Android is in a tricky spot within China. While the OS is run by practically every smartphone in China that’s not an iPhone, including of course handsets from domestic champions such as Xiaomi, the Chinese government maintains a near state of war against Google (NASDAQ: GOOG).

Google, with its libertarian ethos, antagonized the Chinese government when it operated in the country by refusing to comply with censorship requests. When Google left China, the Chinese government began traffic shaping its packets before outright blocking Google late last year. Now trying to use Google or things like Gmail or Google Apps is impossible in China without a VPN (and the majority of which no longer work inside the country). The majority of Android platforms used by Chinese vendors are heavily forked. While this presents its own security problems, it’s the best vendors can do to still use Android without relying on Google.

China’s government recognizes the problem and is developing its own indigenous mobile OS as a way to remove the dependence Chinese companies have on Google.

For Intel’s (NASDAQ: INTC) part, the company says that it will assist China in developing this platform to ensure compatibility with the Intel platform (a must considering the investments Intel is making in Chinese smartphone vendors).

“We have and continue to collaborate on indigenous platforms. We have thousands of software engineers and leadership here in China,” Intel’s Doug Fisher, the company’s Vice President General Manager, Software and Services Group, said at IDF Shenzhen 2015. “We will work with China’s government industries to ensure that we participate in the creation of an indigenous operating environment here in China.”

He said that Intel’s role with the China OS Association, the industry group working with China’s government, will be to “enable” the OS.

It will be interesting to see how close China lets Intel get to the development process of the indigenous OS. On one hand China would need to consult with Intel to ensure compatibility with its platform. On the other hand, China might not want to let Intel get too close to the platform for fear that it would lose face letting a foreign firm in to help with the heavy lifting development work – or worse plant a backdoor.

The post Intel Onboard to Support Indigenous China Mobile OS appeared first on VR World.

“Innovating together, winning together.”

That’s how Intel (NASDAQ: INTC) CEO Brian Krzanich defined the relationship between Intel and China during the kickoff keynote of IDF Shenzhen 2015.

“Since last year, we’ve made a lot of progress together. It’s been a good year full of innovation and full of partnerships and collaborations together,” Krzanich said on stage.

Though interference from the US government may block Intel from parts of the lucrative high-performance computing market in China, on stage Krzanich said that Intel and China maintain a strong relationship and high levels of cooperation.

“The local and global impact of our 50 years of Moore’s Law innovation and 30 years of strong collaboration and winning together in China is unmatched,” said Krzanich. “Intel remains focused on delivering leadership products and technologies in traditional areas of computing, while also investing in new areas and entrepreneurs – students, makers and developers – to find and fuel future generations of innovation with China.”

Krzanich began the keynote by highlighting the how Intel met or beat its goals from last year.

In terms of Intel’s goal to hit 40 million tablets shipped with Intel silicon inside, that goal was met and exceeded as the company announced in January as Intel says it hit not only the 40 million mark, but exceeded initial estimates by hitting 46 million.

With regards to the Smart Device Innovation Fund established last year, Intel said that so far it has been “very successful” with $37 million of the $100 million fund disbursed so far. Many of the companies highlighted by Intel as recipients of the funds are relatively unknown outside of China. Eyesmart technology, Appscomm, were some of the firms highlighted by Intel.

Updates on collaboration with Rockchip

At last year’s IDF Shenzhen, Krzanich gave a first preview of SoFIA its first SoC solution with an embedded 3G baseband. SoFIA was Intel’s plan to get a foothold into the value-oriented Chinese market.

Later in the year Intel announced that it would be collaborating with China’s Rockchip to further develop SoFIA, with Rockchip taking the lead.

Rockchip CEO Min Li

On stage at IDF Shenzhen, Krzanich and Rockchip’s CEO said that they had scored hardware wins from from 20 companies, with more than 45 tablet, phablet and smartphone designs currently in development based on the Intel Atom x3 processor reference designs.

Krzanich then demonstrated the Intel Atom x3 processor in a smartphone, supporting LTE-TDD connectivity over China Mobile’s network by streaming a song from a popular Chinese music streaming service.

A new fund for makers

Following in the footsteps of the Intel Innovation Fund for smartphone and tablet vendors, Intel announced a program to accelerate the development of maker projects powered by Intel’s Galileo and Edison platforms. It’s not clear how these funds will be disbursed, but Intel said it is investing $20 million (120 million RMB) into the project.

Real Sense gets thinner and an enterprise partner

Intel’s RealSense technology has been a favourite staple of the company during its keynotes at events like IDF and Computex. While Intel has secured a handful of wins for its 3D camera, interest from vendors has otherwise been scant. One of the few wins Intel was able to secure for the technology was the Dell Venue 7000, which had many other selling points other than the inclusion of the camera.

