Haswell Refresh Coming Next Year

Intel has been executing its tick tock strategy flawlessly since January 2006 and now there is some indication that we might see the first slip in 8 years come 2014. Intel’s latest roadmap claims that in 12 months from now, in Q2 2014 Haswell will be replaced by a “Haswell refresh”.

Haswell is a tock, a 22nm new architecture and Broadwell is supposed to be based on Haswell fundamentals, but shrunk to 14nm like a proper “tock”. In case that the Haswell refresh is a tweaked 22nm core, this would mean that after 7 years of execution and billions of investments in cutting edge fabrication processes, Intel would have to slow things down.

It is not certain what would happen to 2015 Skylake, a new 14nm architecture, or the 10nm Skymont that is supposed to be the shrink, but in case Broadwell gets pushed back by a year there is a big possibility that the whole roadmap would slip a year.

When it gets ready the Haswell refresh (possibly a disguise name for Broadwell ed.) is replacing Core i7, Core i5, Core i3, Pentium and Celeron based Haswell chips, some sooner rather than later.

The chipset responsible for Haswell refresh is already branded as Z97 and H97 in desktop versions replacing the Z87 and H87 boards proving that the socket are likely to continue existing at least through 2014. It will be interesting to see the developments and if Broadwell is really delayed or this is just game of words on Intel’s part.

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Office 365 Goes Yammer

Microsoft has taken the first step in its integration roadmap for SharePoint and Yammer, allowing Office 365 customers to swap SharePoint Online’s activity stream with Yammer’s.

This first, modest integration point will let SharePoint Online users click on the Yammer link and launch a separate browser window where they’re asked to sign in.

Later this year, Microsoft will deepen the integration with a single sign-on and the addition of Yammer to the main Office 365 interface, which will begin to merge the two products’ user experience.

Next month, Microsoft will release a Yammer application for SharePoint that will let users embed a Yammer group feed into a SharePoint site. The application will work both with SharePoint Online and with the on-premises version of the server SharePoint 2013.

Also in July, Microsoft will provide instructions for replacing the SharePoint 2013 newsfeed with Yammer’s.

For now, the first integration step in optional, but Microsoft is strongly suggesting that Office 365 customers make the activity stream switch to Yammer.

“Our recommendation is to use Yammer, since it’s our big bet for enterprise social, and we’re committed to making it the underlying social layer for all our products,” wrote Christophe Fiessinger, a Microsoft Office Division product marketing manager, in a blog post.

Customers should also accompany the technical change with an outreach effort to promote the benefits of using the enterprise social networking features of Yammer, according to Fiessinger.

“To drive adoption and really get the value out of Yammer, you need a strategy, advocates, and openness to the way it will transform the way people in your organization work and communicate,” he wrote.

Microsoft bought Yammer for $1.2 billion in mid-2012 in order to boost the development and availability of enterprise social collaboration features in SharePoint and in other Office and Microsoft business software like the Dynamics applications.

Microsoft makes a convincing case for the benefits of integrating Yammer with SharePoint and its other software to provide a common social collaboration layer, but the process is clearly complicated and will take years.

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HP Aims To Boot ‘Useless’ Data

Hewlett-Packard wants to help organizations rid themselves of useless data, all the information that is no longer necessary, yet still occupies expensive space on storage servers.

The company’s Autonomy unit has released a new module, called Autonomy Legacy Data Cleanup, that can delete data automatically based on the material’s age and other factors, according to Joe Garber, who is the Autonomy vice president of information governance.

Hewlett-Packard announced the new software, along with a number of other updates and new services, at its HP Discover conference, being held this week in Las Vegas.

For this year’s conference, HP will focus on “products, strategies and solutions that allow our customers to take command of their data that has value, and monetize that information,” said Saar Gillai, HP’s senior vice president and general manager for the converged cloud.

The company is pitching Autonomy Legacy Data Cleanup for eliminating no-longer-relevant data in old SharePoint sites and in e-mail repositories. The software requires the new version of Autonomy’s policy engine, ControlPoint 4.0.

