Did Qualcomm Snub Intel?

Earlier this year Intel made a lot of noise about leasing its foundries to third parties, but at least one big played does not appear to be interested.

Speaking at a tech conference, Qualcomm CEO Paul Jacobs said his company is not interested in using Intel fabs and that it will continue to cooperate with established foundries like TSMC.

Jacobs argued that Intel is great at building huge volumes of equally huge cores, but TSMC is a tad more flexible. He pointed out that foundries like TSMC can run build multiple different products simultaneously, controlling the process using software.
“Intel is famous, has been known for having a copy-exact model, so they need very large volumes of a particular chip to run through that,” Jacobs said, reports ITProPortal.

However, Jacobs did point out that he was glad to hear Intel is joining the foundry space and that it will be interesting to see how it plays out.

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NSA Spies With Tracking Cookies

The browser cookies that online businesses use to track Internet customers for targeted advertising are also used by the National Security Agency to track surveillance targets and break into their systems.

The agency’s use of browser cookies is restricted to tracking specific suspects rather than sifting through vast amounts of user data, theWashington Post reported Tuesday, citing internal documents obtained from former NSA contractor Edward Snowden.

Google’s PREF (for preference) cookies, which the company uses to personalize webpages for Internet users based on their previous browsing habits and preferences, appears to be a particular favorite of the NSA, the Post noted.

PREF cookies don’t store any user identifying information such as user name or email address. But they contain information on a user’s general location, language preference, search engine settings, number of search results to display per page and other data that lets advertisers uniquely identify an individual’s browser.

The Google cookie, and those used by other online companies, can be used by the NSA to track a target user’s browsing habits and to enable remote exploitation of their computers, the Post said.

Documents made available by Snowden do not describe the specific exploits used by the NSA to break into a surveillance target’s computers. Neither do they say how the NSA gains access to the tracking cookies, the Post reported.

It is theorized that one way the NSA could get access to the tracking cookies is to simply ask the companies for them under the authority granted to the agency by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA).

Separately, the documents leaked by Snowden show that the NSA is also tapping into cell-phone location data gathered and transmitted by makers of mobile applications and operating systems. Google and other Internet companies use the geo-location data transmitted by mobile apps and operating systems to deliver location-aware advertisements and services to mobile users.

However, the NSA is using the same data to track surveillance targets with more precision than was possible with data gathered directly from wireless carriers, the Post noted. The mobile app data, gathered by the NSA under a program codenamed “Happyfoot,” allows the agency to tie Internet addresses to physical locations more precisely than was possible with cell-phone location data.

An NSA division called Tailored Access Operations uses the data gathered from tracking cookies and mobile applications to launch offensive hacking operations against specific target computers, the Post said.

An NSA spokeswoman Wednesday did not comment on the specific details in the Post story but reiterated the agency’s commitment to fulfill its mission of protecting the country against those seeking to do it harm.

“As we’ve said before, NSA, within its lawful mission to collect foreign intelligence to protect the United States, uses intelligence tools to understand the intent of foreign adversaries and prevent them from bringing harm to innocent Americans and allies,” the spokeswoman said.

The Post’s latest revelations are likely to shine a much-needed spotlight on the extensive tracking and monitoring activities carried out by major Internet companies in order to deliver targeted advertisements to users.

Privacy rights groups have protested such tracking for several years and have sought legislation that would give users more visibility and control over the data that is collected on them by online companies.

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Did Intel Have an IPad In Y2K?

Intel apparently built an IPAD ten years before Steve Jobs though of the tablet and the name. It was in the days when sticking an I in front of anything meant it was Intel rather than Apple and the Intel Pad, or IPAD for short, could browse the Internet, play music and videos, and even act as a digital picture frame.

Intel scrapped the IPAD before consumers could get their hands on it as its move into Tablets was seen as one of the outfit’s biggest blunders. According to CNET in the late 1990s and early 2000s, Intel wanted to diversify its operations beyond the PC. The IPAD came from one of several small teams within its research arm tasked with exploring new business opportunities. The IPAD, which included a touch screen and stylus, would not run entirely on its own but connected to a computer to browse the Internet through an Intel wireless technology.

