News

A former Metro Vancouver resident has pleaded guilty in California to hacking into the computer networks of major U.S. defence contractors and sending stolen military data to China.

Chinese citizen Su Bin, who is also known as Stephen Su and Stephen Subin, was arrested on the U.S. charges in Richmond two years ago and launched an unsuccessful B.C. Supreme Court battle against his extradition.

U.S. officials announced Wednesday that Bin, 50, appeared in a Los Angeles courtroom after a plea agreement had been reached.

When he is sentenced in July, he could face five years in prison and a $250,000 U.S. fine.

In the agreement, Bin admitted to conspiring with two people in China from October 2008 to March 2014 to gain unauthorized access to protected computer networks in the U.S., including computers belonging to the Boeing Company in Orange County, California.

Bin was able “to obtain sensitive military information and to export that information illegally from the United States to China,” the agreement states.

Some of the stolen information related to military technical data, including data relating to the C-17 strategic transport aircraft and certain fighter jets produced for the U.S. military.

“Protecting our national security is the highest priority of the U.S. Attorney’s Office, and cybercrime represents one of the most serious threats to our national security,” U.S. Attorney Eileen Decker said after Bin’s plea. “The innovative and tireless work of the prosecutors and investigators in this case is a testament to our collective commitment to protecting our nation’s security from all threats.”

She said the guilty plea demonstrates “that these criminals can be held accountable no matter where they are located in the world and that we are deeply committed to protecting our sensitive data in order to keep our nation safe.”

Bin admitted that he would email his co-conspirators with targets he wanted them to hack. The China-based hackers then sent him detailed file listings they had accessed during the hacks so Bin could pick which files and folders he wanted stolen.

Once Bin had the stolen files, he translated some of them into Chinese.

U.S. authorities said that Bin and his accomplices also wrote reports about “the information and technology they had acquired by their hacking activities, including its value, to the final beneficiaries of their hacking activities.”

Bin’s plea agreement says that he and partners “intentionally stole included data listed on the United States Munitions List contained in the International Traffic in Arms Regulations.”

And Bin also admitted that he engaged in the crime for money and specifically sought to profit from selling the data the he and his conspirators illegally acquired.

Assistant Attorney General John Carlin said Bin “admitted to playing an important role in a conspiracy, originating in China, to illegally access sensitive military data, including data relating to military aircraft that are indispensable in keeping our military personnel safe.”

He said his division “remains sharply focused on disrupting cyber threats to the national security, and we will continue to be relentless in our pursuit of those who seek to undermine our security.”

Bin is the owner and manager of Lode-Tech, a Chinese-based company focused on aviation technology with an office in Canada.

At the time of his arrest in June 2014, Bin had permanent resident’s status in Canada. He told a B.C. judge that he owned a Vancouver home then worth $1.8 million and said both his children were born in Canada.

Throughout his court appearances in B.C., his wife and Chinese government officials sat in the public gallery.

On March 11, 2013, Thomas Donilon, President Obama’s national-security adviser, gave a speech at the Asia Society on Manhattan’s Upper East Side. Much of it was boilerplate: a recitation of the administration’s policy of “rebalancing its global posture” away from the battles of the Middle East and toward the “dynamic” region of Asia-Pacific as a force for growth and prosperity.

But about two-thirds of the way through the speech, Donilon broke new diplomatic ground. After listing a couple of “challenges” facing U.S.-China relations, he said, “Another such issue is cybersecurity,” adding that Chinese aggression in this realm had “moved to the forefront of our agenda.”

American corporations, he went on, were increasingly concerned “about sophisticated, targeted theft of confidential business information and proprietary technologies through cyber-intrusions emanating from China on an unprecedented scale.”

Then Donilon raised the stakes higher. “From the president on down,” he said, “this has become a key point of concern and discussion with China at all levels of our governments. And it will continue to be. The United States will do all it must to protect our national networks, critical infrastructure, and our valuable public and private-sector property.”

The Obama administration, he said, wanted Beijing to do two things: first, to recognize “the urgency and scope of this problem and the risk it poses—to international trade, to the reputation of Chinese industry, and to our overall relations”; second, to “take serious steps to investigate and put a stop to these activities.”

The first demand was a borderline threat: Change your ways or risk a rupture of our relations. The second was an attempt to give Chinese leaders a face-saving way out, an opportunity for them to blame the hacking on hooligans and “take serious steps” to halt it.

