Intel Announces Atom E3900 Series - Goldmont for the Internet of Things (anandtech.com) 68
Intel has announced the Atom E3900 series. Based upon the company's latest generation Goldmont Atom CPU core, the E3900 series will be Intel's most serious and dedicated project yet for the IoT market. AnandTech adds: So what does an IoT-centric Atom look like? By and large, it's Broxton and more. At its core we're looking at 2 or 4 Goldmont CPU cores, paired with 12 or 18 EU configurations of Intel's Gen9 iGPU. However this is where the similarities stop. Once we get past the CPU and GPU, Intel has added new features specifically for IoT in some areas, and in other areas they've gone and reworked the design entirely to meet specific physical and technical needs of the IoT market. The big changes here are focused on security, determinism, and networking. Security is self-evident: Intel's customers need to be able to build devices that will go out into the field and be hardened against attackers. Bits and pieces of this are inerieted from Intel's existing Trusted Execution Technology, while other pieces, such as boot time measuring, are new. The latter is particularly interesting, as Intel is measuring the boot time of a system as a canary for if it's been compromised. If the boot time suddenly and unexpectedly changes, then there's a good chance the firmware and/or OS has been replaced.
Exactly what we need (Score:1)
More CPU power for the next DDoS.
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Complain about Windows 10? No way, as long as there is Windows, my job security is guaranteed.
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Of course. There is also ways to create secure devices in the first place. Unfortunately neither is a selling point, manufacturers of those devices are not held responsible for the damage their insecure and impossible to secure devices cause so you won't get it.
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Many of these attacks involve taking over an IP security camera, and throwing the video stream at the DDoS target. So it's the same rate and difficult to tell the difference, except maybe by looking for the lack of ACK packets.
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And now explain that to the mom that just bought a cam to monitor her baby. I'll bring the popcorn.
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These attacks rely on security shortcomings of said devices. Whether they can make one or a million requests per second doesn't change the game, the problem is that there are many such compromised devices, not that a single one of them is causing a lot of traffic.
The problem is actually less the amount of traffic. That amount did increase, yes, but until the IoT became a part of the attack, most of the high volume attacks were reflected DNS attacks or similar that could easily be filtered at scrubbers. You
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They should be held responsible. That means the customers must be the ones demanding those features. Sometimes the manufacturers have to inform the customers about why security is important (ie if your SCADA or utility customers think security is an afterthought then bring up the worst case scenarios and scare them into getting a better product).
Too often time to market trumps security - especially in the consumer market where fads can vanish suddenly and your market for IoT refrigerators dries up overnig
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The customers will not demand these features. For them, these aren't features. To them, they're at best useless, at worst a nuisance. Where's the benefit for the user if his device doesn't harm him, only harms others, and he's not responsible for it?
Yes, he should feel responsible. But people are not that way.
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Well, if your customer is a utility, and they've got an angry mob outside your office wondering why all their data has been stolen... A city manager may care that the traffic lights aren't hacked. And so on. Those people ARE responsible. The home hipster though probably isn't concerned that his wifi coffee maker is being spied on, he just wants a cool gadget to prove to his friends that he's not a luddite. But if home hipster causes damage to others through his own negligence he will be held liable in
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I'm less concerned with the home hipster, he will quickly be deconverted as soon as one of his computer savvy friends points out that the device is insecure and that he's now part of the bot herd. Because if there's one thing a hipster cannot stand it's being part of the herd.
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Yes, but it won't be useful. Part of the nature of the DDOS attack is that no particular host sends packets at a high rate (too easy to detect and shut down). It's the sheer number of slow devices that floods the target.
Right conclusion, erroneous argument (Score:2)
That's true that generating packets doesn't require a lot of cpu power.
> consider that your average 20 buck switch has a routing capacity of several Gigabits per second (on paper, at least)
Switches actually don't route, they switch. Routing is level 3, IP packets. Switching is level 2, ethernet frames. For $5,000 you can get a "level 3 switch", which is actually a router combined with a switch.
> and that *is not* running any top of the line CPU.
It is, however, running a purpose-built switching chi
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A DDOS doesn't require CPU power, but maybe you were trying to be funny.
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This isn't really "IoT". A home router is not IOT either. Yes it's a thing, and it's on the internet, but so is your computer and your phone. This new CPU sounds like a power hog focused on being fast, whereas I'm working on something that has to run on a non-rechargeable battery for twenty years. Intel is focusing on the consumer IoT fad I suspect.
What an IoT chip *should* have: low power and security. Meaning average only a handful of microamps, the fewer the better as it allows customers to add the
"inerieted"? (Score:1)
"Inerieted"? That's an odd word. Did the writer perhaps mean to type "inebriated"?
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"Inerieted"? That's an odd word. Did the writer perhaps mean to type "inebriated"?
I suspect they meant "inherited".
But they probably were inebriated
Boot timing and attacks? (Score:2)
I wonder how useful having the time it takes to boot be a measurement if a ROM is compromised or not.
For example, assuming the ROM uses Linux and has a few writable partitions, if it boots up and does a fsck, or just replays filesystem transaction logs, this will almost certainly be different each boot, especially if the system had a dirty shutdown.
