2014 was an interesting year for Intel (NASDAQ: INTC). While the company remains wildly profitable, beating the estimates of analysts during the past quarter, it remains at something of an impasse regarding its pivot towards mobile and the Internet of Things.

For Intel, the PC Client and Data Center groups bring in the lion’s share of the company’s revenue and profit. Its IoT group is growing: in the third quarter of 2013 it saw a healthy growth in revenue of 14% year-over-year. But mobile is a different story. The division, despite some promising wins in 2014, is a perpetual money loser for the company. Largely due to Intel’s aggressive contra revenue strategy of paying vendors to include its silicon in devices, revenue shrank to $1 million from $353 million a year prior. In mid-November, Intel brass announced that the division would be absorbed by the PC client group in 2015.

Intel has a lot riding on its continued transition out of its traditional PC and desktop business. ARM’s traditional stronghold is mobile, and Intel needs to work on convincing the world there’s an alternative.

2015 will be an important year for Intel. This year the company made a big push to continue the diversification of its business, and 2015 will the the next act in this transition play.

In order to get a better sense of what to expect from Intel in 2015, VR World sat down with Intel’s David McCloskey, director of marketing and business operations for Asia Pacific and Japan, when he was in Taipei. Below are excerpts of the conversation.

VR World: What’s Intel planning for 2015?

David McCloskey: The overall theme for [next year] is the continuation of the overall immersive and much more personal computing experience. Within computing, the transformations we see continued to be powered by high-performing and lower-power types of devices. You see that continuing theme across the form factor. You saw that momentum begin during the second half of this year with things like compute sticks — which are all enabled because you have that combination of power and performance.

We’ll see more devices driven by the demand for power and performance.

VRW: Mobile chips typically have lower margins than Desktop and Server. How do you plan to generate more margins from Mobile?

DM:. As we’ve ramped Bay Trail, we’ve enabled lower price points, which is critical for regions like Asia, with the same or better margins. That’s the power of Moore’s Law, and advancements in transistors and microprocessor architecture.

Typically we get the question: ‘doesn’t that generate a sell-down, and how do you support your ASPs?’. The reality is, it’s a much different value proposition. We talked about the Core-M coming to help the 2-in-1 category, and in that 10-to-11-inch screen size it becomes a debate whether you’ve sold a tablet or you’ve driven an incremental unit from that stack.

Financially, it’s a great thing for us and it’s a great thing for users. And it’s probably not a sell-down from a 15-inch Core i5 notebook.

Within those underlying themes, the big thing about the computing transformation is the form factor explosion. These mini-PCs, the compute stick stuff, kinda came out of nowhere. The other underlying piece to that are the standards like wireless charging. That fundamental capability — especially scalable across gadgets and wearables up through notebooks — will completely reinvent the way we think about usage. Those capabilities will bring a new computing world which will drive business models.

The wireless charging example is akin to Centrino, where there’s a big infrastructure play and there’s a big business model opportunity that’s connected back to the technology.

Intel’s David McCloskey chats about 2015. (Photo: Jimmy Chuang/VR World)

VRW: The Internet of Things was a hot topic for Intel in 2014. What will we see next year in IoT?

DM: We’ve been in IoT for 30 years from an underlying compute perspective. The big challenge is that we’re looking to evolve. We just announced a few days ago a new set of standards of security in order to help scale up. The three big challenges for IoT are the interoperability, security, and scalability. What we think will help us get to the orders of magnitude of billions of devices, and zetabytes of data, is solving those three issues. I think the advancements we are making in addressing the interoperability, addressing security, and addressing scalability.

VRW: Can you describe how Intel is working with software vendors to push out this new vision for computing?

DM: For us it goes back to scalability. Two of the key players we announced in the IoT space are NTT Data in Japan and Tata Consulting Services in India. We do all of our normal work with Microsoft, in terms of their embedded OS, Enterprise, client and so forth. But for us the scale opportunities is through these two SIs.

