Now that Apple's lost item finder AirTag has officially been introduced, competitor Tile is going on record ahead of its testimony in front of Congress tomorrow about how it perceives Apple's latest product. In a statement, Tile CEO CJ Prober said today: "Our mission is to solve the everyday pain point of finding lost and misplaced things and we are flattered to see Apple, one of the most valuable companies in the world, enter and validate the category Tile pioneered. The reason so many people turn to Tile to locate their lost or misplaced items is because of the differentiated value we offer our consumers. In addition to providing an industry leading set of features via our app that works with iOS and Android devices, our service is seamlessly integrated with all major voice assistants, including Alexa and Google. And with form factors for every use case and many different styles at affordable prices, there is a Tile for everyone.

Tile has also successfully partnered with top brands like HP, Intel, Skullcandy and fitbit to enable our finding technology in mass market consumer categories like laptops, earbuds and wearables. With over 30 partners, we look forward to extending the benefits of Tile to millions of customers and enabling an experience that helps you keep track of all your important belongings. We welcome competition, as long as it is fair competition. Unfortunately, given Apple's well-documented history of using its platform advantage to unfairly limit competition for its products, we're skeptical. And given our prior history with Apple, we think it is entirely appropriate for Congress to take a closer look at Apple's business practices specific to its entry into this category. We welcome the opportunity to discuss these issues further in front of Congress tomorrow.

"FreeBSD, the other Linux, reached version 13," writes long-time Slashdot reader undoman. "The operating system is known for its stable code, native ZFS support, and use of the more liberal BSD licenses." Phoronix highlights some of the major new improvements: FreeBSD 13.0 delivers on performance improvements (particularly for Intel CPUs we've seen in benchmarks thanks to hardware P-States), upgrading to LLVM Clang 11 as the default compiler toolchain, POWER 64-bit support improvements, a wide variety of networking improvements, 64-bit ARM (AArch64) now being a tier-one architecture alongside x86_64, EFI boot improvements, AES-NI is now included by default for generic kernel builds, the default CPU support for i386 is bumped to i686 from i486, and a variety of other hardware support improvements. Various obsolete GNU tools have been removed like an old version of GNU Debugger used for crashinfo, obsolete GCC 4.2.1 and Binutils 2.17 were dropped from the main tree, and also switching to a BSD version of grep. The release announcement can be found here.

A federal judge tossed a $506.2 million damages award against Apple after ruling the iPhone maker should have been able to argue that patent owner Optis Wireless Technology was making unfair royalty demands, though he refused to throw out the liability finding. From a report: Optis and its partners in the case, PanOptis Patent Management and Unwired Planet, claimed that Apple's smartphones, watches, and tablets that operate over the LTE cellular standard were using its patented technology. U.S. District Court Judge Rodney Gilstrap said the jury should have been allowed to consider whether the royalty demand was consistent with a requirement that standard-essential patents be licensed on "fair, reasonable and non-discriminatory," or FRAND, terms. The patent trial in August, one of the few held during the pandemic, was part of an unusual sweep of verdicts in Texas that collectively resulted in $3.7 billion in damages against tech companies like Apple and Intel Corp. Apple was also hit with damages awards of $502.8 million in a decade-long battle over security communications technology, and $308.5 million in a case over digital rights management.

How many years will the ongoing chip shortage affect technology firms across the world? This week, multiple tech executives offered their own dismal estimates as part of their usual public financial disclosures, with the worst one coming in at "a couple of years." From a report: That nasty estimate comes from Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger, who offered that vague timeframe to The Washington Post in an interview on Tuesday. He clarified that was an estimate for how long it would take the company to "build capacity" to potentially address supply shortages. The conversation came as Intel offered to step up for two supply chains particularly pinched by the silicon drought: medical supplies and in-car computer systems.

In previous statements, Gelsinger pointed to Intel's current $20 billion plan to build a pair of factories in Arizona, and this week's interview added praise for President Joe Biden's proposed $50 billion chip-production infrastructure plan -- though Gelsinger indicated that Biden should be ready to spend more than that. TSMC CEO C.C. Wei offered a similarly dire estimate to investors on Thursday, saying that the Taiwan-based company hoped to "offer more capacity" for meeting retail and manufacturing demand "in 2023." TSMC, coincidentally, is moving forward with a manufacturing plant of its own in Arizona, which Bloomberg claims could cost "up to $12 billion," despite the company clarifying that it intends to prioritize research, development, and production in its home nation.

