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Biggest security purchase since Intel wolfed down McAfee Intrusion prevention's a hot topic in the world of security, as reflected in the $2.8bn price tag Cisco has paid to complete the acquisition of network security specialists Sourcefire.The purchase - which was announced in July - is the largest security firm purchase since Intel's $7.7bn acquisition of McAfee in 2010. And it's a huge personal payday for Marty Roesch, creator of the open-source intrusion protection system Snort. He took Snort's basic technology and built commercial code under the Sourcefire brand since 2001."I'd be lying if I said I wasn't sentimental. When...

″ Exclusive: Seems awfully antitrusty from this point of view Sources high up at Nvidia say that the program that bribed Origin PC to drop AMD products and publicly badmouth the company, its products, and anything related is called “Tier 0″. The plan was hatched by Nvidia sales and it has a few bits to it. Tier 0 partners have to drop competitive products, AMD in this case, publicly badmouth AMD, and put out press releases/bang the publicity drum on the subject. The idea is to make it look like a grassroots problem that high-end gaming PC makers are all...

Logitech Readies G-Series Controller for iPhoneNow that Apple iOS 7 operating system officially supports various gaming accessories, expect both iPad and iPhone to gain various controllers and add-ons designed with games in mind. Apparently, Logitech is among the first to offer one of such devices for the iPhone. Logitech is reportedly working on a controller that basically transforms iPhone into a game console. @Evleaks has managed to publish the first photos/renderings of the first Logitech gamepad for the iPhone, which is expected to be unveiled in the coming weeks. The Logitech G-series controller for iPhone is a long block with a...

The controller offers two trackpads which provide "haptic" feedback capable of delivering various physical sensations to the player. Valve said it offers a better way to play games that have traditionally been controlled with a keyboard and mouse. Gamers have been invited test the device before it goes on sale in 2014. "Traditional gamepads force us to accept compromises," the company said via its announcement page. "We've made it a goal to improve upon the resolution and fidelity of input that's possible with those devices. "The Steam controller offers a new and, we believe, vastly superior control scheme, all while...

IoT to Generate Global Revenue of $8.9 Trillion by 2020 The Internet of Things (IoT) represents a new construct in the information and communications technology (ICT) world that is occupying the minds of IT vendors, service providers, and systems integrators as it represents huge potential for new streams of revenue and new customers. The ongoing development of smart cities, cars, and houses; enhanced connectivity infrastructure and increasingly connected culture are just some key enablers to the rise of IoT. In fact, Internet of Things is not something that is coming, but something that has already been partly implemented, but will...

By 2016, Nearly 50% of NAND Flash to Be Made Using 3D TechnologyWill look different too:With conventional semiconductor manufacturing technology soon to reach its limit in the NAND flash segment, suppliers of these memory chips are set to adopt 3D production techniques in order to boost the capacity of their devices.

Earlier this year Advanced Micro Devices generally confirmed plans to apply ARM architecture not only to special low-power microprocessors for servers, but also to consumer chips. According to a new rumour, the company is indeed preparing a chip designed mostly for tablets with ARMv8 general-purpose cores as well as AMD Radeon HD graphics engine. In order to be more successful on the market of media tablets, AMD is rumoured to be designing a system-on-chip with unknown number of ARM Cortex-A57 or A53 general-purpose cores as well as Radeon HD graphics engine based on GCN [graphics core next] architecture, reports SweClockers...

FPGAs, ASICs, and other high performance commercial applications will be targeted by next year at volume Today, vertical NAND (v-NAND) flash memory is in production and bumping storage densities in mobile devices to new highs.  Yet while many players -- including Samsung Electronics Comp., Ltd. (KSC:005930) -- are actively producing v-NAND, vertical DRAM -- stacked volatile memory -- remained unsampled until now. I. HMC -- 70 Percent Less Power, 8x the Transfer Rate of DDR4 Micron Technologies Inc. (MU) this week announced the industry's first stacked DRAM.  While Micron describes the stacked chips as a "hybrid memory cube" (HMC) (also known as vertical DRAM (v-DRAM), the...

It's been a long time coming, and Advanced Micro Devices definitely clamored about it wherever and whenever they could: The Hawaii graphics processing unit from the Volcanic Islands line is now out, and so is the Radeon R9 290X graphics card based on it.Hawaii is the first in a new collection of chips, the other two being Hawaii Pro and Hawaii XT, which will arrive around October. On that note, the first video card powered by the new chip, and the flagship graphics adapter for that matter, might not ship right away either. We'll know for sure after watching retailers...

Wrapping up our AMD product showcase coverage for the week, AMD’s final announcement for the showcase was a very brief announcement about a new API called Mantle. Mantle is something of an enigma at this point – AMD isn’t saying a whole lot until November with the AMD Developer Summit – and although it’s conceptually simple, the real challenge is trying to understand where it fits into AMD’s product strategy, and perhaps more importantly what brought them to this point in the first place. So although we don’t have all of the necessary details in hand quite yet, we wanted...

