The secret sauce that will drive Mozilla’s new JavaScript engine engine into the fast lane is some code borrowed from Apple’s WebKit project. Mozilla intends to bring together the powerful optimization techniques of TraceMonkey and the extremely efficient native code generator of Apple’s JSCore engine. The mashup will likely deliver a significant boost in Firefox’s JavaScript execution speed, making Mozilla’s browser a formidable contender in the ongoing JavaScript speed race.

Mozilla’s current JavaScript engine uses nanojit as its native code generator. Adobe originally developed nanojit to power Flash’s ActionScript execution and released it under an open source software license in 2006. Mozilla and Adobe were going to use nanojit to build an ECMAScript 4 implementation called Tamarin, but the project was largely abandoned when ECMAScript 4 was shelved. Mozilla integrated nanojit into its existing SpiderMonkey engine and added tracing optimization to build TraceMonkey.

Mozilla’s new JägerMonkey engine will continue to use nanojit for some things, but will rely on Apple’s Nitro Assembler to generate efficient native code. This will allow JägerMonkey to benefit from the performance advantages of method-based just-in-time (JIT) compilation. JägerMonkey will also use tracing optimization to flatten out loops and speed up other kinds of execution paths that can benefit from further optimization. Mozilla says that this blend of technologies potentially offers the best of all worlds.

“The reason we’re [building JägerMonkey] is that TraceMonkey is very fast for code that traces well, but for code that doesn’t trace, we’re stuck with the interpreter, which is not fast. The JägerMonkey method JIT will provide a much better performance baseline, and tracing will continue to speed us up on code where it applies,” wrote developer David Mandelin a blog entry about the new engine.

The project is said to be at a relatively early stage of development and is not yet ready to be broadly demonstrated. Developers who want to have a look at the code can download it from Mozilla’s version control repository. The current development status is described in a page at the Mozilla wiki.

www.arstechnica.com

Advanced Micro Devices plans to release a processor in its “Fusion” line that will be positioned for the netbook market, putting it in competition with the Intel Atom, and, to a lesser degree, the ARM processor.

The “Fusion” program is AMD’s (NYSE: AMD) long-term project to integrate its CPU cores with graphics processor cores from ATI, which it acquired in 2006. The first Fusion processors are expected some time early next year. Intel (NASDAQ: INTC) has its own integrated processors, the Westmere family of Core i5/i7 chips, which feature integrated graphics in dual-core CPUs.

AMD hasn’t yet hammered out all the specifics, but the netbook part will run in the 10-15 watt range, which is similar to the Intel Atom, and “it will have a good processor integrated with graphics, so you won’t need the [Nvidia] Ion graphics to give it half-decent performance,” according to Nigel Dessau, chief marketing officer at AMD.

The processor is likely from the “Bobcat” line of chips first disclosed last November. It will be designed for 12-inch and smaller screens. Intel has defined netbooks by screen size, and only supports 10-inch and smaller devices. AMD chose to make a new part rather than whittle down an existing one for the low-power, low-profile environment of netbooks.

www.internetnews.com

The attack by the former US Army computer-security specialist is notable because it goes where no hacker has gone before: into the widely used Infineon SLE 66PE, a microcontroller that carries the TPM, or Trusted Platform Module designation of security. The hack means he can access sensitive data and algorithms locked away in the chip’s digital vault and even make counterfeit clones that could fool the many devices that rely on it.

Its genesis came when Tarnovsky learned that manufacturers of video game controllers had to obtain a license from Microsoft for the peripherals to work on the Xbox 360. The requirement offended his sense of fair play, so he put his reverse engineering muscle to breaking it.

“I was very surprised they would put a security chip in a wired controller, as well as a wireless controller,” he said. “It’s very monopolistic what they’ve done. They have a right to do it, but I have a right to break it too.”

After dissecting a controller, he found that the chip that allowed it to communicate with the Xbox was made by Infineon. He eventually purchased dozens of related microcontrollers on the Hong Kong surplus market for 15 cents apiece.

He then employed an electron microscope called a focused ion beam workstation (price tag $250,000 used) that allowed him to view the chip in the nanometer scale so he could manipulate its individual wires using microscopic needles.

It took Tarnovsky four months to develop techniques for probing the chip and another two months to apply them to breaking the 66PE.

What he found was a chip that was locked down with multiple levels of defenses. Optical sensors, for instance, were designed to detect ambient light from luminous sources. And a wire mesh that covered the microcontroller was aimed at disabling the chip should any of its electrical circuits be disturbed.