Stepping up the value chain, our hope is that working with the likes of an NTT Data, TCS, Accenture, etc, there’s much more ability for those guys to pull those value chains together and for us to get the scalability.

VRW: Let’s look back at the past year in the mobile segment. How was 2014 for Intel?

DM: There are two things: We said we wanted to ship 40 million units of tablets. We’re going to ship 40 million units of tablets.

Next, what we didn’t expect is that we’d build a phone business at the same time with Asus as a lead partner. We’re really pleased with the ramp and what Asus has been able to do with us. For tablets and phones as well. The underlying point there, especially in the phone sector, is that we’ve been able to dispel this myth of the Intel Architecture [being ill-suited] in phones in terms of battery life and heat. There’s no question typically about the performance we’d bring, the question is can you fit it into the form factors.

If you shift that out of 2014, the issue becomes how do you build on that momentum.

VRW: Thanks for your time.

This interview has been edited and condensed. 

The post Intel’s David McCloskey Looks Ahead at 2015 and Back at 2014 appeared first on VR World.

Intel (NASDAQ:INTC) has announced that Robert Swinnen will be heading the semiconductor giant’s marketing and sales efforts in Asia-Pacific and Japan. Swinnen previously led the World Sales Organization Group, and was overseeing the Intel Inside program before that. He was also involved with Intel’s Mobility Group, where he oversaw the Global Business Development activities for the Ultra Mobility Group. In his new role, which goes into effect from January 1, Swinnen will lead Intel’s growth in the region.

Swinnen will be succeeding Gregory Bryant, who was hired as the general manager for Asia-Pacific in March 2012. Bryant will be moving back to the US as general manager and vice president of Intel’s Desktop Client Platforms Group. Bryant has considerable expertise in this segment, having handled Intel’s relationship with Lenovo in the past.

As Vice President and General Manager of Intel Asia-Pacific and Japan, Swinnen will be looking to recognize emerging trends in the region. “The region has crucial role to play in terms of design and manufacturing, while I know from my own time in Japan how consumers in this region lead the world in trends and consumption.” With the semiconductor giant struggling in the mobile SoC segment, it is looking to the IoT segment to drive growth in the future.

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Behind the emerging market of the Internet of Things are embedded processors. Without these chips, such as Intel’s Atom and Quark, there would simply be be no IoT.

On Wednesday in Taipei Intel (NASDAQ: INTC) hosted its IoT Asia Tour to showcase some of its IoT solutions from partners in order to give an idea to industry stakeholders where the ecosystem is going.

As a testament to the confidence that Intel has in the staying power of IoT, Philip Cronin, the company’s regional sales director for the Asia Pacific and Japan likened the rise of IoT to that of both cloud services and big data.

“Nobody is rejecting the concept of IoT,” Cronin said on stage during the event’s keynote.

To get a sense of how Intel’s embedded technology is driving the IoT — as Intel has been pushing IoT with some effort for over a year now — we sat down with Richard Dwyer, Intel’s VP and general manager of its embedded sales group, when he was in Taipei.

VR World: In the embedded space, how would you compare Intel’s efforts to those of ARM and AMD. What are Intel’s strengths?

Richard Dwyer: First and foremost, we are the preeminent microprocessor silicon manufacturer in the world — we’re pretty proud of it. We’ve made a number of investments over the past three-to-five years in assets that help us differentiate those transistors and microprocessors that we build in ways that go beyond what our competitors offer in the marketplace.

One of the things that I think is truly unique — it’s not just because we bought McAfee (now referred to as Intel Security) so we have 15 to 16 security workloads we can apply to different applications — but we have the ability to do hooks in the silicon with that software. We have Intel Security, we make the microprocessors, we create hooks that tightly couple that security environment with the software stack that sits on top of it. That’s a pretty unique offering and position. That allows us to do things like establishing root of trust and passing that root of trust up through the chain of command before the processor boots.