API inception of sorts AMD’s Hawaii even dragged on for hours and that is perhaps our only complaint – there was too much stuff, it was too damn long. For some reason AMD left the best for last. The consumerish stuff was shown off first, new cards, some audio tech and new games. But Mantle was for some reason reserved for the end of the presentation. So what’s the big deal about Mantle? Well AMD describes it as a low-level high-performance console-style graphics API for PC. That is a mouthful, but basically it is an API designed to tie in...

Give me Steam It looks like Valve’s announcement about its SteamOS has poked Nvidia and AMD to spruce up their Linux support. A day after Valve announced penguin flavoured SteamOS, AMD and Nvidia announced improvements to their driver support for the Linux. One of the things which prevented Linux from taking off in the gaming world, other than a lack of decent games, was a lack of drivers. AMD is active in the Linux community, but its open-source Linux drivers are not as good as its Windows drivers. It has been making efforts. It recently released 165 kernel patches...

AMD Introduces New Radeon R7 and R9 Graphics ProductsAdvanced Micro Devices on Wednesday introduced its all-new Radeon graphics cards as well as new family of graphics processing units. The new R9- and R7-series of GPUs -- which will be available at price-points from $89 to $599+ -- will not only improve performance, but will also introduce a set of new graphics, audio and compute-related capabilities. The new AMD Radeon R7 and R9 families of graphics chip feature three key pillars: AMD GCN architecture with tweaks that adds support for DirectX 11.2 application programming interface; AMD TrueAudio technology, a fully programmable...

********************************************************* Intel proves once and for all that PCs are not coming back IDF 2013: Rant - Dead and gone because that is what Intel wants for some reason I went to IDF this year hoping to find a reason that PCs weren’t doomed and came away knowing all key players are actively making things worse. The PC isn’t just in trouble, it is actively being destroyed because no one involved is interested in changing.Lets face it, the modern Windows 8 PC is a miserable experience, it is not a step forward from its predecessors in any measurable way but...

Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. has released three silicon-validated reference flows within the open innovation platform (OIP) that enable 16 FinFET systems-on-chip (SoC) designs and 3D chip stacking packages. Leading electronic design automation (EDA) vendors collaborated with TSMC to develop and validate all these flows through multiple silicon test vehicles. There are three reference flows.

Last month, the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration charted the 11,967 tropical cyclones that have occurred on Earth since records began. By colouring how many times any storm track overlapped another, certain patterns arise in the density of storms affecting a given area. Cyclone tracks overlapped the most in the western Pacific and Bay of Bengal. The frequency of track overlaps is much lower in the Western Hemisphere

Crucial Rolls-Out Mammoth 64GB DDR3 1333MHz Crucial on Thursday announced the 64GB LRDIMM (load-reduced dual-inline memory module) for new-generation servers. Load-reduced DIMMs enable users to populate more DIMMs per channel for up to twice the installed memory capacity of a server, which is crucial for new-generation servers that can feature twelve or more microprocessor cores per socket.The 64GB Crucial DDR3L LRDIMMs operates using 1.35V, unlike the 1.5V common in DDR3 RDIMMs, making the new module more energy-efficient and cost-effective, especially in large deployments. The modules work at 1333MHz clock-rate with CAS latency 9. These modules offer up to a 35%...

PengPod, a low-quantity Linux tablet vendor, released the PengPod 1040 tablet today that they claim will "transform the PC and Tablet world by merging both elegantly together to fit any lifestyle." But will it really pan out? The company claims their latest tablet will transform the PC and tablet worlds since it can effectively dual-boot between Android and Linaro/Ubuntu on ARM. This way, you can enjoy Android apps and then reboot and gain access to your normal Ubuntu (desktop-focused) apps -- not too different from Canonical's failed Ubuntu Edge campaign with a smart-phone dual-booting Ubuntu and Android. PengPod also...

IDF 2013: One tenth of power Intel has just announced Quark, a new SoC family that is just one fifth of Atom in size and uses one tenth of the power. This subatomic chip is intended for ubiquitous computing, from watches to washing machines and many medical devices that people can wear. Essentially companies such Intel wants to have as many computers possible in just about anything including headlights in your car. It creates new market and expands existing ones, hence all that hype about the internet of things.This might be Intel’s solution to a wearable computing like smart glasses,...

64-bit chip for iPhone 5S and iOS 7 In addition to the new 64-bit kernel iOS 7 as well as the iPhone 5S and the iPhone 5C, Apple has unveiled its new A7 SoC, which is actually the first consumer ARM-based SoC with 64-bit support.According to Apple, the new A7 SoC consists of over 1 billion transistors on a 102mm2 die, which is actually twice what they had in the A6 chip. The chip will feature 64-bit desktop-class architecture with a modern instruction set, twice the amount of general-purpose and floating-point registers.According to Apple, the new chip will be twice...