Intel thought that “mobility” meant moving around your home or business and the IPAD was to be a portable device you could take around your house. The reason that they never thought of connecting it to the phone network was because Intel wanted to tie it all back to its core PC chip business. After several years of development on the Intel Web Tablet, then-CEO Craig Barrett unveiled the device at the Consumer Electronics Show in January 2001. The company planned to sell the tablet to consumers later that year.

Sadly though it miffed Intel’s PC partners, which didn’t want a product that could potentially compete with them and Intel caved in and cancelled the project.

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IBM To Become Cloud Broker

IBM is in the throes of developing software that will allow organizations to use multiple cloud storage services interchangeably, reducing dependence on any single cloud vendor and ensuring that data remains available even during service outages.

Although the software, called InterCloud Storage (ICStore), is still in development, IBM is inviting its customers to test it. Over time, the company will fold the software into its enterprise storage portfolio, where it can back up data to the cloud. The current test iteration requires an IBM Storewize storage system to operate.

ICStore was developed in response to customer inquiries, said Thomas Weigold, who leads the IBM storage systems research team in IBM’s Zurich, Switzerland, research facility, where the software was created. Customers are interested in cloud storage services but are worried about trusting data with third party providers, both in terms of security and the reliability of the service, he said.

The software provides a single interface that administrators can use to spread data across multiple cloud vendors. Administrators can specify which cloud providers to use through a point-and-click interface. Both file and block storage is supported, though not object storage. The software contains mechanisms for encrypting data so that it remains secure as it crosses the network and resides on the external storage services.

A number of software vendors offer similar cloud storage broker capabilities, all in various stages of completion, notably Red Hat’s DeltaCloud and Hewlett Packard’s Public Cloud.

ICStore is more “flexible,” than other approaches, said Alessandro Sorniotti, an IBM security and cloud system researcher who also worked on the project. “We give customers the ability to select what goes where, depending on the sensitivity and relevance of data,” he said. Customers can store one copy of their data on one provider and a backup copy on another provider.

ICStore supports a number of cloud storage providers, including IBM’s SoftLayer, Amazon S3 (Simple Storage Service), Rackspace, Microsoft Windows Azure and private instances of the OpenStack Swift storage service. More storage providers will be added as the software goes into production mode.

“Say, you are using SoftLayer and Amazon, and if Amazon suffers an outage, then the backup cloud provider kicks in and allows you to retrieve data,” from SoftLayer, Sorniotti said.

ICStore will also allow multiple copies of the software to work together within an enterprise, using a set of IBM patent-pending algorithms developed for data sharing. This ensures that the organization will not run into any upper limits on how much data can be stored.

IBM has about 1,400 patents that relate to cloud computing, according to the company.

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Intel’s Cherry Trail Forthcoming

The next generation desktop and mobile Atom is Cherry Trail in 14nm and the first parts are expected in late 2014. Intel has been working hard to accelerate the introduction of Atom parts based on the new architecture and in 2014 it will finally ship Broadwell notebook chips and Cherry Trail Atoms in the same year, both using the new 14nm node.

The Cherry View is a notebook SoC version of a chip based on new Airmont core, while Cherry Trail is the part meant for tablets. The phone version is based on Moorefield architecture and they are all expected to show up in late 2014, most likely very late Q3 2014.

The TDP should go down compared to Bay Trail platform as the new 14nm needs less voltage to hit the same speed and should produce less heat at the same time. With the 14nm shrink Intel’s new Atoms will be able to get more fanless design wins.

The significance of 14nm products for mobile phones and tablets will be in the fact that ARM alliance lead by Qualcomm, Samsung, MediaTek and a few other players will be struggling to get 20nm designs out of the door in 2014, and Intel can already get to a 14nm.

However, Intel still has to integrate LTE inside its mobile phone SoCs, which has traditionally been proven to be a tough task. At this time only Qualcomm has on-die LTE and its LTE enabled SoCs are under the bonnet of almost every significant ARM based high-end phone out there.

Only time will tell how successful Intel’s mobile push will be. Even with these 14nm parts, once they show up roughly a year from now, it might be really tough for Intel to get some high-volume design wins in the phone space, despite the transition to 14nm.

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App Stores For Supercomputers Enroute

A major problem facing supercomputing is that the firms that could benefit most from the technology, aren’t using it. It is a dilemma.

Supercomputer-based visualization and simulation tools could allow a company to create, test and prototype products in virtual environments. Couple this virtualization capability with a 3-D printer, and a company would revolutionize its manufacturing.

