Tesla Motors (NASDAQ: TSLA) unveiled its new Model S 70D Wednesday, an all-wheel drive electric car with a 0-60 time of 5.2 seconds and a 240 mile range at 65 mph.

This marks the removal of the Tesla Motors Model S as the company’s lowest end car, further enticing potential buyers. The car will mark a new chapter for the American car maker, ensuring its solid position as the leader in EV market is kept intact.

The new model comes with independently operational front and rear motors, allowing for superb traction and performance, combined with additional extras like the Autopilot hardware, navigation, blind spot detection and many other features. As with every Model S, the 70D will receive free over-the-air updates that add functionality and improve the driving experience for years to come. The updates received by Tesla Motors, available to current and future owners, may help providing additional range, potential new features and other items.

The new model will start at $75,000. In certain cases the Model S 70D will include additional fuel savings and incentives, which make the actual cost of owning Model S 70D about $55k over five years according to Tesla’s numbers (the average length of new car ownership). This is partly achievable, thanks to the Supercharging option included at no additional cost since the option is available included in the base price of this model shown.

The Tesla Model S 70D is available starting today. It is available in three new colors: Ocean Blue, Obsidian Black, and Warm Silver. The current color finishes are also available for ordering with this vehicle, giving would-be owners a nice selection overall.

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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.

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The well-known tire company Goodyear Tire (NASDAQ: GT) unveiled a very interesting prototype at the Geneva Motor Show.

The concept behind this prototype — which is far from going into production — could radically change the way we view car tires and car travel in the future. This concept, named “BHO3” – offers the possibility of charging the batteries of electric cars by transforming the heat generated by the rolling tire into electrical energy. This means, that under certain conditions, the car’s tires could actually charge the batteries of the vehicle. While the whole technology is rather new, the concept sounds profoundly promising all together.

The role of the car tires has always been to provide the safety and performance by adding better traction. Tires also allow for a smoother ride and take the hard hits of variable driving conditions the cars may encounter. In a nutshell they are the contact surface that the car has with the road. On the other hand, the technology of the tires remained stagnant in a lot of ways. Now, with Goodyear releasing its concept tires, dedicated to charging electric vehicles, we might see a big shift of focus for this often neglected part of the automotive culture entirely.

“These concept tires re-imagine the role that tires may play in the future,” said Joe Zekoski, Goodyear’s senior vice president and Chief Technical Officer, in a statement. “We envision a future in which our products become more integrated with the vehicle and the consumer, more environmentally friendly and more versatile.”

These tires would generate electricity through the action of materials in the tires themselves, reacting to the driving surfaces it encounters. The energy is created by heat when it flexes as it rolls during normal driving conditions, creating energy that can be transformed from one state to another, providing electricity. The materials used would optimize the tire’s electricity generation capabilities as well as its rolling resistance.

While Goodyear hasn’t released that much information about this potential groundbreaking technology, it is easy to see how such a solution would benefit would be range anxious drivers and help their electric vehicles achieve better range as well. Take a look at the video we’ve added below to find out more about this revolutionary tire concept. We’re sure some high-profile car manufacturers will take a rather compelling interest in this technology as well.

Now the question is, can Goodyear make this 3D rendering a reality? Only time will tell.

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Nvidia (NASDAQ:NVDA) reported fairly mixed numbers across the board for its fiscal Q3 2015 quarter, which is represented mostly by the calendar third quarter of the year.

In the third quarter, Nvidia reported a record $1.23 billion in revenues and profit of $173 million, which translates to an EPS of $0.31. This is compared to the previous quarter, where Nvidia saw $1.103 billion in revenue and $128 million in profit or an EPS of $0.22. Nvidia also improved over the same quarter a year ago even more significantly where that quarter only had $1.054 billion in revenue and $119 million in revenue  or an EPS of $0.20. Nvidia saw both revenue and profitability increase double digits for both quarter over quarter and year over year, which should make any investor in Nvidia very happy. The margins did slip almost a whole percentage point, but they also significantly improved revenue and profitability.

Nvidia’s revenue increase to $1.23 billion can be attributed to growth across the board for the company in multiple business segments. Revenue for its GPU business grew 13% from the previous quarter and notebooks grew 36%, fueled by the release of its new Maxwell GTX GeForce consumer cards and mobile gaming GPUs. Nvidia states that mobile gaming notebooks more than doubled from a year ago, indicating much stronger PC gaming growth than analysts had been dooming and glooming.

Tesla GPU sales increased strongly, representing another record quarter for revenue driven mostly by large project wins in GPU compute with cloud providers and government customers. The company also saw Quadro revenue continue to be strong, also helped along by its launch of the new Quadro line, including the K5200, which is squarely aimed at Adobe users. As a result, the whole business unit saw a 13% increase in revenue due to the Maxwell release and seasonal increase in consumer PCs, which is going to only continue into the next quarter.

Tegra processors grew 51 percent from a year ago, mostly led by automotive infotainment systems, mobile devices, embedded systems and SHIELD tablet sales. Automotive infotainment revenue alone nearly doubled year over year, which can strongly be attributed to Tegra’s renewed strength compared to last year. As a whole the business unit saw revenue go up 11% sequentially. Nvidia has won some seriously significant automotive design wins, including Honda and will create a very good baseline of sales for Nvidia in the Tegra business unit regardless of mobile device seasonality.

Nvidia also saw a $66 million license payment from Intel from their settlement and licensing agreement.

