Intel

Intel's Mobileye Will Launch a Fully Driverless Delivery Service in 2023 (theverge.com) 30

Mobileye, the company that specializes in chips for vision-based autonomous vehicles, announced that it will launch a full-scale, fully driverless delivery service starting in 2023. The company, a subsidiary of Intel, is joining forces with self-driving delivery startup Udelv to run this new service. From a report: Deliveries will be made using a new type of cabin-less vehicle called The Transporter. While manufacturing plans are still in flux, Mobileye and Udelv say they will produce 35,000 Transporters between 2023-2028 -- a signal of their seriousness to launch a driverless delivery system at scale. "This is a real commercial deployment," Jack Weast, vice president of automated vehicle standards at Mobileye, told The Verge. "Thirty-five thousand units starting in 2023 that will fully integrate our self driving system for commercial use for automated goods delivery." Mobileye's turn-key self-driving system features a full-sensor suite of 13 cameras, three long-range LiDARs, six short-range LiDARs, and six radar. It also includes the Israeli company's EyeQ system-on-a-chip and a data crowdsourcing program called the Road Experience Management, or REM, which uses real-time data from Mobileye-equipped vehicles to build out a global 3D map.
China

Huawei To Invest $1 Billion on Car Tech It Says Surpasses Tesla (bloomberg.com) 53

Huawei will invest $1 billion on researching self-driving and electric-car technologies, accelerating plans to compete with Tesla and Xiaomi in the world's biggest vehicle arena. From a report: Huawei's autonomous-driving technology has already surpassed Tesla's in some spheres, for instance by allowing cars to cruise for more than 1,000 kilometers (621 miles) without human intervention, Rotating Chairman Eric Xu told analysts in Shenzhen Monday. The Chinese telecom giant will partner with three automakers initially to make self-driving cars that carry the Huawei name as a sub-brand, said Xu, one of three executives who take turns to fill the post. It will keep its circle of partners small and get its logo onto cars -- not unlike how Intel calls attention to its microprocessors on PCs -- that adopt its autonomous driving technology, he added. The mobile giant has so far agreed to team up with BAIC Group, Chongqing Changan Automobile and Guangzhou Automobile Group.
Intel

Nvidia To Make CPUs, Going After Intel (bloomberg.com) 111

Nvidia said it's offering the company's first server microprocessors, extending a push into Intel's most lucrative market with a chip aimed at handling the most complicated computing work. Intel shares fell more than 2% on the news. From a report: The graphics chipmaker has designed a central processing unit, or CPU, based on technology from Arm, a company it's trying to acquire from Japan's SoftBank Group. The Swiss National Supercomputing Centre and U.S. Department of Energy's Los Alamos National Laboratory will be the first to use the chips in their computers, Nvidia said Monday at an online event. Nvidia has focused mainly on graphics processing units, or GPUs, which are used to power video games and data-heavy computing tasks in data centers. CPUs, by contrast, are a type of chip that's more of a generalist and can do basic tasks like running operating systems. Expanding into this product category opens up more revenue opportunities for Nvidia.

Founder and Chief Executive Officer Jensen Huang has made Nvidia the most valuable U.S. chipmaker by delivering on his promise to give graphics chips a major role in the explosion in cloud computing. Data center revenue contributes about 40% of the company's sales, up from less than 7% just five years ago. Intel still has more than 90% of the market in server processors, which can sell for more than $10,000 each. The CPU, named Grace after the late pioneering computer scientist Grace Hopper, is designed to work closely with Nvidia graphics chips to better handle new computing problems that will come with a trillion parameters. Systems working with the new chip will be 10 times faster than those currently using a combination of Nvidia graphics chips and Intel CPUs. The new product will be available at the beginning of 2023, Nvidia said.

