Oracle has announced their next generation Ampere A2 Compute Instances based on the latest AmpereOne processor, with availability starting later this year. According to Oracle, the new instances will deliver up to 44% more price-performance compared to x86 offerings and are ideal for AI inference, databases, web services, media transcoding workloads and run-time language support, such as GO and Java.

In related news, several new customers including industry leading real-time video service companies 8x8 and Phenix, along with AI startups like Wallaroo, said they are migrating to Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) and Ampere as more and more companies seek to maximize price, performance and energy efficiency.

Internet services provider Cloudflare has announced that it has successfully protected one of its clients from one of the most powerful DDoS (Distributed-Denial-of-Service) attacks in history. According to the services provider, an undisclosed cryptocurrency platform was targeted by a botnet comprising around 6,000 "zombie" computers distributed throughout 112 different countries. The botnet ultimately generated a collective 15.3 million requests per second. While that's still shy of the largest recorded metric - set at 17.2 million requests per second - the fact that the DDoS attack occurred through HTTPS likely pushed its complexity above the record-setting attack, due to the higher computational workload of secure HTTP. The attack lasted 15 seconds.

DDoS attacks aim to flood a network with requests and data packets in a bid to overload and paralyze it. The attack also showcases the ingenuity of bad actors, as the originated from cloud-based ISPs, as attackers leverage more complex and capable networking hardware than what's usually offered by last-mile ISPs. According to Cloudflare, the botnet seems to have mostly compromised systems with Java-based applications that were still open to the recently-discovered CVE-2022-21449 vulnerability.

AMD and Google Cloud today announced T2D, the first instance in the new family of Tau Virtual Machines (VMs) powered by 3rd Gen AMD EPYC processors. According to Google Cloud, the T2D instance offers 56% higher absolute performance and more than 40% higher price performance for scale-out workloads. The Tau VM family provides customers with a leading combination of performance, price, and easy integration. The T2D instances, using the leadership performance of 3rd Gen AMD EPYC processors, excels at workloads including web servers, containerized micro-services, data logging-processing, large scale Java applications and more.

"At Google Cloud, our customers' compute needs are evolving," said Thomas Kurian, CEO of Google Cloud. "By collaborating with AMD, Google Cloud customers can now leverage amazing performance for scale-out applications, with great price-performance, all without compromising x86 compatibility." "We designed 3rd Gen AMD EPYC processors to meet the growing demand from cloud and enterprise customers for high-performance, cost-effective solutions with optimal TCO," said AMD President and CEO Dr. Lisa Su. "We work closely with Google Cloud and are proud they selected AMD to exclusively power the new Tau VM T2D instance which provides customers with powerful new options to run their most demanding scale-out workloads."

Microsoft has a goal to nurture the Windows on Arm (WoA) ecosystem and give new adopters the best possible experience. Today, Microsoft made an important announcement. The OpenJDK, an open-source implementation of the Java platform, is coming to the WoA project. Why this is so important you might question yourself? Well, the OpenJDK enables plenty of Java applications to run, so with this, Microsoft is giving WoA users a whole set of new supported applications. Take for example Minecraft Java edition. Now you can run that as well thanks to the new port. This shows commitment to the Arm platform by Microsoft and strong will to not abandon it.

Intel CPUs have been rather notorious for system bugs recently. Starting from 2018's Spectre and Meltdown which used speculative execution to exploit systems, the string of new vulnerabilities just continued to this day. Recently we had CrossTalk exploit which represents a threat to cloud providers, where one user could compromise another just by using the same CPU from which the virtual instances are powered. These types of exploits are even more dangerous than ones that require local access, as that is already dangerous by itself. A lot of these issues are said to be ironed out by Intel's new microarchitecture designs like Ice Lake, Tiger Lake, and future revisions.

