https://www.theregister.co.uk/2019/10/18/intel/

Folks in England and Europe sometimes see through the smoke screens better than the American Tech Press allow us to do.

There's still no light at the end of the tunnel for PC makers as Intel's CPU production constraint – a problem that showed up in anger 13 months ago – is on course to continue for another couple of quarters.

At the start of the year, Intel claimed its chip supply drought would end by the summer but it continues to drag on as Chipzilla switches fabs from 14nm to 10nm, and Chipzilla prioritises production of higher-margin Xeons and top-end Core products to use all the capacity they still have. This has shunted PCs to the back of the queue. More on that later.

Talking at the Canalys Channels Forum in Barcelona, Alex Cho, president of HP's Personal Systems Business, claimed Intel's supply worries were across a portfolio of products, "not just specific CPUs".

He added: "No surprise that it's been a hard year, it makes life more complex and expect it to continue for another quarter or two."

At the same event in the Catalonian capital, Gianfranco Lanci, chief operating officer at Lenovo, branded the lack of chips as a "concern" and a "limitation", saying the global PC market shipments could have grown at 7 to 8 per cent in Q3 if availability had improved, rather than the 4 per cent recorded.

He said Lenovo has been told repeatedly, presumably by Intel account managers, that supply would improve but quarter-on-quarter that has yet to happen, leading him to speculate on the causes.

There are two possibilities, according to Lanci: production issues, though he said Intel should have rectified this by now, or a "problem with the architecture of the CPU. If this is the problem, it is unpredictable."

Steve Brazier, CEO at Canalys, said the "short answer is that we don't know [what is causing Intel's shortages]. And they are not telling anybody, so nobody completely knows why. All we can do is speculate that they made a serious software design flaw."

He added: "The interesting thing is the big PC builders and value-added vendors do not know either, they have no better information than we have. There is no sign of a short-term fix."

In the same article, the Europeans were asked about AMD and what they see out of AMD's new generations as they come up on their radar screen.

Of course, this has played into the hands of Intel nemesis AMD, which Brazier claimed was "now equal or ahead in performance – and it's cheaper".

Cho at HP said: "The AMD portfolio has improved. They've made good progress on the performance of their products, AMD is a viable alternative for our customers."

Looking into the crystal ball, these same sources were asked for "What will be the conclusion of this long term Intel shortage situation?".

Supply chain sources close to the matter said Intel is retooling factories for 10nm and 7nm processes so Intel has fewer remaining 14nm fabs making processors. PC CPU shortages are compounded by Intel prioritising supply for higher-margin Xeon chips for hyperscale cloud builders and server makers.

The 10nm rollout delays have ensured Intel plants have been out of commission for longer than planned.

We are also told that organisations, including financial institutions and cloud providers, are replacing the current Intel chips with better performing AMD based ones that have Meltdown and Spectre fixes built in.

During this protracted delay period AMD is not standing still ---- Intel may complete their belated 10nm push and find that they come out of the gate again they are BEHIND AMD ALL OVER AGAIN, having wasted billions and billions of dollars putting in their "state of the art" 10nm Intel processes.

 
https://seekingalpha.com/article/4298039-intels-10nm-process-bust

I covered all this stuff as it happened and I predicted that the Financial folks would be hard on Intel for FAILING MISERABLY and then lying about it and getting caught at all that lying yet again too.

Amazing, how well I can pick 'em, ain't it?:

Intel is very obviously having difficulties scaling its 10nm process and every day the company puts into trying to boost yields is another day it falls behind AMD's 7nm chips. At a certain point, the effort might not be worth it if Intel believes its 7nm process can be reliably rolled out in 2022. Additionally, Intel has been able to squeeze improvements out of its current process to make 14nm+ and 14nm++ relatively competitive, so perhaps the company would be content to rely on those improved nodes and maybe cede a bit of market share in order to avoid sinking costs into a 10nm process that might never come to fruition.

On the other hand, Intel has already likely spent billions attempting to scale 10nm and for them throw in the towel and remain on the same node size for seven years (!) until 7nm would be problematic for multiple reasons:

1) It would signal to the market that the company's 7nm process might be plagued by the same issues that plagued its 10nm process, which were never resolved.