Another differentiation is having a common architecture from the very low end such as Quark all the way up the architectural stack to Xeon’s in the data center.  The common architecture creates code compatibility and scalability from device to cloud as well as enabling more secured system. Couple core expertise with the IP and the assets that we’ve acquired, such as Wind River, McAfee, Mashery, Aepona as well as internally developed IP from our SSG and labs R&D efforts, Intel is able to create significant value with integrated system up the stack, from devices to data center.

So, our strength and differentiation is based on our ability to take transistors and the assets that we’ve purchased — such as Wind River from an Operating System perspective, or a hypervisor — and couple those assets with the security-based IP we’ve acquired from McAfee as well as that we’ve acquired from our own research. We’ve created this offering that leverages the silicon technology all the way up the stack.

I think our strength is our strength. Period, full stop. We will continue to build assets and IP that differentiates us from the competition.

I don’t approach a customer that’s approaching other architectures — there are many other architectures. I go into the discussion first and foremost trying to understand what’s the problem the customer has, what’s the business and engineering issue we’re trying to solve, and then we have a discussion about what our strengths are. Our strengths are our strengths: I think they are formidable and we will continue to invest in them. But I’m not going to disparage the other guys.

VRW:You’ve mentioned before that the Internet of Things is happening first in Asia. Why is that?

RD: I think that Asia is an “IP incubation melting pot” of capability, intellect, and manufacturing that is unmatched in other places around the world.  There were 1000 people [at the Intel IoT event] today. This set of people create things. They create solutions: there were ISVs, SIs, hardware manufacturers… this melting pot of talent is what percolates and generates wonderful things.

That’s not to say that there is not innovation and invention in other parts of the world. But things happen and come to life first here. I think there is a desire for risk taking here. People are willing to take bets, and to run fast and run hard. It’s an exciting place to be because there is so much capability here.

VRW: For IoT to succeed — or any platform really — there needs to be open standards. The problem is, there are competing open standards (for example with wireless charging). In large IoT environments a certain degree of hardware and software agnosticism is required — which is the case for using open standards. What’s Intel doing to ensure that competing open standards do not hamper the development of IoT or provide an annoyance to end users?

RD: Our position is that we realize that we cannot do this on our own. We participate in industry consortia with other companies — the biggest companies in the world — so that the standards we are involved with and helping to define we aren’t doing alone. We have, for example, the Industrial Internet Consortium which has members that are the “who’s who”.

Our focus will be to continue to participate in consortia that has the best, brightest and biggest companies in the world so that the standards we are involved with become ubiquitous. So that we are able to deliver solutions that are interoperable, that are multi-vendor oriented. The only way we can describe how we’re doing that is name the consortia we’re involved in and those peers that sit on the consortia with us.

Open standards are always open, there just may be some differences. At the end of the day, it’s likely that one may win. Which one will win? I think the one that will win will be the one that has the most market momentum and mass behind it based on who’s participating — but that’s Rick’s opinion, not Intel speaking.

VRW: Thanks for your time.

This interview has been edited for clarity and length.

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ARM (NASDAQ:ARMH) today announced its new mbed IoT device platform which consists of three parts, primarily focused around software and software enablement. The goal of this platform is to take away from the complexities of building an IoT solution using an ARM Cortex-M processor.

ARM wants to help the IoT growth by allowing people building IoT devices to focus on unique features and differentiation rather than spend most of their time on how their silicon will work with an OS and how it will interact with other silicon.

The first, and biggest part of this new mbed IoT device platform is the inclusion of a free mbed OS for ARM Cortex-M processors. The OS already has built-in security, communication and device management features in order to enable quality and efficient IoT devices. The mbed OS already has built-in support for countless communications standards including 2G, 3G, CDMA and LTE as well as Wi-Fi, Bluetooth Smart, Thread, 802.15.4/6LoWPAN as well as HTTP, TLS/DTLS, CoAP, MQTT and Lightweight M2M. It will be available to key mbed partners this quarter and in devices in 2015.

