![]() Tweet ThisFacebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg. (AP Photo/Jeff Roberson, File) Since March 16, Facebook has dropped nearly 18% from $185 to a low of $152 on the news that Cambridge Analytica, a political consulting firm, misused data on up to 50 million Facebook users. According to filings at the Securities and Exchange Commission, Facebook's CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, sold 5.4 million shares of stock in the 10 weeks before the news broke and the stock dropped, thereby saving himself about $70 million. However, in an SEC filing in September of last year, Zuckerberg stated his intention to sell at least $6 billion in Facebook stock over the following 18 months to fund the Chan-Zuckerberg Initiative, a philanthropic organization he started with his wife in 2015. Since Zuckerberg announced he was going to sell stock far enough in the future such that even the CEO could not know what news would come up at the time of the sale, I don't believe the sale was done to avoid a $70 million drop in value or that he was abandoning the ship. After all, Zuckerberg still owns about 470 million shares of Facebook worth about $75 Billion so he still has a lot at stake. The situation at Intel is very different. ">When a company is in the midst of a crisis, the last thing you want to find out is that the CEO is selling his stock. Recently, Intel and Facebook have each been caught up in separate crises during which their CEOs sold stock. After looking into both situations, I think Intel's shareholders should be concerned but not Facebook's. Whenever this situation comes up, I see a picture in my mind of a ship's captain in a lifeboat using a megaphone to tell everyone on the ship that there is nothing to worry about. If you were on the ship, would you believe the captain? Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg. (AP Photo/Jeff Roberson, File) Since March 16, Facebook has dropped nearly 18% from $185 to a low of $152 on the news that Cambridge Analytica, a political consulting firm, misused data on up to 50 million Facebook users. According to filings at the Securities and Exchange Commission, Facebook's CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, sold 5.4 million shares of stock in the 10 weeks before the news broke and the stock dropped, thereby saving himself about $70 million. However, in an SEC filing in September of last year, Zuckerberg stated his intention to sell at least $6 billion in Facebook stock over the following 18 months to fund the Chan-Zuckerberg Initiative, a philanthropic organization he started with his wife in 2015. Since Zuckerberg announced he was going to sell stock far enough in the future such that even the CEO could not know what news would come up at the time of the sale, I don't believe the sale was done to avoid a $70 million drop in value or that he was abandoning the ship. After all, Zuckerberg still owns about 470 million shares of Facebook worth about $75 Billion so he still has a lot at stake. The situation at Intel is very different. Read More Does It Matter That Intel And Facebook CEOs Sold Stock During A Crisis : https://ift.tt/2GmDrDP
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![]() A recently revealed patent filing from Intel may change that, however. In a patent filed on September 23, 2016, Intel lays out the details of a Bitcoin Mining Hardware Accelerator. The actual title of the patent, which was posted yesterday to the U.S. Patent & Trademark Office, is “BITCOIN MINING HARDWARE ACCELERATOR WITH OPTIMIZED MESSAGE DIGEST AND MESSAGE SCHEDULER DATAPATH”. GPU Prices Are Currently Inflated Due To Increased Demand From Crypto-Currency Miners. The device Intel outlines in the patent filing is a configurable SoC, or System On A Chip, that will mate low-power general purpose processing cores with hardware accelerators specifically designed for mining digital currency. Today’s GPUs are vastly superior to central processors like a Core i7 or AMD Ryzen for many crypto-currency mining algorithms, because the GPU’s many smaller, cores and high-bandwidth link to frame buffer memory can handle significantly more processing tasks in parallel than a CPU. But that fact remains that GPUs are not purpose built for crypto-mining and purpose built hardware can typically handle the specialized tasks it was designed for with higher performance and improved efficiency. And that appears to be the goal for Intel’s potential mining SoC. The patent filing describes what the company claims is a highly power-efficient device for crypto-mining. After the initial hardware and setup costs, powering a GPU farm for mining is usually the biggest cost center. A single GPU may consume hundreds of watts, so keeping it powered up and mining can cost quite a bit over time. Multiply that by X number of GPUs, and costs add up fairly quickly. Hopefully, Intel is on to something and new hardware arrives that’s highly efficient and not cost prohibitive. Should such a device arrive that’s compatible with an array of crypto-currencies, GPU prices should come back down, and give PC gamers worldwide a bit of a reprieve from the current pricing situation. ">Crypto-currency mining has been disrupting the GPU market for quite a while now. Mainstream graphics cards are selling for significantly more than their suggested retail prices and the most sought-after GPUs from AMD and NVIDIA for mining – like the Radeon RX Vega 64 or GeForce