Intel today announced the launch of new products tailored to edge computing scenarios like digital signage, interactive kiosks, medical devices, and health care service robots. From a report: The 11th Gen Intel Core Processors, Atom x6000E Series, Pentium, Celeron N, and J Series bring new AI security, functional safety, and real-time capabilities to edge customers, the chipmaker says, laying the groundwork for innovative future applications. Intel expects the edge market to be a $65 billion silicon opportunity by 2024. The company's own revenue in the space grew more than 20% to $9.5 billion in 2018. And according to a 2020 IDC report, up to 70% of all enterprises will process data at the edge within three years. To date, Intel claims to have cultivated an ecosystem of more than 1,200 partners, including Accenture, Bosch, ExxonMobil, Philips, Verizon, and ViewSonic, with over 15,000 end customer deployments across "nearly every industry."

The 11th Gen Core processors -- which Intel previewed in early September -- are enhanced for internet of things (IoT) use cases requiring high-speed processing, computer vision, and low-latency deterministic processing, the company says. They bring an up to 23% performance gain in single-threaded workloads, a 19% performance gain in multithreaded workloads, and an up to 2.95 times performance gain in graphics workloads versus the previous generation. New dual video decode boxes allow the processors to ingest up to 40 simultaneous video streams at 1080p up to 30 frames per second and output four channels of 4K or two channels of 8K video. According to Intel, the combination of the 11th Gen's SuperFin process improvements, miscellaneous architectural enhancements, and Intel's OpenVINO software optimizations translates to 50% faster inferences per second compared with the previous 8th Gen processor using CPU mode or up to 90% faster inferences using the processors' GPU-accelerated mode.

As chip makers have reached the limits of atomic-scale circuitry and the physics of electrons, Moore's law has slowed, and some say it's over. But a different law, potentially no less consequential for computing's next half century, has arisen. WSJ: I call it Huang's Law, after Nvidia chief executive and co-founder Jensen Huang. It describes how the silicon chips that power artificial intelligence more than double in performance every two years. While the increase can be attributed to both hardware and software, its steady progress makes it a unique enabler of everything from autonomous cars, trucks and ships to the face, voice and object recognition in our personal gadgets. Between November 2012 and this May, performance of Nvidia's chips increased 317 times for an important class of AI calculations, says Bill Dally, chief scientist and senior vice president of research at Nvidia. On average, in other words, the performance of these chips more than doubled every year, a rate of progress that makes Moore's Law pale in comparison.

Nvidia's specialty has long been graphics processing units, or GPUs, which operate efficiently when there are many independent tasks to be done simultaneously. Central processing units, or CPUs, like the kind that Intel specializes in, are on the other hand much less efficient but better at executing a single, serial task very quickly. You can't chop up every computing process so that it can be efficiently handled by a GPU, but for the ones you can -- including many AI applications -- you can perform it many times as fast while expending the same power. Intel was a primary driver of Moore's Law, but it was hardly the only one. Perpetuating it required tens of thousands of engineers and billions of dollars in investment across hundreds of companies around the globe. Similarly, Nvidia isn't alone in driving Huang's Law -- and in fact its own type of AI processing might, in some applications, be losing its appeal. That's probably a major reason it has moved to acquire chip architect Arm Holdings this month, another company key to ongoing improvement in the speed of AI, for $40 billion.

ZDNet reports: Oracle has released version 15 of Java, the language created 25 years ago by James Gosling at Sun Microsystems, which Oracle snapped up in 2009 for about $7.4bn to gain what it said was the "most important software Oracle has ever acquired". Java 15, or Oracle Java Development Kit (JDK) 15, brings the Edwards-Curve digital signature algorithm, hidden classes, and former preview features that have been finalized, including text blocks, and the Z Garbage Collector, while the sealed-classes feature arrives and pattern matching and records emerge as a second preview...

In July, Java fell out of RedMonk's top two positions for the first time since 2012 and now resides behind JavaScript and Python in terms of popularity. Tiobe in September ranked Java in second position, behind C and ahead of Python.... But Java is still hugely popular and widely used in the enterprise, according to Oracle, which notes it is used by over 69% of full-time developers worldwide... It counts Arm, Amazon, IBM, Intel, NTT Data, Red Hat, SAP and Tencent among its list of notable contributors to JDK 15. Oracle also gave a special mention to Microsoft and cloud system monitoring service DataDog for fixes...

