https://www.techpowerup.com/270838/vulne...to-hacking

Quote:Vulnerabilities in Qualcomm's DSP (Digital Signal Processor) present in the company's Snapdragon SoCs may render more than a billion Android phones susceptible to hacking. According to research reported this week by security firm Check Point, they've found more than 400 vulnerabilities in Snapdragon's DSP, which may allow attackers to monitor locations, listen to nearby audio in real time, and exfiltrate locally-stored photos and videos - besides being able to render the phone completely unresponsive.

The vulnerabilities (CVE-2020-11201, CVE-2020-11202, CVE-2020-11206, CVE-2020-11207, CVE-2020-11208 and CVE-2020-11209) can be exploited simply via a video download or any other content that's rendered by the chip that passes through its DSP. Targets can also be attacked by installing malicious apps that require no permissions at all. Qualcomm has already tackled the issue by stating they have worked to validate the issue, and have already issued mitigations to OEMs, which should be made available via software updates in the future. In the meantime, the company has said they have no evidence any of these flaws is being currently exploited, and advise all Snapdragon platform users to only install apps via trusted locations such as the Play Store.

https://www.tomshardware.com/news/massiv...-backdoors

Quote:Till Kottmann, a Swiss IT consultant, posted on Twitter a link to a file sharing service today that contains what an anonymous source claims is a portion of Intel's crown jewels: A 20GB folder of confidential Intel intellectual property. The leaker dubbed the release the "Intel exconfidential Lake Platform Release ."

Update: Intel has responded to Tom's Hardware with an official statement:

"We are investigating this situation. The information appears to come from the Intel Resource and Design Center, which hosts information for use by our customers, partners and other external parties who have registered for access. We believe an individual with access downloaded and shared this data."

Quote:Now, don’t mistake me — it could be that there’s some killer data lurking in this repository, with major implications for Intel security, or IP, or what have you. I haven’t exactly scanned it. But while a Simics simulation for an unreleased platform is interesting, Simics is a commercial platform you can buy. It’s a full-system simulator used for software development. There could be security flaws lurking in some of the software, and the leaker has encouraged people to look for backdoor mentions in the dump — which is a whole lot different than a leak in which you say “Hey everybody, here’s the 8MB of documents showing where Intel hid the x86 hardware backdoor… no, not IME. The other backdoor.”

Note: The degree to which closed-source processors that run invisible code (from the OS’ perspective) should be considered “backdoors” is hotly contested between a subset of security researchers and open-source computing advocates on the one hand, and Intel and AMD on the other. The former group believes that security processors and “trusted computing” zones should either not exist or, if they do exist, should be based on open, transparent projects. AMD and Intel disagree. The remark above should be considered tongue-in-cheek, particularly if you’re the kind of person who requires a paragraph-long explanation to be mollified by anything.

In any event, it’s not clear how much of this is juicy details and how much of it is dull. Some of it covers chips that were under NDA as recently as May, but the presentations we get on a regular basis are under NDA as well, and trust me, Intel doesn’t give us the keys to the kingdom, so much as information it doesn’t want leaked until it’s ready to announce it. According to Ars Technica, the details were fond on an unsecured server hosted by Akamai.

7-26-2020

Intel ‘Stunning Failure’ Heralds End of Era for U.S. Chip Sector

Over the years, Intel has spent tens of billions of dollars updating its factories, and all of Swan’s predecessors touted them as a crucial advantage that kept the company ahead of the rest of the industry. As the largest chip producer, Intel benefited from economies of scale and attracted the most experienced engineers and scientists

“By outsourcing leading edge technology, presumably to TSMC, Intel would give up what has been its main source of competitive advantage for 50 years,” Caso of Raymond James said.

