Inside AMD’s development of the Zen CPU

AMD knew it needed to make radical changes in its Zen CPU chip to become a force in the PC and server markets again.So when the chip designers sat down four years ago to etch out the Zen design, they had two things in mind: to drive up CPU performance as much as possible and to keep power efficiency stable.The company ultimately settled for a 40 percent improvement in Zen over its predecessor, Excavator."We had a hard time convincing the team we were going for 40 percent," said Mike Clark, a senior fellow at AMD. "It was a very aggressive goal, and we knew we had to do it to be competitive."AMD first promoted the 40 percent CPU improvement goal when it introduced Zen in 2015 during an overhaul of its chip roadmap. The company recently demonstrated chips to prove it has achieved the goal.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Inside AMD’s development of the Zen CPU

AMD knew it needed to make radical changes in its Zen CPU chip to become a force in the PC and server markets again.So when the chip designers sat down four years ago to etch out the Zen design, they had two things in mind: to drive up CPU performance as much as possible and to keep power efficiency stable.The company ultimately settled for a 40 percent improvement in Zen over its predecessor, Excavator."We had a hard time convincing the team we were going for 40 percent," said Mike Clark, a senior fellow at AMD. "It was a very aggressive goal, and we knew we had to do it to be competitive."AMD first promoted the 40 percent CPU improvement goal when it introduced Zen in 2015 during an overhaul of its chip roadmap. The company recently demonstrated chips to prove it has achieved the goal.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

19% of shoppers would abandon a retailer that’s been hacked

Nearly a fifth of shoppers would avoid at a retailer that has been a victim of a cybersecurity hack, according to a survey.The 2016 KPMG Consumer Loss Barometer report surveyed 448 consumers in the U.S. and found that 19% would abandon a retailer entirely over a hack. Another 33% said that fears their personal information would be exposed would keep them from shopping at the breached retailer for more than three months.The study also looked at 100 cybersecurity executives and found that 55% said they haven't spent money on cybersecurity in the past yearand 42% said their company didn't have a leader in charge of information security.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

19% of shoppers would abandon a retailer that’s been hacked

Nearly a fifth of shoppers would avoid at a retailer that has been a victim of a cybersecurity hack, according to a survey.The 2016 KPMG Consumer Loss Barometer report surveyed 448 consumers in the U.S. and found that 19% would abandon a retailer entirely over a hack. Another 33% said that fears their personal information would be exposed would keep them from shopping at the breached retailer for more than three months.The study also looked at 100 cybersecurity executives and found that 55% said they haven't spent money on cybersecurity in the past yearand 42% said their company didn't have a leader in charge of information security.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Linux at 25: How Linux changed the world

I walked into an apartment in Boston on a sunny day in June 1995. It was small and bohemian, with the normal detritus a pair of young men would scatter here and there. On the kitchen table was a 15-inch CRT display married to a fat, coverless PC case sitting on its side, network cables streaking back to a hub in the living room. The screen displayed a mess of data, the contents of some logfile, and sitting at the bottom was a Bash root prompt decorated in red and blue, the cursor blinking lazily.I was no stranger to Unix, having spent plenty of time on commercial Unix systems like OSF/1, HP-UX, SunOS, and the newly christened Sun Solaris. But this was different.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Flashy Storage Interfaces Ahead

Review: Google Cloud SQL takes on Amazon Aurora

To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here(Insider Story)

Who gets to telecommute once Zika’s bite comes closer?

Florida’s announcement Tuesday that a locally transmitted Zika case turned up Pinellas County, which includes St. Petersburg, moves reported cases of the virus a little closer to Georgia. That’s where Maria Stephens, who is pregnant, works as a senior data research analyst.Stephens was initially skeptical about Zika and paid little attention to the headlines about it.“I don't really respond to dramatization and felt that things were possibly being blown out of proportion,” said Stephens. “I'm a statistician at heart and only listen to numbers, so when my quant-minded OB-GYN shared the figures with me, this threat became a lot more real."To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Who gets to telecommute once Zika’s bite comes closer?

Florida’s announcement Tuesday that a locally transmitted Zika case turned up Pinellas County, which includes St. Petersburg, moves reported cases of the virus a little closer to Georgia. That’s where Maria Stephens, who is pregnant, works as a senior data research analyst.Stephens was initially skeptical about Zika and paid little attention to the headlines about it.“I don't really respond to dramatization and felt that things were possibly being blown out of proportion,” said Stephens. “I'm a statistician at heart and only listen to numbers, so when my quant-minded OB-GYN shared the figures with me, this threat became a lot more real."To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Best Android phones: What should you buy?

Choosing a new Android phone isn’t easy. The Android universe is teeming with options, from super-expensive flagship phones, to affordable models that make a few calculated compromises, to models expressly designed for, say, great photography. Chances are that whichever phone you buy, you’ll keep it for at least two years. So choosing the best Android phone for you isn’t a decision you should take lightly. But we can make things easier. Everyone has different priorities and needs, so we’ve made some picks for the best Android phone in several categories. At the bottom of this article, we also list all our recent Android phone reviews—in case you have your eye on a model that doesn’t make our cut.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

