New USB Chip Developed

Silicon Motion says it has begun shipping samples of a new USB 3.0 controller chip for flash drives that could boost performance by up to 50%.

The company said the new SM3267 integrated controller is expected to deliver up to 160MB/s read, and 60MB/s write speeds through a single channel; that would be a 30% to 50% performance improvement over today’s USB 3.0 flash drive technology.

Even though the USB 3.0 specification has the capability to support 4.8Gbps throughput speeds, the speed of a USB 3.0-enabled flash drive is dictated by the speed of the accessing flash devices in the drive. Today, most consumer-USB 3.0 flash drives support about 100MB/s read speeds.

We are pleased to announce that SM3267 has received design-ins from most of our current USB controller customers, including many top-tier OEMs, and we expect SM3267-based USB 3.0 flash drives will be commercially available starting in the fourth quarter of 2013,” Wallace Kou, CEO of Silicon Motion, said in a statement.

The new integrated chip will also be able to run at lower voltages, from 5 volts to 1.2 volts, enabling a 25% to 30% lower USB flash drive device temperature compared with other USB 3.0 flash controller products in the market, Silicon Motion said.

The new IC will support the vast majority of NAND flash technology, including new triple-level cell (TLC), multi-level cell (MLC), high speed Toggle, and ONFI DDR NAND manufactured by Samsung, Toshiba, SanDisk, SK Hynix, Micron and Intel.

The new chip has already passed both USB-IF compliance testing and WHCK (Windows Hardware Certification Kit) tests for Windows 7 and Windows 8.

The new IC is available in a Chip-on-Board (COB) and in a 48-pin QFN green package.

Source

Banks Join Instant Chat

Goldman Sachs Group Inc, JPMorgan Chase & Co and six other financial institutions have agreed to join a new instant messaging network from Markit and Thomson Reuters Corp to connect disparate messaging systems.

The network, called Markit Collaboration Services, launched on Monday and allows members to chat with one another regardless of the proprietary messaging technology that each firm uses.

This open platform differs Bloomberg LP’s messaging system, which is a closed network only for users of Bloomberg terminals.

Bloomberg messaging is the most popular form of chat on Wall Street, and often cited as one of the reasons banks are willing to pay around $20,000 a year for a subscription to a Bloomberg terminal.

Markit and Thomson Reuters said they hoped their open messaging network will attract banks that want to chat with their clients or other financial institutions but cannot currently do so because they are on different messaging systems.

The other banks that have joined the new network are Deutsche Bank, Bank of America Merrill Lynch, Barclays, Citigroup, Credit Suisse and Morgan Stanley, according to a statement from Markit.

The banks collectively employ more than 1 million people worldwide, though it was not immediately clear how many individuals will use the new Markit service.

David Craig, president of Thomson Reuters’ Financial & Risk division, said one of the challenges facing banks is that their messaging systems do not always talk to one another. “That creates costs and complexity,” he said.

Markit and Thomson Reuters said the messages on the new network are encrypted, and the system does not store them.

Representatives from Bank of America, Deutsche Bank, Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley were not immediately available to comment on the new messaging system. Representatives from Barclays, Citi, Credit Suisse and JPMorgan also declined to comment.

Source

Sharp Shows MEMs

Sharp on Monday unveiled its latest prototypes of a new kind of display screen that it says brings several advantages over today’s liquid crystal display (LCD) screens.

The screens, called microelectromechanical systems (MEMS) displays for the tiny moving parts they contain, are being developed by the Japanese company in partnership with Qualcomm and were on show at the Ceatec electronics show just outside of Tokyo.

Behind each pixel in a MEMS display is a backlight that flashes red, green and blue in fast succession, and in front of it is a tiny shutter can be opened to let light through.

Synchronized to the backlight, the shutter can control the amount of each color of light allowed through. The eye perceives these flashes as the desired hue.

In contrast, today’s LCD screens create colored pixels using three filters. The filters swallow about two thirds of the brightness of the backlight before it leaves the display, said Akira Imai, deputy general manager of Sharp’s new business development center.

The MEMS display can allow all the light through, so the intensity of the backlight can be reduced using less power for the display, said Imai.

In a portable gadget, the screen often consumes more power than any other component, so reducing its demands can have a big impact on battery life.