Businesses

Drought in Taiwan Pits Chip Makers Against Farmers (nytimes.com) 50

smooth wombat writes: Chuang Cheng-deng's modest rice farm is a stone's throw from the nerve center of Taiwan's computer chip industry, whose products power a huge share of the world's iPhones and other gadgets. This year, Mr. Chuang is paying the price for his high-tech neighbors' economic importance. Gripped by drought and scrambling to save water for homes and factories, Taiwan has shut off irrigation across tens of thousands of acres of farmland. The authorities are compensating growers for the lost income. But Mr. Chuang, 55, worries that the thwarted harvest will drive customers to seek out other suppliers, which could mean years of depressed earnings. "The government is using money to seal farmers' mouths shut," he said, surveying his parched brown fields.

Officials are calling the drought Taiwan's worst in more than half a century. And it is exposing the enormous challenges involved in hosting the island's semiconductor industry, which is an increasingly indispensable node in the global supply chains for smartphones, cars and other keystones of modern life. Chip makers use lots of water to clean their factories and wafers, the thin slices of silicon that form the basis of the chips. And with worldwide semiconductor supplies already strained by surging demand for electronics, the added uncertainty about Taiwan's water supply is not likely to ease concerns about the tech world's reliance on the island and on one chip maker in particular: Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company.

More than 90 percent of the worldâ(TM)s manufacturing capacity for the most advanced chips is in Taiwan and run by TSMC, which makes chips for Apple, Intel and other big names. The company said last week that it would invest $100 billion over the next three years to increase capacity, which will likely further strengthen its commanding presence in the market. TSMC says the drought has not affected its production so far. But with Taiwan's rainfall becoming no more predictable even as its tech industry grows, the island is having to go to greater and greater lengths to keep the water flowing. In recent months, the government has flown planes and burned chemicals to seed the clouds above reservoirs. It has built a seawater desalination plant in Hsinchu, home to TSMC's headquarters, and a pipeline connecting the city with the rainier north. It has ordered industries to cut use. In some places it has reduced water pressure and begun shutting off supplies for two days each week. Some companies, including TSMC, have hauled in truckloads of water from other areas.

Hardware

Lenovo's ThinkPad X1 Nano Weighs Only 1.99 Pounds and Is Powered By Intel Tiger Lake CPUs (hothardware.com) 51

MojoKid writes: The new 13-inch ThinkPad X1 Nano is the thinnest and lightest Lenovo ThinkPad ever in the brand's history. The machine weighs just 1.99 pounds (907 grams), while still sporting a fairly powerful Intel Core i7-1160G7 Tiger Lake quad-core CPU, up to a 1TB NVMe SSD, 16GB of 4267MHz LPDDR4X RAM and a 48 Whr battery. In the benchmarks, the machine holds its own for productivity and content creation tasks as well as a bit of light-duty gaming, versus heavier machines in its peer group. In terms of battery life, the new ThinkPad X1 Nano hangs pretty tough as well, offering about 7.5 hours of constant use up-time with HD video playback. With its 2K (2160X1350 -- 16:10) IPS Dolby Vision-certified display and top tier configuration, it doesn't come cheap, as you might imagine. The ThinkPad X1 Nano has a current starting price of $1,289 and tops out at $2,231 for its most powerful configuration with 1TB of fast SSD storage. Regardless, it's impressive what the machine can deliver in terms of features and performance in its weight class.
Intel

Intel's Dystopian Anti-Harassment AI Lets Users Opt In for 'Some' Racism (vice.com) 131

Intel is launching an artificial intelligence application that will recognize and redact hate speech in real-time. It's called Bleep, and Intel hopes it'll help with one of gaming's oldest and most intractable problems -- people can be real pieces of shit online. From a report: A video of the app shows that it will allow users to customize what kind and how much hate speech they want to see, including "Racism" and "White Nationalism" sliders that can be set to "none," "some," "most," or "all," and a separate on and off toggle for the "N-word." "While we recognize that solutions like Bleep don't erase the problem, we believe it's a step in the right direction -- giving gamers a tool to control their experience," Roger Chandler, Vice President and General Manager of Intel Client Product Solutions, said during a virtual presentation at 2021's Game Developers Conference.

