Tag: techeye

Forrest joins AMD

Posted on October 28, 2014 by - Moving People, News

Forrest Gump</p> <p>Tom Hanks</p> <p>© ParamountAMD has hired a former Dell senior executive to lead the chipmaker’s push into microservers.

AMD said that Forrest Norrod will be senior vice president and general manager of AMD’s enterprise, embedded and semi-custom business group and report to Chief Executive Lisa Su.

Norrod, 49, ran Dell’s server business and joins AMD as the company develops chips for new low-power servers that might challenge heavyweight Intel in cutting-edge data centres.

AMD has been expanding into new markets including low-power “microservers” and game consoles, but progress has been slow.

Earlier this month, Su took over as CEO, replacing Rory Read. Norrod fills Su’s previous position, which she had held temporarily since July.

Following Su’s appointment as CEO, AMD announced on Oct. 16 it was cutting 7 percent of its workforce to reduce costs.

Dell was the man behind the creation of Dell’s first internal startup focused on the hyper-scale datacentre market as the vice president and general manager, Data Center Solutions (DCS). He held several engineering leadership roles previously at Dell, starting as CTO of Client Products before leading Enterprise Engineering and ultimately having responsibility for all of Dell’s global engineering teams.

Prior to Dell, he ran the integrated x86 CPU business at Cyrix and National Semiconductor.

LG kills off Plasma TVs

Posted on October 28, 2014 by - News

additional-oxford-dodo-bookLG will end the production of plasma display televisions by end-November in order to focus its efforts on liquid crystal display and OLED televisions.

LG Electronics said in a regulatory filing the decision reflects a decline in demand for plasma televisions. The move was widely expected as LCD TVs have become the mainstay product in the global market while Plasma has become the Betamax of the telly world.

It is not the only company that thinks that plasma is a Norwegian Blue. Samsung SDI, a sister company of LG’s TV rival Samsung , also said in July that it will shut down its plasma panel production business by Nov. 30 due to the decline in overall demand.

The first prototype for a plasma display monitor was invented in July 1964 at the University of Illinois by professors Donald Bitzer and Gene Slottow. However, it was not until after the advent of digital and other technologies that successful plasma televisions became possible. Plasma display is an emissive flat panel display where light is created by phosphors excited by a plasma discharge between two flat panels of glass.

While many companies have successfully manufactured different sizes of plasma displays through early 2000, during 2006 through 2008, Panasonic came out with a 103 inch plasma display, which is the third largest display of plasma in the world, and it was marketed by Jumbo Electronics in Dubai.

By 2006 plasma TVs were overtaken by the LCDs, but in the 40-inch series and above slice, plasma displays had established the control over the market share. It was considered that LCD technology was most suited to small size televisions only while the plasma technology was highly competitive in larger sizes, especially in 40-inches and above.

That changed as bigger LCD screens proved just as good and cheaper.

 

Amazon burnt by Fire

Posted on October 28, 2014 by - News

FireOnTheAmazonPosterAmazon has admitted that it has lost a pile of dosh on its Fire smartphone.

Chief Financial Officer Tom Szkutak confessed to investors that the company took a $170 million charge related to the write-down of costs associated with its smartphone.

The smartphone was supposed to be one branch of Amazon’s expanding family tree of devices, which has grown from a single e-reader to tablets, a media-streaming box and the smartphone.

The company last week  reported a third-quarter loss that significantly widened over a year ago and missed Wall Street expectations, while warning that its fourth-quarter revenue would also disappoint. The Fire Phone charge was a large component of the $437 million lost in the period.

But the Fire Phone, its first foray into the smartphone business, was supposed to do to Amazon what its tablet had done.  Make piles of dosh by forcing people to buy its content.  The phone itself was not bad either with some technology which should have helped it elbow its way into the market. It could display 3D images and graphics and scan certain products and media for additional information and purchasing options.

Where Amazon went wrong was that it did not subsidise the phone in the same way that it had done for its Fire Tablet. Even with an exclusive partnership with wireless carrier AT&T in the US. The phone has failed to make a dent in the market, and after two months, went from $200 to 99 cents with a two-year contract. In the UK it’s free on various contracts from the O2 network.

