Tag Archive for INTC

| March 14, 2011
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Wireless Charging Amped Up

Wireless Charging Amped UpThose of us tired of dealing with tangled cord and bulky wall warts may get some relief in the near future. iSuppli Corp. is predicting that a flood of new electronic gizmos with wireless charging capabilities will be inundating the market. The market research firm believes that the global market for wireless charging devices for smartphones like the RIM (RIMM) Torch, tablet computers such as the Apple (AAPL) iPad2 media players like the Apple iPod Touch will drive the global market for wireless charging devices to 234.9 million units in 2014, up 65% from 3.6 million in 2010, according to iSuppli.

iSuppli table Tina Teng, senior analyst for wireless research at iSuppli told Itnewslink.com, “Over the next five years, wireless charging devices will find their way into an increasing number of applications, including mobile phones, portable media players, digital still cameras, and mobile PCs.”

Mobile phones will drive wireless charging acceptance according to Ms. Teng, ” …mobile phones will contribute the largest share of revenue to wireless charging-not only because of the large volume of mobile devices expected to benefit from the technology, but also because of participation by name brands in manufacturing the device, providing much-needed market recognition in the process.”

“Genius of Electricity,” 1915, Gilded Bronze, Bedminster, NJ. Photography Lee sandstead"Despite the optimism, iSuppli believes there are still barriers to the widespread adoption of wireless charging. Manufacturers will have to make wireless charging in their devices down to the circuit board level which will drive down costs. The wireless charging industry will need to adopt a common standard to ensure interoperability among products. Currently, all products are proprietary. Skins made by one company, will not work with the charger pad of another. “Until the industry finds a standard to follow, the wireless charging industry will be fragmented, and consumers will hesitate to adopt any solution that could be compromised by the rival companies,” Itnewslink.com quotes Ms. Teng, “However, an open, standardized system will create a healthier competitive environment and prompt manufacturers to join forces-which will enhance consumer awareness and lead to adoption in the markets.”

There are four wireless charging technologies. The wireless charging technologies include Near-field magnetic resistance, Far-field magnetic resistance, Conductive magnetic resistance, and Inductive magnetic resistance wireless charging systems.

  • Far-field magnetic resonance, a technology that has raised safety as well as health concerns and for which no commercial products are available for the time being.
  • Inductive wireless charging uses the principle of electromagnetic induction where current generated from the induced magnetic field in the receiver coil charges devices is the most widely wireless charging technology adopted by the value chain.  the technology enjoys wide support from semiconductor vendors, device manufacturers, accessories makers as well as retailers according to the Wireless Design and Development website. The most successful proponent of magnetic induction is Powermat, a Michigan-based company which I wrote about in 2010, that also owned 62 percent share of the wireless charging market as reported by Wireless Design and Development.

iSuppli notes that most companies are not ready with commercial products yet, several high-profile manufacturers are looking at producing wireless charging solutions. The companies include Texas Instruments (TXN) and ST-Ericsson from the semiconductor side; Nokia Corp (NOK) and Research In Motion Ltd. from the device manufacturer side; and Logitech (LOGI) and Case-Mate from the accessory manufacturer side.

Product-specific wireless charging systems consist of a charger as well as a so-called “skin” or receiver sold for specific devices. These product-specific devices contrast with aftermarket solutions, which are universal chargers and various skins that can be used with multiple consumer electronics. Growth is also projected for aftermarket wireless charging, with revenue rising at a massive five-year Compound Annual Growth Rate (CAGR) of 133.4 percent.

Rats nest of cablesrb-

I hate the cluttered cluster of cables on my desk. The wireless chargers should clean up that mess, but until the manufacturers get their act together and build in some interoperability from the factory, they still got a problem.

What do you think?

Is wireless charging a practical technology?

Do you have a wireless charging rig?

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Ralph Bach has been in IT long enough to know better and has blogged from his Bach Seat about IT, careers, and anything else that catches his attention since 2005. You can follow him on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter. Email the Bach Seat here.

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| January 2, 2011
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Big Tech Increases Lobbying

Big Tech Increases LobbyingThe Business Insider has a great post that lays out the lobbying spending by most of the techs stalwarts. Arik Hesseldahl at All Things D compiled the data. The data says that the telecom’s spent the most on lobbying last year. The biggest spender was Verizon (VZ) which spent $3.83 million, an increase of nearly $1 million over last year. AT&T (T) spent $3.47 million on lobbying.