However, it seems like Intel is encountering some problems with even the latest Ice Lake CPUs when it comes to system bugs. JetBrains, a Czech provider of software development tools has a Java programming language development environment called IntelliJ integrated development environment. It was recently reported that on MacBook Air 2020 and Microsoft Surface Pro models equipped with 10th generation Intel Ice Lake CPUs, IntelliJ IDE causes system restart or a complete OS crash. In the report, the CPU ran in a Linux VM that isolates itself from MacOS so the macOS XNU kernel is not to blame. In the report thread, another user running Windows on Microsoft Surface Pro experienced the crash as well.

In a recent Microsoft blog post, Mojang Studios announced that Minecraft has sold over 200 million copies to date, with 126 million active monthly players. This achievement comes 11 years after the game was originally released in May 2009 as a Java applet on an online forum. To this day Minecraft has remained as one of the world's most popular games from being the most-watched game on YouTube in 2019 to getting released on almost every device imaginable and still actively receiving updates.

It has come into the limelight that popular torrenting website The Pirate Bay (TPB) has been running additional code on their site, which helped enable them to make use of a visitor's CPU in mining Monero (XMR, a cryptocurrency with added layers of anonymity when compared to Bitcoin). Now, I realize Torrenting (in particular, of copyright-protected material) is in itself a subject open to heated debate - but let's leave that discussion for another day. Today, I thought I'd focus on this mining act itself, on how TPB was secretly using your computing resources to stealthily mine cryptocurrency which they could then turn into additional revenue.

That this was done without the users' consent is clearly wrong. We as users are entitled to know what to expect from our system and from its usage of our resources - as seldom as we can claim that ability nowadays. That a site we are visiting is using our computing resources to generate additional revenue than the one it obtains from ads without, at the very least, being forthcoming about it (with the increased electricity costs that implies, however small) can be considered, at a minimum, distasteful. However, the discussion becomes much more interesting if we wonder what would have happened if users had, in fact, been warned. What does this mean for the future of web browsing, for revenue models - and for those pesky, flashy, little (or not so little) ads?To our forum-lurkers: this article is marked as an Editorial

NVIDIA released the GeForce 378.57 Hotfix drivers, designed to address glaring bugs. The driver update fixes a critical game crash bug noticed in "Minecraft" and other Java-based titles; and resolves "debug mode" being the default mode on GPUs based on the "Pascal" architecture. The rest of their features appear consistent with older releases. Find the driver from the links below.DOWNLOAD: NVIDIA GeForce 378.57 Hotfix

AMD today unveiled nine new mid-range and entry-level AMD Opteron 4300 Series and 3300 Series server processors increasing performance per watt versus the previous generation to maximize compute capabilities in power-constrained environments1, while delivering outstanding value to cloud providers and web hosts. The AMD Opteron 3300 Series processors provide enterprise-class features in a low power envelope at a desktop processor price, making it ideal for web hosts and small- and medium-sized businesses.

The AMD Opteron 4300 Series processors offer up to 15 percent better performance versus the prior generation, based on SPECint benchmark results2. And SPECpower results show up to a 24 percent improvement in performance per watt. As with the AMD Opteron 6300 Series processors, these are socket compatible with the previous generation processor, providing an effortless upgrade path for customers.

During the JavaOne 2012 Strategy Keynote, AMD announced its participation in OpenJDK Project "Sumatra" in collaboration with Oracle and other members of the OpenJDK community to help bring heterogeneous computing capabilities to Java for server and cloud environments.

The OpenJDK Project "Sumatra" will explore how the Java Virtual Machine (JVM), as well as the Java language and APIs, might be enhanced to allow applications to take advantage of graphics processing unit (GPU) acceleration, either in discrete graphics cards or in high-performance graphics processor cores such as those found in AMD accelerated processing units (APUs).