Nvidia guided its revenue to be about $1.2 billion, essentially flat with the last quarter. They also expect margins to stay about the same if not increase a bit from the last quarter and operating expenditures to increase slightly. Overall, next quarter should really be a fantastic one for Nvidia as it is traditionally the strongest quarter for most of their consumer products and they are currently putting the hurting on AMD in consumer GPU sales, they are also in the newly announced HTC Nexus 9, which means that Tegra shipments should be very good in the fourth quarter and should drive up its profitability in the business segment. Overall, Nvidia’s expectations for Q4 are very conservative and there’s a very good chance they will outperform significantly.

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It is said that rising automotive sales is a sign of a booming economy, especially if it involves luxury and novelty cars. In China, Tesla has already made a foothold, launching online retail stores for 38 cities across the country. However, while Tesla has traditionally only sold its vehicles through its own website, it will start selling the Model S through Alibaba’s (NYSE:BABA) Tmall e-commerce service starting November 11th.

That particular date is called Singles Day in the country or “Guanggun Jie,” which celebrates singlehood. Businesses have joined in on the festivities, however, and with sales and promotions, Singles Day also marks a time for discounts and promotions.

Buyers can pay CNY 50,000 ($8,200) as reservation via tesla.tmall.com, after which the fund is held in escrow under the user’s Yuebao interest-bearing mutual fund account. The Model S starts at CNY 734,000 ($121,000) — significantly lower than comparable sports cars sold in China. Tesla says buyers can then pay the balance upon pick up, which can be in as short as five days. Dealerships in Beijing, Shanghai, Hangzhou, Chengdu, or Shenzhen, serve as pick up points.

Tesla’s Tmall online store also offers other items, like clothing, caps, mugs, toolboxes and blankets. It can be noted that the partnership between Tesla and Alibaba actually started in April this year, when Tesla started accepting payments through Alipay for Chinese buyers. Other automotive brands have also offered similar deals and arrangements through Tmall, including Volkswagen (OTCMKTS:VLKAY) and General Motors (NYSE:GM).

Tesla’s direct marketing and selling method has been in the news lately, with Michigan effectively blocking sales within its jurisdiction, citing the need to “ensure that all automotive manufacturers follow the same rules to operate in the State of Michigan.” As Michigan law will now require Tesla to sell through dealerships (if it wishes to), that will require significant investment, which will result in price increases for buyers in that state.

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Today in Michigan Republican Governor Rick Snyder signed a bill into law that effectively stop Tesla from selling in the state with its direct buying business model.  This is a blow to consumers in Michigan who should have the right to choose how they purchase their vehicles.

The bill has language that will stop Tesla from using its direct sales to customers in Michigan.  This amendment was added by Repbulican State Senator Joe Hune, who used the loophole to add it to the bill, without being able to be up for debate or inquiry.  This was backed by GM, who said today ““We believe that House Bill 5606 will help ensure that all automotive manufacturers follow the same rules to operate in the State of Michigan; therefore, we encourage Governor Snyder to sign it.”.  Since the start of Tesla they have only sold .625% of GM’s first nine months of 2014  sales figures of 4,000,000 vehicles.

It may come with little surprise that Joe Hune has the Michigan Auto Dealers Association as one of his largest backers, to the tune of $14,400.  The wife’s firm also lobbies for the dealers, making things look even worse. In the gubernatorial race Governor Snyder is only leading by a very slim margin.  Likely if Governer Snyder did not pass the bill he would no doubt have been the target of attack ads that could place his lead in jeopardy.

This is bad for consumers, who should have a choice in how they buy a vehicle.  Buying from Tesla means that people could get what they want and pay the price for the car, not dealer mark ups or added equipment.  Some of the new D model Teslas running past $100,000 and  are in limited supply.  This would mean that dealers could possibly mark up the vehicle more than $10,000, which would not be a stretch of the imagination by any means.  This is money that dealers want to get their hands on and are trying to force on Tesla around the country.

Tesla released a statement saying: “By striking a single, but critical, word from MCLA 445.1574(14)(1)(i), the law governing franchise relations in Michigan, the dealers seek to force Tesla, a company that has never had a franchise dealership, into a body of law solely intended to govern the relationship between a manufacturer and its associated dealers. In so doing, they create an effective prohibition against Tesla opening a store in Michigan.  This amendment goes even further. It also seeks to prevent Tesla from operating a gallery in Michigan that simply provides information without conducting sales. We could even be barred from telling people about our car.”

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No, we aren’t talking about a Tesla Motors museum. We are talking about a Tesla Museum that Matthew Inman, the creator of The Oatmeal comics is building to commemorate Nikola Tesla, the Serbian-Croat inventor that captured the minds of millions of people around the world, including the minds of Matthew Inman and Elon Musk.

Originally, Inman had written a comic about how awesome Nikola Tesla was and continued to write comics about him and the old research facility that Tesla had kept in New York state, including its state of disrepair. Eventually, he decided that the facility needed to be repaired and restored and to make it into a museum. That sparked a Tesla Museum IndieGoGo campaign back in 2012, which raised a whopping $1.3 million. In addition to that money, New York State agreed to match them for that same amount (up to $850,000) — putting the total raised for the Tesla Museum at $2.1 million, even though they only needed to raise $1.7 million.

Inman did state that, “Even if we raise the full amount and end up with $1.7 million, this isn’t enough to build an actual Tesla Museum / science center. But it will effectively put the property into the right hands so it can eventually be renovated into something fitting for one of the greatest inventors of our time.” So, he knew that they were going to need more funding to really build the Tesla Museum.

Tesla Motors

Then, Inman got excited about his new Tesla Motors Model S electric car and asked Elon Musk if he would donate to help build the museum, which he agreed to donate $1 million and a Tesla Motors Supercharging station. This put the total projects funding somewhere around $2.7 million, which apparently wasn’t enough to built the museum and science center in addition to buying the property and such. So, now we’re at this new round of funding with a new Indiegogo campaign, this time giving people the opportunity to have their names etched into a brick on the walls of the museum, to help finish paying for its building.