“One wrong move and I vaporize a track on the chip,” Tarnovsky said.

Indeed, some 50 of the chips were vaporized in the course of the hack. But over time, he learned how to use the needles to penetrate the chip’s inner recesses so he could tap sensitive data that remains unencrypted so it can be processed.

Using the tungsten as microscopic bridges, Tarnovsky said, he can digitally clone chips used to prevent piracy of satellite TV service, to disable unauthorized cartridges in printers – or to make Xbox game controllers.

“You could counterfeit this chip,” he said, although he stressed he had no plans to use the hack for illegal purposes.

In a statement sent to Infineon customers last week, the company noted the time and expense required for Tarnovsky to crack the chip. But the company went on to say it was a sign of attacks to come and said engineers were already working on a more successor to the 66PE.

“In contrast to conventional solutions, the SLE 78 family now utilizes encryption even in the CPU itself, leaving no plaintext for the attacker,” the release stated. “Technical advances of that scale are only possible if the CPU itself is designed ‘from the scratch’ by the hardware manufacturer with security in mind, right from the beginning.”

The physical attack on the 66PE is similar to hacks cryptographers have recently waged on proprietary encryption algorithms in cordless phones and the world’s most popular smartcard. In all of them, the secret formula was lifted after sanding down the chips’ silicon and examining its circuitry using an electron or optical microscope.

“More and more things are moving to hardware, and as things move to hardware, people are analyzing these devices and getting the algorithms out and putting them back in the software,” Tarnovsky said.

While the risks of physical attacks are in many cases inevitable, he said the cracking of the 66PE was aided by its abundant supply on international surplus markets, which is something Infineon may want to consider as it readies its new generation of ultra-secure microcontrollers.

“If this is supposed to be such a secure device and it’s common-criteria certified, why are they available on the used surplus market?” he said. “This device should not have been readily available for a researcher like me.”

www.theregister.co.uk

If this works, you could theoretically speak to someone on the phone who doesn’t speak your language. And you two could communicate in real-time. Something tells us the iPhone App Store won’t be getting this right after Android, but who knows.

www.hothardware.com

However, if we look back over the last decade, relationship between Apple and Adobe have also been tagged with some dark periods. It probably starts when Apple launched its movie/video edition suite, Final Cut Pro that killed Première on Mac OS X in a record time. Over the last versions of the Adobe Creative Suite, optimizations developed specifically for Windows, leaving Mac OS X users with an older and slower code, probably fueled the Apple resentment, leading to today’s open conflict.

One of our source, very close to an Apple executive and decision board sent us some information and comments, highlighting the current situation with a new angle bringing further details on the roots and reasons concerning the conflict between Apple and Adobe. Let’s start with a sentence from Steve Jobs spoken at the Apple HQ:

“Like Microsoft, Adobe has become a stodgy and conservative company, they’ve lost their focus – they are stuck in the middle.”

Below are some details of Apple’s complains against Adobe, some things are known from the public, others not:

• Adobe completely missed the transition to Cocoa, and tried to extend the use of Carbon, causing problems for both users and Apple. They only now start to work within the programming environment, however, the first beta of the new Creative Suite 5 remain incomplete and unstable.
• Adobe is reported to be very slow to react when Apple sends them bug reports, especially about Flash. Apple sent them description of 410 bugs, identified as important for Flash on Mac OS X, but Adobe only fixed 25 of them so far. Another comment from Steve Jobs about Flash:

“Flash has become a collection of cobbled together technologies – a Kludge. It takes a huge amount of processing power and memory – it is too inefficient, and takes too long to learn.“

• According to Apple, the lack of Flash on the first iPhone OS was not a choice, but rather the consequence of the inability of Adobe to offer a mobile and power efficient bug-free Flash version.
• Apple is also upset about Adobe Software Activation, their anti-piracy protection. This system forces CS users to validate their license online. In order to prevent any bypassing by software-based debuggers, the ASA shunts the system in order to directly access the deepest layer of the CPU and the RAM, without considering the protection of such components built into Mac OS X. As a consequence it would increase the risk of crash and fragmentation, making Mac OS X unable to manage or better control them. So, every time the ASA is modified or updated as it has already been hacked a certain number of times, Adobe asks Apple to take measures on its system to let the ASA work efficiently, without creating too much instability
• Last but not least, Apple thinks that the user interface of current Adobe applications is now getting too old, and did not move to a more user friendly version; and finally the price of the Creative Suite are just too high according to Apple’s ranking.

