The iPhone 7’s new A10 Fusion: quad-core, high-efficiency, and a more powerful GPU

Apple announced the iPhone yesterday, along with its A10 microprocessor. We’ll have to wait a bit to see how the new CPU compares with the A9 in terms of overall performance, but Apple shared some significant details of what to expect with the new chip.

Past rumors have suggested a second-generation 14nm SoC built at TSMC, but Apple said nothing about either its process node or foundry manufacturer of choice. What we do know is that the new A10 is a quad-core, 3.3-billion transistor CPU (the A9 CPU contained more than two billion transistors) with an estimated 40% performance advantage over A9 (according to Apple).

Big.Little-ish

Ever since it debuted the iPhone 4s, Apple has stuck to a dual-core policy for its iPhone, even as its Android competitors steadily boosted their core counts. It’s become common for flagship Android devices to field 4-8 cores — either a single cluster of high-end CPUs like the Snapdragon 820, or a combination of high-end and low-power CPUs in a unified cluster via ARM’s big.Little.

When ARM debuted big.Little it was by no means certain that the idea would take off. As we covered at the time, making the large and small CPU clusters talk to each other effectively required some heavy lifting from both SoC manufacturers and Android itself. Intel, meanwhile, believed that it could use Dynamic Frequency and Voltage Scaling to effectively address the market with a single CPU or CPU cluster, rather than relying on clusters of high-performance and high-efficiency CPU cores that share data and workloads amongst themselves.

Apple isn’t calling its own cluster implementation big.Little, but its implementation of the same concept appears similar. The A10 will combine two high performance cores with 40% better performance than the A9 with two high-efficiency cores that draw 1/5 the power of the A10’s high-end chips. The controller that manages these workloads is custom Apple silicon, so we don’t know how well Apple’s solution will compare with ARM’s. Apple could be facing a learning curve here — the first chips to implement big.Little didn’t actually do so properly and it took several technology and Android iterations before the standard was fully supported in both hardware and software. Alternately, Apple may have been developing the technology through several revisions, and only rolled it out when it knew it had everything nailed down.

Apple is also claiming that the new GPU inside the iPhone 7 will deliver 50% more graphics performance than A9 and 240x more performance than the original iPhone. These gains appear to have been plotted against the iPhone 6s rather than the 6s Plus. The iPhone 7’s battery life is said to have improved as a result of these changes, with more than two hours of run-time compared with the iPhone 6s and one hour more than the iPhone 6s Plus.

Apple’s decision to use a similar technology to big.Little should pay dividends in terms of battery performance, but we’ll have to wait for more details before we can compare the two technologies. The latest revisions of big.Little allow for workloads to be shared across all the CPU cores in a device, provided its thermal budget allows for this. Apple may have duplicated this functionality with the A10 Fusion. Apple is also claiming that its screens are now 25% brighter than before, and these types of changes can have a significant impact on battery life.

Heading into the event there were rumors that the iPhone would use an Intel-branded modem rather than a Qualcomm chip, but if this is true Tim Cook didn’t mention it. The new Fusion technology Apple is debuting here is a significant shift for its device strategy and it’ll be interesting to see how the new hardware impacts overall SoC performance. The GPU is presumably by Imagination Technologies — they’ve built the hardware for every iPhone and there’s no sign Tim Cook changed suppliers for the iPhone 7.

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The really interesting reason why ATM PINs have a 4 digit code

You walk into your friendly neighborhood ATM kiosk and swipe your card. You then punch in a 4 PIN code to authenticate yourself and proceed to withdraw money. You may have been doing this mechanically since the day ATM was introduced but have you given a thought why ATM PINs have a 4 digit code?  No! Then read on.

Automated Teller Machines (ATM) were first introduced in 1967 and now have emerged as a best option to disburse cash. Instead of visiting your bank and waiting in a long queue to withdraw money, you just have to swipe your ATM card, punch in your secret 4 digit PIN and take away the money you require.

But if someone was to find or steal your card, the only barrier protecting your money is your 4-digit ATM PIN. Ever wondered why most PINs have only 4 digits? Given that an ATM dishes out money wouldnt the manufacturers of ATMS have been wiser to introduce a longish PIN say six digit or eight digit one. Isn’t that why our email passwords are also expected to be 6 letters or more?

You see there is a bit of story behind it. ATM was invented by a wellknown Scottish inventor John Adrian Shepherd-Barron, the man who pioneered the development of the ATM machine. Barron was born in Shillong and was son to a Wimbledon ladies doubles champion, Dorothy Barron. When testing out his invention, Barron had also proposed a 6-digit PIN.

