According to the testing details, the device in question uses a 1280 x 800 display and is running Android 4.2.2. The processor can run between 800 MHz and 1.6 GHz clock cycles and uses a PowerVR 533 for graphics, which fits the bill as an Intel Atom chip, possibly the newest CloverTrail+ that Intel recently announced.

So does this particular device perform? Based on the benchmarks: Quite good. Here’s a comparison of the graphics performance of the tested Galaxy Tab 3 and last year’s Galaxy Tab 2 model, for example.

And SamMobile recently noted a different benchmark test of the Tab 3 using the Antutu test, finding that the device scored the highest ever for an Android tablet in terms of overall performance.

So why would Samsung, which makes it own chips for smartphones and tablets, consider an Intel inside its newest Galaxy Tab? Samsung could be keeping the Exynos for its own handsets, such as the new Galaxy S 4, because it sells more handsets than tablets. The company’s tablets wouldn’t like suffer any performance hit by using Intel’s silicon either; at least not if the early benchmarks are valid.

If Intel’s Atom does power the Galaxy Tab 3, it would be one of the biggest mobile design wins yet for Intel. The chipmaker does power a few smartphone products, but hasn’t yet cracked the U.S. market with a top-tier hardware partner such as Samsung.

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Intel Labs is engaged in a research partnership with wethedata.org, a “hub of conversation, news, and events celebrating innovative communities who are each focused on democratizing data in their own way.” Intel also has contributed to a hackathon for building tools consumers can use to understand publicly available data, and it’s sponsoring the National Day of Civic Hacking for getting people across the country to come up with ways to analyze open data sets.

It’s somewhat surprising for Intel to be pushing for data democratization. Intel chips are at the heart of servers THAT companies and government organizations use to crunch heavy loads of consumer data. And Intel also has come out with its own Hadoop distribution for handling big data.

The sort of rhetoric floating around the Wethedata.org site — “we are the customer, but our data are the product. … How do we regain more control over what happens to our data and what is targeted at us as a result?” — seems more likely to come from a nonprofit or even a government agency than from a collaboration that includes a corporation such as Intel. But that might help explain why the efforts are noteworthy.

Intel isn’t the only one active on this front. Andreas Weigend, a former chief scientist at Amazon.com, often raises the topic with executives in his consulting work with big companies around the world, partly because some data is simply wrong, and consumers ought not be penalized for it. And as the MIT Technology Review article notes, legislators have taken stabs at the issue, albeit with little success so far.

Now that Intel is on board, perhaps more tech companies will join in and the prompt the tide to change. And if that happens, interesting questions would arise, such as how exactly companies would roll out more data on its customers, whether companies should give consumers access to algorithms that factor into decision-making and how much visualization software and other tools should be made available.

Feature image courtesy of Shutterstock user Lasse Kristensen.

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Koruta, which I profiled last November, makes a photonics chip that allows signals to pass between chips using light (photons) instead of electrons. This makes communications between chips faster, something becoming more important inside the data center as networks become flatter, faster and fatter.

The Kotura chip is a fiber-based transceiver that can deliver 100 gigabits per second inside the data center. The transceiver could live on a board next to the CPU or inside a switch and could eventually expand to deliver a terabit per second (Tbps). Currently it’s used in high-performance compute clusters, which are also the most-popular home for Infiniband. From my post in November:

While one 1 Tbps is crazy fast when you consider that many data centers are currently upgrading to 10 gigabit Ethernet between servers, it’s going to be necessary. Arlon Martin, VP of Marketing, Government Contracts & Industry Relations at Kotura, tells me that customers are building products for the high-performance computing sectors but also for real-time data processing. The goal is bringing a low-power and less expensive optical part into a rack of servers, able to scale up to terabit per second capacities.

Kotura isn’t the only company trying to bring fiber optics into the data center. Plexxi is building fiber-based switches, while Facebook and the Open Compute Project in January announced their own plans to integrate photonics into their open hardware program. Intel, Cisco and IBM all have research or have acquired startups in this space as well. With its emphasis on fast networking, it makes sense for Mellanox to follow suit.

The company plans to continue offering the Kotura transceiver and open a research center in Monterrey Park, Calif., where Kotura is headquartered. From the Mellanox release:

“Operating networks at 100 Gigabit per second rates and higher requires careful integration between all parts of the network. We believe that silicon photonics is an important component in the development of 100 Gigabit InfiniBand and Ethernet solutions, and that owning and controlling the technology will allow us to develop the best, most reliable solution for our customers,” said Eyal Waldman, president, CEO and chairman of Mellanox Technologies.

At the time of my profile, Kotura had raised undisclosed millions from ARCH Venture Partners, Fuse Capital, GF Private Equity and others. It has an established customer base in the telecommunications business where it has sold product since 2006. But last year it began targeting the data center, where it apparently attracted Mellanox’s eye.