The recent comments from Steve Jobs regarding Adobe might well be the first sign of a “cold war” between the two companies. Apple would be already preparing and developing applications to compete directly with Adobe’s solutions, leading to open warfare. Cupertino would also be developing a software that could compete with Flash and Dreamweaver, entirely based on HTML 5.0. Beside Aperture X which should be released soon, Apple might also be working to develop a solution similar to Photoshop, a high-end Pro-oriented solution. We do not know further details about those applications being developed as it is either hidden from view or just starting.

www.hardmac.com

“To lead the entire semiconductor industry with the most advanced process technology is a phenomenal feat for Intel and Micron, and we look forward to further pushing the scaling limits,” said Brian Shirley, vice president of Micron’s memory group. “This production technology will enable significant benefits to our customers through higher density media solutions.”

“Through our continued investment in IMFT, we’re delivering leadership technology and manufacturing that enable the most cost-effective and reliable NAND memory,” said Tom Rampone, vice president and general manager, Intel NAND Solutions Group. “This will help speed the adoption of solid-state drive solutions for computing.”

So what does this mean for consumers? Basically, the shrink to 25nm reduces the dies size of the NAND flash chips, which enables higher densities, and hence the chip count within products can be reduced by up to 50% when compared to the previous process generation. It allows for smaller, yet higher density designs at lower costs. For example, a particular SSD may be able to be produced using only 16 chips versus 32. Solid State Drives will feature larger maximum capacities while prices of current options will be driven further down. We were told to expect performance to be on par with 34nm products, though there are the obvious intrinsic benefits of a die geometry shrink from a performance standpoint.

Of course, there will be a number of products based on this technology over time. The first one will be the industry’s first monolithic 8GB NAND device. At a die size of 167mm², it is twice the capacity of their highest density 34nm part in roughly the same footprint. It is small enough to fit through the hole in the middle of a compact disc, but is able to store more than 10 times the data capacity of a CD. In roughly the same real estate, SSD makers will now be able to provide double the capacity as the previous generation.

IMFT is on track to begin production of this device and expects to start shipping in the second quarter of this year. Consumers can expect products featuring 25nm flash memory towards the end of 2010.

Micron and Intel are also supporters of the Open NAND Flash Interface (ONFI). ONFI is a consortium of tech companies working to develop open standards for NAND memory and supporting devices. The formation of the group was initially announced at the Intel Developer Forum in 2006 and began the effort to standardize the low level interface to NAND flash chips that are on the market today. One of the main motivations for this is to make it easier to switch between chips from different manufacturers, which allows faster development of NAND-based products and lower prices through broader competition among manufacturers. Besides Intel and Micron, the ONFI consortium is led by several prominent manufactures of NAND such as Hynix, SanDisk, and Sony.

The 8GB NAND device shown above supports the ONFI 2.2 interface standard, delivering up to 200MB/s of throughput bandwidth. Both Intel and Micron have been pleased with it and feel it is very much in tune to what they have driven in the DRAM world, using standard synchronous interfaces to increase speed. This is critical when SSD manufacturers rely on high speed communication between chips.

In January 2006, Micron and Intel formed IM Flash Technologies, LLC. IMFT combines the technology, assets, and industry experience of the two companies to create NAND flash memory. Jointly investing over $2 billion dollars, they opened up a semiconductor fabrication plant in Lehi, Utah which currently operates 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. This fab employs about two thousand people.

The central area of the fab is the clean room, where the environment is controlled and air is scrubbed to eliminate dust down to micrometer size and no more than 10 particles per cubic meter levels. Before entering the fabrication areas, we put on clean room suits also known as bunny suits. These garments covered all parts of the body with the exception of eyes and the nose. Once inside, the lack of people working inside the fab was surprising. It was explained that most of the people we saw were technicians conducting preventive maintenance and ensuring the equipment operated within specifications. What the images are unable to show is the bustling movement of machinery occurring overhead and along the walls of this fully automated fab, carrying materials to the various stations within the plant.

www.hothardware.com

Bright Side of News has unveiled what the Apple A4 really is, and it has been able to do so thanks to a little chat it had with Warren East, CEO of ARM, during the GlobalFoundries event in Las Vegas. Warren East talked about a new member of the ARM family – this new member was Apple, Bright Side of News can now confirm.