GTX 1070 – often sell for hundreds more than MSRP, if you can find them in stock at all. A recently revealed patent filing from Intel may change that, however. In a patent filed on September 23, 2016, Intel lays out the details of a Bitcoin Mining Hardware Accelerator. The actual title of the patent, which was posted yesterday to the U.S. Patent & Trademark Office, is “BITCOIN MINING HARDWARE ACCELERATOR WITH OPTIMIZED MESSAGE DIGEST AND MESSAGE SCHEDULER DATAPATH”. GPU Prices Are Currently Inflated Due To Increased Demand From Crypto-Currency Miners. The device Intel outlines in the patent filing is a configurable SoC, or System On A Chip, that will mate low-power general purpose processing cores with hardware accelerators specifically designed for mining digital currency. Today’s GPUs are vastly superior to central processors like a Core i7 or AMD Ryzen for many crypto-currency mining algorithms, because the GPU’s many smaller, cores and high-bandwidth link to frame buffer memory can handle significantly more processing tasks in parallel than a CPU. But that fact remains that GPUs are not purpose built for crypto-mining and purpose built hardware can typically handle the specialized tasks it was designed for with higher performance and improved efficiency. And that appears to be the goal for Intel’s potential mining SoC. The patent filing describes what the company claims is a highly power-efficient device for crypto-mining. After the initial hardware and setup costs, powering a GPU farm for mining is usually the biggest cost center. A single GPU may consume hundreds of watts, so keeping it powered up and mining can cost quite a bit over time. Multiply that by X number of GPUs, and costs add up fairly quickly. Hopefully, Intel is on to something and new hardware arrives that’s highly efficient and not cost prohibitive. Should such a device arrive that’s compatible with an array of crypto-currencies, GPU prices should come back down, and give PC gamers worldwide a bit of a reprieve from the current pricing situation. Read More Intel Patent Filing For Efficient Crypto-Mining Chip Could Reshape The GPU Landscape : https://ift.tt/2GrzUQHLate in 2017, Intel (NASDAQ:INTC) announced that it would be entering the market for high-performance stand-alone graphics processors. Although Intel has some key go-to-market advantages that could help it gain a reasonable amount of share, such as broad and deep relationships with all major computer vendors and a dominant position in the computer processor market, the reality is that for Intel's stand-alone graphics processors to succeed, they need to be competitive in terms of performance and power efficiency. ![]() Image source: Intel. A critical enabler of both of those factors is the choice of chip manufacturing technology. Intel historically had a lead over other contract chip manufacturers, such as Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company(NYSE:TSM), in moving to next-generation manufacturing technologies. However, in recent years, Intel's execution with respect to chip manufacturing technologies has degraded and it's now arguable that the best contract chip manufacturers are ahead of Intel in terms of manufacturing technology. If Intel cannot maintain parity with the top contract chip manufacturers, then its graphics processors will be at a severe disadvantage to those made by market leader NVIDIA(NASDAQ:NVDA), since NVIDIA works very closely with TSMC. So, to mitigate potential manufacturing-related risks with respect to its graphics processor efforts, Intel might want to consider tapping TSMC to build these chips. The benefitsHere's why Intel should tap TSMC to build its stand-alone graphics processors. First, Intel would be guaranteed to have roughly the same length of time from product conception to sale as NVIDIA. Intel would, of course, still need to design competitive graphics processors using that technology (NVIDIA is the best in the industry at its craft and even coming close won't be easy for Intel to pull off), but at least it wouldn't be held back by manufacturing-related concerns. TSMC has many years of experience of building high-performance graphics processors for multiple vendors, so Intel would be in good hands here. Manufacturing technology quality, suitability, and time-to-market would not be of any concern to Intel were it to work with TSMC. The disadvantagesThere are, of course, some negatives to Intel using TSMC to build its stand-alone graphics processors rather than building them itself. First, TSMC doesn't work for free. Intel would need to pay not only TSMC's raw manufacturing costs, but also whatever profit margin TSMC demanded on top of that. TSMC's corporate gross profit margin typically hovers in the range of 50%. If Intel's repeated claims of having a manufacturing cost advantage over the contract chip manufacturers are true, then Intel would likely enjoy better profit margins building the graphics processors itself. Next, while TSMC is a contract chip manufacturer that works with anyone who will pay, the reality is that NVIDIA is a far bigger and more reliable customer of TSMC's than Intel is. TSMC is likely to work more closely with NVIDIA to tune its manufacturing technology to meet NVIDIA's needs than it is with Intel. This could give NVIDIA a slight, but potentially meaningful leg up in the marketplace. Additionally, in the case of allocating highly in-demand leading-edge manufacturing technology, Intel