The screens on show at Ceatec were 7-inch models with 800 pixel by 1,280 pixel resolution. The colors were bright and the screen image was sharp, although people viewing the screens did tend to see a brief flash of red, green and blue pixel each time they turned their eyes away from the display. That’s something Sharp is working on, said Imai.

Sharp also showed a version of the screen working in several low power modes.

The development work with Qualcomm began earlier this year when the U.S. company said it would invest $120 million into Sharp. The money, which was invested in two parts, was accompanied by Qualcomm’s MEMS expertise. Sharp has a long history in flat-panel display technology, especially LCD, and has recently been working on a new type of display called IGZO, on which the MEMS display is partly based.

Source

King.com Has IPO In The Works

King.com Ltd, the British mobile gaming firm best known for its popular puzzle game ‘Candy Crush Saga’, has filed confidentially for an initial public offering (IPO) in the United States, a person familiar with the matter said on Sunday.

Online technology companies are rushing to the stock market on the backs of Twitter Inc’s announcement earlier this month that it plans to go public in the most eagerly anticipated IPO since last year’s flotation ofFacebook Inc.

Emerging growth companies such as King can use a secretive IPO registration process in the U.S. thanks to the Jumpstart Our BusinessStartups (JOBS) Act, which loosened a number of federal securities regulations in hopes of boosting capital raising and thereby increasing job growth.

King has hired Bank of America Merrill Lynch Corp, Credit Suisse Group AG and JPMorgan Chase & Co to lead the offering, said the person, confirming an earlier report by the Daily Telegraph and asking not to be identified because the information is confidential.

Representatives for King and the banks either declined to comment or did not respond to requests for comment.

King offers 150 games in 14 languages through mobile phones, Facebook and its website. It boasts more than 1 billion gameplays per day from its users.

The company’s games appeal to a growing trend for players to play puzzles with their friends in short bursts, especially as games are increasingly played on the move on phones or tablets to kill spare minutes.

Rival Zynga Inc went public two years ago in a high-profile IPO that raised $1 billion. Since then, Zynga has suffered from sagging morale during several quarters of worsening performance and repeated waves of layoffs.

Founded in 2003, King has been profitable since 2005 and has not had a funding round since September of that year, when it raised 34 million euros ($46.04 million) from investment firms Apax Partners and Index Ventures.

Source

Does Intel Need Help?

As time runs out for Intel to bring its Internet-based TV service by the end of the year, the outfit has approached Samsung and Amazon to ask them to lend a hand. Intel has asked about providing funding and distribution for the service. It looks like the set-top box project could be scrapped if a strategic partner isn’t found soon.

OnCue was supposed to allow users to watch live TV, on demand, and other offerings. Intel said it would provide the hardware and services directly to consumers and that the box would come with a camera that can detect who is in front of the TV. More than 300 engineers are working on the project under Erik Huggers, the head of Intel Media. A version of the service running on Intel hardware is testing with 3,000 Intel employees. Goodness knows what content they are running. Intel is having difficulty getting content deals.

Intel has yet to announce any TV programming partners, and Time Warner Cable and other cable TV providers have been pressuring channel owners to shun pacts with Intel and other Internet-based TV providers. Samsung, which ships millions of smart TVs, could distribute the service as a bundle, while Amazon could provide access to its growing library of movies and TV shows.

Source

Oracle Goes After SAP’s HANA

Oracle has upped its game in its fight against SAP HANA, having added in-memory processing to its Oracle 12c database management system, which it claims will speed up queries by 100 times.

Oracle CEO Larry Ellison revealed the update on Sunday evening during his opening keynote at the Oracle Openworld show in San Francisco.

The in-memory option for Oracle Database 12c is designed to ramp up the speeds of data queries – and will also give Oracle a new weapon in the fight against SAP’s rival HANA in-memory system.

“When you put data in memory, one of the reasons you do that is to make the system go faster,” Ellison said. “It will make queries go faster, 100 times faster. You can load the same data into the identical machines, and it’s 100 times faster, you get results at the speed of thought.”

Ellison was keen to allay concerns that these faster query times would have a negative impact on transactions.

“We didn’t want to make transactions go slower with adding and changing data in the database. We figured out a way to speed up query processing and at least double your transaction processing rates,” he said.

