Prediction articles:
2020: A consumer electronics forecast for the year(s) ahead
AI Chips: What Will 2020 Bring?
CEO Outlook: 2020 Vision: 5G, China and AI are prominent, but big changes are coming everywhere
Top 10 Tech Failures From 2019 That Hint At 2020 Trends – Last year’s tech failures often turn into next year’s leading trends
Trends:
AMD’s 7nm Ryzen 4000 CPUs are here to take on Intel’s 10nm Ice Lake laptop chips
Top 9 challenges IT leaders will face in 2020: From skills shortages to privacy concerns
From the oil rig to the lake: a shift in perspective on data
In December 2020, the new IEC/EN 62368-1 will replace the existing safety standards EN 60950-1 and EN 60065-1
Use of technology money outside company IT department is the new normal
Tech to try:
12 Alternative Operating Systems You Can Use In 2020
CONTINUOUS INTEGRATION: WHAT IT IS AND WHY YOU NEED IT
Research:
Universal memory coming? New type of non-volatile general purpose memory on research, some call it UltraRAM.
1,318 Comments
Tomi Engdahl says:
Mehedi Hassan / Thurrott:
Microsoft unveils Windows Package Manager, native to Windows 10, letting users install software from the command line without visiting vendor sites or the Store
Windows 10 Is Getting Its Own Built-In Package Manager
https://www.thurrott.com/windows/windows-10/236301/windows-10-is-getting-its-own-built-in-package-manager
Microsoft is adding a built-in package manager to Windows 10. The company today announced Windows Package Manager at Build 2020, and it’s a new, native package manager that is going to be built into Windows 10.
A package manager, for those unfamiliar, allows users to quickly install software on their machine without having to manually go to every application’s website or through the Microsoft Store.
Windows Package Manager is a new tool that will allow users to do exactly that. With the new “winget” command, Windows Package Manager automatically gets the latest version of an app you want to download, validates its authenticity, and installs it on your machine. For example, to install the latest version of Windows Terminal (which just hit 1.0 by the way), you can simply run “winget install terminal” and install the latest version of the Windows Terminal without having to go to the Microsoft Store. You can also use “winget search” to search for an app.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Tom Warren / The Verge:
Microsoft says it is improving its Windows Subsystem for Linux, including adding GUI app support, as its Terminal command line tool reaches version 1.0
Microsoft is bringing Linux GUI apps to Windows 10
https://www.theverge.com/2020/5/19/21263377/microsoft-windows-10-linux-gui-apps-gpu-acceleration-wsl-features
Linux on Windows 10 gets a big boost and GPU acceleration
Microsoft is promising to dramatically improve its Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL) with GUI app support and GPU hardware acceleration. The software giant is adding a full Linux kernel to Windows 10 with WSL version 2 later this month, and it’s now planning to support Linux GUI apps that will run alongside regular Windows apps.
This will be enabled without Windows users having to use X11 forwarding, and it’s mainly designed for developers to run Linux integrated development environments (IDE) alongside regular Windows apps.
While it has been possible to run Linux GUI apps within Windows previously using a third-party X server, poor graphics performance has always been an issue.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Microsoft’s new PowerToys Run launcher for Windows 10 is now available to download
https://www.theverge.com/2020/5/19/21262060/microsoft-windows-10-launcher-powertoy-spotlight-alfred-download-build
Microsoft is releasing a new Spotlight-like launcher app for Windows 10 today. Designed to replace and modernize the existing Win + R shortcut, the new PowerToys Run launcher includes quick search for apps and files across Windows, plugins like a calculator, and the ability to find running processes.
This early version will support basic search tasks that are typically handled by the built-in Windows Start menu search functionality. But there are plans to make this a more powerful launcher that’s similar to Alfred on macOS and more functional than Apple’s Spotlight search.
The current Win + R functionality is basic and used by Windows power users to launch cmd prompts, regedit, powershell instances, and even shortcuts to areas in Windows like the Control Panel. This new PowerToys Run launcher will support all of the same commands that Run does currently in Windows, but Microsoft is collaborating with an open-source community that’s contributing to make it far more powerful.
https://github.com/microsoft/PowerToys/releases
This open-source app will include custom plugins in the future
Tomi Engdahl says:
Tom Warren / The Verge:
Microsoft announces the Fluid Framework, a new type of Office document built around collaborative Lego-like blocks on the web, and says it will be open source — Microsoft is creating a new kind of Office document. Instead of Word, Excel, or PowerPoint, the company has created Lego blocks of Office content that live on the web.