Parallels today announced the release of Parallels Desktop 16.5 for Mac with full support for M1 Macs, allowing for the Windows 10 ARM Insider Preview and ARM-based Linux distributions to be run in a virtual machine at native speeds on M1 Macs. From a report: Parallels says running a Windows 10 ARM Insider Preview virtual machine natively on an M1 Mac results in up to 30 percent better performance compared to a 2019 model 15-inch MacBook Pro with an Intel Core i9 processor, 32GB of RAM, and Radeon Pro Vega 20 graphics. Parallels also indicates that on an M1 Mac, Parallels Desktop 16.5 uses 2.5x less energy than on the latest Intel-based MacBook Air. Microsoft does not yet offer a retail version of ARM-based Windows, with the Windows 10 ARM Insider Preview available on Microsoft's website for Windows Insider program members. The ability to run macOS Big Sur in a virtual machine is a feature that Parallels hopes to add support for in Parallels Desktop later this year as well.

Huawei has blamed the U.S. for the chip crunch rocking the global tech industry, saying Washington's sanctions against Chinese companies have spurred panic buying of semiconductors and other supplies. From a report: "Because of the U.S. sanctions against Huawei, we have seen panic stockpiling among global companies, especially the Chinese ones. In the past, companies were barely stockpiling, but now they are building up three or six months' worth of inventory ... and that has disrupted the whole system," Rotating Chairman Eric Xu said at the company's 18th Huawei Analyst Summit. The U.S. has placed Huawei and other Chinese tech companies on trade blacklists that restrict their access to American technology, citing national security risks. "Clearly the unwarranted U.S. sanctions against Huawei and other [Chinese] companies are creating an industry-wide supply shortage, and this could even trigger a new global economic crisis," Xu added. Xu's remarks come hours before the White House plans to host a summit aimed at addressing the chip shortage, with an emphasis on its impact on the automotive industry. Dozens of executives from U.S., Asian and European tech companies and automakers -- including General Motors, Ford, Google, Intel, Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co., Samsung Electronics, and NXP -- are slated to attend the event. White House officials have already acknowledged that the chip shortage may be difficult to solve in the short term.

Microsoft on Tuesday announced a new 2021 Surface Laptop, called the Surface Laptop 4. The new version adds 11th-gen Intel Core processors, paired with Intel Iris XE graphics. There's also an AMD processor option -- Zen 2 series -- with a graphics chip called AMD Radeon Graphics Microsoft Surface Edition. From a report: For all the buzz Microsoft's Surface tablets get, I've always thought the Surface Laptop was actually Microsoft's secret weapon. Since Surface Laptop debuted in 2017, it's been a strong contender for the best all-purpose slim Windows laptop. But plenty of companies offer 13-inch-class slim laptops, all hoping to be the Windows version of Apple's ubiquitous MacBook Air. (Microsoft also introduced a 15-inch version in 2019.) Microsoft says the Surface Laptop has the Surface line's highest level of customer satisfaction. Besides simply working well and being stylish and easy to use, the Surface Laptop was frequently on sale at very reasonable prices, making it a great way to get a rock-solid clamshell laptop for not much money. Shortly before the Surface Laptop 4 preorders went live, you could still order a Core i5 13-inch Surface Laptop 3 (with 8GB RAM and a 128GB SSD) for $769, or $899 for a 256GB SSD.

Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger called Monday for the U.S. to spend billions of dollars over the next few years as part of a "moonshot" designed to regain lost ground in semiconductor manufacturing. The goal, he said, is to see the U.S. again account for a third of global output, up from about 12% today. From a report: Investments made now will take several years to bear fruit, so they won't do much to ease the current semiconductor shortage, but are vital to America's long-term economic future and national security, Gelsinger told Axios on Monday. The White House met with tech leaders in a virtual summit on Monday discussing the need for investment in chip manufacturing. With demand for broad categories of chips exceeding supply, makers of everything from cars to computers and networking gear are having to slow factories and cut output. Automakers have been hit especially hard. At the very leading edge, the vast majority of chip production today is done in Taiwan, an island that remains imperiled by China's longstanding claims. "I would argue the most important building block for our economic livelihood and every aspect of human life is now increasingly not in our control," Gelsinger told Axios in an interview after the White House meeting.