is likely to be far lower in the priority queue than NVIDIA. The ideal situationUltimately, the ideal scenario for Intel would be for its manufacturing group to clean up its act and deliver new manufacturing technologies that are finely tuned to Intel's graphics processor product requirements. However, if Intel can't get its manufacturing act together, tapping TSMC to build its stand-alone graphics processors would be a viable option. Ashraf Eassa owns shares of Intel. The Motley Fool owns shares of and recommends Nvidia. The Motley Fool recommends Intel. The Motley Fool has a disclosure policy. Everyone knows Intel as a chipmaker, but its influence extends well beyond the CPU. Today’s laptops wouldn’t be ultra-thin if it weren’t for Intel’s ultrabooks, upgrading a desktop wouldn’t be easy if not for the company’s ATX standard, and graphics cards couldn’t connect to laptops over Thunderbolt if Intel didn’t push that new standard. The company has many other projects, such as its Next Unit of Computing, better know as the NUC. Since 2012, the NUC team has worked to make desktop computers as small as possible. John Deatherage, Director of Product Marketing at Intel, told Digital Trends the project started from this notion for a cutting-edge yet compact PC. “Wouldn’t it be wonderful if we could build something that was really small, but also kind of was where we wanted computing to go,” Deatherage said, “instead of where it had been.” That’s exactly what Intel has attempted to do. From small to fastNUC started with a question. Just how small can a desktop PC be? Six years ago, when the NUC project started, that wasn’t an easy question to answer. The NUC team’s first order of business was deciding on a size small enough to impress, but large enough to implement. They finally settled on a foam model about four inches on a size, and an inch and a half thick. That size came with limitations. “For the initial product we kind of had to shoot down the middle with a Core i3,” Deatherage recalled, “we thought that might serve a number of different markets.” Core i3, being the least powerful processor in the Core line-up, is also the easiest to cool. Its success, and improvements to Intel processors, meant the i3 was soon followed by a Core i5 model in 2013 and, eventually, a Core i7 in 2015. It’s not just size that made the NUC unusual. Customization also played a role. While the processor can’t be replaced, the RAM and hard drive can be upgraded — in fact, most NUCs are sold as kits that don’t come with either. “It’s kind of in our DNA that a certain amount of flexibility in the configuration ought to be here,” Deatherage said. Most small computers ditch customization for sake of size, but the NUC team thought that’d be the wrong move. The team knew businesses and hardcore do-it-yourself enthusiasts both want control over the hardware. They finally settled on a foam model about four inches on a size, and an inch and a half thick. As with most of Intel’s initiatives, though, direct sales aren’t the entire point. Products like the NUC are important as proof-of-concept. Before the NUC, small Intel-powered computers were still at least the size of a phonebook. Today, there’s a variety of pint-sized PCs including the Alienware Alpha, Gigabyte Brix, and Zotac Zbox. Most of these systems also target either businesses or enthusiasts, promising a small box that’s nearly as functional and upgradable as a full-sized desktop PC. Joel Christensen, General Manager of Intel’s Systems Product Group, doesn’t mind this competition. Inspiring such systems is the entire point. “We view ourselves as somebody who should be inspiring the industry to come along with us,” he told Digital Trends. “We want others to bring other ideas and other solutions to the table.” Without Intel’s work, others likely wouldn’t have introduced their own small form-factor desktops or, if they did, they wouldn’t be as prolific as they’ve become. The new frontierThe original NUC team’s goal was to engineer a small yet capable PC, proving it possible to fit serious compute power in the palm of your hand. That goal was met — and even surpassed — but NUC wasn’t done. Instead of falling into a routine, the team has moved the goalposts. Now, they want a tiny computer that can not only handle everyday computing, but also game. It’s not a novel concept. The Alienware Alpha, for instance, is essentially Dell’s attempt to apply the NUC’s values to a gaming machine, and it’s had success. Intel wants to go a step further with a far smaller rig that relies entirely on its own hardware. The first attempt was Skull Canyon, a small PC with an Intel quad-core processor and the company’s own Iris integrated graphics. “We’re putting a 100-watt processor in 1.2-liters. When we started, our engineers wouldn’t have dreamed of that.” “Usually the enthusiast machine is the big machine, the big gaming machine, right?” Deatherage explained. “I think we saw the opportunity as we got into Core i7, and we took a little bit of a taste, and said ‘Oh yeah, there is an appetite for a seven and a four-by-four form factor.’” Skull Canyon was far more powerful than any previous NUC, but as we found in our review, it wasn’t perfect. Iris graphics had limits. Late last year, Intel acquired the missing piece of the puzzle with a deal that brought AMD’s Radeon Vega graphics to a select few processors. NUC has used those processors to build Hades Canyon, which is far quicker than its