As part of Java's 25th anniversary, Oracle commissioned analyst firm Omdia to assess its six-month release strategy for Java and whether it would be enough to keep millions of Java developers away from memory-safe alternatives such as Kotlin, the language Google has endorsed for Android development, and Rust, a system programming language that was created at Mozilla. "In Omdia's opinion, the work Oracle began a few years ago in moving to a six-month update cycle and introducing a new level of modularity, puts the vendor in good stead with its constituency of approximately 12 million developers," Oracle said in its report on Omdia's analysis.

"However, Oracle and the Java programming language need an ongoing series of innovative, must-have, and 'delightful' features that make the language even more user friendly and cloud capable. These will keep existing Java developers happy while steering potential Java developers away from newer languages like Rust and Kotlin."

"Microsoft has submitted a series of patches to Linux kernel developers," reports ZDNet, "requesting that Linux run as the root partition on the Hyper-V, its hypervisor software for running Windows and non-Windows instances on hardware." Microsoft "wants to create a complete virtualization stack with Linux and Microsoft Hypervisor", according to Microsoft principle software engineer Wei Liu. Liu has proposed an RFC or request for comment that for now merely implements what are only the "absolutely necessary components to get things running... There will be a subsequent patch series to provide a device node (/dev/mshv) such that userspace programs can create and run virtual machines. We've also ported Cloud Hypervisor over and have been able to boot a Linux guest with Virtio devices since late July." Cloud Hypervisor is an experimental open-source hypervisor implementation from Intel written in the Rust programming language. It's a virtual-machine monitor that runs on top of KVM, the Kernel-based Virtual Machine hypervisor in the Linux kernel that's designed for cloud workloads...

Liu points out three more changes beyond amendments to the Hyper-V Top-Level Functional Specification. For example, Microsoft wants Linux to set up existing Hyper-V facilities differently. It also wants Linux kernel developers to change the kernel's behavior when accessing hardware memory in a way that affects driver access to the GPU and CPU that's being managed by an operating system memory manager. It's this issue that Microsoft engineers are least confident about and are asking for Linux developer support, according to Liu....

As Microsoft's executive VP of the cloud and enterprise group, Scott Guthrie, told ZDNet last year, Microsoft's shift to Linux and open source started over a decade ago when it open-sourced ASP.NET. "We recognized open source is something that every developer can benefit from. It's not nice, it's essential. It's not just code, it's community," explained Guthrie.

MojoKid writes: Intel formally announced its 11th Gen Core mobile processor family, known by the code name Tiger Lake, a few weeks back and made some bold performance claims for it as well. The company even compared its quad-core variant to AMD's 8-core Ryzen 7 4800U in gaming and content creation. Today Intel lifted the embargo veil on benchmarks with its Core i7-1185G7 Tiger Lake CPU with on-board Iris Xe graphics and there's no question Tiger Lake is impressive. Intel indeed achieved single-threaded performance gains north of 20% with even larger deltas for multithreaded throughput in some cases as well. In addition, Tiger Lake's integrated Iris Xe graphics put up over 2X the gaming performance over the company's 10th Gen Ice Lake processors, and it looks to be the fastest integrated graphics solution for laptops on the market currently, besting AMD's Ryzen 4000 series as well. Battery life measurements are still out, however, as retail ready products have yet to hit the channel. Intel notes Tiger Lake-powered laptops from OEM partners should be available in the next month or so.

MojoKid writes: NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang officially unveiled the GeForce RTX 30 series based on the company's new Ampere architecture a couple of weeks back. According to Huang, the GeForce RTX 30 series represents the greatest generational leap in the company's history and he claimed the GeForce RTX 3080 would offer double the performance of its predecessor. The embargo for GeForce RTX 3080 reviews just lifted and it seems NVIDIA was intent on making good on its claims. The GeForce RTX 3080 is the fastest GPU released to date, across the board, regardless of the game, application, or benchmarks used. Throughout testing, the GeForce RTX 3080 often put up scores more than doubling the performance of AMD's current flagship Radeon RX 5700 XT. The RTX 3080 even skunked the NVIDIA Titan RTX and GeForce RTX 2080 Ti by relatively large margins, even though it will retail for almost half the price of a 2080 Ti (at least currently). The bottom line is, NVIDIA's got an absolutely stellar-performing GPU on its hands, and the GeForce RTX 3080 isn't even the best Ampere has to offer, with the RTX 3090 waiting in the wings. GeForce RTX 3080 cards will be available from NVIDIA and third-party board partners on 9/17 for an entry-level MSRP of $699.