2) It would essentially forfeit the desktop CPU market to AMD for 2-3 years while Intel futilely attempts to enhance its 14nm process (14nm+++++++ anyone?) to compete with the significantly higher densities of TSMC's 7nm and 7nm+ processes.

3) It would harm Intel's mind share and brand by essentially admitting that whatever manufacturing lead or prestige the company once had is now gone. One could argue the current sad state of 10nm has already proved this, but skipping a node entirely would confirm it beyond the shadow of a doubt in the minds of consumers and likely for enterprise customers as well.

Personally, I think the veracity of the rumor is not nearly as important as the situation it highlights. What I mean by that is a little-known German website is claiming Intel's 10nm CPUs for desktop are cancelled - an entire generation of chips, cancelled - and the nearly half-decade delay of those chips, with no end in sight, might actually bear that claim out!

I think the most likely outcome will be that Intel does capitulate on full-fledged 10nm and instead continues to eke out performance gains in its 14nm process (sort of like 10nm-lite) and hopes its market share doesn't crater before 7nm arrives in 2022. This would represent a golden opportunity for AMD to press the issue by ramping up marketing and keeping prices competitive in order to take a chunk out of Intel's market share.

From a big picture perspective, I think we are seeing Intel fall deeper and deeper into the hole that AMD avoided when it went fabless a decade ago. Of course, there are benefits to having a completely integrated supply chain, but as Intel is now experiencing, there are potentially crushing costs as well.

I think AMD's Zen 2 design is a great analogy for the supply chain of the two companies. While Intel stuck with a monolithic die, which hinders yields, AMD elected to go with a multi-chip module (MCM) design which improves overall yields and is a great demonstration that an entirely integrated chip isn't always better. In the same vein, Intel stuck with its fully-integrated supply chain while AMD saw the writing on the wall and went lean and modular.



Okay, now that we've discussed the technology issues at hand, how should investors view this situation? Read on!

Investor Takeaway
The growing process lead AMD is developing over Intel should be cause for significant concern to INTC shareholders. This article has primarily focused on the desktop CPU market, but AMD is waging a successful battle in the server market as well, also due in part to TSMC's manufacturing expertise. Further, no one can be sure whether Intel will be able to execute on nodes going forward. Typically, chip design and manufacturing gets more difficult at smaller scales, so if Intel hasn't been able to nail down 10nm yet (and possibly won't be able to nail it down at all) why should investors believe that 7nm will be any different?

To make matters worse, the foundry side of the supply chain will continue to be a cost anchor going forward. I admit I'm not overly familiar with the viability of Intel going fabless, but at this point, it might be something for the company to at least consider.

Back to reality, even if Intel does manage to scale 7nm by 2022, that would still leave it behind TSMC, which has already started test production of 5nm and expects volume production sometime in 2020, which may be optimistic but is still better than 2022. As the process advantage, and therefore the probable performance advantage, shifts to AMD, I think we'll continue to see the gap in market share between the two companies narrow in both desktop and server markets. AMD already offers an equal or better value proposition due to selling its products at competitive price points, but armed with equal or better performance to boot, Intel will be hard-pressed to make the case to consumers and enterprise customers that "Intel Inside" is still the best route.

What will happen .......

Intel has circa 50 billion invested in 10nm by now in total  (counting all three times they rolled lines over to yet another failed crop of 10nm production equipment).   The stuff they are using now "for 10nm" is their original 7nm process equipment (which never worked right either).   That was another 30 million down the tubes that was spent for the 7nm stuff ...... and I am losing count of the different ways and all the billions Intel has wasted trying to do it their way.

Intel supposedly has another wave of brand new 7nm production lines on order (from ASML this time instead of making them up themselves).    These ASML lines are about a year and a half out from volume production as of this week.   Hopefully, these are really 5nm twin scan lines that may be actually useful for something by the time they are installed, and that is IF Intel can design a chip to use the 24 layer deep burn technology without stubbing their toe on it all over again.

AMD is launching their first 5nm production products from TSMC this Christmas Time.   AMD is technically already running some 6nm 5 layer products already at Samsung as we speak.

By Christmas, Intel will be 3-4 lithography generations behind AMD depending on how you want to count all the layers of behind that Intel really is.