https://www.tomshardware.com/news/intel-...pectations

Quote:Intel announced today in its Q2 2020 earnings release that it has now delayed the rollout of its 7nm CPUs by six months relative to its previously-planned release date, undoubtedly resulting in wide-ranging delays to the company's roadmaps. Intel's press release also says that yields for its 7nm process are now twelve months behind the company's internal targets, meaning the company isn't currently on track to produce its 7nm process in an economically viable way. The company now says its 7nm CPUs will not debut on the market until late 2022 or early 2023.
...
On the earnings call, Intel CEO Bob Swan said the company had identified a "defect mode" in its 7nm process that caused yield degradation issues. As a result, Intel has invested in "contingency plans," which Swan later defined as including using third-party foundries. The company will also use external third-party foundries for its forthcoming 7nm Ponte Vecchio GPUs, the company's first graphics chips. Ponte Vecchio comes as a chiplet-based design, and Swan clarified that production for some of the chiplets (tiles) will be outsourced to third parties. Swan noted the GPUs will come in late 2021 or early 2022, portending a delay beyond the original schedule for a 2021 launch in the exascale Aurora supercomputer.
...
For perspective, rival foundry TSMC plans to be on the 3nm node in the same time frame as Intel's new schedule for 7nm. Intel clearly isn't pleased with its execution on the 7nm node, as an embattled Swan remarked that "And we feel pretty good about where we are, though we’re not happy. I’m not pleased with our 7nm process performance" at the end of the call after a bruising question and answer session with analysts. Swan also said "we have root-caused the [7nm] issue and believe there are no fundamental roadblocks," and that the company would provide further updates at an upcoming Architecture Day.

Swan said the company had a built-in buffer in its roadmap to account for process node delays. That accomodation comes as a result of hard-learned lessons from the company's incessant 10nm delays. Intel says it will use its advanced packaging technologies, which allow it to mix and match components produced from external sources with its own chips, to help reconcile the six month delay to its 7nm processors with the year-long delay to its internal 7nm yield projections. In the past, Intel stated that it would also enable newer architectures to be portable to older nodes, so it's plausible that Intel could resort to back-porting some architectures as part of its contingency plan.

The 7nm delay reflects yet another setback as Intel still struggles to overcome the multi-year yield issues it has encountered with its 10nm process. Those delays have allowed its competitors, like AMD, to wrest the process node leadership position from Intel for the first time in the company's history. That's triggered a price war in the market as Intel fights a true x86 competitor with a better node, not to mention Amazon's new Graviton 2 ARM chips based on TSMC's 7nm node. Apple also recently announced that it is transitioning from Intel's chips to its own ARM-based 7nm silicon. The 7nm delay also exacerbates the recent news that rock star chip architect Jim Keller, who was a key part of a team effort to revitalize the company's roadmaps, has left the company.
...
Today Intel said that it plans to increase its shipments of 10nm chips by 20% over its prior projections, so it appears the company's 10nm plans have shifted out of necessity. Intel's new plan centers on gaining another 'full node' of performance from its current 10nm node, meaning 10nm may have longer legs than the company expected when it announced last year that it would accelerate 7nm production. Intel pulled off a similar feat with its 14nm processors through a series of "+" revisions that added incremental performance improvements, so it does have a track record of successful inter-node improvements that could help it remain competitive until it can correct the issues with its 7nm process.

Intel has also traditionally used third-party fabs, currently to the tune of ~20% of its production, for low-margin, non-CPU products built on trailing-edge nodes. Intel's new plans to more aggressively leverage external fabs could result in it using other fabs for its core logic, like CPUs and GPUs, which the company hasn't done in the past. As Swan noted, that will present challenges in maintaining attractive ASPs for Intel's products, especially given the scale of its production needs. Ultimately, Intel could also face significantly reduced margins if it outsources significant portions of its fabrication of high-margin products, like CPUs, to third parties. Relying upon an outside vendor for leading-edge node production also incurs more risk in terms of supply assurance as Intel could be forced to compete with deep-pocketed rival semiconductor companies, like Apple, Nvidia and AMD, among others, for production capacity.

Quote:This time, Intel’s entire approach to the topic was different. Instead of reassuring investors that the products built at third-party foundries would be low-cost hardware, Intel openly acknowledged that it would use whatever technology stack was required to deliver performance leadership, be that fully internal manufacturing, fully external, or a combination of the two. CEO Bob Swan emphasized that this plan is part of Intel’s commitment to flexibility and argued that its willingness to develop what he called contingency plans is a sign that the company is determined to deliver maximum value to both investors and customers.