So, what, exactly, is the Apple A4? Technically, it isn’t a CPU. It might be semantics (but hey, where would the internet be without semantics?), but the A4 is actually a system-on-chip, a piece of silicon that containts not only the CPU, but also the graphics core, memory controller, and so on.

The Apple A4 consists of an ARM Cortex-A9 MPCore, the same processor that powers the NVIDIA Tegra and Qualcomm Snapdragon. The graphics unit is a ARM Mali 50-Series. The key thing to note here is that this is all mostly ARM IP; Apple and P.A.Semi have little to do with it. Since Apple doesn’t have its own chip factory, this thing is produced by Samsung.

Because of Apple’s apparent disinterest in divulging specifications, we have to rely on pieces of information all over the web. What is pretty clear, though, is that the Apple A4 is pretty much a relatively standard ARM SoC, similar to what’s powering the Zune HD. It doesn’t give the iPad any specific industry advantage, as there are numerous similar chips that deliver the same kind of performance (Tegra, Snapdragon).

www.osnews.com
www.brightsideofnews.com

The deal has been approved by both companies’ boards of directors and is expected to close in the first half of next year. HP is offering $7.90 per share for 3Com, about $2 per share above the stock’s price of $5.69 at the close of trading on Wednesday. U.S. and foreign regulatory approvals will be required, the companies said.

3Com will add to HP’s Ethernet switching portfolio, which is already a growing competitor to Cisco Systems, and add routing products to its lineup.

“Companies are looking for ways to break free from the business limitations imposed by a networking paradigm that has been dominated by a single vendor,” said Dave Donatelli, executive vice president and general manager, Enterprise Servers and Networking, at HP, in a prepared statement. “We will enable customers to build a next-generation network infrastructure that supports customer needs from the edge of the network to the heart of the data center.”

The acquisition will also give HP access to a research and development team and strong sales channels in China, where 3Com operates the H3C subsidiary it originally formed as a joint venture with Huawei Technologies. The deal would also bring in 3Com’s TippingPoint line of intrusion prevention products.

As data centers are centralized and virtualized, the largest IT vendors are pursuing data-center strategies that span all parts of what is increasingly a single infrastructure of networks, storage, computing and software. Cisco’s introduction of servers earlier this year made it a more direct competitor to HP as well as IBM. HP’s own ProCurve networking line has already gained ground on Cisco in enterprises over the past few years.

3Com has trailed the dominating Cisco in the networking arena since the late 1990s and has pursued several different strategies to find its place in the market. Its TippingPoint acquisition gave it a strong position in intrusion prevention, and the company has also focused on networking gear for small and medium-sized businesses.

HP plans to combine 3Com’s enterprise network core and security products with its own offerings for the edge of the network to form an end-to-end portfolio, Donatelli said on a conference call about the deal.

“Every customer I speak to has asked us to do more networking,” Donatelli said. There is little overlap between the two companies’ products, and it will be easy to integrate them because both companies adhere to industry standards, he added. “We’re ready to go to market day one with a portfolio,” Donatelli said. HP executives declined to discuss what brand the products would carry until after the deal has closed.

The purpose of the deal is focused on the traditional enterprise market, not service providers, HP said.

3Com, which once left the enterprise networking business altogether, has had trouble regaining ground in most of the world because it didn’t have enough sales and marketing scale, Donatelli said. HP has examined 3Com’s products and found them compelling enough that it plans to build all of its own networking infrastructure from the combination of 3Com’s gear and its own, he said.

The deal will give HP the network parts it has needed in large enterprises, along with the power of a well-known name, analysts said.

“It gives HP a core switch—a brand-new core switch,” said Steve Schuchart of Current Analysis, referring to 3Com’s H3C 12500, which the company is pitting against Cisco’s Nexus 7000.

“It gives them a real platform to move forward with,” he said, adding that the HP ProCurve 8212 and 5400 series switches didn’t really cut it for core applications. “This is newer, bigger, and a much more purpose-built switch.”

3Com will also give HP some enterprise edge routers. The MSR line features a Linux-based server blade for running open-source applications such as IP PBX (Internet Protocol Private Branch Exchange), security and WAN optimization, much like Cisco’s wildly successful ISR series platforms.

There will be considerable overlap, however, at the low end of both companies’ switching lines, Schuchart said. HP will have to rationalize that and base its decisions on which product line is newer and more feature-laden.