Microsoft’s new Fluid Office document is Google Docs on steroids
Fluid is coming to Office.com and going open source
https://www.theverge.com/2020/5/19/21260005/microsoft-office-fluid-web-document-features-build
Tomi Engdahl says:
Pandemic Delays Electronic Product Launches
A survey finds component prices are surging as supply chain disruptions continue. 53 percent of electronics industry product launches have been delayed.
https://www.eetimes.com/pandemic-delays-electronic-product-launches/
Tomi Engdahl says:
Clouds Lift on Microsoft’s Telecom Ambitions
https://www.eetimes.com/clouds-lift-on-microsofts-telecom-ambitions/
Microsoft has further strengthened its position in the telecom services sector with the acquisition, for an undisclosed sum, of Metaswitch Networks.
The move follows its purchase of cloud-based mobile core solutions specialist Affirmed Networks late March. The two companies certainly bring a wealth of telecoms expertise and know-how, not to mention a big customer base.
Undercutting operators and infrastructure suppliers?
Both acquisitions, in the era of network virtualization, reveal Microsoft’s telecom ambitions. The moves can be viewed as Microsoft finally taking its gloves off, poised to undercut operators and traditional telecommunication equipment vendors such as Ericsson and Nokia.
Announcing the strategic move late last week in a blog on Microsoft’s site, Yousef Khalidi , corporate vice president of the increasingly influential Azure Networks division also expanded on the company’s ambitions in the sector.
Our intention over time is to create modern alternatives to network infrastructure, enabling operators to deliver existing and value-added services — with greater cost efficiency and lower capital investment than they have faced in the past.
How clear is that!
So, mobile network operators and their infrastructure suppliers — don’t say you have not been warned.
Khalidi continued:
We have a long history of working with operators as they increasingly embrace software-based solutions and continue to support the advancement of cloud-based networking while helping create new partnership opportunities for existing network equipment providers.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Salvador Rodriguez / CNBC:
Mark Zuckerberg announces Facebook Shops, a free tool that helps businesses easily list products on their Facebook Page, Instagram profile, Stories, or in ads — – Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced Facebook Shops, a new e-commerce feature that allows businesses to easily list their products on Facebook and Instagram.
Mark Zuckerberg announces Facebook Shops, making it easier for businesses to list products for sale
https://www.cnbc.com/2020/05/19/zuckerberg-announces-facebook-shops-e-commerce-for-businesses.html
Using Facebook Shops allows businesses to list their products on their Facebook Page, Instagram profile, Stories or in ads.
In the future, Facebook Shops will also allow businesses to sell products to customers through the chat features of WhatsApp, Messenger and Instagram Direct and tag products during livestreams.
The company has previously let businesses list products on Facebook and Instagram, but Facebook Shops lets them upload their catalogs once to make them accessible across Facebook’s various apps.
“It’s one simple and consistent experience across this family of apps, which means it is easier for people,” Zuckerberg said in a live stream on Facebook. “That of course means there’ll be higher conversions and more sales for small businesses.”
Facebook Shops comes as Facebook ramps up its efforts to support small businesses during the coronavirus pandemic,
Tomi Engdahl says:
Paul Ford / Wired:
Video chat tools like Zoom do well to emulate workspaces but lack flexibility in creative presentation and miss the subtleties of in-person interactions
https://www.wired.com/story/we-are-all-livestreamers-now-zoom-stage/
Tomi Engdahl says:
TSMC to Build 5nm Fab in Arizona
Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. (TSMC) said it will build a 5nm fab in Arizona with support from that state and the U.S. federal government. The facility will have a 20,000 wafer-per-month capacity, create over 1,600 jobs directly and thousands more indirect jobs, the company said in a press statement today. The announcement comes following press reports that the U.S. government was pushing …
TSMC to Build 5nm Fab in Arizona
https://www.eetimes.com/tsmc-to-build-5nm-fab-in-arizona/
Tomi Engdahl says:
‘More Than Moore’ Reality Check
Multi-chip design is becoming more mainstream, but gaps remain.
https://semiengineering.com/more-than-moore-reality-check/
The semiconductor industry is embracing multi-die packages as feature scaling hits the limits of physics, but how to get there with the least amount of pain and at the lowest cost is a work in progress. Gaps remain in tooling and methodologies, interconnect standards are still being developed, and there are so many implementations of packaging that the number of choices is often overwhelming.
Multi-die implementations today encompass a range of packaging technologies and approaches that have evolved over the past 40 years. It began with multi-chip modules in the 1980s. In the late 1990s, system-in-package approaches were introduced. That was followed by interposer-based implementations around 2008. Today, all of those still exist, along with fan-outs, true 3D-ICs, and some proprietary implementations of chiplets, which are sometimes referred to as disaggregated SoCs.
