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Will Lenovo Go Public In 2K14?
Lenovo’s parent firm Legend Holdings could float an initial public offering (IPO) as soon as 2014, according to the firm’s chairman.
Liu Chuanzhi, chairman of Legend Holdings told China Business News that the firm plans to list on the China A-share market between 2014 and 2016. Chuanzhi also reportedly said the company will invest $3.2bn by 2014 to develop its various businesses.
Legend Holdings is 36 percent owned by the Chinese state controlled Academy of Sciences, with a further 20 percent owned by the private investment firm China Oceanwide Holdings Group.
Legend Holdings also has venture capital and real estate interests outside of Lenovo Group. The firm’s system building operations however have gone from strength to strength since it bought IBM’s PC business back in 2005, and it is now heavily promoting its Yoga tablet-laptop hybrid device.
Earlier this year Gartner reported that Lenovo had overtaken HP to become the largest PC vendor, something that HP disputed by offering IDC’s figures. Regardless of HP’s protestations then, Lenovo is set to overtake HP as its PC business continues to grow while HP’s has been shrinking for some time.
Legend Holdings might want to cash in on Lenovo’s high flying status and a cash injection from an IPO could help the company invest in designing products for the smartphone and tablet markets.
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TSMC To Boost 28nm Production
TSMC is able to make chips using 28nm process technology at a speedier pace that it originally anticipated. This means that the chipmaker will likely be able to meet demand for existing orders and start accepting new designs.
TSMC promised to increase its 28nm capacity to 68 thousand 300mm wafers per month by the end of the year. It did this by ramping up fab 15/phase 2 to 50,000 300mm wafers a month. According to the Taiwan Economic News it looks like the outfit managed to beat its own projections, which should be good news for customers like AMD, Nvidia and Qualcomm. Well not AMD of course. It just told Globalfoundries to stop making so many of its chips so it can save a bit of money.
But it looks like TSMC is flat out. In November the fab 15/phase 2 processed 52,000 wafers. When combined with fab 15/phase 1, TSMC should be able to process 75 – 80, 000 300mm wafers using 28nm process technologies this month. TSMC produces the majority of 28nm chips at fab 15, which will have capacity of more than 100,000 300mm wafers per month when fully operational.
WD Going 5TB Next Year
According to Russian website Almodi.org that managed to snag some screenshots of WD’s plans for the next year, it appears that Western Digital wants to bring 5TB drives in both its Green ant the Red Series in Q4 2013.
In addition to the 5TB WD50EFRX Red series and the WD50EZRX in the Green series, the Q3 2013 will also bring 4TB drives in both series. Of course, we are talking about 3.5-inch drives that will feature 64MB of cache and SATA 6Gbps interface.
The slides also do not reveal any info regarding standard 3.5-inch Blue series and 2.5-inch Scorpio line of drives. As you may remember, WD has recently announced a 4TB version in its Black series lineup so 5TB one might come sooner than in the Green or WD Red NAS line.
AMD Shows Piledriver Opteron
AMD’s Piledriver rollout is all but complete. With Trinity in the mobile and desktop space, new 3300 and 4300 Opterons are bringing the new architecture to data centers.
The Opteron 4300 series offers six different parts, in quad-, six- and eight-core flavours. Stock clocks range between 2.2GHz and 3.5GHz, with TDP’s in the 35W to 95W range. The cheapest Opteron 4334 costs $191, while the priciest 4332HE comes in at $501. The 3300 series consists of three quad- and eight-core SKUs, priced at $125 to $229. The pricing of both series is pretty aggressive.
But what’s next for AMD? Well things should be eerily quiet on the server front in 2013. Abu Dhabi, Seoul and Delhi/Orochi C should last throughout 2013 and even a good part of 2014. That’s when we can expect some major changes, as AMD transitions to 28nm and goes about transforming its Opteron lineup.
Future Low Power CPUs and APUs (as AMD calls them) should replace Dehli/Orochi-C in 1P and dense server markets, but AMD is also planning “Client APUs for market enablement,” and this sounds a lot like ARM-based low voltage parts. Of course, in the high end AMD plans to stick with big Steamroller cores, but mid-2014 is a long way off.
