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A year of healthy progress along Microsoft strategic ambitions

July 24, 2016 11:45 am / Leave a comment

Microsoft Stock Price for the last 5 years — July 22, 2016:Microsoft Stock Price for the last 5 years -- 22 July, 2016 My earlier posts related specifically to this 3 years overall transition history:
– Microsoft partners empowered with ‘cloud first’, high-value and next-gen experiences for big data, enterprise social, and mobility on wide variety of Windows devices and Windows Server + Windows Azure + Visual Studio as the platform as of July 10, 2013
– Microsoft reorg for delivering/supporting high-value experiences/activities as of July 11, 2013
– An ARM-focussed Microsoft spin-off could be the only solution to save Microsoft in the crucial next 3-years period as of August 24, 2013
– Opinion Leaders and Lead Opinions: Reflections on Steven Sinofsky’s “Era of Continuous Productivity” vision as of September 1, 2013
– The question mark over Wintel’s future will hang in the air for two more years as of September 15, 2013
– Microsoft could be acquired in years to come by Amazon? The joke of the day, or a certain possibility (among other ones)? as of September 16, 2013
– Sinofsky’s ‘continuous productivity’ idea to be realised first in Box Notes as of September 21, 2013
MS FY15 NEW STRATEGIC SETUP– Microsoft is transitioning to a world with more usage and more software driven value add (rather than the old device driven world) in mobility and the cloud, the latter also helping to grow the server business well above its peers as of April 25, 2014
– Satya Nadella on “Digital Work and Life Experiences” supported by “Cloud OS” and “Device OS and Hardware” platforms–all from Microsoft as of July 23, 2014
– Steve Ballmer on leaving Microsoft, relationship with Bill Gates: “We’ve dusted-up many times”, on His Biggest Regret: “doing hardware earlier [for being] more effective in phone business” AND on Amazon: “They Make No Money.” as October 25, 2014
– The Empire Reboots — Can C.E.O. Satya Nadella Save Microsoft? | Vanity Fair, Oct 27, 2014

WPC Day 1: The Digital Transformation Opportunity from Microsoft Partner Network UK Blog as of July 11, 2016:

“Empower every person and every
organisation on the planet to achieve more”
The Microsoft Mission

At the core of today’s opening Worldwide Partner Conference keynote was ‘Digital Transformation’ aka the desire of CEO’s to use technology to change business outcomes – whether it be how they:

  • Engage their customers,
  • Empower employees to make better decisions,
  • Optimise their operations,
  • Build up the predictive power within their organisations so that every operation is intelligent,
  • Transform their products and services.

Digital Transformation = An Unprecedented Partner Opportunity

Every customer of every size business (startup to Enterprise) is not only looking to use digital technology, but to build digital technology for their own.

Digital-transformatoin-all-partner-types1-1024x530[1]

Businesses are looking to drive greater efficiency – automating processes and enhancing productivity, particularly in those areas where there are operating expenses. This poses an unprecedented opportunity for you no matter what partner type you are.

Digital Transformation Opportunity by Microsoft and Partners -- July 11, 2016Microsoft Ambitions to Drive Digital Transformation

Microsoft has three core ambitions which play a fundamental part in digitally transforming businesses:

  • Re-inventing Productivity and Business process
  • Building the Intelligent Cloud
  • Create more Personal Computing

These will be covered in more detail over the next two days keynotes, however, Satya provided some great examples of what these 3 ambitions entail.

1) Re-inventing Productivity and Business Process

This is all about removing the barriers between productivity tools and business applications. Satya focused on two key areas:

  • ‘Conversations as a Platform’: Using human language understanding personal assistants and Bots (conversational interfaces) which augment our connection with technologies. (Watch the demo 48 minutes into Day 1 Keynote)

2) Building out the intelligent Cloud

To showcase how intelligent cloud is helping transformation, Satya invited General Electric CEO, Jeff Immelt, on stage to discuss how he has digitally transformed the GE business.

Considering GE is over 140 years old, it’s a company that has embraced transformation and digital transformation. You can read more about their story and find out about Microsoft’s new partnership with GE to bring Predix to Azure, accelerating digital transformation for industrial customers.

Satya then went on to talk about ‘The next phase of building the Intelligent cloud’ with ‘Cognitive services’.  We’re seeing the beginnings of a new platform for cognitive services. Microsoft has taken decades of research from Microsoft Research encapsulating speech, computer vision, natural language text understanding, and made these available as API’s. These API’s are being used to infuse perception into apps – the ability for Apps/Bots to understand speech and see i.e. computer vision. These cognitive capabilities are capable of transforming business by bringing productivity gains. A great example of this is how Macdonalds are creating efficiency in their Drive Thru’s with speech/order recognition (Watch the demo 1 hour 10 minutes into the Day 1 keynote).

3) Create More Personal Computing

Create more personal computing was the third and final ambition covered. Satya discussed Windows 10 – an OS system spanning multiple devices from Raspberry PI to Hololens and bringing centralised infrastructure benefits and cost savings to business.

It was on the topic of Hololens, he discussed how personal computing is shaped by category creation moments. Moments where input and output change. ‘Mixed Reality’ is that moment. With Hololens its created an interface changing moment – Mixing real with virtual, enabling us to be anywhere and everywhere – fully untethered and mobile.

What followed was a great demo showcasing how Japan Airlines are using Microsoft HoloLens to change how they train flight crews and mechanics (Watch the demo 1 hour 17 minutes into the Day 1 keynote)

Mixed reality offers huge opportunities for partners with so many applications across so many sectors.

Expect more details on Digital Transformation and Microsoft’s three ambitions in WPC Day 2 and 3 keynotes.

News From WPC2016 Day 1

The three ambitions announced a year ago and the proof-points of healthy progress along them in FY16:

  1. Office 365, Dynamics 365, AppSource, and LinkedIn as all being part of one overarching strategy in Productivity and Business Process:
    – core part of an overarching strategy
    – digital transformation both for us and our partnerships with customers
  2. Significant differentiation vs. Amazon AWS in Intelligent Cloud:
    – enterprise cloud leadership
    – every customer is also an ISV
    – hyperscale-plus-hybrid approach with annuity focus enabling cloud lead conversation with customers
    – meeting cloud needs of customers where they are
  3. Windows strategy to achieve progress in More Personal Computing:
    – deliver more value and innovation, particularly for enterprise customers
    – grow new monetization through services across our unified Windows platform
    – innovate in new device categories in partnership with our OEMs

The Q1FY16 progress was presented in my Microsoft is ready to become a dominant force in cloud computing with superior cloud offerings, a Windows ecosystem under complete renewal, first signs of Surface-Lumia-Xbox successes on the market, and strong interest in technology partnerships by other industry leaders as of October 24, 2015.

“Reinvent Productivity and Business Processes“, “Build the Intelligent Cloud” and “Create More Personal Computing” were the original 3 “interlocking ambitions” the Microsoft CEO talked about at Microsoft Iginite held on May 4-8, 2015 in Chicago. The proof-points of FY16 progress are shown along that list, and explained in detail by remarks from Microsoft (MSFT) Satya Nadella on Q4 2016 Results – Earnings Call Transcript as of July 18, 2016.

For more information see also:  Q4 2015 Earning Call Transcript, the 2015 Annual Report or—even better—my earlier posts indicated here under each ambition. For a deeper strategic intent underlying these ambilitions see my earlier post Julia Liuson: “Microsoft must transform from a company that throws a box with software into the market … into a company that offers pure services” published on October 25, 2015. These ambitions also became reporting segments in FY16. See Earnings Release FY16 Q1 as of October 22, 2015. The major corporate groups were also organised along these line: ASG = Application & Services Group for “Reinvent productivity and business processes” ambition, C&E = Cloud & Enterprise for “Build the intelligent cloud platform” ambition, and OSG= Operating Systems Group for “Create more personal computing” ambition.

Note that the overall strategic approach was developed 2 years ago and it was described in my post Satya Nadella on “Digital Work and Life Experiences” supported by “Cloud OS” and “Device OS and Hardware” platforms–all from Microsoft of July 23, 2014:

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Here are the remarks from Microsoft (MSFT) Satya Nadella on Q4 2016 Results – Earnings Call Transcript as of July 18, 2016. for details

1. Office 365, Dynamics 365, AppSource, and LinkedIn as all being part of one overarching strategy in Productivity and Business Process:

For initial and additional details available earlier see my earlier posts:
– The first “post-Ballmer” offering launched: with Power BI for Office 365 everyone can analyze, visualize and share data in the cloud as of February 10, 2014
– OneNote is available now on every platform (+free!!) and supported by cloud services API for application and device builders as of March 18, 2014
– An upcoming new era: personalised, pro-active search and discovery experiences for Office 365 (Oslo) as of April 2, 2014
– Microsoft Azure: Marketable machine learning components capability for “a new data science economy”, and real-time analytics for Azure HDInsight service as of October 22, 2014

In fact, this last quarter, some of the most strategic announcements were all around our application platform. At our partner conference, there was a significant amount of excitement with the tools that we announced like PowerApps and Power BI, Azure functions and Flow. These are tools that our developers and system integrators and solution partners will use in order to be able to customize applications around Azure. And so to me that’s another huge advantage and a competitive differentiation for us.

1.1 Core part of an overarching strategy

The move to the cloud for our customers and for us is not just about a new way of delivering the same value just as a SaaS service. It’s really the transformation from having applications that are silos to becoming more services in the cloud where you can reason about the activity and the data underneath these services to benefit the customers who are using these services. So that’s what this notion of a graph [by Microsoft Graph] represents.

So when somebody moves to Office 365, their graph [by Microsoft Graph], their people, their relationships with other people inside the organization, their work artifacts all move to the cloud. You can connect them with all the business process data that’s in Dynamics 365, but not just in Dynamics 365 but all the applications in AppSource because business process will always be a much more fragmented market as opposed to just one market share leader by industry, by vertical, by country. And so that’s our strategy there.

And now the professional cloud or the professional network helps usage across all of that professional usage. Whether it’s in Office 365 or whether you’re a salesperson using any application related to sales, you want your professional network there. Of course, it’s relevant in recruiting, it’s relevant in training, it’s relevant in marketing. So that’s really our strategy with LinkedIn as the professional network meeting the professional cloud. And these are all part of one overarching strategy, and ultimately it’s about adding value to customers.

1.2 Digital transformation both for us and our partnerships with customers

This past year was a pivotal one in both our transformation and in our partnerships with customers who are also driving their own digital transformation. Our progress is best captured in the results of our three ambitions, starting with Productivity and Business Process. In a world of infinite information but finite attention and time, we aim to change the nature of work with digital technology. In pursuit of this ambition, we continue to add value to our products, grow usage, and increase our addressable market. Along these lines, let me start with Office 365 and then move to Dynamics 365.

