Today’s topics include Intel offering up more details on its Omni-Path interconnect fabric, Lenovo moving its smart phone efforts to Motorola, security experts debating whether anti-phishing training is worth the cost, and Amazon reworking hardware plans after the failure of its Fire phone.
More than a year ago, Intel officials started mentioning the Omni Scale interconnect fabric it was developing for high-performance computing environments, and in late 2014 changed its name to the Omni-Path Architecture.
Since then, more details have trickled out, from its 100G-bps capabilities, to its low port-to-port latency to fast MPI messaging rates.
Last week, in a paper released during the HotInterconnect 2015 show, and in a briefing during the Intel Developer Forum 2015 conference, Intel executives released more details of the high-speed interconnect fabric.
The company expects it will become the dominant fabric technology for large-scale systems in HPC environments as well as some enterprises.
Lenovo, which has seen its share of the mobile phone market slide in recent quarters, is reorganizing its mobile operations and shifting responsibility for its smartphone business to its Motorola Mobility division.
The streamlining move comes less than a year after the Chinese system maker bought Motorola from Google for $2.91 billion in an effort to rapidly grow its mobility capabilities in an increasingly competitive global market.
Senior vice president at Lenovo and president of its Mobile Business Group, Chen Xudong, said the restructuring is aimed at enabling the company to create better products, leverage what both Motorola and Lenovo have to offer, and achieve profitable growth.
Anti-spam products and services do not catch every phishing attack. So many companies have turned to user education in an attempt to make workers less likely to click on dodgy email messages.
If the impact of phishing consists of constant nuisance attacks, rather than a serious breach, such training can pay significant dividends, according to a survey released on Aug. 26 by the Ponemon Institute.
Yet other security experts have taken a dim view of security training. Relying on humans to make the right decision is not a good security practice, said David Aitel, CEO of security-services firm Immunity. Instead, companies should make sure that their security does not rely on such decisions.
Amazon’s unsuccessful venture into the highly competitive smartphone space last year with the ill-fated Fire Phone reportedly is leading the massive online retailer to scale back or stop development of other hardware efforts and to cut jobs in its secretive development center.
According to a report last week in The Wall Street Journal, Amazon officials are putting aside plans for other phones as well as such products as a 14-inch tablet dubbed Project Cairo, a stylus called Nitro that is designed to translate notes into digital shopping lists, and Shimmer, a projector.
However, some other projects are still moving forward, including a kitchen computer code-named Kabinet that will play a central role in future smart homes.