This operating system should theoretically be more lightweight than some other IoT embedded operating systems and mbed should help unify the countless ARM Cortex-M products under a single OS. Currently, ARM has six different Cortex-M class processors in their product line, which means that with the mbed OS they can effectively and easily scale in almost any type of embedded IoT device imaginable. This announcement follows the company’s recent announcement of their most powerful Cortex-M processor, the Cortex-M7.

Another reason why this mbed IoT platform is so important is because ARM’s licensees are churning out Cortex-M processors faster than anyone could have imagined. Since 2005 alone over 8 billion Cortex-M-based chips have shipped. Out of that 8.6 billion, 4.6 billion of those took place in the past 18 months alone. This means that something like this was absolutely necessary from ARM’s perspective to make their platform to continue to be the platform of choice of IoT as they have Intel and Imagination breathing down their backs.

The second part of the mbed IoT platform is the mbed device server which is a licensable software product that ARM is offering to customers to help connect and manage devices. ARM claims that this will help provide a bridge between different protocols and APIs used for IoT used by developers. It effectively serves as a receiving end software platform for IoT devices for cloud services and the like. It also is designed to reduce the complexity of device and application management by eliminating the need for duplicate infrastructure for clients and servers.

Last but not least is the mbed.org website which will serve as a community to unify the more than 70,000 developers around the mbed platform. The website will serve as a repository for software components, a comprehensive database of hardware dev kits, reference apps and documentation. The community is already quite large and will enable ARM’s community to latch on and grow with it, creating an even bigger and more powerful community as a whole.

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The Cortex A series of CPUs from ARM (NASDAQ:ARMH) are mainly used in smartphones and tablets, and while ARMv8 has heralded a set of features geared toward energy efficiency, the A series processors are too powerful for embedded devices. For this segment, ARM has the Cortex M series of low-power processors, which are used to power devices like sensor hubs, fitness trackers, smart thermostats and connected home hardware.

One of the main differences between the Cortex M line from full-fledged mobile processors in the Cortex A series is that they do not feature a memory management unit, which is a controller that parses memory references to translate virtual memory addresses to physical addresses. The lack of this controller makes the M series not suitable to run an operating system like Windows, but they are ideal for devices that feature a RTOS, like Samsung’s (KRX:005935) Gear Fit fitness tracker.

Key features of the Cortex M7 include a 64-bit interconnect, which has two levels of cache for different memory operations. ARM is stating that the Cortex M7 delivers twice as much performance as its successor, the Cortex M4. The Cortex M7 will be able to handle more displays and control devices like drones as it is more responsive. The chip can also handle voice controls and has better touch sensitivity.

With a wide variety of third-part tool availability, ARM mentions that vendors looking to offer embedded solutions with Cortex M7 will not have any difficulty in migrating from earlier Cortex M processors. What is very clear from the announcement is that more and more vendors are interested in the wearable segment. MediaTek (TPE:2454) has launched its Labs initiative to allow hobbyist builders to build wearable devices, and Qualcomm (NASDAQ:QCOM) has several processors and technologies that are targeted at the IoT segment. Manufacturers are also actively launching new form factors that include connected home devices, like the Philips Hue.

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MediaTek (TPE: 2454) is the latest chipset vendor to provide tools to developers venturing into the Internet of Things segment, after the vendor announced that it is launching a MediaTek Labs initiative. The global initiative will see MediaTek provide software as well as hardware development kits to students, developers and any enthusiast users looking to build for the IoT segment.

Along with the development kits, MediaTek will offer guidance and support to developers, students and tinkers working on building wearable devices. With MediaTek Labs, hobbyist builders can buy the vendor’s LinkIt development platform for $79, which includes the MT2502 (Aster), a SoC designed for the wearable market. One of the main advantages offered by Aster is energy efficiency, which is achieved by entering a low power state which is activated when the device is idle, allowing wearables utilizing the SoC to deliver a battery life of four days. The processor is based on the ARMv7 architecture, and while it may not be able to drive a smartwatch running Android Wear, it is sufficient to drive other devices like fitness trackers. 