The U.S. chip industry said as much as $50 billion in federal incentives will be needed to halt a decades-long trend of manufacturing moving overseas as China spends heavily to become a leading semiconductor producer. From a report: The federal government needs to deploy $20 billion to $50 billion to make the U.S. as attractive a location for plants as Taiwan, China, South Korea, Singapore, Israel and parts of Europe, the Semiconductor Industry Association said in a study released Wednesday. Failure to do that threatens U.S. leadership of the sector as a whole, it added. The lobbying group, which represents companies such as Intel and Qualcomm, is making the pitch at a time when it believes Washington is more open to listening. The China-U.S. trade war and supply-chain disruptions caused by the pandemic have revealed the risks of having such vital components made abroad.

Microsoft has submitted a series of patches to the Linux kernel with its aim being "to create a complete virtualization stack with Linux and Microsoft Hypervisor." The Register reports: The patches are designated "RFC" (Request for comments) and are a minimal implementation presented for discussion. The key change is that with the patched kernel, Linux will run as the Hyper-V root partition. In the Hyper-V architecture, the root partition has direct access to hardware and creates child partitions for the VMs it hosts. "Just think of it like Xen's Dom0," said Microsoft principal software engineer Wei Liu. Hyper-V's architecture is more similar to Xen than it is to KVM or to VMware's ESXi, and Liu acknowledged that "we drew inspiration from the Xen code in Linux," specifically for code handing interrupts. Until now, the Hyper-V root partition had to run Windows.

Microsoft has also ported Intel's open-source Cloud Hypervisor, a Virtual Machine Monitor (VMM) written in Rust that normally runs on KVM, the hypervisor that is built into the Linux kernel. Cloud Hypervisor itself is currently in "very early pre-alpha stage." Even when Linux is the root partition, it will still run on top of Microsoft's hypervisor, a thin layer running with ring -1 privileges. It will no longer be necessary to run Windows on that hypervisor, though, enabling Microsoft to call the new arrangement "a complete virtualization stack with Linux."

"SoftBank is set to sell the U.K.'s Arm Holdings to U.S. chip company Nvidia for more than $40 billion," writes Ars Technica, adding that the deal's imminent announcement was reported earlier by the Wall Street Journal. The move comes just four years after Softbank bought ARM, promising it would become their company's linchpin: Multiple people with direct knowledge of the matter said a cash-and-stock takeover of Arm by Nvidia may be announced as soon as Monday, and that SoftBank will become the largest shareholder in the U.S. chip company.

The announcement of the deal hinged on SoftBank ending a messy dispute between Arm and the head of its China joint venture, Allen Wu, who earlier rebuffed an attempt to remove him and claimed legal control of the unit. Several people close to SoftBank said the matter was now "resolved," though one person close to Mr Wu said he "remains the chairman of Arm China." A spokesperson for Mr Wu declined to comment.

The takeover values Arm above the $32 billion price that SoftBank paid for the business in 2016, a deal that was struck weeks after the U.K. voted to leave the European Union and prompted critics including Arm's founder to accuse the country of selling off the crown jewel of its tech sector. While Nvidia is paying more for the asset than SoftBank did, the price also reflects the scale of Arm's underperformance under the Japanese group's ownership. Nvidia had a market valuation of roughly similar to that of Arm's at the time of the 2016 deal, but now trades with a market value of $300 billion, or roughly 10 times the amount SoftBank paid in cash for Arm. By paying for a large portion of the deals with its own shares, it is also passing part of the risk of the transaction to SoftBank. For Nvidia, which recently overtook Intel to become the world's most valuable chipmaker, the deal will further consolidate the US company's position at the centre of the semiconductor industry...

One person close to the talks said that Nvidia would make commitments to the UK government over Arm's future in Britain, where opposition politicians have recently insisted that any potential deal must safeguard British jobs.

