Sign up for our Technology Newsletter 
Intel’s Haswell Goes 13W
Intel’s Haswell Y-series processors as we said a few weeks ago have yet launch. The current plan is to launch two Ivy SKUs in Q1 2013, both dual-cores, and later in 2013 Intel plans to replace them with Haswell Y series parts, with even lower TDP.
The faster one is called Core i7 3689Y and has two cores and two threads, as well as a base clock of 1.5GHz. With the help of Intel Turbo Boost 2.0, the top single-core turbo clock is an impressive 2.6GHz, while the maximum dual-core turbo clock stops at 2.4GHz, which is still impressive. This core comes with Intel HD graphics 4000 clocked between 350MHz and 860MHz with turbo.
This new core supports both DDR3 and DDR3L at 1600MHz, has 4MB of cache and impressively low 13W TDP. We have explained that SDP stands for Standard Dissipation Power and Intel expect it to be at 7W for this part.
The runner up is called Core i5 3439Y and has the same two cores and two threads with 1.5GHz base clock, but the single core turbo clock stops at 2.3GHz, while the dual-core top clock is 2.10GHz. The graphics speed, TDP and memory support remain the same, but there is a difference in cache size. Core i5 3439Y comes with 3MB instead of 4MB for Core i7 Y series 3689Y part.
Google Sells A Piece Of Motorola
December 31, 2012 by admin
Filed under Around The Net
Comments Off on Google Sells A Piece Of Motorola
Google plans to unload the TV set-top box business of its Motorola Mobility subsidiary to Arris Group, a broadband device vendor, for $2.35 billion.
Arris will also receive patents belonging to the business, called Motorola Home, and will get a perpetual license to other Motorola Mobility patents as part of the deal. The companies announced their agreement late on Wednesday and expect the sale to close by the second quarter of next year.
Google acquired Motorola Mobility in a closely examined deal that concluded in May. It bought the business primarily for its mobile assets and proceeded to seek a buyer for its Motorola Home division, which primarily makes set-top boxes for bringing video and other broadband services to TVs. Motorola Home had revenue of $3.4 billion in the year ending Sept. 30.
Despite the growth of Internet-based video services, Arris sees growth ahead in the set-top box business. The combined companies will have more than 500 customers in 70 countries, according to a press release.
“Every operator that we’ve talked to tells me that in-home devices are not going to go away,” Arris Chairman and CEO Bob Stanzione said on a conference call to discuss the deal. He sees a new generation of the boxes that will carry both traditional and IP (Internet Protocol) video services going into homes soon.
nVidia’s Tegra 4 Specs Spotted
Here is an interesting leak, just what the doctor ordered to spice up a rather slow news cycle. Chiphell has posted a slide containing a few Tegra 4 specs, but we still don’t know the clocks or a few other interesting details. Of course, the leak should be taken with a grain of salt, but the specs are more or less in line with what we were expecting all along.
Tegra 4, codenamed Wayne, is a 28nm part with revamped graphics and new ARM cores. Although the slide does not directly point to the type of ARM cores used in the design, the new chip is based on ARM’s latest A15 core. Like the Tegra 3, the new chip will also feature an additional companion core to improve energy efficiency. No surprises here really.
In terms of GPU performance, Nvidia promises to deliver a six-fold improvement over the Tegra 3 and a 20x improvement over Tegra 2 chips. Oddly enough, in spite of Nvidia’s graphics prowess, Tegra chips never featured world-beating graphics. This time around they could, thanks to the new 72-core GPU. The GPU will be able to cope with 2560×1600 screens at 120Hz, but it could also take on 4K resolutions, although details are still sketchy. At this point 4K support could only be relevant for next-generation smart TVs, with a huge price tag.
As far as other features go, Tegra 4 brings support for USB 3.0 and DDR3L dual-channel memory. The leak does not mention LTE support.
Tegra 4 will have to take on the likes of Samsung’s upcoming Exynos 5440, which should also debut in early 2013. Nvidia was first to market with a quad-core A9 chip, but this time around it will have to face off against the new Exynos and A15 quad-cores from other vendors.
Nvidia is expected to showcase the new chip at CES and we’ll be there to check it out.
Will Cisco Boot Linksys?
Cisco reportedly has hired Barclays to find a buyer for its Linksys business.
Cisco bought Linksys back in 2003 to get into the consumer networking business and the firm has put out some good products, most notably the WRT54G wireless router that was a favourite with technology savvy punters. Now Cisco is looking to offload Linksys as it continues to pull back from the consumer networking market.
Cisco has been cutting jobs and products such as the Flip video camera, as it wants to get back to the high margin enterprise networking business. Back in 2003, Cisco paid $500m for Linksys and got access to an established business that focused on producing consumer network equipment.