In the last quarter, we advanced our collaboration tools. We launched Microsoft Planner, which helps teams manage operations, as well as Skype Meetings, which is aimed at helping small businesses collaborate. In June, we further strengthened our security value proposition with the release of Advanced Security Management.

Lastly, we continue to add intelligence in machine learning to Office to help people automate their tasks and glean insights from data. These advancements helped to drive increased usage across enterprises, small and medium businesses, and consumers. In the enterprise, Office 365 Commercial seats grew 45% year over year, and revenue grew 59% in constant currency. Also 70% of our Office Enterprise agreement renewals are in the cloud. Innovative companies like Facebook, Hershey’s, Discovery Communications, Cushman Wakefield all adopted Office 365 and now see how transformative this service can be for their own business.

We are enthusiastic about the early feedback and growth opportunity from companies using our newly released Office 365 E5, which includes powerful security controls, advanced analytics, and cloud voice. These customers tell us that they love the simplification that comes with standardizing across all of our productivity workloads.

We will continue to grow our install base and drive premium mix through offers like Office 365 E5, but they’re very, very early days of E5. And E5 value proposition across all three of the areas, whether it’s cloud voice or analytics or security are all three massive areas for us. And I would say if anything, the initial data from our customers around security is gaining a lot of traction. But at the same time, one of the things that customers are looking for is making an enterprise-wide architectural decision across all of the workloads.

We see momentum in small and medium businesses, with a growing number of partners selling Office 365, now up to nearly 90,000, a 25% increase year over year. We continue to grab share and adding over 50,000 customers each month for 28 consecutive months.

We also see momentum amongst consumers, with now more than 23 million Office 365 subscribers. Across segments, customers increasingly experience the power of Office on their iOS and Android mobile devices. In fact, we now have more than 50 million iOS and Android monthly active devices, up more than four times over last year.

Now let’s talk about progress with the other pillar of this ambition, Dynamics 365. We are removing any impedance that exists between productivity, collaboration, and business process. This month we took a major step forward with the introduction of Microsoft Dynamics 365 and Microsoft AppSource. Dynamics 365 provides business users with purpose-built SaaS applications. These applications have intelligence built in. They integrate deeply with communications and collaboration capabilities of Office 365.

Dynamics 365 along with AppSource and our rich application platform introduces a disruptive and customer-centric business model so customers can build what they want and use just the capabilities they need. The launch of Dynamics 365 builds on the momentum we’re already seeing in this business. Customers around the globe are harnessing the power of Dynamics in their own transformation, including 24 Hour Fitness and AccuWeather. Overall, Dynamics now has nearly 10 million monthly paid seats, up more than 20% year over year, and Q4 billings grew more than 20% year over year.

Overall, Business Processes represent an enormous addressable market, projected to be more than $100 billion by 2020. It’s a market we are increasingly focused on, and I believe we are poised with both Dynamics 365 and Microsoft AppSource to grow and drive opportunity for our partners.

Across Office 365 and Dynamics 365, developers increasingly see the opportunity to build innovative apps and experiences with the Microsoft Graph, and we now have over 27,000 apps connected to it. Microsoft AppSource will be a new way for developers to offer their services and reach customers worldwide.

Lastly, with Office 365 and Dynamics 365, we have the opportunity to connect the world’s professional cloud and the world’s professional network with our pending LinkedIn deal. Overall, the Microsoft Cloud is winning significant customer support. With more than $12 billion in Commercial Cloud annualized revenue run rate, we are on track to achieve our goal of $20 billion in fiscal year 2018. Also, nearly 60% of the Fortune 500 companies have at least three of our cloud offerings. And we continue to grow our annuity mix of our business. In fact, commercial annuity mix increased year over year to 83%.

2. Significant differentiation vs. Amazon AWS in Intelligent Cloud 

For initial and additional details available earlier see my earlier posts:
– Windows Azure becoming an unbeatable offering on the cloud computing market as of June 28, 2013
– Microsoft partners empowered with ‘cloud first’, high-value and next-gen experiences for big data, enterprise social, and mobility on wide variety of Windows devices and Windows Server + Windows Azure + Visual Studio as the platform as of July 10, 2013

– 4. Microsoft products for the Cloud OS [‘Experiencing the Cloud’, as of Dec 18, 2013, but published only on Feb 14, 2014] (was separated from the next “half bakedness” post because of its length)
– 4.5. Microsoft talking about Cloud OS and private clouds: starting with Ray Ozzie in November, 2009[‘Experiencing the Cloud’, as of Dec 18, 2013, but published only on Feb 14, 2014] (was separated from the next “half bakedness” post because of its length)
– Microsoft’s half-baked cloud computing strategy (H1’FY14) as of February 17, 2014 Note that this “half bakedness” ended by the facts published in Microsoft is ready to become a dominant force in cloud computing with superior cloud offerings, a Windows ecosystem under complete renewal, first signs of Surface-Lumia-Xbox successes on the market, and strong interest in technology partnerships by other industry leaders as of October 24, 2014
– Microsoft is transitioning to a world with more usage and more software driven value add (rather than the old device driven world) in mobility and the cloud, the latter also helping to grow the server business well above its peers as of April 25, 2014
– Microsoft BUILD 2014 Day 2: “rebranding” to Microsoft Azure and moving toward a comprehensive set of fully-integrated backend services as of April 27, 2014
– Scott Guthrie about changes under Nadella, the competition with Amazon, and what differentiates Microsoft’s cloud products as of October 2, 2014
– Sam Guckenheimer on Microsoft Developer Division’s Journey to Cloud Cadence as of October 19, 2014
– Microsoft Azure: Marketable machine learning components capability for “a new data science economy”, and real-time analytics for Azure HDInsight service as of October 22, 2014
– Microsoft Cloud state-of-the-art: Hyper-scale Azure with host SDN — IaaS 2.0 — Hybrid flexibility and freedom as of July 11, 2015
– Microsoft’s first quarter proving its ability to become a dominant force in cloud computing with superior cloud offerings as of Januar 27, 2015
– DataStax: a fully distributed and highly secure transactional database platform that is “always on” as of February 3, 2016
– Microsoft chairman: The transition to a subscription-based cloud business isn’t fast enough. Revamp the sales force for cloud-based selling as of June 6, 2016

Cloud Growth Helps Microsoft Beat Street in Q4 from TheStreet as of July 19, 2016 

… [0:34] and Microsoft’s Enterprise Mobility [Suite]
customers nearly doubled YoY to 33,000. [0:40] …

Note that the Q1FY16 report was that “Enterprise Mobility [Suite] customers more than doubled year-over-year to over 20,000, and the installed base grew nearly 6x year-over-year“. Enterprise Mobility Suite (EMS) is a service available in the CSP (Cloud Solution Partner program) along with Windows Intune, Office 365, Azure and CRM Online. The reason for that very impressive growth was given by Satya Nadella in the much earlier Q2FY15 report as:

Microsoft Enterprise Mobility Suite is one key of product innovation that I would like to highlight given the growth and uniqueness of our offering. Microsoft offers a comprehensive solution that brings together mobile device management, mobile application management, hybrid identity management and data protection into a unified offering via EMS.

Office 365 now includes new app experiences on all phones and tablets for mobile productivity.  Further, we have released completely new scenarios. This includes Office Sway for visualizing and sharing ideas; Delve, to help search and discover content; Office 365 Groups to make it easier to collaborate; andOffice 365 Video for secure media streaming for businesses.

Finally, we continue to invest in enterprise value by integrating MDM and the Enterprise Mobility Suite into Office 365; new encryption technologies and compliance certifications; and new eDiscovery capabilities in Exchange.

…

Overall at the highest level, our strategy here is to make sure that the Microsoft Services i.e. cloud services be it Azure, Office 365, CRM Online or Enterprise Mobility Suite are covering all the devices out there in the marketplace. So that, that way we maximize the opportunity we have for each of these subscription and capacity based services.

2.1 Enterprise cloud leadership

Now let’s get into the specifics of the Intelligent Cloud, an area of massive opportunity, as we are clearly one of the two enterprise cloud leaders. Companies looking to digitally transform need a trusted cloud partner and turn to Microsoft. As a result, Azure revenue and usage again grew by more than 100% this quarter. We see customers choose Microsoft for three reasons. They want a cloud provider that offers solutions that reflect the realities of today’s world and their enterprise-grade needs. They want higher level services to drive digital transformation, and they want a cloud open to developers of all types. Let me expand on each.

To start, a wide variety of customers turn to Azure because of their specific real-world needs. Multinationals choose us because we are the only hybrid and hyperscale cloud spanning multiple jurisdictions. We cover more countries and regions than any other cloud provider, from North America to Asia to Europe to Latin America. Our cloud respects data sovereignty and makes it possible for an enterprise application to work across these regions and jurisdictions. More than 80% of the world’s largest banks are Azure customers because of our leadership support for regulatory requirements, advanced security, and commitment to privacy. Large ISVs like SAP and Citrix as well as startups like Sprinklr also choose Azure because of our global reach and a broad set of platform services. Last week GE announced it will adopt our cloud for its IoT approach.

Next, Azure customers also value our unique higher-level services. Now at 33,000, we nearly doubled in one year the number of companies worldwide that have selected our Enterprise Mobility Solutions. The Dow Chemical Company leverages EMS along with Azure, Office 365, and Dynamics to give its thousands of employees secure real-time access to data and apps from anywhere.

Just yesterday, we announced Boeing will use Azure, our IoT suite, and Cortana Intelligence to drive digital transformation in commercial aviation, with connected airline systems optimization, predictive maintenance, and much more. This builds on great momentum in IoT, including our work with Rolls-Royce, Schneider Electric, and others.

This is great progress, but our ambitions are set even higher. Our Intelligent Cloud also enables cognitive services. Cortana Intelligence Suite offers machine learning capabilities and advanced predictive analytics. Customers like Jabil Circuit, Fruit of the Loom, Land O’Lakes, LIBER already realize the benefits of these new capabilities.

Lastly, central to our Intelligent Cloud ambition is providing developers with the tools and capabilities they need to build apps and services for the platforms and devices of their choice. We have the best support for what I would say is the most open platform for all developers. Not only is .NET first class but Linux is first class, Java is first class. The new Azure Container service cuts across both containers running on Windows, running across Linux. So again, it speaks to the enterprise reality. .NET Core 1.0 for open source and our ongoing work with companies such as Red Hat, Docker, and Mesosphere also reflects significant progress on this front. We continue to see traction from open source, with nearly a third of customer virtual machines on Azure running Linux.

So those would be the places where we are fairly differentiated, and that’s what you see us gaining both for enterprise customers and ISVs.

On the server side, premium server revenue grew double digits in constant currency year over year. New SQL Server 2016 helps us expand into new markets with built-in advanced analytics and unparalleled performance. More than 15,000 customers, including over 50% of the Fortune 500, have registered for the private preview of SQL Server for Linux. And we’re not slowing down. We will launch Windows Server 2016 and System Server 2016 later this year.