Much of this has been driven by a reduction in performance and power benefits from scaling below 10nm, along with the growing number of physics-related issues at the most advanced nodes, such as multiple types of noise, thermal effects and electromigration. Most companies working at those nodes already are utilizing some form of advanced packaging to help justify the huge cost of moving to the next node.
Three major changes are underway in this “More Than Moore” paradigm:
Heterogeneous integration using chiplets. Companies such as Intel, AMD and Marvell already are utilizing a chiplet approach for their own designs, but there are efforts underway to standardize the interfaces for chiplets and open this up to third-party chiplets.
Big improvements in multi-chip performance. Approaches such as fan-out wafer-level packaging originally were slated to be low-cost alternatives to 2.5D and 3D-IC, but increased density, pillars, high-bandwidth memory and faster interconnects have made these approaches much more attractive. 3D-ICs likewise are beginning to take shape at the high end of this market.
Shifts by all the major foundries into advanced packaging. TSMC, UMC, GlobalFoundries, Samsung and others offer advanced packaging options today. TSMC also is developing packaging at the front end of the line, where chiplets are etched directly into silicon using a direct bond approach.
Tomi Engdahl says:
https://semiengineering.com/choosing-the-appropriate-interconnect-protocol/
Tomi Engdahl says:
Microsoft is bringing Linux GUI apps to Windows 10
Linux on Windows 10 gets a big boost and GPU acceleration
https://www.theverge.com/2020/5/19/21263377/microsoft-windows-10-linux-gui-apps-gpu-acceleration-wsl-features
Microsoft is promising to dramatically improve its Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL) with GUI app support and GPU hardware acceleration. The software giant is adding a full Linux kernel to Windows 10 with WSL version 2 later this month, and it’s now planning to support Linux GUI apps that will run alongside regular Windows apps.
This will be enabled without Windows users having to use X11 forwarding, and it’s mainly designed for developers to run Linux integrated development environments (IDE) alongside regular Windows apps.
All of these latest Linux improvements are clearly aimed directly at developers who want to use Windows as a dev box. Microsoft has made some solid improvements to Windows with WSL in recent years after surprising everyone by adding the Bash shell to Windows at Build four years ago. The development community has also embraced WSL, with direct support in many tools.
Microsoft also added native OpenSSH in Windows 10, and even Ubuntu, SUSE Linux, and Fedora in the Windows Store.
All of these latest Linux improvements are clearly aimed directly at developers who want to use Windows as a dev box. Microsoft has made some solid improvements to Windows with WSL in recent years after surprising everyone by adding the Bash shell to Windows at Build four years ago. The development community has also embraced WSL, with direct support in many tools.
Microsoft also added native OpenSSH in Windows 10, and even Ubuntu, SUSE Linux, and Fedora in the Windows Store.
Tomi Engdahl says:
EA is releasing the source code for two classic Command and Conquer games
Tiberian Dawn and Red Alert will be open sourced
https://www.theverge.com/2020/5/20/21265663/ea-command-conquer-tiberian-dawn-red-alert-open-source-remastered
Tomi Engdahl says:
Microsoft aims to spread JAMstack through Azure App Service via GitHub and Visual Studio Code
Developers, get ready to hook into Windows giant’s cloud
https://www.theregister.co.uk/2020/05/19/jamstack_comes_to_azure_app/
Tomi Engdahl says:
”There may still be issues with hardware but corona will accelerate various approaches to VR and that will give it a strong boost.”
Sony ramps up VR efforts as demand for virtual events surges
https://www.ft.com/content/08f620d1-a433-41e6-af7c-a12335880076?shareType=nongift
Chief Kenichiro Yoshida reveals plans to experiment with streaming concerts on headsets
Tomi Engdahl says:
Three quarters of workers don’t want to go back to the office full-time
https://www.zdnet.com/article/three-quarters-of-workers-dont-want-to-go-back-to-the-office-full-time/
Even as businesses start reopening, bringing staff back to work is by no means a given.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Microsoft announces Project Reunion to make Windows app development easier again
https://techcrunch.com/2020/05/19/microsoft-announces-project-reunion-to-make-windows-app-development-easier-again/
Microsoft today announced a major new initiative that will finally alleviate some of the persistent confusion around Windows app development. Project Reunion, as it is called, is meant to unify the Windows developer platform, which is currently broken up between Win32, which was long the standard way of building Windows app, and the Universal Windows Platform (UWP), which Microsoft started betting on during the ill-fated Windows 8 era (you may remember UWP under the “Metro-style apps” monicker).
