Basically this means that the hardware can be used by the OPNFV collaborative open source community to accelerate the delivery of cloud-enabled networks and applications.

Nokia said the OPNFV Lab will be a testbed for NFV developers and accelerates the introduction of commercial open source NFV products and services. Developers can test carrier-grade NFV applications for performance and availability.

Nokia is making its AirFrame Data Center Solution available as a public OPNFV Lab with the support of Intel, which is providing Intel Xeon processors and solid state drives to give communications service providers the advantage of testing OPNFV projects on the latest and greatest server and storage technologies.

The Nokia AirFrame Data Center Solution is 5G-ready and Nokia said it was the first to combine the benefits of cloud computing technologies to meet the stringent requirements of the telco world. It’s capable of delivering ultra-low latency and supporting the kinds of massive data processing requirements that will be required in 5G.

Morgan Richomme, NFV network architect for Innovative Services at Orange Labs, OPNFV Functest PTL, in a release. “NFV interoperability testing is challenging, so the more labs we have, the better it will be collectively for the industry.”

AT&T has officially added Nokia to its list of 5G lab partners working to define 5G features and capabilities. It’s also working with Intel and Ericsson.

Courtesy-Fud

As we have been saying for ages, Jobs’ Mob is no longer exclusively going with Qualcomm to provide modem chips for the upcoming iPhone 7. The deal, while large, is tailored for some of Apple’s partnerships. Intel gets AT&T phones and Qualcomm remains the supplier for Verizon network phones and for China.

The press has been claiming that it is terrible news for Qualcomm. But it appears Qualcomm knew it was coming and had already factored in the loss of the business into its results. The reason Qualcomm is not losing any sleep over the deal is because the most Intel is going to get is a third of the iPhone modems. This is what in financial terms is considered a “pisser” but hardly a reason to jump off any buildings over.

Other good things are happening to Qualcomm which more than balance out what has been lost to Intel. Firstly its latest Snapdragons are selling extremely well and secondly the shine is starting to go off its number one rival MediaTek.

For a while, naysayers have been predicting that MediaTek was going to sink Qualcomm. In fact there was even a suggestion that Qualcomm should get out of chipmaking and become a patent troll.

MediaTek had been luring away Qualcomm customers with cheaper chips, which combined with Apple, Samsung and Huawei making their own chips was creating a perfect storm of doom.

Now there is a suggestion that MediaTek’s growth wagon might have stalled. MediaTek’s sales fell 9.4 per cent annually last quarter to $1.7 billion. Its operating margin halved from 16 per cent last year to eight per cent. The reason was due to higher expenses across the board. This meant that its net income fell to $136 million. MediaTek is still more profitable than Qualcomm’s chipmaking division has a wafer thin 5 per cent last quarter.

Analysts expect MediaTek to post double-digit sales growth fuelled by rising demand for 4G smartphone chips in China. But its margins are also expected to keep contracting due to tough competition from Qualcomm and Spreadtrum.

Another risk for MediaTek is its dependence on China. Taiwan just got rid of the pro-unification KMT party, which controlled the presidency for the past eight years, in favour of the pro-independence DPP party.

MediaTek needs direct investments from mainland China to fight off Qualcomm, but it is finding that the Taiwanese government is blocking that sort of investment cash.

All this is giving Qualcomm a fighting chance in the area where it makes a lot of its cash. Sure its margins might be lower, but it still making more money. Enough so that it does not have to worry about losing a small about of dosh to Intel.

Courtesy-Fud

In an IDC interview Intel’s data center boss said that Nvidia gained an early lead in the market for accelerated HPC workloads when it positioned its GPUs for that task several years ago. However there is a perception that processors used for machine learning today are GPUs like those from Nvidia and AMD.

Bryant was a bit miffed when she was asked how Intel can compete in this market without a GPU. She said that the general purpose GPU, or GPGPU was just another type of accelerator and not one that’s uniquely suited to machine learning.
It is better to look at Knights Landing which is a coprocessor, but it’s an accelerator for floating point operations, and that’s what a GPGPU too.

She said that since the release of the first Xeon Phi in 2014, Intel now clawed back 33 percent of the market for HPC workloads that use a floating point accelerator.

“So we’ve won share against Nvidia, and we’ll continue to win share,” she said.

She said that Intel’s share of the machine learning business may be much smaller, but the market is still young.

“Less than one percent of all the servers that shipped last year were applied to machine learning, so to hear Nvidia is beating us in a market that barely exists yet makes me a little crazy,” she says.

Intel will continue to evolve Xeon Phi to make it better at machine learning tasks. She said that there are two aspects to machine learning – training the algorithmic models, and applying those models to the real world in front-end applications. Intel’s FPGAs and its Xeon processors mean Intel has both sides of the equation covered.

