INTEL launches Atom Chips

 

SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) – Intel Corp (INTC.O: Quote, Profile, Research) is rolling out five new Atom microprocessors and a collection of chips designed for portable gadgets that access the Internet and for other uses, as the world’s largest chipmaker uses its marketing muscle to help create a new market.

 

The low-power, tiny Atom chips will come in speeds of up to 1.86 gigahertz and Intel says that speed, plus other technologies designed into the chip, make it the fastest processor that consumes 3 watts of electricity or less.

 

The recently named Atom family of processors is part of Intel’s effort to have chips designed with Intel Architecture — the fundamental blueprint of its semiconductors — in myriad computing devices — from what it calls mobile Internet devices, or MIDs, all the way up to high-performance computers.

 

Intel is making the announcements at its Intel Developer Forum conference on Wednesday in Shanghai, the company said.

 

“Global Internet growth continues unabated,” said Anand Chandrasekher, who runs Intel’s Ultra Mobility Group. “The best Internet experience is still on the PC, but users want to carry that experience with them.”

 

That is where the Atom and Centrino Atom, come in. The Centrino Atom also includes a single-chip with integrated graphics called Intel System Controller Hub that allows for PC-like capabilities and long battery life for devices that fit in a user’s pocket.

 

“Intel is really pumping this category,” said Roger Kay, an analyst with market research firm Endpoint Technologies Associates. “That said, mobile Internet is here. For them this is really a great potential business.”

 

Intel said that the features of the Atom processor — the “brains” of an electronic device — and its system controller hub would help device makers create a range of MIDs with differing functions and designs.

 

Chandrasekher said major device makers are already planning to adopt Atom, with more than 20 manufacturers coming out with products using the processor. As far as MIDs, those will start shipping in May, he said.

 

He said Intel expects about 30 percent of those MIDs to have both WiFi — short range high-speed wireless Internet access — and WiMax — longer-range high-speed access designed into them.

 

MID device makers include Asus, Fujitsu, Lenovo, NEC, Panasonic, Samsung, Sharp and Toshiba, among others, and prices will probably average about $500, with some priced higher than that or lower, depending on the functions, Chandrasekher said in a telephone briefing ahead of his keynote speech at the IDF in Shanghai.

 

The small size of the Atom processor — the die of the chip is less than 25 square millimeters, or about a 10th of the low- cost Celeron desktop and notebook PC chip — also lets Intel target the embedded market.

 

Embedded chips are used in devices such as portable cash registers, robotics for industrial manufacturing, kiosks, patient monitoring and car “infotainment” systems.

 

The economics of the diminutive chip are appealing, Kay said, noting Intel gets nearly 2,700 Atom processors from a single dinner-plate-size silicon wafer.

 

He estimates Intel could yield about $30,000 per wafer with a gross margin of around 50 percent, not far off the gross margin of its mainstream PC chips. He put Intel’s approximate cost-per-chip for Atom at about $11.

 

“If you start looking at that number, then the profitability of one of these things sold at $45, or even $160, they’re fantastically profitable,” Kay said.

 

Still, do not expect the MID and this new market to take off right out of the gate.

 

“The world often divides half way between the reality on the ground and where Intel would like it to go,” Kay added. “It’ll likely go a little more slowly than Intel would like.”

 

Well this is a good step forward I see, still to come must be the holographic processors for the mobile devices i guess.i read somewhere that CERN is co ordinating a project for providing low cost holgraphic generators .I am already dreaming futuristic as it gets ,live 3d hologram of a person i am chatting , forget GUI … then there would me 3DUI . The sooner the better , the brains at Intel must  have thought that much before !

