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Samsung Goes Eight Cores
It was only a matter of time before someone got the cunning idea to build an eight-core ARM chip and Samsung seems to have taken up the challenge.
The Korean giant will detail its first eight-core SoC at the International Solid State Circuits Conference in February. The 28nm part features two stitched quad-core clusters, based on A7 and A15 cores, hence the name – big.little.
The A7 cluster runs at up to 1.2GHz, while the A15 cluster can hit 1.8GHz, and it packs 2MB of L2 cache. It sounds like an intriguing concept, a bit like Nvidia’s companion core taken to the next level. The “little” cluster is tuned for energy efficiency, while the beefy A15 cluster should deliver unparalleled performance.
But what about real life applications? Eight cores sound like overkill for smartphones and even high end tablets, so it is unclear whether the big.little chip will find its way into actual products anytime soon.
Baidu Heads To The Cloud
China’s largest search engine Baidu said on Monday that they would provide 30GB of free cloud storage to Android devices built with certain Qualcomm chips, in what’s the latest move by the company to build a presence in the country’s mobile services sector.
Baidu’s limited-time offer applies in China to two of Qualcomm’s latest chips, the Snapdragon S4 MSM 8×25 processor, and the Snapdragon S4 MSM 8x25Q processor. Users activating Baidu’s cloud service will receive 15GB of free cloud storage over the device’s lifetime, and an additional 15GB of storage free for one year.
As of Monday phones containing the chips, from Chinese manufacturers including Lenovo and Huawei, will ship with the free Baidu cloud storage enabled as a result of the partnership with Qualcomm.
Baidu is offering the free storage after the company in September declared China’s mobile Internet space as its next major focus, and announced a $1.6 billion investment to build a new cloud computing center.
Is Google Going Wireless?
November 26, 2012 by admin
Filed under Smartphones
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They already sells phones and tablets, provides a wealth of online services and has been laying high-speed fiber to people’s homes. Now Google is apparently weighing the possibility of a wireless network service as well.
Google has been in talks with satellite TV provider Dish Network over a possible partnership to build out a wireless service that would rival those from carriers such as AT&T and Sprint, the Wall Street Journal reported late last week.
The talks are at an early stage and could amount to nothing, and Google is just one of many companies Dish is talking to, according to the Journal, which cited anonymous sources. But it raises the prospect that Google might expand its business in a new direction.
Dish has been buying spectrum that could support a wireless service, although it still needs regulatory approval to set one up. In an interview with the Journal Thursday, CEO Charlie Ergen said the partners Dish is talking to include companies that don’t currently have a wireless business.
Google declined to comment on the report, the newspaper said.
nVidia Soars
Nvidia has published its third quarter earnings and the results are impressive to say the least. With record revenue of $1.2 billion, Nvidia’s net income in Q3 was $209.1 million (GAAP).
Quarterly revenue is up 12.9 percent year-over-year and represents a 15.3 percent sequential bump, beating analyst expectations. However, Nvidia expects its revenue to dip to between $1.02 and $1.17 billion in the fourth quarter.
The company blames the projected slump on a declining PC market. It seems Nvidia does not expect Windows 8 will have a very positive impact on the PC market.
Lenovo On The Rise
Lenovo has topped off a great 2012 with record sales figures and revenues, and claimed it took 15.6 percent of the PC market.
Lenovo is the PC maker that has bucked the industry trend of a shrinking PC market, posting faster than average industry growth for 14 consecutive quarters. All of that has left the firm announcing an 11 percent increase in second fiscal quarter sales to $8.7bn with profits of $162m, an increase of 13 percent over the same period last year.
Lenovo has managed to maintain the legendary status held by IBM’s Thinkpads and introduce its own low-cost models aimed at consumers. The firm has also been pushing smartphones in China and close to half of its revenues in its second fiscal quarter came from its home market.
Yang Yuanqing, chairman and CEO of Lenovo said, “Our global PC market share reached another historic high, moving us closer to our dream of becoming the worldwide PC leader. With four years’ effort, our consumer PC business has become the world’s number one in this segment for the first time. Our smartphone business in China, which we started only two years ago, has again strengthened its number two position,”
Is The x86 Falling
According to Mercury Research, worldwide shipments of x86 parts saw a sharp decline in Q3. Researchers claim the drop was the biggest seen in more than a decade, 9 percent year-over-year.
Despite the drop, Intel still has something to brag about. Intel’s share hit 83.3 percent, up from 80.6 percent sequentially. AMD’s share dropped to 16.1, down from 18.8 percent, while VIA garnered a 0.6 percent share.
Mercury Research analyst Dean McCarron told PC World that both AMD and Intel experienced declines, but AMD took more of the hit than Intel.
“AMD was simply hit by what OEMs saw in the markets… and hitting the brakes,” he said.
What’s more, the third quarter is supposed to be traditionally strong for x86 chipmakers, thanks to the back-to-school shopping frenzy. However, x86 CPU shipments dropped 4 percent in Q2, followed by 9 percent in Q3. Things aren’t looking good for Q4, either.
“The key is how the macroeconomic situation is, which is not looking good for the next couple of quarters,” McCarron said. “Hopefully things will improve next year.”