Mobileye, the company that specializes in chips for vision-based autonomous vehicles, announced that it will launch a full-scale, fully driverless delivery service starting in 2023. The company, a subsidiary of Intel, is joining forces with self-driving delivery startup Udelv to run this new service. From a report: Deliveries will be made using a new type of cabin-less vehicle called The Transporter. While manufacturing plans are still in flux, Mobileye and Udelv say they will produce 35,000 Transporters between 2023-2028 -- a signal of their seriousness to launch a driverless delivery system at scale. "This is a real commercial deployment," Jack Weast, vice president of automated vehicle standards at Mobileye, told The Verge. "Thirty-five thousand units starting in 2023 that will fully integrate our self driving system for commercial use for automated goods delivery." Mobileye's turn-key self-driving system features a full-sensor suite of 13 cameras, three long-range LiDARs, six short-range LiDARs, and six radar. It also includes the Israeli company's EyeQ system-on-a-chip and a data crowdsourcing program called the Road Experience Management, or REM, which uses real-time data from Mobileye-equipped vehicles to build out a global 3D map.

Huawei will invest $1 billion on researching self-driving and electric-car technologies, accelerating plans to compete with Tesla and Xiaomi in the world's biggest vehicle arena. From a report: Huawei's autonomous-driving technology has already surpassed Tesla's in some spheres, for instance by allowing cars to cruise for more than 1,000 kilometers (621 miles) without human intervention, Rotating Chairman Eric Xu told analysts in Shenzhen Monday. The Chinese telecom giant will partner with three automakers initially to make self-driving cars that carry the Huawei name as a sub-brand, said Xu, one of three executives who take turns to fill the post. It will keep its circle of partners small and get its logo onto cars -- not unlike how Intel calls attention to its microprocessors on PCs -- that adopt its autonomous driving technology, he added. The mobile giant has so far agreed to team up with BAIC Group, Chongqing Changan Automobile and Guangzhou Automobile Group.

Nvidia said it's offering the company's first server microprocessors, extending a push into Intel's most lucrative market with a chip aimed at handling the most complicated computing work. Intel shares fell more than 2% on the news. From a report: The graphics chipmaker has designed a central processing unit, or CPU, based on technology from Arm, a company it's trying to acquire from Japan's SoftBank Group. The Swiss National Supercomputing Centre and U.S. Department of Energy's Los Alamos National Laboratory will be the first to use the chips in their computers, Nvidia said Monday at an online event. Nvidia has focused mainly on graphics processing units, or GPUs, which are used to power video games and data-heavy computing tasks in data centers. CPUs, by contrast, are a type of chip that's more of a generalist and can do basic tasks like running operating systems. Expanding into this product category opens up more revenue opportunities for Nvidia.

Founder and Chief Executive Officer Jensen Huang has made Nvidia the most valuable U.S. chipmaker by delivering on his promise to give graphics chips a major role in the explosion in cloud computing. Data center revenue contributes about 40% of the company's sales, up from less than 7% just five years ago. Intel still has more than 90% of the market in server processors, which can sell for more than $10,000 each. The CPU, named Grace after the late pioneering computer scientist Grace Hopper, is designed to work closely with Nvidia graphics chips to better handle new computing problems that will come with a trillion parameters. Systems working with the new chip will be 10 times faster than those currently using a combination of Nvidia graphics chips and Intel CPUs. The new product will be available at the beginning of 2023, Nvidia said.

smooth wombat writes: Chuang Cheng-deng's modest rice farm is a stone's throw from the nerve center of Taiwan's computer chip industry, whose products power a huge share of the world's iPhones and other gadgets. This year, Mr. Chuang is paying the price for his high-tech neighbors' economic importance. Gripped by drought and scrambling to save water for homes and factories, Taiwan has shut off irrigation across tens of thousands of acres of farmland. The authorities are compensating growers for the lost income. But Mr. Chuang, 55, worries that the thwarted harvest will drive customers to seek out other suppliers, which could mean years of depressed earnings. "The government is using money to seal farmers' mouths shut," he said, surveying his parched brown fields.

Officials are calling the drought Taiwan's worst in more than half a century. And it is exposing the enormous challenges involved in hosting the island's semiconductor industry, which is an increasingly indispensable node in the global supply chains for smartphones, cars and other keystones of modern life. Chip makers use lots of water to clean their factories and wafers, the thin slices of silicon that form the basis of the chips. And with worldwide semiconductor supplies already strained by surging demand for electronics, the added uncertainty about Taiwan's water supply is not likely to ease concerns about the tech world's reliance on the island and on one chip maker in particular: Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company.

