Categoria: HardwareSoftware

Risky business will not end up with him dancing in his underware

Chipzilla supremo Brian Kzarnich has had enough of taking the safe approach and he is casting off the cardigan and bobble hat his mum insisted he wears and is going to take a few risks.

Dashing out a risky memo to Intel employees, he said that the company would be taking more risks in the future. He said that those chip things which made it shedloads of money… well they will not be Intel’s centre any more.  Instead it will be more interested in data  memory, FPGAs, IOT, artificial intelligence, and autonomous driving.

The Intel CEO also mentioned the company’s financial outlook and growth of recent times, with the increased focus on those same data-hungry fields that have led the company to achieve an almost 50/50 ratio in income divided by both PC and all other Intel growth areas.

Intel’s recent acquisitions of Nervana, Mobileye and Altera, just to name a few, have been some of the more evident of these, but the company has also been picking up slightly smaller companies as well.

To be fair, Intel’s consumer PC market hardly pays its way these days.

Kzarnich said that in the early 80s, he  was hired fresh out of college to be a process engineer in Intel’s New Mexico fab.  At the time, Intel made DRAM and in 1985 Andy Grove and Gordon Moore bet the company on a decision to get out of memory and switch to manufacturing microprocessors.

“I was about three months into the job when my boss walked in and said: ‘We’re not in the DRAM business anymore. We’ll shut the factory down'”. I remember calling up my father and telling him: “Well, I’ll be coming home.” Instead, I watched as Intel made a massive shift. It required downsizing, new investments, and a lot of change. Yet in December 1997-20 years ago this month, Time magazine named then Intel CEO Andy Grove its Man of the Year. “Under his leadership, Intel had transformed from embattled memory maker to the world’s leading microprocessor company and a leader of the digital revolution”, Kzarnich wrote.

He added: “Data is becoming the most valuable asset for any company. That’s why our growth strategy is centered on data: memory, FPGAs, IOT, artificial intelligence, autonomous driving. Anything that produces data, anything that requires a lot of computing, the vision is, we’re there.”

He said that within five to ten years “the world will run on Intel silicon”.

Intel was “inches away” from being a 50/50 company, meaning that half of its revenue comes from the PC and half from new growth markets. While in many of these new markets Intel is the underdog, it is an exciting challenge.

“The new normal for Intel is that we are going to take more risks. The new normal is that we will continue to make bold moves and try new things. We’ll make mistakes. Bold doesn’t always mean right or perfect. The new normal is that we’ll get good at trying new things, determining what works and moving forward”, he said.

Of course there is nothing wrong with risky business, just so long as you don’t end up being filmed dancing in your underware.

You must upgrade

Fruity cargo cult Apple has admitted that it deliberately tinkers with older versions of its iPhones to force its users to upgrade.

A feature Apple introduced last year was claimed to protect against problems caused by ageing batteries and was first used on the iPhone 6, 6S and SE last year during a software update, and on the iPhone 7 as of December with the release of iOS 11.2. The feature is planned to be rolled out to newer devices in the future.

Apple said it slowed down phones that have old batteries, batteries with low charge or that are old.

It told the Independent that the move delivered the best experience for customers, which includes overall performance and prolonging the life of their devices.

Apple claims that when a battery is in a poor condition, it may not be able to supply the required maximum current demanded by the phone’s processor at full speed. If that happens, the iPhone can shut down unexpectedly to protect the internal components.

Apple users noticed that this feature resulted in iPhone 6S  turning off abruptly, even though there was about 30-40 percent charge remaining in the battery.

“Last year we released a feature for iPhone 6, iPhone 6S and iPhone SE to smooth out the instantaneous peaks only when needed to prevent the device from unexpectedly shutting down during these conditions”, said an Apple spokesperson. “We’ve now extended that feature to iPhone 7 with iOS 11.2, and plan to add support for other products in the future.”

Analysis of data by benchmarking firm Primate Labs collected from thousands of iPhones appeared to confirm the theory, showing multiple performance peaks for phones of different ages, slowing down from their maximum speed.

However, there is a question over whether Apple is doing it deliberately.

The confirmation will reignite the debate over whether the move is “planned obsolescence” with Apple triggering the device after a certain period to nudge users into buying new products.

Apple insists that this slowdown feature is not an example of planned obsolescence, and instead is designed to protect against battery problems and prolong the life of iPhones. However, it is odd that no other manufacturer feels the need to implement the software which does not seem to do much good. In fact even
Apple fanboys think this is a bug rather than a feature.

Of course, they are too stupid to think about buying a product which does not do this, and many can’t even be arsed buying a new battery.

John Poole, the founder of Primate Labs, said in his analysis of the Geekbench data that “users expect either full performance or reduced performance with a notification that their phone is in low-power mode. This fix creates a third, unexpected state.

“While this state is created to mask a deficiency in battery power, users may believe that the slowdown is due to CPU performance, instead of battery performance, which is triggering an Apple-introduced CPU slowdown”.

Apple charges £79 ($ 79) to replace batteries not covered under the phone’s warranty.