predecessor, offering performance that compares closely to a mid-range discrete graphics chip from Nvidia, like the GTX 1050 Ti. Putting Vega graphics into Hades Canyon was only half the battle, however. The NUC team also had to keep it cool under stress. Deatherage highlighted the challenging, saying, “We’re putting a 100-watt processor in a 1.2-liter form factor. Six years ago, when we started on this journey, our engineers would have never dreamed about doing that.” More power means more heat, and that became the key challenge in Hades Canyon’s design. NUC engineer Greg La Tour said the problem forced an engineering re-think. “In future NUCs coming out […] the thermal challenge was tremendous. I don’t think we’ve had 100 watts in anything aside from full ATX towers in the past,” he told Digital Trends. The solution? A new, vapor-chamber cooling design, like that used in the Xbox One and Razer Blade Pro. It’s essentially a small-scale, self-contained liquid cooler. “There’s a space that has water inside it. And then there’s different structures to allow it to condense and go through a vapor cycle,” La Tour explained, “which allows for a very efficient thermal transfer.” Six years on, NUC’s just getting startedHades Canyon potential as a small game machine is enticing. It could finally offer gamers a simple, small, all-in-one solution, which can be attached to either a monitor or a TV. It’s nuts to think of: At 1.2 liters, the Hades Canyon NUC is roughly a quarter the size of a PS4 Pro, but nearly matches that console in raw power. Squeezing so much juice into such a small package opens a new avenue for NUC, one that no longer needs to focus on everyday compute and can expand into serious gaming and workstation use. If successful, the NUC’s small size may no longer seem exceptional — but instead become the new standard. Editors' RecommendationsThese days, graphics processing units (GPUs) are used for far more than just rendering 3D video games at fast speeds -- they're being used extensively in high-performance computing, machine learning, and even automotive and self-driving car applications. Chip giant Intel (NASDAQ:INTC)recently announced that it would be entering the market for high-performance stand-alone graphics processors. Intel does sell graphics processors today, but they are relatively low-performance designs that are integrated onto the same piece of silicon as the main processor cores. ![]() Image source: Intel. While it may be tempting for Intel to try to develop stand-alone graphics processors to allow it to attack both the gaming market as well as the other non-graphics portions of the computing market (e.g., machine learning/artificial intelligence), I think that Intel's first step should be to build graphics processors that excel in 3D gaming tasks. Here's why. Gaming represents a large opportunityAlthough other applications for graphics processors are getting the spotlight, the reality is that the market for gaming-capable graphics processors is quite large. Market leader NVIDIA (NASDAQ: NVDA) recently said at its financial analyst day that its revenue from sales of stand-alone gaming-oriented graphics processors grew to around $5.5 billion, up from around $4 billion the year before -- and the market is still growing. If Intel can capture a reasonable amount of share in this market, it could add hundreds of millions of dollars -- if not billions -- to its top line in the years ahead (depending on overall market growth and the extent to which Intel can capture share here). Moreover, while other types of applications that can take advantage of graphics processors require a significant software ecosystem be built around the specific vendors' graphics processors (programs written using NVIDIA's proprietary CUDA development language will only work on NVIDIA processors), such a restriction doesn't exist with respect to gaming-oriented graphics processors. The barrier to entry for Intel to enter the market for gaming-focused stand-alone graphics processors is much lower from a software ecosystem perspective than it is for other large markets. A rising tide lifts all boatsIntel's future stand-alone graphics processor efforts are likely to be based on the same technology that the company will integrate alongside future processors. To the extent that Intel can optimize its future graphics processor designs for gaming, the better the gaming experience will be on the graphics processors that are integrated into its standard personal computer processors. An improved gaming experience in Intel's integrated graphics processor technology could potentially be a valuable selling point. If Intel were to try a so-called shotgun approach with respect to its graphics processors, it could wind up with technology that's the jack of all trades but a master of none, which would ultimately result in less valuable technologies that aren't as salable. It makes sense, then, for Intel to focus on getting gaming performance right at first with its graphics efforts, and then if those are successful, try to extend its graphics processor technology into new markets and application domains. Ashraf Eassa owns shares of Intel. The Motley Fool owns shares of and recommends NVDA. The Motley Fool recommends Intel. The Motley Fool has a disclosure policy. Chip giant Intel (NASDAQ:INTC) tried but failed spectacularly to become a significant player in the market for mobile applications processors. Mobile applications