Right now Intel is STILL only doing one layer lithography.   AMD is already doing 5 layers and getting ready to crank up to 14 layers and by the end of next year will be using brand new 5nm 24 layer "deep burn" technologies.

https://www.cnx-software.com/2019/10/26/sifive-u8-series-out-of-order-risc-v-...



I like fast improving stuff, I like it even better if it is Open Source fast improving stuff.  Risc-V is Open Source and it is improving by leaps and bounds, lapping up on ARM not more than a year back now.

The current Risc-V processor is an out of order processor that can do disruptive stuff faster than it can do in order operations --- this heavy and quite early out of order optimization is quite powerful and potentially very disruptive to the existing players like ARM.

Look at the graph again, that is a 7.2x improvement in only half a calendar year.  What sorts of stuff will Risc-V be good for inside another full year from now?

Yes, ARM Holdings is acting quite scared at the moment as the amount of money and effort that are currently flowing into the Risc-V space is quite scary for a stodgy older established company like ARM, especially with the Chinese hockey stick boys now kicking in with their fast moving attitudes.

   

..... from the bottom upwards, Risc-V is going to erode 50% of ARM's market share next year.

Qualcomm and Huawei are not blind to this situation, see both of them put out a Risc-V based unit of some sort or another by 2020 year's end.

Why is 5nm is going to ramp so much faster than the previous tech waves.  

Why is 5nm is going to wipe out the latter stages and modes of 7nm (starting like right now as a matter of fact).

Both of these situations spring from COST and speed considerations involving the use of production masks.

7nm, even the latter stages require expensive production masks to be built for the ever more complex chipsets.   Getting these masks built right and making all those replacement masks on a steady basis is a time and productivity killer par excellence.   Masks at the finer levels have short service lives and have an allocated cost up near a million dollars each to develop and make.

5nm "direct deep burn" does not need near as many masks, in some cases none at all.   See everybody buying up ASML 5nm twin scan units just as fast as they can be built, because using production masks really is an expensive pain in the arse to keep up with.





News Flash:    

TSMC has just broken ground on their 19.2 billion dollar 3nm production facility that will be ready to roll in 2022-23.  
Intel should be worried all over again ......  3nm is direct deep burn all at 24 levels from the get go.  


Somehow I think Intel's much delayed 7nm really isn't going to compete well against TSMC 3nm, no matter how many billions Intel throws at their 7nm at this late stage of things.

https://liliputing.com/2019/11/google-is-buying-fitbit-for-2-1-billion-promis...


1


Meanwhile, Google has bought Foss and Fitbit each for some relatively small amounts of money.   Google now owns the original base patents for all wrist mounted fitness devices (that are also watches, btw).   Google also writes the code that runs them all, so this could mean a lot to that corner of computing.

Google is also a key member of the Risc-V consortium.

Google isn't giving out any stupid bogus roadmaps, they are simply going about executing their game plans.   Google already seamlessly stuff runs on Risc-V, ARM, AMD, Intel ..... Google/Android/Linux is the operating systems vendor of the future.

Now do you see why Microsoft is so hot to "go Linux" for whole chunks of its operating system's guts ????


===================================================


The rumors were true. Google has announced plans to acquire Fitbit in a deal valued at $2.1 billion.

Fitbit is a 12-year-old company that currently dominates the wearable activity tracker space, but which has struggled to move beyond fitness devices. Google, meanwhile, has been developing software for wearables for the past five years… but the company’s Wear OS has a pretty small market share and Google has yet to release its own first-party smartwatch or other wearable device.

It looks like that will change after the acquisition is complete — Google says it views the Fitbit deal as “an opportunity to invest even more in Wear OS as well as introduce Made by Google wearable devices into the market” (emphasis added).

Both Google and Fitbit note that one concern some folks might have about the acquisition is a key difference between Fitbit and Google’s business models — Google makes much of its money through targeted advertising. Fitbit does not.

So Fitbit’s press release includes the following language:

Fitbit will continue to put users in control of their data and will remain transparent about the data it collects and why. The company never sells personal information, and Fitbit health and wellness data will not be used for Google ads.