A decade later, it is being reported that Cisco will be lucky to get its $500m back. Cisco has been pulling out of its failed attempt to get into the consumer market and is now focusing on flogging both network infrastructure hardware and servers, though it is widely expected to be hit hard as software defined networks become more popular.
Unlike Cisco’s core enterprise business, Linksys products typically have low margins, and with its parent firm’s slowing sales growth, it is not surprising Cisco wants to offload it. Bloomberg’s sources said Cisco might find interest in buying Linksys from television makers, though they wouldn’t provide any more details.
Will Lenovo Go Public In 2K14?
Lenovo’s parent firm Legend Holdings could float an initial public offering (IPO) as soon as 2014, according to the firm’s chairman.
Liu Chuanzhi, chairman of Legend Holdings told China Business News that the firm plans to list on the China A-share market between 2014 and 2016. Chuanzhi also reportedly said the company will invest $3.2bn by 2014 to develop its various businesses.
Legend Holdings is 36 percent owned by the Chinese state controlled Academy of Sciences, with a further 20 percent owned by the private investment firm China Oceanwide Holdings Group.
Legend Holdings also has venture capital and real estate interests outside of Lenovo Group. The firm’s system building operations however have gone from strength to strength since it bought IBM’s PC business back in 2005, and it is now heavily promoting its Yoga tablet-laptop hybrid device.
Earlier this year Gartner reported that Lenovo had overtaken HP to become the largest PC vendor, something that HP disputed by offering IDC’s figures. Regardless of HP’s protestations then, Lenovo is set to overtake HP as its PC business continues to grow while HP’s has been shrinking for some time.
Legend Holdings might want to cash in on Lenovo’s high flying status and a cash injection from an IPO could help the company invest in designing products for the smartphone and tablet markets.
.
Will Foxcomm Invade The US?
Foxconn Technology Group is weighing whether or not to expand its existing manufacturing operations in the U.S., in a move that could be linked with Apple’s plan to bring back Mac manufacturing to the country.
Foxconn made the statement last Friday after Apple CEO Tim Cook said in interviews with NBC and Businessweek that Apple would manufacture one of its Mac lines in the U.S. by the end of next year.
“So we’ll literally invest over $100 million,” Cook said. “This doesn’t mean that Apple will do it ourselves, but we’ll be working with people, and we’ll be investing our money.”
Analysts said Foxconn could be involved. The Taiwan-based firm is a major supplier for Apple, helping to build its iPhone and iPad. But much of that manufacturing is done in China, where Foxconn employs 1.2 million workers and labor costs are lower.
Without elaborating, Foxconn said it was considering the expansion in order to meet the needs of it customers, and to “leverage the high-value engineering talent” available in the U.S. market.
It’s unclear what kind of manufacturing operations the company already has in the U.S. An expansion in the nation, however, would face challenges, said Amy Teng, an analyst with research firm Gartner.
“From the financial perspective, I don’t see any advantage in why they (Foxconn) would assemble there, unless this is part of Apple’s plan,” she said. Labor costs in the U.S. are higher and it will be harder for the company to recruit U.S. workers for menial factory jobs, when compared to China.
Qualcomm Throws $$ At Sharp
December 12, 2012 by admin
Filed under Consumer Electronics
Comments Off on Qualcomm Throws $$ At Sharp
Qualcomm is set to make a $120m investment in troubled Japanese display maker Sharp.
Rumours had been floating around that Qualcomm was looking to make an investment in Sharp, and the display maker has confirmed the investment. Qualcomm initially will invest $60m in Sharp through its Pixtronix subsidiary by the end of 2012 to help develop Sharp’s IGZO display technology.
Qualcomm will make a further $60m investment in Sharp should the initial work on its IGZO displays seem promising. Should Qualcomm complete the $120m investment in Sharp, that will make it the single largest shareholder with around five percent of the firm, primarily due to the fact that Sharp’s share price has fallen by almost 75 percent in 2012.
While Sharp said it will work with Qualcomm on further developing its display technology, the two firms will also look at working together on developing chip fabrication technologies.
It had been reported that Intel and Dell were also sniffing around Sharp, while Hon Hai is known to be looking to make a stake in the firm, though its demand for a seat on Sharp’s board is likely the main sticking point in negotiations. Sharp has warned that its future is in doubt if it cannot secure investment to repay large debts it amassed as part of its LCD manufacturing push back in 2006 and 2007.
Amazon Looking For Investors
December 6, 2012 by admin
Filed under Around The Net
Comments Off on Amazon Looking For Investors
Amazon has issued its first bonds in nearly 15 years as it looks to borrow money while interest rates are low.