In fact, Donilon and every other official with a high-level security clearance knew that the culprit  in these intrusions was no gang of freelance hackers, but rather the Chinese  government itself—specifically, the Second Bureau of the Third Department of the People’s Liberation Army’s General  Staff, also known as PLA Unit 61398, which was headquartered in a white, 12-story office building on the outskirts of Shanghai.

Since the start of his presidency, Obama had raised the issue repeatedly but quietly—in part to protect intelligence sources and methods, in part because he wanted to improve relations with China and figured a confrontation over cyber theft would impede those efforts. His diplomats brought it up, as a side issue, at every one of their annual Asian-American “strategic and economic dialogue” sessions. On none of those occasions did the Chinese delegates bite. To the extent they replied at all, they agreed that the international community must put a stop to this banditry; if an American diplomat brought up China’s own involvement in hacking, they waved off the accusation.

On February 18, a few weeks before Donilon’s speech, Mandiant, a leading computer-security firm with headquarters in Alexandria, Virginia, published a 60-page report identifying PLA Unit 61398 as one of the world’s most prodigious cyber hackers. Over the previous seven years, the report stated, the Shanghai hackers had been responsible for at least 141 successful cyber intrusions in 20 major industrial sectors, including defense contractors, waterworks, oil and gas pipelines, and other critical infrastructures. On average, these hackers lingered inside a targeted network for a full year—in one case, for four years and 10 months— before they were detected. During one particularly unimpeded operation, they filched 6.5 terabytes of data from a single company in a 10-month period. The company also shared an advance copy of the report with The New York Times, which ran a long front-page story summarizing its contents.

China’s foreign affairs ministry denounced the allegation as “irresponsible,”  “unprofessional,” and “not helpful for the resolution of the relevant problem,”  adding, in the brisk denial that its officials had always recited in meetings with American diplomats, “China resolutely opposes hacking actions.”

In fact, however, the Chinese had been hacking, with growing profligacy, for more than a decade. A senior U.S. intelligence official had once muttered at an NSC meeting that at least the Russians tried to keep their cyber activity secret; the Chinese just did it everywhere, out in the open, as if they didn’t care whether anyone noticed.

As early as 2001, in an operation that American intelligence agencies dubbed Titan Rain, China’s cyber-warriors hacked into the networks of several Western military commands, government agencies, defense corporations, and research labs, using techniques reminiscent of the Russians’ Moonlight Maze operation.

Around the same time, the Third Department of the PLA’s General Staff, which later created Unit 61398, adopted a new doctrine that it called “information confrontation.” Departments of “information-security research” were set up in more than 50 Chinese universities. By the end of the decade, the Chinese army had begun extensively training its soldiers in hacking techniques; one training scenario had the PLA hacking into U.S. Navy and Air Force command-control networks in an attempt to impede their response to an occupation of Taiwan. The United States military had been conducting similar exercises for years, under the rubric ‘Information Warfare.’ The Chinese were now following suit.

By 2006, various cyber bureaus of the Chinese military were hacking into a vast range of enterprises worldwide. The campaign began with a series of raids on defense contractors, notably a massive hack of Lockheed Martin, where China stole tens of millions of documents on the company’s F-35 Joint Strike Fighter aircraft. None of the files were classified, but they contained data and blueprints on cockpit design, maintenance procedures, stealth technology, and other matters that could help the Chinese counter the plane in battle or build their own F-35 knockoff (which they eventually did).

Colonel Gregory Rattray, a group commander in the Air Force Information Warfare Center (which had recently changed its name to the Air Force Information Operations Center), was particularly disturbed—not only by the scale of China’s cyber-raids, but also by the passivity of American corporations. Rattray was an old hand in the field: He had written his doctoral dissertation on information warfare at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy, worked on Richard Clarke’s staff in the early years of George W. Bush’s presidency, then, after Clarke  resigned, stayed on as the White House director of cybersecurity.

In April 2007, Rattray summoned several executives from the largest U.S. defense contractors  and informed them that they were living in a new  world. The intelligence estimates that pinned the cyber attacks on China were highly classified, so for one of his briefing slides, Rattray coined a term to describe the  hacker’s actions: “APT,” for  advanced persistent  threat. (The term caught on; six years later, Kevin Mandia, the CEO of Mandiant, titled his report APT1.)