At this year’s IDF Shenzhen Intel announced that it had developed a new version of the camera that’s thinner and lighter than the previous version.

Intel also announced that China online mega retailer JD.com would be using Intel RealSense technology in its wharehouses to organize and sort supplies into boxes.

IDF Shenzhen 2015 continues through Wednesday and Thursday in Shenzhen.

The post IDF Shenzhen 2015: Intel Celebrates 30 Years in China at IDF Shenzhen appeared first on VR World.

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.

The 2015 Shenzhen Intel (NASDAQ: INTC) Developer Forum kicks off Tuesday, the second event Intel is hosting in the city.

Like its San Francisco counterpart, IDF Shenzhen was a very mobile-centric event. At last year’s event, Brian Krzanich, the company’s CEO, made some very aggressive promises.

But one year later, where is Intel on these promises?

40 Million Intel Tablets in 2014

Without a doubt the most aggressive promise Intel made at IDF Shenzhen 2014 was shipping 40 million Intel powered tablets in 2014.

The tablet SoC market is dominated by ARM’s (LON: ARM) silicon. To grow that much in one year would be a herculean task for any company, and many analysts thought it would be an impossible task. But in January 2015 Intel announced that it had met, and even beaten, its goal: 46 million.

But to get to that goal Intel paid a handsome cost that would be impossible for any of its competitors even consider undertaking. In its yearly earnings call in January Intel said that is mobile and communications division posted a loss of $4.21 billion for the 2014 fiscal year. Income for the division for the year was razor thin, only coming in at $202 million.

However for Intel this was total war. Posting this kind of loss was an acceptable cost for achieving victory.

This goal was intended to establish Intel Architecture in the marketplace,” Intel CEO Brian Krzanich said during the company’s earnings call. “We don’t need to go out and outpace the market for this year,” he continued. “A key goal for mobility is to improve profitability.”

This strategy pushed Intel’s x86 competitor out of the market entirely. Although AMD never really was a contender in the tablet space, the company decided to concede the market entirely once it realized the lengths Intel was willing to go to achieve dominance in the market.

“We’re evaluating [tablets] closely. It’s not our priority,” Kevin Lensing, senior director for mobility solutions at AMD, said in a November interview. Lensing explained that the margins just were not there for AMD to justify its attempts at entering the market, on top of Intel’s aggressive behavior.

Now that Intel has hit its goal, the question is: can it make a profit?

Intel’s $100 Million China Bet

The other big announcement from Intel at IDF Shenzhen 2014 was the establishment of a $100 million “China Smart Device Innovation Fund” and innovation center to help Chinese vendors jumpstart their mobile ambitions with Intel cash and know-how.

Tracking the deliverables surrounding this promise has been a bit tricky, as Intel’s bigger China-themed announcements this year such as the $1.5 billion investment in Tsinghua Unigroup have pushed it to the sidelines.

To date Intel has disbursed $28 million from the $100 million pot. The list of companies that have received the funds, and what projects they have used them for, has not been widely publicized.

It’s also understood that the company’s innovation center is not going as planned. Sources said Kirk Skaugen’s platform development center in Shenzhen was supposed to have 600 engineers, and to date it’s understood that there are only 150. In addition key high-level R&D personnel have returned to the United States.

What’s in store for this year?

This year’s IDF event is a much shorter affair than last year. With Intel no longer as hungry for market wins as it was last year, it’s doubtful that it will be as high profile as the year prior.

The conference’s first keynote kicks off Wednesday morning.

The post IDF Shenzhen 2015: Did Intel Keep Its Promises From Last Year? appeared first on VR World.

Google (NASDAQ: GOOG) unveiled Tuesday two new low-cost Chromebooks that will make the Google laptop platform much more competitive against the low-end Windows laptop space.

The two Chromebooks are from Hisense (SHA:600060) and Haier (HKG:1169),two China-based OEM/ODMs known best for providing budget electronics to specific retailers. Both Chromebooks are priced at $149 and are powered by the quad-core Rockchip RK3288 SoC clocked at 1.8GHz.

Each laptop is virtually identical with 11.6-inch LED-backlit display, 2GB of DDR3L SDRAM, 16GB of eMMC flash storage, and a 720p webcam. The only difference between the two is battery life.

First up is the Hisense Chromebook, which will be exclusively sold at Walmart (NYSE: WMT). It promises 8.5 hours of battery life. It’s 0.6 inches thick and weighs 3.3 pounds.

