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Dell Goes A4WP
Dell has become the first major PC OEM to join the Alliance for Wireless Power (A4WP) group, joining over 80 existing members Broadcom, Gill Electronics, IDT, Intel, Qualcomm and Samsung.
Dell’s membership means it could soon be developing mobile devices that do not require a wired power adapter to charge.
The A4WP aims to standardise wireless power transfer using near-field magnetic resonance technology called “rezence”, which seeks to liberate mobile devices from wired chargers, charging multiple devices simultaneously without the need to dock the devices.
“Power levels and charging speed will meet the expectations of today’s ‘always on, always connected’ user,” the A4WP said. “Users can simply ‘drop and go’ their devices onto a charging surface without the hassle of accurate positioning or alignment.”
Along with the news that Dell will jump on board to unshackle users from the curse of wired chargers, A4WP is also introducing a secondary, higher-powered project focusing on wirelessly charging electronic products from 20 to 50 watts, like ultrabooks, laptops, and mid-powered appliances.
“Dell’s addition to the Alliance signifies the importance of defining a wireless power standard that spans these higher power levels thus expanding the range of electronics beyond smartphones,” the group added.
A4WP said it believes the development of magnetic resonance technology will improve the customer experience when it comes to charging and will bring the capability into more homes and businesses over the next few years.
It also said that its development of wireless charging technology will help benefit both industry and consumers as the specification powers broadly adopted wireless technologies such as Bluetooth Smart, “which simplifies development and manufacturing”.
Intel Outs New Xeon Chipset
Intel has released details about its new Xeon E7 v2 chipset. The Xeon processor E7 8800/4800/2800 v2 product family is designed to support up to 32-socket servers with configurations of up to 15 processing cores and up to 1.5 terabytes of memory per socket.
The chip is designed for the big data end of the Internet of Things movement, which the processor maker projected will grow to consist of at least 30 billion devices by 2020. Beyond two times better performance power, Intel is promising a few other upgrades with the next generation of this data-focused chipset, including triple the memory capacity, four times the I/O bandwidth and the potential to reduce total cost of ownership by up to 80 percent.
The 15-core variants with the largest thermal envelope (155W) run at 2.8GHz with 37.5MB of cache and 8 GT/s QuickPath connectivity. The lowest-power models in the list have 105W TDPs and run at 2.3GHz with 24MB of cache and 7.2 GT/s of QuickPath bandwidth. There was also talk of 40W, 1.4GHz models at ISSCC but they have not been announced yet.
Intel has signed on nearly two dozen hardware partners to support the platform, including Asus, Cisco, Dell, EMC, and Lenovo. On the software end, Microsoft, SAP, Teradata, Splunk, and Pivotal also already support the new Xeon family. IBM and Oracle are among the few that support Xeon E7 v2 on both sides of the spectrum.
Google Moves into Conerencing
February 18, 2014 by admin
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Google Inc introduced a videoconferencing system for businesses on Thursday, the Internet search company’s latest attempt to generate revenue from corporate customers.
Google said it was partnering with Asus, Hewlett-Packard Co and Dell to offer a specialized version of its Chromebox PC that comes with videoconferencing gear, including a video camera and speakers.
The first Chromebox for meetings to be available is made by Asus and goes on sale in the U.S. on Thursday for $999, Google said. Customers can also pay a $250 annual service and management fee, though the first year is included in the product’s sales price.
The product uses Google’s free Hangouts video chat technology to connect up to 15 separate video streams from users in different locations.
The product will put Google in competition against Cisco Systems Inc and Polycom Inc, which make the video conferencing systems used by many corporations.
The world’s largest Internet search engine, Google makes the vast majority of its revenue from advertising. But Google also sells services to corporate customers, including special versions of its online apps such as email and word processing, as well as Chromebook laptops aimed at business users.
Is Acer Doomed?
Taiwanese PC maker Acer reported worse-than-expected quarterly loss. Actually, it had been expected to be bad, but no one had predicted it would be this bad.
For the fourth quarter, the world’s No.4 PC vendor reported a net loss of $254 million. The company had posted a worse-than-expected net loss of $446 million in the third quarter and a $112.31 million loss in the same quarter of 2012. In short, its troubles have been getting worse for more than two years.
At the end of last year the company named former Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co sales executive Jason Chen as its new CEO and launched a new initiative to integrate hardware, software and cloud services. It will be a while before the new broom can sweep out two years of doom, so many are expecting more doom to emerge. Acer relied too heavily on making low-end laptops, which weakened its brand, it also missed the shift to mobile.