The typical Chinese hack started off with a spear-phishing email to the target company’s employees. If just one employee clicked the email’s attachment, the computer would download a webpage crammed with malware, including a “Remote Access Trojan,” known in the trade as a RAT. The RAT opened a door, allowing the intruder to roam the network, acquire the privileges of a systems administrator, and extract all the data he wanted.

They did this with economic enterprises of all kinds: banks, oil and gas pipelines, waterworks, health-care data managers—sometimes to steal secrets, sometimes to steal money, sometimes  for motives that couldn’t be ascertained.

McAfee, the anti-virus firm that discovered and tracked the Chinese hacking operation, called it Operation Shady RAT. Over a five-year period ending in 2011, when McAfee briefed the White House and Congress on its findings, Shady RAT stole data from more than 70 entities—government agencies and private firms—in 14 countries. The affected nations included the United States, Canada, several nations in Europe, and more in Asia, including many targets in Taiwan—but, tellingly, none in the People’s Republic of China.

President Obama didn’t need McAfee to tell him about China’s cyber spree; his intelligence agencies were filing similar reports. But the fact that a commercial anti-virus firm had tracked so much of the hacking, and released such a detailed report, made it hard to keep the issue locked up in the closet of diplomatic summits. The companies that were hacked would also have preferred to stay mum—no point upsetting customers  and stockholders—but the word soon spread, and they reacted by pressuring the White House to do something. Largely because, after all these decades of analyses and warnings, many of them still didn’t know what to do themselves.

This was the setting that forced Obama’s hand. After another Asia security summit, where his diplomats once again raised the issue and the Chinese once again denied involvement, he told Donilon to deliver a speech that brought the issue out in the open. The Mandiant report—which had been published three weeks earlier—upped the pressure and accelerated the timetable, but the dynamics were already in motion.

One passage in Donilon’s speech worried some mid-level officials, especially in the Pentagon. Characterizing cyber offensive raids as a violation of universal principles, even as something close to a cause for war, Donilon declared, “The  international community cannot afford to tolerate any such activity from any country.”

The Pentagon officials scratched their heads: “any such activity from  any country?” The United States engaged in this activity, too, and everyone knew it.

The targets were different, though: American intelligence agencies weren’t stealing foreign companies’ trade secrets or blueprints, much less their cash. In NSC meetings on the topic, White House aides argued that this distinction was important: Espionage for national security was an ancient, acceptable practice, but if the Chinese wanted to join the international economy, they had to respect the rights  of property, including  intellectual property.

But other officials at these meetings wondered if there really was a difference. The NSA was hacking into Chinese networks to help defeat them in a war; China was hacking into American networks mainly to help enrich its economy. What made one form of hacking permissible and the other form intolerable?

Even if the White House aides had a point (and the Pentagon officials granted that they did), wasn’t the administration flirting with danger by going public with this criticism? Wouldn’t it be too easy for the Chinese to release their own records, revealing that the U.S. was hacking them, too, and thus accuse the Americans of hypocrisy? Part of what the U.S. was doing was defensive: penetrating Chinese networks in order to follow the Chinese hacking into U.S. systems. On a few occasions, the manufacturing secrets that the Chinese stole weren’t real secrets at all; they were phony blueprints that the NSA had planted on certain sites.

But, to some extent, these cyber operations were offensive in nature: The United States was penetrating Chinese networks to prepare for battle, to exploit weaknesses and exert leverage, just as the Chinese were doing—just as every major power had always done in various realms of warfare.

In May, Donilon flew to Beijing to make arrangements for a summit between President Obama and his Chinese counterpart, Xi Jinping. Donilon made it clear that cyber would be on the agenda and that, if necessary, Obama would let Xi in on just how much U.S. intelligence knew about Chinese practices. The summit was scheduled to take place in Rancho Mirage, California, at the estate of the late media tycoon Walter Annenberg, on Friday and Saturday, June 7 and 8, 2013.

On June 6, The Washington Post and The Guardian reported, in huge front-page stories, that in a highly classified program known as PRISM, the NSA and Britain’s GCHQ had long been mining data from nine Internet companies, usually under secret court orders—and that, through this and other programs, the NSA was collecting telephone records of millions of American citizens. These were the first of many stories, published over the next several months by the Guardian, thePost, Der Spiegel, and eventually others, based on a massive trove of beyond-top-secret documents that the NSA systems administrator Edward Snowden had swiped off his computer.