The Haier Chromebook 11, an exclusive to Amazon (NASDAQ:AMZN), has 10 hours of promised battery life.

What’s in a Rockchip?

Rockchip is probably best known for its deal with Intel (NASDAQ: INTC) to bring x86 to the next-generation of cheap tablets for the Chinese market.

Aside from that Rockchip is a fairly run-of-the-mill low-end ARM (LON: ARM) manufacturer that would one day like to challenge the incumbents such as Qualcomm (NASDAQ: QCOM) and MediaTek (TPE: 2454).

The Rockchip RK3288 has four 1.8 GHz ARM Cortex A17 cores and a quad-core ARM Mali T760 GPU.

Benchmarks on the RK3288 are scant, but one from January from a firm called CNX Software shows that its around 18% faster in Antutu than an Intel Atom Z3735F.

Chromebook on a stick

The other Rockchip RK3288 powered Chrome device is the Chromebit, and HDMI dongle that brings full Chromebox (a set-top Chrome computer) to a dongle. It’s powered by a Rockchip 3288 SoC, has 2GB of RAM, 16GB of storage, and 802.11ac connectivity.

One obvious use case for the Chromebit is presentations. Instead of trying to get one’s laptop connected to the venue’s projector, someone could just plug in the Chromebit into the projector’s HDMI port.

Pricing of the Chromebit will be less than $100.

The post Rockchip’s RK3288 Powers Sub-$150 Chromebooks and Chrome Stick appeared first on VR World.

Intel (NASDAQ:INTC) has shed further details on its second-generation Xeon Phi CPU, known as Knights Landing.

The processor features several technical achievements, starting with a 14nm manufacturing process, which is a first in this series. Designed to offer high-performance computing, Knights Landing differs from other server-based CPUs in that it uses lots of low-energy cores to run parallel tasks, whereas offerings from IBM (NYSE:IBM) or Oracle (NYSE:ORCL) use fewer but more powerful cores.

Built on Intel’s MIC (Many Integrated Core) architecture with a total of 8 billion transistors, Knights Landing runs a modified version of the Atom Silvermont x86 core in a tile configuration, with a single tile featuring two cores and vector execution units along with shared L2 cache as well as a circuitry that connects the tile to the rest of the mesh network. Intel has mentioned that each Knights Landing package would include a processor with 30 or more tiles and eight on-chip memory modules. Another major highlight with Knights Landing is that it would be able to function as a host processor, meaning that it can boot and run x86 operating systems and application code without any need for recompilation. It can also act as a co-processor.

Talking about memory, the chip vendor has announced that Knights Landing would feature eight 2GB stacks of memory, totaling up to 16GB. The chip is manufactured at Micron, and looks to be a variant of the manufacturer’s Hybrid Memory Cube, which involves stacking memory and using an embedded logic chip to deliver higher bandwidth at a lower power. Micron has mentioned that its HMC modules will be able to transfer data 15 times faster than a standard DDR3 module, while utilizing 70% less energy. Along with on-chip memory, Knights Landing will come with six memory channels that can connect a total of 384GB DDR4 memory.

The result of the new manufacturing process, core design and memory is that Knights Landing will offer three times the performance as the current-gen Knights Corner, with Intel claiming 3 teraflops double-precision and 6 teraflops single-precision performance. That number is close to the 7 teraflops figure Nvidia (NASDAQ:INTC) touted during the launch of its latest video card, the Titan X.

It is no wonder, then, that Intel is aiming for the same use-cases as Nvidia for Knights Landing, with the chip vendor stating that the CPU can be used for deep learning and data analytics. Nvidia, however, has invested significant resources in its platform, and is offering tools such as the Digits software framework. Even if Intel does not manage to successfully challenge Nvidia in the Knights Landing, it is witnessing a great amount of demand, with over 50 companies set to sell server systems with the CPU as the host.

The post Intel Gunning To Challenge Nvidia At HPC With ‘Knights Landing’ Xeon Phi Processor appeared first on VR World.

In what may be a sign that Intel (NASDAQ:INTC) is set to move on from the Broadwell platform and focus on Skylake, it is being reported that the chip vendor will launch just two Broadwell SKUs for desktop, with the parts set to be announced at this year’s Computex.

The processors will be the Core i7-5775C and Core i5-5675C, and the 65W TDP offerings will be fully compatible with current Z97 motherboards following a BIOS update. The “C’ in the nomenclature is to denote the fact that the processors are unlocked, with Intel said to be moving away from the “K” naming convention.