The goal for this campaign is actually far less than the previous one, with only $250,000 as the target goal and only within day of being online it has already reached $150,000 out of $250,000. However, Inman warns that this is nowhere near the end of this project as the Tesla Musuem will need a lot of work to ultimately reach an acceptable appearance and functionality.

Inman states that ultimately, they need to raise somewhere near $10 million in total to pay for everything to be fixed, replaced, or rebuilt. Right now, their goal is to help pay for fixing the roof to protect Tesla’s lab from the environment of Long Island New York during the winter. The property itself is in a relatively expensive area, which explains why they needed so much money to buy the property and keep it from being torn down.

They are slowly making their way to $10 million, but I suspect that there will be a chance that they could get another $1 million from this campaign alone. Inman stated that he expects to have future campaigns to pay for future phases of the project that will ultimately land them at the $10 million goal and saving the entire facility and making it a functional science center and museum.

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Yesterday, Tesla (NASDAQ:TSLA) announced that the company would be placing its new Gigafactory in Nevada, where it had already broken ground and many believed it would ultimately place the Gigafactory. And during the Gubernatorial debate in California, between sitting Governor Jerry Brown and challenger Neel Kashkari the topic of Tesla’s Gigafactory was brought up as a lost business opportunity for California by Kashkari.

Kashkari stated, “We need to bring good jobs to California. Tesla is one of many examples of this failure of this Administration.” Then, Governor Brown followed by saying, “It’s pretty clear what happened. We fought hard for Tesla, but Tesla wanted a massive upfront cash payment that I don’t think would be fair to the taxpayers of California.” He then goes on to talk about how when Tesla wanted to build their car they picked a factory in California and that they continue to maintain their presence in California. In fact, Jerry Brown neglected to mention that Tesla has been slowly increasing hiring for their NUMMI factory in Fremont, California as they continue to ramp their production of the Tesla Model S and upcoming Model X.

Now, getting to Nevada itself, the Nevada state legislature had already approved the Tesla tax deal ahead of the announcement and it appears as though Tesla had pretty much already made their decision when they announced that they had broken ground in Nevada but were still confirming locations. So, if anything, there’s a very good chance that the cash payment they were looking for would have been to sweeten the deal over what Nevada had already approved.

Tesla Nevada Tax Deal Breakdown

As you can see from the breakdown above, Tesla would be allowed to operate in Nevada essentially tax free for a decade, something that makes the long term profitability of this Gigafactory incredibly easy and encourages Tesla to try to generate as much profit as possible.

So, Governor Brown of California would have been forced to convince the state legislature to not only approve something similar to nevada but also to sweeten the deal with some sort of upfront cash deal as he had indicated in during the debate. He did not harbor any ill will towards Tesla, encouraging them to do well in Nevada because the rest of the company’s operations are still located in California and the better they do, the better the State of California does and they will inevitably hire more people and contribute more to the tax base of the state. The Gigafactory and the accompanying 6000 jobs would without a doubt be beneficial to the state economy, but at a very high cost to tax payers.

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Tesla Motors [NASDAQ:TSLA] today reported their earnings for the second quarter of 2014, beating many analysts expectations by delivering a record 7,579 Model S vehicles in the quarter as well as producing a record 8,763 Model S vehicles in the quarter. Non-GAAP earnings were $16 million dollars (broken down to $0.11 EPS), while GAAP earnings (loss) was a loss of $62 million or a loss of $0.50 cents per share. Tesla Motors also cautioned that they expect the third quarter revenue and overall production to be lower than initially expected due to the retooling of the Fremont NUMMI plant for higher volume Model S and new Model X production. They also said that this new Model S/ Model X assembly line is planned to begin operation next week. However, they did not change their guidance for the year, as they expect that the fourth quarter, Q4 2014, should make up for any lost production in Q3. As such, they are still on track for their expected figure of 35,000 deliveries in 2014.

They also talked about the groundbreaking at the Reno, Nevada site for the Tesla Gigafactory, however they still have made it clear that the site has not been finalized yet, even though they’ve broken ground in Nevada. On the topic of reduced production, they still expect to product 9,000 vehicles in Q3, and without the retooling they expect that they would be producing 11,000. They expect to deliver 7,800 vehicles in Q3, and without the retooling and production stoppage they expect that they would have delivered nearly 9,500 vehicles, which may explain investors’ current unhappiness with the stock. Tesla’s stock is currently down 2 1/2 percent, on top of being down 2 1/2 percent in normal trading. Obviously, most of this is not really news, but Tesla is now quantifying exactly how bad their expected retooling slowdown is. Elon Musk will very likely calm investors down with some news about the Model X deliveries or increased average sale price as a result of shipping the Model X in Q3 and Q4 of this year.

The news that Panasonic is also investing in the Gigafactory is also big news for Tesla Motors, but that officially came out yesterday which may partially have been to try to stem the blow from reduced Q3 product numbers. But even so, Tesla clearly expects to deliver as many vehicles as they had promised, which makes the long term outlook better than the quarterly one. Not to mention, Tesla Motors has already beaten earnings expectations for Q2 2014, even though they’re still technically operating on a GAAP net loss (which will likely change by the end of this year).

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As we all know, Tesla is looking to build a battery Gigafab somewhere in the southwest of the US. Tesla [NADSAQ:TSLA] has not quite decided on a location quite yet, however there is a very short list of a few states and that list continues to narrow. Obviously, many states would like Tesla to build their fab in their states, but the gigafab will have to be close enough to Tesla’s factory in Fremont that they can still get their own batteries into their cars reasonably easily. As such, I suspect that the gigafab will very likely be put somewhere in Nevada, Arizona, New Mexico or California. Originally, California had been out of the running for the battery gigafab but it appears to be back in the running once again.