2.2 Every customer is also an ISV

One of the phenomena now is that pretty much anyone who is a customer of Azure is also in some form an ISV, and that’s no longer just limited to people who are “in the classic tech industry” or the software business. So every customer who starts off consuming Azure is also turning what is their IP in most cases into an ISV solution, which ultimately will even participate in AppSource. So at least the vision that we have is that every customer is a digital company that will have a digital IP component to it, and that we want to be able to partner with them in pretty unique ways.

That’s the same case with GE. It’s the same case with Boeing. It’s the same case with Schneider Electric or ABB or any one of the customers we are working with because they all are taking some of their assets and converting them into SaaS applications on Azure. And that’s something that we will in fact have distribution agreements with.

And AppSource is a pretty major announcement for us because we essentially created for SaaS applications and infrastructure applications a way to distribute their applications through us and our channel. And I think it makes in fact our cloud more attractive to many of them because of that. So we look – I think going forward, you’ll look to see – or you’ll see us do much more of this with many other customers of ours.

2.3 Hyperscale-plus-hybrid approach with annuity focus enabling cloud lead conversation with customers

The focus for us is in what I describe as this hyperscale-plus-hybrid approach when you think about the current approach, which is pretty unique to us. Overall, I believe this hyperscale plus hybrid architecturally helps us a lot with enterprise customers because we meet them where their realities are today and also the digital transformation needs going forward, so that’s one massive advantage we have.

And the way we track progress is to see how is our annuity growth of our server business, and how is our cloud growth. And if you look at this last quarter, our annuity grew double digits and our cloud grew triple digits. And that’s a pretty healthy growth rate, and that’s something that by design both in terms of the technical architecture as well as the traction we have in the marketplace and our sales efforts and so on are playing out well, and we are very bullish about that going forward.

The Transactional business is much more volatile because of the macro environment, IT budgets, and also the secular shift to the cloud. The question again that gets asked is about the cannibalization. But if you look at Boeing or you look at any of the other examples that I talk about when it comes to the cloud, our servers never did what these customers are now doing in our cloud. So at a fundamental long-term secular basis, we have new growth, new workloads, and that’s what we are focused on, and that’s a much bigger addressable market than anything our Transactional Server business had in the past.

[Amy E. Hood – Chief Financial Officer & Executive Vice President:]
The first thing really that I think Satya and I both focus on every quarter, every month, is how much of our business are we continuing to shift to annuity and specifically to the cloud. We structure all of our motions at this company, from how we engineer to how we do our go-to-markets to how we think about sales engagement to how we do our investments, fundamentally toward that long-term structural transition in the market.

In terms of server products and services, I tend to think of it as the all-up growth. It’s really about growing the cloud, growing the hybrid, and then whatever happens in the Transactional business happens.

And so to your question on Transactional performance, there were some deals that didn’t get done in Q3 that got done in Q4, and there were some deals done in Q4 on the Office side with large companies that I’m thrilled by. But at the same time, we still will focus on those deals moving to the cloud over time. And so this volatility that we are going to see because of macro and because of budget constraints, especially on Transactional, we will focus on because we expect excellent execution and have accountability to do that in the field. But our first priority, every time, is to make sure we are focused on annuity growth and digital transformation at our company, which is best done through that motion.

In terms of the sales motion they are absolutely incented more towards cloud versus Transactional going into this year.

I do believe that every conversation that we’re having with customers is cloud-led. That cloud-led conversation and making a plan for customers to best change and transform their own business certainly is a far more in-depth one than on occasion is required by long-time Transactional purchasers, especially in Office, as an example, because what we’re talking about now is really pivoting your business for the long term.

And so I’m sure there are examples where that has elongated the sales cycle, for good reason. But I would generally point back and say most of these are driven at the structural level, which is – structurally over time, on-premises Transactional business will move to the cloud or to a hybrid structure through an annuity revenue stream.
[END BY Amy E. Hood]

2.4 Meeting cloud needs of customers where they are

The position that we have taken is that we want to serve customers where they are and not assume very simplistically that the digital sovereignty needs of customers can be met out of a fewer data center approach. Because right now, given the secular trend to move to the cloud across all of the regulated industries across the globe, we think it’s wiser for us and our investors long term to be able to meet them where they are. And that’s what you see us. We are the only cloud that operates in China under Chinese law, the only cloud that operates in Germany under German law. And these are very critical competitive advantages to us.

And so we will track that, and we will be very demand driven. So in this case we’re not taking these positions of which regions to open and where to open them well in advance of our demand. If anything, I think our cycle times have significantly come down. So it will be demand-driven, but I don’t want to essentially put a cap because if the opportunity arises, and for us it’s a high ROI decision to open a new region, we will do so.

3. Windows strategy to achieve progress in More Personal Computing

For initial and additional details available earlier see my earlier posts:
– Windows Embedded is an enterprise business now, like the whole Windows business, with Handheld and Compact versions to lead in the overall Internet of Things market as well as of June 8, 2013
– How the device play will unfold in the new Microsoft organization? as of July 14, 2013
– With Android and forked Android smartphones as the industry standard Nokia relegated to a niche market status while Apple should radically alter its previous premium strategy for long term as of August 17, 2013
– Windows [inc. Phone] 8.x chances of becoming the alternative platform to iOS and Android: VERY SLIM as it is even more difficult for Microsoft now than any time before as of August 20, 2013
– Leading PC vendors of the past: Go enterprise or die! as of November 7, 2013
– Xamarin: C# developers of native “business” and “mobile workforce” applications now can easily work cross-platform, for Android and iOS clients as well as of November 15, 2013
– Microsoft is transitioning to a world with more usage and more software driven value add (rather than the old device driven world) in mobility and the cloud, the latter also helping to grow the server business well above its peers as of April 25, 2014
– Microsoft Surface Pro 3 is the ultimate tablet product from Microsoft. What the market response will be? as of May 21, 2014
– Windows 10 Technical Preview: Terry Myerson and Joe Belfiore on the future of Windows as of October 1, 2014
– The Era Of Sub-$90 Windows 8.1 Phones in U.S. as of October 3, 2014
– Windows 10 is here to help regain Microsoft’s leading position in ICT as of July 31, 2015
– Microsoft and partners to capitalize on Continuum for Phones instead of the exited Microsoft phone business as of June 5, 2016

We have increased Windows 10 monthly active devices and are now at more than 350 million. This is the fastest adoption rate of any prior Windows release. While we are proud of these results, given changes to our phone plan, we changed how we will assess progress. Going forward, we will track progress by regularly reporting the growth of Windows 10 monthly active devices in addition to progress on three aspects of our Windows strategy:

3.1 Deliver more value and innovation, particularly for enterprise customers

We continue to pursue our goal of moving people from needing Windows to choosing Windows to loving Windows. In two weeks, we will launch Windows 10 Anniversary Update, which takes a significant step forward in security. We are also extending Windows Hello to support apps and websites and delivering a range of new features like Windows Ink and updates to Microsoft Edge. We expect these advances will drive increased adoption of Windows 10, particularly in the enterprise, in the coming year. We already have strong traction, with over 96% of our enterprise customers piloting Windows 10.

3.2 Grow new monetization through services across our unified Windows platform

As we grow our install base and engagement, we generate more opportunity for Microsoft and our ecosystem. Bing profitability continues to grow, with greater than 40% of the search revenue in June from Windows 10 devices. Bing PC query share in the United States approached 22% this quarter, not including volume from AOL and Yahoo!. The Cortana search box has over 100 million monthly active users, with 8 billion questions asked to date.

We continue to drive growth in gaming by connecting fans on Xbox Live across Windows 10, iOS, and Android. Just this quarter we launched our Minecraft Realm subscription on Android and iOS. Overall engagement on Xbox Live is at record levels, with more than 49 million monthly active users, up 33% year over year. At E3 we announced our biggest lineup of exclusive games ever for Xbox One and Windows 10 PCs. And we announced Xbox Play Anywhere titles, where gamers can buy a game once and play it on both their Windows 10 PC and Xbox One. We also announced two new members of the Xbox One console family, the Xbox One S and Project Scorpio.

The Windows Store continues to grow, with new universal Windows apps like Bank of America, Roku, SiriusXM, Instagram, Facebook, Wine, Hulu, and popular PC games like Quantum Break.

3.3 Innovate in new device categories in partnership with our OEMs

Our hardware partners are embracing the new personal computing vision, with over 1,500 new devices designed to take advantage of Windows 10 innovations like Touch, Pen, Hello, and better performance and power efficiency.

Microsoft’s family of Surface devices continues to drive category growth, and we are reaching more commercial customers of all sizes with the support of our channel partners. We recently announced new Surface enterprise initiatives with IBM and Booz Allen Hamilton to enable more customer segments. Also in the past year, we grew our commercial Surface partner channel from over 150 to over 10,000.

Lastly this quarter, more and more developers and enterprise customers got to experience two entirely new device categories from Microsoft Surface Hub and Microsoft HoloLens. While we are still in the early days of both of these devices, we are seeing great traction with both enterprise customers and developers, making us optimistic about future growth.

What is behind the ARM Holding’s acquisition by SoftBank Group?

July 22, 2016 12:03 pm / Leave a comment

Update: Recently SoftBank Group among other Silicon Valley notaries such as Apple and Facebook, have poured over $100 billion into a new Softbank “vision Fund” that Founder Masayoshi Son says is going to be used to help develop AI. This is allocated to spending on emerging technology companies in the next 5 years. To put that number in perspective, the entire global venture capital “industry” is only $65 billion in size. Here is his presentation about that from MWC 2017:
March 3, 2017: Globalfuturist.org: Softbank CEO, Masayoshi Son Keynote at MWC 2017 (25 and half min)

The How to Invest in the Singularity – It’s Near from June 3, 2017 will also give you a deep analysis of this initiative. Highly recommended!
End of Update

The quick answer is that “ARM is the driver of the IoT era” when every thing is interconnected. Another reason is that they have been steadily working in an early investment mode from very beginning, and quite successfully.

SoftBank CEO and Founder Masayoshi Son has been referring back to the PC and Internet era when his company invested into Yahoo US which had only 16 employees then. In the beginning of PC broadband they have invested into mobile internet. And now is one of the biggest paradigm shifts is coming BIG TIME, that is IoT — he says. Some of his quotes shed light on what kind of perspective he is thinking of:

I truly believe Singularity [*] is coming and that computers will one day become smarter than mankind.

Every street light will be interconnected to the internet because we can save when car is not passing.

Automobile will all be connected so driverless car much safer.

All the things will be connected and what is biggest common denominator, that is Arm.