In traditional databases, data is stored in rows, for example a row of sales orders, Ellison explained. These types of row format databases were designed to operate at high speeds when processing a few rows that each contain lots of columns. More recently, a new format was proposed to store data in columns rather than rows to speed up query processing.

Oracle plans to store the data in both formats simultaneously, according to Ellison, so transactions run faster in the row format and analytics run faster in column format.

“We can process data at ungodly speeds,” Ellison claimed. As evidence of this, Oracle demoed the technology, showing seven billion rows could be queried per second via in-memory compared to five million rows per second in a traditional database.

The new approach also allows database administrators to speed up their workloads by removing the requirement for analytics indexes.

“If you create a table in Oracle today, you create the table but also decide which columns of the table you’ll create indexes for,” Ellison explained. “We’re replacing the analytics indexes with the in-memory option. Let’s get rid of analytic indexes and replace them with the column store.”

Ellison added that firms can choose to have just part of the database for in-memory querying. “Hot data can be in DRAM, you can have some in flash, some on disk,” he noted. “Data automatically migrates from disk into flash into DRAM based on your access patterns. You only have to pay by capacity at the cost of disk.”

Firms wanting to take advantage of this new in-memory option can do so straightaway, according to Ellison, with no need for changes to functions, no loading or reloading of data, and no data migration. Costs were not disclosed.

And for those firms keen to rush out and invest in new hardware to take advantage of this new in-memory option, Ellison took the wraps off the M6-32, dubbed the Big Memory Machine. According to Ellison, the M6-32 has twice the memory, can process data much faster and costs less than a third of IBM’s biggest comparable machine, making it ideal for in-memory databases.

Source

More OEM’s Seeking nVidia

As expected and announced, Zotac has now “joined the mobile gaming revolution” with the new Tegra Note 7 tablet and will be one of a handful of Nvidia partners that will sell it in both Europe and Asia-Pacific region for US $199.

In case you missed it yesterday when it was officially unveiled by Nvidia, the Nvidia Tegra Note 7 is based around a 7-inch 1280×800 IPS display and powered by Nvidia’s own Tegra 4 SoC with quad-core Cortex-A15 CPU and 72-core Geforce GPU paired up with 1GB of memory. It also packs some neat features exclusive to Nvidia, including a stylus with Nvidia DirectStylus technology as well as the 5-megapixel rear main camera backed by Chimera computational photography architecture revealed earlier by Nvidia. The camera will have support for both HDR as well as slow-motion video.

Unfortunately, Zotac did not announce the precise launch date so we are still stuck with Nvidia’s October time-frame and we are still to see the price of the new Tegra Note 7 in Europe.

Source

Apple Hacked

A group of German hackers claimed to have successfully breached the iPhone fingerprint scanner on Sunday, just two days after Apple Inc debuted the technology that it promises will better protect devices from criminals and snoopers seeking access.

If the claim is verified, it will be embarrassing for Apple which is betting on the scanner to set its smartphone apart from new models of Samsung Electronics Co Ltd and others running the Android operating system of Google Inc.

Two prominent iPhone security experts told Reuters that they believed the German group, known as the Chaos Computing Club, or CCC, had succeeded in defeating Apple’s Touch ID, though they had not personally replicated the work.

One of them, Charlie Miller, co-author of the iOS Hacker’s Handbook, described the work as “a complete break” of Touch ID security. “It certainly opens up a new possibility for attackers.”

Apple representatives did not respond to requests for comment.

CCC, one the world’s largest and most respected hacking groups, posted a video on its website that appeared to show somebody accessing an iPhone 5S with a fabricated print. The site described how members of its biometrics team had cracked the new fingerprint reader, one of the few major high-tech features added to the latest version of the iPhone.

The group said they targeted Touch ID to knock down reports about its “marvels,” which suggested it would be difficult to crack.

“Fingerprints should not be used to secure anything. You leave them everywhere, and it is far too easy to make fake fingers out of lifted prints,” a hacker named Starbug was quoted as saying on the CCC’s site.

The group said it defeated Touch ID by photographing the fingerprint of an iPhone’s user, then printing it on to a transparent sheet, which it used to create a mold for a “fake finger.”