Nevada and Arizona seem the most logical because they won’t be too far from the Fremont NUMMI plant and they will still be close enough to a major port that batteries can be shipped out or moved quickly. There are tons of factors in this equation, and one of them is how Tesla is going to fill this gigafab’s capacity. Because, right now, Tesla is only using about 50% of their capacity at the NUMMI plant in Fremont and they’ve been building cars there for years. Eventually, I suspect they will reach capacity once they start to produce the Model X in addition to the Model S. And there’s a very good chance that the upcoming Model 3 will very likely require an entirely new factory.

Now, getting to Panasonic’s involvement. Tesla and Panasonic have reached a deal for Panasonic to invest in Tesla’s gigafab (Tesla calls it a gigafactory). Nikkei reports that Panasonic says they will invest between $200 million and $300 million in the factory, and an official announcement is expected by the end of the month. Panasonic had already signed an LOI (letter of intent) to join the battery factory in May, but there were doubts it would go through as the company went under a major restructuring. Panasonic is already the main supplier of battery cells for Tesla, so this arrangement is not between two companies that are strangers. In fact, these two companies are very close partners and are already doing heavy business together. Tesla said that the total fab/factory cost could be as high as $5 billion, partially driven by its own sustainable design and the sheer size of the factory. Tesla expects that they will break ground on the gigafab/gigafactory later this year and expect to reach volume production by 2020, manufacturing enough battery packs for about 500,000 cars a year.

Update: Tesla has officially signed the agreement with Panasonic.

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In case you haven’t heard, Tesla just confirmed a story originally posted by AutoExpress in the UK that they will be indeed naming the vehicle that follows the Model X by the name Model 3. This is unfortunately a result of the fact that Ford blocked Tesla from naming their next car after the Model X by the name Model E. If that had happened, Tesla would have been able to sell a Line of Model S, Model E and Model X vehicles, also known as the SEX Models of cars when you combine all three letters of the different Tesla models.

The Model 3 still technically allows for that if you use ‘leet speak’ and type SEX out as S3X instead. The guys at AutoExpress had an extensive interview with Tesla’s founder, Elon Musk who gave a lot of details about the new Tesla model as well as the motivations behind the naming and who they were looking to compete against. After all, the new Model 3 will be targeted towards the $35,000 price range of vehicles which puts it squarely in the BMW 3 Series’ court, much like the Model S did with the 5 and 7 series.

In their interview with Elon Musk he said, “The new model is going to be called Model III, we’ll have three bars to represent it and it’ll be S III X!” However S3X looks a lot more like SEX than SIIIX and I think we can all agree that Elon Musk is smart enough to know this. The new Model III or Model 3 will be unveiled in 2016 and should be on sale by 2017 and will likely have an entirely new platform rather than a scaled-down version of what’s currently in the Model S and planned for the Model X. The new technology, according to AutoExpress, will be the brainchild of Tesla’s British engineering chief Chris Porritt, formerly of Aston Martin.

Musk also announced that Tesla was planning to setup an R&D facility in the UK and that it could be operational in time for involvement in the Model 3’s development. The Model 3 is also rumored to be 20% smaller than a Model S and will likely use batteries from Tesla’s planned Gigafactory which has yet to be built. The Gigafab still hasn’t been placed yet in terms of location but there’s a very short list. The new Tesla will also have a range of about 200 miles and still have good performance, like the Model S.

Tesla also announced plans to update the Tesla Roadster, the company’s first car, with a new battery pack that would extend its range from 245 miles to about 400 miles per charge, enabling a Los Angeles to San Francisco trip, non-stop. Personally, I fell in love with Tesla with the Roadster, so if that car can be had with a new battery pack and improved range, it may still be more attractive to many than the Model S, Model X or Model E. Also, they didn’t give many specifics but it appears that they will be offering this upgrade to existing owners of the roadster since they went out of production a few years ago.

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Tesla is probably one of the most unique companies in the world, time and time again they’ve proven to us that they simply aren’t what we think they are. First, everyone believed that they were a car company, but they proved that they were a technology company first and a car company second. And now, they’ve once again changed what we believe to be a technology company by freeing their patents and making them available to anyone that wishes to use them, in good will.

In a blog post titled, All Our Patents Are Belong To You (a play on the geeky “All Your Bases Are Belong to Us” Meme) Elon Mus, Telsa’s Founder and CEO, basically talks about how the company once had a wall of patents hanging in the halls of Tesla’s Headquarters in Palo Alto and that they have since been removed. He talks about how the company is doing this for the sake of the open source movement and the advancement of the electric car, and ultimately, the environment. This move is sure to worry investors of Tesla’s stock, who put part of their value in the company’s stock in all of the patents that it currently holds (or held?). Currently, based on how the stock performed yesterday and how its performing in pre-trading hours, the stock does not appear to be affected, yet.

Why? Because this is part of Tesla’s grander vision. They know that they can design and manufacture cars better than any of their competitors and just because their competitors have free access to their patents doesn’t mean that they can build better cars than Tesla. Additionally, and even more importantly, it will spur demand for Tesla’s battery technologies and the need to have them manufactured, you know maybe in some sort of a battery Gigafab? If anything, this will enable more companies to utilize different Tesla technologies and to bring more partners onboard to work with Tesla on improving the electric car industry.

It could also work in Tesla’s favor to promote their own proprietary technologies as standards since they don’t require any licensing. This would mean that people could build Tesla ‘superchargers’ into their charging stations and it would not only widen the network of chargers across the world, but it would also improve the value of owning a Tesla.