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Well, those startups now have seriously heavyweight competition in the form of LogMeIn, the remote connectivity specialist, and ARM, the British firm whose low-power chip designs underpin the vast majority of mobile devices, and which is now competing with Intel to own the IoT space.

LogMeIn has just launched its own PaaS for the internet of things, calling it Xively (the beta version was known as Cosm). And developers wanting to start creating connected devices on this platform are being offered the Xively Jumpstart Kit, which combines Xively with ARM’s mbed platform, for building devices using ARM’s microcontrollers. With this kit, the companies promise, developers can “rapidly progress from prototyping to volume deployment”.

Xively is based on LogMeIn’s Gravity infrastructure – the same one used to support the company’s cloud storage offering, Cubby — and it comes with development tools for writing and prototyping services, a provisioning engine for deployment and a scalable management console. It supports real-time messaging and directory and data services, as well as analytics, and it uses a “pay-as-you-grow” pricing model that should make the platform attractive to startups.

The directory services extend to a “commons” named the Xively Connected Object Cloud, through which different companies’ devices can interconnect. According to LogMeIn, a “fundamental philosophy” baked into the Xively terms of service states that “customers own their data and can choose whether or not to share all, part, or none [of] it.”

A showcase page for the platform shows early projects built on Xively that include the Visualight smart lightbulb and even some of the post-Fukushima crowdsourced radiation-monitoring efforts (which used an earlier iteration of the platform, called Pachube at the time).

While the Xively Jumpstart Kit should help inventors and developers gravitate in ARM’s direction, it’s not like Intel is sleeping. Intel said in February that its own Intelligent Systems Framework – a set of specifications for connecting, managing and securing IoT devices – had been used to support more than 50 products. The company also released new software tools for, you guessed it, reducing time to market.

Although ARM does benefit from a much broader ecosystem than Intel, it’s too early to call that race. However, those startups trying to build their own PaaSes for the internet of things had better get a move on. LogMeIn’s offering is already pretty mature for this space and, given the momentum rapidly building behind the IoT movement, its timing is exquisite.

(Incidentally, the internet of things is a subject that will be discussed at our Structure 2013 event in San Francisco on 19-20 June, so be there.)

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The project, in a presentation by Frank Frankovsy at Interop, said it was taking a slightly different tack with its design, deciding to get input from others before actually making and releasing the hardware to the community. However, just because the hardware isn’t designed yet, Facebook isn’t going to twiddle its thumbs for a traditional multi-year design cycle. Frankovsky told me in an interview that he expects the hardware to b out in 9 to 12 months.

“We have built these islands of openness in the data center but the last element, and the one that was connecting the compute and storage, was the network,” said Frankovsky. “And there is a lot of pent-up passion out there for breaking open this appliance model.”

Networking is the last bastion of proprietary profits

Prepare to be disaggregated, switch!

For those who don’t dwell in data centers, the top-of-rack switch is the networking gear that sits on the top of a rack of servers directing traffic between those boxes and between the other racks in the data center. While the networking world is all aflutter over the promise of OpenFlow and software-defined networking, very little real progress has been made in building switches for the webscale data center.

Google, a few years back, had famously issued a request for a new type of switch that would fit its very specific scaled-out needs and no one responded. Now the search giant makes its own hardware. But soon after that, Andy Bechtolsheim saw the need for Google-like speeds and scale and started Arista, a switch company that has dominated in the webscale, financial and high-performance switching space. Meanwhile, at the lower end, Cisco’s cheaper Nexus line of switches have done really well.

Facebook’s Najam Ahmad.

Yet, these options aren’t palatable for Frankovsky or Najam Ahmad of Facebook (Ahmad will be at our Structure conference in June discussing more about Facebook’s networking strategy). On the existing product side, Frankovsky is frustrated by hardware that doesn’t play nicely at scale. He specifically mentioned that the side venting of heat on switches means he can’t place them right next to another switch. Ahmad, who is in charge of the social-networking giant’s network, is concerned about getting out of the proprietary OS model.

“We want it to be OS-agnostic so we can use one from our existing provider or build our own,” he said. He added that he’d prefer an open Linux-based implementation. These proprietary OSes — Cisco has IOS, Juniper has Junos and Arista has EOS — are one of the reasons that companies are locked into one networking gear provider. They are also stuck using proprietary code to make changes.

Who will be the Red Hat of the networking OS?

Networking cables along the ceiling at Facebook HQ.

If you are chock full of technically savvy people, losing the agility that comes from writing your own code as well as paying higher prices for the proprietary hardware and software combination is probably maddening. Hence Facebook’s interest in the open source OS. Of course, building out the underlying hardware is only the first step, the next will be supporting an OS that runs on top of that system.

