"We don't often talk about power supplies, but Intel's new ATX12VO spec — that's an 'O' for 'Oscar,' not a zero — will start appearing soon in pre-built PCs from OEMs and system integrators, and it represents a major change in PSU design," reports PC World.

"The ATX12VO spec removes voltage rails from the power supply, all in a bid to improve efficiency standards on the PC and meet stringent government regulations. But while the spec essentially removes +3.3-volt, +5-volt and -12-volt and +5-volt standby power from the PSU, they aren't going away — they're just moving to the motherboard. That's the other big change..."

Long-time Slashdot reader UnknowingFool explains: If those voltages are required, the motherboard is expected to supply it by converting 12V power. Removing those two rails will shrink the connector from 24 pin to 10 pin.

One of the main reasons is increased flexibility for future needs. That dependence on these separate rails has been reduced over time but current power supplies must dedicate a fixed amount to those rails. The example given is that a current 600W PS may only need 15% (90W) of total power dedicated to those rails but a decade ago may require 25% (150W). Switching to the MB supplying the power means more 12V power.

A benefit is power supplies will be cheaper to make and also more power efficient. With two fewer rails, there is fewer connectors and parts and power supply makers can focus on efficiency of just one rail.

Reliable Apple analyst Ming-Chi Kuo believes Apple will launch MacBook models with an all-new design in the second or third quarter of 2021, but did not indicate whether these will be Pro or Air models. As MacRumors points out, "The last significant redesign of the MacBook Pro occurred in October 2016, while the MacBook Air received a major redesign in October 2018." From the report: In a research note today, obtained by MacRumors, Kuo said Apple plans to launch MacBook models with its own custom processors in the fourth quarter of 2020 or the first quarter of 2021. Kuo did not indicate whether these will be MacBook Pro or MacBook Air models, or both, nor did he share any further details. Rumors have suggested that Apple is working on custom Arm-based processors that would allow it to transition away from its current MacBook processor supplier Intel, which has occasionally experienced delays with its chips. The company is also planning to launch new MacBooks with scissor keyboards in the second quarter of 2020.

A team of academics from universities across the world, along with vulnerability researchers from Bitdefender, today disclosed a new security flaw in Intel processors. From a report: Named Load Value Injection, or LVI for short, this is a new class of theoretical attacks against Intel CPUs. While the attack has been deemed only a theoretical threat, Intel has released firmware patches to mitigate attacks against current CPUs, and fixes will be deployed at the hardware (silicon design) level in future generations.

Security researchers say that a bug in one of Intel's CPU technologies that was patched last year is actually much worse than previously thought. From a report: "Most Intel chipsets released in the last five years contain the vulnerability in question," said Positive Technologies in a report published today. Attacks are impossible to detect, and a firmware patch only partially fixes the problem. To protect devices that handle sensitive operations, researchers recommend replacing CPUs with versions that are not impacted by this bug. Only the latest Intel 10th generation chips are not vulnerable, researchers said. The actual vulnerability is tracked as CVE-2019-0090, and it impacts the Intel Converged Security and Management Engine (CSME), formerly called the Intel Management Engine BIOS Extension (Intel MEBx).

Ampere has unveiled the industry's first 80-core ARM-based 64-bit server processor today in a bid to outdo Intel and Advanced Micro Devices in datacenter chips. From a report: Ampere announced today that it has begun providing samples of the Ampere Altra processor for modern cloud and edge computing datacenters. The Ampere Altra processor runs on 210 watts and is targeted at such server applications as data analytics, artificial intelligence, database, storage, telco stacks, edge computing, web hosting, and cloud-native applications. Intel dominates about 95.5% of the server chip market with its x86-based processors, and AMD has the rest. But Ampere is targeting power-efficient, high-performance, and high-memory capacity features. Renee James, former president of Intel and CEO of Ampere, said in an interview with VentureBeat that the chip is faster than a 64-core AMD Epyc processor and Intel's 28-core high-end Xeon "Cascade Lake" chip.