In addition to the Aster SoC, the LinkIt platform contains Wi-Fi (MT5931) and GPS (MT3332) chipsets, which makes it easier for hobbyists to build prototype devices. MediaTek is also offering a host of told and services on its Labs website for developers looking to get started in the IoT segment. 

MediaTek Labs’ efforts echo what other vendors in this space have been doing over the course of the year. Intel (NASDAQ:INTC) offers the Quark development platform for IoT devices, while Qualcomm (NASDAQ:QCOM) is building its own ecosystem of connected services through the AllJoyn platform. At this year’s IDF, Intel focused heavily on the wearable segment, talking about low-power processors which will power upcoming devices in this market. While MediaTek has been content to provide low-cost SoCs for Chinese manufacturers thus far, with its latest initiative, the vendor is signifying its intentions to venture into other territories and garner more attention from the Western world. 

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Apple has been pushing heath and fitness heavily with their most recent campaign for the iPhone. This can be most noticeable in their recent ad campaign featuring Apple’s iPhone and a series of fitness applications and accessories, which include a multitude of wearables. Their campaign states, “You’re more powerful than you think.”

So, what is Apple getting at here, exactly? That the iPhone, and Apple, can be at the very core of your physical and health success. Surely, there are plenty of people that are already using many of these devices on both their Android and iOS devices, so that doesn’t necessarily set Apple apart from the rest. What will set Apple apart from the rest is how they will very likely incorporate a lot of these different wearables’ functionality into a single device.

According to some of our sources, Apple is looking to make the iWatch a very health-centric device rather than one that is about accomplishing tasks and being an extended digital assistant (See: Google Now + Android Wear). However, there are concerns that Apple’s focus on health with the iWatch may actually hurt them and could have sent the company back to the drawing board in order to increase the overall daily ‘usefullness’ of the device outside of health applications. But even so, Apple is rumored to be purchasing certain types of sensors that will be able to measure your heart rate and sweat in addition to movement data. They’re also becoming ever more serious about how they test these sensors and the functionality of their platform as they’ve been rumored to be spending millions on medical equipment from various manufacturers. The idea that Apple is buying medical equipment should be a pretty ridiculous one, but once you think about how serious Apple is about launching their first new product line in over 4 years, you’ll realize that they don’t want to make any mistakes.

So, there’s no doubt that Apple’s iWatch is going to have a health focus. The real question will be whether or not the iWatch will be almost entirely health focused, or if they will try to build in Siri integration and make the iWatch both functional and health conscious. Because, right now, Google and Microsoft don’t really have much by ways of health applications of their own, let alone hardware. So if Apple can build an iWatch that is health focused, they may already have a significant leg up on Google and Microsoft. Now, if you add heavy Siri integration and other helpful features there’s a good chance that Apple could once again set the standard for a new type of technology, but this time in wearables.

As of right now, I don’t think anyone has any concrete idea of when Apple will launch the iWatch, but from what it looks like it is still majorly in development and we probably won’t see it until next year. Obviously, if they launch sooner, it will put a greater burden on their competitors, but as of right now most of the smart watches from their competitors either haven’t launched yet or lack a native health functionality. Samsung and Qualcomm certainly have the lead in terms of health focus with their smartwatches, but it remains to be seen how far they’ll go and how they’ll compete against an Apple iWatch.

The post Apple's iWatch to Have Major Health Focus, A Mistake? appeared first on VR World.

Intel reported stronger than expected quarterly earning for the second calendar quarter of 2014. In Q2 2014, Intel [NASDAQ:INTC] managed to report $2.8 billion in profit on $13.8 billion in revenue. As a result, they reported an earnings per share of $0.55 and generated $5.5 billion in cash from operations. They also paid out dividends of $1.1 billion and used $2.1 billion to repurchase 74 million shares.