I don’t disagree. At this point, given the challenges Intel has faced with its own manufacturing, the company would be foolish and potentially negligent if it failed to explore every option. That doesn’t change the fact that six years ago, Intel declared its process node leadership would continue on 14nm and into the future, while in 2020, the company CEO spoke of protecting the company’s roadmaps and products from its own process node problems. “We have learned from the challenges in our 10-nanometer transition,” Bob Swan said, “And have a milestone-driven approach to ensure our product competitiveness is not impacted by our process technology roadmap.”
...
I think what Intel did today was put a very smooth face on a radical corporate realignment. If I might be permitted a bit of poetic license and a Deus Ex: Human Revolution quote: “It’s not the end of the world, but you can see it from here.”

Based on Swan’s own remarks and timelines, Chipzilla has 24-36 months to demonstrate why it should still own its own fabs. By late 2022 / early 2023, TSMC should be shipping 3nm. Even if we assume that Intel’s 7nm is good enough to compare directly to TSMC’s 5nm, that still puts the Taiwanese company a full node ahead.

Is this the end of Intel? Not by half. Intel’s financials are great, the company is tremendously profitable, its data center business continues to grow, and its cash flow is healthy. AMD was in far more trouble after Bulldozer bombed in 2011 than Intel is now, even facing further delays and the question of whether it will remain an IDM over the long term. The company’s process engineers may be struggling, but its CPU design teams are still excellent.

But having a great CPU design team is a necessary but insufficient component of holding the leadership position in CPUs that Intel has long commanded. The company is capable of mounting aggressive comebacks, but if Intel wants investors to see its foundry facilities as a necessary part of the business rather than a drag on its profits, it’s time to pull out all the stops and fix its factories. No, Bob Swan didn’t say that explicitly, today.

He didn’t have to.

https://www.techpowerup.com/270197/jim-k...om-scratch

Quote:Jim Keller on Lex Fridman's AI Podcast shed some light on his thoughts on the microprocessor design fundamentals as he sees them. In a hour-and-a-half-long interview, he approaches Moore's Law and its much lauded - and ubiquitously repeated - death, as well as the need for both iterative and zero-point microprocessor design requirements.

Mr. Keller approaches the usual microprocessor design loop, where a company develops a new design from scratch and then looks at the most fundamental way of adding performance. Usually, he says, easy 10% performance increments can be found by simply looking at a design and increasing execution units - increase a buffer here, increase a cache over there, put in another add processor on this part of the pipeline. However, he also speaks of how this process in itself is limiting, inasmuch as doing this often will eventually guide processor designs towards a bottleneck and the diminishing returns problem, where any more additions made to the design don't seem to increase performance - mostly just adding complexity, area and power requirements, and generally convoluting a given design.
...
Mr. Keller approaches the usual microprocessor design loop, where a company develops a new design from scratch and then looks at the most fundamental way of adding performance. Usually, he says, easy 10% performance increments can be found by simply looking at a design and increasing execution units - increase a buffer here, increase a cache over there, put in another add processor on this part of the pipeline. However, he also speaks of how this process in itself is limiting, inasmuch as doing this often will eventually guide processor designs towards a bottleneck and the diminishing returns problem, where any more additions made to the design don't seem to increase performance - mostly just adding complexity, area and power requirements, and generally convoluting a given design.
...
Of course, then comes Intel, which Keller himself describes as having a microprocessor development mindset that's closer to a 10-year sustained designed rather than the 3-5 year development schedule for a new architecture he favors. Interestingly, in the podcast, Jim Keller approaches this microarchitecture mindset on Intel from a short-term and long-term disaster perspective. According to him, repeating and refining a recipe (like Intel did many years with their Core architecture [author's side-note]) is the most efficient way to go about it: incrementally improving a design, saving money and taking a low-risk approach to processor development, albeit threatened by the diminishing returns equation we mentioned earlier.

