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TSMC Testing ARM’s Cortex A57
ARM and TSMC have manufactured the first Cortex A57 processor based on ARM’s next-gen 64-bit ARMv8 architecture.
The all new chip was fabricated on TSMC’s equally new FinFET 16nm process. The 57 is ARM’s fastest chip to date and it will go after high end tablets, and eventually it will find its place in some PCs and servers as well.
Furthermore the A57 can be coupled with frugal Cortex A53 cores in a big.LITTLE configuration. This should allow it to deliver relatively low power consumption, which is a must for tablets and smartphones. However, bear in mind that A15 cores are only now showing up in consumer products, so it might be a while before we see any devices based on the A57.
In terms of performance, ARM claims the A57 can deliver a “full laptop experience,” even when used in a smartphone connected to a screen, keyboard and mouse wirelessly. It is said to be more power efficient than the A15 and browser performance should be doubled on the A57.
It is still unclear when we’ll get to see the first A57 devices, but it seems highly unlikely that any of them will show up this year. Our best bet is mid-2014, and we are incorrigible optimists. The next big step in ARM evolution will be 20nm A15 cores with next-generation graphics, and they sound pretty exciting as well.
Court Sides With Aereo
April 10, 2013 by admin
Filed under Consumer Electronics
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Streaming television service Aereo does not infringe the copyrights of over-the-air TV stations, and a request from several stations to shutter the New York-based service isn’t warranted, an appeals court has ruled.
The U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York was right to deny a request for a preliminary injunction from Fox, ABC, WNET and other TV stations, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit ruled Monday.
The TV stations had argued Aereo, a service that allows subscribers to record and play over-the-air TV programs on Internet-connected devices, violated their so-called public performance right, their exclusive right in U.S. copyright law to “to perform the copyrighted work publicly.”
But Judge Christopher Droney, writing for the appeals court majority, noted that Aereo makes use of technology already found by courts to be legal. The service combines Aereo-designed mini TV antennas, DVRs, and a Slingbox-like streaming service, he noted.
Aereo users, by making personal copies of TV programs for their own use, were not creating public performances, Droney added.
The TV stations “have not demonstrated that they are likely to prevail on the merits on this claim in their copyright infringement action,” Droney wrote in rejecting the request for an injunction against the service. “Nor have they demonstrated serious questions as to the merits and a balance of hardships that tips decidedly in their favor.”
Aereo praised the decision. The decision “again validates that Aereo’s technology falls squarely within the law, and that’s a great thing for consumers who want more choice and flexibility in how, when and where they can watch television,” Chet Kanojia, Aereo’s CEO and founder, said in a statement.
Lawyers for the TV stations weren’t immediately available for comment.
Digital rights group Public Knowledge cheered the ruling, saying it is a “victory for consumer choice and video innovation.”
Lenovo To Buy NEC’s Mobile Phone Unit
Japan’s NEC Corp is in negotiations to sell its struggling mobile phone unit to its PC venture partner Lenovo Group Ltd, a source familiar with the discussions said, confirming media reports of the negotiations.
NEC is also in talks with potential domestic buyers, the source said on condition that he wasn’t identified.
NEC has until now said its mobile business is an important part of its overall operations. But after two years of losses the company is shedding assets to bolster profitability.
“Amid the rapidly changing market we are considering a number of ways to bolster the competitiveness of our mobile phone business, but nothing has been decided,” NEC said in a statement through the Tokyo Stock Exchange on Friday in response to the media reports.
Lenovo officials could not be immediately reached for comment.
Japanese phone makers have struggled to gain traction overseas inmarkets dominated by Samsung Electronics Co Ltd and Apple Inc where they are also being challenged by upcoming Chinese makers. In Japan, the two foreign giants are whittling down their share of cell phone sales.
Last October, NEC cut its mobile phone sales target for the year ending March to 4.3 million from a previous estimate of 5 million units. Lenovo, the world’s No.2 maker of PCs, is cranking up overseas expansion in smartphones after solid growth in China.
Japan’s biggest cell phone maker, Sony Corp, is vying with China’s Huawei Technology Co and ZTE Corp to be No.3 in the global smartphone market.
NEC also plans to sell its mobile services subsidiary NEC Mobiling Ltd for as much as $850 million, separate sources told Reuters this month.
Marubeni Corp’s telecommunications unit and TD Mobile, a joint venture between Toyota Tsusho Corp and Denso Corp, are vying for the 51 percent stake, the sources said.
Is Ubuntu Linux Spyware?
Richard Stallman has asked a South American free software association not to promote Ubuntu Linux at its events because it “spies on its users” by collecting its users’ desktop search activity and selling the data to Amazon.
Canonical released Ubuntu 12.10 last October with Amazon search integrated into its Dash desktop search function.
Although Ubuntu users can opt out and Canonical claims it anonymises users’ search information before sending it to Amazon, the change resulted in Ubuntu users being shown Amazon ads in response to desktop search queries.
The ‘feature’ has attracted a lot of criticism and might have led some users to defect to other Linux distributions.