However, if the timing is measured from the OS boots until it mounts the read-only RAMdrive and gets ready to load the main OS, that is a lot more predictable.
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I wonder how useful having the time it takes to boot be a measurement if a ROM is compromised or not.
You mean system, not ROM. ROM cannot be compromised unless physically replaced, as it by definition is read-only.
And all this will do is make any startup commands for malware run detached with a delay. That's child's play.
But, as you allude to, it will likely lead to lots of false positives, as startup can depend on not only things like file system checks, but external factors like SSID broadcast frequency, DHCP response time, and various other factors.
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Most of these also require physical access. .*ROM.
But anyhow, if you just say ROM, it means ROM, not
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s/ROM/firmware/g. In any case, a lot of malware remains in RAM. Yes, a reboot will fix it, but it can likely be added again, especially if compromised devices scan each other and re-compromise devices that were rebooted, but still vulnerable. Protecting the boot sequence does help, as firmware reflashes can be nasty and impossible to get rid of. However, what is needed is some thought is perhaps looking at a hypervisor and limiting what each machine/container has access to. For example, one container m
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Many of the recent attacks are RAM-only, so simply rebooting the device gets rid of the malware.
Default password (Score:2)
Let's see
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You joke, but there is a market.
Japanese washlets are quite sophisticated, and can allow uploading of audio files for the sound masking. When you "produce", it's not uncommon to have a button you can push that generates a flushing sound, or otherwise camouflages the sound by playing another sound.
In some areas where water is a premium resource, it can also be useful to monitor the number of washes and flushes. A high number of flushes compared to washes might mean installing a dry urinal could save water.
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I currently have a bidet seat on my toilet. A bidet is a device that washes my privates after I do my thing.
This bidet seat does have a microprocessor in it that controls both the heater for the water jet as well as the heater for the air jet used to blow dry my privates.
Right at the moment, I see no reason for this bidet seat to be on line. Perhaps there might be some reason in the future. Oh, it could be something to do with sensing that I have s
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Well, how else is the webcam going to publish a stream?
6 to 12 Watts? (Score:3)
That's damn hungry for IoT...
Meanwhile, ARM announces Cortex M23 [cnx-software.com] potentially capable on running purely on harvested energy alone apparently.
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Yeah... while Intel's trying to breed T-rex's, the rest of the IoT world is standardizing on velociraptors.
Aren't they too power-hungry? (Score:1)
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From TFA:
"the launch of the Atom E3900 series brings with it Intel’s first custom silicon targeting the roughly 6W to 12W market of more powerful IoT devices... ...As relatively high power processors these aren’t meant for wearables and such, but rather primarily devices on mains power where additional intelligence is needed. In Intel terminology, the E3900 is focused on “edge” devices as opposed to “core” devices. The idea being that Intel wants to move out data processi
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I give up, just what exactly are those "edge" devices? Refrigerators? Air conditioning units? Even if it is these sorts of things, connecting them to the internet is asking for trouble seeing as security is not nailed down just yet. And what refrigerator company wants to ramp up their software effort to take advantage of the extra power. What will it buy them, what do consumers get out of it? They will probably buy from some middleman who wants to sell millions of processing units....which means cost per un
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money wasted. (Score:4, Insightful)
Intel doesn't understand what businesses want: inexpensive parts.
Intel doesn't understand what hobbyists want: inexpensive parts that don't need NDAs.
Intel doesn't understand what the world doesn't need: more power hungry x86 platforms.
Intel doesn't understand that we don't need them.
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Yes, they understand that. That is why Slashdot announced that Intel was killing Atom chips just six months ago.
https://mobile.slashdot.org/st... [slashdot.org]
However, now they have a new Atom chip. What is going on? Did they kill Atom, or didn't they? Me confused.
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they eat a lot more power than comparable ARM chips, so since always.
Where are the I/Os ? (Score:2)
Yawn (Score:1)
Man, I hate the chip market. I want to have an affordable 6 to 12 core chip with 5 to 6 GHz default clock rate, not this low-powered Internet of things crap. I hope AMD comes up with something soon that will make them have to take into account some competition again, or else we will be stuck with slow desktops forever.
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Man, I hate the chip market. I want to have an affordable 6 to 12 core chip with 5 to 6 GHz default clock rate, not this low-powered Internet of things crap.
I don't want overkill. I want something stable, that won't need to be encased in a cubic meter of gold/lead alloy to be protected from cosmic rays because the fab die has decreased to barely usable. Something that will last for 15+ years, while delivering enough umph, but not orders of magnitude more than I need.
My main server is a PIIIs, and as it still runs the latest software, why would I need new hardware that's less reliable? It is more than enough to handle DNS, DHCP, internal web, incoming e-mail
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Comment (Score:2)
Does anyone else see a "Microsoft Azure App Service" Sponsored Content entry right beneath this one on the main page?
What's IoT for Intel then? (Score:2)
What Intel's definition of IoT?
This looks like a human interface device (GUI) with some hardware control capability (enhanced determinism) rather then an embedded MCU.
Perhaps sth that can be use for example on a drone for higher level functions such as command, navigation, video (CV) ?
EU configuration (Score:2)
12 or 18 EU configurations of Intel’s Gen9 iGPU
What is an EU in this context? Execution Unit?