Tomi Engdahl says:
https://www.tweaktown.com/news/72577/epic-games-boss-confirms-unreal-engine-5-will-not-work-on-commodore-64/index.html
Tomi Engdahl says:
Work From Home is dead, long live Work From Anywhere
https://techcrunch.com/2020/05/18/work-from-home-is-dead-long-live-work-from-anywhere/
Understandably, the mandatory Work From Home situation that many of us find ourselves in is not ideal. Schools are closed, kids are home, internet is wonky since everyone else is home, the dog sitter isn’t coming and there are no cafés to find sojourn. It’s not surprising then that there is something of a popular revulsion and revolt to the whole WFH notion, even as large tech companies like Twitter say they will permanently offer Work From Home as an option.
Tomi Engdahl says:
US semiconductor giant shuts China factory hailed as ‘a miracle’, in blow to Beijing’s chip plans
https://www.scmp.com/economy/china-economy/article/3085230/us-semiconductor-giant-shuts-china-factory-hailed-miracle
US chip giant GlobalFoundries confirms it has ceased operations at its only Chinese facility, with industry experts saying the poorly-planned project was doomed to fail
Closure deals blow to China’s plans to move up semiconductor value chain, amid increasingly hostile tech rivalry with the United States
Tomi Engdahl says:
The original source code of Microsoft GW-BASIC from 1983 released https://github.com/microsoft/GW-BASIC
Tomi Engdahl says:
https://devblogs.microsoft.com/commandline/microsoft-open-sources-gw-basic/
Tomi Engdahl says:
SD Association Publishes SD 8.0 Standard, Promises Up to 4GB/s From New SD Express Cards
Fully backwards compatible but scaling to 4GB/s throughput, the new SD 8.0 standard could be great news for embedded projects.
https://www.hackster.io/news/sd-association-publishes-sd-8-0-standard-promises-up-to-4gb-s-from-new-sd-express-cards-614ef89f9c5c
Tomi Engdahl says:
https://spectrum.ieee.org/tech-talk/computing/software/software-development-environments-cloud
Tomi Engdahl says:
With 165 billion chips shipped and counting, Arm is the computing platform the world’s software runs on
https://www.arm.com/company/news/2020/05/virtual-arm-devsummit#
Tomi Engdahl says:
https://www.gnu.org/graphics/gnulove.en.html
Tomi Engdahl says:
https://www.makeuseof.com/tag/why-linux-phones-laptops-arent-cheap/
Tomi Engdahl says:
https://www.cio.com/article/3540233/it-outsourcing-is-back-and-its-more-critical-than-ever.html
Tomi Engdahl says:
https://www.cybercom.com/About-Cybercom/Blogs/managed-cloud-services/no-two-servers-alike/?utm_source=facebook&utm_medium=paid-social&utm_campaign=SDM+%7C+B2B+track+%7C+Blog+content&utm_content=No+two+servers+alike+%7C+Cold+%7C+Interests+and+demographics&hsa_acc=266304853801169&hsa_cam=23842812769810793&hsa_grp=23842895129180793&hsa_ad=23842895129170793&hsa_src=fb&hsa_net=facebook&hsa_ver=3
Tomi Engdahl says:
5 high paying coding languages you can learn for free
https://content.techgig.com/5-high-paying-coding-languages-you-can-learn-for-free/articleshow/75556224.cms
Tomi Engdahl says:
Intel Preparing Platform Monitoring Technology – Hardware Telemetry With Tiger Lake
https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Intel-Platform-Monitoring-Linux
Intel developers are working on a new Linux feature and technology called “Intel Platform Monitoring Technology” as amounting to a hardware telemetry framework that can also be used by other hardware vendors. This appears to be a new feature Intel will be supporting on the hardware side starting with Tiger Lake.
Tomi Engdahl says:
GitHub gets a built-in IDE with Codespaces, discussion forums and more
https://techcrunch.com/2020/05/06/github-gets-a-built-in-ide-with-codespaces-discussion-forums-and-more/
Tomi Engdahl says:
No Two Servers Alike
https://www.cybercom.com/About-Cybercom/Blogs/managed-cloud-services/no-two-servers-alike/?utm_source=facebook&utm_medium=paid-social&utm_campaign=SDM+%7C+B2B+track+%7C+Blog+content&utm_content=No+two+servers+alike+%7C+Cold+%7C+Interests+and+demographics&hsa_acc=266304853801169&hsa_cam=23842812769810793&hsa_grp=23842895129180793&hsa_ad=23842895129170793&hsa_src=fb&hsa_net=facebook&hsa_ver=3
Tomi Engdahl says:
Rachel Lerman / Washington Post:
A look at webcam supply chain issues as ecommerce tracking firm CommerceIQ finds 78% of views on webcam product pages showed out of stock in the week of May 9
The hunt for a work-from-home webcam: A story of broken supply chains, ‘sold-out’ messages and refreshing online carts
https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2020/05/21/webcam-backorder-coronavirus-pandemic/
Webcams are back-ordered and sold out across the Internet as we struggle to look our best on camera while working from home
All those hours of pandemic-induced video conference calls, chats with family and hangouts with friends are straining our eyes — and, apparently, straining webcam availability.