Gordon Moore's 1965 forecast that the number of components on an integrated circuit would double every year until it reached an astonishing 65,000 by 1975 is the greatest technological prediction of the last half-century. When it proved correct in 1975, he revised what has become known as Moore's Law to a doubling of transistors on a chip every two years. Since then, his prediction has defined the trajectory of technology and, in many ways, of progress itself. Moore's argument was an economic one. It was a beautiful bargain -- in theory, the more transistors you added to an integrated circuit, the cheaper each one got. Moore also saw that there was plenty of room for engineering advances to increase the number of transistors you could affordably and reliably put on a chip.

Almost every technology we care about, from smartphones to cheap laptops to GPS, is a direct reflection of Moore's prediction. It has also fueled today's breakthroughs in artificial intelligence and genetic medicine, by giving machine-learning techniques the ability to chew through massive amounts of data to find answers. But what happens when Moore's Law inevitably ends? Or what if, as some suspect, it has already died, and we are already running on the fumes of the greatest technology engine of our time?

VCs have given nearly half a billion dollars to a stealth startup called SambaNova Systems to build "a new kind of computer to replace the typical Von Neumann machines expressed in processors from Intel and AMD, and graphics chips from Nvidia."

ZDNet reports: The last thirty years in computing, said CEO Rodrigo Liang, have been "focused on instructions and operations, in terms of what you optimize for. The next five, to ten, to twenty years, large amounts of data and how it flows through a system is really what's going to drive performance." It's not just a novel computer chip, said Liang, rather, "we are focused on the complete system," he told ZDNet. "To really provide a fundamental shift in computing, you have to obviously provide a new piece of silicon at the core, but you have to build the entire system, to integrate across several layers of hardware and software...."

[One approach to training neural networks with very little labeled data] is part of the shift of computer programming from hard-coded to differentiable, in which code is learned on the fly, commonly referred to as "software 2.0." Liang's co-founders include Stanford professor Kunle Olukotun, who says a programmable logic device similar to a field-programmable gate array could change its shape over and over to align its circuitry [to] that differentiated program, with the help of a smart compiler such as Spatial. [Spatial is "a computing language that can take programs and de-compose them into operations that can be run in parallel, for the purpose of making chips that can be 'reconfigurable,' able to change their circuitry on the fly."]

In an interview in his office last spring, Olukotun laid out a sketch of how all that might come together. In what he refers to as a "data flow," the computing paradigm is turned inside-out. Rather than stuffing a program's instructions into a fixed set of logic gates permanently etched into the processor, the processor re-arranges its circuits, perhaps every clock cycle, to variably manipulate large amounts of data that "flows" through the chip.... Today's chips execute instructions in an instruction "pipeline" that is fixed, he observed, "whereas in this reconfigurable data-flow architecture, it's not instructions that are flowing down the pipeline, it's data that's flowing down the pipeline, and the instructions are the configuration of the hardware that exists in place.

"Intel's security plans sound a lot like 'we're going to catch up to AMD,'" argues FOSS advocate and "mercenary sysadmin" Jim Salter at Ars Technica, citing a "present-and-future" presentation by Anil Rao and Scott Woodgate at Intel's Security Day that promised a future with Full Memory Encryption but began with Intel SGX (launched with the Skylake microarchitecture in 2015).

Salter describes SGX as "one of the first hardware encryption technologies designed to protect areas of memory from unauthorized users, up to and including the system administrators themselves." SGX is a set of x86_64 CPU instructions which allows a process to create an "enclave" within memory which is hardware encrypted. Data stored in the encrypted enclave is only decrypted within the CPU -- and even then, it is only decrypted at the request of instructions executed from within the enclave itself. As a result, even someone with root (system administrator) access to the running system can't usefully read or alter SGX-protected enclaves. This is intended to allow confidential, high-stakes data processing to be safely possible on shared systems -- such as cloud VM hosts. Enabling this kind of workload to move out of locally owned-and-operated data centers and into massive-scale public clouds allows for less expensive operation as well as potentially better uptime, scalability, and even lower power consumption.