However, the first person to use his invention was his wife, Caroline. We all know that behind every successful man is a woman, and Caroline apparently rejected the idea of using a six code PIN for her husband’s invention because she could only remember the numbers up to four.

When Barron came up with the idea when he realised that he could remember his six-figure army number. But he decided to check that with his wife, Caroline.

“Over the kitchen table, she said she could only remember four figures, so because of her, four figures became the world standard,” he laughs.

Reportedly, 6 numbers stringed together were too much information for her to recall.

Although, there are many banks nowadays that offer 6 digit PINs for security purposes, shouldn’t those of us using 4 digit PINs be thanking Caroline? It gets tough to recall those 4 digits at times, imagine what 6 or more would do to us?

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Announcing Windows 10 Insider Preview Build 14905 for PC & Mobile

Here’s what’s new in Build 14905 for Mobile

We are introducing a newly refined sound set in this build, uniting the best of our past and present. We aspire to set a new bar for mobile sound set quality, and are trying to make the soundscape of technology more beautiful and harmonious. This also helps align with new sound design direction of the Windows platform as a whole, so that mobile sounds will family with desktop and tablet and be feel instantly familiar to all Windows users. We will continue to evolve – head to Settings > Personalization > Sounds to see the updated list of available sounds and let us know what you think!

Improvements and fixes for PC

We have fixed an issue causing a large blank space to appear between the address bar and web content after the address bar moves back to the top when opening a new tab in Microsoft Edge.

We have updated Narrator Scan mode for table navigation to now support CTRL + ALT + HOME to go to the beginning of the table CTRL + ALT + END to go to the end of the table.

Microsoft Edge now supports the CTRL + O keyboard shortcut for setting focus to the address bar.

We fixed an issue resulting in Sketchpad and Screen Sketch crashing after trying to change the ink color twice in a row when the ruler was visible.

Improvements and fixes for Mobile

Missed call notifications are now more actionable, with inline options to call back, text or remind yourself to do something about it later.

We fixed an issue where videos played in Windows Phone 8 apps might not pause when an incoming call was received.

We fixed an issue where, if “Show my caller ID” is set to “My contacts”, the contact being called might still see a blocked caller ID.

We fixed an issue where the Lock screen might fail to update to the new time after a time zone change.

We fixed an issue resulting in music not resuming after a call was finished, if Turn-by-Turn directions were being read out from the Maps app when the phone call came in.

Known issues for PC

Support for kernel debugging over 1394 has been removed, but will be available in an upcoming kit release. A work-around will be posted to the Debugging Tools for Windows Blog shortly.

Adobe Acrobat Reader crashes when you try to launch it.

Cortana’s text to speech capabilities is not working in this build. For example, Cortana won’t be able to read text messages out loud for you, tell jokes, sing, or give verbal prompts.

When clicking on the power button on the Start menu, it closes the Start menu without opening the flyout with restart/shutdown options appearing. As a workaround – you can right-click on the Start button (or WIN + X) and choose to shutdown via this menu instead.

Apps such as Yahoo Mail, Trivia Crack, Google and the Skype Translator Preview app will crash in this build due to a compatibility issue from a recent platform change.

The Settings app may crash on certain editions of Windows 10 when navigating to different settings pages due to a missing .dll file. We are working on getting this fixed soon.

Known issues for Mobile

If you move apps between a SD card and internal storage (either direction), those apps will get stuck in a pending state. The workaround to get your apps working again is to uninstall the app through Settings > System > Storage (apps cannot be uninstalled from All apps list). Then you can re-install the app from the Store.

Cortana’s text to speech capabilities is not working in this build. For example, Cortana won’t be able to read text messages out loud for you, tell jokes, sing, or give verbal prompts.

A few months ago, we set out to design a new T-shirt for the Windows Insiders Program – and what better source for ideas than Windows Insiders themselves! So, we organized a design competition with a few simple rules:

1. Come up with a design that reflected the innovative spirit of the Windows Insider Program

2. Include the Windows logo and a call out to Windows Insiders.

In just a few weeks, we received some absolutely amazing designs from around the world. After a long – and often heated – selection process (including a vote by the Windows Insider community), our judges narrowed it down to five finalists before picking the ultimate winner: a beautiful design concept by E. Bautista from the United States. The final design below (zoom in to see the finer details) will soon be available on the eCompanyStore. We’ll let you know when it’s ready. Thanks to everyone for participating and congratulations to our finalists – and ultimate winner!

