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Lenovo Soars
PC sales in China and high growth in smartphones sales helped boost Lenovo’s net profit for its fiscal fourth quarter by 90% year-over-year.
For the quarter ended March 31, Lenovo’s net profit was $127 million, the company said on Thursday. Revenue shattered records and was at $7.8 billion, growing 4% from the same period last year.
In Lenovo’s home market of China, the company had an operating margin of 4.9%, an increase of 8% year-over-year. The company also saw continued profitability in its mobile devices business, which makes up 9% of its overall sales. At the end of the quarter, Lenovo’s smartphone shipments were up 206% year-over-year.
Globally, PC shipments were down 13.9% year-over-year in the quarter, the market’s steepest decline since research firm IDC began tracking the market in 1994. Lenovo itself posted flat year-over-year PC shipment growth in the period.
Smartphone and tablet popularity have hurt PC sales, according to analysts. Computers running Microsoft’s Windows 8 have also failed to drum up consumer interest in the previous two quarters.
Lenovo, however, has managed to weather the slowdown by taking advantage of the Chinese PC market, where it has an over 30% market share. Close to half of the company’s revenue comes from the country, now the world’s largest PC market.
The company is now close to surpassing leading PC vendor HP for the top spot. The company had a 15.3% share of the market in this year’s first quarter, while HP had a 15.7% share.
But the Chinese PC maker also plans to focus more of its investment on tablets, smartphones and enterprise hardware, the company’s CEO Yang Yuanqing said in a statement. Earlier this year, Lenovo also reorganized its operations to sharpen the company’s branding and compete better in high-end products.
For the current fiscal year, Lenovo aims to ship 50 million smartphones, up from 30 million last year, Yang said Thursday in an earnings call. It aims to ship 10 million tablets, a five-fold increase from the previous fiscal year.
Most of Lenovo’s smartphone sales come from China, but the company has also begun selling handsets in the emerging markets of Russia, India, Indonesia, the Philippines and Vietnam. In addition, Lenovo is preparing to bring its smartphones to the U.S. and European markets, Yang said, without saying when.
Are CUDA Applications Limited?
Acceleware said at Nvidia’s GPU Technology Conference (GTC) today that most algorithms that run on GPGPUs are bound by GPU memory size.
Acceleware is partly funded by Nvidia to provide developer training for CUDA to help sell the language to those that are used to traditional C and C++ programming. The firm said that most CUDA algorithms are now limited by GPU local memory size rather than GPU computational performance.
Both AMD and Nvidia provide general purpose GPU (GPGPU) accelerator parts that provide significantly faster computational processing than traditional CPUs, however they have only between 6GB and 8GB of local memory that constrains the size of the dataset the GPU can process. While developers can push more data from system main memory, the latency cost negates the raw performance benefit of the GPU.
Kelly Goss, training program manager at Acceleware, said that “most algorithms are memory bound rather than GPU bound” and “maximising memory usage is key” to optimising GPGPU performance.
She further said that developers need to understand and take advantage of the memory hierarchy of Nvidia’s Kepler GPU and look at ways of reducing the number of memory accesses for every line of GPU computing.
The point Goss was making is that GPU computing is relatively cheap in terms of clock cycles relative to the time it takes to fetch data from local memory, let alone loading GPU memory from system main memory.
Goss, talking to a room full of developers, proceeded to outline some of the performance characteristics of the memory hierarchy in Nvidia’s Kepler GPU architecture, showing the level of detail that CUDA programmers need to pay attention to if they want to extract the full performance potential from Nvidia’s GPGPU computing architecture.
Given Goss’s observation that algorithms running on Nvidia’s GPGPUs are often constrained by local memory size rather than by the GPU itself, the firm might want to look at simplifying the tiers of memory involved and increasing the amount of GPU local memory so that CUDA software developers can process larger datasets.
LG Buys webOS From HP
Hewlett-Packard has sold some of the rights to its webOS mobile operating system to LG Electronics for use in smart TVs manufactured by the South Korean electronics giant.
LG has agreed to acquire the source code, webOS engineering team and other assets from HP, in a deal announced on Monday. LG will also license HP patents related to webOS and cloud technology, the companies said.
Financial terms of the deal weren’t disclosed.