HP Autonomy Legacy Data Cleanup evaluates whether to delete a file based on several factors, Garber said. One factor is the age of the material. If an organization has an information governance policy of only keeping data for seven years, for example, the software will delete any data older than seven years. It will root out and delete duplicate data. Some data is not worth saving, such as system files. Those can be deleted as well. It can also consider how much the data is being accessed by employees: Less consulted data is more suitable for deletion.

Administrators can set other controls as well. If used in conjunction with the indexing and categorization capabilities in Autonomy’s Idol data analysis platform, the new software can eliminate clusters of data on a specific topic. “You apply policies to broad swaths of data based on some conceptual analysis you are able to do on the back end,” Garber said.

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Intel Shows More Ivy Bridge

Last week Intel officially released Haswell, but there’s still life in good old Ivy Bridge. The chipmaker has announced a range of low-end Ivy parts and even a Sandy Bridge based Celeron.

The Celeron G470 is possibly the last consumer Sandy Bridge we will ever see. It is a single-core 35W part clocked at 2GHz and it’s priced at just $37.

However, Ivy Bridge parts are a bit more interesting. They include the Celeron 1017, a dual-core, dua-thread chip clocked at 1.6GHz, with a TDP of just 17W. It costs $86 and should be a nice part for low-end laptops and nettops. The Celeron 1005M also costs $86, but it has a 35W TDP and a 1.9GHz clock.

There are four new G2000 Pentiums as well. The G2140 and G2030 are 55W parts, clocked at 3GHz and 3.3GHz respectively. The G2120T and G2030T are 35W chips, clocked at 2.6GHz and 2.7GHz. They cost $64 and $75 respectively. Of course, Pentiums don’t feature Hyperthreading and all four of them are dual-core parts.

The Core i3 line-up also got some speed bumps. The Core i3-3245 and 3250 are clocked at 3.4 and 3.5GHz and both have a TDP of 55W. The 3245 features HD 4000 graphics and costs $134, while the 3250 ends up with HD 2500 graphics and a price tag of $138. Lastly, the Core i3-3250T is a 3GHz part with a 35W TDP, it costs $138, just like its 55W sibling.

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Will Icahn Boot Michael Dell?

Carl Icahn reportedly is drawing up a shortlist of potential Dell CEO replacements for Michael Dell should his bid for the company be successful.

Icahn and Southeastern Asset Management have made a bid to rival that of Michael Dell and Silver Lake Partners in the high stakes fight over Dell and its board. Now it is being reported that Icahn has already started drawing up a list of candidates that he and Southeastern Asset Management will propose as replacements for Michael Dell as CEO of Dell.

Icahn has previously warned that should his offer for Dell be accepted by the shareholders he would look to not only oust Michael Dell as CEO but replace the firm’s board of directors. Reuters reports that Icahn is casting his net far and wide, including consideration of former HP CEO and current Oracle co-president Mark Hurd.

According to Reuters’ sources Cisco director Michael Capellas, IBM services head Michael Daniels and Oracle’s Hurd are all in the frame, although none of the individuals would confirm having been approached by Icahn.

Michael Dell’s initial plan to buy back the company he founded has met with strong opposition by existing shareholders, some of whom think they are getting shortchanged. According to Michael Dell, the firm’s reorganisation into an enterprise IT vendor will be easier if the company goes private and doesn’t face investor and market scrutiny.

So far Dell’s board is backing Michael Dell’s and Silver Lake Partners’ buyout offer, suggesting that Icahn’s offer is short of cash. However some of Dell’s investors might like the drastic action that Icahn is promising, along with the fact that his offer allows existing shareholders to maintain a diluted stake in the company.

Should Icahn manage to get his takeover offer accepted by Dell’s shareholders, it will set up a sensational return to the PC industry for Hurd and give Dell renewed momentum to compete with HP.

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IBM Buys SoftLayer

IBM has signed an agreement to purchase SoftLayer Technologies, as it looks to accelerate the build-out of its public cloud infrastructure. The company is also forming a services division to back up the push.

