Just as Intel’s (NASDAQ: INTC) CEO Brian Krzanich opens the regular staff meetings before a dramatically reduced IDF2015 Shenzhen conference, it is a good time to review how government and enterprises don’t see eye to eye when it comes to strategic business.

China’s Tianhe-2 supercomputer is world’s fastest supercomputer, at 33 PFLOPS demonstrated and 55 PFLOPS theoretical performance.

Remember the Tianhe-2 machine at Guangzhou Supercomputer Center, the current World’s number one according to Top 500 Supercomputer list? Unlike some other China supercomputers – Tianhe-2 is fully Intel based machine,  the world’s largest assembly of Intel Xeon CPUs and Xeon Phi accelerators.

Even after Intel ‘opened the kimono’ and gave a nearly 70%  discount on its processors and accelerators, it has given Intel, and therefore US technology sector a major foothold in China and Asian region as such. Over the course of past two years, we were involved in a lot of discussions with Intel staff who were not privy to see the financial impact of the deal — and even argued our undoubtedly solid information. We’re not here to report how things should be, or are in marketing and investor presentations to its numerous staff, but how things really are.

During 2015, the Tianhe-2 supercomputer was supposed to be doubled in its size, up to 110 PFLOPs peak, again using the very same Intel processors and accelerators. Since now these are mature products with lower real manufacturing cost for Intel, they could finally make some real money.

Well, it was not to be: our tweety bird from the window chirped to us that Uncle Sam has put this supercomputer centre, together with National University of Defense Technology in Changsha, the system’s creators, and Tianjin centre, among others, on so a so-called “Denial List”, which prevents any high technology from the USA to be sold to these sites. Our sources used even harsher words.

Knowing that these several sites alone are expected to order some 250+ PFLOPS of compute in the next few years (around 500,000 top-end Broadwell-EP Xeon E5v4 processors, or  approximately $1 billion high margin list price) and they were THE Intel friendly ones, this is quite a loss to Intel, thanks to Uncle Sam.

But, what’s worse strategic loss in time is that, based on this decision as an excuse, indigenous China high end processor architectures can now push the government to gradually remove any dependence on US. This means just one thing: an AMD or Intel x86 processor technology is increasingly becoming errata non grata. Should the Chinese government react in force, it will give the Chinese vendors the blank check support to go all the way a developing their Alpha, POWER and MIPS processors for both the government and the mainstream commercial use.

You may think they are not up to the mark, but remember how fast British ARM architecture became the dominant processing architecture in the world. And this group doesn’t need to worry about the antiquated x86 ISA, worry about satisfying the dumbed down shareholder masses, or overpaying their marketing and sales staff, as well as the fat check, golden parachute-protected CxOs.

They have taken the best that the USA has developed (some of key Alpha, GPGPU and MIPS architects left US over the course of past four years, a lot of them due to non-renewed visas) and discarded due to corporate shenanigans, and the continued developing it much farther than anyone expected both on hardware and software side.

Five years ago, ShenWei showed a CPU that performed faster than the fastest GPUs of the time. Now, fifth generation is approaching, slotting between Tesla and FirePro GPGPUs and next-gen Xeon Phi accelerators. However, this is not an accelerator or a GPGPU – this is a CPU.

So, thanks to Uncle Sam, China might not have a 110 PFLOPS Intel based supercomputer but it definitely will launch a 100 PFLOPS system based on upcoming 64-core, TFLOPS-class ShenWei Alpha, with true blue CPUs possibly faster per socket then even the next generation Xeon Phi or Volta/Pascal-based Teslas.  Next, of course 100 PFLOPS Chinese POWER8 or 9 — (thank you IBM) and then possibly even Loongson MIPS – -it may come back into the high end field with renewed government support because of this Uncle Sam move. All are clean, elegant, scalable high end RISC architectures.

So who are the winners and losers from this?

NUDT and Tianhe may be the losers for now, but only short term. They will simply speed up their HPC ARM plan.

Intel comes out the big loser from this and a lot: who will want to do a phased deployment large x86 machine in China now, and worry about future phases? Then comes Uncle Sam himself: they lost even that little bit of influence on the high end China HPC. How is that for “cutting your nose to spite your face?”.

VR WORLD’s  Analysis: US government moves accelerate the Chinese CPU roadmap while curtailing juiciest sales for Intel and other US vendors.

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While Microsoft (NASDAQ:MSFT) already gave the world an official first look at its next operating system earlier this fall, the unveiling event in San Francisco was decidedly small and low key. According to a report, the operating system’s “real unveiling” — where consumer features will be revealed in full — will occur in late January.

A source within Microsoft that spoke with The Verge said that the company is planning a press event in January where executives will demonstrate a consumer preview of the new operating system.  Reportedly, Microsoft will also demonstrate the operating system on other platforms such as phones, tablets and the Xbox One. Microsoft will also demonstrate the operating system’s new touch platform called Continuum too.

The choice to put Windows 10 on stage at a press event in late January, and not at the Consumer Electronics Show, is an interesting yet understandable one. A trend over the past few years is for vendors to show off their big announcements for the year — and Windows 10 is certainly Microsoft’s — at press events outside of the big tent of CES. It’s far too noisy and chaotic for vendors to get adequate attention, which means that important launches are scheduled for press events outside of the time CES occupies.

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Sony has announced the update to their Alpha A7 full frame mirrorless camera, with the announcement of the Alpha A7s. This is not to be confused with the later released Alpha A7R, which sports an enormous 36.4 megapixel sensor, identical to that of the one in Nikon’s D800, but packed into a body less than half the size of the D800. The original A7 came with a 24 megapixel sensor, while the A7R comes with a 36 megapixel sensor, and now the A7s comes with a 12 megapixel sensor. All of this may seem a bit bizarre and confusing until you realize why the A7S is 1/3 the resolution of the A7R, and that has to do with the fact that the A7s has some of the craziest ISO performance on earth, oh and it supports 4K video at 30 FPS, something only one other photo camera in the world can do. In fact, this may actually be the smallest 4K consumer camera in the world.

The A7s also sports an impressive ISO range of ISO 50 to 409,600 with the standard ISO range for stills ranging from 100 to 102,400 which is still within the range of most professional DSLRs with their expanded ISO ranges. The Expanded range is 50-409,600 and when shooting video you can use ISO 200 to 409,600.

The camera also has a lot of video friendly features and supports 4K video, however, you cannot record the 4K video directly to the Sony or SDXC memory cards within the camera. Sony states that 4K is a ‘Pro-Quality’ feature and as a result requires an optional external 3rd party 4K recorder, which means that Sony isn’t even the company that’s going to sell you what you need to record your own 4K video. Considering that the camera supports All of the fancy Sony Memory Stick standards as well as SDHC and SDXC, there should be no problem recording 4K video directly to a UHS-1 SDXC card, there are even cards being made specifically with very high write speeds for 4K use. I believe that if you have to use the camera’s HDMI output (which does 4K @ 30 FPS) and record that to an external HDMI recorder, this camera has defeated its own purpose of supporting 4K.

That aside, this camera does support NFC and Wi-Fi which means that you can wirelessly stream your images out to your wireless devices incredibly easily, especially if you have a device with NFC which makes pairing effortless. Overall, I think this camera is pretty awesome, but it remains to be seen if the 4K feature is really worth noting considering the fact that it can’t record directly to an SDXC card that’s inside the camera. If they can fix this, then maybe this camera might be worth getting over Panasonic’s GH4.

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