More than 90 percent of the worldâ(TM)s manufacturing capacity for the most advanced chips is in Taiwan and run by TSMC, which makes chips for Apple, Intel and other big names. The company said last week that it would invest $100 billion over the next three years to increase capacity, which will likely further strengthen its commanding presence in the market. TSMC says the drought has not affected its production so far. But with Taiwan's rainfall becoming no more predictable even as its tech industry grows, the island is having to go to greater and greater lengths to keep the water flowing. In recent months, the government has flown planes and burned chemicals to seed the clouds above reservoirs. It has built a seawater desalination plant in Hsinchu, home to TSMC's headquarters, and a pipeline connecting the city with the rainier north. It has ordered industries to cut use. In some places it has reduced water pressure and begun shutting off supplies for two days each week. Some companies, including TSMC, have hauled in truckloads of water from other areas.

MojoKid writes: The new 13-inch ThinkPad X1 Nano is the thinnest and lightest Lenovo ThinkPad ever in the brand's history. The machine weighs just 1.99 pounds (907 grams), while still sporting a fairly powerful Intel Core i7-1160G7 Tiger Lake quad-core CPU, up to a 1TB NVMe SSD, 16GB of 4267MHz LPDDR4X RAM and a 48 Whr battery. In the benchmarks, the machine holds its own for productivity and content creation tasks as well as a bit of light-duty gaming, versus heavier machines in its peer group. In terms of battery life, the new ThinkPad X1 Nano hangs pretty tough as well, offering about 7.5 hours of constant use up-time with HD video playback. With its 2K (2160X1350 -- 16:10) IPS Dolby Vision-certified display and top tier configuration, it doesn't come cheap, as you might imagine. The ThinkPad X1 Nano has a current starting price of $1,289 and tops out at $2,231 for its most powerful configuration with 1TB of fast SSD storage. Regardless, it's impressive what the machine can deliver in terms of features and performance in its weight class.

Intel is launching an artificial intelligence application that will recognize and redact hate speech in real-time. It's called Bleep, and Intel hopes it'll help with one of gaming's oldest and most intractable problems -- people can be real pieces of shit online. From a report: A video of the app shows that it will allow users to customize what kind and how much hate speech they want to see, including "Racism" and "White Nationalism" sliders that can be set to "none," "some," "most," or "all," and a separate on and off toggle for the "N-word." "While we recognize that solutions like Bleep don't erase the problem, we believe it's a step in the right direction -- giving gamers a tool to control their experience," Roger Chandler, Vice President and General Manager of Intel Client Product Solutions, said during a virtual presentation at 2021's Game Developers Conference.

According to Intel Marketing Engineer Craig Raymond, Bleep is "an end-user application that uses AI to detect and redact audio based on your user preferences." In footage of the application, Bleep presented users with a list of sliders so gamers can control the amount of hate and abuse they encounter. The list included ableism and body shaming, LGBTQ+ hate, aggression, misogyny, name-calling, racism and xenophobia, sexually explicit language, swearing, and white nationalism. As Chandler explained, Intel can't "solve" racism or the long-running and well-documented problems in gaming culture (and culture more broadly). At the same time, Bleep is techno-AI solutionism that feels pretty dystopian, pitching racism, xenophobia, and general toxicity as settings that can be tuned up and down as though they were graphics, sound, or control sliders on a video game. It is also a way of admitting defeat: if we can't stop players from being incredibly racist in chat, we can simply filter out what they say and pretend they don't exist.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Motherboard: A group of bipartisan lawmakers, including the chairman of the intelligence committee, have asked ad networks such as Google and Twitter what foreign companies they provide user data to, over concerns that foreign intelligence agencies could be leveraging them to harvest sensitive information on U.S. users, including their location. "This information would be a goldmine for foreign intelligence services that could exploit it to inform and supercharge hacking, blackmail, and influence campaigns," a letter signed by Senators Ron Wyden, Mark Warner, Kirsten Gillibrand, Sherrod Brown, Elizabeth Warren, and Bill Cassidy, reads. The lawmakers sent the letter last week to AT&T, Verizon, Google, Twitter, and a number of other companies that maintain advertisement platforms.