The exclusive deal with AT&T in the US did not help either. Most high-profile smartphones opt to go with multiple carriers, but Amazon tied itself to AT&T in exchange for more prominent promotional positioning in the carrier’s shops.  However that did not explain why it also tanked in the UK.

ARM claims new Mali will be smoking

Posted on October 28, 2014 by - News

Bob_Marley__Smoking_Blighty chip designer ARM claims that its new Mali chips will offer both higher performance and higher energy efficiency. The top-end Mali-T860, for instance, supports 4K graphics and beyond while “being 45 percent more energy efficient across a wide range of content” compared to ARM’s current offerings.

The new GPUs include the high-end Mali-T860 GPU, the Mali-T830 GPU, and the Mali-T820 GPU. ARM is also introducing the Mali-V550 video processor and the Mali-DP550 display processor chip, which a coprocessor interface and support for 7 layer composition.

ARM said that the Mali-T860 is 45 percent more energy efficient across a wide range of content. It can support 4K graphics and beyond. Each processor is tuned to a different mobile submarket.

ARM claims its silicon will make it from drawing board to device far faster than before and there will be lots of them ranging from low end to high spec chips.

Currently, ARM Mali GPU designs are used by 60 partners and there were more than 400 million Mali GPUs shipping in 2013 alone.

Apple CEO furious at shops

Posted on October 28, 2014 by - News

tim-cook-glareApple CEO Tim Cook is furious that shops are not using his Apple Pay system and are thinking of setting up their own payment schemes.

CVS and Rite Aid gave Apple Pay the thumbs down in favour of a rival system that roughly 50 chains, including Wal-Mart and Best Buy, are developing for in-house use.
Apple touted Apple Pay as one of the reasons you needed to buy one of its expensive bendy phones and told its fan boy base that they would be able to shop in most places by waving their phones at bored cashiers.

Unfortunately, for Cook, his cunning plan required retailers to pay fees to card companies like Visa and Mastercard. Fees range between two percent and three percent of costs per transaction and it would seem unnecessary if retailers used their own system.

Cook argued on Monday that Apple Pay offered better security and privacy than competing services, and that retailers risked alienating customers by limiting choices at checkout.
“It’s a skirmish,” Cook said in response to a question about the retailers’ moves.

“Merchants have different objectives sometimes. But in the long arc of time, you only are relevant as a retailer or merchant if your customers love you.”

In other words if the retailers do not do what Apple tells them, people who own its phones will shop elsewhere.

Of course the Tame Apple press is doing its best to help. Rather than telling fanboys that no shop is going to be impressed with them waving their flaccid bendy phone at them, it is instead trying to talk up the failing Apple Pay system. This is mostly done by publishing Apple sourced figures about the number of people signing up to Apple Pay  to put pressure on retailers to do Cook’s bidding.

AMD faces Nvidia threat

Posted on October 28, 2014 by - News

AMD, SunnyvaleNvidia is ahead of AMD on the graphics front and it won’t be until next year that the Sunnyvale firm catches up.

That’s according to financial analyst Sean Chandler, who works for Seeking Alpha.

He said in a note to his clients that the Nvidia “Maxwell” architecture has put AMD under heavy pressure in the consumer graphics arena.  And that’s worry investors and taking its toll on the AMD share price.

Chandler said that while AMD’s restructuring are widely seen as positive, the firm “still needs to release competitive technologies to remain relevant”.

Nvidia Maxwell, he said, means “monumental advancements” in both efficiency and performance.

Nvidia’s 60watt 750Ti is comparable to AMD’s 150 watt R7 260X, he said.  And Maxwell also outforms AMD in performance efficiency per die size.

He added that the rumour mill suggests AMD may respond with 20 nanometre chips now chip foundry TSMC has got the shrink down pat.

He suggests to investors: “AMD is almost certainly not out of the game, but be cautious and don’t pour all of your eggs into one basket.”

Outlook gloomy for notebook PCs

Posted on October 28, 2014 by - News

notebooksThere’s darkness at the end of the tunnel for vendors of notebooks, it appears.

Digitimes Research said that while notebook sales in 2014 fell by 2.1 percent in 2014, next year isn’t going to be too brilliant either.

