According to Electronista, recent court filings suggest that IBM may be concerned that Mark Papermaster could transmit knowledge about an upcoming IBM memory technology to Apple. Papermaster is the former IBM chip designer that recently accepted a job at Apple which triggered a lawsuit from IBM over a non-compete agreement.
The memory technology called "racetrack" memory was previously detailed in a Times Online article:
Scientists at IBM say they have developed a new type of digital storage which would enable a device such as an MP3 player to store about half a million songs - or 3,500 films - and cost far less to produce.
The new technology is said to require much less power and could run on a single battery charge for "weeks at a time." The technology, however, was described as "exploratory" just earlier this year and end-user products weren't expected for 10 years.
It's unclear how involved Papermaster was in the development of this technology, and how serious a concern this is for IBM. Papermaster was IBM's vice president of microprocessor technology development prior to his departure.
Update: ZDNet reports the connection between Papermaster and "racetrack" memory is very tenuous at best.
Wednesday April 24, 2024 2:05 pm PDT by Joe Rossignol
Apple is set to unveil iOS 18 during its WWDC keynote on June 10, so the software update is a little over six weeks away from being announced. Below, we recap rumored features and changes planned for the iPhone with iOS 18. iOS 18 will reportedly be the "biggest" update in the iPhone's history, with new ChatGPT-inspired generative AI features, a more customizable Home Screen, and much more....
Wednesday April 24, 2024 3:39 pm PDT by Juli Clover
Apple today released several open source large language models (LLMs) that are designed to run on-device rather than through cloud servers. Called OpenELM (Open-source Efficient Language Models), the LLMs are available on the Hugging Face Hub, a community for sharing AI code. As outlined in a white paper [PDF], there are eight total OpenELM models, four of which were pre-trained using the...
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Best Buy is discounting a collection of M3 MacBook Pro computers today, this time focusing on the 14-inch version of the laptop. Every deal in this sale requires you to have a My Best Buy Plus or Total membership, although non-members can still get solid second-best prices on these MacBook Pro models. Note: MacRumors is an affiliate partner with Best Buy. When you click a link and make a...
Apple used to regularly increase the base memory of its Macs up until 2011, the same year Tim Cook was appointed CEO, charts posted on Mastodon by David Schaub show. Earlier this year, Schaub generated two charts: One showing the base memory capacities of Apple's all-in-one Macs from 1984 onwards, and a second depicting Apple's consumer laptop base RAM from 1999 onwards. Both charts were...