"Security researchers from Amsterdam have publicly detailed 'BlindSide' as a new speculative execution attack vector for both Intel and AMD processors," reports Phoronix: BlindSide is self-described as being able to "mount BROP-style attacks in the speculative execution domain to repeatedly probe and derandomize the kernel address space, craft arbitrary memory read gadgets, and enable reliable exploitation. This works even in face of strong randomization schemes, e.g., the recent FGKASLR or fine-grained schemes based on execute-only memory, and state-of-the-art mitigations against Spectre and other transient execution attacks."

From a single buffer overflow in the kernel, researchers claim three BlindSide exploits in being able to break KASLR (Kernel Address Space Layout Randomization), break arbitrary randomization schemes, and even break fine-grained randomization.
There's more information on the researcher's web site, and they've also created an informational video.

And here's a crucial excerpt from their paper shared by Slashdot reader Hmmmmmm: In addition to the Intel Whiskey Lake CPU in our evaluation, we confirmed similar results on Intel Xeon E3-1505M v5, XeonE3-1270 v6 and Core i9-9900K CPUs, based on the Skylake, KabyLake and Coffee Lake microarchitectures, respectively, as well as on AMD Ryzen 7 2700X and Ryzen 7 3700X CPUs, which are based on the Zen+ and Zen2 microarchitectures.

Overall, our results confirm speculative probing is effective on a modern Linux system on different microarchitectures, hardened with the latest mitigations.

On Wednesday, Acer and Walmart announced they were reviving the Gateway brand to sell affordable Windows 10 notebooks and laptop convertibles from $179 and up. PCMag reports: Gateway was once a major PC vendor in the US, especially during the 1990s when it famously sold computers packaged in cow spotted boxes. However, the company's fortunes began to falter in the 2000s, resulting in Taiwanese PC vendor Acer later buying it up. Acer has now decided to bring back Gateway, calling it a "beloved" brand in the US. And to market the products, the company has resurrected the cow spotted box logo.

According to Acer, the products are designed for everyday consumers, students and "creators," who pump out content or graphic designs. The hardware will also feature processors from either Intel or AMD, and come fitted with 1080p screens. In total, the Gateway PCs span nine different notebook models. At the low-end is the "11.6-inch Ultra Slim" laptop, which retails for $179, and contains 4GB of RAM and 64GB of storage. At the high-end, you can buy the "Gateway Creator Series 15.6-inch Performance Notebook," which has an Intel 10th Gen Core i5-10300H processor, an NVIDIA 2060 RTX graphics card, 256GB of SSD storage and 8GB of RAM.

Joe Biden's presidential campaign was hit by an attack that was caught by Microsoft, which reportedly gathered information identifying hackers linked to the Kremlin as the most likely suspects. The Daily Beast reports: Reuters reported Thursday morning that suspected Russian state-backed hackers have attempted to breach the systems at Washington-based SKDKnickerbocker, a strategy and communications firm working hand-in-glove with Joe Biden's campaign. The attacks, which took place over the past two months, were unsuccessful. The failed hacking attempt was brought to SKDK's attention by Microsoft, which reportedly gathered information identifying hackers linked to the Kremlin as the most likely suspects. The attacks are said to have mainly focussed on phishing -- a common hacking method which lures users into disclosing sensitive passwords. That was the method used by Russian hackers to access DNC emails, which were subsequently leaked online, ahead of the 2016 presidential election.

A person familiar with SKDK's repelling to the hacking attempts said the agents didn't get very far, telling Reuters: "They are well-defended, so there has been no breach." Another source said it was impossible to confirm if Biden's campaign was the target, or whether the Russians were trying to gather intel on the long list of other SKDK clients.

An anonymous reader shares a report: Microsoft has seen success with its budget friendly Surface Go tablet thanks to its $399 starting price, and it appears the company is hoping to further capitalize on that success with another price conscious Surface PC, this time in the form of a laptop. Codenamed Sparti, I'm told that Microsoft is working on a lightweight midrange clamshell PC designed with students in mind. According to my sources, Sparti has a 12.5-inch display with a 10th-generation Intel Core i5 processor, 4GB RAM, and 64GB storage in the entry-level model. It'll ship with Windows 10 in S mode and be priced somewhere between $500 and $600. I'm told that Sparti is being positioned as a more affordable Surface Laptop, similar to how Microsoft positions the Surface Go alongside the Surface Pro today.

