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Will SSDs Make HD’s Obsolete?
HD makers can expect to see revenues decline as demand for traditional disk drives falls, according to IHS Isuppli.
Hard drive manufacturers Seagate, Western Digital and Toshiba have carved up most of the market, lowering warranties and keeping prices high after the Thai floods in 2011 that shuttered several factories. Now IHS Isuppli claims that the good times have come to an end, with industry revenues expected to drop by 11.8 percent in 2013 and 2014 not expected to show signs of improvement.
While Seagate and Western Digital gouged consumers by keeping prices artificially high even after production recovered to pre-flood levels, solid-state disk (SSD) drive makers aggressively brought prices down. Intel has also been pushing SSDs as part of its ultrabook specification and with Windows 8 tablets using SSDs, the long term prospects for hard drive makers are not looking good.
Fang Zhang, analyst for storage systems at IHS Isuppli said, “The HDD industry will face myriad challenges in 2013. Shipments for desktop PCs will slip this year, while notebook sales are under pressure as consumers continue to favour smartphones and tablets. The declining price of SSDs also will allow them to take away some share from conventional HDDs. However, HDDs will continue to be the dominant form of storage this year, especially as demand for ultrabooks picks up and hard drives remain essential in business computing.”
IHS Isuppli said Western Digital could overtake Seagate to become the market share leader by the end of 2013, and said that hard drives will see greater use in the enterprise market in cloud and big data use cases.
No LTE On IBM’s SoC Until 2014
Intel is working on integrated LTE modems for its upcoming SoC designs, but CEO Paul Otellini claims they will not be ready for prime time until 2014.
In a recent conference call Otellini was directly asked about Intel’s plans for LTE integration and said “higher levels of integration” are expected next year. He went on to say that the first Intel-based phones with LTE should launch in early 2014, in time for the Mobile World Congress.
Otellini said Intel’s wireless team, formerly a business unit of Infineon, is making good progress in LTE.
“We believe we have a very competitive solution. The Infineon team is known for not necessarily being first to market, but being really good at engineering a very solid solution and being cost effective and cost competitive and I think that they are doing a very good job with respect to this product,” said Otellini.
Broadcom Goes UltraHD
January 16, 2013 by admin
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As TV manufacturers show off UltraHD TVs at CES, communications chip maker Broadcom is introducing the guts of future gateways that will be able to deliver video for those sets into viewers’ homes.
Broadcom’s BCM7445 silicon platform, announced just hours before the show opened on Tuesday morning, will be able to process incoming video from cable, carrier and satellite services that has four times the resolution of typical 1080p video offered today, according to the company.
Like the eye-catching but expensive TVs on the show floor in Las Vegas, the BCM7445 is just one of the first of many steps to consumers watching UltraHD shows at home. New content, displays and delivery technologies will all be required for the new resolution, which is also known as 4K.
Broadcom expects its chip to be in volume production by the middle of next year, in time for mainstream UltraHD TVs that will probably hit the market for the late 2014 holiday season, said Joe Del Rio, associate product line manager at Broadcom. However, service providers, which will probably be the distributors of most of the gateways built with the BCM7445, may take longer to start sending UltraHD video to their subscribers, Del Rio said.
AP Goes With Twitter
January 14, 2013 by admin
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The Associated Press began using its official Twitter account as an advertising platform on Monday, as the news organization looks for new ways to generate revenue.
Samsung Electronics Co Ltd was the first sponsor on the @ap account for breaking news, which is followed by 1.5 million Twitter users. The South Korean electronics maker’s initial “SPONSORED TWEET” promoted its events at the 2013 Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas this week.
AP did not disclose financial details of the arrangement.
Twitter, which sells ads directly to make money from the social media’s monthly base of 200 million users, will not receive any proceeds from the AP-Samsung deal.
The AP called the initiative part of a new business strategy and stressed that sponsored tweets will clearly be labeled to differentiate them from news tweets.
The ads provide AP a new income source as news organizations from newspapers to television face severe revenue declines in the face of high production costs.
While the AP was founded in 1846 by U.S. newspapers as a breaking news conduit, only 22 percent of its revenue comes from member fees. Photo licensing, advertising on its news application AP Mobile and YouTube channel are other revenue streams.
Toshiba To Offer A 20-megapixel Image Chip
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Toshiba is gearing up for to offer a 20-megapixel image sensor for digital cameras that it says will be the highest resolution of its kind.
The Tokyo-based firm said the new chips will be able to support capturing 30 frames per second at full resolution. They will also be able to shoot video at 60 frames per second at 1080P or 100 frames at 720P.
Toshiba said it will begin shipping samples of the new CMOS chips in January, with mass production to begin in August of 300,000 units monthly. Toshiba is best known in components for its NAND flash memory, which it develops with partner SanDisk, but is also a major manufacturer of LSI and other semiconductors.
Digital point-and-shoot cameras are steadily falling in price, squeezed between brutal competition among manufacturers and the increasing threat of smartphones and mobile devices. While the number of pixels a camera can capture is not always a direct measure of the overall quality of its images, it is a key selling point to consumers.
The image resolution of top-end smartphones now often meets or exceed that of digital cameras. The Nokia 808 PureView launched earlier this year has a 41-megapixel image sensor.
The Japanese manufacturer said it has increased the amount of information pixels in the new chip can store compared to its previous generation of CMOS, producing better overall images. It has also reduces the size of pixels – the new 20-megapixel version has individual pixels that measure 1.2 micrometers, down from 1.34 micrometers in its 16-megapixel product.
