LAS VEGAS — CES was again awash in car technology. There weren’t as many auto-industry keynote speakers as in recent years, but there was certainly more technology, particularly autonomous cars and shuttle vans. In what has become a recent Vegas tradition for car-related shows here, the parking lot just outside the huge Las Vegas Convention Center was turned over to a drifting track. Last fall for , it was Ford. This year for CES, it was BMW. Here’s our take on the most important trends in car technology for CES 2018. CES is now the unofficial kickoff of the auto show season.
Security researchers have pinpointed another major security hole in Intel processors, in addition to the security holes in the Intel Management Engine and the Meltdown flaw that hits Intel CPUs uniquely hard. This time, it’s an issue with Intel’s Active Management Technology (AMT), a feature typically reserved for systems that support Intel vPro or workstation platforms with certain Xeon CPUs. The Intel AMT is designed to allow administrators to access and update PCs, even if those PCs are turned off. All they need is an internet connection and a wall socket and they can be updated. That’s a useful tool for large multinational firms with far-flung employees, but it’s also a potential security risk.
LAS VEGAS — Unless you’ve been living under a rock, or are perhaps a company executive or a member of Congress with a gold-plated, fully paid-for insurance plan, you know healthcare costs in the United States have skyrocketed in the past 30 years. The issue, which has been politically charged with the recent moves to defang the Affordable Care Act, is not just about insurance costs. High health insurance premiums simply reflect a complex health care system that has seen little significant structural change to reduce costs or new business models, or to use a favored word in tech, disruption.
HBM2 has had a difficult 12 months. The memory standard hasn’t followed the path of its predecessors. If it had, we should’ve already seen widespread rollouts from AMD and Nvidia across midrange and high-end products. Instead, AMD’s Vega 56 and 64 are currently the only consumer GPUs to carry the memory standard at all. One of the rumors that dogged HBM2 last year was that clock speeds were well below what was targeted Indeed, neither of AMD’s GPUs hit the expected 2Gbps per-pin signal rates (Hynix added 2.0Gbps speeds to its HBM2 offerings in August 2016, then removed them in 2017).
OnePlus has made a name for itself by selling inexpensive phones with top-of-the-line specs. You can buy a OnePlus 5T right now that compares well with a Galaxy S8 costing hundreds of dollars more. Sounds good, right? However, you might want to consider what OnePlus is doing on the security side. It’s been caught several times making basic errors, and it just happened again. The latest beta version of its custom “OxygenOS” build was sending user clipboard data to a server in China. Oops. Yesterday, a noted that his OnePlus 3T (a phone released in late 2016) got a new system app in the latest beta build.
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IBM may have just turned a profit for the first time in 22 straight quarters, but Big Blue clearly still has its eyes set on downsizing and reducing headcount. Approximately 30,000 workers are scheduled to be reassigned to other departments in 2018, with a further 10,000 losing their jobs through attrition, with no plans to replace them. And the overall count could be higher — there are 5,000 people listed that haven’t been put into new positions yet and might find themselves eliminated. The move will cause significant ripples through IBM, with reassigned employees moving over to other roles, which may or may not qualify as long-term positions.
With Meltdown and Spectre now unveiled and out in the wild, focus has shifted on how to contain the problems they represent and not tank CPU performance in the process. Different vendors have released their own statements — Intel is hit the hardest by Meltdown, ARM has some limited vulnerability, and so on — but AMD has stayed pretty quiet, apart from its initial statement last week. Today, the company published to its previous guidance, with more specific information. AMD continues to state it’s immune to Meltdown (Variant 3), the attack that specifically hits Intel the hardest, writing: “We believe AMD processors are not susceptible due to our use of privilege level protections within paging architecture and no mitigation is required.
Quantum computing has been a major research topic for multiple companies the past few years, with D-Wave, IBM, and Intel all launching their own systems and improving them at a fairly rapid clip. At CES 2018 this week, Intel’s CEO, Brian Krzanich, declared the company’s new 49-qubit quantum computer represented a step towards “quantum supremacy.” A 49 qubit system is a for Intel, which just demonstrated a 17-qubit system two months ago. Intel’s working with the Netherlands-based Qutech on this project, and expanding the number of qubits is key to creating quantum computers that can deliver real-world results.
