Tech Brew Ride Home - Wed. 12/12 - Intel's Next Generation Architecture

Episode Date: December 12, 2018

Intel’s next generation architecture revealed, was China behind that massive Marriott hack, Good Money wants to give customers a stake in their own banking, and what is Michael Dell’s long game?Sponsors:Eero.com/ride (promo code: ride)Tiny.websiteLinks:Intel unveils a new architecture for 2019: Sunny Cove (Ars Technica)Intel is bringing teraflop integrated graphics to 10nm chips in 2019 (Engadget)AN INTEL BREAKTHROUGH RETHINKS HOW CHIPS ARE MADE (Wired)Marriott Data Breach Is Traced to Chinese Hackers as U.S. Readies Crackdown on Beijing (NYTimes)Apple Suppliers Are Considering Moving iPhone Output if Tariffs Hit 25% (Bloomberg)U.S. investigators point to China in Marriott hack affecting 500 million guests (The Washington Post)Indonesia e-commerce leader Tokopedia raises $1.1B from Alibaba and SoftBank's Vision Fund (TechCrunch)At this new online banking platform, customers are the owners (Fast Company)Apple’s ‘Netflix for Magazines’ Getting a Chilly Reception (Bloomberg)Dell’s long game is in hybrid and private clouds (TechCrunch)U.S. internet speeds rose nearly 40 percent this year (ReCode) 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 tech meme ride home for Wednesday, December 12th, 2018. I'm Brian McCullough. Today, Intel's next generation architecture is revealed,

was China behind that massive Marriott hack? Good money wants to give customers a stake in their own banking. And what is Michael Dell's long game? Here's what you miss today in the world of tech. For years, Intel's core and zion processors have been based on its skylake, 14 nanometer architecture. This was supposed to be supplanted by the 10-nanometer Cannon Lake architecture, but that has been running into some manufacturing issues.

Well, Intel today announced the next step moving forward. It's called Sunny Cove, and the company says this architecture will allow the execution of more instructions in parallel with lower latency, better cryptography support, and a lot more. Sunny Cove will be 10 nanometer, and while still a skylake derivative, quoting from Ars Technica, the level one data cache is 50% larger than in Skylake, as is the cache for decoded microops and the level two cache, with the exact size depending on market positioning.

Where Skylake has two reservation stations dispatching instructions across eight ports with a maximum of four instructions dispatch per cycle, Sunnycove has four reservation stations, 10 ports, and up to five instructions per cycle, end quote. Intel also announced that its 11th generation integrated graphics will have more than a terraflop of computing power, as in gadget notes, quote, to give you a comparison the Xbox 1X sports a six terraflop GPU

while the PlayStation 4 has 4.2 terraflops of power. AMD's HD-4800 GPUs were the first to break the tarifflop barrier a decade ago. Intel claims its Gen 11 graphics will be twice as fast as its Gen 9 hardware in a, quote, popular photo recognition application. It also has more than double the execution units, 64, compared to Gen 9's 24, end quote. And finally, Intel also this morning demoed its first 3D chip architecture that allows for the stacking of logic chips. If you're not familiar with 3D chip design, it's basically yet another effort to extend Moore's law a bit by going vertical into a new dimension. Intel calls this architecture

Fovarose. And aside from cramming in more transistors, this architecture will allow customizable combinations of different kinds of transistors. For example, putting, say, a 5G radio on top of a CPU. Here's how Wired puts it.

Quote, think of Intel's 3D stacking technology as more of a Lego brick solution. It's changing the concept of the architecture, says Maribel Lopez, founder of Lopez Research, a technology, research firm. That change comes with practical benefits. The 2D approach allows for some variety,

but also sacrifices performance and draws more power, says Patrick Moorhead, CEO of more insights and strategy. Intel appears to have dodged those issues. Quote, what is so astonishing about what has been presented is there's virtually no power loss and no performance loss when you're putting these chipsets together, says Moorhead. Who cautions that Intel still needs to prove that it can produce the same results across millions of chips versus a single demonstration. Remember that huge Marriott hack from last week? Well, here's a troubling new wrinkle. According to the New York Times, that data breach was part of a Chinese intelligence

gathering effort that also hacked health insurers and the security clearance files of millions of Americans, quoting from the Times, who is quoting their sources. The hackers, they said, are suspected of working on behalf of. of the Ministry of State Security, the country's communist-controlled civilian spy agency. The discovery comes as the Trump administration is planning actions targeting China's trade, cyber and economic policies, perhaps within days. Those moves include indictments against Chinese hackers working for the intelligence services and the military, according to four government officials who spoke on the condition of anonymity.