The concerns center around the process of so-called real-time bidding, and the flow of "bidstream" data. Before an advertisement is displayed inside of an app or a browsing session, different companies bid to get their ad into that slot. As part of that process, participating companies obtain sensitive data on the user, even if they don't win the ad placement. "Few Americans realize that some auction participants are siphoning off and storing 'bidstream' data to compile exhaustive dossiers about them. In turn, these dossiers are being openly sold to anyone with a credit card, including to hedge funds, political campaigns, and even to governments," the letter continued. [...] The letter asked the ad companies to name the foreign-headquartered or foreign-majority owned firms that they have provided bidstream data from users in the U.S. to in the past three years. The other companies the lawmakers sent the letter to were Index Exchange, Magnite, OpenX, and PubMatic. Mark Tallman, assistant professor at the Department of Emergency Management and Homeland Security at the Massachusetts Maritime Academy, told Motherboard in an email that "It's difficult to imagine any policy solution or technical sorcery that can fully 'secure' consumers' private data such that applications and platforms can collect it, and the publishing and advertising industries can access it, while guaranteeing that cybercriminals and foreign intelligence agencies will never get it. Our adversaries already know that they can buy (or steal) data from our marketplace that they could only dream of collecting on such a broad swath of Americans twenty years ago."

MojoKid writes: Intel just officially launched its first server products built on its advanced 10nm manufacturing process node, the 3rd Gen Xeon Scalable family of processors. 3rd Gen Xeon Scalable processors are based on the 10nm Ice Lake-SP microarchitecture, which incorporates a number of new features and enhancements. Core counts have been significantly increased with this generation, and now offer up to 40 cores / 80 threads per socket versus 28 cores / 56 threads in Intel's previous-gen offerings. The 3rd Gen Intel Xeon Scalable processor platform also supports up to 8 channels of DDR4-3200 memory, up to 6 terabytes of total memory, and up to 64 lanes of PCIe Gen4 connectivity per socket, for more bandwidth, higher capacity, and copious IO.

New AI, security and cryptographic capabilities arrive with the platform as well. Across Cloud, HPC, 5G, IoT, and AI workloads, new 3rd Gen Xeon Scalable processors are claimed to offer significant uplifts across the board versus their previous-gen counterparts. And versus rival AMD's EPYC platform, Intel is also claiming many victories, specifically when AVX-512, new crypto instructions, or DL Boost are added to the equation. Core counts in the line-up range from 8 — 40 cores per processor and TDPs vary depending on the maximum base and boost frequencies and core count / configuration (up to a 270W TDP). Intel is currently shipping 3rd Gen Xeon Scalable CPUs to key customers now, with over 200K chips in Q1 this year and a steady ramp-up to follow.

To understand why the $450 billion semiconductor industry has lurched into crisis, a helpful place to start is a one-dollar part called a display driver. From a report: Hundreds of different kinds of chips make up the global silicon industry, with the flashiest ones from Qualcomm and Intel going for $100 apiece to more than $1,000. Those run powerful computers or the shiny smartphone in your pocket. A display driver chip is mundane by contrast: Its sole purpose is to convey basic instructions for illuminating the screen on your phone, monitor or navigation system. The trouble for the chip industry -- and increasingly companies beyond tech, like automakers -- is that there aren't enough display drivers to go around. Firms that make them can't keep up with surging demand so prices are spiking. That's contributing to short supplies and increasing costs for liquid crystal display panels, essential components for making televisions and laptops, as well as cars, airplanes and high-end refrigerators.

"It's not like you can just make do. If you have everything else, but you don't have a display driver, then you can't build your product," says Stacy Rasgon, who covers the semiconductor industry for Sanford C. Bernstein. Now the crunch in a handful of such seemingly insignificant parts -- power management chips are also in short supply, for example -- is cascading through the global economy. Automakers like Ford Motor, Nissan Motor and Volkswagen have already scaled back production, leading to estimates for more than $60 billion in lost revenue for the industry this year. The situation is likely to get worse before it gets better.

An inventive MacRumors forums member has successfully retrofitted a water-cooling system to their 15-inch Intel-based MacBook Pro, thereby eliminating fan noise and boosting performance. From the report: MacRumors forums member "theodric" explained that the noise of their MacBook Pro's fans had become disruptive during conference calls, so amid ordering an M1 MacBook Air, they decided to fit a water cooling system to their machine. theodric used inexpensive parts such as Bitcoin ASIC miner blocks from AliExpress, an Aquastream XT Ultra water pump, and a Zalman radiator and reservoir from 2005 to create the system.