Intel's SGX has several problems. The first and most obvious is that it is proprietary and vendor-specific -- if you design an application to utilize SGX to protect its memory, that application will only run on Intel processors... Finally, there are potentially severe performance impacts to utilization of SGX. IBM's Danny Harnik tested SGX performance fairly extensively in 2017, and he found that many common workloads could easily see a throughput decrease of 20 to 50 percent when executed inside SGX enclaves. Harnik's testing wasn't 100 percent perfect, as he himself made clear -- in particular, in some cases his compiler seemed to produce less-optimized code with SGX than it had without. Even if one decides to handwave those cases as "probably fixable," they serve to highlight an earlier complaint -- the need to carefully develop applications specifically for SGX use cases, not merely flip a hypothetical "yes, encrypt this please" switch....

After discussing real-world use of SGX, Rao moved on to future Intel technologies -- specifically, full-memory encryption. Intel refers to its version of full-memory encryption as TME (Total Memory Encryption) or MKTME (Multi-Key Total Memory Encryption). Unfortunately, those features are vaporware for the moment. Although Intel submitted an enormous Linux kernel patchset last May for enabling those features, there are still no real-world processors that offer them... This is probably a difficult time to give exciting presentations on Intel's security roadmap. Speculative prediction vulnerabilities have hurt Intel's processors considerably more than their competitors', and the company has been beaten significantly to market by faster, easier-to-use hardware memory encryption technologies as well. Rao and Woodgate put a brave face on things by talking up how SGX has been and is being used in Azure. But it seems apparent that the systemwide approach to memory encryption already implemented in AMD's Epyc CPUs -- and even in some of their desktop line -- will have a far greater lasting impact.

Intel's slides about their own upcoming full memory encryption are labeled "innovations," but they look a lot more like catching up to their already-established competition.

Ming-Chi Kuo is out with a new analyst note today and the most interesting part of his forecast is that Apple will release its first Mac with an ARM processor in the first half of 2021. From a report: Kuo is predicting that one of Apple's new products to be released within the next 12-18 months will be a Mac with an in-house processor, instead of using an Intel CPU. There have been growing reports over the last couple of years about Apple making the switch to a custom-designed ARM processor for its Macs and today's report gives a concrete timeframe for when to expect that launch, which has actually held true since Kuo's prediction back in 2018. Since the coronavirus outbreak, Kuo highlights that Apple has been "more aggressive" with its funding for research, development, and production of 5nm process chips that are expected to show up in the first Macs with ARM CPUs. That's because 5nm chips will be integral to iPhone, iPad later this year, as well as Macs come 2021.

Intel's sale of its consumer 5G modem unit signaled its exit from the smartphone business last year, but the company remains heavily committed to participating in the growing 5G marketplace -- primarily on the carrier and enterprise sides. Today, the company announced three chips built for various types of 5G computers, plus a 5G-optimized network adapter for PCs. From a report: Up first is an updated second-generation Xeon Scalable processor, now at a top speed of 3.9GHz and bolstered by additional AI capabilities to aid with inference applications. The new chip promises up to 36% more performance than the first-generation version, with up to 42% more performance per dollar, though early second-generation chips were introduced in April 2019. Intel says the Xeon Scalable is the "only CPU with AI built in" -- a pitch that's not exactly accurate, given the range of existing laptop and mobile CPUs with AI features, but one Intel further explains means "the only CPU on the market that features integrated deep learning acceleration." Xeon Scalable's Deep Learning Boost feature set promises up to 6 times more AI performance than AMD's Rome processors, though Intel won't quantify the number of TOPS available for AI processing, calling the metric "theoretical." Regardless, Intel says Xeon Scalable will support the cloud AI needs of Alibaba, AWS, Baidu, Microsoft, and Tencent, as well as other major companies.

Network-optimized "N-SKUs" of the new Xeon Scalable will also be available, offering up to 58% more performance for network function virtualization workloads compared with the first chip. Customers such as China Mobile, SK Telecom, Sprint, and T-Mobile Poland are all using Xeon Scalable in their 5G networks. The boosted Xeon Scalable chips are officially available starting today. Intel is also introducing the Atom P5900, billed as the first Intel architecture SoC for base stations and designed from the ground up for radio access network (RAN) needs. It's a 10-nanometer chip with hardware-based network acceleration features, including integrated packet processing, ultra low latency, and a switch for inline cryptographic acceleration.