The Trump administration also plans to declassify intelligence reports to reveal Chinese efforts dating to at least 2014 to build a database containing names of executives and American government officials with security clearances. Other options include an executive order intended to make it harder for Chinese companies to obtain critical components for telecommunications equipment, a senior American official with knowledge of the plans said, end quote. So, of course, this new wrinkle comes in the background of all of the other things going on, the arrest of that Huawei executive, the general back and forth of the tariff negotiations.

It just sort of is beginning to feel like all of this is coming to a head. And as Ben Thompson said recently, if U.S. tech companies aren't hedging their bets in terms of supply chain and sourcing, they probably need to be thinking about it. There was a story in Bloomberg just this morning that Apple would have to consider its supplier options if President Trump decides on a 25% import tariff. If it's just a 10% import tariff, apparently Apple can stand pat. But 25% pushes them over the edge, apparently. But back to the alleged Chinese hacking.

How do the dots on the Marriott hack and security clearances connect? Emerald Robinson painted this picture on Twitter, quote, The Chinese already hacked the OPM federal employee database. Now they have the Marriott list. Why? once they hack Uber, they would be able to track Americans with government jobs around the world moving in real time, end quote. And this from the Washington Post coverage of the story. The people familiar with the investigation said the Marriott breach involved the same cloud hosting space

that Chinese state hackers have used in the past, and that one signature technique that involved hopping among servers also points to Chinese involvement. Another clue suggesting nation-state involvement was that none of the breach data has appeared on the dark web or any of the forums that criminals typically use to sell stolen credentials and other valuable personal data. If it were a criminal act, people would be trying to sell it, said one of the people familiar with the investigation, end quote. One of the reasons that I follow the investment moves of the SoftBank Vision Fund so closely is that they can often reveal up-and-coming tech players that, as an ignorant American, are not even on my radar. Massa-San is laser-focused on the next.

30 years in technology, and that increasingly means non-North American markets. A perfect example is Takapedia, which is apparently Indonesia's largest online marketplace. Takapedia says it has raised $1.1 billion, led by SoftBank's Vision Fund and Alibaba, giving the company evaluation of $7 billion. And note that this deal comes mere weeks after SoftBank made a $2 billion investment in Kupang, Korea's leading e-commerce firm. But back to Tacopedia. Quoting TechCrunch, founded nine years ago,

Takopedia is often compared to Taubo, Alibaba's hugely successful e-commerce marketplace in China, and the company recently hit 4 million merchants. Takopedia said it has increased its GVM fourfold, although it did not provide a figure. Logistics are a huge issue in Indonesia, which is spread across some 17,000 islands. Right now, it claims to serve an impressive 93%

of the country, while it's said that one quarter of its customers are eligible for same-day delivery on products. That's also notable, given that it operates in a marketplace which makes coordinating logistics more challenging. The firm plans to use this new capital to develop its technology to enable more SMEs, small and medium enterprises, and independent retailers to come aboard its platform. On the consumer side, it is developing financial services and products that go beyond core e-commerce and increase its captive audience of consumers, end quote. And let me squeeze one more in here because I found this one fascinating. Online banking platform Good Money says it has raised a $30 million series A round from a group of investors, including Breyer Capital, Mitch Kapoor and Ken Howrie.

What's so interesting to me about good money? Well, quoting from Fast Company, when a new consumer signs up with good money, they're given an equity share and become partial owners of the platform. Good Money CEO Gunnar Lovelace says customers may eventually own as much as 70%. Credit unions, non-profit financial institutions collectively owned and governed by members, have existed since the mid-1800s, and Good Money, Lovelace says, was inspired in part by the cooperative movement that those banks play a part in. As non-profits, credit unions ultimately serve their members and return whatever profits they make to them in the form of lower fees and higher savings rates.

Good Money offers its members similar financial perks like no ATM or overdraft fees, but 50% of the profits it makes, it funnels toward the planet through impact investments and charitable donations. The platform's customers, who are partial owners, vote on where good money will invest its profits, but options will include only sustainable investments like clean energy or reforestation efforts, end quote. Lovelace was previously one of the founders of the organic e-commerce site Thrive Market, and he says that he wants good money's customer slash owners to feel more empowered within capitalism. Money is actually just energy, Lovelace says. The system can start to work better when people and the planet are the stakeholders, end quote.