While a blog post from Google VP Rick Osterloh claims that:

Similar to our other products, with wearables, we will be transparent about the data we collect and why. We will never sell personal information to anyone. Fitbit health and wellness data will not be used for Google ads. And we will give Fitbit users the choice to review, move, or delete their data.

One thing that’s not clearly spelled out is what the acquisition means for the Fitbit brand — will we see new Fitbit-branded hardware in the future? Or is the current line of Fitbit-branded devices the last, with new Google-branded hardware coming in the future?

And what about existing customers? Will your current Fitbit smartwatch or fitness tracker continue working indefinitely? Will you eventually have to pair it with a new Google app to sync data rather than the existing Fitbit app?

I suspect we’ll hear a lot more about Google and Fitbit’s plans in the coming months and years. But for now there are still a lot of unanswered questions.

OK, a really smart guy who works in Open Source has just released a generic Bios driver for the Ryzen 3000 8 plus core AMD chipsets (8, 12, 16, 18, 24, 32 cores) that increases the chip throughput by roughly 20%.

It re-balances power usage too, giving a 10% reduction on post throttle watts of power draw to still have that 20% throughput increase.

The guy who did this has offered it to AMD to include in the official formal BIOS updates should they wish to incorporate it (or parts of it) into AMD's formal offerings.

Throw these two things together and you are talking what ....... a freebee 25% improvement on steady state running that can be back-loaded into existing two year old chipsets?


amazing stuff, open source


AMD is aware of this sort of stuff, they are aware of the untapped 25% improvement that it entails.  AMD has already recently offered two BIOS updates through the board vendors that improved performance on core scheduling and improved their therm-reduced clock speed to the tune of 10-15% so AMD is not against upping the BIOS baselines having done it themselves twice already since releasing the 2nd generation Ryzen chipsets.

I suspect a series of life tests are required on this because thermal related life span can be hurt by pushing the chipsets too too far.

Expect this sort of stuff to come out in the new 3rd generation chipsets before being back released into the 2nd generation.   Sitting on it completely isn't a good idea unless AMD wants to have Open Source to be putting out a competing "improved BIOS" not under their control, so I expect the man did his approach correctly and it will be thoroughly tested and pushed out by AMD and the board vendors as part of "AMD approved updates".

https://liliputing.com/2019/11/intel-insecurity-update-new-vulnerabilities-di...

Info is from the New York Times, Wired and Hacker News.  Text is copied from Liliputing.com and the wording is from Brad Linder

Intel insecurity update: new vulnerabilities disclosed… and likely to keep popping up

It’s been almost two years since the Spectre and Meltdown vulnerabilities affecting Intel processors and some other chips were revealed. Since then Intel has released a number of security patches meant to mitigate the effect of those vulnerabilities and the chip maker says its latest processors include hardware-based mitigations.

But similar vulnerabilities keep popping up, and there’s mounting evidence that the issue isn’t going to be easy to fix without completely redesigning the way modern processors work.

This week security researchers revealed a set of previously undisclosed vulnerabilities affecting Intel chips — and also pointed out that some of Intel’s previous “fixes” didn’t address all known issues at the time.

The researchers say that when Intel released a set of mitigations in May, 2019 to address the RIDL vulnerability, the update was only a partial fix. Computers with the latest security updates were still vulnerable to certain types of known vulnerabilities which could allow an attacker to access protected data.

Intel had asked the team to hold off on disclosing the vulnerability until security patches were available — but after finding that Intel continued to claim that its latest updates were adequate, this week the researchers decided to call out Intel for over-promising the effectiveness of its security updates.

At issue are side-channel attacks that take advantage of a chip feature called speculative execution. In a nutshell, many modern processors make an educated guess about some of the things they’re going to need to do, and do them ahead of time… even before you explicitly ask them to do that work. Side-channel attacks allow data that’s being processed or stored in this way to be accessed.

One solution is to simply disable speculative execution altogether. But that would have a dramatic impact on performance in some situations — effectively erasing years of progress in making computer processors work more quickly.

So rather than address the root causes, Intel has been working on patches to address specific side-channel vulnerabilities as they’re discovered/disclosed. If that seems like an uphill battle, that’s because it is… and there’s always the chance that some black hat hackers will discover a vulnerability that Intel isn’t aware of and exploit it before a patch can be made available.