Personal information from more than 10.6 million people was published online this week, reports ZDNet -- all from people who'd stayed at MGM Resorts hotels (which include the Bellagio, Mandalay Bay, and ARIA): Besides details for regular tourists and travelers, included in the leaked files are also personal and contact details for celebrities, tech CEOs, reporters, government officials, and employees at some of the world's largest tech companies. ZDNet verified the authenticity of the data today, together with a security researcher from Under the Breach, a soon-to-be-launched data breach monitoring service. A spokesperson for MGM Resorts confirmed the incident via email.

According to our analysis, the MGM data dump that was shared today contains personal details for 10,683,188 former hotel guests. Included in the leaked files are personal details such as full names, home addresses, phone numbers, emails, and dates of birth... These users now face a higher risk of receiving spear-phishing emails, and being SIM swapped, Under the Breach told ZDNet.

Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey, pop star Justin Bieber, and DHS and TSA officials are some of the big names Under the Breach spotted in the leaked files.
While the data appears to be several years old, Irina Nesterovsky, Head of Research at threat intel firm KELA, tells ZDNet that the data has been shared in "hacking forums" since last July. MGM blames the breach on "unauthorized access to a cloud server" last summer -- pointing out that at least no credit card information was stolen, and that they notified all affected customers.

But NBC News "spoke to a man with a Secret Service email address who was surprised to learn that he had been hacked. He said MGM never notified him about to breach."

MGM told ZDNet that "we take our responsibility to protect guest data very seriously, and we have strengthened and enhanced the security of our network to prevent this from happening again."

em1ly writes: Spin bike maker Flywheel lost a patent lawsuit to rival company Peloton, announcing yesterday that it's shutting down. Motherboard uncovered some wild corporate espionage in the court documents: "At some point before the launch of FLY Anywhere, according to Peloton's lawyers, Flywheel launched 'Project Magnum,' an attempt to 'obtain as MUCH secret intel on Peloton as we can,' according to an improperly redacted document Peloton filed in court. 'Project Magnum was not some extemporaneous side-project [...] but rather a concerted, widespread effort,' one of Peloton's filings adds.

But Project Magnum was, apparently, more haphazard than spy operation. Flywheel created a Google Doc to 'create tabs with the functional areas of info so that the team know[s] to keep adding to it,' one of the documents reads. Much of the conspiracy seems to have taken place over email, judging by discovery that Peloton obtained. Someone at Flywheel named the project after the Magnum PI television series, one of the court documents adds, although the filing does not include the individual's name. The filings do not go into detail on how Flywheel apparently tried to obtain Peloton's secrets, but they do include contours of the project. In a message seemingly written by a former Flywheel CTO who now works at Facebook, he wrote 'Villency could be useful in providing insight related to Project Magnum.' Eric Villency, and his company Villency Design Group, designed the Peloton and SoulCycle stationary bikes..."

At the International Solid State Circuits Conference, which runs through this week in San Francisco, Intel and QuTech -- a partnership between Delft University of Technology and TNO (Netherlands Organization for Applied Scientific Research) -- are unveiling the technical designs for a first-of-its-kind cryogenic control chip for quantum computing, which they call Horse Ridge. From a report: Intel Labs and QuTech researchers outlined the technical features of the new cryogenic quantum control chip in a research paper. They designed the scalable system-on-chip (SOC) to operate at cryogenic temperatures, simplifying the control electronics and interconnects required to elegantly scale and operate large quantum computing systems. Horse Ridge addresses fundamental challenges in building a quantum system powerful enough to demonstrate quantum practicality -- scalability, flexibility, and fidelity.

The challenge of quantum computing is that right now, it only really works at near-freezing temperatures. Intel is trying to change that, but the control chip is a step toward enabling control at very low temperatures, as it eliminates hundreds of wires going into a refrigerated case that houses the quantum computer. Currently, quantum researchers are working with just a small number of qubits, or quantum bits, using smaller, custom-designed systems surrounded by complex control and interconnect mechanisms. Intel's Horse Ridge greatly minimizes this complexity.