A great link of INTEL atom demo at http://www.intel.com/personal/our-technology/mids/demo.htm 

Battle of Browsers

Judging strictly by the sheer volume of vulnerabilities Mozilla Firefox was the most insecure browser in 2007, according to Symantec. Firefox had a total of 122 security holes, more than any other rival browser. Symantec credited the efforts poured into securing Internet Explorer 7 for IE managing to be situated under Firefox in terms of security flaws. Internet Explorer, Firefox, Opera and Safari are together synonymous with the browser market, having divided the vast majority of the Internet audience among them. In addition to the constant race for an increased install base, the four browsers are also continually evolving toward new standards of performance, compatibility and security. In this regard, Symantec has published a report offering an insight on one critical aspect of browser security – vulnerabilities.

According to the Cupertino-based security company, there is an increasing trend for the threat environment to shift the focus of exploits and attacks toward client-side problems, with browsers growing in prominence. Obviously, no browser is a panacea to security or a silver-bullet solution, and at the same time the vulnerability count is not, in itself, a complete measure of security.

“Web browser vulnerabilities are a serious security concern due to their role in online fraud and the propagation of spyware and adware. They are particularly prone to security concerns because they come in contact with more potentially untrusted or hostile content than most other applications. This is a concern because attacks can originate from malicious Web sites or legitimate Web sites that have been compromised to serve malicious content. It is also true that browsers can play a role in client-side attacks because of their ability to invoke plug-ins and other applications when handling potentially malicious content served from the Web such as documents and media files,” Symantec stated.
Firefox was impacted by no less than 88 vulnerabilities in the second half of the past year, with another 34 in the first half. Mozilla’s open source browser cumulated more vulnerabilities in 2007 than any other browser, this despite the fact that Firefox is generally perceived as an apex of security. For Firefox, 19 vulnerabilities in the second half of 2007 and 12 in the first half were labeled with a severity rating of medium by Symantec, and the remaining 34 flaws in July-December 2007 and 22 in January-June 2007 were designated as representing only low-level threats.

“Safari was affected by 22 vulnerabilities in the second half of 2007. One was considered high severity, 12 were medium, and nine were low. This is a decrease from the 25 Safari vulnerabilities that were documented in the first half of 2007, of which seven were medium severity and 18 were low,” Symantec added.

No less than 57 security vulnerabilities affected Internet Explorer in 2007, but the volume is lower compared with just the holes that plagued Firefox between July and December of the past year. Furthermore, only 13 security holes were labeled as medium with the remaining five rated as low out of the 18 IE vulnerabilities in the second half of 2007. In the first half of the past year, IE was impacted by 39 vulnerabilities, with 15 medium, and 23 low.

“In the last six months of 2007, 12 vulnerabilities were documented in Opera. Of these, eight were medium severity and four were low. This is fewer than the seven vulnerabilities that affected Opera in the first half of 2007, of which three were considered medium severity and four were low,” Symantec said.

According to the Cupertino-based security company, the increase in popularity of both Firefox and Safari has been synonymous with a jump in the number of vulnerabilities discovered. In the second half of the past year, both Safari and Firefox had more security flaws compared to Internet Explorer.

“While fewer vulnerabilities were discovered in Internet Explorer during this period, Mozilla was subject to a sharp increase. The decrease in Internet Explorer vulnerabilities may be due to the focus on security in Internet Explorer 7. The increase in Mozilla vulnerabilities was a by-product of internal and community driven security audits of the browser,” Symantec said

 

Though the people have been crying foul ever since MSIE took over Netscape comm , but then did any one say the Netscape guys have been recently heard of taking a full scale battle in the markets head on .. ! The uglier  the better  , coz in the end we are the benefitted

Best antivirus awards goes to……

A new year… A new beginning… And the inevitable security solution smackdown. In this context, AV-Test has thrown together in the same arena no less than 24 antivirus products from the heavyweights of the security market. The security solutions were tested against in excess of 1 million malware samples from the last six months. According to Av-Test’s Andreas Marx, the test involved only the top of the line, “‘best’ available Security Suite edition” from each vendor, last updated on January 7, 2008, and running on Windows XP SP2. And yes Microsoft’s Windows Live OneCare 2.0 was tested, but no, it’s not the best antivirus of 2008. Well, of the beginning of 2008, anyway…

“First, we checked the signature-based on-demand detection of all products against more than 1 Mio. samples we’ve found spreading or which were distributed during the last six months (this means, we have not used any ‘historic’ samples.) We included all malware categories in the test: Trojan Horses, backdoors, bots, worm and viruses. Instead of just presenting the results, we have ranked the product this time, from ‘very good’ (++) if the scanner detected more than 98% of the samples to ‘poor’ (–) when less than 85% of the malware was detected,” Marx revealed.