Webcams are sold out or on weeks-long back order nearly everywhere across the Internet, and people are reporting having trouble finding them in the limited number of retail stores that are open as well. E-commerce tracking company CommerceIQ found 78 percent of views on webcam product pages on big online retail sites showed the items were out of stock during the week ended May 9.
People’s shopping habits have shifted away from just buying bulk amounts of food during the pandemic to facing extended work-from-home periods, CommerceIQ CEO Guru Hariharan said.
“Now, I think people are slowly starting to realize this is a new normal,” he said. “They realize they need to get prepared for a new operating normal.”
For years, consumers have gravitated toward newer, smaller, more mobile devices for life on the move. Just three months ago, webcams were turning into relics of the past.
But the coronavirus pandemic changed that as millions of people began to work from home and heavily rely on technology to keep in touch with family and friends.
It’s not just webcams. Monitors, keyboards and even office chairs became harder to find as people flocked to the Internet to buy them in numbers that manufacturers couldn’t have foreseen before the pandemic. At the same time, manufacturing plants in China and around the world have been closed intermittently because of coronavirus lockdowns.
Tomi Engdahl says:
The 2020 Stack Overflow Developer Survey – 65,000 Devs Share Their Salaries, Top Programming Languages, and More
https://www.freecodecamp.org/news/stack-overflow-developer-survey-2020-programming-language-framework-salary-data/
Stack Overflow just released the results of their 2020 survey of more than 65,000 developers.
This article will give you a snapshot of what the software development profession looks like in 2020.
How old is the average professional software developer?
Most professional developers are in their late 20s or early 30s. But as we’ll see, Indian developers (and there are a lot of them) bring the average age down quite a bit.
But contrary to popular belief, coding is not just a young person’s game. (I’ve been trying my darnedest to dispel this myth). 1 out of every 20 developers is age 50 or older.
American developers tend to be older than developers in other countries, with an average age of nearly 34 years.
Americans also seem to start coding later in life than other countries, and have on average only coded for about 16 years – meaning most of them didn’t start coding until after high school.
What is the educational background of most professional developers like?
About 75% of developers finished an undergraduate university degree, and many of those people also went on to get a graduate degree, too.
3% of professional developers stopped school after completing a 2-year associates degree, and around 17% of developers haven’t earned any university degree at all.
How many of the respondents were women?
Only 7.7% of respondents who were professional developers identified as women. But on a plus note, this number is up from 7.5% in 2019.
Tools and technologies: the most commonly used programming language is JavaScript
Rust has been the most loved programming language by developers for the past 4 years. The high-performance language, which just turned 5 years old this month, is used heavily by the Mozilla Firefox team.
Developers who are already working with other programming languages are most interested in learning Python, JavaScript, Go, and TypeScript.
Redis, the in-memory database structure for storing key-value pairs, is the most-loved database. 66.5% of developers have either used it or want to use it on a future project. PostgreSQL – the popular relational database – is a close second.
MongoDB is the “Most Wanted” database, with 19% of developers expressing interest in using it on their next project. PostgreSQL is a close second, at 15.6%
Linux is the most-loved platform, with 76.9% of developers either using it or expressing interest in using it in the future.
Docker and Kubernetes – while not operating systems – are also popular platforms to build applications on top of. In terms of cloud platforms, AWS was more popular than Azure, which was more popular than Google Cloud Platform and IBM Cloud.
In terms of developers being excited about platforms, Docker was right at the top with 24.5% of developers wanting to use it for a future project. And the interest around AWS was quite high, too
Developers who are already working with other programming languages are most interested in learning Python, JavaScript, Go, and TypeScript.
Linux is the most-loved platform, with 76.9% of developers either using it or expressing interest in using it in the future.
As of 2020, nearly half (46%) of developers still use Windows as their main desktop operating system.
MacOS and Linux are nearly tied for second.
A small minority of mavericks out there use BSD.
Node.js is again the most widely used non-language, non-operating system, non-database tool.