The timing of the leak, coming on the eve of the Obama-Xi summit, was almost certainly happenstance—Snowden had been in touch with the reporters for months—but the effect was devastating. Obama brought up Chinese cyber theft; Xi took out a copy of the Guardian. From that point on, the Chinese retort to all American accusations on the subject shifted from “We don’t do hacking” to “You do it a lot more than we do.”

Hackers using tactics and tools previously associated with Chinese government-supported computer network intrusions have joined the booming cyber crime industry of ransomware, four security firms that investigated attacks on U.S. companies said.

Ransomware, which involves encrypting a target’s computer files and then demanding payment to unlock them, has generally been considered the domain of run-of-the-mill cyber criminals.

But executives of the security firms have seen a level of sophistication in at least a half dozen cases over the last three months akin to those used in state-sponsored attacks, including techniques to gain entry and move around the networks, as well as the software used to manage intrusions.

“It is obviously a group of skilled of operators that have some amount of experience conducting intrusions,” said Phil Burdette, who heads an incident response team at Dell SecureWorks.

Burdette said his team was called in on three cases in as many months where hackers spread ransomware after exploiting known vulnerabilities in application servers. From there, the hackers tricked more than 100 computers in each of the companies into installing the malicious programs.

The victims included a transportation company and a technology firm that had 30 percent of its machines captured.

Security firms Attack Research, InGuardians and G-C Partners, said they had separately investigated three other similar ransomware attacks since December.

Although they cannot be positive, the companies concluded that all were the work of a known advanced threat group from China, Attack Research Chief Executive Val Smith told Reuters.

The ransomware attacks have not previously been reported. None of the companies that were victims of the hackers agreed to be identified publicly.

Asked about the allegations, China’s Foreign Ministry said on Tuesday that if they were made with a “serious attitude” and reliable proof, China would treat the matter seriously.

But ministry spokesman Lu Kang said China did not have time to respond to what he called “rumors and speculation” about the country’s online activities.

The security companies investigating the advanced ransomware intrusions have various theories about what is behind them, but they do not have proof and they have not come to any firm conclusions.

Most of the theories flow from the possibility that the Chinese government has reduced its support for economic espionage, which it pledged to oppose in an agreement with the United States late last year. Some U.S. companies have reported a decline in Chinese hacking since the agreement.

Smith said some government hackers or contractors could be out of work or with reduced work and looking to supplement their income via ransomware.

It is also possible, Burdette said, that companies which had been penetrated for trade secrets or other reasons in the past were now being abandoned as China backs away, and that spies or their associates were taking as much as they could on the way out. In one of Dell’s cases, the means of access by the team spreading ransomware was established in 2013.

The cyber security experts could not completely rule out more prosaic explanations, such as the possibility that ordinary criminals had improved their skills and bought tools previously used only by governments.

Dell said that some of the malicious software had been associated by other security firms with a group dubbed Codoso, which has a record of years of attacks of interest to the Chinese government, including those on U.S. defense companies and sites that draw Chinese minorities.

PAYMENT IN BITCOIN

Ransomware has been around for years, spread by some of the same people that previously installed fake antivirus programs on home computers and badgered the victims into paying to remove imaginary threats.

In the past two years, better encryption techniques have often made it impossible for victims to regain access to their files without cooperation from the hackers. Many ransomware payments are made in the virtual currency Bitcoin and remain secret, but institutions including a Los Angeles hospital have gone public about ransomware attacks.

Ransomware operators generally set modest prices that many victims are willing to pay, and they usually do decrypt the files, which ensures that victims will post positively online about the transaction, making the next victims who research their predicament more willing to pay.

Security software companies have warned that because the aggregate payoffs for ransomware gangs are increasing, more criminals will shift to it from credit card theft and other complicated scams.

The involvement of more sophisticated hackers also promises to intensify the threat.

InGuardians CEO Jimmy Alderson said one of the cases his company investigated appeared to have been launched with online credentials stolen six months earlier in a suspected espionage hack of the sort typically called an Advanced Persistent Threat, or APT.

“The tactics of getting access to these networks are APT tactics, but instead of going further in to sit and listen stealthily, they are used for smash-and-grab,” Alderson said.

(Reporting by Joseph Menn in San Francisco; Additional reporting by Megha Rajagopalan in BEIJING; Editing by Jonathan Weber and Clarence Fernandez)

Superfast quantum computers could transform the world of finance, advocates say.

In a world where how fast you can assimilate and analyse data, then act on it, makes the difference between profit and loss, computing speed is key.