The Core i7-5775C will feature a base clock of 3.3GHz along with a turbo clock of 3.7GHz. With four cores, eight threads and 6MB cache along with Iris Pro Graphics 6200, the i7-5775C will be the higher-end offering in this series.

The Core i5-5675C, on the other hand, will feature a slightly lower clock speed of 3.1GHz, with a turbo frequency of 3.6GHz. The CPU has 4MB cache and will also feature Iris Pro Graphics 6200. The LGA1150 Broadwell offerings are essentially a 14nm shrink of the Haswell die, and unlike previous years, Intel will not be offering a full gamut of CPUs across pricing tiers.

Instead, the vendor will focus its efforts on the Skylake architecture, the tock in Intel’s tick-tock release cadence cycle. Skylake will also be fabricated on a 14nm process, but will usher in significant CPU and GPU improvements along with lesser power consumption. To expedite the launch of Skylake, Intel is rumored to move up its annual Intel Developers Forum to mid-August, where it is officially set to unveil the new CPUs.

Skylake for the desktop will be offered as fully unlocked versions with TDPs of 65W and 95W, with a 35W SKU also planned for low-power devices. The chip vendor is set to begin producing the hardware in June or July, with retail availability set to commence from October.

The post Intel To Launch Two Broadwell CPUs For Desktop, Skylake Debuting In October appeared first on VR World.

Intel (NASDAQ: INTC) announced Thursday morning that it was downgrading its revenue prospects for its upcoming first-quarter earnings release due to the continued shift from desktop PCs to mobile.

Intel expects revenue to be approximately $12.8 billion, plus or minus $300 million, down from $13.7 billion, plus or minus $500 million.

“The change in revenue outlook is a result of weaker than expected demand for business desktop PCs and lower than expected inventory levels across the PC supply chain,” Intel wrote in a statement released Thursday morning. “The company believes the changes to demand and inventory patterns are caused by lower than expected Windows XP refresh in small and medium business and increasingly challenging macroeconomic and currency conditions, particularly in Europe.”

Many vendors in the PC space, including Intel, have been the victim of a prolonged upgrade cycle. Though Windows XP has been pushed to its end of life, many large enterprises are hanging on to their Windows 7-based machines. Microsoft (NASDAQ: MSFT), Intel and other vendors in the space hope that the upcoming release of Windows 10 will spur demand for upgrades.

The post Intel Chops $1 Billion From Revenue Expectations appeared first on VR World.

Intel (NASDAQ:INTC) hasn’t been as successful as Qualcomm (NASDAQ:QCOM) in the LTE modem segment, but that may all change in 2016 as it is being rumored that Apple (NASDAQ:AAPL) is leaning toward the chip vendor’s XMM 7360 LTE modem in lieu of Qualcomm’s offerings, which have been in use in iPhones for several generations now.

Venturebeat, citing anonymous sources, revealed that a variant of the next-generation iPhone — aimed at Asian and other emerging markets —  will feature Intel’s new XMM 7360 modem:

Intel has been gunning hard during the past year for a place in the iPhone and now appears to have succeeded, at least partly. The 7360 chip will ship inside a special version of the iPhone that will be marketed to emerging markets in Asia and Latin America, the sources said.

Like Qualcomm’s X12 modem, the Intel XMM 7360 offers LTE Category 10 connectivity, which is achieved through 3x carrier aggregation. The cellular modem can attain download speeds of 450 megabits per second. The modem was announced at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona earlier this month, with commercial availability slated for the second half of 2015. Apple engineers have allegedly traveled to Intel’s R&D facility in Munich, Germany to work with the chip vendor on the modem.

One of the major issues with Intel’s LTE offering in 2014, the XMM 7260, was finding manufacturers that were willing to use the modem in their SoCs. Samsung and LG used the modem in a few of their products, with a few versions of the Galaxy Alpha and Galaxy Note 4 featuring the XMM 7260 module, as well as LG’s first in-house SoC — Nuclun.

Managing to get its cellular modem on the iPhone will be a major win for Intel, and will be yet another blow for Qualcomm, which has already lost Samsung as a customer for its Snapdragon SoCs — at least in high-end devices — this year. Intel is readily acknowledging that it is far behind Qualcomm in the mobile application processor segment, but by making power efficient LTE modems and offering integrated solutions for mid-tier devices aimed at emerging markets, such as the Zenfone 2, it is turning into a credible threat in this space.

The post Next iPhone May Feature Intel’s Blazing Fast XMM 7360 LTE Modem appeared first on VR World.

USB has always been a universal standard, but it also has always had its competition, chiefly from Apple (NASDAQ: APPL) with its Lightning protocol for mobile devices and Thunderbolt for desktop. But with USB Type-C, things will be a little different.