According to Jerry Smith in Bloomberg, Apple is planning to relaunch the recent acquired texture this spring to test if the Netflix slash Spotify model can work for news. One big problem, though, major publishers are a tad wary of the idea. Apple wants to make texture a premium subscription product within Apple News to bundle subscription access to a variety of publishers for one monthly fee. Apple is currently wooing the likes of the Wall Street Journal and the New Yorker to join this scheme, but those same publishers fear that this would merely amount to Apple stealing their existing subscribers. And if Apple came in at, say, a $9.99 per month price point, I mean, that's

less than what the New York Times by itself charges per month to be a digital subscriber. So does the math even work here? Quoting from Bloomberg, in recent months, Apple has met with media executives to address concerns that a new texture could siphon off, subscribers, a team led by Eddie Q and former Condi Nass, Executive Liz Schimel, has argued that texture subscriber growth could generate enough revenue to exceed what media companies get from their own subscription businesses, one person said. Apple executives have also compared the opportunity with texture to their success with music. Since the company bought beats music in 2014 and used it as the basis for Apple music, the following year, the service has grown to more than

50 million subscribers. The question now is whether text is, whether textuals. can achieve that kind of growth. The app had roughly 200,000 subscribers when Apple acquired it, a person familiar with the matter said. In 2015, the service paid out more than $15 million in revenue to publishers, which get compensated based on how much time readers spend with their articles. I didn't get to cover this yesterday, but Dell has officially voted to buy back the VMware tracking stock, setting in motion, a return to public markets for Dell.

Dell will begin trading on the New York Stock Exchange beginning December 28 under the ticker symbol, Dell. You might have been aware of the years-long saga of Dell going private and retooling its entire business. What has been the result of this transformation? What is Dell's long game? In TechCrunch, Ron Miller lays it all out. He says it's all about hybrid and private clouds. The hybrid cloud involves managing workloads on-premises and in-leases. the cloud where private clouds are ones that companies run themselves, either in their own data

centers or on dedicated hardware in the public cloud. Patrick Moorhead, founder and principal analyst at More Insight and Strategy, says this approach takes a longer investment timeline and that required the changes we saw this morning. I believe Dell Technologies can better invest in its hybrid world with longer-term investors as the investment will be longer term, at least five years, he said. Part of that, he said, is due to the fact that many more on-prem to public connector services need to be built. Dell could be the company that helps build some of these missing pieces. It has always been, at its heart, a hardware company. And as such, either of these approaches would play to its strengths. When the company paid $67 billion for EMC in 2016, it had to have a long-term plan in mind. Michael Dell's parents didn't raise no fool, and he saw an opportunity with that,

move to push his company in a new direction, end quote. The bottom line, apparently, is that while the long-term trend in enterprise computing is moving fully into the cloud, there will nevertheless be a long interim period where you'll still need workloads to stay on site in some instances. So, Dell is positioning itself to be that half in the cloud and half-out provider. Let's end today with some good news. We all know that the U.S. pays some of the highest prices for some pretty mediocre Internet speeds, at least compared to the rest of the developed world. But according to Internet Speed Test Company, Ucla, broadband download speeds in the U.S. rose 35% this year, and upload speeds rose 22%.

Quoting recodes write-up of this. New Jersey had the highest mean download speed, 121 megabits per second, while Rhode Island had the fastest upload speeds, 63 megabits per second, in Q2 and Q3 of 2018. Maine had the slowest mean upload and download speeds of any state. California, the home of Silicon Valley, ranked 17th in downloads, and 24th in uploads. Xfinity was the fastest broadband provider nationwide, followed by Verizon, according to Ucla. On a city level, Kansas City, the home of Google Fiber, had the highest mean broadband speeds of any city in the country, both for downloads

and uploads at 159 and 127 megabits per second, respectively. Memphis had the slowest mean download speed, 45mbPS, while Laredo, Texas, had the slowest upload speed at about 9mbps. Hey, Boston listeners, I am going to be coming at you on Friday afternoon. On Friday at 2.45 p.m. I will be signing books at Porter Square Books in Cambridge. at 3.45, I will be signing books at Brookline Booksmith in Brookline. And at 4.30 p.m. I will be at Triton Booksellers and Cafe on Newberry Street in Boston proper.

If you Boston folks come out, please say hi. And specifically, let me know that your ride home listeners, just like the ride home listeners did when I went to Google. And at that last event at Trident Booksellers and Cafe, I'll probably be starving at that point. because I'll only have had A Sela food all day long. So if anyone wanted to hang out afterwards, grab a bite to eat or a beer and just commiserate. I'll be down for that as well. So Friday, Boston, see you then.

And Mutant Podcast Army for the win. Once again, we are currently at 302 reviews on iTunes slash Apple Podcasts. The 300th review either came from iTunes user Worthy Adventures or Joel Sack. or trumpet one one one one. It was one of you. So if that was you, thank you so much for putting us over the top at that nice round number. Talk to y'all again tomorrow.