Continue reading Intel and Micron announce new 20nm NAND Flash manufacturing process

Intel and Micron announce new 20nm NAND Flash manufacturing process originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 14 Apr 2011 18:57:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Not all creatures have soft squishy eyes like us mammals — the mollusks known as chitons have hundreds of primitive visual sensors all over their body, and they’re made of a rock called aragonite. More

We were just pondering this very thing yesterday — would Intel dedicate itself to Thunderbolt and give USB 3.0 the cold shoulder — and now we have our answer from the Santa Clara crew, albeit delivered from Beijing. The Chinese capital is the site of Intel’s currently ongoing developer conference, which is where Kirk Skaugen, VP of the company’s Architecture Group, assured the world that the promise for native USB 3.0 support in Intel chipsets will be fulfilled. Not this year, mind you, but it’ll be with us in 2012 as part of the Ivy Bridge CPU refresh. That matches AMD’s plans to support USB 3.0 in Fusion APUs, and was augmented with a strong word of endorsement from Skaugen about the connector’s future. He urged developers to embrace USB 3.0 on an equal footing with Intel’s proprietary Thunderbolt interconnect, describing the two technologies as “complementary.” If you say so, captain.

Intel to support USB 3.0 alongside Thunderbolt, coming with Ivy Bridge in 2012 originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 14 Apr 2011 04:07:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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It’s amazing what an electric motor and some lithium-ion junk in the trunk can do. For the SWIGZ team, which earlier bested some internally-combused competition on the track, the results are 190MPH from a standing start, completed at the Mojave Mile event. As you can see in the video below the 241HP bike wasted no time in getting up to that speed — also wasting no time getting into an unsettling head shake and speed weave. Thankfully it was all over in less than 30 seconds and the new (unofficial) record was recorded: 190.6MPH. Fastest for an electric bike in a standing mile — and pretty darned quick for any bike.

Continue reading Chip Yates goes 190MPH on an electric motorcycle, takes you along (video)

Chip Yates goes 190MPH on an electric motorcycle, takes you along (video) originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 14 Apr 2011 08:43:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Start capturing traffic from Android phones, and you’ll learn something about security. Google encrypts Gmail and Voice requests, but not Calendar. Twitter’s semi-secure, Facebook not at all. And some apps capture GPS locations for no good reason. [Freedom to Tinker] More

Start capturing traffic from Android phones, and you’ll learn something about security. Google encrypts Gmail and Voice requests, but not Calendar. Twitter’s semi-secure, Facebook not at all. And some apps capture GPS locations for no good reason. [Freedom to Tinker] More

Unfortunate news for anyone who saw HTC’s Sense 3.0 UI and started dreaming about seeing it on their Desire HD, Incredible S or any other handset that doesn’t ship with it preloaded. HTC has said that because of the hardware requirements of the fancier new Android skin, only the dual-core Sensation 4G and EVO 3D smartphones and the 1.5GHz Flyer tablet will be benefiting from it for now. The company’s expected to introduce more tablets in the summer and its inevitable march forward with smartphones will continue, but Sense 3.0 — and those delectable multifunctional lock screens — will remain the exclusive privilege of its highest-end devices.

Continue reading HTC Sense 3.0 will only support Sensation, EVO 3D, Flyer and newer devices; older hardware left behind

HTC Sense 3.0 will only support Sensation, EVO 3D, Flyer and newer devices; older hardware left behind originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 14 Apr 2011 07:43:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Unfortunate news for anyone who saw HTC’s Sense 3.0 UI and started dreaming about seeing it on their Desire HD, Incredible S or any other handset that doesn’t ship with it preloaded. HTC has said that because of the hardware requirements of the fancier new Android skin, only the dual-core Sensation 4G and EVO 3D smartphones and the 1.5GHz Flyer tablet will be benefiting from it for now. The company’s expected to introduce more tablets in the summer and its inevitable march forward with smartphones will continue, but Sense 3.0 — and those delectable multifunctional lock screens — will remain the exclusive privilege of its highest-end devices.

Continue reading HTC Sense 3.0 will only support Sensation, EVO 3D, Flyer and newer devices; older hardware left behind

HTC Sense 3.0 will only support Sensation, EVO 3D, Flyer and newer devices; older hardware left behind originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 14 Apr 2011 07:43:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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The FBI and the Justice Department on Wednesday began dismantling a ring of international computer thieves who have stolen an undetermined amount of money by infecting over 2.3 million computers with malicious software, the biggest such enforcement action U.S. authorities have ever taken against cyber criminals.

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US targets ring infecting 2.3 million computers

When the A4 came out, I was surprised at the fanfare surrounding it. Why such a big deal? Apple was now designing their own chips, isn’t that great?— came the echoing chorus. But they weren’t — the A4 was almost entirely a Samsung design implementing existing ARM processor tech. But Apple touched it, so it turned to gold. I kind of expected Apple to ride that wave for a while and just “overclock” the processor for the iPad 2, but to my surprise, out came the A5.

The decision to use a mostly off-the-shelf piece for the launch of a potentially disastrous product line (the iPad could easily have been bad, or at any rate unpopular) was one of economy; why go to the great expense of truly redesigning a chip, when tweaking an existing design will serve, and for a fraction of the cost? Chances are that development of a new chip would have happened sooner or later, but the success of the iPad made it a necessity to differentiate after that first volley.

This analysis of the A5 (based on the Chipworks images from last month) is five pages long, but is mostly meta-discussion, and the only real conclusion (considering how little is actually known about the SoC) is that while the CPU and GPU are licensed, the rest of the chip is kind of a mystery. By surface area, the CPU cores and GPU take up less than half the die. Assuming the usual business of memory management and I/O takes up another 10% or so, what is Apple doing with fully half of its design?

There’s no answer at present. But EE Times raises the possibility of a set of specialized chips set to do the kinds of calculations and transformations that Apple knows are absolutely necessary to the device. It could be the reason for, say, the smooth and responsive scrolling on web pages. A processor has to track those pixels, perform the little calculations that describe the input, and so on. Many little tasks that Apple may have essentially set aside die space for: a core or a fraction of a core totally dedicated to image filtering, JPEG decoding, accelerometer smoothing — things that might have been integrated by OEMs in the components, but which Apple could easily take over and bend to their own purposes.

It’s a truly custom-built system, and what makes it exciting is that these unknown functions could be almost anything — even unused. They could easily be for something like hardware video transcoding, or physics calculations, entire instruction sets that have yet to be implemented, but leave plenty of room for expansion in directions Apple has already charted.

I was bearish on the A4, but I’m bullish on the A5. I think we’ve only barely begun to see what it can do.

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Analysis Of Apple’s A5: It’s Not What We Know, It’s What We Don’t Know