At Apple’s recent unveiling of its new 12-inch Retina Macbook Air, many noticed the notebook’s ports — or lack thereof. The new Macbook Air ships with only one port: USB Type-C. Apple decided just to include this version of USB, nothing else, with the notebook. The USB port will handle charging, data transfers, and display output.

This strong endorsement of support from Apple is likely the beginning of the end of USB Type-C’s competition.

Apple once pitched Thunderbolt to the PC ecosystem, which was co-developed with Intel (NASDAQ: INTC), as everything USB Type-C is going to be. While many vendors ended up including Thunderbolt on their motherboards, the hardware wins just didn’t add up. When it came down to licensing royalties, cost-comparison issues just meant that Thunderbolt wasn’t as competitive. It had a place with those who needed a connector to do high-end video and graphics work, but the mainstream market wasn’t just that enthusiastic about it.

Support from everyone

The remarkable thing about USB Type-C is the broad support it is getting from both Apple and vendors in the PC space. Though the USB 3.1 protocol, which is the standard behind USB-C, isn’t expected to be fully phased in to later this year, support is rising fast from vendors. MSI (TPE: 2377) launched a USB 3.1 compliant motherboard, the Z97A, in early March and SanDisk launched the first flash drive with support around the same time.

This is only going to grow. Dozens of companies have already stated publicly their support for the protocol, and many more will be in the coming weeks.

How big will USB Type-C grow? Only time will tell. Will its growth come at the expense of Apple-centric connectivity ports? Definitely.

The post Apple’s Support For USB Type-C Shows it’s the Future of Connectivity appeared first on VR World.

The post Intel Xeon D: Hitting the ARM Microserver Hopes? appeared first on VR World.

Intel (NASDAQ: INTC) unveiled three chips in its mobile Atom lineup at the 2015 Mobile World Congress, emulating its “good-better-best” style used for desktop and mobile Core processors.

The Atom x3, which occupies the low end of the lineup, is based on Intel’s SoFIA platform and comes with an integrated 3G or LTE baseband. The x3 will come in three editions, targeting different use cases and price points.

The first is the low-cost x3-C3130, which is intended for budget smartphones or devices marketed to the developing world. It has a 64-bit 1Ghz processor, Mali 400 MP2 GPU, and an integrated 3G modem.

Next is the Atom x3-C3230RK. It has a quad-core 1.2GHz CPU, with a Mali 450 MP4 GPU and 3G connectivity. Intel says this chip will be competitive against the likes of MediaTek’s MT6582 and Qualcomm’s MSM8212 by 50%.

Lastly we have the Atom x3-C3440, which is targeted at higher-end devices in the low-cost marketspace. It has an integrated LTE baseband, a 1.4GHz quad-core 64-bit CPU with Mali T720 MP2 GPU and NFC connectivity.

Intel said that the x3 lineup of chips would be integrated in devices between $75-$149.

On the higher end is the x5 and x7 lineup, formerly known as Cherry Trail. These are targeted at higher-end devices running Windows (Windows 10 will be fully supported) or Android. Chips in these lineups will be the first to be fabricated on Intel’s 14nm process node. They will not have an integrated modem so they will be required to be paired with something like the Intel XMM 726x.

Intel also announced that many leading vendors have already committed to building devices with the x3, x5 and x7 Atom chips.

More information on these chips, including in-depth benchmarking, is likely to be available at IDF Shenzhen in April.

The post Intel at MWC 2015: Atom Chips for Low-Cost Phones appeared first on VR World.

A recent leak coming out of Embedded World 2015 in Nuremberg, Germany revealed a sixth-generation Skylake motherboard with the LGA1151 socket from ASRock. The motherboard is not targeted at consumers, but is instead aimed at the industrial/embedded segment. Intel (NASDAQ:INTC) is rumored to unveil its next-generation processors sometime next year, although there isn’t a clear timeline as to when we may see retail availability of Skylake-based hardware.

From the images, it can be seen that the motherboard features two DDR3L-1600 SO-DIMM slots that can accommodate a total of 16GB memory. The feature highlights the fact that OEMs can select either DDR3 or DDR4 with Skylake. The motherboard leak also gives us a look at the ports on offer, which include one PCIe 3.0 x4 slot, one miniPCIe port, two SATA 6Gb/s connectors and one mSATA port. There isn’t an M.2 port, but seeing as how there are no SSDs marketed at this segment, it may turn out to be ASRock opting to not include the port. Also seen on the board are three HDMI ports, four USB 3.0 ports along with two Ethernet ports.