So maybe insecurity from Intel is the new normal.

What Brad said --- Intel won't try to fix any of it really because Intel CANNOT slow their processing down any further while fighting in a cage death match with AMD over processor speed and throughput.

Intel is flat running out of brown vapor and lies on this topic.

Intel has to slow their stuff down 20-30% to properly and correctly mitigate what is already known for their real, in the wild right now speculative processing bugs.  And Intel has chosen NOT to done so ..... they would rather you run at risk to known issues that exist in the wild right now.

And Intel has lied a bunch about all the rest of their "corrections" to date.   Intel has lied a bunch on a lot of topics currently, ran a bunch of intentionally misleading or flat out false metrics and is generally being held liable in Class Action courtrooms for the damages created by doing this sort of stuff, too.

Intel is BROKEN right now, and they can't (or won't) get up ......

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/11/12/technology/intel-chip-fix.html?smid=tw-nyt...

Intel Fixes a Security Flaw It Said Was Repaired 6 Months Ago


The research team at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam included, from left, Herbert Bos, Cristiano Giuffrida, Sebastian Österlund, Pietro Frigo, Alyssa Milburn and Kaveh Razavi. Stephan van Schaik is not pictured.


Last May, when Intel released a patch for a group of security vulnerabilities researchers had found in the company’s computer processors, Intel implied that all the problems were solved.

But that wasn’t entirely true, according to Dutch researchers at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam who discovered the vulnerabilities and first reported them to the tech giant in September 2018. The software patch meant to fix the processor problem addressed only some of the issues the researchers had found.

It would be another six months before a second patch, publicly disclosed by the company on Tuesday, would fix all of the vulnerabilities Intel indicated were fixed in May, the researchers said in a recent interview.

The public message from Intel was “everything is fixed,” said Cristiano Giuffrida, a professor of computer science at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam and one of the researchers who reported the vulnerabilities. “And we knew that was not accurate.”

The Intel flaws, like other high-profile vulnerabilities the computer security community has recently discovered in computer chips, allowed an attacker to extract passwords, encryption keys and other sensitive data from processors in desktop computers, laptops and cloud-computing servers.

The claims made by the researchers are indicative of the tensions between tech companies and the security experts who routinely scour their products, looking for flaws that make systems vulnerable to attacks.

While many researchers give companies time to fix problems before the researchers disclose them publicly, the tech firms can be slow to patch the flaws and attempt to muzzle researchers who want to inform the public about the security issues.

Researchers often agree to disclose vulnerabilities privately to tech companies and stay quiet about them until the company can release a patch. Typically, the researchers and companies coordinate on a public announcement of the fix. But the Dutch researchers say Intel has been abusing the process.

Now the Dutch researchers claim Intel is doing the same thing again. They said the new patch issued on Tuesday still doesn’t fix another flaw they provided Intel in May.

Intel acknowledged that the May patch did not fix everything the researchers submitted, nor does Tuesday’s fix. But they “greatly reduce” the risk of attack, said Leigh Rosenwald, a spokeswoman for the company.

While not directly addressing some of the complaints from the researchers, Ms. Rosenwald said Intel was publishing a timeline with Tuesday’s patch for the sake of transparency.

“This is not something that is normal practice of ours, but we realized this is a complicated issue. We definitely want to be transparent about that,” she said. “While we may not agree with some of the assertions made by the researchers, those disagreements aside, we value our relationship with them.”

The Dutch researchers had remained quiet for eight months about the problems they had discovered while Intel worked on the fix it released in May. Then when Intel realized the patch didn’t fix everything and asked them to remain quiet six more months, it also requested that the researchers alter a paper they had planned to present at a security conference to remove any mention of the unpatched vulnerabilities, they said. The researchers said they reluctantly agreed to comply because they didn’t want the flaws to become public knowledge without a fix.

“We had to redact the paper to cover for them so the world would not see how vulnerable things are,” said Kaveh Razavi, also a professor of computer science at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam and part of the group that reported the vulnerabilities.