According to Intel Marketing Engineer Craig Raymond, Bleep is "an end-user application that uses AI to detect and redact audio based on your user preferences." In footage of the application, Bleep presented users with a list of sliders so gamers can control the amount of hate and abuse they encounter. The list included ableism and body shaming, LGBTQ+ hate, aggression, misogyny, name-calling, racism and xenophobia, sexually explicit language, swearing, and white nationalism. As Chandler explained, Intel can't "solve" racism or the long-running and well-documented problems in gaming culture (and culture more broadly). At the same time, Bleep is techno-AI solutionism that feels pretty dystopian, pitching racism, xenophobia, and general toxicity as settings that can be tuned up and down as though they were graphics, sound, or control sliders on a video game. It is also a way of admitting defeat: if we can't stop players from being incredibly racist in chat, we can simply filter out what they say and pretend they don't exist.

Privacy

Congress Says Foreign Intel Services Could Abuse Ad Networks For Spying (vice.com) 30

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Motherboard: A group of bipartisan lawmakers, including the chairman of the intelligence committee, have asked ad networks such as Google and Twitter what foreign companies they provide user data to, over concerns that foreign intelligence agencies could be leveraging them to harvest sensitive information on U.S. users, including their location. "This information would be a goldmine for foreign intelligence services that could exploit it to inform and supercharge hacking, blackmail, and influence campaigns," a letter signed by Senators Ron Wyden, Mark Warner, Kirsten Gillibrand, Sherrod Brown, Elizabeth Warren, and Bill Cassidy, reads. The lawmakers sent the letter last week to AT&T, Verizon, Google, Twitter, and a number of other companies that maintain advertisement platforms.

The concerns center around the process of so-called real-time bidding, and the flow of "bidstream" data. Before an advertisement is displayed inside of an app or a browsing session, different companies bid to get their ad into that slot. As part of that process, participating companies obtain sensitive data on the user, even if they don't win the ad placement. "Few Americans realize that some auction participants are siphoning off and storing 'bidstream' data to compile exhaustive dossiers about them. In turn, these dossiers are being openly sold to anyone with a credit card, including to hedge funds, political campaigns, and even to governments," the letter continued. [...] The letter asked the ad companies to name the foreign-headquartered or foreign-majority owned firms that they have provided bidstream data from users in the U.S. to in the past three years. The other companies the lawmakers sent the letter to were Index Exchange, Magnite, OpenX, and PubMatic.
Mark Tallman, assistant professor at the Department of Emergency Management and Homeland Security at the Massachusetts Maritime Academy, told Motherboard in an email that "It's difficult to imagine any policy solution or technical sorcery that can fully 'secure' consumers' private data such that applications and platforms can collect it, and the publishing and advertising industries can access it, while guaranteeing that cybercriminals and foreign intelligence agencies will never get it. Our adversaries already know that they can buy (or steal) data from our marketplace that they could only dream of collecting on such a broad swath of Americans twenty years ago."
Intel

Intel Launches First 10nm 3rd Gen Xeon Scalable Processors For Data Centers (hothardware.com) 42

MojoKid writes: Intel just officially launched its first server products built on its advanced 10nm manufacturing process node, the 3rd Gen Xeon Scalable family of processors. 3rd Gen Xeon Scalable processors are based on the 10nm Ice Lake-SP microarchitecture, which incorporates a number of new features and enhancements. Core counts have been significantly increased with this generation, and now offer up to 40 cores / 80 threads per socket versus 28 cores / 56 threads in Intel's previous-gen offerings. The 3rd Gen Intel Xeon Scalable processor platform also supports up to 8 channels of DDR4-3200 memory, up to 6 terabytes of total memory, and up to 64 lanes of PCIe Gen4 connectivity per socket, for more bandwidth, higher capacity, and copious IO.

New AI, security and cryptographic capabilities arrive with the platform as well. Across Cloud, HPC, 5G, IoT, and AI workloads, new 3rd Gen Xeon Scalable processors are claimed to offer significant uplifts across the board versus their previous-gen counterparts. And versus rival AMD's EPYC platform, Intel is also claiming many victories, specifically when AVX-512, new crypto instructions, or DL Boost are added to the equation. Core counts in the line-up range from 8 — 40 cores per processor and TDPs vary depending on the maximum base and boost frequencies and core count / configuration (up to a 270W TDP). Intel is currently shipping 3rd Gen Xeon Scalable CPUs to key customers now, with over 200K chips in Q1 this year and a steady ramp-up to follow.