There’s no denying that this move is a risky one, but I believe that ultimately it is a very smart one and it helps solve Tesla’s problem of not having enough demand to build a battery Gigafab and make it profitable. After all, Tesla sees themselves as a battery technology company first and foremost, not a car company. So, this is clearly in line with their long term strategy.

This could also encourage current or future partners to want to work with Tesla to build batteries since they won’t have to pay for licensing the technology. Maybe Toyota will rethink moving to hydrogen fuel cell and move back to using battery based electric vehicles. Some may worry about how Tesla’s current partnerships may suffer from these developments, but the truth is that most of them are buying batteries directly from Tesla, which means that there isn’t really much licensing revenue that Tesla has to worry about losing, which may also have been a factor in the decision.

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Toyota has announced that they would be moving away from Tesla’s battery technology, which they were originally one of the first supporters in Tesla’s battery technology and took a 3% share (worth about $690 million) of the company in addition to adopting their battery technology. Keep in mind that currently, Tesla manufactures battery technology for Toyota and Mercedes and is in the process of building a $5 billion gigafab in order to increase their battery capacity. So, while Tesla is looking to expand their battery manufacturing capacity, one of their closest partners is moving away from Tesla’s tech.

Toyota is claiming that they are moving towards a new alternative energy standard which has long been considered to be less feasible than electric power, hydrogen fuel cell. Companies like Honda and Toyota have been toying with hydrogen fuel cell and electric car technology for the past few decades with a few prototypes here and there, but ultimately little to no commercial traction. However, it seems like Toyota isn’t particularly interested in the current model with electric cars where new charging stations need to be installed at users’ homes, work and places that they go. Toyota appears to be more interested in the ‘gas station’ model where people would simply refuel with hydrogen rather than waiting for a charge. So, Toyota recently created the FCV Concept which was announced at CES and ultimately showed where Toyota had been looking to move for 2014 and beyond.

Toyota FCV Concept

While I don’t think anyone can definitively say whether or not Toyota’s decision to move away from Tesla’s battery technology is necessarily a good one, Toyota is still the #1 seller of hybrid and plug-in hybrid vehicles and that’s still a whole lot of batteries that need installing. I personally understand why someone would look at electric cars as not-so-green technology considering the amount of energy necessary to create those batteries and the source of a lot of the power that charges them. However, I believe that we may ultimately see a combination of hydrogen fuel cell technologies alongside electric car technologies much like we have diesel and gasoline engines which ultimately are both combustion engines but they accomplish combustion via different types of fuel.

Hopefully this isn’t too much of a blow for Tesla, with Toyota moving away from their battery tech. Perhaps once Tesla launches a more affordable electric car and the Model X they will be able to spur enough battery demand on their own so that companies like Toyota aren’t as critical to them anymore.

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As we had reported, Nvidia announced very strong preliminary earnings for the fiscal first quarter of 2015, calendar Q1 2014. They were supposed to announce their earnings today, May 8th, however someone had mistakenly sent the preliminary earnings announcement to 100 internal users and they decided to make those figures public to avoid any potential insider trading issues.

In terms of Nvidia’s earnings [NASDAQ:NVDA] themselves, the company reported for their fiscal first quarter of 2015, which is actually the first calendar quarter of 2014, earnings of $136 million on $1.1 billion in revenue, which is down sequentially from the fourth quarter where Nvidia is traditionally their strongest. As a result, it is expected to see that their revenue was down 4% quarter over quarter and profit down the same amount. In fact, it is actually really good to only take a 4% quarter over quarter reduction from your strongest quarter, most companies generally see a much larger decrease because of how big their third and fourth quarters are for their business. So, then, it comes as no surprise that when compared to the same quarter a year ago, Nvidia was actually up 16% in terms of revenue ($954 million last year vs. $1,102 this year) and 85% in terms of profitability, which is HUGE. Nvidia took in $77.9 million in profit in their first quarter last year, compared to $136 million this year which accounts for the 85% GAAP increase. Now, if you look at their non-GAAP EPS, then you’ll see that it is a slightly more moderated 61% increase, but even so, it indicates Nvidia is strong as ever, even with some weaker business units.

GAAP EPS were $0.24, up 85% from $0.13 a year ago and down 4% from $0.25 in the previous quarter, and non-GAAP earnings were $0.29, up 61% from $0.18 and down 9% from $0.32 in the previous quarter. Nvidia also saw their gross margin grow to 54.8 % from the previous quarter’s 54.1 % to the same quarter a year ago’s 54.3.

Nvidia Quarterly Revenue by Business Unit

As you can see above, Nvidia’s revenue in their GPU business was actually down quarter over quarter, considering the seasonality of GPU sales, but still up 14% year over year. This is primarily because of Nvidia’s renewed strength in their mobile GPU business in laptops where they saw their strongest marketshare since 2010.  They also saw some renewed strength in their Tegra processor division, which saw growth thanks to their automotive design wins which are now shipping inside Audi’s vehicles. This is combined with Nvidia’s continued strength in their Quadro and Tesla business which has continually buoyed the company’s profitability for the past few years and appears to continue to do so, but to a lesser degree this quarter. Overall revenue was up 16% year over year, meaning that Nvidia continues to improve their strength especially with their high-end products where they saw growth as high as 50%. And even though notebook sales and volumes went down, Nvidia still saw growth in their side of the business, selling the dedicated GPU.

The good thing for Nvidia is that they’ve diversified the placement of their Tegra business with smartphones, tablets and automotive. For their competitors, who are more mobile-heavy, they are experiencing much better growth in their mobile business because of their exposure in automotive in addition to tablets and smartphones. Even though, realistically, Nvidia is still needing a lot of help with their smartphone design wins when compared to their competitors. Perhaps, with Tegra K1 they will get much better pull with Tegra than they did with the Tegra 4 SoC.