Samsung And Yahoo Ink A Deal
November 14, 2012 by admin
Filed under Around The Net
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Yahoo announced a deal on Tuesday with Samsung to integrate its Broadcast Interactivity service into the company’s Smart TVs.
The agreement will allow Yahoo to push real-time content alongside TV shows and advertisements on Samsung TVs, such as “subtle, on-screen prompts” that inform viewers of additional content that they can watch.
“With the touch of a remote, connected tablet or phone, Samsung Smart TV viewers can easily surface content or offers related to the TV shows and commercials they are watching,” Samsung said.
TV programmers can use the integration feature to provide Samsung TV customers with “complementary content” such as trivia, additional information about the show being watched and interactive gaming.
Showtime Networks and National Geographic Channel are two of the first TV programming partners that will take advantage of the agreement, Yahoo said.
If TV ads aren’t annoying enough, Yahoo said the partnership also creates new forms of advertising by “extending traditional 30-second commercials into immediate actions”.
In other words, with broadcast interactivity enabled commercials, advertisers can embed “calls-to-action” for downloading apps or digital media, providing coupons, ordering samples, reading reviews or viewing product information. Just in case you really want to know more about that Mr Muscle sink unblocker, or the next JML cleaning gadget that is set to transform your home life forever.
Lenovo Adds Enterprise Servers
Eager to expand its horizons beyond PCs and tablets, Lenovo on Monday announced the first server from the newly created Enterprise Product Group, which deals in servers, storage, networking and software.
The ThinkServer TD330 is a tower server based on Intel’s Xeon E5-2400 processors. The server will support up to 16 processor cores and start at $929.
Lenovo last week announced the formation of the Enterprise Product Group. It is headed by Roy Guillen, vice president and general manager of the division. Guillen was previously vice president and general manager of Dell’s data center solutions (DCS) division.
Lenovo already offers low-end servers and workstations for homes and small businesses, but the new division will target small, medium-size and large enterprises. Lenovo has offered low-end servers based on Intel’s Xeon E3 and E5 processors, but the company did not respond to a request for comment on whether existing ThinkServer products would be part of the enterprise product portfolio.
“We’ve placed expanded emphasis on building our server portfolio this year, introducing products that meet the needs of all our customers — from enterprise customers to small businesses,” Guillen said in a statement.
Lenovo established itself as a PC company after it bought IBM’s PC division in 2005. Lenovo’s progress in the PC market has been rapid, with IDC placing the company as the world’s largest PC vendor for the first time in the third quarter this year. The new enterprise division will put Lenovo in competition with IBM, Hewlett-Packard and Dell, which also sell x86 servers.
Amazon Goes To Court
Amazon is suing Daniel Powers, its ex VP in charge of global sales for Amazon Web Services because he joined Google in a cloud role.
Taking the new job, asserts Amazon, violates Powers’ non-compete agreement with Amazon, which let Powers go this summer with a reasonable severance package.
There is a risk that Powers could take important information that he learned about the Amazon web services business to its rival, Google, and that is what the firm is seeking to stop.
According to Geekwire Amazon wants an injunction against Powers to prevent him from “engaging in any activities that directly or indirectly support any aspect of Google’s cloud computing business”.
A court filing claims that Amazon has an agreement with Powers that says he will not join a rival for a “limited time following the termination of his employment”.
Powers, it warns, is a veteran who knows the cloud business from “top to bottom”, adding that he has “acquired and currently possesses extensive knowledge of Amazon’s trade secrets and its highly confidential information”.
The complaint says that he has extensive and detailed information about Amazon Web Services’ prospects, business, potential business partners, pricing strategies and goals.
Amazon has not provided us with further comment.
ARM Goes High-End
Nvidia is itself an ARM chip licensee that has seen significant design wins with its Tegra 3 system-on-chip (SoC) processor, however the firm doesn’t see ARM based servers being able to do heavy lifting in server tasks for two years. Sumit Gupta, GM of Nvidia’s Tesla Accelerated Computing business unit said that even with GPGPUs, ARM based servers are not yet able to provide the computing power needed to drive high performance servers.
Gupta said, “Performance of these ARM cores is still not where it needs to be for servers. It is getting there; the new ARM64 [processor] is going to get it part of the way.” However he did say that eventually ARM SoCs could hit X86-like performance levels. “One day I think ARM will at least get to similar performance levels as X86 performance. The belief is that over the next one or two years these ARM SoCs will be good enough for cloud applications and web serving. I think it will take some more time to be good enough for accelerated computing.”
As for Nvidia using its Tegra chips to push work to the firm’s GPGPUs, a scenario that would make the firm’s accountants very happy, Gupta said he was surprised at the level of interest from developers and questioned the need for powerful CPUs. “We did a small development kit called Karma that has a Tegra 3 and a Nvidia GPU, [and] I was shocked by the number of those kits that have been sold. The interest in this ARM plus GPU is far larger than even I expected. If the GPU can do dynamic parallelism, it becomes more independent than how powerful CPUs do you need? I believe the first thing that will happen is that people will start using lower performing [Intel] Xeons […] then at some point when these Atom based processors become available they might use that, and when ARM64 is available they’ll use that.”