“Whoever has newer/faster/better/more will get the nod,” he said.

The symbolism of the acquisition also counts for something, according to analyst Gordon Haff of Illuminata.

“Even if 3Com is a shadow of what it once was, this is a storied company in the networking space. I think that has to rub off at some level on HP, from an internal engineering perspective and external perception,” Haff said.

Yankee Group analyst Zeus Kerravala said 3Com’s departure from the enterprise market about 10 years ago left a bad taste in the mouths of IT managers, but HP’s brand and distribution can overcome that.

“3Com is perhaps the most undervalued company in the networking space,” Kerravala said. It has the broadest enterprise portfolio of any networking vendor except Cisco and will make HP an even more effective rival to the dominant networking company, he said.

In a statement

Wednesday that did not refer directly to the proposed acquisition, Cisco said it is confident in its business strategy. “While Cisco has a healthy respect for all of our competitors, acquisitions in our industry only validate the fact that networking is becoming the platform for all forms of communications and IT,” it said.

3Com’s strongest market is China, where it holds about 30 percent of the networking market, HP executives said. HP already has a strong business in China itself but plans to use 3Com’s assets to gain market share there and to develop new products, they said.

China is a high-growth market where 3Com has been “going gangbusters,” Schuchart of Current Analysis said. The R&D team is also a key asset, he said. “They have some serious networking R&D people,” Schuchart said.

And 3Com’s TippingPoint business will give HP security products it either had to partner to obtain or could not offer customers at all, Schuchart said.

“This is huge for HP. It gives them legitimate network security,” he says.

HP also gets a VoIP (voice over IP) product line in the 3Com NBX and VCX IP PBX and handset lines. 3Com has less than 0.5 percent share of the total $16 billion enterprise telephony market, according to Dell’Oro Group. But that’s still more than the zero share HP has, which up to now addressed the market through partnerships with Avaya and Microsoft, among others.

There will also be considerable overlap in wireless LANs, Schuchart said. 3Com has an OEM arrangement with Trapeze Networks, but HP bought Colubris a couple of years ago. HP is expected to continue on with the Colubris product line.

The deal also is in line with a trend among large technology companies to become vertically integrated suppliers, Illuminata’s Haff said. “The story here isn’t the rise of a new Cisco, but really, this is part of this reintegration of the big systems company,” he said.

He cites Oracle’s proposed acquisition of Sun and the Cisco, EMC and VMware deal as other examples of this trend. “It’s a bit different in every case, but we do have this movement toward vertically integrated companies,” Haff said.

www.macworld.com
by Stephen Lawson, IDG News Service

Word of the open sourcing first arrived from French blogger Olivier Faurax, and it’s now been confirmed by Skype itself.

In a back-and-forth to Skype Customer Support about the possibility of a Skype-supporting RPM package manager for the Mandriva distro becoming available, Faurax was told: “We are happy to be able to inform you that Skype will from now on be part of the open source community.”

When Faurax asked for clarification of that assertion, customer-support minion “Joerg” affirmed the statement, saying: “Yes, indeed, the Linux Skype version will become open source in the nearest future.”

When The Reg asked Skype about this report, a spokeswoman confirmed that open-sourcing is in the cards. “We realize the potential of the open source community,” she wrote in an email, “and believe that making Skype for Linux an open source application will help to speed up its development and enhance its compatibility with various Linux distributives.”

However, she wouldn’t provide a more-specific definition of “the nearest future,” saying only: “While it is our goal is to make Skype for Linux source code available to the community in the nearest future, we are not at a point to disclose exact release date yet.”

www.theregister.co.uk

This new mobile connectivity standard, based on Silicon Image’s Mobile High-Definition Link (MHL) technology, will be defined, promoted and marketed by the working group as an industry standard open to anyone desiring to be an adopter and enable the development of mobile products that adhere to this new standard across a broad connectivity ecosystem.

The working group’s vision for the next generation of mobile connectivity is to provide an easy and cost-effective implementation for manufacturers while offering consumers a simple and reliable mobile connectivity experience. A single-cable with a low pin count interface will be able to support up to 1080p high-definition (HD) digital video and HD audio in addition to delivering power to a portable device.

The working group is expected to organize a Consortium of founding members who will develop a mobile connectivity technology standard specification that governs transmission and reception of high-definition content between portable devices and display devices, to support connectivity in accordance with the new specification.

www.xbitlabs.com