IBM to Announce Breakthrough Caching Innovation at ISSCC
This morning, IBM confirmed to BetaNews that later this afternoon, its engineers are scheduled to demonstrate their own concept chip, which will utilize an embedded memory architecture for caching. The company is saying it could double the performance of existing 65 nm processors and future generations by tripling its cache memory capacity and perhaps increase the throughput of that memory tenfold.
The demonstration will take place at the International Solid-State Circuits Conference, where on Monday Intel demonstrated its own concept chip, whose architecture is based on the fabricator’s ability to stamp out multiple cores side-by-side as tiles. IBM’s counter-argument today may very well prove that core multiplication may not be the most efficient way to achieve performance gains.
HD DVD User Claims to Have Bypassed AACS Encryption
In a separate matter perhaps inspired by, but otherwise unrelated to, last December's discovery of how a software-based HD DVD player may have left title keys exposed, giving users access to one of the key components necessary for them to back up their content onto separate discs, another user has posted the source code that may enable HD DVD users to determine the title keys for themselves.
In tests over the past few days by users of the Doom9 Forum, people putting this software to use appear to have isolated and identified title keys for their HD DVD movies - the cryptographic components necessary for players, or for anyone, to decrypt content. So while this method is technically not an "AACS crack," as some have been led to believe, though which the source code's author himself has never claimed, if this method does lead to the identification of title keys, conceivably at least some users may become armed with the tools they need to back up HD DVD content without cracking AACS.
Sony May Pull Out of Cell CPU Production for PS3
One of Sony's senior executives, Executive Deputy President Yutaka Nakagawa, is quoted by several US and Asian press sources as saying that, in the interest of finding cost savings, his company is considering exiting the production end of the Cell processor business. Cell processors are produced by an alliance between Sony, IBM, and Toshiba.
Nakagawa was apparently cornered by reporters after he blamed Cell processor production costs for a 5% decline in quarterly profits for Sony's semiconductor division. Cell processors are currently fabricated using 90 nm lithography, and while plans have been in the works to move the chip to 65 nm, IBM is gearing to retool many of its operations for 45 nm, as part of its other partnership with x86 CPU producer AMD. IBM will have one of only two chip foundries capable of producing silicon-on-insulator (SOI) components such as Cell at the 45 nm level (the other is owned by Chartered Semiconductor), and IBM has already signaled its intention to use that foundry for 45 nm production as soon as next year.
NVidia, AMD Battle to Turn Phones into Multimedia Platforms
With nearly every major consumer electronics device manufacturer lately having signed onto the notion that consumers everywhere are eager to watch CinemaScope movies on their cell phones and cell phone videos on their plasma HDTVs, the world's two principal manufacturers of graphics hardware are vying for center stage in Barcelona this week.
There, at the 3GSM World Congress, nVidia and AMD (we still have to get used to not saying "ATI") are making strong cases in favor of the convergence of all media, and that the center of that convergence is themselves.
Intel to Show Off 1 TFlop, 80-core CPU
At a meeting of the International Solid-State Circuits Conference in Santa Clara later this afternoon (early this evening East coast time), engineers from Intel are slated to demonstrate a working version of a conceptual CPU, using designs the company may integrate into future product lines. As promised during the last Intel Developers' Forum, this concept CPU will incorporate 80 cores using an experimental "network-on-a-chip" architecture, which enables the cores to share data without depositing it in memory first.
Last month, in an about-face in its strategy toward waging the "dual-core duel," AMD CEO Hector Ruiz pronounced, "It's not about the cores," in an attempt to deflect attention toward those parts of CPU architecture where AMD may still hold a slight advantage. Today's ISSCC conference is evidently where Intel responds, "The heck it's not!"
Broadcom-based Handsets Cleared for Sale in US
In another indication that one of the most heated intellectual property disputes in the history of telecommunications could end up a near-wash for both sides, a US District Court ruled late last week that two major handset manufacturers will be allowed to export devices with Broadcom chips to the US, despite a pending patent infringement lawsuit from Qualcomm.
The two manufacturers are Samsung and Panasonic, for whom the ruling was quite timely, especially with the 3GSM World Congress in Barcelona having opened just this morning. Both companies have current licenses with Qualcomm already as well, with respect to WCDMA technology; this ruling enables them to continue selling Broadcom chip-based phones by virtue of the fact that Qualcomm has already licensed its technology to them anyway.
Microsoft, Novell to Bridge Active Directory, eDirectory
In the next phase of the two companies' much-discussed collaboration, Novell and Microsoft announced they are working together to develop a method for using existing protocols for bridging network access between eDirectory and Active Directory, with complete details to come sometime during the first half of this year.
Though the two companies did not mention this explicitly, the common bond between the two identity management services for their networks is Lightweight Directory Access Protocol (LDAP). Both are implementations of an LDAP store, although Microsoft utilizes a kind of abstraction layer that enables Windows Server-based networks to bind an LDAP application to a replica partition rather than specifically to an IP address. Differences in implementation such as this are why bridging the two identity services is not an academic process.