While Facebook might build its own OS, not every company will want to do that, and Facebook may not open source its own networking OS if it ever makes one. That leaves a market opportunity. Perhaps a firm like Arista might move in here with an open source version of EOS, although given that Arista uses merchant silicon in its boxes, putting up an open-source version of its software would eat into its margins.

This is neither Open Flow nor SDN

But let’s go back to the box. Facebook is working with Broadcom, Intel, The Open Daylight Foundation, the Open Networking Foundation and Big Switch as some of its collaborators on this project. The box itself might run x86 hardware or a proprietary ASIC, according to Frankovsky. As for the protocols, Open Compute is going to see what the other collaborators want.

Software-defined networking

But for those wondering about Open Flow support, it’s likely. Frankovsky said that the Open Networking Foundation asked Facebook to get involved via the Open Compute Project with making open networking hardware. While Frankovsky and Ahmad didn’t cop to it, I know there has been frustration in many areas of the webscale and networking world that the promise of commodity hardware that Open Flow could offer has not really hit the market in a way that offers the most flexibility for data center operators.

Frankovsky said that the ONF approached Open Compute (Facebook is a founding member of both organizations) in part because it believed it could move quickly on this. And it will. But it’s worth noting that this announcement is about an open source top-of-rack switch, not a controller and not some type of software-defined networking play.

Other companies may take this box and perhaps an open source OS if one is developed, and then layer on some type of controller software to make a software-defined network, but this is just a box.

That being said, this is a box that could seriously disrupt the existing players in networking, from giants like Cisco and Dell all the way to smaller startups like NoviFlow or even Pica8. Much like Facebook is changing the server market with Open Compute, we’ll see if it can tweak the model and do the same in networking.

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What’s the secret sauce in the silicon? The chips will use a 22 nanometer process combined with Intel’s Tri-Gate transistors. The Tri-Gate technology is already used in Intel chips for laptops and desktops, but Silvermont will be the first to use it in mobile devices such as tablets.

AnandTech has a superbly detailed analysis of the new chip, which, according to Intel’s official press release, offers these benefits:

• A new out-of-order execution engine enables best-in-class, single-threaded performance.
  
• A new multi-core and system fabric architecture scalable up to eight cores and enabling greater performance for higher bandwidth, lower latency and more efficient out-of-order support for a more balanced and responsive system.
• New IA instructions and technologies bringing enhanced performance, virtualization and security management capabilities to support a wide range of products. These instructions build on Intel’s existing support for 64-bit and the breadth of the IA software installed base.
• Enhanced power management capabilities including a new intelligent burst technology, low-power C states and a wider dynamic range of operation taking advantage of Intel’s 3-D transistors. Intel Burst Technology 2.0 support for single- and multi-core offers great responsiveness scaled for power efficiency.

I expect we’ll first see Silvermont power a new generation of Windows 8 tablets around the holidays. The current Intel Atom slates running Windows 8 offer the same benefits and experiences of a similarly priced Windows RT slate with an ARM chip. The added benefit is that the tablets with Intel inside run the full Windows 8 software and provide a complete Desktop mode experience.

The downside is that the chips aren’t powerful enough to provided a superb Windows 8 experience; for that, buyers opt for Intel Core i5 chips and give up battery life in the process. If Intel’s claims of Silvermont are correct, however, a low-priced Windows 8 tablet of the future could offer a big performance boost when needed or provide battery savings if a user prefers it.

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Although it’s always been very important, network security seems to be attracting an increasing amount of attention these days, largely due to high-profile hacks. The Stonesoft acquisition, should it go through the usual regulatory hoops, will give Intel a boost in the areas of firewalls, evasion prevention systems and secure VPN services.

Here’s how McAfee president Michael DeCesare put it in a statement on Monday morning:

“With the pending addition of Stonesoft’s products and services, McAfee is making a significant investment in next-generation firewall technology. These solutions anticipate emerging customer needs in a continually evolving threat landscape.”

McAfee will blend Stonesoft’s services with its own existing portfolio, in particular its IPS Network Security Platform and its Firewall Enterprise product, and it looks like Stonesoft’s “next-generation” firewall will continue to be a product in its own right. In the statement, Stonesoft CEO Ilkka Hiidenheimo noted that “the combination of the two companies allows Stonesoft to benefit from McAfee’s global presence and sales organization of over 2,200 employees, best-in-class threat research and technology synergies.”

Intel said in January that it intended to “deliver more integrated solutions and comprehensive protection across mobile devices, endpoints, servers, and network through an extensible framework,” and would embark on a series of acquisitions, development initiatives and new partnerships to do so. The Stonesoft buy appears to be a pretty loud shot in that salvo.