Hewlett-Packard (HPQ) spent $1.6 million on lobbying in 2010, which is nearly double what it spent last year. Microsoft (MSFT), Oracle (ORCL), Google (GOOG), IBM (IBM), and Yahoo (YHOO) also increased the dollars spent on lobbying from 2009 to 2010. Only Intel (INTC) decreased its lobbying spending in 2010.

Tech Spending on Lobbying 2010

The Business Insider points out that despite their incredible influence in the world of tech, Apple (AAPL) and Facebook are hardly spending anything on lobbying. The post speculates that while Apple is influential, it doesn’t dominate anything other than mp3 players, so the government has had little reason to mess with it. (Apple rules the tablet world, but that’s an 8-month-old market.) Also, Apple doesn’t do big blockbuster acquisitions that the government looks at.

Facebook spent the least of anyone with just $120,000. The author expects this will change soon as the company’s power is growing quickly, drawing the eye of regulators.

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The telecom monoliths spent $7.3 million on lobbying, which is more than HP, MSFT, Google and IBM combined what are they up to? I wrote about AT&T’s activities previously, clearly, these firms expect something back from the politicians they bribe donate to. History has proven that the politicians on the receiving end of the bribes donations generate results for their largest contributors and not the SMB or end-user.

What do you think? What are these tech stalwarts getting for their money in Washington DC?

 

Ralph Bach has been in IT long enough to know better and has blogged from his Bach Seat about IT, careers, and anything else that catches his attention since 2005. You can follow him on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter. Email the Bach Seat here.

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| November 23, 2010
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Server Counts Climbing

Server Counts ClimbingData Center Knowledge has updated its list of companies with the most servers (at least the ones that release the information). I wrote about this server list last year and some of the changes from last year include adding Intel (INTC) and Facebook to the list, SoftLayer’s acquisition of The Planet, and increases in server fleets.

Server Growth

FirmServers (2009)Servers (2010)% change
Intel--100,000NA
OVH55,00080,00045
SoftLayer21,00076,000262
Akamai Technologies48,00073,00052
1&1 Internet55,00070,00027
Rackspace50,03863,99628
Facebook--60,000NA
iWeb10,00035,000250

Some notable companies that have not changed since 2009 include:

* SBC Communications
* Verizon
* Time Warner
* AT&T
* Peer1/ServerBeach.

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One thing that many of these companies have in common is that they are cloud companies or companies that enable cloud computing. The research firm IDC reported in 2009 that only 14.3% (2.2 Exabytes) of the 15.4 Exabytes of enterprise storage capacity resides in the public cloud. IDC believes this number will grow to 27.6% by 2013.

If IDC is right,  over the next 3-4 years, server fleets will continue to grow.

 

Ralph Bach has been in IT long enough to know better and has blogged from his Bach Seat about IT, careers, and anything else that catches his attention since 2005. You can follow him on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter. Email the Bach Seat here.

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| November 13, 2010
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Terabit Ethernet Developing

Terabit Ethernet DevelopingResearchers at the University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB) are working on the next evolution of Ethernet – Terabit Ethernet. UCSB Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering Dan Blumenthal told LightReading that the goal of the recently created Terabit Optical Ethernet Center (TOEC), is to create Terabit Ethernet (TbE) which runs at 1 trillion bits per second by 2015 and to follow it up with 100Tbit/s Ethernet by 2020.

Professor Blumenthal explained to LightReading that he wants the TOEC and its partners to produce something the industry can use, not a one-time lab experiment that only works with duct tape and glue. “We’re not talking about lab hero experiments,” Blumenthal told LightReading. The real-world focus of TOEC has helped attract partners like  Agilent Technologies Inc. (NYSE: A), Google (NASDAQ: GOOG), Intel Corp. (NASDAQ: INTC), Rockwell Collins Inc., and Verizon Communications Inc. (NYSE: VZ) to help with the research. I wrote about Intel’s TBPS efforts back in July.

Terabit Ethernet is hard

TOEC could probably use the help because developing TbE is looking like no simple task according to LightReading. Bob Metcalfe, Ethernet’s creator, and now a Polaris Venture Partners partner, speculated two years ago that a terabit standard might need a rethinking of everything, even the fiber itself.

Based on current UCSB research, professor Blumenthal speculates that TbE  may include:

  • Photonic integrated circuits (PICs) are a must.
  • Coherent receivers, but at a scale well beyond what’s being used for 100Gbit/s Ethernet. A likely candidate is 1,024-QAM: quadrature amplitude modulation (QAM) transmitting 10 bits per symbol, a scheme likely to require 100GHz electronics.
  • To make that coherent receiver energy-efficient, TOEC is “trying to move a lot of what’s in the digital signal processor into the optics,” Blumenthal says.
  • New materials for fiber-optics aren’t out of the question. “We won’t start out with that, but it’ll move in that direction,” Blumenthal says.
  • Other items on the TOEC shopping list include optical phase-locked loops, new semiconductor optical amplifiers (SOAs), and methods for drastically lowering on-chip optical losses.