Now, compared to the previous quarter Intel’s revenue of $13.8 billion was $1 billion or 8% higher than the $12.8 billion reported last quarter. Additionally, they reported an increase of nearly 5% to their gross margin to 64.5% up from 59.6%. This is surely going to make a lot of Intel’s investors very happy and should translate to much higher profits, which it has. Intel’s $2.8 billion is an increase of 45% from the $1.9 billion profit figure that they reported last quarter, which makes Intel’s stock look really good. Compared to the same period a year ago, Intel’s revenue was also up about 8% and their profit was up 40% from $12.8 and $2.0 billion respectively.

Intel Financials

Intel’s earnings for each business division showed strength in almost every single division except for Mobile and Communications. The PC Client Group revenue was $8.7 billion, up 9 percent sequentially and up 6 percent year over year. Since Intel is generally considered a bellwether for the rest of the PC industry, nearly 10% of growth quarter over quarter in the PC business is huge. The 6 percent growth over the same quarter a year ago also means that this is more than a cyclical increase and that the PC industry may be starting to rebound. Their Data Center Group reported $3.5 billion in revenue which was a healthy 14 percent sequentially and a whopping 19 percent. This has traditionally been Intel’s rock and most reliable source of reliable revenue and profit growth as the PC Client Group struggled over the past 2 years. In their Internet of Things Group (IoT) they reported revenue of $539 million, up 12 percent over the previous quarter and 24 percent other the same period a year ago. This looks great for Intel’s IoT business, but the truth is that a year ago there was almost no IoT business for anyone, so it seems a bit too early to start comparing to a year ago. But still, 12 percent over the previous quarter isn’t bad except for the fact that IoT is supposed to be one of the biggest growth sectors in semiconductors right now. And now for Intel’s black eye, the Mobile and Communications Group which reported a measly $51 million in revenue and reported a decrease of revenue from the previous quarter of 67 percent and a decrease compared to the same quarter a year ago of 83 percent. Their software and services operating segments reported revenues of $548 million, basically flat (down one percent) over the previous quarter and up 3 percent compared to the same quarter a year ago. Obviously this would be considered mostly flat, so many will mostly ignore this division when looking at Intel’s earnings.

Intel also reported their outlook for the third quarter of 2014 as well as the full year 2014. In the third quarter of 2014 they expect to report $14.4 billion in revenue, give or take $500 million. They also expect gross margin to increase to 66 percent, from 64.5 percent, plus or minus a few points. For the full year of 2014 Intel increased their outlook for revenue growth, expecting overall revenue growth of 5 percent, slightly higher than previous expectations (making investors very happy).

For Intel as a company, they have done very well this quarter and that is quite obvious. However, Intel’s mobility division that focuses on tablets and smartphones has taken an absolute beating and may indicate a serious weakness in their business plans. Intel has been promising better and better chips for tablets and smartphones, which may actually be true, however Intel has failed to gain serious design wins and as a result they only reported $51 million in revenue last quarter which is shameful compared to their biggest competitors, MediaTek and Qualcomm. I don’t know what Intel has planned to resolve these issues for the second half of 2014, but the second quarter of 2014 was an ugly one for Intel’s mobile division and that may scare some investors knowing how important it is to have a strong mobile presence.

The post Intel Reports Stronger Q2 2014, Raises Expectations appeared first on VR World.