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The iPhone 7S may ditch the iconic home button

With seemingly few mysteries left surrounding the iPhone 7 attention is already turning to the iPhone 7S, and one big change we might see in next year's phone is the removal of the home button.

This is a rumor we've heard before, but now Bloomberg is making the same claims, citing "a person familiar with the matter."

The site doesn't go into any more detail, other than to say that the changes to the phone are designed with a focus on the display in mind, with possibly ultrasonic frequency used to identify the finger.

This adds up with earlier rumors, which suggested that a future iPhone would have a fingerprint scanner built into the screen, allowing the display to be bigger, with less bezel above and below it.

It sounds like an ambitious change, but with the iPhone 7 likely to be a fairly modest upgrade we're expecting big things from the iPhone 7S, especially as it will mark the iPhone's tenth anniversary.

One step at a time and the removal of the home button might not be a sudden change, as there have also been rumors that Apple will redesign the button for the iPhone 7, making the button pressure-sensitive rather than having it physically click.

That's one of the things we're less sure we're going to see on the iPhone 7, as it's not been as heavily rumored as other changes, like the removal of the headphone jack, but it would make sense as a step towards the total removal of the button.

We'll know soon, as the iPhone 7 is expected to launch on September 7. The iPhone 7S is likely still over a year away, so we'll have a much longer wait to find out whether Apple is getting rid of the home button entirely, but one way or another the iPhone 7S is likely to be a big change, with a massive curved screen and a glass back also rumored.

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Google will soon rank some mobile sites with pop-ups lower in search

Google will soon rank sites with clumsy interstitials ads lower than those which are more responsible, the company announced today.

The change will affect mobile sites, and only those which have ads that take up an entire screen or otherwise block content wholly. Ads that try to trick you into thinking it’s part of the content (like leaving the article header in place with ads below it) are also being pinged.

Some full-screen interstitials won’t be affected. Easily dismissed banners, age verification and login boxes are okay by Google’s standards.

Google is also dropping the ‘mobile-friendly’ label from search results. It found that roughly 85 percent of webpages meet the criteria for mobile, so it’s dropping the search tag entirely.

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LeEco Le 2s will have 8GB RAM, Snapdragon 821, rumors say

Back in June, there were rumors of Chinese giant LeEco working a massive new flagship smartphone, which would be the successor to its budget smartphone Le 2. The Chinese smartphone maker LeEco had released its Le 2 Android smartphone back in April.

 If a new rumor and the leaked images are to be believed, the new device is called Le 2s and will come with 8GB RAM on-board and powered by Qualcomm’s latest Snapdragon 821 processor. If true, the device will be the first ever smartphone in the world to have that RAM size, according to GSMArena. The handset is also speculated to feature 64GB of on-board storage and a 5.5-inch QHD display. Similar to the Le 2-series, the Le 2s is also expected drop support for 3.5mm audio port, and come with USB Type-C port with CDLA technology instead. However, it is not yet clear that LeEco will offer a microSD card slot or not.

While other details about the smartphone are scarce at the moment, it is likely that the company is expected to launch the Le 2s in China in the first week of September 2016.

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Twitter Says It Suspended 360,000 Suspected Terrorist Accounts in a Year

TWITTER IS STILL actively combating terrorism on its platform, and it wants you to know so. Really and truly, the company says, it is making progress.

For Twitter, fighting terrorism on its platform is a particularly sensitive problem. While Facebook has taken a hardline stance on terrorism and removes any and all posts that carry even a trace of suspicious content, Twitter has continually attempted to strike a balance between protecting free speech and cracking down on players who use its service as a way to promote violence or threats. As a recent WIRED feature reported, Twitter is often still the “main engine” for ISIS propagandists to promote their cause and find new recruits.

The company said in a post today that it’s applying an even more aggressive strategy to eradicate violent extremism on its platform. Since the company announced its first efforts to combat terrorism back in February, it says it has suspended an additional 235,000 accounts, bringing the total number of suspensions in violation of its terrorism policy to 360,000 in about a year. According to the company, it is also suspending accounts faster—daily, suspensions are up over 80 percent since last year, which helps to stop dangerous accounts from gaining significant followings. And Twitter is continuing its investment in proprietary spam-fighting tools to identify suspicious accounts, and broadening its partnerships with organizations working to counter violent extremism, including law enforcement agencies around the world.