The questions go beyond the optical layer. To make operations more synchronous padding and frame delineation were added to 10Gbit/s and 100Gbit/s Ethernet, Blumenthal pointed out. “Do we keep doing that? Or do we go purely asynchronous? We don’t know yet. …Once you put the word ‘Ethernet’ in there, it’s not about just transmission. It’s about being backward-compatible. That’s the beauty of Ethernet. We can’t lose that essence.”

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The need for TbE is real (I first wrote about Intel’s TbE efforts here) and being driven by video. More video is already riding over existing networks. “We’re going to need much faster networking to handle the explosion in Internet traffic and support new large-scale applications like cloud computing,” Professor Blumenthal told Physorg. Stuart Elby, Vice President of Network Architecture for Verizon told Physorg, “Based on current traffic growth, it’s clear that 1 Terabit per second trunks will be needed in the near future.”

Facebook is already looking at TbE in their data centers. PCWorld reports that at the Ethernet Alliance‘s Technology Exploration Forum, Donn Lee, a Facebook Engineer said, “… there is already a need for 1 terabit.” Facebook has so many servers, and those servers can process data so fast, that they could fill 64 Terabit Ethernet pipes in the backbone of one data center, Lee said.

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Ralph Bach has been in IT long enough to know better and has blogged from his Bach Seat about IT, careers, and anything else that catches his attention since 2005. You can follow him on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter. Email the Bach Seat here.

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| October 22, 2010
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Intel to Invest In America

Intel to Invest In AmericaThis week, Intel (NASDAQ: INTC) announced it will invest In America. Chipzilla will invest between $6 billion and $8 billion in American-based manufacturing facilities. Dailywireless says this investment in America will fund the deployment of Intel’s next-generation 22 nanometers (nm) manufacturing process across several existing U.S. factories and building a new development fabrication plant in Oregon. The Oregon factory should be ready in 2013 and will primarily produce chips for research and development as Intel advances its designs.

In an era when politicians and Wall Street refuse to invest in America, Intel has shown its leadership. “This is probably the largest private investment during this last two or three years in this country,” proclaimed Oregon Governor Ted Kulongoski. The projects will support 6,000 to 8,000 construction jobs and result in 800 to 1,000 new permanent high-tech jobs according to media reports.

Highlights

  • Intel will invest in America with $6-8 billion in manufacturing to support future technology advancements in Arizona and Oregon.
  • The investment will create 6,000-8,000 construction jobs and 800-1,000 permanent high-tech jobs, and allows Intel to maintain its current manufacturing employment base in the U.S.
  • The investment will fund a new development fab in Oregon, as well as upgrades to four existing U.S. fabs (Fab 12 and Fab 32 in Arizona and D1C and D1D in Oregon) to manufacture the next-generation 22-nm process technology.
  • Intel’s next-generation, 22 nm microprocessors will enable sleeker device designs, higher performance, and longer battery life at lower costs.

Intel’s upcoming 32-nanometer “Sandy Bridge” Core architecture got much of the attention at the company’s developer show last month. Sandy Bridge chips, built using 32 nm architecture, will be out early in 2011. Ivy Bridge is the codename given to the 22 nm die shrink of Sandy Bridge.

The “tick” (new architecture) of 32 nm Sandy Bridge, available in January 2011, will be followed by the “tock” (22 nm shrink) of Ivy Bridge in January 2012. The new D1X plant may be built with the 15 nm process in mind since that process would likely be mainstreamed just 12 months after D1X begins production.

Moving to 22-nanometer could also help the company produce chips with lower power consumption to better compete in smartphones—where designs from ARM currently dominate. Intel launched the Atom platform two years ago. Now executives are looking to aggressively expand the reach of the Atom chips, into tablets, handheld devices, and phones.

Intel Technology Outlook

Intel is also building its first production facility in China, reports Bloomberg. Intel is vying with Samsung Electronics to be the industry’s biggest spender on plants and equipment in 2010. Intel’s microprocessors run more than 80 percent of the world’s personal computers. Rival Samsung is the biggest maker of memory chips.

 

Ralph Bach has been in IT long enough to know better and has blogged from his Bach Seat about IT, careers, and anything else that catches his attention since 2005. You can follow him on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter. Email the Bach Seat here.

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