Radeon 8000 HD Expected In Q2
Since we only have one month left in 2012 and due the fact that graphics companies rarely announce something big in December, it is obvious that Radeon HD 8000 slipped to 2013.
Our well informed industry sources are confirming that the next generation, based on Sea Islands, architecture is coming in 2013 and some of them dare to say that it will be Q2 2013 rather than Q1 2013. Some people were expecting to see the cards in Q1 2013 but even according to AMD’s own roadmap Sea Islands, the new GPU architecture with HAS features was scheduled (or should we say delayed. Ed) for 2013.
AMD has already communicated this schedule loud and clear in its February 2012 roadmap update, and even then it killed hopes that Sea Islands or HD 8000 cards are coming in very late Q3 or Q4 2012, as was previously expected.
We won’t get into any specific details like the 8000 branding, or die sizes as we simply don’t know this at the time being. It’s safe to say that these cards will end up faster than 7000 series and at similar TDPs to the previous generation, all manufactured in 28nm.
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
Comments Off on Is Google Going Wireless?
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.
IBM Sued Over Disaster
IBM has been hit with a multimillion-dollar lawsuit by chemical products manufacturer Avantor Performance Materials, which alleges that IBM lied about the suitability of an SAP-based software package it sells in order to win Avantor’s business.
In 2010, Avantor decided to upgrade its ERP (enterprise resource planning) platform to SAP software, according to the lawsuit, filed Thursday in U.S. District Court for the District of New Jersey.
“Seizing upon Avantor’s decision — and fully aware that, given the competitive pressures of Avantor’s industry, and the specialized demands of its customers, Avantor could not tolerate any disruptions in customer service — IBM represented that IBM’s ‘Express Life Sciences Solution’ … was uniquely suited to Avantor’s business,” the lawsuit states. “The Express Solution is a proprietary IBM pre-packaged software solution that runs on an SAP platform.”
But Avantor discovered a different truth after signing on with IBM, finding that Express Life was “woefully unsuited” to its business and the implementation brought its operations to “a near standstill,” according to the suit.
IBM also violated its contract by staffing the project with “incompetent and reckless consultants” who made “numerous design, configuration and programming errors,” it states.
In addition, IBM “intentionally or recklessly failed” to tell Avantor about risks to the project and hurried towards a go-live date, the suit alleges.
“To conceal the System’s defects and functional gaps, IBM ignored the results of its own pre-go-live tests, conducted inadequate and truncated testing and instead recommended that Avantor proceed with the go-live as scheduled — even though Avantor had repeatedly emphasized to IBM that meeting a projected go-live date was far less important than having a fully functional System that would not disrupt Avantor’s ability to service its customers,” the suit states.
The resulting go-live, which occurred in May, “was a disaster,” with the system failing to process orders properly, losing some orders altogether, failing to generate need paperwork for U.S. Customs officials and directing “that dangerous chemicals be stored in inappropriate locations,” the suit states.
Avantor has suffered tens of millions of dollars in monetary damages, as well as taken a hit to its reputation among partners and customers, the suit states.
AMD’s Roadmap Leaked
According to the latest AMD desktop roadmap, published by DonanimHaber, the Steamroller architecture could be delayed, which means Piledriver cores will power AMD’s third-generation APUs.
So what does this mean for consumers? Well, Richland APUs might not be quite as good as expected. AMD could optimize the x86 cores and go for more powerful graphics, but it’s hard to get excited about the next generation.
Vishera parts will also stick to Piledriver cores, backed by discreet Radeon 7xxx and 8xxx series graphics. However, we will see a new architecture in the low end. Kabini is apparently on track to launch next year, with Jaguar cores, refreshed graphics and an all new system-on-chip version, with an integrated on-chip Fusion controller hub (FCH).
What’s more, AMD will also offer quad-core Kabini parts, and who could say no to a dirt cheap E-series APU with four cores, good graphics and a ridiculous TDP?