* Technological singularity (Wikipedia): “is a hypothetical event in which an upgradable intelligent agent (such as a computer running software-based artificial general intelligence) enters a ‘runaway reaction’ of self-improvement cycles, with each new and more intelligent generation appearing more and more rapidly, causing an intelligence explosion and resulting in a powerful superintelligence that would, qualitatively, far surpass all human intelligence.[1][2] This would signal the end of the human era, as the new superintelligence would continue to upgrade itself and would advance technologically at an incomprehensible rate.[3]”
For more information see the rest of the Wikipedia article.

And about the automobile opportunity alone he said:

I would say automobile is becoming smarter and smarter so when automobile becomes so smart it is required to have more and more chips integrated inside the car, especially when it becomes a driverless car. Automotive itself will become a super computer which consists of a bunch of multiple chips so ARM will be going into that market very aggressively.

More information along these lines see in the SoftBank CEO: the average person will have 1,000 internet-connected devices by 2040 article by Tech in Asia.

July 18, 2016: ARM CEO Simon Segars about SoftBank acquisition 

Official video released at https://www.acceleratingtech.com/ a site to explain the SoftBank acquisition of ARM, they claim:
– SoftBank’s £17 offer price gives ARM shareholders a 43% premium on Friday’s closing share price and a 41.1% premium on the all-time high share price
– Assurance to double ARM’s UK headcount in the next five years and increase headcount outside the UK
– Leaves ARM’s successful partnership business model, culture and brand unchanged
– Great endorsement of UK tech

July 18, 2016: Acquisition of ARM Holdings plc
Background and Rationale by SoftBank Group Corp.
(from Recommended Acquisition of ARM by SoftBank)

The acquisition of ARM by SBG will deliver the following benefits:

  • Support and accelerate ARM’s position as the global leader in intellectual property licensing and R&D outsourcing for semiconductor companies

SBG’s deep industry expertise and global network of relationships will accelerate adoption of ARM’s intellectual property across existing and new markets.

  • Maintain ARM’s dedication to innovation

SBG intends to sustain ARM’s long-term focus on generating more value per device, and driving licensing wins and future royalty streams in new growth categories, specifically “Enterprise and Embedded Intelligence.”

  • Increased investment to drive the next wave of innovation

SBG intends to support ARM’s multiple growth initiatives by investing in engineering talent and complementary acquisitions with the aim of ensuring ARM maintains a R&D edge over existing and emerging competitors. SBG believes such an investment strategy in long-term growth will be easier to execute as a non-listed company.

  • Shared culture and long-term vision

SBG believes the two companies share the same technology-oriented culture, long-term vision, focus on innovation and commitment to attracting, developing and retaining top talent. These common values will be the foundation for the strong strategic partnership necessary to capture the significant opportunities ahead.

  • Maintain and grow the UK’s leadership in science and technology

SBG is investing in the UK as a world leader in science and technology development and innovation and, as evidence of this, intends to invest in multiple ARM growth initiatives, at least doubling the number of ARM employees in the UK over the next five years.

July 18, 2016: Our Business Model (from Presentation material (English) (PDF) )

SoftBank Group Corp. Business Model -- 18 July 2016

Everything in violet color has been added by myself to the slide.

July 2015, from CEO Message:

Transformation into “SoftBank 2.0”

Thirty-four years have now passed since the foundation of SoftBank, and so far, our position has been one of SoftBank holding assets in overseas companies as a company in Japan. Now, however, we are going to the second stage of SoftBank—“SoftBank 2.0”—in which we will transform SoftBank into a truly global company that can ensure sustained business growth over the long term. We are now in a major transition period.

As the founder, I have set out to create a business model that can deliver continued business growth for centuries. However, many technology companies face the common challenge of a 30-year life cycle where growth is followed by decline. This decline stems from factors such as the increasing obsolescence of technologies and business models, and an over-reliance on founders.

What is the solution? Not only do we need to transform our existing businesses, we also need to have a comprehensive structure in place for supporting disruptive entrepreneurs and facilitating continued development with them.

… [the rest is to see at the place of original]

July 18, 2016: Press Conference: ARM to be acquired by SoftBank

Japanese SoftBank CEO and Founder Masayoshi Son (https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=Masayoshi+Son), the richest person in Japan, speaks at the SoftBank Press Conference to announce the acquisition of ARM Holdings for $31.4 Billion, SoftBank promises to keep the same business model for ARM, to increase the employee count in the UK by 2x within the next 5 years, to increase ARM’s employee count around the world. You can read the official presentation materials here:
http://www.softbank.jp/corp/d/sbg_press_en/list/pdf/pressconference_01/material_en.pdf
[i.e. Presentation material (English) (PDF)]

July 2015, Major Subsidiaries

Company Name Voting Rights (%) Principal Business Activities

Mobile Communications Segment
SoftBank Mobile Corp.*1                         100 Mobile communications services, sale of mobile devices
BB Mobile Corp.                         100 Holding company
Ymobile Corporation*1*2                        99,7 Mobile broadband services, development and sale of communications devices, ADSL services, PHS-based mobile communications services
GungHo Online Entertainment, Inc.*3 40.2
[18.6]*4 		 Production and distribution of online games for smartphones and other devices
Wireless City Planning Inc.                        33,3 Planning and provision of mobile broadband services
SoftBank Commerce & Service Corp.*5                         100 Manufacture, distribution, and sale of IT-related products, IT-related services
Brightstar Global Group Inc.                         100 Holding company
Brightstar Corp.                         100 Mobile device distribution, supply chain solutions, handset protection and insurance, buy-back and trade-in, omnichannel solutions and financial services
GRAVITY Co., Ltd.*6                        59,3 Planning, development, and operations of online games
Supercell Oy*7                        53,7 Production and distribution of mobile game applications

Sprint Segment
Sprint Corporation                        79,5 Holding company
Sprint Communications, Inc.                         100 Mobile communications services, sale of mobile devices and accessories, fixed-line telecommunications services

Fixed-line Telecommunications Segment
SoftBank BB Corp.*1                         100 ADSL services, IP telephony services
SoftBank Telecom Corp.*1                         100 Fixed-line telephone services, data transmission and leased-line services

Internet Segment
Yahoo Japan Corporation                        43,0 Operation of the Yahoo ! JAPAN portal, sale of Internet advertising, operation of e-commerce sites, membership services
IDC Frontier Inc.                         100 Data center business
ValueCommerce Co., Ltd.                        50,6 Ad affiliate marketing service, StoreMatch online advertising distribution service

Others
Mobiletech Corporation                         100 Holding company
SB Energy Corp.                         100 Generation of electricity from renewable energy sources, supply and sale of electricity
SoftBank Payment Service Corp.                         100 Settlement services, card services and related services
Fukuoka SoftBank HAWKS Corp.                         100 Ownership of professional baseball team, operation of baseball games, management and maintenance of baseball stadium and other sports facilities, distribution of video, voice and data content via media
SoftBank Robotics Holdings Corp.                         100 Planning, development, and sale of robots
SBBM Corporation                         100 Holding company
ITmedia Inc.                        57,9 Operation of comprehensive IT information site ITmedia, etc.
SoftBank Technology Corp.                        55,4 Solutions and services for online businesses
Vector Inc.                        52,4 Operation, sales, and marketing of online games, software downloads, advertising
SFJ Capital Limited                         100 Procurement of funds by issuing preferred (restricted voting) securities
SB Group US, Inc.                         100 Holding company
SB CHINA HOLDINGS PTE LTD                         100 Holding company
SoftBank Ventures Korea Corp.                         100 Holding company
SoftBank Korea Corp.                         100 Holding company
Starburst I, Inc.                         100 Holding company
SoftBank Holdings Inc.                         100 Holding company
SoftBank America Inc.                         100 Holding company
STARFISH I PTE. LTD.                         100 Holding company
SB Pan Pacific Corporation                         100 Holding company
Hayate Corporation                         100 Holding company
*1   On April 1, 2015 SoftBank BB, SoftBank Telecom, and Ymobile, merged into SoftBank Mobile.  On July 1, 2015, SoftBank Mobile changed its company name to SoftBank Corp.
*2   eAccess merged with WILLCOM on June 1, 2014 and changed its company name to Ymobile on July 1, 2014.
*3   As a result of the completion of a tender offer by GungHo for its shares on June 1, 2015, and other factors, GungHo became an equity method associate of SoftBank Corp. (currently SoftBank Group Corp.).  Please refer to page 190 for details.
*4   Holdings by parties in close relationships, etc., with SoftBank Corp. (currently SoftBank Group Corp.)
*5   SoftBank BB Corp., divided its commerce and service business and newly established SoftBank C&S on April 1, 2014.  All shares of SoftBank C&S held by SoftBank Corp. (currently SoftBank Group Corp.) were transferred to a wholly owned subsidiary of Brightstar.
*6   Since GRAVITY Co., Ltd.’s parent company GungHo is an equity method associate, as noted in *3, as of the publication of this annual report, GRAVITY is not a subsidiary of SoftBank Corp. (currently SoftBank Group Corp.).
*7   The Company purchased additional shares of Supercell from existing shareholders on May 29, 2015.  After this transaction, the Company’s share of voting rights stands at 77.8%.

July 2015, Major Associates

Company Name Voting Rights (%) Principal Business Activities

Internet Segment
ASKUL Corporation                    41,9 Mail order sales of stationary, office products, services, etc.
The Japan Net Bank, Limited                    41,2 Banking business
BOOKOFF CORPORATION LIMITED                    15,0 Auction service and reuse business

Others
Scigineer Inc.                    33,2 Provision of Internet marketing support services using the personalized engine “deqwas” for e-commerce business operators and retailers
Bharti SoftBank Holdings Pte. Ltd.                    50,0 Holding company
Renren Inc.                    43,0 Investor company of company operating Renren.com SNS site in China
Alibaba Group Holding Limited                    31,9 Investor company of companies operating e-commerce sites Alibaba.com, Taobao. com, and Tmall.com
InMobi Pte. Ltd.                    35,2 Mobile advertising services

Main Overseas Fund Data
Fund Name
Subsidiaries
SoftBank Ranger Venture Investment Partnership
SoftBank Capital Fund ’10 L.P.
Associates
SoftBank US Ventures VI L.P.
SoftBank Capital Technology Fund III L.P.

 

The Next Revolution: 3D XPoint™ non-volatile memories with speed and performance close to DRAM

May 19, 2016 7:45 pm / Leave a comment

UPDATE

June 20, 2017, Intel Online: How fast is Intel® Optane™ Memory? Performance results
Comparing two identical NUCs – one with Intel® Optane™ memory.