Machine learning tools are becoming more widely used this year, too. Quite a few developers are using TensorFlow, Pandas, and PyTorch.
the most widely used web framework / library in 2020 is still jQuery.
How do developers choose their tools?
This was a new question on this year’s Stack Overflow survey: how do developers research new tools and decide whether to use them?
The most popular approach: if it has a free trial, just give it a try.
This said, most developers don’t feel a whole lot of power in determining which tools their team will ultimately use.
I suspect one reason for this may be that large companies often have Chief Information Officers (CIOs) who make enterprise software license purchasing decisions at an institutional level.
Professional developers pick up new tools often. Nearly ¾ of them seem to learn at least one new technology every year.
A vast majority of professional developers work for an employer. Less than 10% of them were self-employed or working as freelancers or contractors when surveyed in February 2020.
all of these “name brand” software companies and their peers only employ about 14% of developers. Most developers are working at companies you haven’t heard of. Many of them aren’t even working at tech companies, but rather at banks, hospitals, and local governments. As of 2020, Pretty much every Fortune 1000 company has software engineers on staff.
Less than half of respondents considered their company’s new developer onboarding process to be “good”.
But about 65% of them were satisfied with their jobs.
The main consideration that spurs developers to start looking for new jobs? Money. Not a huge surprise there.
But what is surprising is that a desire to work with new technologies came in second – above growth and leadership opportunities and work/life balance.
And when it comes to job satisfaction, “Languages, frameworks, and other technologies I’d be working with” was the main consideration for most developers. But… only for men.
For the 3,694 women who responded to the survey, “office environment and company culture” was the most important consideration. The technologies they’d be working with were a tertiary consideration.
If you want to get a high wage earlier in your career, it would seem that DevOps and Site Reliability Engineering are your golden tickets.
One thing you’ll note from looking at these charts: back end developers in the US seem to average about $8,000 more than full stack developers do, but full stack developers make slightly more outside the US.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Linus Torvalds drops Intel and adopts 32-core AMD Ryzen Threadripper on personal PC
‘My ‘allmodconfig’ test builds are now three times faster than they used to be’ says Linux overlord
https://www.theregister.com/2020/05/24/linus_torvalds_adopts_amd_threadripper/
Tomi Engdahl says:
The same core Task Manager app that David Plummer wrote in 1994 still ships with Windows 10 today.
Windows 10: The developer who wrote Windows Task Manager reveals its secrets
https://www.zdnet.com/article/windows-10-the-developer-who-wrote-windows-task-manager-reveals-its-secrets/?ftag=COS-05-10aaa0h&utm_campaign=trueAnthem%3A+Trending+Content&utm_medium=trueAnthem&utm_source=facebook
The same core Task Manager app that David Plummer wrote in 1994 still ships with Windows 10 today.
David Plummer, the former Microsoft developer who wrote Windows Task Manager in the 1990s, has revealed the application’s inner workings and hidden tricks.
Windows Task Manager (TaskMgr) first shipped with Windows NT 4.0 in 1996, and anyone who’s used Windows since then has probably used the app to check CPU load or to kill a process.
https://www.reddit.com/r/techsupport/comments/gqb915/i_wrote_task_manager_and_i_just_remembered/
Tomi Engdahl says:
Little-known Japanese CPU threatens to make Nvidia, Intel and AMD obsolete in HPC market
https://www.techradar.com/news/little-known-japanese-cpu-threatens-to-make-nvidia-intel-and-amd-obsolete-in-hpc-market
Sandia National Laboratories has announced it will be the first Department of Energy labs in the US to deploy the Fujitsu A64FX, the only ARM-based processor designed from ground up for HPC projects and supercomputers.
Launched in 2019, the CPU has 48 cores, a theoretical peak performance of 3.38 TFLOPS, runs at 2.2GHz and has 32GB HBM2 memory on the die itself.
Tomi Engdahl says:
https://www.memtest86.com/
Tomi Engdahl says:
Covid-19 Raises Demand for Thermal Imagers and Detectors
https://www.eetimes.com/covid-19-raises-demand-for-thermal-imagers-and-detectors/
Thermal imaging and sensing technology will certainly be among the lines of defense against the Covid-19 virus, according to market research firm Yole Développement (Lyon, France), triggering a boom in the market for thermal technologies. Between 2019 and 2020, the thermal imager and thermal detector markets are projected to rise by 76 percent and 20 percent, respectively.