The financial details of the deal were not announced, but SoftLayer is the world’s largest privately held cloud computing infrastructure provider, according to IBM.

IBM already has an offering that includes private, public and hybrid cloud platforms. The acquisition of SoftLayer will give it a more complete in-house offering, as enterprises look to keep some applications in the data center, while others are moved to public clouds.

SoftLayer has about 21,000 customers and an infrastructure that includes 13 data centers in the U.S., Asia and Europe, according to IBM. SoftLayer allows enterprises to buy compute power on either dedicated or shared servers.

Following the close of the acquisition of SoftLayer, which is expected in the third quarter, a new division will combine its services with IBM’s SmartCloud. IBM expects to reach $7 billion annually in cloud revenue by the end of 2015, it said.

Success is far from certain: The public cloud market is becoming increasingly competitive as dedicated cloud providers, telecom operators and IT vendors such as Microsoft and Hewlett-Packard all want a piece. The growing competition should be a good thing for customers if it drives down prices. For example, Microsoft has already committed to matching Amazon Web Services prices for commodity services such as computing, storage and bandwidth.

Not all hardware vendors feel it’s necessary to have their own public cloud. Last month, Dell changed strategy and said it would work with partners including Joyent, instead of having its own cloud.

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Will Qualcomm Be First?

We could not get the right timeframe for the launch of Qualcomm’s successor to the high-end Snapdragon 800, but there is no doubt that Qualcomm, Samsung, Nvidia and other ARM supporters are thinking about 20nm products where some of them will be based on Cortex A57.

Qualcomm has its own Krait core that can be adapted to 20nm and follow up the success of Snapdragon 600 and the soon to come Snapdragon 800. It turns out that it traditionally takes 18 to 24 months for the mobile industry to shift from one process to another and Qualcomm had its first 28nm part in April 2012, with the Snapdragon S4, used in the HTC One S. The first ever 28nm part from Qualcomm was the Snapdragon S4 MSM8260A that is now more than a year old and a relatively obsolete product.

Less than a year after the first 28nm product Qualcomm followed up with the Snapdragon 600 that is shipping in millions of high end devices right now. In a month or two it plans to release Snapdragon 800 based on new Krait 400 core and add a new core and get even better performance.

The next step is the 20nm core that should start shipping before the end of 1H 2014. We would not be surprised to see 20nm Krait demoed at CES 2014 already in January, see more of it at the Mobile World Congress in February and the volume shipment to follow in early Q2 2014. This is the expected schedule and not something we got from Qualcomm.

The only official world we got is that the new generation traditionally comes 18 to 24 months after the first iteration of a current one. This can give you an idea that Tegra 5, codenamed Logan, should show up at a similar time, along with Samsung’s 20nm Exynos.

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Does Haswell Need A Separate GPU?

Nvidia actually has a person with the catchy title of Chief Blogger and this person managed to get “an interview” with Rene Haas a VP and GM of computing products that currently takes care of Geforce mobile among other things.

Rene was asked to explain “why Gamers still need a discrete GPU with Haswell” and the answer is as logical as why do you use a seatbelt. Rene expects that Intel will continue to suck in graphics (our words not his ed.) and that that most popular games won’t play well on Haswell at standard resolution.

It seems that history really does repeat itself, as Intel had big claims for both Ivy Bridge and Sandy Bridge had been struggling to run new games of their time. Any serious gamers know that the answer is a proper discrete GPU. Haswell won’t change that, claims Rene.

It looks like Nvidia will have at least as many design wins as with Ivy Bridge, and Ivy Bridge was the record number or design wins for Nvidia. Rene claims that with this refresh Nvidia will have as much as 95 per cent of the gaming notebook which is nothing short of spectacular.

Rene also attacks Intel boldly claiming that “Their (Intel) comparison is misleading on a number of fronts.” Commenting the fact that Intel claims that GT3e will be faster than Geforce GT 650M. Intel based its claims on synthetic benchmarks, something that can be optimised, while Nvidia prefers real games, and even if GT3 wins again Geforce GT650, the new Geforce GT 750 is much faster than its predecessor and will have double the performance of GT3e in games.