Microsoft Builds DRM for Mobile Phones
In an indication that Microsoft’s strategy for digital rights management in the "Zune era" will be even more stratified than at first thought, the company introduced another DRM technology to the mix this morning at 3GSM in Barcelona: PlayReady, which appears to add streaming media and pay-per-view capabilities to the PlaysForSure platform it already had in place.
This morning, Microsoft is calling PlayReady “the result of extended dialogue with the mobile industry,” whose members were evidently looking for a more flexible way to transfer content between devices.
Windows Mobile 6 to Synchronize App Development
In an interview with BetaNews, Microsoft product manager for Windows Mobile and embedded devices John Starkweather said that a key feature of the system developers' kit for Windows Mobile 6 will be a set of tools that expose the functionality of a new graphical desktop synchronization tool for Windows Vista called Windows Mobile Device Center. Windows Mobile 6 is expected to play a role in several manufacturers' product introductions on Monday.
Once a Windows Mobile 6-endowed handset is connected to a Vista-based PC either directly or wirelessly, Starkweather told us, Vista will recognize the device's brand and model, and then will launch Microsoft Update, which will automatically download and install the Mobile Device Center for the identified model (it does not ship with Vista). The handset then becomes represented on the Vista desktop by a high-res picture of the device itself.
Internet DNS to Receive 3-Year, $100mn Overhaul
In preparation for the capacity of the entire Internet to double to 1.8 billion users in just three years' time, VeriSign -- which manages the registry for the .com and .net top-level domain names, as well as the root servers for the entire domain name system -- announced this morning it will commit three years' worth of humanpower and $100 million in resources to the overhaul and expansion of DNS.
VeriSign CEO Stratton Sclavos is expected to reveal details of Project Titan, perhaps his company's most ambitious effort to date, later tonight at a keynote address to the RSA Conference in San Francisco.
US Senate Bill Holds IT Managers Responsible for Privacy Breaches
A bill introduced in the US Senate on Tuesday by Judiciary Committee Chairman Patrick Leahy (D - Vermont), along with one independent and one Republican backer, aims to strengthen security requirements for all private databases accessible online that may hold personal information. Reintroducing language that had been stalled since 2005, if passed, the bill could hold IT managers accountable and responsible for security breaches where personal information is pilfered.
"Our bill...requires that companies that have databases with sensitive personal information on Americans establish and implement data privacy and security programs," Sen. Leahy stated in a speech on the Senate floor Tuesday. "In the Information Age, any company that wants to be trusted by the public must earn that trust by vigilantly protecting the databases they use and maintain."
Symantec Finds Yet Another Excel Trojan Variant
It may be a single malicious user with an axe to grind, and that user may be targeting a very small group of people who just happen to use Microsoft Excel. But whoever it is continues to make security firms like Symantec nervous, as yet another Excel-based document with a malformed image string, dubbed Trojan.Mdropper.Y, has turned up.
As a message on Symantec's security blog stated this morning, the Excel document with the malformed string is capable of dropping two Trojan horse programs onto the victim's computer, both of which are identified as Backdoor.Bias.
RIM Lawsuit Settled, Cingular May Use 'Blackjack' Name
In a statement released to wire services early this morning, BlackBerry manufacturer Research in Motion said it has settled its lawsuit with Samsung over its use of the "BlackJack" trademark for handsets sold in the US by Cingular Wireless (now AT&T).
But the exact terms of the settlement are being left private, and those parts of the settlement that were revealed this morning are about as vague as the news of the original lawsuit. Judging from RIM's own words and not Reuters' interpretation of them, it appears AT&T will be permitted to continue to use the trademark on a limited basis.
AMD Salvages Low-power Argument with New Opteron CPUs
In the fourth calendar quarter of last year, Intel made the most headway against arch-rival AMD in the server CPU market in several years, surging ahead in shipments and reportedly taking back a few points of market share. Now, AMD is working to take those points back and then some, and to do so, it's working hurriedly to seize the low-power, high-performance advantage that the company is perceived to have lost in the wake of Intel's Woodcrest introduction.
Two of AMD's introductions today include "high-efficiency" versions of its high-performance line. Whereas the Opteron 8220 and 2220 models for dual-processor systems, introduced today, are both rated for a thermal design point (TDP) of 95 watts, their 8218 HE and 2218 HE counterparts are rated for 68 W TDP, and five other single-processor HE models introduced today are rated for 65 W TDP.
German Court Decision Re-ignites Online Surveillance Debate
A decision Monday by the German Federal High Court (BGH) in Karlsruhe renders it illegal in that country –- for now -– for police and intelligence services to use clandestine tools such as Trojan horse routines, or what would normally be categorized as malware, for use in surveillance on federal suspects.
But the high court ruling did not set a legal precedent, which means that it didn’t actually find a new way for existing law to be interpreted to permanently prohibit the use of remote computer exploits for surveillance purposes.
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