The next big battle for consumers is transportation. Forget about living room, your own pocket, your bedroom, the house in general – it’s cars, planes, shopping malls and the way how to interact with the world.

Thus, it is of no surprise that CES 2015 featured an interesting announcement, almost hidden behind the limelight of all the TVs, mobile phones etc. The announcement was that LG Electronics (KRX:066570) will become the default supplier of 4G LTE connectivity systems for General Motors (NYSE: GM). If you ever owned a GM car, you’re well aware of its ‘OnStar’ service.

OnStar Service to get 4G LTE connectivity

After multiple providers, very well known in the consumer space, it looks like LG Electronics won a global contract, to supply as much as 10 million cars (factor in at least 5-10% overhead for spare parts) annually. It is not known who is the chipset provider, but there’s no doubt LGE’s silicon unit will push for as much of their own chips as possible.

LG Electronics is a known automotive supplier, but this is as good as it gets – OnStar 4G LTE is coming to all the cars in General Motors gamma, regardless of are we talking about Cadillacs, Vauxhall/Opel etc. Expanding OnStar globally requires the use of 4G LTE technology, and the way how we will use cars as hotspots only goes to show that Tesla Motors started something big, and incumbents are working hard on catching up.

OnStar used to be a simple telematics service, but now is rapidly expanding its capabilities, bringing a whole new layer of connectivity usage. OnStar will now push key stats from the car, spare parts life, recommended service intervals and many more to consumers, while in case of product recalls etc. the service could notify all the owners of affected vehicles, reducing time to service.

The service originally started in North America, and recently started to expand in Europe. Over the course of next two years, GM will expand OnStar almost globally with focus on Europe and China.

According to Tim Nixon, Chief Technology Officer for OnStar, the company plans to put OnStar in no less than 50 cars across its brands by the end of the year (expect major announcements in Detroit, Geneva, Beijing and Frankfurt).

First vehicle to launch using this new improved service is the brand new 2016 Chevrolet Volt (leaked images courtesy of Motorauthority.com), to be officially introduced at the Detroit Motor Show. The car will also debut as 2^nd Generation Opel Ampera in Europe.

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AMD (NASDAQ:AMD) announced late yesterday that Forrest Norrod, formerly Dell’s VP & GM for Server Platforms would be joining the company to take Lisa Su’s position which she had left vacant after ascending to the position of CEO. That puts him in charge of AMD’s entire Enterprise, Embedded and Semi-Custom business unit (EESC) as well as managing all aspects of strategy, business management, engineering, and sales for AMD’s EESC business.

Forrest Norrod comes from over 10 years of working at Dell and having valuable enterprise and server experience, where AMD needs it most. What will be interesting to see is how he will help shape AMD’s future enterprise and server businesses in ways that will set them up for success, because as it stands right now they are in an awful place in terms of server market share and overall sales. Thankfully for Norrod, AMD is already building ARM server chips and shipping them to customers and is working on new ARM and x86 core IP as well, which should give him and his team even more ammunition, come 2016.

Forrest Norrod – AMD

The truth is that Norrod has a long road ahead of him and there’s no doubt that he’s a qualified person for the job, it also may result in AMD having a closer relationship with Dell and getting more AMD products inside of Dell’s own servers.

After all, AMD currently has quite a good relationship with HP, but that hasn’t been enough to get them serious amounts of enterprise design wins to the point where they could actually gain some market share. It is going to be a very big uphill climb, but it really seems like Su has picked the right man for the job and now we just have to see where it will go from here.

“Forrest is an industry veteran whose strong track record of establishing and growing businesses strengthens our leadership team. Forrest’s unique combination of engineering,” Su said in a press release about the new hire. “Business management and technical expertise at both the chip and system level make him ideally suited to lead AMD into an expanded set of markets where our differentiated technology assets provide a competitive advantage.”

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