The response from Twitter comes at a time when it may be feeling particularly defensive. Twitter, after all, is at a crucial point in its life as a company: its business is ailing, and in recent months it has come under fire for what many perceive to be a slow reaction to abuse and harrassment, prompting many high-profile users to leave the platform. Not to mention, as the election cycle continues on, politicians have been putting pressure on the company—and others in Silicon Valley—to acknowledge that social media can indeed be a crucial tool for terrorist groups in the recruitment and radicalization of sympathizers. Twitter needs to show that it not only knows terrorism and abuse is an issue on its platform. It needs to prove it’s doing something about it. This announcement today attempts to address the terrorism problem, but the question of how it will curb abuse on the platform in general remains open.

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Intel will start producing ARM chips to boost foundry business

Chip maker Intel and British semiconductor IP company ARM announced an agreement that could help boost the chip giant’s custom foundry business.

The deal, revealed today at the the Intel Developer Forum in San Francisco, will allow Intel Custom Foundry to make ARM processors for third parties.

Intel’s latest earnings announcement made it clear that the company is in the midst of a shift, and it needs to gear up for the Internet of Things. The agreement with ARM Holdings, which was acquired by Japanese tech giant Softbank a month ago, could be the first step in this direction.

“This will allow Intel to compete with Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing and Samsung foundries for the business of the likes of Qualcomm and Apple,” Abhinav Davuluri, equity analyst for Morningstar in Chicago, wrote in an online note.

As part of the collaboration, ARM and Intel Custom Foundry will accelerate the development and implementation of ARM SoCs on Intel’s 10-nanometer process. Specifically, Artisan Physical IP, ARM’s intellectual property, will be made available in the process.

“Optimizing this technology for Intel’s 10 nm process means that foundry customers can take advantage of the IP to achieve best-in-class PPA (power, performance, area) for power-efficient, high-performance implementations of their designs for mobile, IoT and other consumer applications,” Zane Ball, co-general manager of Intel Custom Foundry at Intel, wrote in a blog post.

Ball added that Intel has partnered with ANSYS, Cadence, Mentor Graphics and Synopsys previously. Intel also is making chips for customers such as Netronome and LG Electronics, which recently announced a new flagship device that will be the first handset to ship with Android 7.0.

Goodbye Patch Tuesday: Windows 7, 8.1 Patches Go Monthly

Patch Tuesday is soon to be a thing of the past. Beginning in October, Microsoft will deploy fixes for Windows 7, Windows 8.1, Windows Server 2008 and Windows Server 2012 with a single cumulative monthly patch. The move is designed help reduce fragmentation across your company’s PCs. The new system is right in the line with how updates are currently deployed for Windows 10.

It’s a big departure from the current system, under which Microsoft sporadically releases individual patches for the older platforms. That has some advantages, allowing IT administrators to selectively deploy updates as needed, but it also comes with some serious drawbacks. Under the current system, individual PCs frequently wind up with different updates installed, which causes syncing problems, boosts scan times, and ups testing complexity. Even just pinpointing the right patches before applying them can be a pain.

Here’s how the new system will work. In October, up-to-date PCs running the older platforms will receive just a single package of security and stability fixes from Windows Update, Windows Server Update Services (WSUS), System Center Configurations Manager (SCCM) and the Microsoft Update Catalog. If you delay the update in October, you’ll be prompted to install it again in November, along with another single set of patches for that month, and so on. Each month’s update will include patches for all previously-uninstalled months, from October onwards.

Eventually, older updates will begin to be included in the monthly patch rollouts, dating all the way back to Service Pack 1 for Windows 7. That means that — at some point — you’ll be able to get fully up to date with just a single installation, no matter the current state of your PC.

Microsoft is allowing one exception for its new all-in-one update system, affording the ability to download and deploy security patches separately from stability fixes. That will reduce the size of the initial update needed to secure your company’s PCs as quickly as possible. Those updates will be available from WSUS, SCCM and the Microsoft Update Catalog, not Windows Update.

Servicing Stack and Adobe Flash updates won’t be included in the rollups. Microsoft will move to the same monthly rollup model for the .NET Framework in October too.

If you like to micromanage your systems, this might not sound like good news. In fact, we don’t actually know just yet is whether or not it will be possible to pick and choose specific updates for your systems. But since Windows 10 does not offer that kind of precision, our best guess is that Windows 7 and 8.1 users will find themselves in the same boat.

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Google buys Orbitera, a platform for cloud marketplaces, for $100M+

Google today announced another acquisition that will help the company improve how it competes against Amazon’s AWS, Salesforce and Microsoft in the area of enterprise services, and specifically selling enterprise services in the cloud: it has acquired Orbitera, a startup that developed a platform for buying and selling cloud-based software.