As Wall Street approaches the 20th anniversary of the piercing of the dot-com bubble, today's decade-old rally led by a few small players shows some similarities that cautious investors are keeping an eye on. From a report: March 11, 2000 marked the beginning of a crash of overly-inflated stocks that would last over two years, lead to the failure of investor favorites including Worldcom and Pets.com and take over 13 years for Wall Street to recover from. That bust ended a 1,000% decade-long Nasdaq .IXIC rally that had been fueled by low interest rates and a rush to invest in the emerging World Wide Web, often at any cost. Now, after hitting a record high on Feb. 13, the Nasdaq has reached over 9,700 points, almost double its high point in 2000 and about eight times the level of its trough in 2002. Among the so-called "Four Horsemen" of tech stocks that fueled much of the 1990s tech rally, only Microsoft's stock price has recovered from the dot-com bust. Intel and Cisco Systems remain below their 2000 highs, while Dell, the fourth member, has since been taken private and then relisted on the stock market.

Microsoft is dueling with Apple for the title of Wall Street's most valuable publicly listed company, with its stock quadrupling since CEO Satya Nadella took over as chief in 2014 and refocused the maker of Windows on cloud computing, a technology central to the current rally in Silicon Valley stocks. With a market capitalization of $1.4 trillion, Microsoft is now trading at over 30 times expected earnings, its highest valuation since 2002, but still less than half of the highest PE it reached during the dot-com era. Intel and Cisco, no longer among Wall Street's most-favored tech stocks after investors refocused on software, are trading at PEs in line with recent years. Further reading: NYU Professor Scott Galloway adds: In the last 13 months Apple and Amazon have added Disney, AT&T/Time Warner, Fox, Netflix, Comcast, Viacom, MGM, Discovery, and Lionsgate to their market capitalization.

Dell said it will sell RSA to a consortium led by Symphony Technology Group for $2.075 billion in a move to simplify its portfolio of businesses. From a report: RSA provides security technologies for threat detection and response, identity and access management as well as fraud prevention. RSA has more than 12,500 customers. According to Dell, the all-cash deal includes RSA Archer, RSA NetWitness Platform, RSA SecureID, RSA Fraud and Risk Intelligence and the RSA Conference. The Symphony Technology Group consortium includes the Ontario Teachers' Pension Plan Board (Ontario Teachers') and AlpInvest Partners (AlpInvest). Dell's deal to sell RSA comes as Broadcom acquired Symantec Enterprise Security business for $10.7 billion and Symantec's consumer unit became NortonLifelock. McAfee, formerly part of Intel, is now independent with a new CEO.

An anonymous reader shares a report: The Intel Core i5-8210Y delivers a multi-core score of 1544 which compares poorly with the Qualcomm Snapdragon 8cx multi-core score of 2745. Yet, despite fitting the MacBook Air with a 49.9 Wh battery, Apple claims it will deliver just 13 hours of continuous video playback. However, because of the superior performance-per-watt of the Snapdragon 8cx when paired with the smaller 42 Wh battery in the Galaxy Book S, it delivers up to 25 hours (claimed) of continuous video playback. You can probably also argue that Microsoft has done an excellent job of optimizing Windows on ARM so that it works so harmoniously in this WinARM union. The MacBook Air weighs 1.25 kg (2.75 pounds) and is 15.6 mm (0.61-inches) at its thickest point. This compares with the Galaxy Book S which weighs 0.96 kg (2.11 pounds) and measures 11.8 mm (0.46-inches). Given that buyers of the slightly more expensive MacBook Air (US$1,099) are also only going to be doing relatively light-weight tasks on it like internet browsing and running Microsoft's Office suite on it, why would anyone choose the MacBook Air over the Galaxy Book S (US$999)? Like the MacBook Air, the Galaxy Book S runs its operating system, pre-installed apps and the Office suite natively while also giving users the option to use 32-bit x86 apps for those occasions where you might want to use other apps.

An anonymous reader quotes TechRadar: Intel's Clear Linux distribution looks like it could be the best operating system to run on cheap AMD hardware, with benchmarks showing it outperforms Windows 10 and Ubuntu on a $199 laptop with a budget AMD Ryzen 3200U processor. The Phoronix website ran a series of benchmarks on a super-cheap AMD laptop from Walmart, and found that Intel Clear Linux beat popular Linux distros Fedora and Ubuntu for 78% of the tests.

Not only is it remarkable that a relatively unknown Linux distro is so easily outperforming established operating systems, the fact that Intel is the company behind the distro is particularly ironic. As you can imagine, Clear Linux is optimized for Intel processors, but it seems like it works brilliantly on AMD hardware as well.

