Last week, Qualcomm (NASDAQ: QCOM) held a press and analyst event in New York City, spread across the Plaza Hotel and the Hayden Planetarium. It was a combination of a wireless modem workshop with a 4K content push. The day began with presentations from Verizon, Ovum, JPR and Qualcomm. These presentations were followed up by a demo session showing off Qualcomm’s various wireless technological capabilities including their LTE Broadcast capabilities as well as WiGig, which was one of the focal technologies of the day. Later in the evening, Qualcomm held a press event with film makers to talk about 4K as well as the CTO of the MLB to talk about the importance of 4K to sports. Oh, and one of the guest film makers was none other than Guardians of the Galaxy Director, James Gunn.

Qualcomm’s presenters for the day were VP of Worldwide Marketing, Tim McDonough and SVP, Product Management at Qualcomm Raj Talluri.

Tim McDonough giving the opening presentation

Raj Talluri talking about the importance of Qualcomm’s wireless technologies

Most of these presentations covered the importance of technologies like LTE Broadcast (Verizon) and 4K video, with Jon Peddie’s presentation ensuring that you know that 4K is coming whether or not you like it. And he’s not wrong.

During the wireless demonstrations, Qualcomm showed off something that may be a taste of what’s to come with the integration of WiGig technology into their SoCs. The company formerly known as Wilocity has developed a very high throughput 60 GHz Wi-Fi technology also known as 802.11ad or WiGig. WiGig currently enables speeds of up to 2 Gbps, with the next generation doing 4 Gbps. At the demo room, Qualcomm showed off their upcoming Snapdragon 810 streaming a 4K video from one tablet to another, which would then display the 4K video on a TV in 4K. This is the first time they’ve shown the Snapdragon 810 SoC in public and the first time they’re showing 4K video streaming over WiGig with the Snapdragon 810.

WiGig Antennas and PCIe wireless card

Snapdragon 810 WiGig Test Device showing 802.11ad bandwidth while streaming 4K video

Currently, Qualcomm is the leading vendor of SoCs capable of creating 4K videos for consumers. It was the first to market with the Samsung Galaxy Note 3 and the Snapdragon 800. The Snapdragon 800 was the first chip that enabled 4K video recording and Samsung’s Galaxy Note 3 was the first phone to enable that. In fact, we took a video testing out that feature at this last CES just to test that out. In fact, at this moment, Qualcomm’s SoCs power 12 different Android devices that are capable of recording in 4K, which includes the featured phone of the night, the LG G3. In fact, two vendors that make these 4K capable phones, Sony and LG were on hand to give people hands on experiences with the LG G3, Sony Xperia Z3 and Z3 Compact.

The real key here is that Qualcomm is talking about 4K content creation to help satisfy the vacuum left by Hollywood. As of right now, there’s virtually no 4K content out there for people to enjoy on their 4K TVs unless they haven’t seen House of Cards or Breaking Bad before (both are available in 4K on Netflix). The reality is that 4K content creation on phones is already here and possible and that we already have TVs selling for under $999 that you can play that content on. Not to mention having 4K video quality means that you can always downsample and get even better quality 1080P and 720P videos as well.

The LG G3 was brought up a lot over the course of the press event in the evening, as Qualcomm had given both Nathan Silver and James Gunn LG G3 phones to use for 4K video recording. In fact, Nathan Silver made a quick and short film in 4K called “Family Affair” with the phone that Qualcomm gave him. Nathan Silver’s dad eventually came on stage and they talked about the short film, at which point James Gunn came on stage to talk with Tim about how 4K is important to him and how having a 4K phone is valuable for him in film making. Needless to say, none of them seemed disappointed with the LG G3’s 4K capabilities, especially when you realize that you can also play back and simultaneously zoom 4K footage as its playing back.

Tim McDonough with Nathan Silver and his dad.

Tim McDonough with James Gunn

Tim McDonough and Raj Talluri on stage with James Gunn and Nathan Silver talking about 4K movies and film making and doing Q&A to wrap up the event

To end the event, Qualcomm announced, with all of the men on stage, a new $25,000 contest for the best 4K video. All you have to do is the following:

Capture a 1-2min 4K Ultra HD video on an eligible Snapdragon powered device
Edit and Upload to your YouTube channel
Enter the contest with your video URL on the contest page

The post Qualcomm Wants to Lead Us to 4K appeared first on VR World.

According to Jon Peddie’s latest GPU marketshare numbers for Q1 2014, the add-in board market shrunk 0.8% year over year and a more expected 6.7% quarter over quarter. Most people expect GPU seasonality between Q1 and Q4 regardless of what year it is, but the 0.8% decrease year over year is still an indication of basically flat growth/slight shrinkage. Even though, this is significantly less than in laptops and the overall PC business in terms of shrinkage. for the GPU market as a whole, shipments were down 11.6% quarter-to-quarter, and down 4% compared to the same quarter last year. This is clearly a lot worse than what we’re seeing from the discrete add-in board market.

Additionally, much like we saw in laptop and desktop graphics, the add-in board market saw the complete elimination of two minuscule competitors and their market share. According to Jon Peddie Research’s estimates, the GPU market for add-in boards is now between AMD and Nvidia GPU, period. However, Nvidia was able to maintain their 65% market share over AMD’s 35% marketshare, meaning that over the course of the last quarter both companies effectively sold at the same rate as another, contrary to what some might lead you to believe. Total shipments decreased this quarter to 14 million units with both AMD and Nvidia reporting quarter to quarter shipments decreasing 6.6%.

This is still better, however than the 9% reduction seen in the overall PC market, indicating that desktop GPUs with add-in cards and add-in card sales overall are far less impacted by the shrinkage of the PC market than some analysts would lead people to believe.  However, GPUs are usually a pretty good indicator of future growth since many of these cards have to be purchased prior to their integration, which means that most PC vendors will likely see a fairly flat growth for the next quarter, which is basically in line with most predictions of PC shipments.

The post Desktop GPUs Shrunk in Q1, Nvidia Held Marketshare appeared first on VR World.

A small blog, but a big heart from its folding members - thank you guys!

As a second big thing I can inform you that with the dying hour of October, Folding@Home team 69864 (a.k.a. The Bright Side of IT) broke into Top 1000 teams. Even though there is only 18 active members, we’re almost all GPU powered and we managed to fold more than 4100 units, averaging 40K PPD (Points Per Day). But, the story does not end here. Given the fact that my personal wish for 2008 was exceeded two months before the year ended, my next target is that this team breaks into Top 500 by the end of the year.
Again, if you want to join us, you’re very welcome.
On a personal note, I will be moving from Mountain House to San Francisco (temporarily) this weekend, so there could be lack of updates on the blog. Due to my “fiscal outlook”, it seems that I will have to spend the winter in Croatia, but who knows where I’ll end up. All I know is that I want to give you the best information out there, and hopefully the new company will do just that.

Anyways, I will do my best to have articles ready for Monday… as I have an exciting week ahead.

The post A big thank you: 6K visitors, Top 1000 F@H Team appeared first on VR World.