Nvidia’s outlook for the next quarter are effectively flat in Q2, in terms of both revenue and operating expenses. As a result of today’s announcements and the company’s outlook, the shares of NVDA are actually trading down 3%, which is disappointing considering the fact that their outlook isn’t necessarily bad and they weren’t necessarily doing poorly.

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Based on his article, which speaks about the death of high-end PC computers (neatly, some years after Rahul sold his own boutique PC manufacturer to HP for a large sum of dead presidents), the world is going to evolve into small and neat things. And that is a nice pitch to launch a product like the upcoming Blackbird 003, as insinuated in a follow-up post.

And this is where it hit me. The perception of human species is that we’re an exclusive kind. One cannot co-exist with another, starting in kindergartens, throughout school, rivalry between brothers/sisters in a family or nations – does not matter, we all think of ourselves as God/Allah/Manitou-given right to exterminate the opponent because “we’re better”. However, when we look at the world in general, we see that everything is inclusive, even our position in the food chain. We cannot be different, because we would belong to a different position in the food chain, not on top of it. We are predators (Orca the killer whale is also a mammal, so don’t pull that argument that we’re cute as dolphins), we take all the best qualities, them being good or bad, and use them for our own interests. However, we do not cancel each other out. It is the competition that drives us to the best or worst of our potentials, and it does not matter who comes second, it is the matter of who makes the best product, that being your performance in a family, or a company.

The IT industry – error in global economy DNA
Factor of inclusiveness comes to life the moment you walk into the world of IT industry. This industry is best described as “disruptive”, because it continuously shakes up the world order, like it or not. We change the level playing field in every industry that we touch, that being weapons of our own destruction, or tools of our own creation. Now, why all of a sudden this industry is turning into an exclusive one, or just keeps talking about exclusiveness?

For starters, a lot of my mainstream colleagues are now writing about Apple products like nothing else exists in the world. For starters, Apple did not invent multi-touch nor does it own the technology. But, Apple is the first company that took the existing technology and did a brilliant job to create currently the best interface between humans and machines.

Tomorrow brings a whole another ballgame of alternative interfaces that will change the way how we communicate with the digital world. Perceptive Pixel, Dragon Systems/Nuance, Google Voice-activated search, and E-Plus Speech-to-Text (SMS) technologies – all of these companies are bringing technologies that are utterly brilliant, but in the end, they will be adopted by other companies. Following exclusive logic, all of these companies will keep technologies to themselves, regardless of Google being an American company, E-Plus a German mobile operator, Dragon a small UK company that exchanged more hands (corporations) than Microsoft has employees… but all of these companies bring stuff that will be adopted by other companies and they will deliver their stuff.

At the end of the day, we all will benefit – smaller and big companies, but only those that think outside the box.

What a Ferrari F1 car has to do with my car?
In order to be able to draw parallels with current situation, let’s compare computers to cars, since both share emotional similarities. There is a world crisis in car sales, as a consequence of recession. But, let’s take a deeper look into numbers, shall we? Big Three in US are in trouble, because they have millions (sadly, not exaggerating) of unsold cars. Why? Because people don’t want to buy them. Car industry missed the way what car drivers’ desire and that was punished with a dramatic decrease in sales… from makers of bog standard automobiles.

No wonder, you might add – because these cars don’t give us that buzz, that emotion. Now, let’s take a look into the world of supercars… are the sales down? Judging by the appearance of numerous supercars manufacturers, the answer is a very loud – NO. Ferrari increased its production from 4999 cars/annum in 2005 to 6700 cars in 2008, followed by 7500 cars in 2009. Current leadership of the company told yours truly that they won’t increase production for more than 10,000 cars a year, because they want to keep the exclusivity. Then again, they told me the same thing back in 2005, so don’t hold your breath. Porsche makes 80,000 cars/year, and they plan to pass the 100,000 mark with the introduction of baby SUV and a four-door limo. Crisis? What crisis?

I won’t even explain how start-ups companies like Tesla, Carbon Motors and many others are preparing the stage for either a takeover, or big ones “stealing” a lot of ideas from their 2010 cars. Let’s move forward. In the past five years, more supercar manufacturers appeared than in 10 years between 1990 and 2000. Whoever heard about companies such as British Atom or German Gumpert? Yet, these manufacturers are finding their customers than GM or Ford. Different volume? Certainly. Profitability? Well… if GM was any smart and produced real sport versions of their cars, they would not be in such a doodle. Honda Type-R was a stuff legends were made from, yet their current Civic Type-R is a heavy and non-responsive PoS of a car. What happened to sales? You’ve guessed it. In today’s world, we’re pampered by dream visions wherever we go. These marketing visions make our emotions work and make us want things. In all honesty, can a Chevy Tahoe make us drool? Hardly. It’s a workhorse, regardless how you like present it. Range Rover Sport or chrome alloys on Tahoe are nothing else but “pig with a lipstick”.

Getting back to the world of computers, did Dell, IBM, HP, Gateway and others really thought they could continue to sell beige boxes forever? The answer is very simple – NO.

HP had to buy VoodooPC, Dell had to buy Alienware, and Acer had to buy Gateway, eMachines. Why? Because all of these companies need to generate buzz around their products. Raise hands who want to buy “beige or maybe grey” PC with “ultra-interesting” 19″ LCD display (connecting to PC with analog D-SUB connector, DVI cable is more expensive) and a beige PS/2 keyboard (still have on stock) that will change color the moment you touch it?