Today, Lenovo has released a ThinkPad with Red Hat's community Linux, Fedora. ZDNet reports: First in this new Linux-friendly lineup is the X1 Carbon Gen 8. It will be followed by forthcoming versions of the ThinkPad P1 Gen2 and ThinkPad P53. While ThinkPads are usually meant for business users, Lenovo will be happy to sell the Fedora-powered X1 Carbon to home users as well. The new X1 Carbon runs Fedora Workstation 32. This cutting-edge Linux distribution uses the Linux Kernel 5.6. It includes WireGuard virtual private network (VPN) support and USB4 support. This Fedora version uses the new GNOME 3.36 for its default desktop.

The system itself comes standard with a 10th Generation Intel Core 1.6Ghz i5-10210U CPU, with up to 4.20 GHz with Turbo Boost. This processor boasts 4 Cores, 8 Threads, and a 6 MB cache. It also comes with 8MBs of LPDDR3 RAM. Unfortunately, its memory is soldered in. While that reduces the manufacturing costs, Linux users tend to like to optimize their hardware and this restricts their ability to add RAM. You can upgrade it to 16MBs, of course, when you buy it for an additional $149. For storage, the X1 defaults to a 256GB SSD. You can push it up to a 1TB SSD. That upgrade will cost you $536.

The X1 Carbon Gen 8 has a 14.0" Full High Definition (FHD) (1920 x 1080) screen. For practical purposes, this is as high-a-resolution as you want on a laptop. I've used laptops with Ultra High Definition (UHD), aka 4K, with 3840x2160 resolution, and I've found the text to be painfully small. This display is powered by an integrated Intel HD Graphics chipset. For networking, the X1 uses an Intel Wi-Fi 6 AX201 802.11AX with vPro (2 x 2) & Bluetooth 5.0 chipset. I've used other laptops with this wireless networking hardware and it tends to work extremely well. The entire default package has a base price of $2,145. For now, it's available for $1,287. If you want to order one, be ready for a wait. You can expect to wait three weeks before Lenovo ships it to you.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from NS Tech: SoftBank is in advanced talks with US chip company Nvidia to sell Arm -- with a price in the region of 32 billion euros reportedly being thrown around. But Nvidia's purchase of the Cambridge-based chip designer would not only strike a blow to the UK's technological sovereignty, but would result in the destruction of Arm itself, Arm co-founder Hermann Hauser has claimed. Nvidia recently overtook Intel as the most valuable microprocessor company in the world, and its great wealth right now provides it a unique opportunity, says Hauser. "They are the semiconductor company that can buy Arm to destroy it -- and it is very much in its interest to destroy Arm because they [would] gain a lot more than the 40 billion that they pay for it," he claims.

Hauser says the acquisition would allow Nvidia to swipe "the microprocessor crown from Intel", and become the chip supplier for 95 per cent of mobile phones, 90 per cent of embedded controllers for the internet of things, as well as taking the PC and data centre markets. Hauser says that an Arm acquisition is a means for Nvidia to become the dominant microprocessor company in the world, "at the same time as they can prevent their main competitors" from making use of further Arm developments. Instead, competitors would need to "scramble" to create their own architecture, handing Nvidia the edge. Up until now, Arm's business model is acting as the "Switzerland of the semiconductor industry" -- maintaining relations with many customers around the world. "Most of them of course, are competitors of Nvidia," says Hauser. Japanese technology investment firm SoftBank acquired Arm in 2016, but ensured the company's continued neutrality.

Apple, Google, Cisco and Intel this week sued the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, challenging the agency's recent rule that it can refuse to adjudicate patent claims while litigation about them is pending in court. From a report: The companies say the rule hurts innovation and their legal rights, letting invalid patents stay on the books while lawsuits slowly wend their way through court. The rule, which was introduced by the USPTO in March and became final in May, deals with the agency's obligations around inter partes review (IPR) -- a sort of expert-court process for assessing whether patent claims are valid. USPTO says deferring to an ongoing court case is more efficient than setting up a parallel review internally. District courts are costly and have less expertise in patent law, Cisco general counsel Mark Chandler told Axios. Cisco owns 16,000 U.S. patents, but the agency is undermining its ability to invalidate unworthy ones, he said.