processors combine the key processing elements that a smartphone requires (CPU, graphics, audio, image processor, etc.) along with -- in most cases -- a cellular modem. Though Intel didn't succeed in the mobile applications processor market, its cellular modem business did find a significant degree of success in winning contracts to supply stand-alone modems to Apple for the iPhone. ![]() Image source: Intel. Unfortunately for Intel, which is expected to win the entirety of the modem orders in the iPhone models that will launch later this year, the market for stand-alone cellular modems is pretty limited -- Apple is the only smartphone vendor left that uses stand-alone solutions. In light of that, if Intel wants to grow its business beyond Apple, it needs to find a way to re-enter the market for smartphone applications processors that integrate both the processing elements and the modem. Apparently, Intel is going to go about this in a quite interesting way -- through its partnership with China-based smartphone chipmaker Spreadtrum. Partnering on a mobile platformBack in February, Intel announced that it would be working with Spreadtrum -- a company that's known mainly for developing and selling processors for low-end and midrange smartphones -- in a "long-term collaboration on 5G." Here's what they'll be working on, specifically: "Integrating Intel's strong technical expertise in modems with Unigroup Spreadtrum & RDA's solid experience in chipset design, the companies will collaborate on 5G and develop Spreadtrum's first Android-based high-end 5G smartphone solution utilizing an Intel modem and Spreadtrum's application processor technology." What this sounds like, then, is that Spreadtrum and Intel will co-develop a mobile processor for high-end Android smartphones that'll effectively be a Spreadtrum applications processor but with an Intel modem inside instead of a Spreadtrum-developed modem. A match made in heavenSpreadtrum has shown itself to be a competent applications processor developer, and with support from key ecosystem partners like Arm (which does a lot of the heavy lifting with respect to processor, graphics, and multimedia intellectual property designs), it shouldn't be too hard for Spreadtrum to whip up an applications processor (again, sans the modem) that's competent enough to vie for high-end smartphone spots. The hard part would, of course, be the modem. Spreadtrum's modems tend to lag significantly behind those from other high-end smartphone makers, and the shift to 5G technology would likely only increase the barrier to entry for Spreadtrum in the high-end smartphone processor market. This is where Intel comes in: Intel's modem technology has gotten increasingly competent over the years, going from barely passable to good enough to potentially power every one of Apple's new flagship smartphones in 2018. Moreover, since Intel seems to be investing aggressively in future modem technology, the odds seem good that Intel will continue to build competitive, high-end modems. Marrying that modem technology with Spreadtrum's applications processor technology and leveraging Spreadtrum's business relationships with key smartphone makers could lead to significant mutual financial benefit for Spreadtrum and Intel. It's not clear who will be manufacturing the chips that come out of this collaboration, but if Intel is able to manufacture them, then this could be a win for Intel's nascent contract chip manufacturing arm as well (which, unfortunately, has seen minimal success to date). All told, this is a smart collaboration that has the potential to get Intel back into the mobile applications processor market in a thoughtful, minimally risky way. It should also allow Spreadtrum to attack portions of the smartphone processor market that it couldn't otherwise access without Intel's modem technology. Ashraf Eassa owns shares of Intel. The Motley Fool owns shares of and recommends Apple. The Motley Fool has the following options: long January 2020 $150 calls on Apple and short January 2020 $155 calls on Apple. The Motley Fool recommends Intel. The Motley Fool has a disclosure policy. ![]() Intel, one of the world’s largest semiconductor companies, hasfiled a patent for a new Bitcoin mining chip accelerator. Entitled “Bitcoin Mining Hardware Accelerator with Optimized Message Digest and Message Scheduler Datapath,” the patentwas originally submitted in September of 2016, but is now being released for the first time. Bitcoin and cryptocurrency mining haslong been under scrutiny for the excessive energy it allegedly uses. Countries like Iceland, for example,admit that more energy is used to mine Bitcoin than to power its residences, while cities like Plattsburgh, New York — a once-popular haven for commercial Bitcoin mining — haveimposed strict moratoriums to lessen miners’ growing needs and the surging costs of electricity. Intel claims to have found a more reasonable and cost-effective way to mine bitcoins. The patent says the product can decrease energy use by up to 35 percent while lowering financial requirements and mining more bitcoins in the process. The document reads: Because the software and hardware utilized in Bitcoin mining uses brute force to repeatedly and endlessly perform SHA-256 functions, the process of Bitcoin mining can be very power-intensive and utilize large amounts of hardware space. The embodiments described herein optimize Bitcoin mining operations by reducing the