Stonesoft’s secret sauce is its Security Engine, which can adapt to act as firewall, unified threat management system, server load balancer or VPN concentrator as needed. The company’s military-grade firewalls can be deployed as software or in the form of hardware or virtualized appliances. It’s not yet clear what will happen to the parts of Stonesoft’s portfolio not mentioned in the statement, such as its intrusion prevention system, which is also powered by the Security Engine.

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Intel’s incoming CEO, Brian Krzanich.

Krzanich, who has held roles at Intel since 1982, becomes the sixth CEO for the chip giant. But the real question is if he can help steer the company through an increasingly competitive semiconductor market as changes in the mobile arena erode the demand for Intel’s PC chips. There are also changes in the data center that aren’t hurting Intel yet, but will introduce more competition. The board seems to think he’s capable. From the release:

“Brian is a strong leader with a passion for technology and deep understanding of the business,” said Andy Bryant, chairman of Intel. “His track record of execution and strategic leadership, combined with his open-minded approach to problem solving has earned him the respect of employees, customers and partners worldwide. He has the right combination of knowledge, depth and experience to lead the company during this period of rapid technology and industry change.”

Intel’s incoming president, Renee James.

Krzanich acknowledged the changing industry in part in his canned quote in the release, referring to “ultra-mobility,” as the next era for Intel.

In a symbol of its understanding of the importance of software, the Intel board also elected Renee James as president of Intel. She also assumes her new role on May 16. James had a leadership role in Intel’s R&D division and was the chair of its McAfee, Wind River and Havok software operations, which means she probably has a lot of the insights into the threats and opportunities Intel faces, as well as understands what the chip giant can bring to bear on the market.

James also currently serves on the board of directors of Vodafone Group Plc and VMware Inc. and was chief of staff to former Intel CEO Andy Grove. Frankly, she looks like the one who can understand the reality of Intel’s position in the changing world. Hopefully she and Krzanich can bypass Intel’s usual hubris and just focus on making sure it can come out on top when the winds of change stop blowing.

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VMware was already an investor along with Kernel Capital and Enterprise Ireland, and all three have participated in the new round as well. Intel has however taken the lead this time with ACT Venture Capital also joining in.

FeedHenry serves business customers that want to develop and deploy in-house mobile apps. In February the company partnered up with Telefonica, allowing the bundling of FeedHenry’s platform with the telco’s infrastructure-as-a-service platform, Instant Servers, for the benefit of European customers.

According to Marcos Battisti, Intel Capital’s managing director for Western Europe and Israel, the investment will help FeedHenry expand internationally:

“The mobile application market segment for enterprise is at a tipping point and those companies delivering a comprehensive solution that provide both an end to end mobile development strategy and a way to implement applications easily and securely will be at the forefront of the market segment.”

FeedHenry’s rivals include firms such as Antenna Software and SAP. The Irish firm’s particular selling point is flexibility, allowing deployment of its Mobile Application Platform to public, private and hybrid clouds. Apps developed on the platform can also be built once then rolled out to iOS, Android, BlackBerry and Windows Phone devices.

The company also provides “backend-as-a-service” functionality, with server-side code based on Node.js, as well as app management tools and analytics. There’s been considerable activity in that BaaS market with Salesforce.com and Rackspace adding mobile backend capabilities there and Facebook buying Parse just last week.

It should be noted that this is far from the first investment Intel Capital has made in this space. Just this January, it also put $4.6 million into enterprise mobile app deployment firm Apperian. And, in February, parent company Intel bought the mobile app development tools division of AppMobi.

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So what’s the evidence that Haswell-based Chromebooks are in the works? Chrome Story author Dinsan Francis spotted numerous references to Haswell in code for Chrome OS. The code name for the device build is Slippy and I did my own code-hunting to verify Francis’ report. Haswell is mentioned all throughout the code, as is Lynx Point, the chipset controller expected to complement Haswell.

As the Chromebook Pixel is the highest-performing Chromebook to date, it’s possible to see a refresh as a Haswell-powered Chrome OS laptop. If so, the Pixel may be a bit more appealing because it only gets five hours of run-time on a single charge; one of the few technical challenges of the expensive machine. Google could also use Haswell to create a Chromebook in the “middle ground” range: There are no Chromebooks priced between $550 and $1,249, for example.

Don’t expect any new Chromebooks with Haswell at the Google I/O developer event in two weeks, however. It’s an outside possibility that a prototype product could be shown off, but there won’t be one for sale until after June.

While Haswell hasn’t officially debuted yet, it’s quite common for hardware and software companies to get early chip samples. This allows time for integration and testing so that when the chip arrives in larger quantities, new products can immediately hit the market.

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