Tech Brew Ride Home - Mon. 02/24 - ARM-based Macs By Early 2021?

Episode Date: February 24, 2020

The phantom announcements from MWC start trickling in. Safari might be getting strict with HTTPS certificates. Apple might release an ARM-based Mac as soon as early 2021. TONS of specs revealed concerning the Xbox Series X. And Fintech continues to be on a roll. Sponsors: TinyCapital.com MintMobile.com/ride Links: Huawei unveils the Mate Xs and MatePad Pro 5G w/ no Play Store access (9to5Google) Intel debuts 5G server and base station chips, plus a PC network card (VentureBeat) Apple drops a bomb on long-life HTTPS certificates: Safari to snub new security certs valid for more than 13 months (The Register) Microsoft reveals more Xbox Series X specs (Polygon) Apple to release first ARM Mac without Intel processor in next 18 months, predicts Kuo (9to5Mac) Intuit Near Deal to Buy Credit Karma for $7 Billion (WSJ) Fintech startups raised $34B in 2019 (TechCrunch) Enveil raises $10 million for enterprise-scale homomorphic encryption (VentureBeat) Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

On April 4th, 2023, around 2 in the morning, a man was found stabbed multiple times on a sidewalk in downtown San Francisco. Hey, who did this to you? What happened next turned the story into a political firestorm. Reports have identified the victim as Bob Lee, the founder of Cash App. From Bloomberg Podcasts, this is Foundering, the Killing of Bob Lee, beginning April 16. Welcome to the TechMeme right home for Monday, February 24th, 2020. I'm Brian McCullough today. The Phantom announcements from Mobile World Congress start trickling in. Safari might be getting strict with HTTPS certificates. Apple might release an arm-based Mac as soon as early 2021. Tons of specs revealed about the Xbox Series X,

and FinTech continues to be on a roll. Here's what you miss today in the world of tech. So what's probably going to happen this week is we're going to start to get all of the news stories that would have been made at Mobile World Congress had that event not been canceled. We'll start to see those announcements trickle out over the course of the week. Like this three-fur from Huawei. First of all, Huawei debuted the MateXS, a foldable smartphone with an 8-inch unfolded screen and a 6.6-inch folded up display. Also a Kirin chip set and 8 gigabytes of RAM coming in late 2020 for 2,490.

$99. Crucially, the phone has no play store access because, again, Huawei is forbidden to use Google services. Huawei also unveiled the Maitpad Pro 5G, which is a 10.8 inch tablet that is gunning for the iPad Pro because it sports a 7,260 MAH battery, has 5G integrated, and has an optional keyboard and stylus. It's coming in April starting at 749 euro, but again, it has no Google Play apps, quoting 9 to 5 Google. Both devices will rely heavily on the Huawei App Gallery, which will be the default app store for everyone globally. This was expected ahead of time, as the U.S. trade ban remains very much in place for the foreseeable future. Both the Huawei MateXS and MatePad Pro 5G come with EMUI 10 atop Android 10 out of the box.

For those wondering, the software is essentially the same as you would expect with a standard Google Play certified device just without direct or official access to the Google Play Store, end quote. I did get to play around with the earlier version of the MateX at CES, and they felt really good for the five or so minutes that I sat there folding an unfold, them. All I can say is Huawei makes really, really sexy devices, and if I were going full Android, I'd consider them as my main devices. But of course, that's not an option. As David Rooduk tweeted, quote, I hate that Huawei has become a side show because of the U.S. trade entity ban. But that's the reality of the situation, end quote. One more item from Huawei. I said it was a

three-for. The Matebook X-Pro. I know. These names get super confusing because they're mate X, this or that, but this is a laptop with Intel's 10th gen CPUs and the same design as last year basically, but basically includes a really impressive 13.9 inch edge to edge touchscreen display. The Matebook X-Pro is starting at 1,49 euro. It's coming in April and can anyone tell me how these machines are allowed to run Windows, but the phones can't run Android? Do I even want to know the answer? Also an announcement that was probably timed for this week all along. Intel announced three 5G chips, a second-gen AI-focused high-end Xeon-Scalable CPU,

the atom P5900 for 5G base stations, and an updated ASIC for data centers. Yes, Intel has exited the modem business. That hasn't changed, but that doesn't mean that they can't make Silicon to support the transition to 5G overall. all, at least on the carrier and enterprise side. So think of these three chips as optimization for 5G capable computers and networks. Quoting Venture Beat. The atom P5900 is, quote, build as the first Intel architecture system on a chip for base stations and designed from the ground up for radio access network or 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 in-line cryptographic acceleration. It promises up to 1.8 times the integer throughput versus an atom C-3,000, plus 5.6 times the packet security throughput, and 3.7 times the packet balancing throughput compared with software-based alternatives. The atom P5900 is designed for use in 5G base stations, and Intel already has customers for the chip, including commitments from network hardware makers Erickson, Nokia, and ZTE to use it in their Rands. Based on demand, Intel expects it will be the market leader in 5G base station silicon by 2021, ahead of its 2022 goal, with a 40% share of the growing business. With anticipated