What happened after these acquisitions? HP launched all-carbon fiber Envy 133 and more importantly, All-in-One PC with a massive 22″ or 25.5″ touchscreen. Dell implemented Alienware DNA in its XPS series while keeping the company intact (and learned to live with the fact that there are tens of thousands of people want to buy their screens, but not interested in their computers). Gateway launched a sold out notebook which specs are now emulated by ASUS, Toshiba and others. The list goes on.

How to create an industry – sandboxes anyone?
At the dying years of 20th century, the need for better coolers created a whole new industry – premium cooling that became premium cases. Could you imagine Antec Skeleton, Cooler Master Stacker, Cosmos Black Edition, and Blackbird 002 – or imagine that a Ferrari-designer Pininfarina worked with Spire to create a design case for 70 greenbacks. And all of that happened because a small group of people went nuts and overclocked Celeron 300A to 450 MHz and Duron 650 to 1.1 GHz and started to build systems around it (sorry, omitted Athlon 550 and 650 to 950 courtesy of legendary “Gold Finger” device).

This grassroots movement turned into an industry of premium components, yielding companies such as Corsair, OCZ, Mushkin from the world of system memory, BFG, Diamond, EVGA, XFX, Sapphire in the world of graphics cards, Extreme Edition and FX processors from Intel and AMD and completely changed the way how Dell, HP, Acer, ASUS and others market their computers.

Tesla Supercomputer is the latest example of taking an underground movement and creating an industry. Five years from now, every scientist will have a minimum of 100 TFLOPS on his desktop, and supercomputers will become 10-20-40 PFLOPS machines capable of solving world’s greatest problems. Because of who? Because a group of young doctors of science took four gaming cards and turned a gaming machine into a processing monster for computational topography http://fastra.ua.ac.be/en/specs.html and inspired Nvidia to launch an ecosystem around Tesla cards for aspiring scientists.

Would that ever happened if there weren’t for gamers who demanded more and more realistic graphics in computer games, forcing companies to turn regular video processing chips with some texturing power into TFLOPS monsters that eat CPUs for breakfast in any stream-like application?

The answer is very simple. NO. Liked it or not, it all started with bilinear filtering of textures. 3Dfx had it, S3 and Matrox didn’t. Games looked awesome even on Pentium 100 machine, looked like crap on Matrox and Pentium 233 MMX. ATI and Nvidia came later and with wiser moves, moved ahead. End of story.

Personally, I consider that the most important product that HP has in its complete PC lineup is its TouchSmart series. Yet, I don’t see HP advertising this system wherever you go, I don’t see discussions about how controlling the computer by our own fingers is changing the world. No, that’s left to Apple and be honest; iMac does not come close to level of interactivity offered by HP’s system. Apple’s buyers used to be consisted out of dreamers, visionaries and people that don’t want to live in bog standard world. Judging by the rate of market share growth, people want to dream, live the vision and they don’t want to live in a bog standard world. That’s why Apple stuff sells like hotcakes – not to enthusiasts, but to grandmas and grandpas that want to own something beautiful. This is the place where CE industry missed the boat completely and it will get eaten by IT industry (not getting “destroyed”, but adopting IT technology to a point where you can’t tell a difference). Your telly in the living room will have a complete computer inside, or just connect to a home server that will become more important than ever. Is it a Sony TV or Sony Vaio with a larger screen? Wait and see.

High end PC – what can we make of it?
Here comes the ultimate failure of PC industry as such – it lacks people that will spark that creativity, all in the name of cutting costs, even if $2 means the difference between PoS product that nobody wants to buy or will buy only when forced (enterprises tied into their own cycles).

The problem of high-end PCs does not lie in the fact that there is no market between ultra-high end PCs and mainstream crowd. The problem, as some like to see it – actually does not exist. There will always be a market for those 300.000 people (Steam Hardware survey November 2008). That number accounts to 300 million greenbacks of revenue for graphics subsystem alone. Even in five years spread, that’s a hefty number to overlook for anyone, and this exlcuded rest of components that also belong to premium world. Most of motherboard manufacturers now focus on catering overclockers, spend hundreds of thousand of dollars on organizing overclocking competitions… all in the name of better products.

Is this market something that is going to disappear? Nope and yes, I will shave my head if I am wrong. This industry also has its heroes, like Shamino who came from overclocking world to help EVGA design ultimate motherboards, Macci who helped AMD to create an attack on Intel and change the way company markets its CPUs… examples are numerous. And no, these people will not go away, they will actually – get company.

Conclusion
In conclusion, boutique vendors like Biohazard Computers, HyperSonic-PC, SolidWavePC, Smooth Creations, YOYOTech and others will not just continue to exist, but expand their line-ups and put their DNA into more volume products. I won’t make a distinction between Biohazard and McLaren Group, or stop to mention similarities between VoodooPC/HP, Alienware/Dell and AMG/Mercedes relationship.
This industry is huge, there is more than enough room for everybody and guess what? AMD, Intel and Nvidia are not making enough chips to satisfy world’s need for computing. Once that this trio starts making 3-5 billion chips a year, we can start saying that the industry is saturated.

Then, we can start talking about exclusiveness – until then, whenever you hear an industry leader saying that users “don’t need that”, with “that” being TV-out on 3dfx Voodoo cards (Alex Leupp, 3dfx CEO), “that” being 64-bit instruction set (Patrick Pat Gelsinger, Intel’s CTO at time)… is setting its company for the fall or a hefty portion of humble pie.

The new site will have open discussions with the industry leaders outside of this industry, and then it will be interesting to see what IT industry leaders will say. Bear in mind that everybody is talking about netbooks today. First netbook in present form was a computer that a lot of industry executives and journalists claimed that it is impossible to make. Nicholas Negroponte, AMD and Quanta created netbook; ASUS came with Intel platform and created EEE. The rest is history.