28%

14x

2x
Overall system performance is
up to 28% faster6 7 8		 Increase system performance for hard drive access
by up to 14x faster 9 7 8		 Improve everyday task responsiveness
by 2x 6 7 8

(more…)

DataStax: a fully distributed and highly secure transactional database platform that is “always on”

February 3, 2016 7:32 am / Leave a comment

When an open-source database written in Java that runs primarily in production on Linux becomes THE solution for the cloud platform from Microsoft (i.e. Azure) in the fully distributed, highly secure and “always on” transactional database space then we should take a special note of that. This is the case of DataStax:

July 15, 2015: Building the intelligent cloud Scott Guthrie’s keynote on the Microsoft Worldwide Partner Conference 2015, the DataStax related segment in 7 minutes only 

Transcript:

SCOTT GUTHRIE, EVP of Microsoft Cloud and Enterprise:  What I’d like to do is invite three different partners now on stage, one an ISV, one an SI, and one a managed service provider to talk about how they’re taking advantage of our cloud offerings to accelerate their businesses and make their customers even more successful.

First, and I think, you know, being able to take advantage of all of these different capabilities that we now offer.

Now, the first partner I want to bring on stage is DataStax.  DataStax delivers an enterprise-grade NoSQL offering based on Apache Cassandra.  And they enable customers to build solutions that can scale across literally thousands of servers, which is perfect for a hyper-scale cloud environment.

And one of the customers that they’re working with is First American, who are deploying a solution on Microsoft Azure to provide richer insurance and settlement services to their customers.

What I’d like to do is invite Billy Bosworth, the CEO of DataStax, on stage to join me to talk about the partnership that we’ve had and how some of the great solutions that we’re building together.  Here’s Billy.  (Applause.)

Well, thanks for joining me, Billy.  And it’s great to have you here.

BILLY BOSWORTH, CEO of DataStax:  Thank you.  It’s a real privilege to be here today.

SCOTT GUTHRIE:  So tell us a little bit about DataStax and the technology you guys build.

BILLY BOSWORTH:  Sure.  At DataStax, we deliver Apache Cassandra in a database platform that is really purpose-built for the new performance and availability demands that are being generated by today’s Web, mobile and IOT applications.

With DataStax Enterprise, we give our customers a fully distributed and highly secure transactional database platform.

Now, that probably sounds like a lot of other database vendors out there as well.  But, Scott, we have something that’s really different and really important to us and our customers, and that’s the notion of being always on.  And when you talk about “always on” and transactional databases, things can get pretty complicated pretty fast, as you well know.

The reason for that is in an always-on world, the datacenter itself becomes a single point of failure.  And that means you have to build an architecture that is going to be comprehensive and include multiple datacenters.  That’s tough enough with almost any other piece of the software stack.  But for transactional databases, that is really problematic.

Fortunately, we have a masterless architecture in Apache Cassandra that allows us to have DataStax enterprise scale in a single datacenter or across multiple datacenters, and yet at the same time remain operationally simple.  So that’s really the core of what we do.

SCOTT GUTHRIE:  Is the always-on angle the key differentiator in terms of the customer fit with Azure?

BILLY BOSWORTH:  So if you think about deployment to multiple datacenters, especially and including Azure, it creates an immediate benefit.  Going back to your hybrid clouds comment, we see a lot of our customers that begin their journey on premises.  So they take their local datacenter, they install DataStax Enterprise, it’s an active database up and running.  And then they extend that database into Azure.

Now, when I say that, I don’t mean they do so for disaster recovery or failover, it is active everywhere.  So it is taking full read-write requests on premises and in Azure at the same time.

So if you lose connectivity to your physical datacenter, then the Azure active nodes simply take over.  And that’s great, and that solves the always-on problem.

But that’s not the only thing that Azure helps to solve.  Our applications, because of their nature, tend to drive incredibly high throughput.  So for us, hundreds of millions or even tens and hundreds of billions of transactions a day is actually quite common.

You guys are pretty good, Scott, but I don’t think you’ve changed the laws of physics yet.  And so the way that you get that kind of throughput with unbelievable performance demands, because our customers demand millisecond and microsecond response times, is you push the data closer to the end points.  You geographically distribute it.

Now, what our customers are realizing is they can try and build 19 datacenters across the world, which I’m sure was really cheap and easy to do, or they can just look at what you’ve already done and turn to a partnership like ours to say, “Help us understand how we do this with Azure.”

So not only do you get the always-on benefit, which is critical, but there’s also a very important performance element to this type of architecture as well.

SCOTT GUTHRIE:  Can you tell us a little bit about the work you did with First American on Azure?

BILLY BOSWORTH:  Yeah.  First American is a leading name in the title insurance and settlement services businesses.  In fact, they manage more titles on more properties than anybody in the world.

Every title comes with an associated set of metadata.  And that metadata becomes very important in the new way that they want to do business because each element of that needs to be transacted, searched, and done in real-time analysis to provide better information back to the customer in real time.

And so for that on the database side, because of the type of data and because of the scale, they needed something like DataStax Enterprise, which we’ve delivered.  But they didn’t want to fight all those battles of the architecture that we discussed on their own, and that’s where they turned to our partnership to incorporate Microsoft Azure as the infrastructure with DataStax Enterprise running on top.

And this is one of many engagements that you know we have going on in the field that are really, really exciting and indicative of the way customers are thinking about transforming their business.

SCOTT GUTHRIE:  So what’s it like working with Microsoft as a partner?

BILLY BOSWORTH:  I tell you, it’s unbelievable.  Or, maybe put differently, highly improbable that you and I are on stage together.  I want you guys to think about this.  Here’s the type of company we are.  We’re an open-source database written in Java that runs primarily in production on Linux.

Now, Scott, Microsoft has a couple of pretty good databases, of which I’m very familiar from my past, and open source and Java and Linux haven’t always been synonymous with Microsoft, right?

So I would say the odds of us being on stage were almost none.  But over the past year or two, the way that you guys have opened up your aperture to include technologies like ours — and I don’t just say “include.”  His team has embraced us in a way that is truly incredible.  For a company the size of Microsoft to make us feel the way we do is just remarkable given the fact that none of our technologies have been something that Microsoft has traditionally said is part of their family.

So I want to thank you and your team for all the work you’ve done.  It’s been a great experience, but we are architecting systems that are going to drive businesses for the coming decades.  And that is super exciting to have a partner like you engaged with us.

SCOTT GUTHRIE:  Fantastic.  Well, thank you so much for joining us on stage.

BILLY BOSWORTH:  Thanks, Scott.  (Applause.)

The typical data framework capabilities of DataStax in all respects is best understood via the the following webinar which presents Apache Spark as well as the part of the complete data platform solution:
– Apache Cassandra is the leading distributed database in use at thousands of sites with the world’s most demanding scalability and availability requirements.
– Apache Spark is a distributed data analytics computing framework that has gained a lot of traction in processing large amounts of data in an efficient and user-friendly manner.
– The joining of both provides a powerful combination of real-time data collection with analytics.
After a brief overview of Cassandra and Spark, (Cassandra till 16:39, Spark till 19:25) this class will dive into various aspects of the integration (from 19:26).
August 19, 2015: Big Data Analytics with Cassandra and Spark by Brian Hess, Senior Product Manager of Analytics, DataStax

September 23, 2015: DataStax Announces Strategic Collaboration with Microsoft, company press release

  • DataStax delivers a leading fully-distributed database for public and private cloud deployments
  • DataStax Enterprise on Microsoft Azure enables developers to develop, deploy and monitor enterprise-ready IoT, Web and mobile applications spanning public and private clouds
  • Scott Guthrie, EVP Cloud and Enterprise, Microsoft, to co-deliver Cassandra Summit 2015 keynote

SANTA CLARA, CA – September 23, 2015 – (Cassandra Summit 2015) DataStax, the company that delivers Apache Cassandra™ to the enterprise, today announced a strategic collaboration with Microsoft to deliver Internet of Things (IoT), Web and mobile applications in public, private or hybrid cloud environments. With DataStax Enterprise (DSE), a leading fully-distributed database platform, available on Azure, Microsoft’s cloud computing platform, enterprises can quickly build high-performance applications that can massively scale and remain operationally simple across public and private clouds, with ease and at lightning speed.

Click to Tweet: #DataStax Announces Strategic Collaboration with @Microsoft at #CassandraSummit bit.ly/1V8KY4D

PERSPECTIVES ON THE NEWS

“At Microsoft we’re focused on enabling customers to run their businesses more productively and successfully,” said Scott Guthrie, Executive Vice President, Cloud and Enterprise, Microsoft. “As more organizations build their critical business applications in the cloud, DataStax has proved to be a natural  Azure partner through their ability to enable enterprises to build solutions that can scale across thousands of servers which is necessary in today’s hyper-scale cloud environment.”

“We are witnessing an increased adoption of DataStax Enterprise deployments in hybrid cloud environments, so closely aligning with Microsoft benefits any organization looking to quickly and easily build high-performance IoT, Web and mobile apps,” said Billy Bosworth, CEO, DataStax. “Working with a world-class organization like Microsoft has been an incredible experience and we look forward to continuing to work together to meet the needs of enterprises looking to successfully transition their business to the cloud.”

“As a leader in providing information and insight in critical areas that shape today’s business landscape, we knew it was critical to transform our back-end business processes to address scale and flexibility” said Graham Lammers, Director, IHS. “With DataStax Enterprise on Azure we are now able to create a next generation big data application to support the decision-making process of our customers across the globe.”

BUILD SIMPLE, SCALABLE AND ALWAY-ON APPS IN RECORD SPEED

To address the ever-increasing demands of modern businesses transitioning from on-premise to hybrid cloud environments, the DataStax Enterprise on Azure on-demand cloud database solution provides enterprises with both development and production ready Bring Your Own License (BYOL) DSE clusters that can be launched in minutes on theMicrosoft Azure Marketplace using Azure Resource Management (ARM) Templates. This enables the building of high-performance IoT, Web and mobile applications that can predictably scale across global Azure data centers with ease and at remarkable speed. Additional benefits include:

  • Hybrid Deployment: Easily move DSE workloads between data centers, service providers and Azure, and build hybrid applications that leverage resources across all three.
  • Simplicity: Easily manage, develop, deploy and monitor database clusters by eliminating data management complexities.
  • Scalability: Quickly replicate online applications globally across multiple data centers into the cloud/hybrid cloud environment.
  • Continuous Availability: DSE’s peer-to-peer architecture offers no single point of failure. DSE also provides maximum flexibility to distribute data where it’s needed most by replicating data across multiple data centers, the cloud and mixed cloud/on-premise environments.

MICROSOFT ENTERPRISE CLOUD ALLIANCE & FAST START PROGRAM

DataStax also announced it has joined Microsoft’s Enterprise Cloud Alliance, a collaboration that reinforces DataStax’scommitment to provide the best set of on-premise, hosted and public cloud database solutions in the industry. The goal of Microsoft’s Enterprise Cloud Alliance partner program is to create, nurture and grow a strong partner ecosystem across a broad set of Enterprise Cloud Products delivering the best on-premise, hosted and Public Cloud solutions in the industry. Through this alliance, DataStax and Microsoft are working together to create enhanced enterprise-grade offerings for the Azure Marketplace that reduce the complexities of deployment and provisioning through automated ARM scripting capabilities.