space utilized and power consumed by Bitcoin mining hardware. Intel explains thatone of the most expensive and rigorous steps involved in any mining venture is finding the 32-bit field. The value is set so that the block hash contains a nonce, or a solid set of zeros. After computation is complete, these zeros are attached to the “hash of the transaction hashes in the blockchain” and other headers. The traditional 256-bit hash that the document discusses is less than a “pre-defined threshold value.” There are two primary computational blocks involved: a message scheduler and a message digest. Both blocks work together to combine several 32-bit words and 32-bit additions, which can thus bring energy use down. Several problems exist, however, within the present mining community. Energy costs in most of theUnited States are increasing, while other nations like China — prime locations for mining operations due to their low-priced energy supplies — have sought to slow cryptocurrency innovation by “clamping down” on Bitcoin miners or limiting available energy. Perhaps the largest problem stems from bitcoin’s current price. At press time, one bitcoin is trading for roughly $6,600 — a massive drop from the $8,000+ mark seen earlier this week. Figures like Fundstrat’s Thomas Lee now say that Bitcoinmining is no longer profitable, with most miners either breaking even or falling short between what they earn and what they’ve spent to extract coins. Randy Copeland, an Intel partner and the president of Velocity Micro, says that Intel’s new accelerator could change things for the better. Speaking with CRN, Copeland explains, “Once this new Intel technology comes to market, more people will mine again because it’s profitable again, driving down the market value of the coins and finding a new market balance that will again put locations with lower electricity costs back at the advantage.” This isnot Intel’s first attempt to enter the cryptocurrency arena. Last May, the company partnered with healthcare transaction service provider PokitDok to help bring blockchain technology to the healthcare industry. Executives also joined hands with Chinese media and tech firm Tencent in September to collaborate on a new blockchain solution. Later in October, Intel partnered with hardware wallet developer Ledger to store digital currency on the company’s platform. Intel’s actions could prove to be significant. Patents among some Bitcoin companies have been deemed “unethical,” as the original Bitcoin software is available freely as open-source software. In addition, patents for Bitcoin mining products present concerns regarding the decentralized nature and competitiveness of the industry. If one company is able to use significantly less resources and thereby operate more efficiently, that venture may wind up the single or dominant party, while the rest make a permanent exit — a situation that could result in reduced decentralization and security. The recent Blockchain Defensive Patent License (BDPL) is seeking to provide a more open arena for Bitcoin miners. Should a Bitcoin- or blockchain-based company enter the agreement, they must share all their patents with “other license holders” as long as those holders are also members. The BDPL imposes strict regulations that deny blockchain companies specific rights to certain patents or products, and penalizes “licensees who attack the patents licensed” to other members. It will certainly be interesting to see if Intel, with its latest technology, decides to follow in the spirit of other Bitcoin mining companies and become the BDPL’s newest affiliate. ![]() Intel Kaby Lake-G Features An Intel GPU With Radeon GPU. Intel’s Kaby Lake-G family of processors pair an 8th Generation Core CPU complex with an AMD Radeon RX Vega GPU and 4GB of bleeding-edge HBM2 memory on a single package, through the use of something Intel calls an EMIB, or Embedded Multi-Die Interconnect Bridge. The architecture and designs of the CPU, GPU, and HBM2 (High Bandwidth Memory), and the use of the EMIB, allowed Intel to piece together a powerful compute engine in a low-profile package that’s not much bigger than a typical processor. Versus a traditional CPU and discrete GPU setup, however, Kaby Lake-G is downright tiny. The Dell XPS 15 2-In-1. The first products I’ve gotten to see and evaluate first-hand leveraging Kaby Lake-G are the brand-new Dell XPS 15 2-In-1 and Intel NUC8i7HVK small form factor PC, codenamed Hades Canyon. Comprehensive, multi-page reviews of both products went on-line in the last 24 hours. If you head on over to HotHardware you can see all of the benchmarks and analysis for yourself – there’s too much to share here. What you’ll see if you peruse the images and numbers though is that Kaby Lake-G is somewhat of a beast that crushes previous-generation products in similar form factors. The Intel NUC8i7HVK Featuring Kaby Lake-G. The Dell XPS 15 2-In-1 is a thin-and-light convertible Ultrabook and the Intel NUC8i7HVK is a tiny, full-blown PC that can fit in one hand – it measures only 221 x 142 x 39 mm (1.2 L). Compared to other Ultrabooks and small form factor PCs, there is simply no comparison. The quad-core / eight thread CPUs incorporated into Kaby Lake-G offer best-in-class performance, while the integrated Radeon RX Vega M graphics cores are simply in another league versus any other on-processor, integrated solution. Even versus a discrete NVIDIA GeForce MX150, there is no comparison.