HP acquired the mobile operating system, along with device maker Palm, in February 2010. HP used the OS on its short-lived TouchPad device, which debuted in mid-2011 then disappeared weeks later.
HP announced a new tablet, the US$169 Slate 7, on Sunday. The Slate 7 will run the Android operating system.
LG will lead the Open webOS and Enyo open-source projects as part of the deal, the company said. HP will retain ownership of all of Palm’s cloud computing assets, including source code, talent, infrastructure and contracts.
HP said it will also continue to support Palm users.
LG will use the technology to expand the Web capabilities of its smart TVs, said Sam Chang, LG vice president and general manager of innovation and Smart TV, in an interview.
LG bought the webOS assets in part for the engineering team, which includes user experience engineers, he said. The webOS engineers who remained at HP — the companies aren’t saying how many there are — are to join LG’s Silicon Valley labs.
Will Intel Drop Itanium?
Intel has scaled back plans for its next Itanium chip, prompting observers the question Intel’s commitment to the chip.Intel said the next version of Itanium, codenamed Kittson, will be a 32nm part. It will not migrate to a more advanced process. The new chips will use the same socket as the existing Itanium 9300 and 9500 chips.
Analyst Nathan Brookwood said the move is Intel’s idea of an exit strategy.
“It may very well be that Itanium’s time has come and gone,” he said.
Gartner analyst Martin Reynolds told Computerworld that Itanium might see a new process in the future, if it proves successful enough to make the investment worthwhile. However, he does not expect any more major updates to the architecture.
Itanium launched in 2001 and it quickly became a running joke in the industry. It never achieved the volumes expected by Intel and AMD seized the opportunity to take on Intel with 64-bit Opterons. However, Itanium soldiered on for years, although many vendors stopped developing software for the chip.
HP Looks Beyond Windows
Hewlett-Packard has announced the availability of its latest Pavilion laptop with Google’s Chrome OS as the PC maker attempts to improve laptop sales by offering an alternative to the Windows OS.
The Pavilion 14 Chromebook has a 14-inch screen and runs on a dual-core Intel processor. The laptop is roughly 21 millimeters thick, and weighs 1.8 kilograms. It offers just over four hours of battery life, said David Conrad, director for product management at HP’s consumer products group.
The laptop is expected to ship on Monday in the U.S. starting at $329.99. The company did not immediately provide worldwide availability information.
HP wanted to widen its product offerings and the new Chromebook is targeted at those who do most of their computing on the Web, Conrad said.
“It’s really about choice. We have a very wide offering,” Conrad said. “We think the time is right for an additional choice for people to have a gateway to their Google digital lifestyle.”
The laptop has only 16GB of solid-state drive storage, but will offer 100GB of free Google Drive storage for two years.
The Chromebook has the same design as HP’s other PC offerings, which mostly run on Windows and have standard-capacity hard drives. But, with a lot of data moving to the cloud, the Chromebook provides a different usage model.
“We see this as another device to be used around the house. It’s easily managed,” Conrad said.
Is HP Getting Sued?
HP is in the process of being sued by an angry investor who claims the company knew statements about its Autonomy acquisition were misleading and led the stock to fall.
A proposed class action lawsuit was filed in a San Francisco federal court. HP bought British software firm Autonomy for a $11.1 billion last year but made an $8.8 billion write-down on its acquisition claiming the company inflated sales with improper accounting.
Autonomy co-founder Mike Lynch has denied any wrongdoing. The lawsuit, one of the first to be filed by investors on the Autonomy mess, said HP hid the fact it gained control of Autonomy based on financial statements that could not be relied upon.
It claims HP had not revealed to investors that it tried to undo the Autonomy agreement before it closed because of the accounting issues.
nVidia Speaks On Performance Issue
Nvidia has said that most of the outlandish performance increase figures touted by GPGPU vendors was down to poor original code rather than sheer brute force computing power provided by GPUs.
Both AMD and Nvidia have been using real-world code examples and projects to promote the performance of their respective GPGPU accelerators for years, but now it seems some of the eye popping figures including speed ups of 100x or 200x were not down to just the computing power of GPGPUs. Sumit Gupta, GM of Nvidia’s Tesla business said that such figures were generally down to starting with unoptimized CPU code.