Businesses

Why Shortages of a $1 Chip Sparked Crisis in Global Economy (bloomberg.com) 117

To understand why the $450 billion semiconductor industry has lurched into crisis, a helpful place to start is a one-dollar part called a display driver. From a report: Hundreds of different kinds of chips make up the global silicon industry, with the flashiest ones from Qualcomm and Intel going for $100 apiece to more than $1,000. Those run powerful computers or the shiny smartphone in your pocket. A display driver chip is mundane by contrast: Its sole purpose is to convey basic instructions for illuminating the screen on your phone, monitor or navigation system. The trouble for the chip industry -- and increasingly companies beyond tech, like automakers -- is that there aren't enough display drivers to go around. Firms that make them can't keep up with surging demand so prices are spiking. That's contributing to short supplies and increasing costs for liquid crystal display panels, essential components for making televisions and laptops, as well as cars, airplanes and high-end refrigerators.

"It's not like you can just make do. If you have everything else, but you don't have a display driver, then you can't build your product," says Stacy Rasgon, who covers the semiconductor industry for Sanford C. Bernstein. Now the crunch in a handful of such seemingly insignificant parts -- power management chips are also in short supply, for example -- is cascading through the global economy. Automakers like Ford Motor, Nissan Motor and Volkswagen have already scaled back production, leading to estimates for more than $60 billion in lost revenue for the industry this year. The situation is likely to get worse before it gets better.

Portables (Apple)

Intel MacBook Pro Owner Adds Water Cooling To Silence Noisy Fans, Boost Performance (macrumors.com) 48

An inventive MacRumors forums member has successfully retrofitted a water-cooling system to their 15-inch Intel-based MacBook Pro, thereby eliminating fan noise and boosting performance. From the report: MacRumors forums member "theodric" explained that the noise of their MacBook Pro's fans had become disruptive during conference calls, so amid ordering an M1 MacBook Air, they decided to fit a water cooling system to their machine. theodric used inexpensive parts such as Bitcoin ASIC miner blocks from AliExpress, an Aquastream XT Ultra water pump, and a Zalman radiator and reservoir from 2005 to create the system.

High-transmissivity thermal pads were added between the case shell and various motherboard components to conduct heat away from the MacBook Pro and into the water cooling system. The thermal shielding from the bottom of the case was also removed, as well as the feet, to ensure full contact with the new cooling plates. The pump, which requires Windows software to operate, was run via a virtual machine, and a Raspberry Pi was used for monitoring. theodric says that they have "hardly heard the fan since I started using it" and have seen benchmark scores significantly improve under the system. See theodric's full post for more information about the ambitious project.

IBM

Why IBM is Pushing 'Fully Homomorphic Encryption' (venturebeat.com) 122

VentureBeat reports on a "next-generation security" technique that allows data to remain encrypted while it's being processed.

"A security process known as fully homomorphic encryption is now on the verge of making its way out of the labs and into the hands of early adopters after a long gestation period." Companies such as Microsoft and Intel have been big proponents of homomorphic encryption. Last December, IBM made a splash when it released its first homomorphic encryption services. That package included educational material, support, and prototyping environments for companies that want to experiment. In a recent media presentation on the future of cryptography, IBM director of strategy and emerging technology Eric Maass explained why the company is so bullish on "fully homomorphic encryption" (FHE)...

"IBM has been working on FHE for more than a decade, and we're finally reaching an apex where we believe this is ready for clients to begin adopting in a more widespread manner," Maass said. "And that becomes the next challenge: widespread adoption. There are currently very few organizations here that have the skills and expertise to use FHE." To accelerate that development, IBM Research has released open source toolkits, while IBM Security launched its first commercial FHE service in December...

Maass said in the near term, IBM envisions FHE being attractive to highly regulated industries, such as financial services and health care. "They have both the need to unlock the value of that data, but also face extreme pressures to secure and preserve the privacy of the data that they're computing upon," he said.