HotHardware
Kaby Lake-G GPU Performance Faster and more powerful processors and GPUs are available, of course, but not in the same kind of form factors enabled by Kaby Lake-G. Intel and AMD have collaborated on a groundbreaking product here, and now that I’ve had the chance to test it for myself, I can’t wait to see what other interesting products featuring Kaby Lake-G come to market and if the unlikely collaboration between Intel and AMD continues to bear fruit. ">A few months back, Intel revealed that it was working with AMD to being a family of processors to market featuring on-package Radeon RX Vega graphics. This move seemed quizzical considering the bitter rivalry between the two companies in the CPU space, but the partnership appears to have paid off handsomely if the first benchmarks in retail-ready products are any indication. Intel Kaby Lake-G Features An Intel GPU With Radeon GPU. Intel’s Kaby Lake-G family of processors pair an 8th Generation Core CPU complex with an AMD Radeon RX Vega GPU and 4GB of bleeding-edge HBM2 memory on a single package, through the use of something Intel calls an EMIB, or Embedded Multi-Die Interconnect Bridge. The architecture and designs of the CPU, GPU, and HBM2 (High Bandwidth Memory), and the use of the EMIB, allowed Intel to piece together a powerful compute engine in a low-profile package that’s not much bigger than a typical processor. Versus a traditional CPU and discrete GPU setup, however, Kaby Lake-G is downright tiny. The Dell XPS 15 2-In-1. The first products I’ve gotten to see and evaluate first-hand leveraging Kaby Lake-G are the brand-new Dell XPS 15 2-In-1 and Intel NUC8i7HVK small form factor PC, codenamed Hades Canyon. Comprehensive, multi-page reviews of both products went on-line in the last 24 hours. If you head on over to HotHardware you can see all of the benchmarks and analysis for yourself – there’s too much to share here. What you’ll see if you peruse the images and numbers though is that Kaby Lake-G is somewhat of a beast that crushes previous-generation products in similar form factors. The Intel NUC8i7HVK Featuring Kaby Lake-G. The Dell XPS 15 2-In-1 is a thin-and-light convertible Ultrabook and the Intel NUC8i7HVK is a tiny, full-blown PC that can fit in one hand – it measures only 221 x 142 x 39 mm (1.2 L). Compared to other Ultrabooks and small form factor PCs, there is simply no comparison. The quad-core / eight thread CPUs incorporated into Kaby Lake-G offer best-in-class performance, while the integrated Radeon RX Vega M graphics cores are simply in another league versus any other on-processor, integrated solution. Even versus a discrete NVIDIA GeForce MX150, there is no comparison.
HotHardware
Kaby Lake-G GPU Performance Faster and more powerful processors and GPUs are available, of course, but not in the same kind of form factors enabled by Kaby Lake-G. Intel and AMD have collaborated on a groundbreaking product here, and now that I’ve had the chance to test it for myself, I can’t wait to see what other interesting products featuring Kaby Lake-G come to market and if the unlikely collaboration between Intel and AMD continues to bear fruit. Read More Intel AMD Hybrid Kaby Lake-G Processor Proves Powerful In First Real-World Evaluations : https://ift.tt/2IhtX9e![]() Intel released their 2017 annual report on diversity this week, showing that the company is ahead of its overall workforce goals, but still struggling to hire, retain, and promote black talent. White workers accounted for 47.8% of Intel’s U.S. employees last year. Asian workers made up 38.5%, while Latinx employees were 8.8%, African Americans 4%, and Native Americans 0.7% of the total workforce. Intel employees are still overwhelmingly men — women make up just 26.5% of their U.S. workforce, a 0.7% increase since 2016. “If you do not intentionally include, you will unintentionally exclude,” Barabara Whye, Intel’s chief diversity and inclusion officer, told Fortune. She says her engineering background heavily influences the way she approaches solving this problem at Intel. “We set goals, we measure, we achieve our goals. Just like any other business initiative,” she said. “And we’re having these conversations with our CEO Brian Krzanich on a monthly basis, just talking about the progress.” In 2015, the company pledged to reach full representation in its workforce by 2020 and committed $300 million toward that goal. The company determined this representation gap goal based on market availability — a metric calculated and updated by a third-party human resources law firm that considers U.S. Census Bureau data on the demographics among tech workers, the number of college graduates in related fields from the National Center for Education Statistics, internal company data, and other sources to estimate the total number of qualified workers in the job market for specific positions. At the time of the pledge, Intel identified that this gap was made up of 2,300 employees. Since then it has shrunk to 376 people, and the company is on track to reach full representation this year, two years early. What’s WorkingIntel is seeing some improvement in promoting diverse talent. Underrepresented employees in leadership roles have increased 27% since 2015, according to the report. This is due, at least in part, to an emphasis on accountability — manager pay has been tied to diversity and inclusion goals since 2016. “Intel has a bonus structure such that roughly 7% of our employee bonuses across the Intel enterprise are tied to the diversity business objective — which, again, is echoing the point that this is a business initiative and is integrated into the business and is a portion of our bonus structure,” Whye said. For managers to receive this