A leak of the roadmap from mainboard vendor DFI — who makes boards solely for the embedded segment — show 17 chipsets targeted at workstation, desktop and mobile categories. The image in question highlights C236 as being targeted for workstations, with Q170 and H110 dubbed as chipsets for desktops. The TDP for desktops is given as 35, 65 and 95W, with the last number slightly higher than the 88W TDP maximum we’ve seen with Haswell. For mobile, the TDP is listed in between 15 to 45W. Interesting

Broadwell is set to make its debut on the desktop, with current rumors pointing to a launch sometime in Q2 2015.

The post ASRock’s LGA1151 Motherboard For Intel Skylake CPUs Detailed In Leak appeared first on VR World.

ArrayFire found in its benchmarks that AMD’s (NASDAQ:AMD) integrated GPU in the Kaveri A10-7850K APU fares better at computational tasks than Intel’s (NASDAQ:INTC) Haswell HD 4600 series on the Core i7-4790K. The software company builds  software libraries for GPU programming, with its products working on both Nvidia CUDA-based cards as well as AMD’s OpenCL GPUs.

In its benchmarks, ArrayFire tested several GPU functions such as a bilateral filter, which is a non-linear filter that is used to smoothen out edges from images. The bilateral filter test showed AMD’s integrated GPU achieving 156 fps at 720p and 69 fps at full-HD, more than twice the score managed by the HD 4600 at 62 and 28 fps.

A similar set of results were observed in an erosion and dilution benchmark, with the Kaveri APU scoring four times as high as the HD 4600. ArrayFire also ran 2D convolution tests, which determine image processing, and found that Kaveri significantly outmatched Intel’s offering by achieving 191 fps to HD 4600’s 52 fps at full-HD resolution.

ArrayFire also ran a gamut of other computational tests, includingNxN matrix tests, sort functions as well as image resize and rotate tests, with AMD’s solution coming out on top in all benchmarks.

The post AMD’s Kaveri Holds A Significant Edge Over Intel In ArrayFire GPU Benchmarks appeared first on VR World.

At the International Solid-State Circuits Conference (ISSCC 2015) Monday Intel’s (NASDAQ: INTC) Mark Bohr gave an update on his company’s progress on the 10nm process node and the push to 7nm.

Intel has yet to lay down exact dates but keen observers of the company know that 10nm is expected next year, with 7nm following two years after (2018).

Bohr, who is an Intel Senior Fellow as well as the Technology and Manufacturing Group Director, said that Intel’s current silicon etching techniques will be sufficient to bring it to 10nm but to move to 7nm a new method will be required. This new method will be revolutionary for two reasons: first it will be a move away from FinFETs (watch this for an explainer of what they are), and will be a post-silicon chip likely using a indium gallium arsenide compound. These types of chips are known as III-V semiconductors, and can be fabricated into smaller and faster transistors.

Before ISSCC 2015 kicked off Bohr did mention that the delays in Broadwell were due to the unforeseen complexities of manufacturing at the 14nm process. However, Bohr said, Intel has learned from its mistakes and the same problems (which were based around yield) are not anticipated for the 10nm process for future chips.

Bohr also said that Intel believes it can continue Moore’s Law at the 10nm level: there will be more transistors on the chip consuming less power. But of course the big story is Intel’s push to a post-silicon era at 7nm.  For this Intel, for its part, was light on exact details. It’s still early in the year, so more on its 7nm ambitions can be expected at either IDF Shenzhen in April or IDF San Francisco in September.

More from ISSCC 2015 will be available as the conference continues through the week.

The post Intel Pushes Past 10nm to a Post-Silicon Era appeared first on VR World.

Rumors refuse to die that Apple (NASDAQ:APPL) is considering dumping Intel’s (NASDAQ: INTC) silicon for ARM (LON: ARM), and Intel executives are forced to continue on their debunking offensive.

Apple first announced that Intel silicon would power its desktops and laptops in 2005. As ARM architecture matured throughout the later part of the decade and into the next, many vendors in the PC space have considered — and attempted with varying degrees of success — putting ARM based chips into their notebooks and desktops (think All-in-Ones not big towers).

Speaking to Business Insider late last week, Intel CFO Stacy Smith said that Intel is so far ahead of the competition that Apple simply couldn’t consider anyone else.

“For a customer like Apple you’d have to take a big step off performance to step off our architecture,” Smith said to Business Insider. “That is what in essence enables us to win across different customers.”

Even though rumors hold that Intel’s next-generation architecture, which Apple would be keenly interested in, is delayed Smith brushes off concerns that this might cause vendors to jump ship.

