We've been talking about the shortage of integrated circuits and the race to build more production capacity for over a year, but maybe there's more to this story. News out of Taiwan suggests that production capacity for mature ICs is exceeding demand, and price reductions are coming. Companies like SMIC in mainland China and smaller firms there and in Taiwan are dropping prices over 10% as demand falls. Given that the CHIPS Act was just passed in the United States and companies are making huge investments around the world, what's happening here? This and more on this week's episode of the Rundown. Head to GestaltIT.com for show notes.   

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Attackers are starting to target the critical infrastructure that runs industrial and manufacturing facilities. That may not sound like a new thing but the speed and sophistication with which they're increasing their attacks is. Security firm Dragos hast noted in a recent post that there has been a significant increase in the number of people using password cracking tools on industrial equipment such as programmable logic controllers (PLCs). Where the real devilish genius comes into play is not tha these attackers are trying to corrupt them. Instead, they're converting these machines into nodes in large botnets to amplify attacks. And if you think it's hard to clean a malware infection from a PC try doing it on a PLC that can't be shut down. Dragos noted that while they only tested one particular kind of PLC many other samples had traces of malware infections. Stephen, is this going to cause issues for our already strained supply chain?  

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Apple has quietly added a new "Lockdown Mode" to iOS 16, iPadOS16, and macOS Ventura that allows users to restrict the channels often used by the most intrusive exploits and hacks. It's designed to protect journalists, dissidents, and others at risk of state-sponsored snooping. This and more on this week's Rundown. Head to GestaltIT.com for shownotes.  

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NIST has announced their selections for quantum-safe encryption algorithms. The competition has been running since 2016 when the standards body realized that quantum computing could potentially impact RSA-based public key encryption. The new encryption method, CRYSTALS-Kyber, as well as digital signature methods named CRYSTALS-Dilithium, FALCON, and SPHINCS+, are designed to be implemented in the coming years for highly senstive data that could come under attack from advanced threats as well as the inevitable future of a powerful factoring system like a quantum computer. Are we all going to have to get new key tokens now? Head to GestaltIT.com for show notes and more.   

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The artificial intelligence community is buzzing about the just-released ML Commons MLPerf Training v2.0 results, which were announced today. NVIDIA, Intel Habana, Google, and Graphcore all submitted at least partial results, and everyone is crowing about their performance. NVIDIA is the only one to cover the field, and has a strong showing despite still relying on their A100 GPUs. Intel's Habana Gaudi 2 also shows great performance per watt in the tests they submitted, with the Graphcore Bow IPU and Google TPUv4 trailing somewhat. How do we make sense of all this ML training hardware? Head to GestaltIT.com for shownotes.   

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The last two weeks have been filled with conferences. RSA happened June 6-9 and Cisco Live was June 12-16. There were also gatherings for Splunk, Juniper, and others around the same time in San Francisco and Las Vegas. While the general mood of the conferences seemed to be focused on how good it was to get people back in person the reality of what that looks like a world still affected by a global pandemic came into focus after everyone started getting back home. RSA, according to reports, has seen reported COVID infections as high as 20% of attendees based on informal polling numbers. Cisco Live, which boasted over 16,000 people in Vegas, is seeing similar numbers. While I was able to make it through the conference without testing positive many others that I was interacting with didn't. Which calls into question the practice of having live in-person events during the pandemic. This and more on this week's Rundown. Head over to gestaltit.com for show notes.   

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Pure Storage held their annual Accelerate event in Los Angeles last week. The key new introduction was the next generation of their FlashBlade scale-out storage solution. They claim that it is "disaggregated" because CPU and storage can be mixed and matched, and that it scales past a petabyte. Pure also went GA with Portworx Data Services, which brings the company into the market for database as a service. This and more on the Rundown. Head to GestaltIT.com for show notes.   

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IBM finally lost a court case this week and nows owes BMC $1.6 billion. Why? Well, the reasoning is that IBM stole one of BMC's biggest customers - AT&T. IBM had been providing service on behalf of BMC for a number of years and had a very specific agreement that they wouldn't try to convince BMC customers to go directly to IBM. In this particular case BMC says that IBM violated that agreement back in 2015. IBM countered by saying that this whole thing was AT&T's decision and IBM in no way did anything to encourage it. The judge didn't see it that way and now IBM is going to appeal this little fine. All this and more on this week's Rundown. Head to gestaltit.com for show notes.   

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Intel has some new codenames in the works for their high performance computing lines. The new AI GPU is code named Rialto Bridge and the next generation flexible architecure past 2023 will be Falcon Shores. The Falcon Shores lineup continues the chiplet idea, with x86 and Xe cores mated together to create a very configurable solution somewhat akin to the Apple M1 with CPU and GPU running together with high-speed memory. Speaking of GPUs, Intel also showed of the Ponte Vecchio. This and more on this week's Rundown. Head to GestaltIT.com for show notes.  

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The biggest shock to the virtualization community in months hit this past weekend when the press noted that chip giant Broadcom is in talks to purchase VMware. The former stepchild of Dell and EMC was spun off less than a year ago into a separate company. The news mentioned that Broadcom has been looking to expand their software portfolio and VMware would join CA and Symantec in the Broadcom suite. Community reaction to the news was largely negative, with many analysts weighing in on the potential for disaster for VMware customers. This and more on this week's Rundown.

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