of its patents were ruled invalid. The company had filed two civil lawsuits that were put on hold pending the ITC’s decision, but given the ITC action it will be surprising if the firm continues in its legal campaign against Intel.
No LTE On IBM’s SoC Until 2014
Intel is working on integrated LTE modems for its upcoming SoC designs, but CEO Paul Otellini claims they will not be ready for prime time until 2014.
In a recent conference call Otellini was directly asked about Intel’s plans for LTE integration and said “higher levels of integration” are expected next year. He went on to say that the first Intel-based phones with LTE should launch in early 2014, in time for the Mobile World Congress.
Otellini said Intel’s wireless team, formerly a business unit of Infineon, is making good progress in LTE.
“We believe we have a very competitive solution. The Infineon team is known for not necessarily being first to market, but being really good at engineering a very solid solution and being cost effective and cost competitive and I think that they are doing a very good job with respect to this product,” said Otellini.
Is Intel Really Catching ARM?
A new report suggests that Intel is close to matching ARM on power efficiency.
The study by Bernstein Research analysts said that the days of Intel being mocked because its power-hungry chips shortened the battery life of mobile devices could be over. Bernstein noted that the ARM camp has such a commanding lead in phones and tablets that Intel probably won’t make much of a dent in those markets for a couple of years — even with its energy-efficient chips.
But it said that both company’s chip types “are very close in terms of power efficiency and processing power.” It said that the fight between the ARM and Intel camps will heat up meaningfully as early as 2013, with likely damages on both sides and no winner. For its study, Bernstein compared Intel’s chip in a Motorola RAZR phone and a RAZR phone with an ARM chip. It also compared both chips in similar tablets outfitted with the Windows 8.
The bad news in the report for Intel was that ARM’s chips have become more powerful, making them “a very compelling choice” for consumers looking for low-end notebooks.
Intel Details 22nm SoC
Thanks to a long spate of bad luck over at AMD, Intel now finds itself in a rather safe market lead, at least in high-end and server markets. However, in the low-end and mobile, Intel has a lot of catching up to do.
ARM still dominates the mobile market and Intel is looking to take on the British chip designer with new 22nm SoCs of its own. Intel outlined its SoC strategy at the 2012 International Electron Devices Meeting in San Francisco the other day.
The cunning plan involves 3D tri gate transistors and Intel’s 22nm fabrication process, or in other words it is a brute force approach. Intel can afford to integrate the latest tech in cheep and cheerful 22nm Atoms, thus making them more competitive in terms of power efficiency.
Since Intel leads the way with new manufacturing processes it already has roughly a year of experience with 22nm chips, while ARM partners rely on 28nm, 32nm and more often than not, 40nm processes. Intel’s next generation SoCs will also benefit from other off-the-shelf Intel tech, such as 3D tri-gate transistors.
Will Intel Bring Medfield To The US?
September 28, 2012 by admin
Filed under Computing, Smartphones
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An Intel powered phone powered by a 2GHz Medfield processor is a huge leap forward for Intel. After few tries they finally got a significant design win.
Still many want to see an Intel design win the US market and we were told that this can be expected at 2013 as the USA network providers demand a LTE capability for all their new phones. Now even the iPhone has LTE and it was getting hard even for Apple to convince people in the US that LTE is not relevant.
Intel is aware of that and it is expected that Intel can finish its LTE modem in 2013 and that it will have a LTE enabled chip with its next generation. It’s interesting that this is the same timing for Nvidia LTE while Qualcomm already stunned the market with its S4 LTE enabled chip that everyone wants.
The new Intel-based RAZR doesn’t have LTE support, but even in the US only major cities and metropolitan areas have it decent LTE coverage. Even the suburbs in Silicon valley and surrounding towns have weak and intermittent LTE coverage, while 3G has been almost everywhere you can have a cell signal.
Intel got its first major designs out, and it plans to continue winning the major manufacturers with Intel inside powered phones.
Twitter Wants To Email You
May 23, 2012 by admin
Filed under Around The Net
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Twitter will begin delivering a weekly email digest to highlight for users of the micro-blogging site the tweets they are most likely to be interested in, the company stated on Monday.
The feature marks a departure for a social network that typically emphasizes real-time delivery of information.
How will Twitter determine which tweets a user may want to see? Twitter spokesman Robert Weeks said the digest will feature the tweets that the “people you’re connected to on Twitter are engaging with the most.”
From the email digest, users will be able to see the conversation about a particular tweet, follow shared links and send out their own tweets. The digest will include tweets not just from a user’s own feed but also from the feeds of people he or she follows.
Cisco Hits 50 Million Milestone For Its IP Phones
April 26, 2012 by admin
Filed under Around The Net
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Cisco Wednesday announced Wednesday that it has sold its 50 millionth IP phone, a significant increase in just two years when 30 million were sold.
The switching technology giant today also said it will make software for presence, instant messaging and Cisco Jabber IM clients available for free to its Unified Communications Manager customers.