But licensing fees for the software needed to simulate wind tunnels, ovens, welds and other processes are expensive, and the tools require large multicore systems and skilled engineers to use them.

One possible solution: taking an HPC process and converting it into an app.

This is how it might work: A manufacturer designing a part to reduce drag on an 18-wheel truck could upload a CAD file, plug in some parameters, hit start and let it use 128 cores of the Ohio Supercomputer Center’s (OSC) 8,500 core system. The cost would likely be anywhere from $200 to $500 for a 6,000 CPU hour run, or about 48 hours, to simulate the process and package the results up in a report.

Testing that 18-wheeler in a physical wind tunnel could cost as much $100,000.

Alan Chalker, the director of the OSC’s AweSim program, uses that example to explain what his organization is trying to do. The new group has some $6.5 million from government and private groups, including consumer products giant Procter & Gamble, to find ways to bring HPC to manufacturers via an app store.

The app store is slated to open at the end of the first quarter of next year, with one app and several tools that have been ported for the Web. The plan is to eventually spin-off AweSim into a private firm, and populate the app store with thousands of apps.

Tom Lange, director of modeling and simulation in P&G’s corporate R&D group, said he hopes that AweSim’s tools will be used for the company’s supply chain.

The software industry model is based on selling licenses, which for an HPC application can cost $50,000 a year, said Lange. That price is well out of the reach of small manufacturers interested in fixing just one problem. “What they really want is an app,” he said.

Lange said P&G has worked with supply chain partners on HPC issues, but it can be difficult because of the complexities of the relationship.

“The small supplier doesn’t want to be beholden to P&G,” said Lange. “They have an independent business and they want to be independent and they should be.”

That’s one of the reasons he likes AweSim.

AweSim will use some open source HPC tools in its apps, and are also working on agreements with major HPC software vendors to make parts of their tools available through an app.

Chalker said software vendors are interested in working with AweSim because it’s a way to get to a market that’s inaccessible today. The vendors could get some licensing fees for an app and a potential customer for larger, more expensive apps in the future.

AweSim is an outgrowth of the Blue Collar Computing initiative that started at OSC in the mid-2000s with goals similar to AweSim’s. But that program required that users purchase a lot of costly consulting work. The app store’s approach is to minimize cost, and the need for consulting help, as much as possible.

Chalker has a half dozen apps already built, including one used in the truck example. The OSC is building a software development kit to make it possible for others to build them as well. One goal is to eventually enable other supercomputing centers to provide compute capacity for the apps.

AweSim will charge users a fixed rate for CPUs, covering just the costs, and will provide consulting expertise where it is needed. Consulting fees may raise the bill for users, but Chalker said it usually wouldn’t be more than a few thousand dollars, a lot less than hiring a full-time computer scientist.

The AweSim team expects that many app users, a mechanical engineer for instance, will know enough to work with an app without the help of a computational fluid dynamics expert.

Lange says that manufacturers understand that producing domestically rather than overseas requires making products better, being innovative and not wasting resources. “You have to be committed to innovate what you make, and you have to commit to innovating how you make it,” said Lange, who sees HPC as a path to get there.

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Will Intel’s Tablet Gamble Work?

Earlier this year Intel caused quite a stir when CEO Brian Krzanich announced the company’s ultimate goal is to make $99 tablets a reality. So far Intel has failed to gain much market share in the tablet space, dominated by cheaper ARM application processors and Android.

However, Bay Trail-T has a good chance to turn things around. The new chip can easily take on high-end ARM parts and in most cases, wipe the floor with them. Since it’s an x86 part, it can also be used in Windows 8.1 tablets. However, the price was a problem. Intel’s official Bay Trail-T prices range from $32 to $37, making the chips significantly more expensive than mid-range and low-end ARM parts. However, many vendors are said to be getting discounts and paying a bit less, in the $20 to $30 range.

Things may be about to change. According to Digitimes, Intel is planning to spend up to $1 billion on tablet chip subsides. The cash should sweeten the deal for vendors willing to give Intel SoCs a go. Since we are talking about relatively low average selling prices, Intel could use the cash to practically halve the prices and offer Bay Trail-T parts for as little as $10. This would make them competitive overnight, as high-end ARM SoCs like the Exynos 5 and Tegra 4 are estimated to cost well over $20.