When Stallman’s request was denied by the FLISOL event organiser with the excuse that it would limit user freedom of choice, Stallman fired off a response to the organisation’s entire mailing list on Sunday. Parts of his email are quoted below, as translated by Groklaw.
“The issue I raise is about what should happen at FLISOL events. Give away copies of Ubuntu or not? Promote Ubuntu or no? I asked the organisers of the event that they, as a policy, not distribute or promote Ubuntu.
“Freedom of users is something else, and there isn’t a conflict between a user’s freedom and my request. If someone decides to install Ubuntu, I would consider it a mistake, but it’s his own choice to do it. What I ask is that you don’t participate, help or suggest that he do it. I didn’t request that you block him from doing so.
“As a matter of principle, I don’t believe anyone has a right, morally, to distribute proprietary software, that is, software that deprives the users of freedom. When the user controls his own software, he can install what he wants and no one can stop him. But today’s issue isn’t about him, what he does, but rather what you do with him.”
As Stallman sent his email only yesterday, it’s not yet known whether FLISOL has reconsidered promoting Ubuntu at its free software events.
These points might seem like splitting hairs, but apparently Richard Stallman – the author of the GNU General Public Licence (GPL), as well as the founder and president of the Free Software Foundation – is serious about them.
TSMC And Imagination Team Up
TSMC and Imagination Technologies announced the next step in their tech collaboration in an effort to develop Imagination’s next generation PowerVR 6-series GPUs.
The new GPUs are still not ready for prime time, but they should be used in future SoC designs, including those stamped out using TSMC’s 16nm FinFET process. The two companies will work to create new reference system designs, utilizing high bandwidth memory standards and TSMC’s 3D IC technology.
As GPU muscle becomes more important for next generation SoCs, designers need more advanced and more complex processes, such as TSMC’s 16FinFET.
“Through advanced projects initiated under this partnership, Imagination and TSMC are working together to showcase how SoCs will transform the future of mobile and embedded products,” said Hossein Yassaie, CEO of Imagination.
TSMC VP Cliff Hou argued that the need for high performance mobile GPUs will drive silicon processes in the future, much in the same way CPU development pushed new processes in the nineties.
LinkedIn Beefs Up
April 2, 2013 by admin
Filed under Around The Net
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LinkedIn has re-tooled its search engine with changes designed to make it easier for members to find information on the business networking site, whose volume of content has increased and grown more diverse in recent years.
Launched in 2003, LinkedIn initially focused on giving professionals a place to feature their resumes and career bios, as well as connect with peers and colleagues, but the site has progressively become more interactive and houses a much larger repository of data beyond individual profiles.
For example, almost 3 million companies have set up corporate pages, more than 1.5 million groups have been created, the site features a jobs section, and individuals and publishers are able to post and share comments and links to articles.
So it’s not surprising for LinkedIn to focus on improving its search engine, which fielded 5.7 billion queries last year.
LinkedIn members have until now had to run separate queries for groups, companies, jobs and other professionals, but that’s changing with the upgraded search engine.
“Now, all you need to do is type what you’re looking for into the search box and you’ll see a comprehensive page of results that pulls content from all across LinkedIn including people, jobs, groups and companies,” Johnathan Podemsky, a LinkedIn product manager, wrote in a blog post on Monday.
Users can still segment results, so as to see only job results, for example.
The LinkedIn search engine is also gaining auto-complete and suggested-searches functionalities to help people fine-tune query terms. In addition, the search engine will log members’ search queries and “learn” from them in order to deliver more relevant results.
It will also be possible for users to save search queries and be alerted about new or changed search results. The advanced search option has also gained more search filters, including location, company and school.
However, the search engine still doesn’t include content from the company’s SlideShare site, which about 60 million monthly visitors use to upload, share, rate and comment on primarily slide presentations, but also documents, videos and webinars.
Also, the search improvements are being applied to the main site, not to the mobile apps, although doing so is something the company is looking into, according to a spokeswoman.
LinkedIn started to roll out the new search features on Monday, and expects to finish delivering them to every member worldwide in the coming weeks.
As of the end of 2012, LinkedIn had topped 200 million registered members located in more than 200 countries.
Are CUDA Applications Limited?
Acceleware said at Nvidia’s GPU Technology Conference (GTC) today that most algorithms that run on GPGPUs are bound by GPU memory size.
Acceleware is partly funded by Nvidia to provide developer training for CUDA to help sell the language to those that are used to traditional C and C++ programming. The firm said that most CUDA algorithms are now limited by GPU local memory size rather than GPU computational performance.
Both AMD and Nvidia provide general purpose GPU (GPGPU) accelerator parts that provide significantly faster computational processing than traditional CPUs, however they have only between 6GB and 8GB of local memory that constrains the size of the dataset the GPU can process. While developers can push more data from system main memory, the latency cost negates the raw performance benefit of the GPU.
Kelly Goss, training program manager at Acceleware, said that “most algorithms are memory bound rather than GPU bound” and “maximising memory usage is key” to optimising GPGPU performance.
She further said that developers need to understand and take advantage of the memory hierarchy of Nvidia’s Kepler GPU and look at ways of reducing the number of memory accesses for every line of GPU computing.