Additionally, as a member of Microsoft Azure’s Fast Start program, created to help users quickly deploy new cloud workloads, DataStax users receive immediate access to the DataStax Enterprise Sandbox on Azure for a hands-on experience testing out DSE on Azure capabilities. DataStax Enterprise Sandbox on Azure can be found here.

Cassandra Summit 2015, the world’s largest gathering of Cassandra users, is taking place this week and Microsoft Cloud and Enterprise Executive Vice President Scott Guthrie, DataStax CEO Billy Bosworth, and Apache Cassandra Project Chair and DataStax Co-founder and CTO Jonathan Ellis, will deliver the conference keynote at 10 a.m. PT on Wednesday, September 23. The keynote can be viewed at DataStax.com.

ABOUT DATASTAX

DataStax delivers Apache Cassandra™ in a database platform purpose-built for the performance and availability demands for IoT, Web and mobile applications. This gives enterprises a secure, always-on database technology that remains operationally simple when scaling in a single datacenter or across multiple datacenters and clouds.

With more than 500 customers in over 50 countries, DataStax is the database technology of choice for the world’s most innovative companies, such as Netflix, Safeway, ING, Adobe, Intuit and eBay. Based in Santa Clara, Calif., DataStax is backed by industry-leading investors including Comcast Ventures, Crosslink Capital, Lightspeed Venture Partners, Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, Meritech Capital, Premji Invest and Scale Venture Partners. For more information, visit DataStax.com or follow us @DataStax.

September 30, 2014: Why Datastax’s increasing presence threatens Oracle’s database by Anne Shields at Market Realist 

Must know: An in-depth review of Oracle’s 1Q15 earnings (Part 9 of 12)

(Continued from Part 8)

Datastax databases are built on open-source technologies

Datastax is a California-based database management company. It offers an enterprise-grade NoSQL database that seamlessly and securely integrates real-time data with Apache Cassandra. Databases built on Apache Cassandra offer more flexibility than traditional databases. Even in case of calamities and uncertainties, like floods and earthquakes, data is available due to its replication at other data centers. NoSQL and Cassandra are open-source software.

Cassandra database was developed by Facebook (FB) to handle its enormous volumes of data. The technology behind Cassandra was developed by Amazon (AMZN) and Google (GOOGL). Oracle’s MySQL (ORCL), Microsoft’s SQL Server (MSFT), and IBM’s DB2 (IBM) are the traditional databases present in the market .

datastax[1]The above chart shows how NoSQL databases, NewSQL databases, and Data grid/cache products fit into the wider data management landscape.

Huge amounts of funds raised in the open-source technology database space

Datastax raised $106 million in September 2014 to expand its database operations. MongoDB Inc. and Couchbase Inc.—both open-source NoSQL database developers—raised $231 million and $115 million, respectively, in 2014. According to Market Research Media, a consultancy firm, spending on NoSQL technology in 2013 was less than $1 billion. It’s expected to reach $3.4 billion by 2020. This explains why this segment is attracting such huge investments.

Oracle’s dominance in the database market is uncertain

Oracle claims it’s a market leader in the relational database market, with a revenue share of 48.3%. In 2013, it launched Oracle Database 12C. According to Oracle, “Oracle Database 12c introduces a new multitenant architecture that simplifies the process of consolidating databases onto the cloud; enabling customers to manage many databases as one — without changing their applications.” To know in detail about Database 12c, please click here .

In July 2013, DataStax announced that dozens of companies have migrated from Oracle databases to DataStax databases. Customers cited scalability, disaster avoidance, and cost savings as the reasons for shifting databases. Datastax databases’ rising popularity jeopardizes Oracle’s dominant position in the database market.

Continue to Part 10

Browse this series on Market Realist:

September 24, 2014: Building a better experience for Azure and DataStax customers by Matt Rollender, VP Cloud Strategy, DataStax, Inc. on Microsoft Azure blog

Cassandra Summit is in high gear this week in Santa Clara, CA, representing the largest NoSQL event of its kind! This is the largest Cassandra Summit to date. With more than 7,000 attendees (both onsite and virtual), this is the first time the Summit is a three-day event with over 135 speaking sessions. This is also the first time DataStax will debut a formalized Apache Cassandra™ training and certification program in conjunction with O’Reilly Media. All incredibly exciting milestones!

We are excited to share another milestone. Yesterday, we announced our formal strategic collaboration with Microsoft. Dedicated DataStax and Microsoft teams have been collaborating closely behind the scenes for more than a year on product integration, QA testing, platform optimization, automated provisioning, and characterization of DataStax Enterprise (DSE) on Azure, and more to ensure product validation and a great customer experience for users of DataStax Enterprise on the Azure cloud. There is strong coordination across the two organizations – very close executive, field, and technical alignment – all critical components for a strong partnership.

This partnership is driven and shaped by our joint customers. Our customers oftentimes begin their journey with on-premise deployments of our database technology and then have a requirement to move to the cloud – Microsoft is a fantastic partner to help provide the flexibility of a true hybrid environment along with the ability to migrate to and scale applications in the cloud. Additionally, Microsoft has significant breadth regarding their data centers – customers can deploy in numerous Azure data centers around the globe, in order to be ‘closer’ to their end users. This is highly complementary to DataStax Enterprise software as we are a peer-to-peer distributed database and our customers need to be close to their end users with their always-on, always available enterprise applications.

To highlight a couple of joint customers and use cases we have First American Title and IHS, Inc. First American is a leading provider of title insurance and settlement services with revenue over $5B.  They ingest and store the largest number (billions) of real estate property records in the industry. Accessing, searching and analyzing large data-sets to get relevant details quickly is the new way they want to do business – to provide better information back to their customers in real-time and allow end users to easily search through the property records on-line. They chose DSE and Azure because of the large data requirements and because of the need to continue to scale the application.

A second great customer and use case is IHS, Inc., a $2B revenue-company that provides information and analysis to support the decision-making process of businesses and governments. This is a transformational project for IHS as they are building out an ‘internet age’ parts catalog – it’s a next generation big data application, using NoSQL, non-relational technology and they want to deploy in the cloud to bring the application to market faster.

As you can see, we are enabling enterprises to engage their customer like never before with their always on, highly available and distributed applications. Stay tuned for more as we move forward together in the coming months!

For Additional information go to http://www.datastax.com/marketplace-microsoft-azure to try out Datastax Enterprise Sandbox on Azure.

See also DataStax Enterprise Cluster Production on Microsoft Azure Marketplace

September 23, 2015: Making Cassandra Do Azure, But Not Windows by  Co-Editor, Co-Founder, The Next Platform

When Microsoft says that it is embracing Linux as a peer to Windows, it is not kidding. The company has created its own Linux distribution for switches used to build the Azure cloud, and it has embraced Spark in-memory processing and Cassandra as its data store for its first major open source big data project – in this case to help improve the quality of its Office365 user experience. And now, Microsoft is embracing Cassandra, the NoSQL data store originally created by Facebook when it could no longer scale the MySQL relational database to suit its needs, on the Azure public cloud.

Billy Bosworth, CEO at DataStax, the entity that took over steering development of and providing commercial support for Cassandra, tells The Next Platform that the deal with Microsoft has a number of facets, all of which should help boost the adoption of the enterprise-grade version of Cassandra. But the key one is that the Global 2000 customers that DataStax wants to sell support and services to are already quite familiar with both Windows Server in their datacenters and they are looking to burst out to the Azure cloud on a global scale.

“We are seeing a rapidly increasing number of our customers who need hybrid cloud, keeping pieces of our DataStax Enterprise on premise in their own datacenters and they also want to take pieces of that same live transactional data – not replication, but live data – and in the Azure cloud as well,” says Bosworth. “They have some unique capabilities, and one of the major requirements of customers is that even if they use cloud infrastructure, it still has to be distributed by the cloud provider. They can’t just run Cassandra in one availability zone in one region. They have to span data across the globe, and Microsoft has done a tremendous job of investing in its datacenters.”

With the Microsoft agreement, DataStax is now running its wares on the three big clouds, with Amazon Web Services and Google Compute Engine already certified able to run the production-grade Cassandra. And interestingly enough, Microsoft is supporting the DataStax implementation of Cassandra on top of Linux, not Windows. Bosworth says that while Cassandra can be run on Windows servers, DataStax does not recommend putting DataStax Enterprise (DSE), the commercial release, on Windows. (It does have a few customers who do, nonetheless, and it supports them.) Bosworth adds that DataStax and the Cassandra community have been “working diligently” for the past year to get a Windows port of DSE completed and that there has been “zero pressure” for the Microsoft Azure team to run DSE on anything other than Linux.

It is important to make the distinction between running Cassandra and other elements of DSE on Windows and having optimized drivers for Cassandra for the .NET programming environment for Windows.

“All we are really talking about is the ability to run the back-end Cassandra on Linux or Windows, and to the developer, it is irrelevant on what that back end is running,” explains Bosworth. This takes away some of that friction, and what we find is that on the back end, we just don’t find religious conviction about whether it should run on Windows or Linux, and this is different from five years ago. We sell mostly to enterprises, and we have not had one customer raise their hand and say they can’t use DSE because it does not run on Windows.”

What is more important is the ability to seamless put Cassandra on public clouds and spread transactional data around for performance and resiliency reasons – the same reasons that Facebook created Cassandra for in the first place.

What Is In The Stack, Who Uses It, And How

The DataStax Enterprise distribution does not just include the Apache Cassandra data store, but has an integrated search engine that is API compatible with the open source Solr search engine and in-memory extensions that can speed up data accesses by anywhere from 30X to 100X compared to server clusters using flash SSDs or disk drives. The Cassandra data store can be used to underpin Hadoop, allowing it to be queried by MapReduce, Hive, Pig, and Mahout, and it can also underpin Spark and Spark Streaming as their data stores if customers decide to not go with the Hadoop Distributed File System that is commonly packaged with a Hadoop distribution.

It is hard to say for sure how many organizations are running Cassandra today, but Bosworth reckons that it is on the order of tens of thousands worldwide, based on a number of factors. DataStax does not do any tracking of its DataStax Community edition because it wants a “frictionless download” like many open source projects have. (Developers don’t want software companies to see what tools they are playing with, even though they might love open source code.) DataStax provides free training for Cassandra, however, where it does keep track, and developers are consuming over 10,000 units of this training per month, so that probably indicates that the Cassandra installed base (including tests, prototypes, and production) is in the five figures.

datastax-momentum[1]

DataStax itself has over 500 paying customers – now including Microsoft after its partner tried to build its own Spark-Cassandra cluster using open source code and decided that the supported versions were better thanks to the extra goodies that DataStax puts into its distro. DataStax has 30 of the Fortune 100 using its distribution of Cassandra in one form or another, and it is always for transactional, rather than batch analytic, jobs and in most cases also for distributed data stores that make use of the “eventual consistency” features of Cassandra to replicate data across multiple clusters. The company has another 600 firms participating in its startup program, which gives young companies freebie support on the DSE distro until they hit a certain size and can afford to start kicking some cash into the kitty.