part of their bonuses in full, 45% of new hires have to be from underrepresented groups and the retention rate for diverse talent has to be equal or better than their overrepresented peers. “The formula is not just hiring only,” Whye said. “Retention is probably even more of a critical lever around Intel’s work.” The Warmline program, now in it’s second year, has helped with retention. Set up to assist unhappy Intel workers before they decide to find a new job, more than 10,000 employees have used Warmline so far and 90% of them have remained with the company. The feedback from these employees has also helped identify that managers and career stagnation are two of the main reasons workers become disinterested in their roles. What’s Not WorkingFollowing a trend in many diversity and inclusion efforts, much of Intel’s growth in the share of underrepresented employees is being driven by hiring white women. Even so, the promotion of women is relatively stagnant, with representation among leadership remaining unchanged last year compared to 2016. Intel is still behind their goals — and behind tech companies likeApple — on African American representation in their workforce. “The remaining gap to full representation for us is the hiring, progression, and retention of African American talent and employees,” Whye said. “To that end, about 85% of the remaining gap is African American talent, so that’s kind of where the focus is.” Through internal research, Intel determined three target areas to help increase black representation at the company: sponsorship, isolation, and informal networks. Intel has also established partnerships with historically black colleges and universities to help the company improve recruitment and hiring of their graduates. What’s NextAlong with the employee representation milestone, Intel is also on-track to meet their supplier diversity goal of spending $1 billion with minority- or women-owned businesses by 2020. Last year, the company spent $650 million with diverse suppliers. Intel is moving slowly toward progression goals, seeing small gains for Latinx and Native American employees among the company’s leadership last year. “We strive for leadership parity because if you achieve your leadership progression goals, knowing that the research supports that diverse managers actually hire diverse employees, it drives your ability to sustain the results,” Whye said. “So that’s a very important metric for us.” She recently added VP and director of business HR for Intel’s client and Internet of Things division to her title. She’s joining this part of the business because their progress on diversity goals has been the slowest. The next goal? “Take the burden of the system off of the diverse employee and work together to address the system’s issues head on,” Whye said. Read More Intel's 2017 Diversity Report Shows Progress Is Slowest With African American Employees : https://ift.tt/2pNO3Bq![]() US technology company Intel has filed a patent for a Bitcoin (BTC) mining hardware accelerator that would reduce the amount of electricity used in crypto mining by “reducing the space utilized and power consumed by Bitcoin mining hardware,” according to a US Patent and Trademark Office patent application released yesterday, March 29. The patent, originally filed on Sept. 23 of last year, seeks to solve the “challenge for miners” of “search[ing] through the entire nonce space in a brute force manner while minimizing energy consumption per hash and maximizing performance per watt.” According to Intel, this can be done by “optimizing the critical paths in the computation intensive message digest and scheduler datapaths,” resulting in “extra time” that can “reduce switching capacitance or scale the supply voltage” to create a “35% combinational power improvement in the message digest logic.” The mining of Bitcoin, which Intel refers to as the “most popular type of (e.g., unit of) digital currency used in the digital currency eco-system,” needs large amounts of electricity to solve algorithms to mine for the coin. Bitcoin mining energy has been called by some as as an “environmental disaster,” while the other side argues that the possibility of using leftover electricity and renewable energy makes mining a “non-issue” for the environment. The patent application writes that “because of the large amount of power utilized, and the relatively high cost of that power, mining Bitcoins can be a very costly endeavor. In some embodiments, the cost to mine a single Bitcoin may exceed the value of the mined Bitcoin.” This negative mining cost ratio, which occurs temporarily during market dips, was pointed out by Fundstrat’s Tom Lee in a report earlier this month. Intel’s patent application notes that it refers to ASIC implementations for “convenience,” although their system could apply to “any other logic device [...] including, but not limited to Processors, SoCs, and FPGA platforms.” This patent application is not Intel’s first foray into the crypto sphere. In May of last year, Intel partnered with healthcare transaction service provider and software development firmPokitDok in order to utilize Blockchain technology in the healthcare industry. In September 2017, Intel announced a collaboration with Chinese media and technology firm Tencent for working on an Internet of Things (IoT) Blockchain solution, and in October, Intel partnered with virtual currency hardware startup firm Ledger in order to use their Blockchain platform for storing crypto holdings. Read More Us Tech Company Intel Files Patent To Reduce Bitcoin Mining Energy Use : https://ift.tt/2E70NHs |
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January 2020
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