ImageThe research team at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam included, from left, Herbert Bos, Cristiano Giuffrida, Sebastian Österlund, Pietro Frigo, Alyssa Milburn and Kaveh Razavi. Stephan van Schaik is not pictured.
The research team at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam included, from left, Herbert Bos, Cristiano Giuffrida, Sebastian Österlund, Pietro Frigo, Alyssa Milburn and Kaveh Razavi. Stephan van Schaik is not pictured.Credit...Jasper Juinen for The New York Times
After they notified Intel about the unfixed flaws in advance of Tuesday’s patch release, the company asked the researchers to remain silent until it could produce another patch, the researchers said. But this time they refused.

“We think it’s time to simply tell the world that even now Intel hasn’t fixed the problem,” said Herbert Bos, a colleague of Mr. Giuffrida and Mr. Razavi at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam.

The initial vulnerabilities were discovered in part by the university’s VUSec group, which includes Mr. Giuffrida, Mr. Bos and Mr. Razavi as well as four of their graduate students: Stephan van Schaik, Alyssa Milburn, Sebastian Österlund and Pietro Frigo. A second group of researchers at the University of Graz in Austria independently discovered some of the same issues and reported those to Intel in April.

All of the vulnerabilities stem from a single issue with the way Intel processors handle data.

To save time, the processors perform certain functions they anticipate they will need to perform, and store the processed data. If the function is aborted and the data isn’t needed, it remains in the system for a brief period.

The vulnerabilities would let someone extract the data while it’s being processed or while in storage. Each of the variants the researchers discovered provides another way for attackers to extract the data.

“There’s one real problem and then there are many variants,” Mr. Bos said.

When Intel released the fixes in May, it classified the problems as “low to medium severity.” The researchers said the company paid them a bounty of $120,000 for discovering and reporting the vulnerabilities — a common reward for pointing out problems but a high sum for bugs that would be considered low-to-medium severity.

When the researchers reported their first vulnerabilities to Intel in September 2018, they provided proof-of-concept exploits — malicious code showing how each vulnerability could be successfully attacked.

Intel’s security response team worked for the next eight months to verify the findings and develop a patch, scheduled to be released on May 14. Four days before the release, however, when the company provided the researchers with details of the fix, the researchers quickly realized that the patch didn’t address all of the vulnerabilities.

Intel’s engineers had overlooked some of the proof-of-concept exploits the researchers had provided. But the researchers said that even without seeing the exploits, Intel should have been able to uncover the additional vulnerabilities on their own.

The researchers said Intel had chosen an ineffective way to address its chip vulnerabilities. Rather than fix the core issue, which would possibly require redesigning the processor, it has patched each variant as it is discovered.

“There are tons of vulnerabilities still left, we are sure,” Mr. Bos said. “And they don’t intend to do proper security engineering until their reputation is at stake.”

Whenever a new class of vulnerability is discovered, it is standard practice for engineers fixing the code to search for additional instances of the problem beyond what is known and reported.

None of the attack variants the Dutch researchers gave Intel were fundamentally different from the ones Intel did patch, so Intel should have been able to extrapolate and find the others on their own, the researchers argued.

“Many of the attacks they missed were a few lines of code different from the others. Sometimes a single line of code,” Mr. Giuffrida said. “The implication of this is of course worrisome. It means until we give them all possible variations of the problem, they won’t actually fix the problem.”

The company has addressed the core problem through hardware fixes in some of its chips and will do similar fixes to other chips, Intel’s Ms. Rosenwald said.

Despite the gag on the researchers, discussion about the vulnerabilities began to leak. The information was passed around so loosely that eventually it came back to the researchers.

“More and more people knew about this vulnerability to the point that it actually circled back to us,” Mr. Bos said. “So they provide an illusion that they have this whole disclosure process under control. But it’s not controlled at all; it’s leaking.”

All of this meant that while the researchers kept mum, others who wanted to exploit the vulnerabilities could potentially have learned about them.

“Anybody can weaponize this. And it’s worse if you don’t actually go public, because there will be people who can use this against users who are not actually protected,” Mr. Razavi said.


Intel is in essence attempting to pay these security hole researchers to keep mum and to let Intel stall stall stall and stall some more ..... while Intel does nothing and people lose their data in large numbers.   This group got sick of it and blew the whistle on Intel.