It expects a further decline of 1.7 percent worlldwide in 2015, with shipments amounting to 168 million units.

The research outfit said that Microsoft Windows 10 is unlikely to bump up demand and efforts made by Microsoft to stimulate demand by reducing licensing fees aren’t going to turn things round.

It predicts declines in shipments of notebooks all the way through to 2018.

But every cloud has a silver lining because at least it will mean the price of notebooks will fall in 2015, partly due to Microsoft’s cunning plan to make machines with 11.6-inch notebooks sell for under 2015.

Chromebooks are expected to make additional depradations on the traditional Wintel notebook.

Met Office spends £100 million on computer

Posted on October 28, 2014 by - News

metcrayStung by criticism that its weather forecasts aren’t quite as accurate as they could be, the UK Met Office has decided the answer to the whingers is to buy a supercomputer that cost it £97 million.

How will the Cray supercomputer help?  The Met Office helpfully explains that it’s 13 times more powerful than the current system and has 120,000 times more memory than a top end smartphone.

That means it can deliver incorrect forecasts 13 times faster than it does now.

Of course, it’s all in the software or as the Met Office explains “sophisticated forecasts are anticipated to deliver £2 billion of socio economic benefits to the UK”.

Politician Danny Alexander, who is chief secretary to the Treasury,  said: “We are a country fascinated by the weather.”

The supercomputer is based at the Exeter Science Park and the Met Office says it weighs the equivalent of 11 double decker buses.

But we’ll have to wait nearly a year before the 16,000 trillion calculations a second supercomputer grinds into action.  The first phase will be operational in September 2015 and it won’t reach full capacity until 2017.

IBM brings in the clouds

Posted on October 28, 2014 by - News

Pic Mike MageeBig Blue said it has released or is just about to release a slew of cloud and Big Data analytics to the IT party.

It said that Cognos Business Intelligence, SPSS predictive analytics and Watson Analytics will soon be available on its Cloud marketplace. Currently the Cognos offering is in beta, and won’t be ready for action until the first quarter of next year.  And SPSS Modeller won’t be available for another 30 days.

What’s the Cloud marketplace?  It’s one place you can go to, or in IBM speak it’s “the digital front door to cloud innovation”.

Big Blue said that 25 percent of new business analytic installations will be as subscriptions to cloud analytic or application services by next year.

IBM wants a slice of that lucrative cake.

The giant said that it has five answers to five common problems for businesses including understanding customers, understanding operations, security, compliance and data warehouse modernisation.

IBM makes Ebola initiatives

Posted on October 27, 2014 by - News

ibm-officeGiant vendor IBM said it is offering a number of initiatives in a bid to help the spread of the deadly Ebola virus in Africa.

It has donated IBM Connections technology to Nigera in a bid to help preparedness for future outbreaks of the disease and has created a global portal to share Ebola data.

IBM has worked with Sierra Leone’s Open Government initiative, Cambridge Uni’s Africa Voices project, telco Airtel and startup Echo Mobile.

The Sierra Leone system lets people report Ebola problems and worries using SMS or voice calls. That, it says, will help the government improve its strategies for containing the outbreak.

Using IBM supercomputers and analytics in the cloud, the system will identify correlations and emerging concerns across the entire data set of messages. SMS and voice data are location specific.

According to IBM, the system has already identified regions with growing numbers of suspected cases and helped provide faster response times for body collection and burials.

The system uses radio broadcasts to encourage people to get in touch with the project.  Cambridge Uni’s Dr Sharath Srinivasan said: “We are working with IBM to offer people across Sierra Leone a channel to voice  their opinions and to ensure the data is rapidly analysed and turned into insights about the effectiveness of public service announcements and public misconceptions about Ebola.”

Airtel has provided a toll free number for SMS messages and anonymised by Kenyan company Echo Mobile.

Meanwhile, Big Blue volunteers are calling on organisations worldwide to contribute data as it seeks to identify and classify open data sources.

Intel readies server shifts

Posted on October 27, 2014 by - News

intel_log_reversedRoadmaps seen by sources close to chip manufacturer Intel say there’s a series of sea changes for server chips to be released in the second quarter of 2015.

According to reporters at Taiwanese wire Digitimes, Intel will release processors for servers based on Haswell-EX  as it readies other products for workstations too.