During Intel’s Xeon Phi pre-launch press conference call, the firm cast doubt on some of the orders of magnitude speed up claims that had been bandied about for years. Now Gupta told The INQUIRER that while those large speed ups did happen, it was possible because of poorly optimized code to begin with, thus the bar was set very low.
Gupta said, “Most of the time when you saw the 100x, 200x and larger numbers those came from universities. Nvidia may have taken university work and shown it and it has an 100x on it, but really most of those gains came from academic work. Typically we find when you investigate why someone got 100x [speed up] is because they didn’t have good CPU code to begin with. When you investigate why they didn’t have good CPU code you find that typically they are domain scientist’s not computer science guys – biologists, chemists, physics – and they wrote some C code and it wasn’t good on the CPU. It turns out most of those people find it easier to code in CUDA C or CUDA Fortran than they do to use MPI or Pthreads to go to multi-core CPUs, so CUDA programming for a GPU is easier than multi-core CPU programming.”
Tech CEOs Ready For Tablet Wars
The biggest names in consumer technology, smacked by a string of disappointing quarterly results this month, are gearing up for what appears to be the fiercest holiday battle in years.
Investors and consumers have already largely written off flaccid quarterly numbers from tech behemoths like Microsoft, Apple, Google and Amazon. What counts is the next 60 days, when the biggest names in technology do battle at a near-unprecedented scale and pace.
Just last Thursday, Amazon compared its Kindle Fire with Apple’s new iPad mini, point by point, in its earnings release, an unusual forum to name rivals. Apple CEO Tim Cook compared Microsoft’s Surface tablet to an over-engineered car that can fly and float. And Microsoft went for the iPad, saying its Surface boasted twice its storage.
All three tablets will vie for the shrinking consumer dollar these holidays. By tech standards, it’s getting ugly.
“The tablet space is where the growth is. That’s why they are all fighting over it. PC shipments are down and some tablet buyers may never buy another PC,” said Michael Allenson, strategic consulting director in the Technology and Telecom Research Group at Maritz Research.
Tegra 3 No Match For Adreno 320
Qualcomm’s new Snapdragon S4 Pro quad-cores are slowly starting to show up in new phone and tablet designs, and in case you’ve been following the market, you know they will be the fastest thing around until A15 parts appear.
But aside from the custom Krait core, Qualcomm’s new chips feature new Adreno 3 series graphics and judging by some early benchmarks, this is a match made in heaven.
Tom’s Hardware put the new graphics core to the test, with some very impressive results. Basically Adreno 320 blows the competition out of the water. However, it does not manage to surpass the huge SGX543MP4, used on the third generation iPad.
In GLBenchmark 2.1 the SGX543MP4 ranks first, with 251 and 139 points in Pro and Egypt tests. Adreno 320 comes in second, with 191/137, the SGX543MP2 scores 147/90, while the Tegra 3 TL30 scores 82/63. However, in fill rate tests Adreno 320 trails both the SGX543MP4 and SGX543MP2, but it is still miles ahead of the Tegra 3, SGX540 and Adreno 225.
However, in off-screen GLBench 2.5 Adreno 320 manages to squeeze ahead of SGX543 parts and the rest of the competition, but once again it loses in fill rate tests.
Will HP Be Broken Up?
HP has been urged by investment bank UBS to break itself up in order to boost its share price.
After years of mismanagement, HP’s stock price is far lower than it was during the heady dotcom bubble days when it pulled off one of the biggest mergers in recent years by buying Compaq. Now the firm’s stock price languishes around the $14 mark, a figure that could top $20 if HP were to break itself up, according to UBS.
UBS analysts including Steven Milunovich reported the firm could “realise greater value” by splitting itself up. The analysts added that each separate division of HP is big enough to stand on its own, claiming, “HP’s units are not minnows but rather they are whales packed into the same pond.”
HP spokesman Michael Thacker claimed the firm’s customers want a big HP, effectively allowing them to have one supplier for their IT needs, a message the firm has been playing up for a number of years now. Thacker said, “No matter how you look at it we are confident that HP is stronger together than apart. The company’s operations across business units are deeply integrated and our customers have told us that they want One HP.”