The problem, according to Mr. Keller, is that managing quarter to quarter means that there is fear in hitting a short-term disaster with a rewrite from scratch; companies thus look to "milk" every ounce of profit from a previous design by incrementally improving it. However, this primes companies to hit a long-term disaster, much like we see today with Intel (it's not a disaster for a multi-billion dollar company like Intel, but you get the point): its architecture, which didn't go through a from-scratch design phase for years, was superseded by AMD's new Zen design and its iterations.
...
Closing up this article, which doesn't aim to be a summation of the AI Podcast, but aims to highlight some interesting tidbits present there, are Mr. Keller's thoughts on team management for a technological project. According to him, he sees the existence of abstraction layers in microprocessor design teams. Where a team of 10 humans works well together, and a team of up to 100 people may be able to function properly under a single supervision, any more than that and teams have to be divided, with organizational boundaries having to be set - and here too appears the diminishing returns equation. Jim Keller says some very interesting things regarding this, as in, that humans in general aren't getting smarter - so there is a fundamental limit to how much "processing power" you can have in a team working on a set project, considering team and size and communication capacity caps that derive from the fact that we are, well, humans.
...
TL;DR: Jim Keller is clearly an extremely accomplished microprocessor designer, but also a project leader, and has very clear ideas regarding the industry and his field of work. You should read the entire article and then move onto the podcast.

https://www.extremetech.com/mobile/31295...your-phone

Quote:Security researchers spend a lot of time poking and prodding the software on the myriad smart devices that dominate our lives, but what about the plugs that recharge them? Modern fast chargers are essentially tiny computers, and a team of Chinese researchers has now shown it’s relatively simple to target the charger with an attack called BadPower. It can make your device overheat, smoke, and possibly even catch fire.

Until the last few years, the cables we used to keep our phones, tablets, and other devices running would deliver just a couple watts of power no matter what you plugged in. So, if you forgot to charge your phone overnight, it was impossible to get a full charge before it was time to head out the door. Modern fast charging systems can ramp up the voltage and current to get more power into your battery in a shorter amount of time, getting you hours of battery life in just a few minutes of charging. The chargers need their own tiny electronic brain to make that happen, and this is the target for BadPower.

The researchers from Tencent’s Xuanwu Lab showed that a smartphone could transmit BadPower to chargers, where it can modify the embedded firmware. Just plugging in a device with BadPower can scramble a fast charging plug and turn it into a phone-killing fire hazard.
...
Xuanwu Lab tested 35 fast chargers of the 234 models available in China. The team found that 18 models from eight different vendors were vulnerable to BadPower. Security flaws are fixable on most smart devices, but chargers are barely smart, and many of them don’t have upgradeable firmware at all. Xuanwu Lab says that it tested 34 fast charging controllers and found that 18 of them lacked any firmware update mechanism.

The researchers recommend that vendors develop patches that can be deployed to upgradable plugs and included on future models. It also suggests manufacturers harden fast charger firmware to guard against attacks like this. Tencent says it notified all affected vendors, but some of these chargers are unfixable.

https://www.extremetech.com/mobile/31305...reaks-them

Quote:Smartphones are, unfortunately, disposable pieces of technology. They’re hard to repair, have limited software support, and carriers constantly push upgrades. However, AT&T has taken things to the extreme with its latest email to customers. Using clumsy and profoundly misleading language, AT&T has advised some people with recent phones that they need to upgrade or risk losing service.
...
First, the impending network upgrade to which AT&T is referring won’t happen until February 2022 — the email does not explain this. That’s when the carrier will shut off its 3G network, moving to 4G and 5G only. Bugging people to upgrade new-ish phones that will work fine for a further 18 months is questionable on its own, particularly during an unprecedented global pandemic and economic disruption, but the problem is of AT&T’s own making.

Phones like the S10e have 4G, but AT&T has chosen to only whitelist select unlocked devices for voice over LTE (VoLTE). So, when 3G shuts down, these devices will lose the ability to make calls because AT&T has arbitrarily decided it should be that way. The version of the S10e and other phones sold by AT&T will continue to work normally for the foreseeable future.