Intel has a long tradition of overspending on marketing. A few years ago it showed Ultrabook vendors with $300 million worth of market development funding and it has a huge Core marketing program. Intel recently announced that it would start treating Atom and Core equally, hence the move would make sense. Since Core lifecycles are getting longer, Intel could simply shift some of the funding to Atom products, namely tablet parts like Bay Trail-T.

The only problem? Well the report comes from Digitimes and the site’s hit and miss track record has been on the “miss” side lately, so take it with a grain of salt.

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Will Computer Obtain Common Sense?

Even though it may appear PCs are getting dumbed down as we see constant images of cats playing the piano or dogs playing in the snow, one computer is doing the same and getting smarter and smarter.

A computer cluster running the so-called the Never Ending Image Learner at Carnegie Mellon University runs 24 hours a day, 7 days a week searching the Internet for images, studying them on its own and building a visual database. The process, scientists say, is giving the computer an increasing amount of common sense.

“Images are the best way to learn visual properties,” said Abhinav Gupta, assistant research professor in Carnegie Mellon’s Robotics Institute. “Images also include a lot of common sense information about the world. People learn this by themselves and, with [this program], we hope that computers will do so as well.”

The computers have been running the program since late July, analyzing some three million images. The system has identified 1,500 types of objects in half a million images and 1,200 types of scenes in hundreds of thousands of images, according to the university.

The program has connected the dots to learn 2,500 associations from thousands of instances.

Thanks to advances in computer vision that enable software to identify and label objects found in images and recognize colors, materials and positioning, the Carnegie Mellon cluster is better understanding the visual world with each image it analyzes.

The program also is set up to enable a computer to make common sense associations, like buildings are vertical instead of lying on their sides, people eat food, and cars are found on roads. All the things that people take for granted, the computers now are learning without being told.

“People don’t always know how or what to teach computers,” said Abhinav Shrivastava, a robotics Ph.D. student at CMU and a lead researcher on the program. “But humans are good at telling computers when they are wrong.”

He noted, for instance, that a human might need to tell the computer that pink isn’t just the name of a singer but also is the name of a color.

While previous computer scientists have tried to “teach” computers about different real-world associations, compiling structured data for them, the job has always been far too vast to tackle successfully. CMU noted that Facebook alone has more than 200 billion images.

The only way for computers to scan enough images to understand the visual world is to let them do it on their own.

“What we have learned in the last five to 10 years of computer vision research is that the more data you have, the better computer vision becomes,” Gupta said.

CMU’s computer learning program is supported by Google and the Office of Naval Research.

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Is SAP Searching In The Clouds?

Esoteric business software maker, which no one is really certain what it does, SAP is debating whether to accelerate moving more of its business to the cloud.

The move would be a change in strategy which might initially have only a small impact on its sales. Co-chief executive Jim Hagemann-Snabe said the change would generate more sales by 2017 particularly in markets like the US where there is a big push onto the cloud.

Talking to a Morgan Stanley investor conference this morning, Hagemann-Snabe said that this would have impact on the 2015 level, I don’t expect enormous impact but it would have some impact because you are delaying some revenues. In the long term however it makes a lot of sense, which is not the sort of thing people expect from SAP.

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Is Intel Expanding?

Even if it means that it will be the first to make ARM’s 64-bit chips, Intel said that it wants to expand its contract foundry work. Intel CEO Brian Krzanich said he would expand his company’s small contract manufacturing business, paving the way for more chipmakers to tap into the world’s most advanced process technology.

Krzanich told analysts that he planned to step up the company’s foundry work, effectively giving Intel’s process technology to its rivals. He said that company’s who can use Intel’s leading edge and build computing capabilities that are better than anyone else’s, are good candidates for foundry service. Krzanich added that the slumping personal computer industry, Intel’s core market, was showing signs of bottoming out.

Intel also unveiled two upcoming mobile chips from its Atom line designed interchange features to create different versions of the component. A high-end version of the new chip, code named Broxton, and is due out in mid-2015. SoFIA, a low-end chip was shown as an example of Intel’s pragmatism and willingness to change how it does business. Krzanich said that in the interest of speed, SoFIA would be manufactured outside of Intel, with the goal of bringing it to market next year.

Intel will move production of SoFIA chips to its own 14 nanometer manufacturing lines, Krzanich added.

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