The latter move means organizations with UCM can roll out presence and IM to employees simply and cheaply to smartphones and tablets running various operating systems, Barry O’Sullivan, senior vice president of Cisco’s voice technology group, said in a blog post.
The supported OSs include Windows, Mac, iPad, Cisco Cius, iPhone, BlackBerry and, later in 2012, Android, O’Sullivan said.
The move helps companies “deploy a unified communications client that is BYOD-ready,” he added. BYOD refers to Bring Your Own Device, a trend where companies allow workers to use devices of their choosing to connect to company data wirelessly.
Blackberry Delays Update
October 31, 2011 by admin
Filed under Consumer Electronics
Last week at its BlackBerry DevCon conference, Research in Motion tried to get developers excited about the upcoming PlayBook OS 2.0 mobile operating system, to spur developers to create applications for RIM’s BlackbBerry PlayBook tablet, released last spring to poor reviews and low sales. But yesterday, RIM wrote in a blog post that it was delaying the release of the PlayBook 2.0 OS “until we are confident we have fully met the expectations of our developers, enterprise customers, and users.”
PlayBook OS 2.0 was originally promised for October 2011, but RIM has now set a target of February 2012. To meet the new February 2012 release date, RIM said it was dropping a key feature originally promised for PlayBook OS 2.0: its popular BlackBerry Messenger instant-messaging service.
Developers were looking forward to the promised October PlayBook 2.0 OS release in hopes it might spur sales of the poorly selling tablet, especially as the original timing would have taken advantage of the holiday sales season that will also see the release of the unified tablet/smartphone Android 4.0 “Ice Cream Sandwich” operating system and a bevy of new smartphones using Microsoft’s recently released Windows Phone 7.5 “Mango” operating system, in addition to Apple’s strong-selling iPad and new iPhone 4S, both featuring the recently released iOS 5 operating system.
The PlayBook OS is based on the QNX operating system that RIM bought in spring 2010 to be the basis for its tablets and, sometime in the 2012-13 timeframe, be the basis for a new operating system for its BlackBerry smartphones. Last week, RIM said that it will provide a unified tablet/smartphone operating system called BBX, based on the QNX/PlayBook platform. It said that applications developed for the PlayBook OS would be compatible with BBX, but did not make the same promise for BlackBerry OS apps.
Patches Released For Firefox and Thunderbird
The release of Firefox 7 is important because the new version features better memory management and is the first step in Mozilla’s long term plan to make the browser more resource friendly.
Nevertheless, users who upgrade to it will also benefit from improved security as this release fixes six critical and two moderate severity security vulnerabilities.
Four of the critical patches are shared with Thunderbird 7 and address a use-after-free condition with OGG headers, an exploitable crash in the YARR regular expression library, a code installation quirk involving the Enter key and multiple memory hazards.
A moderate severity patch that provides defence against multiple Location headers caused by CRLF injection attacks is also common to both products.
In addition to these patches Firefox 7 also contains fixes for two critical and one moderate severity vulnerabilities, with one of them resulting in a potentially exploitable WebGL crash.
It’s worth pointing out that Microsoft previously motivated its decision to not include support for WebGL in Internet Explorer by saying that the 3D graphics library opens a large attack surface.
So far several serious vulnerabilities have been identified and patched in WebGL, which partially supports Microsoft’s assessment, but the library’s supporters claim this is no different than with other technologies.
Firefox 7 also updates Websocket, a protocol disabled in the past because of security issues, to version 8, which is no longer vulnerable to known attacks.
Adobe Patches Security Holes in Flash
Adobe has released a security update for Flash Player in order to address several critical vulnerabilities, including one that is being exploited in the wild.
The Flash Player 10.3.183.10 for Windows, Mac and Linux, and Flash Player 10.3.186.7 for Android, contain patches for six security flaws.
One of them is a cross-site scripting (XSS) weakness that can be exploited to execute rogue actions on behalf of web sites or webmail providers if victims click on maliciously-crafted links.
“There are reports that this issue is being exploited in the wild in active targeted attacks designed to trick the user into clicking on a malicious link delivered in an email message,” Adobe warns in its security advisory.
XSS vulnerabilities are the result of improper user input validation and allow attackers to execute rogue code in the context of the current web site. For example, they can be leveraged to extract session cookies or load rogue forms into legitimate pages, which makes for very credible phishing attacks.
Adobe credits Google for reporting this cross-site scripting vulnerability, which is identified as CVE-2011-2444. This means it might have been detected in attacks against Gmail users.
Two other patched vulnerabilities allow for arbitrary code execution and are located in the AVM stack. One of them can also lead to a denial of service condition. Two remote code execution logic errors and a Flash Player security control bypass have also been addressed.
Users should deploy the new update as soon as possible because browser plug-ins like Java, Adobe Reader or Flash Player are amongst the most attacked pieces of software one can have on a computer. However, unlike Adobe Reader X (10.0) which features sandboxing technology, Flash Player doesn’t have any anti-exploitation mechanism built-in.