The Wikipedia entry for homomorphic encryption calls it "an extension of either symmetric-key or public-key cryptography."
AMD

Linus Torvalds Discusses Intel and AMD's New Proposals for Interrupt/Exception Handling (linuxreviews.org) 149

"AMD and Intel have both proposed better ways of doing interrupt and exception handling the last few months," reports LinuxReviews.org.

Then they share this analysis Linus Torvalds posted on the Real World Technologies forum: "The AMD version is essentially "Fix known bugs in the exception handling definition".

The Intel version is basically "Yeah, the protected mode 80286 exception handling was bad, then 386 made it odder with the 32-bit extensions, and then syscall/sysenter made everything worse, and then the x86-64 extensions introduced even more problems. So let's add a mode bit where all the crap goes away".

In contrast, the AMD one is basically a minimal effort to fix actual fundamental problems with all that legacy-induced crap that are nasty to work around and that have caused issues...

Both are valid on their own, and they are actually fairly independent. Honestly, the AMD paper looks like a quick "we haven't even finished thinking all the details through, but we know these parts were broken, so we might as well release this".

I don't know how long it has been brewing, but judging by the "TBD" things in that paper, I think it's a "early rough draft"."

In the article (shared by long-time Slashdot reader xiando), LinuxReviews.org summarizes the state of the conversation today: Torvalds went on to say that while AMD's proposed "quick fix" would be easier to implement for him and others operating system vendors, it's not ideal in the long run. Intel's proposal throws the entire existing interrupt descriptor table (IDT) delivery system under the bus so it can be replaced with what they call a new "FRED event delivery" system. Torvalds believes this is a better long-term solution...

While the pros and cons of Intel and AMD's respective proposals for interrupt and event handling in future processors are worthy of discussion, it's in reality mostly up to Intel. They are the bigger and more powerful corporation. It is more likely than not that future processors from Intel will use their proposed Flexible Return and Event Delivery system. Their next generation processors won't, it will take years not months before consumer CPUs have the FRED technology. Remember, the above-mentioned technical document was published earlier this month [in March]. Things do not magically go from the drawing-board to store-shelves overnight.

Intel isn't going to just hand the FRED technology over to AMD and help them implement it. We will likely see both move forward with their own proposals. Intel will have FRED and AMD will have Supervisor Entry Extensions until AMD, inevitably, adopts FRED or some form of it years down the line.

They also note that Torvalds took issue with a poster arguing that microkernels are more secure than monolithic kernels like Linux. "Bah, you're just parroting the usual party line that had absolutely no basis in reality and when you look into the details, doesn't actually hold up.

It's all theory and handwaving and just repeating the same old FUD that was never actually really relevant."

Intel

Arm Takes Aim at Intel Chips in Biggest Tech Overhaul in Decade (bloomberg.com) 57

Arm unveiled the biggest overhaul of its technology in almost a decade, with new designs targeting markets currently dominated by Intel, the world's largest chipmaker. From a report: The Cambridge, U.K.-based company is adding capabilities to help chips handle machine learning, a powerful type of artificial intelligence software. Extra security features will lock down data and computer code more. The new blueprints should also deliver 30% performance increases over the next two generations of processors for mobile devices and data center servers, said Arm, which is being acquired by Nvidia. The upgrades are needed to support the spread of computing beyond phones, PCs and servers, Arm said. Thousands of devices and appliances are being connected to the internet and gaining new capabilities through the addition of more chips and AI-powered software and services. The company wants its technology to be just as ubiquitous here as it is in the smartphone industry.
Intel

'Intel 11th-Generation Rocket Lake-S Gaming CPUs Did Not Impress Us' (arstechnica.com) 68