This is why banks, insurance firms and hedge funds invest millions on technology to give them an edge when trading and to offset human error.

Quantum computers, that owe more to quantum mechanics than electronics, promise to be exponentially more powerful than traditional computers, holding out the tantalising prospect of near-perfect trading strategies and highly accurate forecasting and risk assessments.

“Financial services is a data-rich environment,” says Kevin Hanley, director of design at the Royal Bank of Scotland (RBS). “Time is money and the ability to process data fast could have a huge potential benefit for our customers.”

---

Quantum computing in a nutshell

Classical computing relies on binary digits or bits – ones and zeros representing on/off, true/false states.

Quantum computing, on the other hand, features qubits, which can be both 0 or 1 at the same time – a state known as superposition. It all goes back to Schrodinger’s cat, but that’s another story….

Subatomic particles such as electrons, photons or ions can be made to behave in this mysterious way.

And because of this flexibility, qubits can do a lot more – a quantum computer could theoretically carry out trillions of calculations per second.

But these computers aren’t easy to build or operate. Quantum processors from one of the leading manufacturers in this field – D-Wave – need to be cooled to just above absolute zero (-273.15C). They also need to be free from any electromagnetic interference.

This makes them bulky and costly; D-Wave’s computers cost about $10m-15m.

Ironically they’re also a bit limited in the kinds of calculations they can currently do, and many observers are still sceptical about how fast they really are.

So it’s fair to say we’re still at the very early stages of quantum computing.

---

Goldman Sachs, RBS, Guggenheim Partners and Commonwealth Bank of Australia have all invested in quantum computing, with the aim of stealing a march on their competitors.

“This is interesting to the financial world because if you can find an algorithmic advantage to solve a problem, that can give you a great competitive advantage,” says Colin Williams, director of business development for D-Wave.

Google, Nasa, Lockheed Martin, the US Department of Energy and the University of Southern California have all used D-Wave’s systems so far.

Other tech companies, such as Cambridge Quantum Computing, QxBranch andRigetti, are also rushing to develop the hardware and software needed to make quantum computing a reality.

Longer-term visibility

Quantum computers could solve problems in a day that would take classical computers thousands of years to solve.

So in the world of investment, they could consider millions of different global investment scenarios and calculate which ones have the best chance of success over the long-term.

“We can build an optimal portfolio today, but tomorrow it won’t be optimal and needs to be rebalanced, which is expensive,” says Marcos Lopez de Prado, a senior managing director at Guggenheim Partners.

Quantum computers could, in theory, give investment firms much better visibility over the longer-term to make more accurate predictions and reduce this need to tinker with their portfolios, saving costs and possibly boosting profits.

“If you can predict the US dollar/Swiss franc exchange rate a tenth of a cent more reliably, then the value isn’t in the computer, it’s in the cost saving,” says Mr Williams.

Better forecasting could also reduce the prevalence of high-frequency trading, which has been accused of creating market volatility.

High-frequency traders have also been blamed for raising the costs of trading for ordinary investors by swooping into purchases nanoseconds before an interested party and reselling the stocks at a higher price.

Not so fast

So how soon will quantum computers be readily available?

D-Wave’s Mr Williams reckons businesses will have access to quantum computing functionality by 2018, whereas RBS’s Mr Hanley thinks it will be “five to 10 years before quantum computing comes of age”.

But this isn’t stopping financial institutions getting excited.

Blu Putnam, chief economist for the CME group – a US-based derivatives market – says quantum computing has led to a “mind-set change” where financial services “now seek out the nearly impossible to solve problems” in asset and risk management.

Before then, there is a lot of preparation to do.

Quantum computers can’t be interrogated in the same way as traditional computers. The algorithms – sets of complex mathematical rules – used for classical computing need to be reworked to fit into the quantum system.

And finding and training computer scientists to understand and use these systems effectively is another big challenge for the financial services industry.

But Mr Hanley says: “Rather than observe these changes from a distance or be last in the queue, I’d rather be at the front and have a seat at the board.”

Cracking the code

Quantum computing may offer potential benefits to the financial services industry, but it also poses risks.

Banks rely on encryption to keep their transactions and customer data secure. This involves scrambling and unscrambling data using keys made of very large numbers – tens, if not hundreds, of digits long.

A hacker would have to find the right key by trial and error and test it in order to unlock the data – a process that could take hundreds of years even with the most powerful of today’s supercomputers.