The point Goss was making is that GPU computing is relatively cheap in terms of clock cycles relative to the time it takes to fetch data from local memory, let alone loading GPU memory from system main memory.
Goss, talking to a room full of developers, proceeded to outline some of the performance characteristics of the memory hierarchy in Nvidia’s Kepler GPU architecture, showing the level of detail that CUDA programmers need to pay attention to if they want to extract the full performance potential from Nvidia’s GPGPU computing architecture.
Given Goss’s observation that algorithms running on Nvidia’s GPGPUs are often constrained by local memory size rather than by the GPU itself, the firm might want to look at simplifying the tiers of memory involved and increasing the amount of GPU local memory so that CUDA software developers can process larger datasets.
Will Tegra 4 Help nVidia’s Financials?
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Trefis analysts believe Nvidia’s Tegra business is likely to grow over the next few years, although Nvidia won’t become a mobile chip company anytime soon.
In a note published a couple of days ago, Trefis concluded that Nvidia has managed to offset the impact of the PC slump thanks to mobile revenue. The PC market took a massive hit in 2012, and although things are looking up, Tegra could still come in handy.
Nvidia currently earns about 18 percent of its revenue from Tegra processors, which is not bad for a product that was on the drawing board just a few years ago.
“We estimate Tegra sales to grow at a CAGR of 17% until 2016. While we believe that Nvidia will manage to expand its footprint in mobile computing, we think that the increasing competition will keep its growth rate lower than the industry average,” said Trefis.
However, Trefis went on to conclude that Nvidia had more lack with tablets than smartphones. Last year it scored several big tablet design wins, but relatively few phone wins. The Tegra 4i, with integrated LTE, should lend a helping hand, but it won’t be ready for much of 2013. In addition, Nvidia is facing more pressure from Qualcomm and Samsung, while at the same time it was forced to push back the introduction of Tegra 4 due to technical issues.
Trefis believes Tegra’s contribution to Nvidia’s overall revenue could reach over 25 percent by 2019, which means the Tegra business won’t expand much in a mature smartphone market.
Nvidia has Tegra, AMD has consoles, so both outfits have something to fall back on in a slow PC market, at least for the time being.
Is Apple Really Security Conscious?
Is Apple proving how clueless it is about security by backing a method of replacing passwords with fingerprint readers?
Just days after a scandal where a South American hospital was staffed by phantom doctors who used silicon fingers of their colleagues to convince administrators’ finger print readers that they were working, Apple has decided that they are the perfect form of security.
Word on the street is that Apple is said to be planning to introduce an iPhone that can be unlocked by the owner’s fingerprint. Speculation about Apple’s plans for fingerprint recognition began last summer when the iPhone maker bought bio-metric security firm AuthenTec for $335 million.
It is believed that the iPhone 5S will have a fingerprint chip under the Home button, to “improve security and usability.” Meanwhile in an engineering journal, two Google security experts outlined plans for an ID ring or smartphone chip that could replace online passwords, which is a lot sexier than fingerprint scanning.
3G And 4G Modems Pose Security Threats
Researchers Nikita Tarakanov and Oleg Kupreev analyzed the security of 3G/4G USB modems obtained from Russian operators for the past several months. Their findings were presented Thursday at the Black Hat Europe 2013 security conference in Amsterdam.
Most 3G/4G modems used in Russia, Europe, and probably elsewhere in the world, are made by Chinese hardware manufacturers Huawei and ZTE, and are branded with the mobile operators’ logos and trademarks, Tarakanov said. Because of this, even if the research was done primarily on Huawei modems from Russian operators, the results should be relevant in other parts of the world as well, he said.
Tarakanov said that they weren’t able to test baseband attacks against the Qualcomm chips found inside the modems because it’s illegal in Russia to operate your own GSM base station if you’re not an intelligence agency or a telecom operator. “We’ll probably have to move to another country for a few months to do it,” he said.
There’s still a lot to investigate in terms of the hardware’s security. For example, the SoC (system on a chip) used in many modems has Bluetooth capability that is disabled from the firmware, but it might be possible to enable it, the researcher said.
For now, the researchers tested the software preloaded on the modems and found multiple ways to attack it or to use it in attacks.
For one, it’s easy to make an image of the USB modem’s file system, modify it and write it on the modem again. There’s a tool available from Huawei to do modem backup and restore, but there are also free tools that support modems from other manufacturers, Tarakanov said.
Malware running on the computer could detect the model and version of the active 3G modem and could write an image with malicious customizations to it using such tools. That modem would then compromise any computer it’s used on.
The researchers also found a possible mass attack vector. Once installed on a computer, the modem application — at least the one from Huawei — checks periodically for updates from a single server, Tarakanov said. Software branded for a specific operator searchers for updates in a server directory specific to that operator.
An attacker who manages to compromise this update server, can launch mass attacks against users from many operators, Tarakanov said. Huawei 3G modems from several different Russian operators used the same server, but there might be other update servers for other countries, he said.
Research in this area is just at the beginning and there’s more to investigate, Tarakanov said. Someone has to do it because many new laptops come with 3G/4G modems directly built in and people should know if they’re a security threat.