A threat intelligence firm called HYAS, a private company that tries to prevent or investigates hacks against its clients, is buying location data harvested from ordinary apps installed on peoples' phones around the world, and using it to unmask hackers. The company is a business, not a law enforcement agency, and claims to be able to track people to their "doorstep." From a report: The news highlights the complex supply chain and sale of location data, traveling from apps whose users are in some cases unaware that the software is selling their location, through to data brokers, and finally to end clients who use the data itself. The news also shows that while some location firms repeatedly reassure the public that their data is focused on the high level, aggregated, pseudonymous tracking of groups of people, some companies do buy and use location data from a largely unregulated market explicitly for the purpose of identifying specific individuals. HYAS' location data comes from X-Mode, a company that started with an app named "Drunk Mode," designed to prevent college students from making drunk phone calls and has since pivoted to selling user data from a wide swath of apps. Apps that mention X-Mode in their privacy policies include Perfect365, a beauty app, and other innocuous looking apps such as an MP3 file converter. "As a TI [threat intelligence] tool it's incredible, but ethically it stinks," a source in the threat intelligence industry who received a demo of HYAS' product told Motherboard.

Intel took the wraps off its not-so-secret central processing units (CPUs) code-named Tiger Lake, built with a 10-nanometer manufacturing process. It may has well been called Tiger Leak. From a report: The 11th Generation Intel Core Processor models include the Intel Core i7-1185G7 chip, with a base 3GHz frequency that can be boosted to 4.8GHz. The Santa Clara, California-based company has dual-core and quad-core variants in the new family, which will be used in high-powered laptops coming this fall. Intel is also unveiling the Intel Xe 12th Gen integrated graphics processing unit (GPU), which replaces the Iris Plus integrated GPU. It has improved AI performance, Thunderbolt 4 input-output, and software optimizations. Intel said it has 20% better CPU performance and two times the graphics performance than the previous generation. With the integrated GPU, Intel said it can deliver frame rates in games that are two times faster than previous models. All told, there are nine new Tiger Lake chips. The chips are the top of the line for now as Intel faces severe competition from rival Advanced Micro Devices, which uses external producers such as TSMC to make its chips and is making historic market share gains. Intel normally makes its own chips, and it is rumored to be talking to TSMC for contract manufacturing, but that deal won't come in time for Tiger Lake. "We're leading the ecosystem forward to deliver new PC experiences," said Gregory Bryant, executive vice president of client computing at Intel, in a briefing.

Apple has designed a 12-inch MacBook powered by Apple Silicon that weighs less than one kilogram (2.2 pounds) and the company intends to launch it by the end of the year, according to a new report. MacRumors: Apple's first ARM-based Mac will use an A14X processor, which is codenamed "Tonga" and manufactured by TSMC, and the MacBook will have a battery life of between 15 and 20 hours, according to the Chinese-language newspaper The China Times. The report adds: According to Apple's supply chain, Apple is expected to launch a Macbook with a 12-inch Retina Display at the end of this year, using its self-developed and designed A14X processor, with the development code of Tonga, supporting a USB Type-C interface and weighing less than 1 kilogram, because of the low-power advantage of the Arm-based processor. The Macbook battery lasts 15 to 20 hours. The A14X processor will also be used in the new generation iPad Pro tablet."

An anonymous reader writes: The fact that Apple is moving away from Intel to ARM has been making a lot of headlines recently — but that's not the only new place where ARM CPUs have been making a splash.

ARM has also been turning heads in High Performance Computing (HPC), and an ARM-based system is now the world's most powerful supercomputer (Fugaku). AWS recently made their 2nd generation ARM Graviton chips available which allows everyone to test HPC workloads on ARM silicon. A company called The Numerical Algorithms Group recently published a small benchmark study that compared weather simulations on Intel, AMD and ARM instances on AWS and reported that although the ARM silicon is slowest, it is also the cheapest for this benchmark.
The benchmark test concludes the ARM processor provides "a very cost-efficient solution...and performance is competitive to other, more traditional HPC processors."