ArsTechnica: Today marks the start of retail availability for Intel's 2021 gaming CPU lineup, codenamed Rocket Lake-S. Rocket Lake-S is still stuck on Intel's venerable 14 nm process -- we've long since lost count of how many pluses to tack onto the end -- with features backported from newer 10 nm designs. Clock speed on Rocket Lake-S remains high, but thread counts have decreased on the high end. Overall, most benchmarks show Rocket Lake-S underperforming last year's Comet Lake -- let alone its real competition, coming from AMD Ryzen CPUs. Our hands-on test results did not seem to match up with Intel's marketing claims of up to 19 percent gen-on-gen IPC (Instructions Per Clock cycle) improvement over its 10th-generation parts. It shouldn't come as an enormous surprise that Core i9-11900K underperforms last year's Core i9-10900K in many multithreaded tests -- this year's model only offers eight cores to last year's 10. On the plus side, Intel's claims of 19% gen-on-gen IPC are largely borne out here, mostly balancing the loss out in Passmark and Geekbench. This year's Core i5 makes a much better showing than its Core i9 big sibling. In Cinebench R20, Core i5-11600K almost catches up with Ryzen 5 5600X, and it easily dominates last year's Comet Lake i5 equivalent. It doesn't catch up to its Ryzen competitor in Passmark or Geekbench multithreaded tests, but it outpaces last year's model all the way around.
Hardware

Samsung Unveils 512GB DDR5 RAM Module (engadget.com) 33

Samsung has unveiled a new RAM module that shows the potential of DDR5 memory in terms of speed and capacity. Engadget reports: The 512GB DDR5 module is the first to use High-K Metal Gate (HKMG) tech, delivering 7,200 Mbps speeds -- over double that of DDR4, Samsung said. Right now, it's aimed at data-hungry supercomputing, AI and machine learning functions, but DDR5 will eventually find its way to regular PCs, boosting gaming and other applications. Developed by Intel, it uses hafnium instead of silicon, with metals replacing the normal polysilicon gate electrodes. All of that allows for higher chip densities, while reducing current leakage.

Each chip uses eight layers of 16Gb DRAM chips for a capacity of 128Gb, or 16GB. As such, Samsung would need 32 of those to make a 512GB RAM module. On top of the higher speeds and capacity, Samsung said that the chip uses 13 percent less power than non-HKMG modules -- ideal for data centers, but not so bad for regular PCs, either. With 7,200 Mbps speeds, Samsung's latest module would deliver around 57.6 GB/s transfer speeds on a single channel.

Intel

Intel To Outsource Some Key CPU Production for 2023 Chips to TSMC (tomshardware.com) 31

An anonymous reader shares a report: Intel made several big announcements about its 7nm tech at this week's Intel Unleashed: Engineering the Future event and divulged that it expects that the majority of its products in 2023 to still be produced in-house using its own manufacturing technology. But there's a caveat: Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger said the company will also release "leadership CPU products" in 2023 with CPU cores that are fabricated with an unspecified process node from third-party foundry TSMC, and those CPUs will come to both the client and data center markets. This development comes on the heels of Intel's announcement last year that its 7nm process was delayed, possibly forcing it to do the unthinkable -- turn to external foundries to produce its core logic, like CPUs and GPUs, for the first time in the company's history.

The newest announcements mean that, in addition to the 7nm Meteor Lake desktop chips and Granite Rapids data center processors that Intel will produce with its own process technology in 2023, the company will also release other lines of CPUs in 2023 that will use CPU cores with an as-yet-unspecified process node from TSMC. Intel noted that the chips that utilize TSMC's third-party process tech will power Intel's "CPU leadership" products for both the client and data center markets, suggesting a split product stack. Intel says that the majority of its products in 2023 will come manufactured with its own process technology. Still, it's important to note that Intel hasn't specified that the majority of the newly-released 2023 products will come with its own 7nm process. Naturally, Intel will still have plenty of chip production volume centered on its 14nm and 10nm process tech in that timeframe, and even older nodes that still ship in large volumes.
Further reading: Intel To Spend $20 Billion To Build Two New Chip Fabs In Arizona.
Businesses

Intel To Spend $20 Billion To Build Two New Chip Fabs In Arizona (cnbc.com) 59

phalse phace writes: During today's "Intel Unleashed: Engineering the Future" webcast, Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger gave an update on the company's future plans and developments, one of which includes a $20 billion investment to build two new chip fabs in Arizona.