demand for 6 million 5G base stations by 2024, that could be good news for the company, end quote. Microsoft has revealed a whole slew of new Xbox Series X details including, and I'm just going to run down the list here, 12 terraflops of GPU performance, which is up two times from what the Xbox 1x can do, also support for 8K gaming, variable rate shading, hardware accelerated direct x ray tracing, a custom SSD to go with the custom RDNA2 and Zen 2 processors, dynamic latency input, HDIMI 2.1, auto low latency, and a variable refresh rate with 120 frames per second support. Also, there's something called a quick resume feature, quoting Polygon. The new quick resume feature lets you continue multiple games from a suspended state almost instantly,

returning you to where you were and what you were doing without waiting through long loading screens, head of Xbox Phil Spencer wrote on the Xbox website. Spencer also touched on efforts to reduce latency on Xbox Series X for both input and output. Quote, we're optimizing latency in the Player 2 console pipeline, starting with our Xbox wireless controller, which leverages our high bandwidth proprietary wireless communication protocol when connected with the console, Spencer said. With dynamic latency input or DLI,

a new feature which synchronizes input immediately with what is displayed, controls are even more precise and responsive, end quote. Also, the Series X will play, All of your Xbox games, four generations worth of them. Quote, our commitment to compatibility means existing Xbox 1 games, including backward-compatible Xbox 360 and original Xbox games, look and play better than ever before, Spencer wrote. Your favorite games, including titles in Xbox Game Pass, benefit from steadier frame rates, faster load times, and improved resolution and visual fidelity, all with no developer work required.

Your Xbox 1 gaming accessories also come forward with you. quote. This is big enough gaming news that it's been at the top of techmeme.com all day, and so I would have done this story regardless. But of course now, I'd point you to the Gaming Ride Home podcast where Kyle will no doubt have much more detail on this than I just provided. Apple analyst Ming Chi Kuo says we will finally see that arm-based Mac that everyone has been anticipating as soon as the first half of 2021. That's when Kuo says, Apple will release a Mac that uses an Apple-designed chip instead of good old Intel. Quoting 9-5 Mac, there have been growing reports over the past 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 Quo's prediction back in 2018. Since the coronavirus outbreak, Quo highlights that Apple has been, quote, more aggressive with its funding for research, development and production of 5-nanometer process chips that are expected to show up in the first Macs with ARM CPUs. That's because 5-nanometer chips will be integral to iPhone and iPad later this year, as well as Max coming in 2021. Five-nanometer processed chips shipments are expected to be taken by Apple in mid-2020. In addition to Apple using the 5-Nameter custom chips for its first Arm Max in 2021, Quo says that the flagship 2020 iPhone lineup, as well as new mini-L-D iPads expected in late 2020 to early 2021 will feature the new 5-nanometer

process chips, end quote. As I said, this is no doubt inevitable, but one does wonder what sort of fragmentation of the user base this will lead to, at least on the max. I mean, there's a whole bunch of professional apps and just professional users who can't afford to jump off the X-86 train anytime soon, right? Beginning on September 4th,000, First, Apple's Safari browsers will reportedly no longer accept new H-T-TPS certificates if they've been valid for more than 398 days. Right now, Safari accepts certificates valid for 825 days, quoting the register. That means websites using Long Life SSL or TLS certs issued after the cutoff point will throw up privacy errors in Apple's browser. The policy was unveiled by the I-Giant,

at a Certification Authority Browser Forum, meeting on Wednesday. Specifically, according to those present at the Confab from September 1st, any new website cert valid for more than 398 days will not be trusted by the Safari browser and instead rejected. Older certs issued prior to the deadline are unaffected by this rule. By implementing the policy in Safari, Apple will, by extension, enforce it on all iOS and MacOS devices. This will put pressure on website admins and developers to meet.

make sure their certs meet Apple's requirements or risk breaking pages on a billion-plus devices and computers, end quote. As Anime Wolf said on Twitter, the entire personal web hosting world is slowly being eaten alive. As this number keeps dropping, every single site will become dependent on let's encrypt. And when let's encrypt folds or its certbot gets compromised, dot, dot, dot, end quote. Everybody was reporting over the week. weekend that Intuit is nearing a deal to buy the personal finance portal credit karma for about $7 billion in cash and stock. The word was that the deal could be announced as soon as today,

though at the time of this recording, nothing official came across the transom, quoting the Wall Street Journal. Credit Karma was valued at roughly $4 billion in a private share sale about two years ago. The deal would mark into its largest acquisition by far in its 37-year history, and the first sizable transaction under Chief Executive Sasan Godarsi, who took over a little more than a year ago. Credit Karma offers its customers free access to their credit scores and borrowing history, alerts to possible data breaches, credit monitoring, and tax preparation, and filing. Customers in turn receive offers from other companies for credit cards and loans tailored to their credit history, and Credit Karma makes money when customers use those products.