“Our leadership over the rest of the industry is extending. We’re not delayed relative to the industry. We’re actually ahead of the industry,” he continued.

The post Intel CFO: ‘Apple is a Great Partner of Ours’ appeared first on VR World.

Apple’s (NASDAQ:APPL) Macintosh desktop and notebooks will be using Intel’s (NASDAQ: INTC) chips for the foreseeable future, according to Intel CEO Brian Krzanich.

Krzanich was on CNBC’s Earnings Central late last week responding to a report by analyst Ming-Chi Kuo from KGI securities that Apple was considering ditching Intel’s chips for ARM’s (LON:ARM) A-Series SoCs for future desktop and notebook releases. Krzanich dismissed the claims saying the relationship between Intel and Apple was “strong.”

“Apple is always going to choose the supplier who can provide the most amount of capability in innovation to build on,” he said on the show. “They’re a company based on innovation.”

“I wake up every morning making sure that across the board, whether it’s Apple or Lenovo or Dell or any of our customers, we have the most competitive parts,” he continued.

While moving to ARM-based chips may be a tempting move for Apple’s low-power Macbook Air or superthin iMac, a broad across the board divorce from Intel would cause too many problems in the long run. Apple’s Mac Pro high-margin workstation business, which is virtually ubiquitous in the digital publishing and creative industry, relies on the horsepower that only an Intel Xeon can provide. Furthermore, the software ecosystem from Adobe (NASDAQ: ADBE) and the like which many rely on for their work is strictly Intel-based and optimized. A transition to ARM would be unthinkable.

For now rumors and reports along this train of thought should be dismissed. But that’s not to say that an ARM-powered Macbook Air would be out of the question.

The post Apple is Not Going to Embrace ARM on Desktop appeared first on VR World.

Intel (NASDAQ: INTC) announced Thursday during its earnings call that it had beaten its goal of getting 40 million of its chips into tablets, but its CEO swears off doing such a play ever again because of the cost involved.

While Intel, thanks to its contra revenue program, was able surpass its target of shipping 40 million tablet chips — hitting 46 million — this victory came at a staggering cost as the mobile and communications division posted a loss of $4.21 billion for the 2014 fiscal year. Income for the division for the year was razor thin, only coming in at $202 million. This is down 85% from last year’s $1.4 billion of revenue, while the division’s losses increased by nearly $1.1 billion.

“This goal was intended to establish Intel Architecture in the marketplace,” Intel CEO Brian Krzanich said during the company’s earnings call.

“We don’t need to go out and outpace the market for this year,” he continued. “A key goal for mobility is to improve profitability.”

A healthy year overall

As far as other divisions of the company Intel’s PC group posted a healthy $14.6 billion in income on $34.7 billion in revenue for the fiscal year, with revenue rising $1.4 billion compared to the year prior. For the quarter revenue was $8.87 billion, down 3% from the last quarter but up 3% from the same time last year.

The company’s server group, known for its Xeon chips that power the web, posted an operating profit of $7.28 billion on revenue of $14.4 billion for the year. For the quarter revenue came in at $4.09 billion up 11% from last quarter and up 25% from the same time last year.

The new Internet of Things Group saw its revenue jump by 19% year-over-year to $2.1 billion. For the quarter the IoT division posted revenue of $591 million, up 12% from the last quarter and 10% from the same time last year.

Overall the company posted revenue $55.9 billion, operating income of $15.3 billion, net income of $11.7 billion and an earnings per share of $2.31

The post 46 Million: Intel Beats its Goal For Tablet Shipments appeared first on VR World.

The 2015 Consumer Electronics Show wrapped up Friday in Las Vegas, giving consumers a glimpse of what’s to come from the consumer electronics sector over the next year.

For as much as some like to lament how CES isn’t as relevant as it once was, or even how it’s “dead”, it still is the biggest electronics trade show in the world’s largest economy. That by itself makes it important. It’s not just where the public, via the press, gets to see new products, it’s where industry alliances are formed and where merchants decide what will be on store shelves next year.

CES is also where the world is given a glimpse of what to come in the long-term, not just in the near future. This matters because ecosystems need to be built around this technology, the process of which starts during closed-door meetings during the show.

Without further ado, here are three things that mattered the most from this year’s CES.

Broadwell on the market

At this year’s CES we got our first glimpse at the next-generation of ultrathin notebooks powered by Intel’s (NASDAQ: INTC) Broadwell processor.

Broadwell promises a substantially reduced power draw, allowing for thinner, lighter and fanless designs.

To of the most exciting Broadwell-powered notebooks that made an appearance on the show floor were the LaVie Z from Lenovo (HKG: 0992) and the refreshed XPS 13 from Dell.