High-transmissivity thermal pads were added between the case shell and various motherboard components to conduct heat away from the MacBook Pro and into the water cooling system. The thermal shielding from the bottom of the case was also removed, as well as the feet, to ensure full contact with the new cooling plates. The pump, which requires Windows software to operate, was run via a virtual machine, and a Raspberry Pi was used for monitoring. theodric says that they have "hardly heard the fan since I started using it" and have seen benchmark scores significantly improve under the system. See theodric's full post for more information about the ambitious project.

VentureBeat reports on a "next-generation security" technique that allows data to remain encrypted while it's being processed.

"A security process known as fully homomorphic encryption is now on the verge of making its way out of the labs and into the hands of early adopters after a long gestation period." Companies such as Microsoft and Intel have been big proponents of homomorphic encryption. Last December, IBM made a splash when it released its first homomorphic encryption services. That package included educational material, support, and prototyping environments for companies that want to experiment. In a recent media presentation on the future of cryptography, IBM director of strategy and emerging technology Eric Maass explained why the company is so bullish on "fully homomorphic encryption" (FHE)...

"IBM has been working on FHE for more than a decade, and we're finally reaching an apex where we believe this is ready for clients to begin adopting in a more widespread manner," Maass said. "And that becomes the next challenge: widespread adoption. There are currently very few organizations here that have the skills and expertise to use FHE." To accelerate that development, IBM Research has released open source toolkits, while IBM Security launched its first commercial FHE service in December...

Maass said in the near term, IBM envisions FHE being attractive to highly regulated industries, such as financial services and health care. "They have both the need to unlock the value of that data, but also face extreme pressures to secure and preserve the privacy of the data that they're computing upon," he said.
The Wikipedia entry for homomorphic encryption calls it "an extension of either symmetric-key or public-key cryptography."

"AMD and Intel have both proposed better ways of doing interrupt and exception handling the last few months," reports LinuxReviews.org.

Then they share this analysis Linus Torvalds posted on the Real World Technologies forum: "The AMD version is essentially "Fix known bugs in the exception handling definition".

The Intel version is basically "Yeah, the protected mode 80286 exception handling was bad, then 386 made it odder with the 32-bit extensions, and then syscall/sysenter made everything worse, and then the x86-64 extensions introduced even more problems. So let's add a mode bit where all the crap goes away".

In contrast, the AMD one is basically a minimal effort to fix actual fundamental problems with all that legacy-induced crap that are nasty to work around and that have caused issues...

Both are valid on their own, and they are actually fairly independent. Honestly, the AMD paper looks like a quick "we haven't even finished thinking all the details through, but we know these parts were broken, so we might as well release this".

I don't know how long it has been brewing, but judging by the "TBD" things in that paper, I think it's a "early rough draft"."
In the article (shared by long-time Slashdot reader xiando), LinuxReviews.org summarizes the state of the conversation today: Torvalds went on to say that while AMD's proposed "quick fix" would be easier to implement for him and others operating system vendors, it's not ideal in the long run. Intel's proposal throws the entire existing interrupt descriptor table (IDT) delivery system under the bus so it can be replaced with what they call a new "FRED event delivery" system. Torvalds believes this is a better long-term solution...

While the pros and cons of Intel and AMD's respective proposals for interrupt and event handling in future processors are worthy of discussion, it's in reality mostly up to Intel. They are the bigger and more powerful corporation. It is more likely than not that future processors from Intel will use their proposed Flexible Return and Event Delivery system. Their next generation processors won't, it will take years not months before consumer CPUs have the FRED technology. Remember, the above-mentioned technical document was published earlier this month [in March]. Things do not magically go from the drawing-board to store-shelves overnight.

Intel isn't going to just hand the FRED technology over to AMD and help them implement it. We will likely see both move forward with their own proposals. Intel will have FRED and AMD will have Supervisor Entry Extensions until AMD, inevitably, adopts FRED or some form of it years down the line.
They also note that Torvalds took issue with a poster arguing that microkernels are more secure than monolithic kernels like Linux. "Bah, you're just parroting the usual party line that had absolutely no basis in reality and when you look into the details, doesn't actually hold up.

It's all theory and handwaving and just repeating the same old FUD that was never actually really relevant."