Adding the buzzy startup to its stable would give into it a stronger foothold in the Burjublj, realm of online personal finance. In addition to TurboTax, the online software that millions of people use to file their taxes, into its offerings include QuickBooks, bookkeeping software used by businesses, and Mint, an online budgeting platform that also pitches individuals' financial products, into it has a market value of roughly $77 billion, end quote. Did want to make note of this point from Dan Primack in his pro rata this morning. Quote, the combined company would hold a staggering, amount of personal financial information.

For consumers, that means much better recommendations and much bigger privacy concerns. Quote, Intuit could try to match all the tax data its turbotax customers provide with the credit scoring data that Credit Karma holds. That could let Intuit serve up better customer prospects to credit card issuers and eventually let Intuit charge lenders more for access to its hoard of data, end quote. Dan was quoting Nathaniel Popper and Michael Dela Marceau. said in the New York Times for that last bit. So if that goes through, that would be another big deal in the FinTech universe, which has been on fire lately, especially with acquisitions. And yet,

according to CB Insights, investments in the FinTech space have cooled a bit recently. The research firm reports that FinTech startups across the world raised $33.9 billion across 1912 deals in 2019, but that's down from the $40.8 billion raised across 2049 deals in 2018, quoting TechCrunch. Early stage startups struggled to attract money. Per the report, financing for startups looking to close seed or series A dropped to a five-year low in 2019. On the flip side, money pouring into Series B or beyond startups was at a record five-year high, and emerging and frontier markets were at the center stage of most of the action. South America, Africa, Australia, and Southeast Asia all topped their annual highs last year, end quote.

But there were also 24 new FinTech unicorns christened last year, including Next Insurance, Flywire, high radius, ripple, figure, lemonade, hippo, and bright health. Finally, let's end today with an interesting raise. Had you ever heard of homomorphic encryption before I just said it? I had not, but a startup called Envale does homomorphic encryption and announced it has raised a $10 million series A led by C5 Capital, MasterCard, and Capital One Ventures. So what do it do, this homomorphic encryption, quoting Venture Beat? Homomorphic encryption isn't new. IBM researcher Craig Gentry developed the first scheme in 2009, but its gain traction in recent years coinciding with the advanced. in compute power and efficiency. It's basically a form of cryptography that enables computation on plain text,

i.e. file contents, encrypted using an algorithm, also known as ciphertexts, so that the generated encryption result exactly matches the result of operations that would have been performed on unencrypted text. Using this technique, a cryptonet, e.g., any learned neural network that can be applied to encrypted data can perform computation on data and return the encrypted result back to the same client, which can then use the encryption key, which was never shared publicly, to decrypt the return data and get the actual result. In practice, homomorphic encryption libraries don't yet fully leverage modern hardware, and they're at least an order of magnitude slower than conventional models.

But newer projects like QHE and Accelerated Encryption Library claim speedups of 12 to 50 times on various encrypted tasks over previous implementations. Moreover, libraries like Pysift and TF encrypted, which are built on Facebook's PiTorch machine learning framework and TensorFlow, respectively, have made great strides in recent months. So two have abstraction layers like H.E. Transformer, a backend for NGraph, Intel's Neuronetwork compiler, that delivers leading performance on some crypto nets.

Envail's API-based product, Zero Reveal, sits above sensitive data, requiring no changes to the underlying compute environment. It works alongside existing services, complementing data at rest and data in transit encryption technologies, while at the same time delivering a flavor of homomorphic encryption that's led to 13 patent applications to date, end quote. So this sounds like, I guess, greater security in the cloud, encrypted data sharing, with even the ability to perform operations while encrypted, and never fearing that the data you're sharing, is compromised, even as you share it.

Apparently, the enthusiasm for homomorphic encryption has given rise to a many boom of startups estimated to be worth a combined $268.3 million by 2027. That is all for today. Nothing really interesting to share other than a couple weeks ago for my birthday. I treated myself to a Nintendo Switch, finally. And my God, playing video games with your kids. It's exactly as fun as I hope that would always be. be. Playing Mario Kart with your kids is almost an argument by itself for having children in the

first place, if you ask me. And actually, we're having a ton of fun with Legend of Zelda, too, which I'd never played a Zelda before, but it's great. Talk to you tomorrow.