But quantum computers could crack the code with relative ease, potentially undermining the security of the entire global financial services industry.

Such a possibility leads Mr Lopez de Prado to fear that governments might outlaw quantum computers entirely.

“Governments could say they should be banned because otherwise there would be no secrets, but they can’t be un-invented.

“We need a new mathematical breakthrough that creates an unbreakable encryption,” he says.

Cryptographers are busy working on new algorithms to block attacks from future quantum computers and many believe this will be possible.

But the industry needs this breakthrough fast. The processing power of quantum computing is growing with each generation.

Mumbai: Once one of the pioneers of the tech industry, Motorola has been has seen some tough years lately. Earlier owned by Google, in 2014 Lenovo completed Motorola’s acquisition from its former owner.

All this while the name Motorola has lived around, however, in a recent announcement, Lenovo confirmed that it has plans to rebrand Motorola. Lenovo wishes to do away with the name ‘Motorola’ and go with ‘Moto’ instead. All high-end devices will carry the name ‘Moto’. The company also quoted specimen names like ‘Moto by Lenovo’.

Here’s your chance to get Marshmallow on your BlackBerry Priv before it’s sent out to the masses.

The beleaguered smartphone maker just launched a beta program that lets you queue up for a chance to install the beta build of Google’s latest OS. And wait you will, as the BlackBerry Beta Zone shows the program is already full.

If you sign in with your BlackBerry ID you’ll be able to join the waitlist, though there’s no guarantee of when your name may be called. Even if you don’t gain access, Marshmallow should be right around the corner. BlackBerry says in ablog post that testing is to take around four to eight weeks, so you should see a final build of Marshmallow around the end of May.

The story behind the story: While our review found many positives in the Priv, it doesn’t appear to be the turnaround device that the company needs. In an analyst call just a few days ago BlackBerry said it sold 600,000 units (the company wouldn’t disclose how many of those were Privs), which was below the 800,000 projection. With BlackBerry switching its main focus to Android, there’s a lot at stake this year. It’ll be all the more challenging with so many good flagships, particularly the new Galaxy S7 and S7 Edge.

AMD will close out its current microprocessor architecture this summer with “Bristol Ridge.” We got a sneak peek at the integrated APU running in HP’s Envy x360 laptop.

John Taylor, AMD’s vice president of corporate marketing, said the Bristol Ridge series of chips will formally debut on May 31, at the Computex show in Taiwan. There, he said, consumers should expect a number of different related product announcements. “You can expect to hear more from all the global OEMs, as well as Microsoft,” Taylor said. That doesn’t necessarily imply that Microsoft will ship an AMD-powered device.

Why this matters: AMD has been largely relegated to the value space of notebooks, where it can emphasize lower power, as well as to desktops, where it seeks to carve out a niche with its integrated graphics technology. It remains to be seen how many OEMs will sign on to use AMD’s new APU, although this HP contract is a nice win for the chip maker. AMD helped launch the APU space five years ago (an Accelerated Processing Unit combines the CPU and graphics acceleration on a single chip), and this year is an important milestone.

Building on Carrizo

Until the chip’s launch, potential customers will have to be satisfied with just a taste of the new processor’s performance, which Taylor claimed would outperform Intel’s Core i7-6500U microprocessor in 3D graphics. All in all, Bristol Ridge should be about 40 percent faster than the Kaveri APU AMD shipped in 2014.

AMD

Bristol Ridge will contain four “Bulldozer” CPU cores, as well as up to eight GPU cores. Taylor didn’t reveal the clock speed of the chip being used inside the HP device. AMD will ship both quad-core and dual-core versions of Bristol Ridge, although Taylor didn’t specify which segments of the market would receive each.

Eventually, AMD plans to ship both a desktop version of Bristol Ridge as well as a low-power, 15-watt version, Taylor said. “I would characterize the 15-watt [version] as the sweet spot of the Bristol Ridge design,” he said.

Both Bristol Ridge and its predecessor, Carrizo, use the same 28nm process technology, but Taylor said Bristol Ridge features process improvements, including more efficient transistors and a technology called adaptive voltage frequency scaling. That’s resulted in a “significant uplift in clock speed,” Taylor said.

By the end of the year, AMD will have moved on, to both its Zen CPU core as well as the Polaris graphics architecture, Taylor said.

Clarification: AMD said it has revised Bristol Ridge’s estimate of compute power relative to its Kaveri chip to a 50 percent improvement, not 40 percent.