There is a hardware contest being run by Hackaday that offers hardware hackers and makers to create something that is both open and connected. This device must be something that can enable others to use it for good and kind of create a cascade effect. A good example would be something like the Raspberry Pi, which has enabled tons of interesting usage applications and spurred tons of people to rethink how we use hardware. The awesome part about the Hackaday prize is that they are offering the winners of the contest to either take a trip out to space on the carrier of their choosing or $196,418 in cash, whichever they find more interesting. Obviously some people are going to be more interested in the cash if they’re committing time and resources to this project. But, there’s a good chance that space travel will not come in under $200,000 and who knows when you’ll have another opportunity to go to space. The contest itself is already running, but they are taking submissions up until August 4th, at which point they will no longer be taking any new entrants. You can check out the current entrants’ ideas over at Hackaday.io and see what you might come up against, or even what kinds of ideas this contest has brought forward. The best part about this whole Hackaday contest is that no matter what happens, there’s a very good chance that we’ll get an awesome product out of it that may once again change the way that we look at or use hardware. Just don’t forget that the entry deadline is August 4th if you’re interested in entering. The awards themselves for the best projects will be judged not only by their overall openness, but also on the actual physical hardware built and how it connects to the outside world (including the internet). This is another way of trying to spur the way that we use connected devices and how we connect our things to the Internet of Things. The judges that will be picking the award winners are also a virtual who’s who of the hardware hacking world’s most notable figures which includes; Andrew “Bunnie” Huang, Ronin, Jack Ganssle, The Ganssle Group, Joe Grand, Grand Idea Studio, Sprite_TM, Spritesmods.com, Limor “Ladyada” Fried, Adafruit, Dave Jones, eevblog.com, Elecia White, Logical Elegance, Ian Lesnet, Dangerous Prototypes. We wish all of the current (and hopefully future) entrants on their projects and we can’t wait to see what’ll come of it.

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Oracle used the Imagination Summit 2014 in Santa Clara, California to announce their affiliation with Imagination Technologies of the UK. The collaboration is aimed at enhancing Java for embedded applications, including those used for the Internet of Things (IoT) and to optimize Java for the MIPS CPU architecture.

Oracle shared their vision of the Internet of Things at the Imagination Summit 2014

The MIPS32 and MIPS64 systems will gain support through Oracle’s Java Development Kit (JDK) for developing, debugging, and monitoring Java applications. Developers can use Java in various applications including routers, wireless access points, residential gateways, networking equipment, and mobile devices. Krishna Yarlagadda, President of Imagination in North America, indicated that his company is extremely committed to growing the MIPS ecosystem.

Henrik Stahl, Oracle’s VP of Product Management for Java & Internet of Things, appeared on stage at the Imagination Summit 2014

Imagination’s BusBridge 2 Module features an easily configurable, high-performance, low latency MIPS core interface. It is designed for semiconductor manufacturing companies, ASIC developers, and system OEMs who want to quickly integrate a MIPS core into an AHB-based system. AHB is a bus protocol introduced in Advanced Microcontroller Bus Architecture version 2 from ARM.

Imagination’s BusBridge 3 family of synthesizable functional blocks help SoC designers integrate MIPS32 CPU’s into the most popular high performance chip bus hierarchies. The OCP2AXI bridge works to connect the MIPS32 OCP{Open Core Protocol) interface to an AXI system bus while the OCP Splitter, a small, synthesizable function block has an OCP input that expands to two OCP outputs. Downloads and User Guides are available on line. Imagination also provides a MIPS Developer Forum.

Additionally a joint effort between Oracle and Imagination will be aimed at improving Java on systems involving Imagination’s PowerVR graphics, a product for multimedia processing, including 2D and 3D graphics. The PowerVR architecture is based on Tile Based Deferred Rendering (TBDR), in contrast to Immediate Mode Rendering (IMR) used by most graphics engines in the PC and games console worlds.

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Intel’s first quarter earnings for 2014 were for the most part fairly tepid. Sure, they were able to post an earnings of $0.38 per share on $12.8 billion in revenue, however this only beat analyst’s fairly conservative expectations of $0.37 per share by $0.01. On $12.8 billion in revenue, Intel showed operating income of $2.5 billion and net income of $1.9 billion. Intel’s net income for Q1 2014 was down 5% over the same period a year ago, nothing to cheer about but still much better than previous declines. They also saw an increase in revenue of about $200 million, even though there was a slight decrease in profitability of about the same amount.

The truth is that Intel’s performance this past quarter was not anything especially exciting write about. The most exciting thing for most, however, was the fact that Intel was essentially flat. To many, that came as an indication of their stemming the tide of PC declines and growth in enterprise and server. Also, remember, that before this earnings report, Intel changed how they report their revenue for certain divisions based on new product groups. So now things are categorized under the following 5 categories:

• PC Client Group revenue of $7.9 billion, down 8 percent sequentially and down 1 percent year-over-year.
• Data Center Group revenue of $3.1 billion, down 5 percent sequentially and up 11 percent year-over-year.
• Internet of Things Group revenue of $482 million, down 10 percent sequentially and up 32 percent year-over-year.
• Mobile and Communications Group revenue of $156 million, down 52 percent sequentially and down 61 percent year-over-year.
• Software and services operating segments revenue of $553 million, down 6 percent sequentially and up 6 percent year-over-year.