Automotive down, thermography and public surveillance up
The Covid-19 pandemic is reshuffling the cards. High-volume applications such as automotive and ruggedized smartphones, which were expected to boom, are showing signs of stagnation, especially as production shifts towards more cameras for fever detection applications. Based on industry indicators, Yole now predicts that thermal imagers will be a $7.6 billion market, up 76 percent year-over-year. Previous forecasts predicted a $4.5 billion market, up 8 percent year-over-year.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Latest IC Outlook: More Uncertainty
Analysis: Downturn is likely, but there are some bright spots.
https://semiengineering.com/latest-ic-outlook-more-uncertainty/
Tomi Engdahl says:
Analog IC Market Rides Rollercoaster
https://www.eetimes.com/analog-ic-market-rides-rollercoaster/
Industrial applications, smartphones and other consumer electronics devices along with automotive use cases are driving an otherwise shrinking analog IC market that saw declining 2019 sales for all but one of the top suppliers.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Consolidating Suppliers? There’s Danger in Single-Sourcing
https://www.eetimes.com/consolidating-suppliers-theres-danger-in-single-sourcing/
The buzz words are very appealing: economies of scale; cost efficiencies; one-stop solutions; turnkey service, etc. These phrases can be comforting when plotting strategies for hefty margins and operational efficiencies. In manufacturing and supply chain management, though they are also loaded and can kill or stunt an enterprise’s growth.
In today’s savagely competitive market, companies desperate to squeeze the best efficiencies out of their supply chain are ignoring best practices by embracing single or sole-sourcing strategies. This tactic will ensure homogeneity of supplies and quick, easy replacement as well as ensure lower cost, from volume pricing. The same strategy in today’s volatile geo-political environment can also tip over your business.
Just ask the companies groaning under US ban on the sale of semiconductor components to Chinese companies produced using equipment supplied by American chip equipment manufacturers.
President Donald Trump is targeting Huawei, ZTE and other Chinese communication equipment makers. They may be legitimate targets but what about TSMC, ST, TI, Analog Devices, NXP, Freescale or a myriad of other chipmakers that may be supplying components to the Chinese entities? If any of these companies produce chips on equipment supplied by the likes of Lam Research, KLA Corp., and Applied Materials they will be severely squeezed. TSMC has relied solely on American-made semiconductor equipment, it can expect severe withdrawal symptoms once it dumps Huawei as it most likely will.
Tomi Engdahl says:
https://www.eetimes.com/chip-equipment-becomes-trade-wars-latest-battlefield/
Tomi Engdahl says:
Storage Optimization Moves Up the Stack
https://www.eetimes.com/storage-optimization-moves-up-the-stack/
As NVMe continues to mature and help storage systems get the most from flash-based SSDs, memory vendors are looking a little higher up the stack for more optimization gains.
Recognizing that existing storage engines are designed for the spinning disk era, Micron Technology recently unveiled its heterogeneous-memory storage engine (HSE) aimed at not only getting more from SSDs but also other storage-class memory (SCM), including 3D XPoint. The company’s open source HSE will enable developers using all-flash infrastructure to customize or enhance code for its unique use cases and take advantage of the performance and reduced latency of next-generation nonvolatile media, said Steve Moyer, vice president of storage software engineering at Micron.
“We’re a huge fan of NVMe,” he said in a telephone interview with EE Times. “It’s eliminated a lot of the inefficiencies from the traditional storage protocols and allowed the lowest layers of the operating system stack — the blocks — to operate very efficiently.” However, there’s more work to be done one level up to make the storage engine use the media more effectively, said Moyer. “One of those aspects is the read and write paths through the stack, eliminating anything that’s unnecessary so you can get the lowest latencies possible.”
Tomi Engdahl says:
A new architecture for the provision of secure storage offers higher capacity at lower cost
https://www.eetimes.com/a-new-architecture-for-the-provision-of-secure-storage-offers-higher-capacity-at-lower-cost/
Tomi Engdahl says:
DARPA Looks to Automate Security for IC Design
https://www.eetimes.com/darpa-looks-to-automate-security-for-ic-design/
Tomi Engdahl says:
4 Things Today’s Engineer Must Know
https://www.eetimes.com/4-things-todays-engineer-must-know/
Daniel Cooley, senior vice president and chief strategy officer at Silicon Labs, did not disappoint us during a recent chat. He went straight to four big industry-wide topics that he believes are changing the face of the tech world:
AI
security
the roles that tech companies play in the real world (will be scrutinized by governments and consumers)
technology stack (what happens in the cloud matters to chip designers)
Tomi Engdahl says:
The Good And Bad Of Chiplets
IDMs leverage chiplet models, others are still working on it.
https://semiengineering.com/the-good-and-bad-of-chiplets/
Chiplet apps and challenges
For decades, chipmakers introduced a new process technology every 18 to 24 months. At this cadence, vendors introduced new chips based on the latest process, enabling devices with more transistor density at lower costs.