But Nvidia’s GPUs are harder for programmers to work with which could give Intel an edge as ordinary businesses need to adopt machine learning. Knights Landing is “self-booting,” which means customers don’t need to pair it with a regular Xeon to boot an OS.
However Intel’s newest Xeon Phi has a floating point performance of about 3 teraflops, which is a little slow compared to the five teraflops for Nvidia’s new GP100.

Courtesy-Fud

The new test chip contains ARM’s yet-to-be-announced “Artemis” CPU core which is named after a goddess who will turn you into deer and tear you apart with wild dogs if you ever see her. [The NDA must have been pretty tough on this chip.ed]

In fact things have been ticking along on this project for ages. ARM discloses that tapeout actually took place back in December last year and is expecting silicon to come back from the foundry in the following weeks.

ARM actually implemented a full four-core Artemis cluster on the test chip which should show vendors what is possible for their production designs. The test chip has a current generation Mali GPU implementation with 1 shader core to show vendors what they will get when they use ARM’s POP IP in conjunction with its GPU IP. There is also a range of other IP blocks and I/O interfaces that are used to validation of the new manufacturing process.

TSMC’s 10FF manufacturing process is supposed to increase density with scaling’s of up to 2.1x compared to the previous 16nm manufacturing node. It also brings about 11-12 per cent higher performance at each process’ respective nominal voltage, or a 30 per cent reduction in power.

ARM siad that comparing a current Cortex A72 design on 16FF+ and an Artemis core on 10FF on the new CPU and process can halve the dynamic power consumption. Currently clock frequencies on the new design are still behind the older more mature process and IP, but ARM expects this to improve as it optimizes its POP and the process stabilizes.

Courtesy-Fud

Bristol Ridge and Stoney Ridge sound a little like locations in a Somerset version of Game of Thrones, but they both feature AMD’s Excavator x86 processor cores and Radeon R7 graphics, which AMD sees powering e-sports gaming on laptops.

Bristol Ridge is the more powerful of the two coming in 35W and 15W versions of AMD FX, A12 and A10 processors, offering up to 3.7GHz of processing power. The former two processors are paired with up to eight Graphics Core Next (GCN) cores in the R7 to provide a decent pool of graphics processing power.

Stoney Bridge offers less in the way of processor power, topping out at 3.5GHz, and versions include 15W A9, A6 and E2 processor configurations coupled with lower powered graphics accelerators.

AMD claimed that the new APUs offer a 50 per cent hike in performance over the previous generation Carrizo APUs. However, this rise is over APUs from the early part of Carrizo’s lifecycle, so performance gains over the most recent Carrizo APUs are likely to be 10 to 20 per cent.

AMD also said that its silicon is faster than rival chips from Intel, including the i3-6100U found in several ultraportable laptops.

Many of these tests are subjective and depend on how a hardware manufacture configures and sets up the APUs in a laptop or tablet, but AMD does have its graphics tech to draw on, such as the GCN architecture, which could give it the edge over Intel’s chips when it comes to pushing pixels.

The APUs will be aimed primarily at slim laptops that need low-power consumption chips, much like Intel’s Skylake line.

Bristol Ridge is currently available to end users only in the form of HP’s latest Envy laptop. But now that AMD has debuted the full range of the seventh-generation APUs we can expect to see them in other ultraportable machines before too long.

Courtesy-TheInq

Our well-placed sources are confident that the PC group will be the hardest hit. This is all because the PC market has stopped growing and Intel has to find its way to new markets to supplement loss of this business.

Latest research data from IDC indicates that in 2016 PC market will decline from 275.8 million units in 2015 to 260.8 million units in 2016 and the current projections for 2017 show the PC market slightly decreasing to 257.9 million units. At its peak PC market was at 364.0 million units, but this was in 2011 when things were rosier, kids were polite to their parents, and rock stars played decent music. These times are clearly behind us and Intel knows it.

The PC group downsize is being supervised by Dr. Venkata “Murthy” Renduchintala who is Intel’s number two. He is the bloke who was paid $25 million dollars to defect from Qualcomm. Murthy has already done a high level clean up at PC client group and is believed to be thinking about dusting the top of the corporate bookshelf next.

Another team which will be pummeled is Rene James’s old software outfit. People from software services and the security division formerly known as McAfee are expected to mostly go the same way as the artist formerly known as Prince.

Murthy’s also wants to get Intel to the right course with IoT market. Marketing for that area is expected to grow from $655.8 billion in 2014 to $1.7 trillion in 2020. Intel wants the piece of that cake, and perhaps a few tea and biscuits to go with it and it will be interesting to look the fight in this promising land market.

There is still no killer app to help the IoT market which defines it. IoT right now is nothing and everything.

Courtesy-Fud

LG said the dispute with Qualcomm has been completely settled, although it did not say how much it had agreed to pay. Earlier it had claimed Qualcomm had overcharged for the chips under a licensing contract.