If you received this email, you don’t need to do anything right now — your phone will keep working for a while longer. Sadly, this is not the first case of AT&T intentionally misleading its customers. Who can forge the fake 5G fiasco? You can safely ignore the hard-sell in the email and upgrade at your leisure, and possibly move to a different carrier. No one would blame you.

https://techreport.com/news/3471752/msi-...ead-at-56/
:(

Quote:MSI CEO and GM Sheng-Chang Chiang, has passed away at the age of 56, resulting from a fall from a building.

The report comes via Taiwanese news site ET Today, which reports that Chiang passed away as a result of head injuries caused by the fall. Police are currently investigating the circumstances of the fall, and the cause is unknown at this time. Chiang was rushed to the hospital but ultimately succumbed to his injuries.

https://techreport.com/news/3471638/hous...egulation/

Quote:With this information in mind, many countries have already or are in the process of examining changing policies regarding loot boxes. The UK’s House of Lords just announced that thy support treating loot boxes as gambling and implementing regulatory changes immediately.

Dr. David Zendle, an expert who spoke to the panel, said that there is an “extraordinarily robust” link between problem gambling and loot boxes. He didn’t claim a casual link, but stated there is a link nonetheless. According to Paul Slovic, Ph.D. & President of Decision Research, human brains make quick assessments of odds, but the amygdala, our emotional centre, can cloud our ability to rationally assess probability. Children and youth’s cerebral cortex, the logical part of the brain, is under developed, and their amygdala’s aren’t entirely stable yet. This is a double whammy for making bad decisions, even if they meaningfully understand what odds represent.

The Lords say they should be classified as “games of chance” – which would bring them under the Gambling Act 2005.

The report states “If a product looks like gambling and feels like gambling, it should be regulated as gambling” and that “The government must act immediately to bring loot boxes within the remit of gambling legislation and regulation”.

They also state that the regulations they desire “could be enacted today” as they don’t require legislation.

They also raise the risk of eSports betting and the risk it presents to youth.

https://techreport.com/featured/3471264/...cial-2020/

Quote:Apple says its putting “relentless focus on performance per watt,” noting that the iPhone performance has increased over 100 times since its original launch and 1000-times performance on the iPad GPU versus the same phone. The company plans to release a whole family of SoCs (System-on-a-Chip) called Mac SoCs to support the change, including GPUs, SSD controllers, and more. The change will encompass Macbooks and desktop systems alike. The first ARM-based Mac is coming this year; Apple expects to complete the transition to ARM within two years.

Apple’s upcoming update, macOS Big Sur, will feature Apple applications already updated to support the upcoming chips–including Final Cut Pro. The company is also taking measures to ensure they don’t leave developers and longtime users in the cold. Apple will offer fast, transparent emulation of legacy apps through its Rosetta 2 emulation platform, upon which Apple says that “most apps will just work.” To show off Rosetta 2, Apple gave us a look at Shadow of the Tomb Raider running on its ARM chip at 1080p in real-time.

Apple is also creating an Apple Developers’ Transition Kit, for which registered developers can apply through its developer website. The system is a Mac Mini enclosure that includes Apple’s A12 SoC, 16 GB RAM, a 512 GB SSD, and a pre-release version of macOS Big Sur. This could be the first ARM Mac that Apple plans to release, too, though Apple was quiet about the specifics on its 2020 ARM system aside from this potential candidate.

Quote:The big question on everyone’s mind since Apple’s unveiling of its upcoming ARM shift is what kind of performance we can expect the new chips to offer. It’s not an easy question to answer right now, and there’s some misinformation about what the differences are between modern x86 versus ARM CPUs in the first place.
...
What people are actually arguing, when they argue about CISC versus RISC, is whether the decoder block x86 CPUs use to convert CISC into RISC burns enough power to be considered a categorical disadvantage against x86 chips.

When I’ve raised this point with AMD and Intel in the past, they’ve always said it isn’t true. Decoder power consumption, I’ve been told, is in the 3-5 percent range. That’s backed up by independent evaluation. A comparison of decoder power consumption in the Haswell era suggested an impact of 3 percent when L2 / L3 cache are stressed and no more than 10 percent if the decoder is, itself, the primary bottleneck. The CPU cores’ static power consumption was nearly half the total. The authors of the comparison note that 10 percent represents an artificially inflated figure based on their test characteristics.