Terms of the deal have not been disclosed but our sources close to the deal tell us it’s just north of $100 million.

This is an acquisition of talent, technology, and existing business. The CEO Marcin Kurc (tellingly) is an alum of AWS. And Google notes that some 60,000 enterprise stacks have already been launched on Orbitera. These include the likes of Adobe, Oracle and Metalogix, who all resell cloud services from third-party vendors as part of their larger enterprise businesses.

“This acquisition will not only improve support of software vendors on Google Cloud Platform but also provides customers with more choice and flexibility in today’s multi-cloud world,” Google said in a statement provided to media.

Kurc notes in his announcement that Google will keep everything running as is, “at this time.”

The startup says its focus is on providing four (end-to-end) aspects of building cloud marketplaces: Packaging and Provisioning, Billing and Cost Optimization, Marketplace and Catalogs, Trials and Lead Management.

It looks like Google will continue to operate that business on behalf of existing users, and maybe to help out its own marketplace for cloud services on its own cloud platform.

“Looking to the future, we’re committed to maintaining Orbitera’s neutrality as a platform supporting multi-cloud commerce. We look forward to helping the modern enterprise thrive in a multi-cloud world,” writes Nan Boden, head of global technology partners at Google.

As Google has grown well beyond its earliest roots as a search company, its reached an interesting relationship with companies that are at turns friends and rivals to its own business interests.

Buying a platform company that works with so many of these in the area of cloud services is an interesting development for Google, and one that it’s keen to try to tread carefully in making.

In this case, Google is trying to reassure customers that even as it sells a platform to sell products, it recognises that the ultimate repository of those products might not be Google itself.

(Whether or not that is the case longer term is another question — in other areas like ads, Google has walked an impartial line and then changed course — but for now there is a viable enough business for Google in remaining a neutral party.)

“We recognize that both enterprise customers and ISVs want to be able to use more than one cloud provider and have a way to conduct product trials and proofs of concept before building a full production deployment, all using their trusted SIs (System Integrators), resellers and normal sales cycles,” Boden notes.

“Orbitera has built a strong ecosystem of enterprise software vendors delivering software to multiple clouds. This acquisition will not only improve the support of software vendors on Google Cloud Platform, but reinforces Google’s support for the multi-cloud world. We’re providing customers with more choice and flexibility when it comes to running their cloud environment.”

Orbitera was co-founded by Firas Bushnaq and Brian Singer, who came up with the idea for the company to fix some of the “transactional and operational challenges associated with selling software” that they encountered while founding and working at previous tech companies.

Based out of West Hollywood, CA, Orbitera had raised some $2 million in funding from angels like Hiten Shah and Arjun Sethi, Double M Partners and Resolute.

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IBM unveils Apple app centre in Bengaluru

IBM on Thursday unveiled a centre in Bengaluru that develops enterprise apps for Apple's iPhones and iPads. Called MobileFirst for iOS Garage, it's the fifth such centre in the world and is also the only facility that encompasses the full suite of apps functionality from designing and development to testing, and finally helping enterprises with integration and implementation.

The IBM programme, which has 500 developers across the five centres, is looking to double its headcount by end of this year, said Mahmoud Naghshineh, general manager, Apple partnership at IBM.

The iOS Garage programme is part of a partnership that IBM entered with Apple two years ago. IBM has generated more than $1 billion in revenue through this programme. It has worked with clients for over 2,000 such projects developing over 100 enterprise apps across 15 industries. "The India team has had a big role in developing and implementing those 100 apps," Naghshineh added.

The four other centres are in Atlanta, Toronto, Chicago and Cupertino (inside the Apple campus).

The apps are developed based on client requests and requirements. The developers use Apple's Swift language and Naghshineh said the company sees plenty of Swift developers in Bengaluru. IBM and Apple also train the engineers at the centre.

"We see the conversation shifting from wanting a single app to cultivating a broader business transformation led by mobile. Our global network of MobileFirst for iOS Garages are a key accelerator for our clients and a significant differentiator for IBM," Naghshineh said. IBM is also planning to open such centres in China, Brazil and Romania soon to serve clients in those respective regions.

There are 22 interdisciplinary teams working in the Garage in Bengaluru. The centre can develop most apps within 6-8 weeks. "We work to mask the complexity in the legacy systems being used by our clients. The final product will have simple user interface and experience to make employees happy," said Naghshineh.

Kalyan Jewelers, one of the leading jewelers in the country, is a client. IBM has also developed for the airline industry an app that helps flight attendants to help passengers with new flight bookings in case of delays or cancellations.

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