And again, this would not happen if there wasn’t for Ferraris and Lambos of this industry. The future is bright for high-end PC manufacturers, but not just that. The future is bright only for open minded manufacturers that will push the envelope in their respective market.
Slow giants will be overrun, regardless of how you look at it. It is the real evolution and exclusiveness in the all-inclusive world.

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Everybody we asked remained coy about the timelines. Nobody wanted to confirm anything, but one thing is certain – according to my sources, nVIDIA is not going to wait for CES 2009 to introduce its 55nm parts. Are these rumors true? Well, like any rumor, take it with a fairly large grain of salt. But I am just the messenger here, don’t shoot

The 55nm die-shrink, GT206 is already shipping in volume in the form of Quadro CX, FX 4800 and FX 5800 boards. Same story applies to Tesla cards – we saw some papers from system integrators mentioning reduced power consumption for C1060. 

And with the number of leaked pictures floating around, showing GeForce GTX260 with 896 MB of memory, talks about GTX260 with 1.79GB, GTX280 cards with 2GB of GDDR3 memory… we know at least two partners are seriously contemplating releasing the 1.79 and 2GB cards, so the battle among nVIDIA partners is definitely heating up.

But will we see a surprise (and most certainly paper) launch already this week? Only time can tell. Back in 2005, ATI had a Christmas launch of Radeon X1800XTX CrossFire Edition, aligned with the launch of Pentium 4 Extreme Edition 955. Both turned to be power-hogs and performance duds, replaced by more powerful and elegant X1900XTX, while 955 was replaced with the worst overheating CPU of all times, the 965. The stigma about 965 was so strong that Intel decided to relaunch the number with Core i7 Extreme 965. We spoke with some Intel folk, and they told me that “it was time do do 965 right”.

Will nVIDIA have more luck with Christmas launch of 55nm parts, even if its only for show? Only time will tell. For now, there are some promising facts, like single 6-pin power connector on Quadro CX and FX 4800 (effectively GTX 260).

Is this 55nm line-up?

GTX260-216 896MB

GTX260-216 1.79 GB

GTX280-240 1.0 GB

GTX280-240 2.0GB

And here lies the question. Why the company did not rename the 55nm parts to GTX270 and GTX290 – clocks are different, power is different, only cooling is the same? Well, brace for impact. According to a large nVIDIA’s partner, it seems that the company ran out of time to allow its AIB partners to print new boxes, and the decision was made to simply rename the older parts and still have new stuff to ship. I cannot validate the source, since it looks, well… just incredible – but I have to leave this option open.

All in all, 2008 turned into a big mess as far as Nvidia is concerned. The company delivered world’s first GPU with hardware FP64 dual-precision and sacrificed hefty part of the die (bear in mind that DP unit takes space as three regular ones… and there is one unit per cluster of eight), but the naming confusion is something that this company should not allow.

If the company started anew with GTX 200 series, and had prepared renaming of the old parts as G80 (Geforce 9300, 9400, 9600) and GT130 (9800GT, 9800GTX+) why oh why oh why they didn’t went with GTX 240 (for GTX260-192), GTX  260 (GTX260-216), GTX 270 (55nm part) GTX 280 (GTX 280), GTX 290 (55nm part) and end up with GX2 295 for the dual part? Logic is so easy to find in the car industry, but impossible to find in the IT industry. Both AMD, Intel, ATI and Nvidia did a fine job of crapping on their engineer’s brilliant jobs. 

What’s wrong with “AMD Phenom X4 2.5 GHz”, since that’s how most people are going to call their product anyways. Core i7 965? Call it The Overclocking Monster Core i7 3.2 GHz and we’re clear. Radeon 4870? Well, that’s a good continuation from 3870, let’s hope they won’t mess it up.

The post Nvidia to launch 55nm GPUs on Tuesday, December 16th? appeared first on VR World.

All of the images in gallery are 1000 pixels wide… if you would like to see wider or narrower galleries, it would be great if I could get some feedback and suggest a resolution
The reason for it is quite simple: unlike companies that are advertising personal supercomputers and charging them tens of thousand dollars (Cray CX1 and Tyan PSC come to mind) – Nvidia is targeting a price of less than 9,999.99 USD. Yep, that’s correct, 4+ TFLOPS supercomputer for less than 10 grand.
At the time of writing, I haven’t been able to found are those Tesla cards using older 65nm or new, power-saving 55nm chips. If we would judge by chips that power new Quadros, 55nm should be under the hood, but then again, Nvidia has a large nVentory of older 65nm chips, so the company might be inclined to clean them out.
Somehow, I would bet that this is not the only supercomputer announcement from companies in Red-Green-Blue area. After all, certain motherboards from ASUS and GigaByte could fit six single-slot cards… can you say FireStream and 6 TFLOPS?
To end this article, here is some food for thought: Nvidia got inspiration to create this system after seeing tens of enthusiasts build their own supercomputers. 11 years ago, overclockers and gamers jump-started the IT industry we know today by overclocking and modding their own systems.
Can this underground movement turn desktop computers into handhelds and supercomputers onto desktops? Only time will tell. After all, what CPU, GPU or motherboard manufacturer does not encourage overclocking or offer an overclocking/gaming product line? After all, all of these products are based on overclocking Celeron 300A to 450 MHz, Dual-Celeron Abit BP6 and so on. Makes me wonder who will remember those crazy doctors that created FASTRA 10 years from now.

UPDATE Nov 18, 01:23AM CET: For some odd reason, gallery didn’t work – uploaded the pictures again. It should work now.

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