Amazon’s position as the undisputed king of online retail has put the company in a good position to take advantage of cheap borrowing rates. Amazon issued three, five and 10-year bonds at 0.38, 0.63 and 0.93 percent above US Treasury rates with investors clamouring to get a ride on the firm’s coattails.
According to the Wall Street Journal, Amazon’s $3bn bond issue has attracted more than $10bn in investor interest. According to ratings agency Moody’s, the firm will use the cash generated in the bond sale to make investments such as buying its corporate headquarters.
Standard and Poor’s rated Amazon’s debt as AA- and said there was minimal financial risk with Amazon. While Moody’s rated the bonds at Baa1, the agency also forecast strong growth in sales for Amazon in the coming years. It seems that Amazon, given that it hasn’t got any other bonds, is proving popular with bond investors despite reporting low profits and recently having been grilled in the UK Parliament over allegations of tax avoidance.
Amazon has been diversifying the ways it generates cash, and while it long ago moved away from simply selling books, the firm is a big player in cloud services through its Amazon Web Services division and is aggressively marketing its own brand of electronics devices in the Kindle range of ebook readers and tablets.
nVidia Speaks On Performance Issue
Nvidia has said that most of the outlandish performance increase figures touted by GPGPU vendors was down to poor original code rather than sheer brute force computing power provided by GPUs.
Both AMD and Nvidia have been using real-world code examples and projects to promote the performance of their respective GPGPU accelerators for years, but now it seems some of the eye popping figures including speed ups of 100x or 200x were not down to just the computing power of GPGPUs. Sumit Gupta, GM of Nvidia’s Tesla business said that such figures were generally down to starting with unoptimized CPU code.
During Intel’s Xeon Phi pre-launch press conference call, the firm cast doubt on some of the orders of magnitude speed up claims that had been bandied about for years. Now Gupta told The INQUIRER that while those large speed ups did happen, it was possible because of poorly optimized code to begin with, thus the bar was set very low.
Gupta said, “Most of the time when you saw the 100x, 200x and larger numbers those came from universities. Nvidia may have taken university work and shown it and it has an 100x on it, but really most of those gains came from academic work. Typically we find when you investigate why someone got 100x [speed up] is because they didn’t have good CPU code to begin with. When you investigate why they didn’t have good CPU code you find that typically they are domain scientist’s not computer science guys – biologists, chemists, physics – and they wrote some C code and it wasn’t good on the CPU. It turns out most of those people find it easier to code in CUDA C or CUDA Fortran than they do to use MPI or Pthreads to go to multi-core CPUs, so CUDA programming for a GPU is easier than multi-core CPU programming.”
Do Supercomputers Lead To Downtime?
As supercomputers grow more powerful, they’ll also become more susceptible to failure, thanks to the increased amount of built-in componentry. A few researchers at the recent SC12 conference, held last week in Salt Lake City, offered possible solutions to this growing problem.
Today’s high-performance computing (HPC) systems can have 100,000 nodes or more — with each node built from multiple components of memory, processors, buses and other circuitry. Statistically speaking, all these components will fail at some point, and they halt operations when they do so, said David Fiala, a Ph.D student at the North Carolina State University, during a talk at SC12.
The problem is not a new one, of course. When Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory’s 600-node ASCI (Accelerated Strategic Computing Initiative) White supercomputer went online in 2001, it had a mean time between failures (MTBF) of only five hours, thanks in part to component failures. Later tuning efforts had improved ASCI White’s MTBF to 55 hours, Fiala said.
But as the number of supercomputer nodes grows, so will the problem. “Something has to be done about this. It will get worse as we move to exascale,” Fiala said, referring to how supercomputers of the next decade are expected to have 10 times the computational power that today’s models do.
Today’s techniques for dealing with system failure may not scale very well, Fiala said. He cited checkpointing, in which a running program is temporarily halted and its state is saved to disk. Should the program then crash, the system is able to restart the job from the last checkpoint.
The problem with checkpointing, according to Fiala, is that as the number of nodes grows, the amount of system overhead needed to do checkpointing grows as well — and grows at an exponential rate. On a 100,000-node supercomputer, for example, only about 35 percent of the activity will be involved in conducting work. The rest will be taken up by checkpointing and — should a system fail — recovery operations, Fiala estimated.
Because of all the additional hardware needed for exascale systems, which could be built from a million or more components, system reliability will have to be improved by 100 times in order to keep to the same MTBF that today’s supercomputers enjoy, Fiala said.
Fiala presented technology that he and fellow researchers developed that may help improve reliability. The technology addresses the problem of silent data corruption, when systems make undetected errors writing data to disk.