Weeks after security mogul Eugene Kaspersky opined that Apple is "10 years behind Microsoft on security," Kaspersky Lab revealed that it is collaborating with Apple to investigate security concerns (read: vulnerabilities) of its operating systems, and improve its security. Kaspersky Lab CTO Nikolai Grebennikov in an interview with Computing.co.uk was quoted saying "Apple recently invited us to improve its security."

Kaspersky Lab maintains that Apple's software is extremely vulnerable, going as far as to claim that Apple doesn't pay enough attention to security. "Our first investigations show Apple doesn't pay enough attention to security. For example, Oracle closed a vulnerability in Java, which was a target for a major botnet several months ago," said Grebennikov. Apple's decision to handle updates of Java runtime environment for OS X by itself, breaking away from Oracle's update cycle, particularly drew flack from Grebennikov. "Apple blocked Oracle from updating Java on Mac OS, and they perform all the udpates themselves. They only released the patch a few weeks ago - two or three months after the Oracle patch. That's far too long," he said. Kaspersky isn't too optimistic about the infinitely more popular iOS platform, either. "Our experience tells us that in the near future, perhaps in a year or so, we will see the first malware targeting iOS," it commented.

NVIDIA today announced that LLVM, one of the industry's most popular open source compilers, now supports NVIDIA GPUs, dramatically expanding the range of researchers, independent software vendors (ISVs) and programming languages that can take advantage of the benefits of GPU acceleration.

LLVM is a widely used open source compiler infrastructure, with a modular design that makes it easy to add support for programming languages and processor architectures. The CUDA compiler provides C, C++ and Fortran support for accelerating application using the massively parallel NVIDIA GPUs. NVIDIA has worked with LLVM developers to provide the CUDA compiler source code changes to the LLVM core and parallel thread execution backend. As a result, programmers can develop applications for GPU accelerators using a broader selection of programming languages, making GPU computing more accessible and pervasive than ever before.

New research released by Sophos has revealed a disturbingly high level of malware on Mac computers -- with both Windows and Mac threats being discovered.
Sophos experts analyzed a snapshot of 100,000 Mac computers running its free anti-virus software, and discovered that one in five machines was found to be carrying one or more instances of Windows malware.

Although Windows malware on Macs will not cause symptoms (unless users also run Windows on their computer), it can still be spread to other computers. Additionally, Sophos's analysis shows that 2.7 percent (one in thirty six) of Macs were found to be carrying Mac OS X malware.

Yes, that's right the maker of notoriously vulnerable software is now blaming you, the user, should you get a virus, trojan or other malware infection on your Windows computer. However, it does look like they have some justification for saying this. For those with long attention spans, Microsoft have just released their 168 page Microsoft Security Intelligence Report 6MB PDF, with the stated aim of providing:

An in-depth perspective on software vulnerabilities and exploits, malicious code threats, and potentially unwanted software in the first half of 2011

The first thing to note about the report is that it is limited to its Malicious Software Removal Tool and Microsoft's other anti-malware products. Zero-day attacks that it can't detect are not included in the findings. So, surely it can't all be the user's fault then? It also means that the security angles from third party security vendors such as Kaspersky, Norton and McAfee aren't represented here.

In early October, content technology major Adobe will release Flash Player 11, the next major release of the Adobe Flash client-end software. The new browser plugin promises a platform that allows 1,000 times faster 2D/3D rendering performance over Flash Player 10, using full hardware-acceleration. Right here we see Adobe waking up to the HTML5 threat. Angry Birds on Google Chrome, anyone? The next key area addressed by Flash Player 11, is full native 64-bit (x86-64) web-browser support. This move will potentially cause the long-overdue decline of 32-bit web-browsers on 64-bit operating systems, since you already have HTML5 and Java on 64-bit browsers.

Next up, Adobe will pack its AIR platform, a Flash-based application runtime environment that uses the "superior user-interface" plank. AIR 3, which accompanies Flash Player 11, will support native extensions, that gives AIR applications added functionality. These include hardware capabilities including access to device data, vibration control, magnetometers, light sensors, dual screens, near field communications (NFC) and more. You know what adobe is getting at, future portable devices that are extremely powerful and functional.