A deeper look at business impact of a cyberattack

Few would dispute that cyberattacks are increasing in frequency and in intensity, and most organizations confirm they have now suffered at least one cyber incident. But do those organizations have a true sense of the full impact on the organization? After all, the direct costs commonly associated with a data breach are far less significant than the “hidden costs” incurred.Indeed, the “hidden” costs can amount to 90 percent of the total business impact on an organization, and will most likely be experienced two years or more after the event. These are among the findings of a recent study by Deloitte Advisory entitled, “Beneath the Surface of a Cyberattack: A Deeper Look at the Business Impacts.”To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

A deeper look at business impact of a cyberattack

Few would dispute that cyberattacks are increasing in frequency and in intensity, and most organizations confirm they have now suffered at least one cyber incident. But do those organizations have a true sense of the full impact on the organization? After all, the direct costs commonly associated with a data breach are far less significant than the “hidden costs” incurred.Indeed, the “hidden” costs can amount to 90 percent of the total business impact on an organization, and will most likely be experienced two years or more after the event. These are among the findings of a recent study by Deloitte Advisory entitled, “Beneath the Surface of a Cyberattack: A Deeper Look at the Business Impacts.”To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

IDG Contributor Network: Internet use is replacing human memory

There’s more evidence that the internet is changing the way we think. Problem solving and recall are among the things people use the internet for. However, the more one does it, the more reliant on the internet one gets, researchers say.And so much so that people who use Google and other internet tools a lot don’t even try to remember things, a study just published in Memory says.“Memory is changing,” says Dr. Benjamin Storm, the lead author in academic publisher Routledge’s press release. “Our research shows that as we use the internet to support and extend our memory, we become more reliant on it. Whereas before we might have tried to recall something on our own, now we don't bother.”To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Big Blue Aims For The Sky With Power9

Intel has the kind of control in the datacenter that only one vendor in the history of data processing has ever enjoyed. That other company is, of course, IBM, and Big Blue wants to take back some of the real estate it lost in the datacenters of the world in the past twenty years.

The Power9 chip, unveiled at the Hot Chips conference this week, is the best chance the company has had to make some share gains against X86 processors since the Power4 chip came out a decade and a half ago and set IBM on the path to …

Big Blue Aims For The Sky With Power9 was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

Why Would I Attend the Virtual Firewalls Workshop?

One of my subscribers considered attending the Virtual Firewalls workshop on September 1st and asked:

Would it make sense to attend the workshop? How is it different from the Virtual Firewalls webinar? Will it be recorded?

The last answer is easy: No. Now for the other two.

NYT says Moscow bureau was targeted by cyberattack

The Moscow bureau of The New York Times was the target of a cyberattack, though there are no indications yet that the hackers were successful, according to the newspaper.The hackers are believed to be Russian, the newspaper said Tuesday evening. It quoted a spokeswoman for the newspaper as saying that it had not hired outside firms to investigate the attempted breach.Earlier in the day, CNN reported that the FBI and other U.S. security agencies were investigating attacks by hackers, thought to be working for Russian intelligence, that targeted reporters at the New York Times and other U.S. news organizations. CNN quoted unnamed U.S. officials briefed on the matter.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

NYT says Moscow bureau was targeted by cyberattack

The Moscow bureau of The New York Times was the target of a cyberattack, though there are no indications yet that the hackers were successful, according to the newspaper.The hackers are believed to be Russian, the newspaper said Tuesday evening. It quoted a spokeswoman for the newspaper as saying that it had not hired outside firms to investigate the attempted breach.Earlier in the day, CNN reported that the FBI and other U.S. security agencies were investigating attacks by hackers, thought to be working for Russian intelligence, that targeted reporters at the New York Times and other U.S. news organizations. CNN quoted unnamed U.S. officials briefed on the matter.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Open source 25-core chip can be stringed into a 200,000-core computer

Researchers want to give a 25-core open-source processor called Piton some serious bite. The developers of the chip at Princeton University have in mind a 200,000-core computer crammed with 8,000 64-bit Piton chips. It won't happen anytime soon, but that's one possible usage scenario for Piton. The chip is designed to be flexible and quickly scalable, and will have to ensure the giant collection of cores are in sync when processing applications in parallel. Details about Piton were provided at the Hot Chips conference this week. The goal was to design a chip that could be used in large data centers that handle social networking requests, search and cloud services. The response time in social networking and search is tied to the horsepower of servers in data centers.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

MIT is dragging hard-wired network chips into the agile era

Cloud computing is changing the demands on networks more quickly than ever. Now researchers say it’s possible to program routers all the way down to their packet-forwarding chips in the quest to keep up.Researchers from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and five other organizations have found a way to make data-center routers more programmable without making them slower. This could allow enterprises to take advantage of new traffic and congestion management algorithms without replacing their routers.The project takes SDN (software-defined networking) beyond the control plane, where things like configuration are handled, and into the data plane that actually forwards packets. Now programmers can change how the network decides which packets to send and which to keep in a buffer, for example. Eventually, that might mean deploying networks with fewer routers.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

MIT is dragging hard-wired network chips into the agile era

Cloud computing is changing the demands on networks more quickly than ever. Now researchers say it’s possible to program routers all the way down to their packet-forwarding chips in the quest to keep up.Researchers from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and five other organizations have found a way to make data-center routers more programmable without making them slower. This could allow enterprises to take advantage of new traffic and congestion management algorithms without replacing their routers.The project takes SDN (software-defined networking) beyond the control plane, where things like configuration are handled, and into the data plane that actually forwards packets. Now programmers can change how the network decides which packets to send and which to keep in a buffer, for example. Eventually, that might mean deploying networks with fewer routers.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here