Intel Details 22nm SoC
Thanks to a long spate of bad luck over at AMD, Intel now finds itself in a rather safe market lead, at least in high-end and server markets. However, in the low-end and mobile, Intel has a lot of catching up to do.
ARM still dominates the mobile market and Intel is looking to take on the British chip designer with new 22nm SoCs of its own. Intel outlined its SoC strategy at the 2012 International Electron Devices Meeting in San Francisco the other day.
The cunning plan involves 3D tri gate transistors and Intel’s 22nm fabrication process, or in other words it is a brute force approach. Intel can afford to integrate the latest tech in cheep and cheerful 22nm Atoms, thus making them more competitive in terms of power efficiency.
Since Intel leads the way with new manufacturing processes it already has roughly a year of experience with 22nm chips, while ARM partners rely on 28nm, 32nm and more often than not, 40nm processes. Intel’s next generation SoCs will also benefit from other off-the-shelf Intel tech, such as 3D tri-gate transistors.
Motorola To Close More Locations
December 19, 2012 by admin
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Motorola Mobility will shut down most operations in South Korea in 2013 as part of an ongoing restructuring under Google ownership.
The decision is estimated to displace about 500 jobs in South Korea and follows a decision made a month ago to close down most international Motorola websites and to lay off about 4,000 workers.
Motorola Mobility said in a statement that it began telling staff in South Korea on Monday about “plans to close most of our operations in Korea, including our research and development and consumer mobile device marketing organization.”
The statement said the changes “reflect our plans to consolidate our global R&D efforts to foster collaboration, and to focus more attention on markets where we are best positioned to compete effectively.”
Yahoo Going Up
November 29, 2012 by admin
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Yahoo Inc shares climbed to their highest level in a year and a half, as investor confidence seems to be increasing that new Chief Executive Marissa Mayer can orchestrate a comeback that eluded three of her predecessors.
The Internet pioneer has yet to actually provide Wall Street with any hard evidence that its business is turning a corner – and she has warned that it will be a lengthy job – but investor faith in the ex-Google executive is running high.
Hedge funds Tiger Global Management and Greenlight Capital Management recently disclosed large stakes in Yahoo, accumulated during the third quarter.
“Money managers are staring to want to own this name again,” said Colin Gillis, an analyst with BGC Partners.
“For the amount of traffic they have, and the assets they have, they should be able to squeeze some value out of that,” Gillis said, referring to Yahoo. With Mayer at the helm, he said, Yahoo has “finally got somebody who the market believes can do that.”
Gravity Capital Management’s Adam Seessel said that Mayer’s recruitment of various Google Inc employees, including recently hired Yahoo Chief Operating Officer Henrique de Castro, has also helped burnish Yahoo’s image.
“What the market is seeing is not (financial) numbers so much as they’re seeing people voting with their feet, people moving from Google to Yahoo,” said Seessel, whose firm owns Yahoo shares.
“All these people from Google wouldn’t be following her if they didn’t think that she didn’t have some good cards to play,” he said.
Is Apple Spying?
Apple, which was in all sorts of hot water when it was caught tracking its users, is up to its old tricks again.
Apple was slammed by privacy experts protested the use of a universal device identifier, or UDID, to track the online preferences of iPhone and iPad users. This made it a perfect target for hackers who broke into digital media firm Bluetoad and made off with close to a million device IDs.
It looks like Apple remains addicted to tracking its users. According to Naked Security iOS 6 has a new tracking system called IDFA, or identifier for advertisers. Like the UDID, the IDFA uniquely identifies your Apple device and any websites that you browse with your iPhone or iPad device can request the IDFA.
While UDID could be tracked to users the IDFA can’t be traced back to individuals, it merely links a pattern of online behaviour with a specific device. In other words, it knows all about you, just not your name.
Fortunately it can be disabled from within iOS, though Apple leaves it enabled, by default and hopes no one will notice. The IDFA acts like a persistent cookie on the phone: allowing advertisers to track user surfing behaviour on their phone and record interactions up to and including purchases or downloads.
Michael Oiknine, the CEO of mobile application analytics firm Apsalar said that IDFA offered many advantages over the discredited UDID. For a start the IDFA is reset when the device, itself, is reset. That will prevent user data from being corrupted when they sell or transfer their phone to a new owner, Oiknine said.
RedHat Takes A Fall
Red Hat announced a 15 percent increase in quarterly revenues to $322.6m, though it reported a 12.5 percent decline in profits to $35m.
Red Hat, which last year became the first Linux vendor to hit $1bn in revenues in a fiscal year, has revealed revenue figures that once again show it can repeat that performance in 2013. The firm announced that its second fiscal quarter revenues were up by 15 percent from the same quarter a year previously to $322.6m, however its profits fell by 12.5 percent from last year to $35m.
Charlie Peters, EVP and CEO of Red Hat said the firm’s earnings per share would have been higher if the firm had not made two large purchases. Peters said, “This quarter marked a significant ramp-up in investments in our nascent storage business, with the launch in late June of Red Hat Storage Server 2.0. Furthermore, we announced two small technology acquisitions in the middleware space to further round out our offerings, which decreased the quarter’s EPS by approximately $0.01 per share due to one-time closing costs.”
Red Hat’s $1bn fiscal year was seen as a watershed moment for the commercial viability of Linux, as it showed that the open source company could compete with large, established competitors such as Microsoft and Oracle and still make a considerable amount of cash.