The largest installation of Cassandra is running at Apple, which as we previously reported has over 75,000 nodes, with clusters ranging in size from hundreds to over 1,000 nodes and with a total capacity in the petabytes range. Netflix, which used to employ the open source Cassandra, switched to DSE last May and had over 80 clusters with more than 2,500 nodes supporting various aspects of its video distribution business. In both cases, Cassandra is very likely housing user session state data as well as feeding product or play lists and recommendations or doing faceted search for their online customers.

We are always intrigued to learn how customers are actually deploying tools such as Cassandra in production and how they scale it. Bosworth says that it is not uncommon to run a prototype project on as few as ten nodes, and when the project goes into production, to see it grow to dozens to hundreds of nodes. The midrange DSE clusters range from maybe 500 to 1,000 nodes and there are some that get well over 1,000 nodes for large-scale workloads like those running at Apple.

In general, Cassandra does not, like Hadoop, run on disk-heavy nodes. Remember, the system was designed to support hot transactional data, not to become a lake with a mix of warm and cold data that would be sifted in batch mode as is still done with MapReduce running atop Hadoop.

The typical node configuration has changed as Cassandra has evolved and improved, says Robin Schumacher, vice president of products at DataStax. But before getting into feeds and speeds, Schumacher offered this advice. “There are two golden rules for Cassandra. First, get your data model right, and second, get your storage system right. If you get those two things right, you can do a lot wrong with your configuration or your hardware and Cassandra will still treat you right. Whenever we have to dive in and help someone out, it is because they have just moved over a relational data model or they have hooked their servers up to a NAS or a SAN or something like that, which is absolutely not recommended.”

datastax-table[1]

Only four years ago, because of the limitations in Cassandra (which like Hadoop and many other analytics tools is coded in Java), the rule of thumb was to put no more than 512 GB of disk capacity onto a single node. (It is hard to imagine such small disk capacities these days, with 8 TB and 10 TB disks.) The typical Cassandra node has two processors, with somewhere between 12 and 24 cores, and has between 64 GB and 128 GB of main memory. Customers who want the best performance tend to go with flash SSDs, although you can do all-disk setups, too.

Fast forward to today, and Cassandra can make use of a server node with maybe 5 TB of capacity for a mix of reads and writes, and if you have a write intensive application, then you can push that up to 20 TB. (DataStax has done this in its labs, says Schumacher, without any performance degradation.) Pushing the capacity up is important because it helps reduce server node count for a given amount of storage, which cuts hardware and software licensing and support costs. Incidentally, only a quarter of DSE customers surveyed said they were using spinning disks, but disk drives are fine for certain kinds of log data. SSDs are used for most transactional data, but the bits that are most latency sensitive should use DSE to store data on PCI-Express flash cards, which have lower latency.

Schumacher says that in most cases, the commercial-grade DSE Cassandra is used for a Web or mobile application, and a DSE cluster is not set up for hosting multiple applications, but rather companies have a different cluster for each use case. (As you can see is the case with Apple and Netflix.) Most of the DSE shops to make use of the eventual consistency replication features of Cassandra to span multiple datacenters with their data stores, and span anywhere from eight to twelve datacenters with their transactional data.

Here’s where it gets interesting, and why Microsoft is relevant to DataStax. Only about 30 percent of the DSE installations are running on premises. The remaining 70 percent are running on public clouds. About half of DSE customers are running on Amazon Web Services, with the remaining 20 percent split more or less evenly between Google Compute Engine and Microsoft Azure. If DataStax wants to grow its business, the easiest way to do that is to grow along with AWS, Compute Engine, and Azure.

So Microsoft and DataStax are sharing their roadmaps and coordinating development of their respective wares, and will be doing product validation, benchmarking, and optimization. The two will be working on demand generation and marketing together, too, and aligning their compensation to sell DSE on top of Azure and, eventually, on top of Windows Server for those who want to run it on premises.

In addition to announcing the Microsoft partnership at the Cassandra Summit this week, DataStax is also releasing its DSE 4.8 stack, which includes certification for Cassandra to be used as the back end for the new Spark 1.4 in-memory analytics tool. DSE Search has a performance boosts for live indexing, and running DSE instances inside of Docker containers has been improved. The stack also includes Titan 1.0, the graph database overlay for Cassandra, HBase, and BerkeleyDB that DataStax got through its acquisition of Aurelius back in February. DataStax is also previewing Cassandra 3.0, which will include support for JSON documents, role-based access control, and a lot of little tweaks that will make the storage more efficient, DataStax says. It is expected to ship later this year.

 

Embedded Android — A VIA Technologies Strategic Direction in addition to its earlier joint CPU venture with the Shanghai government

July 28, 2015 2:34 pm / Leave a comment

– Nov 12, 2012 – July 11, 2014: Can VIA Technologies save the mobile computing future of the x86 (x64) legacy platform? for preliminary reading on this blog
– October 8, 2014: Coming very soon from Centaur Technology: A Leap Ahead in Chip Design as a very small glimpse into the next generation by the Centaur Technology
– October 13, 2014: Centaur Technology: Do the same job that an Intel processor can do, but doing it less expensively, with a much smaller group and Glenn Henry in charge as another as a very small glimpse …
June 3, 2015: VIA pushing for profitability in 2015 by DIGITIMES

VIA Technologies [威盛電子] president Chen Wen-Chi [陳文琦 the spouse of Cher Wang Chairwoman and CEO of HTC] has maintained that the company will not be delisted from the Taiwan Stock Exchange (TSE) and will have a good chance of turning profitable in 2015. [http://technews.tw/2015/06/02/via-technologies-condition/: “this year the operation has turned the corner, there is the opportunity to turn profit, but not sure“]

Chen said during a shareholders meeting on June 2 that VIA’s revenue performance became stable in 2014, while losses have also started narrowing. With its embedded platform and digital signage businesses starting to contribute profits, VIA is expecting an optimistic result for 2015.

As for the recent market rumor about Intel considering acquiring its subsidiary GenieNetworks[a CDMA licensing business having 2 clients by the end of 2014], Chen declined to comment.

December 29, 2014: Ownership of the Centaur Technology has been transfered to VIA CPU PLATFORM, INC. established on December 17, 2013 (⇒威盛電子：代子公司VIA USA Inc.公告進行美國子公司Centaur Technology Inc.股權之投資架構調整) and whose president is Timothy Chen (陳主望), Cher Wang’s nephew

December 25, 2014: VIA to return to profitability in 2015, says company president by DIGITIMES

… As for the China government’s recently announced strategy to fully support and nurture local semiconductor players, Chen believes it could bring a strong challenge to the Taiwan and worldwide semiconductor industries, but VIA has been forming partnerships with China’s players and will only see limited impact from the policies.

November 21, 2014: VIA stock demoted in TSE; expects strong performance in 4Q14 by DIGITIMES

VIA Technologies has recently been demoted to become a full-cash delivery stock by the Taiwan Stock Exchange (TSE) because its stock’s net asset value dropped below NT$5 (US$0.16) in the third quarter. Commenting on the incident, special [technical] assistant to the president [also Head of Sales and Marketing since 1996 according to LinkedIn and VP Business Development and Strategy, VIA Technologies, HTC according to World Economic Forum 2015], Timothy Chen pointed out that the company had losses in the third quarter because its embedded solution orders were delayed and it had non-recurring engineering (NRE) expenses.
…
Although VIA’s CPU business continues to suffer from losses, the company’s invested Wondermedia [in 2014 focused on ARM-based tablet and STB processor development], VIA Labs [having USB 3.0 chips already for the 2014 market] and GenieNetworks as well as the joint venture with the government of Shanghai, China still contribute income.
…
Chen noted that VIA has not yet given up the x86 CPU market and its licensing agreement with Intel is valid until 2018. Although VIA did not achieve much performance in the PC market, the company is seeing stable orders for embedded applications such as digital signage.

The company’s joint venture with the Shanghai government is currently developing x86-based processors and 3D graphics chips and should help the company return to the PC market in the second half of 2015. The joint venture has R&D centers in Shanghai, Beijing and Wuhan, China and has about 600 employees currently.

February 19, 2014: VIA reportedly moving x86 CPU resources to new joint venture in China by DIGITIMES

VIA Technologies is rumored to have started shifting its x86 CPU technologies and related personnel to its newly formed IC design joint venture with a China government-owned investment firm, according to market watchers
…
The joint venture was announced in early 2014 with VIA owning a 20% stake in the company.
…
Because VIA’s x86 CPU business is licensed by Intel, moving related resources to a new joint venture is expected to attract Intel’s attention. However, the chip giant may not be able to do much because Intel reached an agreement with the US’s Fair Trade Commission (FTC) in 2010 to not interfere with competition in the CPU and chipset markets, and extend its licensing of PCI Express to VIA by at least another six years. Intel is also unlikely to wish to offend the China investment firm, which has support from the China government, the market watchers analyzed.

VIA Alliance Semiconductor Co., Ltd. > Introduction:

VIA Alliance Semiconductor Co., Ltd. [磐聚网] was established in April 2013 with a total registered capital of USD$250M. As a joint venture between Shanghai Alliance Investment Ltd. [SAIL] who is affiliated to Shanghai SASAC and VIA Technologies, Inc., VIA Alliance Semiconductor Co., Ltd. has about 1000 employees and locates its headquarter at Zhangjiang of Shanghai with branches in Beijing, Hangzhou, Wuhan, Shenzhen, Taiwan, California and Texas of America.

With the forefront technologies and know-how in the design of CPU, GPU and chipsets, VIA Alliance Semiconductor Co., Ltd. is well known to provide high security, high performance, low power dissipation, and low cost SoC solutions.

As a fabless SoC factory, VIA Alliance Semiconductor Co., Ltd. adopts advanced 40nm and 28nm semiconductor processes. VIA Alliance Semiconductor Co., Ltd.’s main products include CPU and chipsets for desktop PC and laptop and ARM Cortex series SoC with its state of the art Elite series GPU and Video Engine IPs. VIA Alliance Semiconductor Co., Ltd. aims at becoming the leading SoC solution supplier for smart TV, smart phone and enterprise

January 17, 2013: VIA forms IC joint venture with Shanghai Alliance Investment by DIGITIMES

VIA Technologies has announced that it has set up an IC design house jointly with Shanghai Alliance Investment Company targeting the growing chip market in China.

The joint venture will be capitalized at US$250 million with Shanghai Alliance Investment contributing 80.1% of total capital, while VIA makes up the remaining 19.9%. An initial investment of US$100 million is slated for completion by the end of March 2013, VIA said.