Acer’s senior executives are taking a 30 per cent voluntary salary cut starting January, the company said in a statement.
nVidia Pays Up
January 10, 2014 by admin
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Nvidia has agreed to pay any Canadian who had the misfortune to buy a certain laptop computer made by Apple, Compaq, Dell, HP, or Sony between November 2005 and February 2010. Apparently these models contained a dodgy graphics card which was not fixed for five years.
Under a settlement approved by the court Nvidia will pay $1,900,000 into a fund for anyone who might have bought a faulty card. The Settlement Agreement provides partial cash reimbursement of the purchase price and you have to submit a claim by February 25, 2014. You will know if your Nvidia card was faulty because your machine would have a distorted or scrambled video, or no video on the screen even when the computer is on. There would be random characters, lines or garbled images – a bit like watching one of the Twilight series. There will be intermittent video issues or a failure to detect wireless adaptor or wireless networks.
The amount of compensation will be determined by the Claims Administrator who will apply a compensation grid and settlement administration guidelines. Cash compensation will also be provided for total loss of use based on the age of the computer; temporary loss of use having regard to the nature and duration of the loss of use; and reimbursement for out-of-pocket expenses caused by Qualifying Symptoms to an Affected Computer.
Will Businesses Accept The Chromebook?
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Sales of Chromebooks enjoyed rapid growth,going from basically nothing in 2012 to more than 20 percent of the U.S. commercial PC market, analyst firm NPD reported, while Windows PCs and Macs remained flat at best.
NPD estimated that, throughout all of 2013, 14.4 million desktops, notebooks, and tablets were sold through U.S. commercial channels, typically resellers. That compares to 16.4 million PCs, overall, sold in the U.S. during the third quarter alone–excluding tablets, according to IDC. All told, about 46.2 million PCs have been sold in the U.S. during 2013, IDC found.
Within that segment, however, NPD reported some intriguing findings. Chromebooks, once largely the province of Acer and Samsung, have been embraced by Dell, HP, and others–not the least of which are paying customers. In 2012, Chromebook sales were “negligible,” NPD reported. But in the space of a single year, they climbed to 21 percent, NPD found, helping push overall notebook PC growth up by 28.9 percent.
Windows notebooks, however, contributed nothing to that, as NPD found that growth was flat. Worse still, Macs actually declined, with combined sales of desktops and notebooks falling by 7 percent. Windows tablet sales tripled, albeit off what NPD called “a very small base”.
The message? Businesses are turning to the Web, which Chromebooks almost exclusively run. And those low-cost, Net-focused devices are becoming engines of productivity. As a result, they’re receiving validation from traditional PC vendors including Acer, Asus, Dell, and Hewlett-Packard, plus Google’s own Pixel.
“The market for personal computing devices in commercial markets continues to shift and change,” saidA Stephen Baker, vice president of industry analysis at NPD, in a statement.A “New products like Chromebooks, and reimagined items like Windows tablets, are now supplementing the revitalization that iPads started in personal computing devices. It is no accident that we are seeing the fruits of this change in the commercial markets as business and institutional buyers exploit the flexibility inherent in the new range of choices now open to them.”
Naturally, tablet sales continued to explode, capturing 22 percent(or about 3.16 million units) of all the computing device sales sold through the U.S. channel. Of all tablets sold commercially, iPads dominated with 59 percent of all unit sales, leaving the rest to Android (which grew more than 160 percent) and Windows.
Baker said that diversity will be key to the future success of hardware makers, a signpost for what vendors might release at 2014 and the weeks and months following.
Will nVidia’s Tegra 5 Go LTE?
The tradition continues. Our sources are confirming that Nvidia’s Logan SoC, possibly called Tegra 5, doesn’t come with an integrated LTE modem. Just like Apple, Nvidia makes a big fast chip with impressive Kepler based GPU, but it won’t put a an icera LTE solution inside the same chip.
Icera i500 is Tegra 5 compatible and it has AT&T certification. As the launch draws near, it should become compatible with other US and international LTE carriers like Verizon and T-mobile.
This should not be a big issue for Nvidia’s target market, manufacturers will have to choose two chips instead of one, a clear competitive disadvantage compared to future Qualcomm chips with Adreno 400 graphics and updated CPU cores, expected in early 2014.
During Nvidia’s recent conference call, CEO Jen Hsun Huang said devices based on the new Tegra 4i with integrated LTE should be announced in Q1 and ship no later than Q2. Jensen also mentioned that people are going to be “delighted by the OEM that it comes from” which is probably his way of of announcing some big brand design wins, but he also emphasised that the designs will be global rather than US. For US success you need CDMA Jensen said, but as far as we know Verizon is the only company using it.