It is scheduled to introduce Skylake Xeons in the third quarter as well as Broadwell Xeons during the third quarter of next year.

That means – as is the tradition at Intel – we’ll see several processors phased out including Xeon Phis, Itaniums and other microprocessors, according to the wire.

Meanwhile the same media says that Intel will manage to ship a milllion units of its so-called “Education Tablets” this year.  The machines are largely aimed at developing markets.  Shipments will exceed three million units in 2015.

Computers will be made of DNA

Posted on October 27, 2014 by - News

DNAScientists at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem claim to have made a breakthrough that may well lead to the development of computer circuits based on DNA.

Physics is preventing the development of silicon based CMOS technology in the future but molecular electronics have been touted as the way forward.

Now a group led by Professor Danny Porath and Professor Paul Schankerman clailm to have performed reproducible and quantitive measurements of electricity through long molecules made of four DNA strands.

Porath said that the research “paves the way for implementing DNA based programmable circuits for molecular electronics, a new generation of computer circuits that can be more sophisticated, cheaper and simpler to make.”

The announcement comes through a collaboration with other bodies such as Tel Aviv University and groups based in Denmark, Spain, the USA, Italy and Cyprus.

Gadget accessories become big business

Posted on October 27, 2014 by - News

smartphones-genericA staggering $51.1 billion will be spent by people buying accessories for their smartphones this year.

That’s according to ABI Research which said protective cases are responsible for the biggest chunk of revenues and shipments.

The other major accessories are extra charges and memory cards, said ABI.

People, said analyst Thomas McCourtie from ABI, want extr protection for their smartphones – particularly now as they come with larger screens and so are more susceptible to damage.

And there’s a fashion element to the trend too – with some cases aving compartments for debit and credit cards and people want to carry everything valuable together rather than in wallets and purses separately.

The market for Bluetooth accessories continues with sales jumping by 18 percent over the five years between 2014 to 2019.

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“Products such as the Beats by Dr Dre Pill and the Creative D200 have become some of the most sought after mobile accessories,” said McCourtnie.  “People are willing to pay for quality audio and highly visual brands.”

3D printers reach tipping point

Posted on October 27, 2014 by - News

3dprinterOver 217,000 3D printers will ship in 2015, but this is only the start of a headlong rush for people buying the devices.

A report from the Gartner Group estimates that 108,151 3D printers will ship this year, but shipments will double between 2015 and 2018.  Worldwide shipments then will be around 2.3 million.

It’s 30 years since the first 3D printers were invented, surprisingly, but unit shipment growth rates were trifling.  Gartner thinks that the 2.3 millin shipments in 2018 are only the beginning of the matter.

Gartner said 3D printers which use material extrusion will be the dominant technology and drivers for 3D printers include models costing less than $1,000, improved quality and a wider range of materials used to  print.

The market will be worth about $6.9 billion in 2018, it predicts as vendors add features and improve performance.

US spectrum launch delayed

Posted on October 27, 2014 by - News

LPSpectrumThe chance of the US leading the world when it comes to hi-spec mobile networks were put on ice by its regulatory authority.

The FCC has delayed the incentive auction and has prompted the agency to push the spectrum swap until 2016 thanks to a legal challenge.

The National Association of Broadcasters (NAB) started the court case because the incentive auction could hurt TV stations that choose not to participate in the auction.

Final briefs in the case are not due until late January 2015, meaning a decision is probably not likely until mid-2015.

An FCC spokesman said it was confident it wouldl prevail in court, but given the reality of that schedule, the complexity of designing and implementing the auction, and the need for all auction participants to have certainty well in advance of the auction, a delay is necessary.

The spectrum auction will allow broadcasters to sell their unused spectrum to mobile carriers and get a cut of the purchase price. NAB has been cautiously supportive of the move, but the group’s lawsuit says that the FCC is not providing adequate protection for broadcasters who decline to participate.

NAB said it was not its narrowly focused lawsuit which was the cause for delay. NAB Executive Vice President of Communications Dennis Wharton said the  NAB has said repeatedly, it is more important to get the auction done right than right now. Given its complexity, there is good reason Congress gave the FCC 10 years to complete the proceeding.