The news about the lawsuit settlement emerged following Qualcomm’s profit forecast for the second quarter in January, which was below what Wall Street’s tarot readers had predicted.

The company expected its mobile chip shipment to fall by 16-25 per cent in the second quarter. Additionally, it expected 3G and 4G device shipment to decline by 4 to 14 per cent. As for the first quarter of 2016, Qualcomm’s chip shipment fell 10 per cent , with a drop in revenue by 21.6 per cent. Revenue from licensing declined 10.4 per cent, suggests a Reuters report.

An LG spokesperson said that this kind of dispute was “actually nothing” and was similar to the ones that the industries had in the past.

“Qualcomm has lowered its royalty rate to LG in return for LG’s guaranteed purchase of Qualcomm processors, which are currently being used in its flagship handsets and will be used in upcoming flagship models,” added the official.

Qualcomm might have been a little nervy.  LG has invested millions to develop its own chipset, in an attempt to cut down its dependency on Qualcomm for mobile processors.

Courtesy-Fud

According to beancounters at IBS, the news comes on the heels of an announcement that the three-month average of the global market for semiconductors ending in February fell 6.2 percent compared with the same figure in 2015, down from a 5.8 percent decline in January.

IBS chief executive Handel Jones said:

“Based on talking to customers about buying patterns, we see softness,” said. “Smartphone sales are slowing, and the composition of the market is changing with about half all chips bought by companies in China who want low-end devices In addition, over the past year memory prices have fallen by nearly half both for DRAMs and NAND-based solid-state drives as vendors try to buy market share, said Jones. “It’s more of a price issue because volumes are up.”

Jones expects softness in the PC market will continue through this year. Demand for chips is rising in automotive and for the emerging Internet of Things, but so far both sectors are relatively small, he added.

Data shows that the gap between the market share of these Intel and Samsung firms is narrowing. In 2012, the gap between Intel and Samsung was 5.3 percent. This narrowed to 4.2 percent in 2013, and is now 3.2 percent in 2015. SK Hynix, which now stands as the third largest semiconductor brand in the world, beat Qualcomm with a market share of 4.8 percent.

Courtesy-Fud

Nvidia claims it was forced to wind down its cellular mobile broadband chipset business, including its Icera unit just four years after buying it, because of Qualcomm’s anti-trust antics.

Qualcomm’s alleged tactics led to “unexplained delays in customer orders, reductions in demand volumes and contracts never being entered into, even after a customer or mobile network cooperating with a prospective customer has agreed or expressed a strong intention to purchase” Nvidia’s chipsets, the company moaned.

The claim for cash comes as European Union regulators step up antitrust investigations into Qualcomm sales tactics that officials said thwarted other designers of mobile-phone chip technology. This could result in fines or an EU order forcing a company to change its behaviour.

The EU thinks Qualcomm may have charged below-cost fees for chips used in mobile Internet modems known as dongles from 2009 to 2011 to thwart smaller competitor Icera. Regulators are separately probing what they say are exclusivity payments Qualcomm paid to a phone and tablet manufacturer for using its designs.

Qualcomm is “confident” it would prevail in both the EU investigation and the lawsuit.

Nvidia is seeking a declaration from the judge that Qualcomm’s conduct was an abuse of a dominant position, compensation, and an account of the profits it says Qualcomm gained from unlawful conduct, according to the court filings.

Courtesy-Fud

The appeal comes after a ruling at the end of February when SCO’s arguments claiming intellectual property ownership over parts of Unix were rejected by a US district court. That judgment noted that SCO had minimal resources to defend counter-claims filed by IBM due to SCO’s bankruptcy.

In a filing, Judge David Nuffer argued that “the nature of the claims are such that no appellate court would have to decide the same issues more than once if there were any subsequent appeals”, effectively suggesting that the case had more than run its course.

On 1 March, that filing was backed up by the judge’s full explanation, declaring IBM the emphatic victor in the long-running saga.

“IT IS ORDERED AND ADJUDGED that pursuant to the orders of the court entered on July 10, 2013, February 5, 2016, and February 8, 2016, judgment is entered in favour of the defendant and plaintiff’s causes of action are dismissed with prejudice,” stated the document.

Now, though, SCO has filed yet again to appeal that judgment, although the precise grounds it is claiming haven’t yet been disclosed.

SCO is being represented by the not-inexpensive law firm of Boise, Schiller & Flexner, which successfully represented the US government against Microsoft in the antitrust case in the late 1990s. Although SCO is officially bankrupt, it’s unclear who continues to bankroll the case. Its one remaining “asset” is its claims for damages against IBM.

Meanwhile, despite the costs of the case, IBM has fought SCO vigorously, refusing even to throw a few million dollars at the company by way of compensation, which would encourage what remains of the company to pursue other, presumably easier, open source targets.

Courtesy-TheInq