Benefitting from the company's power-saving architecture, transistor and circuit design expertise, plus unique manufacturing process techniques, Intel Corporation today unveiled its newest Intel Atom processor-based platform (formerly "Moorestown").

The technology package provides significantly lower power consumption and prepares the company to target a range of computing devices, including high-end smartphones, tablets and other mobile handheld products. The chips bring Intel's classic product strengths - outstanding performance to run a comprehensive and growing number of rich media and Internet applications, a choice of software, and the ability to easily multitask - across a number of applications, including HD video and multi-point videoconferencing.

QNAP Systems, Inc., a leading manufacturer of world class NAS servers, NVR Video Surveillance Systems, and Network-based Video Players today announced the TS-859U-RP Business Series Turbo NAS server enclosure, the most affordable 2U rack-mounted unit with 8 hot-swappable 2.5-inch or 3.5-inch hard disk drives and a redundant power-supply for maximum up-time in corporate and entry-level enterprise datacenters where high performance, high data-availability, and maximum reliability are paramount. QNAP is the only network appliance company to currently offer 8-drive NAS enclosures, and does so in desktop and rack-mounted configurations.

The TS-859U-RP features a dual-core Intel Atom D510 1.66GHz CPU and 1GB DDRII RAM, delivering exceptionally fast performance coupled with ultra-low power consumption that translates into lower total cost of ownership without sacrificing performance. The TS-859U-RP contains two power units. Should one power supply fail, the other will continue to supply the power for the entire system and alert the administrator via email or SMS to the failure. The TS-859U-RP is chock full of advanced networking features including dual Gigabit LAN ports with 7 bonding modes, including failover (if one network port fails, the other LAN port is still active), load-balancing (aggregates the network load to boost transfer speed), multiple-IP settings. The fail-safe dual OS DOM architecture for positive system boot ups, and single, JBOD, RAID 0/1/5/6/5+ hot spare/6+ hot spare with online RAID capacity expansion and online RAID level migration, and RAID recovery. The TS-859U-RP also features iSCSI for business, which allows easy network storage capacity expansion by simply attaching other QNAP Turbo NAS units to the network and establishing virtual volumes, a feature not offered by other competitors currently in this product segment.

Combining unprecedented security, performance and energy efficiency, Intel Corporation today launched the Intel Xeon Processor 5600 series. The new processors deliver two new security features -- Intel Advanced Encryption Standard New Instructions (Intel AES-NI), and Intel Trusted Execution Technology (Intel TXT) -- that enable faster encryption and decryption performance for more secure transactions and virtualized environments, providing data centers with a stronger foundation for cloud security.

These are also the first server and workstation chips based on the groundbreaking, new Intel 32nm logic technology, which uses Intel's second-generation high-k metal gate transistors to increase speed and decrease energy consumption. The Intel Xeon Processor 5600 series supports up to six cores per processor and delivers up to 60 percent greater performance than the 45nm Intel Xeon processor 5500 series. In addition, data centers can replace 15 single-core servers with a single new one, and achieve a return on their investment in as little as 5 months.

NVIDIA Corporation, the inventor of the GPU, today announced the release of its OpenCL driver and software development kit (SDK) to developers participating in its OpenCL Early Access Program. NVIDIA is providing this release to solicit early feedback in advance of a beta release which will be made available to all GPU Computing Registered Developers in the coming months.

"The OpenCL standard was developed on NVIDIA GPUs and NVIDIA was the first company to demonstrate OpenCL code running on a GPU," said Tony Tamasi, senior vice president of technology and content at NVIDIA. "Being the first to release an OpenCL driver to developers cements NVIDIA's leadership in GPU Computing and is another key milestone in our ongoing strategy to make the GPU the soul of the modern PC."