In terms of signature-based on-demand detection, Windows Live OneCare 2.0 held its own. Microsoft’s security solution ended up detecting a total of 992,880 out of all the malware samples thrown against it, and accounting for a “Signature Detection” rate of 96.9%. This is nothing short of an excellent score for Windows Live OneCare, an antivirus that at the beginning of 2007 managed to occupy positions only towards the bottom of the security solution pack in early 2007. In the latest AV-Test “Signature Detection” test OneCare 2.0 came on top of F-Prot (986,961 – 96.3%), Panda (979,409 – 95.6%), McAfee (959,919 – 93.7%) and Nod32 (953,936 – 93.1%).

However, OneCare 2.0 was bested by the likes of AVK 2008 (1,022,418 – 99.8%); AntiVir (1,020,627 – 99.6%); Avast! (1,018,204 – 99.4%); Trend Micro (1,009,662 – 98.6%); Symantec (1,006,849 – 98.3%); AVG (1,005,006 – 98.1%); BitDefender (1,003,902 – 98.0%); Kaspersky (1,003,470 – 98.0%);
Sophos (1,001,655 – 97.8%) and F-Secure (999,806 – 97.6%). The complete results of the “Signature Detection” test from AV-Test can be accessed here, courtesy of Sunbelt Software.

“Secondly, we checked the number of false positives of the products have generated during a scan of 65,000 known clean files. Only products with no false positives received a ‘very good’ (++) rating. In case of the proactive detection category, we have not only focussed on signature- and heuristic-based proactive detection only (based on a retrospective test approach with a one week old scanner). Instead of this, we also checked the quality of the included behavior based guard (e.g. Deepguard in case of F-Secure and TruPrevent in case of Panda). We used 3,500 samples for the retrospective test as well as 20 active samples for the test of the ‘Dynamic Detection’ (and blocking) of malware,” Marx added.

Windows Live OneCare 2.0 is among the few security solutions that have scored a ++ in the test for False Positives. This means that OneCare 2.0 has generated no false positives, a task also completed by the security solutions from Symantec, Nod32, and Fortinet. However, OneCare 2.0 was ranked as having only a poor proactive detection, and a very poor response time to new malware being issued (more than 8 hours). But at the same time, out of all the malicious code it had to go through, OneCare 2,0 only missed two rootkits. The Anti-virus comparison test of current anti-malware products, Q1/2008 can be accessed here.

“Furthermore, we checked how long AV companies usually need to react in case of new, widespread malware (read: outbreaks), based on 55 different samples from the entire year 2007. ‘Very good’ (++) AV product developers should be able to react within less than two hours. Another interesting test was the detection of active rootkit samples. While it’s trivial for a scanner to detect inactive rootkits using a signature, it can be really tricky to detect this nasty malware when they are active and hidden. We checked the scanner’s detection against 12 active rootkits,” Marx said.

 

Anyways whatever may be the verdict , I am a student  developer and according to the student developer market findings I found that the guys with windows prefered that Windows live one care as it didnot hog much memory as most of the security features it uses are already emmbedded in the OS .Also the vista version of windows has enough security tools like UAC tha prevents the lower auto executable infections .However in any case of major security danger from widespread release of any virus is not at all taken care by most of the common and the major AV.

Moreover the windows liveOneCare is currently coming with a trail of 90 days , enough for warding trouble against the virus for 3 months as compared to Norton internet security’s 15 days . lol !