The new factories are expected to "become a major provider of foundry capacity in the U.S. and Europe" to serve the global demand for semiconductor manufacturing. "To deliver this vision, Intel is establishing a new standalone business unit, Intel Foundry Services (IFS), led by semiconductor industry veteran Dr. Randhir Thakur. IFS will be differentiated from other foundry offerings with a combination of leading-edge process technology and packaging, committed capacity in the U.S. and Europe, and a world-class IP portfolio for customers, including x86 cores as well as ARM and RISC-V ecosystem IPs."
"Gelsinger said the foundry business will compete in a market potentially worth $100 billion by 2025," reports CNBC. "A slide displayed by Intel suggested that companies including Amazon, Google, Microsoft and Qualcomm could be customers for the business."

The company is also partnering with IBM to improve chip logic and packaging technologies, which will "enhance the competitiveness of the U.S. semiconductor industry and support key U.S. government initiatives."
Security

Acer Hit by $50 Million Ransomware Attack (bleepingcomputer.com) 39

Computer maker Acer has been hit by a ransomware attack "where the threat actors are demanding the largest known ransom to date, $50,000,000," writes Bleeping Computer: Yesterday, the ransomware gang announced on their data leak site that they had breached Acer and shared some images of allegedly stolen files as proof...

In response to BleepingComputer's inquiries, Acer did not provide a clear answer regarding whether they suffered a REvil ransomware attack, saying instead that they "reported recent abnormal situations" to relevant law enforcement and data protection authorities... In requests for further details, Acer said "there is an ongoing investigation and for the sake of security, we are unable to comment on details."

PC Magazine reports that data from Advanced Intel's Andariel cyberintelligence platform "was able to link the possible breach to the Microsoft Exchange issue."
Businesses

Qualcomm Now Owns Nuvia, Aims New CPU Design Resources Directly At Apple (arstechnica.com) 41

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Qualcomm has wrapped up its $1.4 billion acquisition of silicon design firm Nuvia, a move that will lead to in-house Qualcomm CPU designs. The acquisition should allow Qualcomm to compete with Apple's silicon division and focus on pushing bigger, better ARM chips into the laptop market. The deal was announced in January 2021. Don't feel bad if you've never heard of Nuvia; the company was only founded in 2019 and has never made a product. Nuvia was focused on building server chips, but Qualcomm seems mainly interested in the engineering pedigree here, since the company was founded by three high-ranking engineers from Apple's silicon division. Nuvia's CEO, Gerard Williams, formerly Apple's chief CPU architect for nearly a decade, is now Qualcomm's SVP of engineering.

Apple is famously in the process of dumping x86 Intel CPUs in order to roll out in-house ARM architecture designs across the company's entire laptop and desktop lines. Qualcomm wants to be here to sell chips to all the PC vendors that want to follow suit. Qualcomm's press release immediately aimed its new design resource at the market Apple is upending, saying, "The first Qualcomm Snapdragon platforms to feature Qualcomm Technologies' new internally designed CPUs are expected to sample in the second half of 2022 and will be designed for high-performance ultraportable laptops." The call-out that this acquisition will lead to "internally designed CPUs" is a big deal, since currently, Qualcomm only ships lightly customized, off-the-shelf ARM CPUs.

Intel

Intel Puts Apple's 'Mac Guy' Into New Ads Praising PCs (theverge.com) 243

Intel has hired Apple's former "I'm a Mac" actor Justin Long to create new ads praising PCs. From a report: Long starts each commercial with "Hello I'm a... Justin," with the typical white background you'd find on Apple's Mac vs. PC ads from the 2000s. Naturally, the ads focus on Mac vs. PC again, with Long mocking Apple's Touch Bar, lack of M1 multiple monitor support, and the "gray and grayer" color choices for a MacBook. One even goes all-in on Apple's lack of touchscreens in Macs or 2-in-1 support by mocking the fact you have to buy a tablet, keyboard, stylus, and even a dongle to match what's available on rival Intel-based laptops. Another ad also points out that "no one really games on a Mac." Intel has put out more ads where they point out that Mac doesn't have the gaming ecosystem that Windows laptops enjoy.

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