Since Apple can pull of two chip designs from day one, we can only assume that two chip approach won’t cost much battery life compared to single chip design that has LTE on board (Snapdragon 600 and 800 ed. ). However, Nvidia is likely going to be making bets on its Kepler based GPU, expected to be the fastest graphics core ever integrated in a mobile SoC that will rock tablets and some phones around the world. The fact that Logan is likely to pack very powerful graphics sans on-die LTE makes it a bit more interesting for tablets than phones, which is exactly what we saw with the Tegra 4.
We expect to see Tegra 5 devices announced at CES 2014 so early January and with some luck we might see them shipping very early in 2014.
Can Acer Go High-End?
Most popular for its low-cost laptops, Acer doesn’t really inspire thoughts of premium products. But building high-end hardware could be the Taiwanese vendor’s best chance as it looks for a way to rescue its struggling business.
With consumers flocking to tablets and smartphones, Acer’s once-thriving PC business has been left in the dust. Quarterly financial losses have become routine at the company and its PC shipments declined more sharply in the past year than at any other major vendor, according to IDC.
The grim situation forced CEO J.T. Wang to resign from his post last Tuesday. Acer will also cut 7 percent of its global workforce and has assembled an advisory committee to come up with a new strategy, the company announced.
Bright spots are hard to find. The Wintel model that propelled Acer for years and helped it become the second-largest PC vendor in 2009 has been falling apart amid the demand for mobile gadgets. And Windows 8 and Intel’s Ultrabook strategy have failed to resuscitate the market.
It hasn’t helped that Acer is so reliant on sales to consumers, said IDC analyst Bryan Ma. The entire PC industry has been hurt by tablets, but Dell and Hewlett-Packard have at least managed to find cover selling PCs to businesses, which are still buying them. And Lenovo has capitalized on its position in China, now the world’s largest PC market.
“Acer didn’t really have the commercial PC business to protect themselves. That’s why they were hit harder,” Ma said.
Acer — whether to its benefit or detriment — has instead gained a reputation for low-priced PCs. Even in tablets it has tried to undercut rivals — its Iconia W4, an 8-inch Windows 8.1 tablet, starts at US$329.99, while its Iconia B Android tablet goes for $129.99. The low prices have helped keep the company on consumers’ radar, but at the expense of profits.
One option for Acer is to build a brand as a higher-end PC player. It took a step in that direction last year with the Aspire S7, a Windows laptop with a slender, aluminum chassis that sells for $1,200 and up. That product and its successors have had some success for the company, with sales of 2,000 to 3,000 units per month, said James Wang, an analyst with research firm Canalys.
“I think Acer has started to learn they are able to sell some expensive products,” he said.
Selling higher-end PCs could help stop the bleeding in Acer’s finances, but with the overall PC market still shrinking it’s unlikely to help it expand in any meaningful way. “You can’t really expect vendors in desktops and notebooks to find growth,” Wang said. “You win in the market by not falling in shipments.”
More OEM’s Seeking nVidia
As expected and announced, Zotac has now “joined the mobile gaming revolution” with the new Tegra Note 7 tablet and will be one of a handful of Nvidia partners that will sell it in both Europe and Asia-Pacific region for US $199.
In case you missed it yesterday when it was officially unveiled by Nvidia, the Nvidia Tegra Note 7 is based around a 7-inch 1280×800 IPS display and powered by Nvidia’s own Tegra 4 SoC with quad-core Cortex-A15 CPU and 72-core Geforce GPU paired up with 1GB of memory. It also packs some neat features exclusive to Nvidia, including a stylus with Nvidia DirectStylus technology as well as the 5-megapixel rear main camera backed by Chimera computational photography architecture revealed earlier by Nvidia. The camera will have support for both HDR as well as slow-motion video.
Unfortunately, Zotac did not announce the precise launch date so we are still stuck with Nvidia’s October time-frame and we are still to see the price of the new Tegra Note 7 in Europe.
Are More Firms Moving To Tegra 4?
A curious rumor is coming out of Taiwan this morning. Nvidia is reportedly seeing more Tegra 4 orders, boosted by the Xiaomi Mi3 smartphone, Surface RT 2 and new tablets from Asus, Toshiba and HP. The source is Digitimes, or its moles in the “upstream supply chain” to be specific. Specific is not the word usually associated with such sources and we have no specific numbers to report.
However, while Nvidia is seeing a bit more interest for Tegra 4 it simply has no high-volume design wins and shipments will remain low until it is eventually phased out in favour of the Tegra 5. We wrote about Nvidia’s Tegra 4 volume woes last month, here.
The Tegra 4 still has just a handful of design wins and the fact that most of them are high-end tablets is not encouraging at all. Not much has changed since our previous report, although Nvidia did manage to land a single smartphone design win, albeit not a major one.
We still believe Tegra 4 shipments will be modest at best and new Android tablet design wins will not help much. Neither will the Shield and Tegra Note tablets.