Rene reminds us that GT3e is only available in top quad core mobile cores such as Core i7 4880QM that usually find their place in $3,000 notebooks. Rene tells customers that getting a Core i5 of Core i3 notebook with a better discrete GPU is the right way to get better gaming performance, although the vast majority of consumers already know that.

We remember that the last time we sat down with Rene, he said that when Intel gets faster with Integrated, Nvidia will simply gets even better with its corresponding low-end products and offers something faster. The cat and mouse game never ends.

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Will Arm/Atom CPUs Replace Xeon/Opteron?

Analyst are saying that smartphone chips could one day replace the Xeon and Opteron processors used in most of the world’s top supercomputers. In a paper in a paper titled “Are mobile processors ready for HPC?” researchers at the Barcelona Supercomputing Center wrote that less expensive chips bumping out faster but higher-priced processors in high-performance systems.

In 1993, the list of the world’s fastest supercomputers, known as the Top500, was dominated by systems based on vector processors. They were nudged out by less expensive RISC processors. RISC chips were eventually replaced by cheaper commodity processors like Intel’s Xeon and AMD Opteron and now mobile chips are likely to take over.

The transitions had a common thread, the researchers wrote: Microprocessors killed the vector supercomputers because they were “significantly cheaper and greener,” the report said. At the moment low-power chips based on designs ARM fit the bill, but Intel is likely to catch up so it is not likely to mean the death of x86.

The report compared Samsung’s 1.7GHz dual-core Exynos 5250, Nvidia’s 1.3GHz quad-core Tegra 3 and Intel’s 2.4GHz quad-core Core i7-2760QM – which is a desktop chip, rather than a server chip. The researchers said they found that ARM processors were more power-efficient on single-core performance than the Intel processor, and that ARM chips can scale effectively in HPC environments. On a multi-core basis, the ARM chips were as efficient as Intel x86 chips at the same clock frequency, but Intel was more efficient at the highest performance level, the researchers said.

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Twitter’s Authentication Has Vulnerabilities

Twitter’s SMS-based, two-factor authentication feature could be abused to lock users who have not enabled it for their accounts if attackers gain access to their log-in credentials, according to researchers from Finnish antivirus vendor F-Secure.

Twitter introduced two-factor authentication last week as an optional security feature in order to make it harder for attackers to hijack users’ accounts even if they manage to steal their usernames and passwords. If enabled, the feature introduces a second authentication factor in the form of secret codes sent via SMS.

According to Sean Sullivan, a security advisor at F-Secure, attackers could actually abuse this feature in order to prolong their unauthorized access to those accounts that don’t have two-factor authentication enabled. The researcher first described the issue Friday in a blog post.

An attacker who steals someone’s log-in credentials, via phishing or some other method, could associate a prepaid phone number with that person’s account and then turn on two-factor authentication, Sullivan said Monday. If that happens, the real owner won’t be able to recover the account by simply performing a password reset, and will have to contact Twitter support, he said.

This is possible because Twitter doesn’t use any additional method to verify that whoever has access to an account via Twitter’s website is also authorized to enable two-factor authentication.

When the two-factor authentication option called “Account Security” is first enabled on the account settings page, the site asks users if they successfully received a test message sent to their phone. Users can simply click “yes,” even if they didn’t receive the message, Sullivan said.

Instead, Twitter should send a confirmation link to the email address associated with the account for the account owner to click in order to confirm that two-factor authentication should be enabled, Sullivan said.

As it is, the researcher is concerned that this feature could be abused by determined attackers like the Syrian Electronic Army, a hacker group that recently hijacked the Twitter accounts of several news organizations, in order to prolong their unauthorized access to compromised accounts.

Some security researchers already expressed their belief that Twitter’s two-factor authentication feature in its current implementation is impractical for news organizations and companies with geographically dispersed social media teams, where different employees have access to the same Twitter account and cannot share a single phone number for authentication.

Twitter did not immediately respond to a request for comment regarding the issue described by Sullivan.

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