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.

The post Uncle Sam Shocks Intel With a Ban on Xeon Supercomputers in China appeared first on VR World.

Social media is increasingly supplanting more traditional avenues of marketing and advertising, as evident with targeted campaigns run on Facebook, Twitter and other social networks. Businesses are likewise increasingly adopting a mobile-first approach to content, marketing and scale. VR World sat down with Hanna Andrzejewska, Marketing Manager at email marketing firm GetResponse, which is gearing up for expansion into the ASEAN region, kicking off the GetResponse Asia Tour in Singapore on September 23rd, with two other cities in the region to follow.

Self-service marketing and advertising are not exactly new, with both enterprises and small businesses starting to eschew the old-world approach to running campaigns via PR and advertising firms at the turn of the century. When Google AdSense first popularized contextual advertising, for example, companies could run campaigns for as cheap as a few dozen dollars, compared to the millions one would have to spend for a TV spot or sponsorship.

Today, social media allows for targeted campaigns, and messages are being pushed based on interest, connections and context. With the ubiquity of mobile devices, businesses can even reach consumers based on proximity, thereby highlighting the power of the incidental sale, impulse buy and on-site promotions. In terms of marketing, it pays to be responsive and even adaptive in reaching out to one’s audience.

Design that adapts to users’ needs

“With the increase in use of mobile devices to access the web for research, entertainment and commerce, responsive design ensures that the user experience across thousands of varied devices is predictable, intuitive and native as possible to the user’s expectations and needs,” Andrzejewska tells VR World. “Adaptive design particularly has a few advantages over general responsive design for the end user’s experience. It allows businesses to accomplish differentiated experiences for users based on the specific intent of the mobile user, therefore, focusing more on the user’s behavior and specific needs rather than delivering a standard fluid layout designed solely to ‘fit’ in the user’s screen.”

“Adaptive design takes into account usage patterns and user behavior to deliver content specially design to convert and fill the need of the user and device,” Andrzejewska adds. “Whereas responsive design will tend to always present similar content and experiences across all devices ignoring the fact that intent and needs are inherently different based on the user’s medium. Adaptive design clearly has the advantage here for businesses will the goal of high conversion via intuitive user experience.”

An increasingly mobile audience

“Marketing has always been about being active where viewers spend most of their time, and this attention is diminishing in traditional media, and is moving towards new media,” Andrzejewska says. In this regard, she stressed the need to refocus marketing efforts in addressing an increasingly mobile audience. “Mobile web adoption is growing eight times faster than web adoption did in the 1990s and early 2000s, which means it’s becoming a more integral part of our daily lives.”

Andrzejewska advises that the mobile-first approach that many startups take today should not be taken lightly. Citing a study by Smart Insights that finds users spending 89% of their time on mobile apps vis-a-vis 11% on mobile web pages, she says businesses should have a presence where customers are. “Mobile-first means that businesses are meeting their customers and prospects via a medium with which they’re most intimate. Failure to do this ignores the user’s expectation and demand for enjoyable experiences tailored for them, and in return the customer ignores the brand. Which translates into less opportunities for sales and growth.”

Opportunities for growth

With the diversity of potential audiences, however, a cookie-cutter approach may not exactly be appropriate. Andrzejewska cites the case of Android rising fast in emerging economies, and Google actually addressing the demand for inexpensive but decently-powered devices meant for these markets. “One powerful example of the nature of business in many parts of the Asia Pacific market is the recent entrance of Google’s Android One in India,” she says.

“With only 10% of India’s 1.2 billion population owning a smartphone, Google has realized that India and other Asian countries are less likely to spend $600+ dollars to purchase phones due to less spending power,” adds Andrzejewska. “In response, they have reengineered the Android operating system to take greater advantage of lower-end hardware, thus creating quality smartphone products that could potentially sell for less than $100 per unit. This strategy will tap into a market that other premium companies like Apple, whose growth and market share is plateauing, cannot enter due to a high price point and lack of understanding of the market.”

Here’s where the ASEAN market comes in. GetResponse’s founders consider the region to be a potentially high-growth market. While the Delaware-headquartered company has been availably in global markets, including Asia, its regional offices are located in Canada and Europe. The company has “recently noticed increased demand in the localized version of the platform” from clients in Asia, particularly in the user interface, mobile application and communication templates.

Building up in Asia

“We decided to officially launch and emphasize our presence in the ASEAN markets because growing customer demand and comparatively few native email marketing alternatives, for one,” says Andrzejewska. In addition, the company wants to capitalize on the “fast-growing Asian technology markets, especially with a focus on online marketing.”

She notes that the rise of technology startups in the region has “generated a huge demand for complex, complete solutions that meet expectations of marketers,” and that a platform like GetResponse will “help enable regional businesses to tap into global solutions in reaching out to their audience both locally and globally.”

For Andrzejewska, the plan is for the company’s Asian operation to “go beyond serving our current customers.” In this regard, the company plans to expand marketing activities, “including event marketing, affiliate relations, and dedicated partnership programs for re-sellers.” The plan is to eventually open a general office in the region as part of its strategic roadmap.

The post GetResponse Talks Adaptive Design, Mobile-First Approach, and Expansion to Asia appeared first on VR World.