CCC said similar processes have been used to crack “the vast majority” of fingerprint sensors on the market.

“I think it’s legit,” said Dino Dai Zovi,” another co-author of the iOS Hacker’s Handbook. “The CCC doesn’t fool around or over-hype, especially when they are trying to make a political point.”

Touch ID, which was only introduced on the top-of-the-line iPhone 5S, lets users unlock their devices or make purchases on iTunes by simply pressing their finger on the home button. It uses a sapphire crystal sensor embedded in the button.

Data used for verification is encrypted and stored in a secure enclave of the phone’s A7 processor chip.

Two security experts who sponsored an impromptu competition offering cash and other prizes to the first hackers who cracked the iPhone said they had reviewed the information posted on the CCC website, but wanted more documentation.

“We are simply awaiting a full video documentation and walk through of the process that they have claimed,” said mobile security researcher Nick DePetrillo, who started the contest with another security expert, Robert Graham. “When they deliver that video we will review it.”

The two of them each put up $100 toward a prize for the contest winner, then set up a website inviting others to contribute. While the booty now includes more than $13,000 in cash, it was not clear that the CCC would receive the full payout, even if DePetrillo and Graham declared them winners.

Source

Inventor Predicts Future Of 3D

Pablos Holman predicts that in the not too distant future our diets will be tailored to our metabolisms, adding a few bits of broccoli, a smattering of beets and some meat — all extruded from a 3D printer in an appetizing form to please our palates.

Holman is a futurist and inventor at the Intellectual Ventures Laboratory in Bellevue, Wash., where he and others work on futuristic projects like printable food. He was not alone in speaking on the topic at the Inside 3D Printing Conference last week.

Avi Reichentall, CEO of 3D Systems, one of the largest consumer printer companies, has already been able to configure his machines to create a variety of sugary goods, including cakes and candy. The sweets were on display with ornate designs.

Reichentall said consumers can expect his company to build a machine that will take a place next to the coffee maker on a kitchen counter, but instead of a caffeine shot, it will offer a sugar rush.

“We are working on a chocolate printer. I want a chocolate printer in my kitchen. I want it to be as cool as a Keurig coffee maker,” Reichentall said. “We now have 3D printed sugar. We’re going to bring to pastry chefs and confectionaries and bakers a whole range of new sugar printing capabilities.

“This is coming to a marketplace near you very soon,” he said.

While Reichentall focuses on desserts, Holman is busy with main courses, creating machines that can take freeze-dried food and hydrate it as it is being extruded through nozzles to create an eye-pleasing meal.

Source

HP To Support The iPad

Is your iPad out of warranty? Hewlett-Packard to the rescue.

HP updated its SmartFriend support service and will now troubleshoot problems with Windows, Android, Chrome OS, OS X and iOS products, according to a fact sheet describing the service.

“HP is expanding its HP SmartFriend service to provide 1:1 expert support for any brand of PC or tablet,” the company said. The plan previously supported PCs from HP and other vendors, as well as Macs.

Users can avail of the service to address general hardware, software and malware issues. HP says its agents can “remove viruses, improve PC performance, solve software errors, and connect devices to a wireless network with enhanced security.” The support is provided by phone or over the Internet, so don’t expect a technician to trot in and fix your iPad in person. But HP notes it can save you from driving to a store.

Unlike Best Buy’s Geek Squad service, HP’s service does not include hardware repairs. It can be tricky to change the battery or storage in tablets, so for iPads, the Genius Bars at Apple Stores may still be the best option for some repairs.

HP didn’t immediately comment on exactly what support it will provide for the iPad. HP printers offer wireless printing from iPads and iPhones. HP sells primarily Windows PCs and Android tablets, though on last Thursday it announced the Pavilion 14 laptop with Google’s Chrome OS.

While SmartFriend includes support for iOS devices, the service seems focused mainly on Windows products. Its technicians include “Microsoft Application Trainers, Microsoft Product Specialists, A+/MCP/MCSE Certified Professionals, Network Administrators and HTML Developers,” according to the fact sheet.

The service starts at US$9.99 per month and users can sign up for a pre-paid, monthly or yearly support plan. A “Complete Plan” supports two devices, while a “Family Plan” supports up to four devices.

Source

« Previous Page — Next Page »