Exact specs of the LaVie Z have yet to be finalized, but it’s said to have a 13-inch screen with a 2,560×1,440 resolution, a 128GB SSD and either a 44Whr or a 29.9 Whr battery depending on the model. Exact pricing and a release date have yet to be determined.

Dell’s refreshed XPS 13 features a variety of display sizes, an incredibly low battery life and an aggressive starting price of $799. For display options, Dell is offering a non-touch 1080p display (which comes with a longer battery life) as well as a touch-enabled QHD+ (3200×1800) model. These come with a  Broadwell 15W Core i3, i5, and i7 processor options and the option of either 4GB or 8GB of memory.

Unfortunately, for reasons that aren’t entirely clear, Broadwell was absent from Intel’s keynote at CES. The chip itself is quite the achievement for the company, and it was rather remiss to leave this product out of the big spotlight.

Quantum dots: The road to 8K starts today

One could call this year’s CES the year that 4K reached maturity. Prototypes of 4K displays have been on the showfloor of CES since 2012, and now they are relatively mainstream. But while 4K is just starting to get off the show floor and into the homes of consumers, a far more impressive technology made an appearance at this year’s CES: 8K.

As its name implies, 8K provides a substantial jump in resolution when compared to 4K or 1080p. On a large screen, the amount of detail one can pick out is beyond remarkable. Of course, 8K is suffering from a content problem — there isn’t much of it available — but what was demonstrated on the show floor proves the potential of the resolution.

For a resolution that large, standard LCD technology won’t cut it. Cinephiles and imaging professionals have long complained that standard LED backlit LCD sets don’t provide the rich blacks and colors of OLED or plasma based screens. This is a tradeoff of LED’s; image quality is sacrificed for power efficiency and thinness.

A diagram of how a quantum dot layer works

Quantum dots are the solution to this problem. Quantum dots are an extremely thin layer of nanometer sized crystals applied to an LCD. Depending on their size — between 2 to 10 nanometers — they emit light at a different wavelength thus glowing green, red, or blue depending on their size. On an LCD, they augment the display’s capability to reproduce the full color gamut: on paper they will allow an LCD to display proper blacks, whites and remove the blueish tint that plagues some displays. All this is done at nearly a third of the cost of producing an OLED.

Quantum dots were in many of the 4K LCD-based displays on the CES show floor. In order for LCDs to mature and jump into the 8K era, quantum dots are a must. Without the color accuracy that they provide, the benefits of the enhanced resolution of 8K would be lost.

Automotive is the next big thing

In the technology world, sometimes rivalries fade. One year two companies might slug it out at the show, and other years there could be nothing.Nvidia (NASDAQ: NVDA) and Qualcomm (NASDAQ: QCOM) have found themselves more and more becoming rivals as Nvidia shifts focus from its traditional markets to mobile with Tegra.

CES 2015 was an example of this new rivalry between the two companies. The keynotes from both Nvidia and Qualcomm focused heavily on automotive. On stage Nvidia CEO Jen Hsun Huang promised that the self-driving cars of the future would be powered by his company’s Tegra X1 SoC, showcasing its ability to power collision detection and other sensing systems.

Nvidia has struggled to build enthusiasm amongst mobile vendors for its Tegra platform, and it’s now up to its sales team to see if it can score some hardware wins in automotive. The biggest complaint amongst vendors was that previous iterations of Tegra draw too much power, but this complaint is a moot point in automotive.

However, Nvidia has to act fast to make inroads in this market. While Nvidia has yet to announce any hardware wins for automotive Tegra, at its keynote Qualcomm was able to announce two.

Automotive will prove to be a interesting and competitive market for these chipmakers, and future CES expos — especially CES Asia in Shanghai — will no doubt have more from this field.

The post 3 Things That Mattered The Most at CES 2015 appeared first on VR World.

Intel (NASDAQ: INTC) has been long trying to find a way to employ its RealSense technology, and on stage during its keynote at the 2015 Consumer Electronics Show it showed one possible application: autonomous drones.

As Intel CEO Brian Krzanich demonstrated on stage, using the RealSense technology and Intel Quark SoCs, the fleet of drones on stage were able to navigate around obstacles on stage. They fled away from stagehands wearing black shirts, and were also able to autonomously navigate through an obstacle course.

Of course these drones are far from being approved for sale on the market. Don’t expect Intel-powered drones to be on sale anytime soon, but the technology demo itself shows an interesting potential use case for Intel’s silicon in a fast-growing market.

The post CES 2015: Intel Promises RealSense Will Improve Drone Vision appeared first on VR World.