This formula began to unravel starting at the 16nm/14nm node. Suddenly, IC design and manufacturing costs skyrocketed, and since then the cadence for a fully scaled node has extended from 18 months to 2.5 years or longer. Of course, not all chips require advanced nodes. And not everything that currently is put on the same die benefits from scaling.
This is where chiplets fit it. A bigger chip can be broken down into smaller pieces and mixed and matched as needed. Chiplets presumably have a lower cost and better yield than a monolithic die.
A chiplet isn’t a package type. It’s part of a packaging architecture. With chiplets, dies could be integrated into an existing package type, such as 2.5D/3D, fan-out or multi-chip modules (MCMs). Some may develop entirely new architectures using chiplets.
For example, using a chiplet methodology called Foveros, Intel last year introduced a 3D CPU platform. This combines a 10nm processor core with four 22nm processor cores in a package.
AMD, Marvell and others also have developed chiplet-like products. Generally, these designs are targeted for the same applications as today’s 2.5D packaging technologies, such as AI and other data-intensive workloads. “Logic/memory on an interposer is probably the most common implementation now,” Intel’s Nagisetty said. “In high-performance products that require large amounts of memory, you will see a chiplet-based approach.”
But chiplets won’t dominate the landscape. “There’s an ongoing increase in the types and numbers of devices,” Nagisetty said. “I don’t think all products will go to a chiplet-based approach. In some cases, a monolithic die is going to be the lowest-cost option. But for high-performance products, it’s safe to say that a chiplet-approach is going to become the norm, if it’s not already.”
Generally, to develop a chiplet-based product requires known-good dies, EDA tools, die-to-die interconnect technologies, and a manufacturing strategy.
“If you look at who is doing chiplet-based designs today, they tend to be vertically integrated companies. They have all the pieces in-house,”
Not all companies have the pieces in-house. Some pieces are available, while others aren’t ready. The challenge is to locate the necessary pieces and integrate them, which will take time and resources.
“Chiplets seem to be the hottest topic right now. The main reason is because of the diversity of applications and architectures required at the edge,” said Scott Kroeger, chief marketing officer at Veeco. “Chiplets could help resolve that, if it’s done right. There is still a lot of work to be done there. The question is how do you get to the point where you can start to incorporate all these different types of devices into one.”
So where does one start? For many, design service companies, foundries and OSATs are possible starting points. Some foundries not only manufacture chips for others, but they also provide various packaging services.
“If the industry wants to move toward an ecosystem that supports chiplet-based integration, that would mean different companies would have to start sharing chip IP with each other,” ASE’s Bergman said. “These are things that are not traditionally done. That’s a hurdle. There is one way to overcome that. Instead of sharing all of the die IP, the devices implement an integrated standard interface.”
Tomi Engdahl says:
What Is Confidential Computing?
Big tech companies are adopting a new security model called confidential computing to protect data while it’s in use
https://spectrum.ieee.org/computing/hardware/what-is-confidential-computing
A handful of major technology companies are going all in on a new security model they’re calling confidential computing in an effort to better protect data in all its forms.
The three pillars of data security involve protecting data at rest, in transit, and in use. Protecting data at rest means using methods such as encryption or tokenization so that even if data is copied from a server or database, a thief can’t access the information. Protecting data in transit means making sure unauthorized parties can’t see information as it moves between servers and applications. There are well-established ways to provide both kinds of protection.
Protecting data while in use, though, is especially tough because applications need to have data in the clear—not encrypted or otherwise protected—in order to compute. But that means malware can dump the contents of memory to steal information. It doesn’t really matter if the data was encrypted on a server’s hard drive if it’s stolen while exposed in memory.
Proponents of confidential computing hope to change that. “We’re trying to evangelize there are actually practical solutions” to protect data while it’s in use
The consortium, launched last August under the Linux Foundation, aims to define standards for confidential computing and support the development and adoption of open-source tools. Members include technology heavyweights such as Alibaba, AMD, Arm, Facebook, Fortanix, Google, Huawei, IBM (through its subsidiary Red Hat), Intel, Microsoft, Oracle, Swisscom, Tencent, and Vmware. Several already have confidential computing products and services for sale.
Confidential computing uses hardware-based techniques to isolate data, specific functions, or an entire application from the operating system, hypervisor or virtual machine manager, and other privileged processes. Data is stored in the trusted execution environment (TEE), where it’s impossible to view the data or operations performed on it from outside, even with a debugger. The TEE ensures that only authorized code can access the data. If the code is altered or tampered with, the TEE denies the operation.