If you look at their new break down of revenue (and profitability) per division, you can see that their PC Client Group is still the bulk of the company’s revenue followed closely by the Data Center Group. All of the others are still relatively at around $500 million or less in terms of revenue, and even less in terms of profitability towards Intel’s bottom line.

But if Intel wants to become a truly competitive company in the mobile space their Mobile and Communications Group is going to need to grow much faster rather than shrinking 52% sequentially and 61% year over year. Not just that, but at $156 million this is actually their smallest business segment which is a bit concerning when you think about how important Mobile and Communications are to Intel’s future.

Intel’s CEO Brian Krzanich said about their earnings, “In the first quarter we saw solid growth in the data center, signs of improvement in the PC business, and we shipped 5 million tablet processors, making strong progress on our goal of 40 million tablets for 2014. Additionally, we demonstrated our further commitment to grow in the enterprise with a strategic technology and business collaboration with Cloudera, we introduced our second-generation LTE platform with CAT6 and other advanced features, and we shipped our first Quark products for the Internet of Things.”

The truth is that Intel is buying their tablet share and it remains to be seen if that 40 million tablets for 2014 goal is really going to be worth it for Intel to effectively eat the profitability for the sake of penetration. Their lack of communications penetration is their biggest weakness and I’m not entirely sure it was a good idea for Intel to commit an entire division to IoT solutions without a solid definition for IoT even existing yet. There is no doubt that Intel is gungho on growth and expanding their product lines, but the real question is whether or not they can help reinvent the PC in ways that make it relevant while also making sure they are a serious player in the mobile computing AND communications front. Sure, they’ve landed themselves inside some of the Samsung Galaxy S5 phones, but their lack of consistent design wins is concerning to say the least. Qualcomm needs a serious and stable competitor and I’m not entirely convinced that Intel is there yet.

Since their earnings announcement, Intel is basically flat (was up 0.60% yesterday and gave up 0.40% over night).

The post Intel Reports First Quarter 2014 Earnings, Signs of Stability appeared first on VR World.

Woot.com, an online discount website owned by Amazon just released its latest ‘deal of the day’. And what a deal it is, slashing the price of an Galaxy Gear Smartwatch by 46%, from $349.99 to mere $159.99. Is it enough to kick the sale volume up?

Woot! now offers Galaxy Gear smartwatch for $159.99

As you can see on the screenshot above, you cannot order more than a single unit of the watch, but opening multiple accounts isn’t exactly a problematic thing to do. If you want to, of course.

By all accounts, Galaxy Gear failed to land on the sweet spot of tens of millions of Galaxy smartphone customers, which wasn’t helped by an utterly creepy and stereotypical advertising campaign which looks like it was created by a member of tech bro gang in a Starbucks somewhere in the new San Francisco. ‘Revenge of Geeks Creepers’, that is.

Still, $159.99 is just $10 more than a regular Pebble, which doesn’t feature a camera or a colored LCD screen (no touch capabilities either) but has a larger ecosystem (apps). If you own a compatible phone (Galaxy SIII, S4, S5, Note II, Note III or a similar Android 4.x running device), the $160 price tag does not look too bad for checking the technology out. The original price of $299.00 was simply overrated for a first generation product.

Naturally, you could wait until this Friday (April 11th) and get a Galaxy Gear 2 watch without camera for $199.99, or wait until the end of the month and get a camera-equipped model for of $299.99.

You can also watch our video review of the Galaxy Gear below

The post Woot Crashes the Price of Samsung Galaxy Smartwatch to $159.99 appeared first on VR World.