A 2014 paper on ISA efficiency also backs up the argument that ISA efficiency is essentially equal above the microcontroller level. In short, whether ARM is faster than x86 has been consistently argued to be based on fundamentals of CPU design, not ISA. No major work on the topic appears to have been conducted since these comparisons were written. One thesis defense I found claimed somewhat different results, but it was based entirely on theoretical modeling rather than real-world hardware evaluation.

CPU power consumption is governed by factors like the efficiency of your execution units, the power consumption of your caches, your interconnect subsystem, your fetch and decode units (when present), and so on. ISA may impact the design parameters of some of those functional blocks, but ISA itself has not been found to play a major role in modern microprocessor performance.

PC Mag’s benchmarks paint a mixed picture. In tests like GeekBench 5 and GFX Bench 5 Metal, the Apple laptops with Intel chips are outpaced by Apple’s iPad Pro (and sometimes, by the iPhone 11).
...
This implies a few different things are true. First, we need better benchmarks performed under something more like equal conditions, which obviously won’t happen until macOS devices with Apple ARM chips are available to be compared against macOS on Intel. GeekBench is not the final word in CPU performance — there’ve been questions before about how effective it is as a cross-platform CPU test — and we need to see some real-world application comparisons.

Factors working in Apple’s favor include the company’s excellent year-on-year improvements to its CPU architecture and the fact that it’s willing to take this leap in the first place. If Apple didn’t believe it could deliver at least competitive performance, there’d be no reason to change. The fact that it believes it can create a permanent advantage for itself in doing so says something about how confident Apple is about its own products.

At the same time, however, Apple isn’t shifting to ARM in a year, the way it did with x86 chips. Instead, Apple hopes to be done within two years. One way to read this decision is to see it as a reflection of Apple’s long-term focus on mobile. Scaling a 3.9W iPhone chip into a 15-25W laptop form factor is much easier than scaling it into a 250W TDP desktop CPU socket with all the attendant chipset development required to support things like PCIe 4.0 and standard DDR4 / DDR5 (depending on launch window).

It’s possible that Apple may be able to launch a superior laptop chip compared with Intel’s x86 products, but that larger core desktop CPUs with their higher TDPs will remain an x86 strength for several years yet. I don’t think it’s an exaggeration to say this will be the most closely watched CPU launch since AMD’s Ryzen back in 2017.

Apple’s historic price and market strategy make it unlikely that the company would attack the mass market. But mainstream PC OEMs aren’t going to want to see a rival switch architectures and be decisively rewarded for it while they’re stuck with suddenly second-rate AMD and Intel CPUs. Alternately, of course, it’s possible that Apple will demonstrate weaker-than-expected gains, or only be able to show decisive impacts in contrived scenarios. I’m genuinely curious to see how this shapes up.

Quote:According to a sensational PC Gamer report citing former Intel principal engineer François Piednoël, Apple's dissatisfaction with Intel dates back to some of its first 14 nm chips, based on the "Skylake" microarchitecture. "The quality assurance of Skylake was more than a problem," says Piednoël. It was abnormally bad. We were getting way too much citing for little things inside Skylake. Basically our buddies at Apple became the number one filer of problems in the architecture. And that went really, really bad. When your customer starts finding almost as much bugs as you found yourself, you're not leading into the right place," he adds.

It was around that time that decisions were taken at the highest levels in Apple to execute a machine architecture switch away from Intel and x86, the second of its kind following Apple's mid-2000s switch from PowerPC to Intel x86. For me this is the inflection point," says Piednoël. "This is where the Apple guys who were always contemplating to switch, they went and looked at it and said: 'Well, we've probably got to do it.' Basically the bad quality assurance of Skylake is responsible for them to actually go away from the platform." Apple's decision to dump Intel may have only been more precipitated with 2019 marking a string of cybersecurity flaws affecting Intel microarchitectures. The PC Gamer report cautions that Piednoël's comments should be taken with a pinch of salt, as he has been among the more outspoken engineers at Intel.