MojoKid writes: In January at CES 2020 in Las Vegas, AMD CEO Dr. Lisa Su took to the stage during a press conference and revealed the company's forthcoming Ryzen Threadripper 3990X 64-core processor. Dr. Su disclosed the 3990X's speeds and feeds and showed the beastly chip taking down a pair of 28-core Xeons worth about $20K, in a 3D rendering benchmark, despite its much smaller price tag. Today, however, the company has lifted the veil on full details of the chip as well as its complete performance profile across a myriad of benchmarks, fresh off embargo lift. Thought it's packing 64 cores capable of processing 128 threads in SMT, the 3990X's TDP is still rated at 280W when it's configured at stock frequencies (2.9GHz base / 4.3GHz boost). As you might expect, Ryzen Threadripper 3990X was an absolute beast all of the multi-threaded tests that scale properly to leverage all of its cores. In fact, Threadripper 3990X stands head and shoulders above every other desktop processor on the market currently, besting competing many-core Intel solutions by more than 2X in some cases. However, because Threadripper 3990X has relatively high clocks for such a high core count chip, it also offers relatively strong performance for day-to-day use cases in lightly threaded workloads and gaming as well. There's no question, at $3990 MSRP, AMD's Threadripper 3990X isn't a mainstream desktop chip, but for those who need serious workstation performance and throughput, nothing on the desktop even comes close right now.

MojoKid writes: When AMD unveiled its forthcoming Ryzen Threadripper 3990X 64-core processor at CES 2020 this year, the company made no bones about comparing its performance to a many-core competitive platform from Intel. Under the hood of the yet formally released high-end workstation AMD chip are 64 physical cores capable of processing 128 threads in SMT, with a 2.9GHz base clock, 4.3GHz boost clock, and 256MB of L3 cache. All that horsepower resides in a single TRX40 socket with a 280 Watt TDP for a suggested retail price of $3990. Conversely, a dual socket Intel Xeon Scalable Platinum 8280 setup will sport 56 cores across two sockets with over a 400 Watt TDP that costs around $20,000. At CES, AMD showed its new 64-core Threadripper beating the dual Xeon Platinum setup in a 3D rendering application called VRAY, and today additional benchmark numbers have surfaced in SiSoft SANDRA, showing Threadripper 3990X out-scoring the Intel setup by around 18 percent. No doubt, AMD's Threadripper 3900X isn't a CPU for the average mainstream desktop user, but when the chips arrive to market in the near future, workstation and content creation professionals will likely be all over AMD's new 64-core beast chip.

Phoronix's Michael Larabel is doing some performance testing on Walmart's $199 Motile-branded M141 laptop (which has an AMD Ryzen 3 3200U processor, Vega 3 graphics, 4GB of RAM, and a 14-inch 1080p display).

But first he compared the performance of its pre-installed Windows 10 OS against the forthcoming Ubuntu 20.04 LTS Linux distribution.

Some highlights: - Java text rendering performance did come out much faster on Ubuntu 20.04 with this Ryzen 3 3200U laptop...

- The GraphicsMagick imaging program tended to run much better on Linux, which we've seen on other systems in the past as well.

- Intel's Embree path-tracer was running faster on Ubuntu...

- Various video benchmarks were generally favoring Ubuntu for better performance though I wouldn't recommend much in the way of video encoding from such a low-end device...

- The GIMP image editing software was running much faster on Ubuntu 20.04 in its development state than GIMP 2.10 on Windows 10...

- Python 3 performance is still much faster on Linux than Windows.

- If planning to do any web/LAMP development from the budget laptop and testing PHP scripts locally, Ubuntu's PHP7 performance continues running much stronger than Windows 10. - Git also continues running much faster on Linux.
Their conclusion? "Out of 63 tests ran on both operating systems, Ubuntu 20.04 was the fastest... coming in front 60% of the time." (This sounds like 38 wins for Ubuntu versus 25 wins for Windows 10.)

"If taking the geometric mean of all 63 tests, the Motile $199 laptop with Ryzen 3 3200U was 15% faster on Ubuntu Linux over Windows 10."