VIA posted revenues of NT$3.36 billion (US$115.47 million) for 2012, decreasing 20.8% from a year earlier.

September 2014: Research and development of Lenovo M6000/S6000 desktops with ZX-A C4350AL [VIA Nano X2 announced on January 4, 2011] CPU have been completed
November 2014: Mass production of Great Wall desktops using ZX-A C3450AL total solution have been achieved

– Targeting a range of Desktop products ZX-A processors and V11PH solution extend the reach into multitasking and performance-oriented segments and offer end users an optimal, power-efficient computing experience
– ZX-A processors are built using the latest 40nm fabrication process. ZX-A processors’ package size is 21mm x 21mm and the die size is only 11mm x 6mm. The launched processor name is C4350AL (the Clock Speed is 1.6G+).
– ZX-A processors are x86 architecture CPUs, support 32-bit/64-bit and the extended instruction sets. ZX-A are the first truly optimized, low power dual-core processors delivering industry leading performance-per-watt and improved multi-tasking ability, without consuming more power. ZX-A processors leverage a multi-core architecture to offer up to twice the performance in multi-thread optimized applications, while staying within the same signature low-power envelope.
– Featuring two out-of-order x86 cores, ZX-A processors come with native 64-bit software support, VT CPU virtualization technology, and PadLock hardware security features.

– Targeting a range of Mobile Notebook products ZX-A processors and VX11H solution extend the reach into multitasking and performance-oriented segments and offer end users an optimal, power-efficient computing experience
– ZX-A processors are built using the latest 40nm fabrication process. ZX-A processors’ package size is 21mm x 21mm and the die size is only 11mm x 6mm. The launched processor name is C4350AL (the Clock Speed is 1.6G+).
– ZX-A processors are x86 architecture CPUs, support 32-bit/64-bit and the extended instruction sets. ZX-A are the first truly optimized, low power dual-core processors delivering industry leading performance-per-watt and improved multi-tasking ability, without consuming more power. ZX-A processors leverage a multi-core architecture to offer up to twice the performance in multi-thread optimized applications, while staying within the same signature low-power envelope.
– Featuring two out-of-order x86 cores, ZX-A processors come with native 64-bit software support, VT CPU virtualization technology, and PadLock hardware security features.

– ZX-C series processor is a new generation of quad-core processors, they are designed for high-performance computing
– ZX-C processors are built using the latest 28nm fabrication process. ZX-C processors’ package size is 21mm x 21mm and pin to pin match with ZX-A.
– There are 4 CPU cores integrated on the single chip packaging. Delivering industry leading performance per watt and improved multi-tasking ability, without consuming more power. ZX-C processors leverage a multi-core architecture to offer up to quad the performance in multi-thread optimized applications, while staying within the same signature low-power envelope.
– Featuring four out-of-order x86 cores, ZX-C processors come with native 64-bit software support, VT CPU virtualization technology, and hardware security features.
– VX11PH Chipset offering a world-class HD multimedia platform for media-intensive applications

Already visible in July through benchmarks the next stepping of the legacy Isiah line: CentaurHauls Family 6 Model 15 Stepping 14 ⇒ VIA Technology Inc. VT3456 6628AMB, VIA QuadCore @ 2.00 GHz 2 processors, 8 cores

So the once influential VIA Technologies is desparately trying to regain its stance by capitalising on the technological fruits of the smartphone revolution which has already ended by Qualcomm’s alignment with latest developments in China via downsizing, Allwinner and Microsoft collaboration.

There are two lines of strategic actions for VIA which have become public as such recently:

1. May 20, 2015: VIA Smart ETK For Embedded Android 

The VIA Smart ETK for Android provides an application programming interface (API) that simplifies Android system development on VIA Embedded ARM platforms by enabling the Android application to access I/O and manageability services provided by the system hardware that are not supported in the Android framework. These APIs help safeguard against system crashes and provide the ability to schedule auto power on and off, as well as periodic system reboots to ensure maximum performance.

The VIA Smart ETK for Android is also bundled with Smart ETK Demo, which is easy to install and has a user-friendly GUI for demonstrating the functions of VIA Embedded ARM platforms. Both the VIA Smart ETK and Smart ETK Demo are easy-to-use tools that help to shorten development time and speed up time to market. Key features include the following:

Watchdog:
This provides an API which allows the user to set a timer to ensure proper operation and help the applications/system to recover from a dead circle or breakdown. When it is set, the system will automatically reboot if no “feeding dog” signal is received.
System Power Off / Reboot:
This provides APIs that allow the user to use an Android application to schedule when the system should power off as well as set periodic reboots to ensure maximum performance is maintained.
RTC Wake-Up:
This provides an auto power on feature by setting the Remote Time Clock (RTC) auto wake-up timer. The RTC supports three auto wake-up modes:
  • Wake-up on a specified hour and minute every day
  • Wake-up on a specified day/ hour/ minute every week
  • Wake-up on a specified day/ hour/ minute every month

Legacy I/O Support:
The VIA Smart ETK enables legacy I/O support such as RS-232, by opening up GPIO, I2C, and CAN bus ports to the application.

February 26, 2015: VIA SMART ETK for Android post on VIA News by Richard Brown VP of International Marketing

We’ve seen a tremendous amount of interest in the VIA SMART ETK at Embedded World this week, particularly for embedded Android system design applications.

As its name implies, the VIA SMART ETK is an embedded tool kit that we offer as part of our software engineering services in order to facilitate the development of embedded systems and devices on based on our ARM and x86 platforms.

The VIA SMART ETK for Android is available with the VIA VAB-600, VIA VAB-820, and VIA VAB-1000 boards, as well as the VIA ALTA DS, VIA ALTA DS 2, VIA ARTiGO A900, and VIA Viega systems. It provides an application programming interface (API) that simplifies Android system development by enabling the Android application to access I/O and manageability services provided by the system hardware that are not supported in the Android framework. These APIs help safeguard against system crashes and provide the ability to schedule auto power on and off, as well as periodic system reboots to ensure maximum performance.

One of the key features we have enabled in the VIA SMART ETK for Android is support for legacy I/O such as RS-232 by opening up the GPIO, I2C, and CAN bus ports to the application. Others include Watchdog, System Power Off/Reboot, and RTC Wake-Up. To learn more, please visit the ARM Software Engineering Services page on our website and download our white paper “Cracking the Embedded Android Code” [January 26, 2015].

We are committed to the continued long-term development of the VIA SMART ETK for Android and regularly issue new releases of it for the boards and systems listed above. Watch this space for news of the latest updates.

2. [February 5, 2015⇒Android-Based Digital Signage Solutions] Signage Solution Pack for Android as the first of software solution packs optimized to meet the requirements of specific vertical market segments

The Signage Starter Solution Pack for Android has been designed to accelerate the development of digital signage solutions using the VIA ALTA DS and VIA ALTA DS 2 [Oct 15, 2014 ⇒ the Solution Pack already came with ⇒Android Signage Goes Dual Screen with VIA ALTA DS 2] systems. It includes a number of APIs that help safeguard against system crashes provide the ability to schedule auto power on and off as well as periodic system reboots to ensure maximum performance, unique to Android OS for digital signage applications. Key features include:

Watch Dog:
Provides an API which allows the user to set a timer to ensure proper operation and help applications/system to recover from a dead circle or breakdown. When it is set, the system will automatically reboot if no “feeding dog” signal is received.
System Power Off / Reboot:
Provides APIs which allow the user to use an Android application to schedule when the system should power off as well as set periodical reboots to ensure maximum performance is maintained.
RTC Wake-Up:
Provides an auto power on feature by setting Remote Time Clock (RTC) auto wake-up timer. The RTC supports three auto wake-up modes:
  • Wake-up on a specified hour and minute every day
  • Wake-up on a specified day/ hour/ minute every week
  • Wake-up on a specified day/ hour/ minute every month

Customer ID:
Provides a unique ID which matches the software to a particular VIA ALTA DS system helping to protect the customer’s application or to identify a particular system.

July 9, 2015: Embedded Android Survey – The Results Are In! by Michael Fox of VIA Technologies

Android-survey-1

Android is picking up quite a head of steam in the embedded market. That’s the inescapable conclusion of the worldwide survey we recently conducted among our customers – with an overwhelming 93% of the respondents indicating that they are either currently using Android or considering using the O/S for an embedded project in the near future.

The growing popularity of visual applications for displaying increasingly rich data sets is clearly a key driver behind the rising momentum of Android among embedded developers. Industrial Automation (28%), Infotainment (20%), and Digital Signage (12%) were the top three applications in the survey, closely followed by HMI (11%) and Medical (11%).

Andorid-survey-benefits

The ability to add a touch interface (26%) was listed by respondents as the main benefit of adopting Android, with reduced time to market (25%) and customizability (19%) coming in second and third respectively. Native multimedia support (14%) in the O/S and the robust Android app ecosystem (12%) were also seen as important.

As a mobile O/S, Android does offer some critical challenges for developers to overcome when implementing it for embedded applications, including its lack of I/O support for peripherals (23%), the need to maintain different versions of it, and ensuring security (17%). Building up internal Android development expertise (21%) and finding the right development tools (19%) are other key issues embedded developers face in adopting the O/S.

We’d like to thank everyone who responded to the survey for the invaluable feedback they provided. We have already begun analyzing the results in order to determine how we can improve the platforms and services we offer for Embedded Android, and will be updating you on our progress.

Download the full results here.

As the enhancement of the technology portfolio there is the new
Apr 8, 2015: HD Video Monitoring Starter Kit

The VIA HD Video Monitoring Starter Kit is a turnkey solution aimed at accelerating the development of wireless multi-node video monitoring systems for the rapidly growing home and commercial markets.The starter kit includes:

VIA ALTA DS 2 System

ALTA_DS_2_ProductAt the heart of the starter kit is the ultra-compact fanless VIA ALTA DS 2 system. Powered by a 1.0GHz dual core VIA Elite E1000 Cortex-A9 SoC with a high-performance 2D/3D graphics and video engine that supports Open GL ES 3.0 hardware acceleration and simultaneous multiple Full HD video playback. The VIA ALTA DS 2 includes SATA and Micro SD Card support, allowing recorded footage to be stored locally for playback at a later time or offloaded to the cloud.

Customized Android BSP & Smart ETK

Included with the ALTA DS 2 system is an Android BSP (Board Support Package) customized for video monitoring applications which includes the following enhancements:

  • Storage – performance improvement
  • Hardware enabled decoding
  • RTSP & WVTP parse performance improvement
  • Hardware acceleration for on screen preview playback

To enable customers to shorten their development time and speed time to market for their specific application needs, the starter kit also includes the VIA Smart ETK (Embedded Tool Kit), which provides a set of APIs for applications to access I/O and manageability services provided by the system hardware.

VIA Video Management Software (VMS)

VIA VMS application framework provides basic functionality including HD playback support, hardware accelerated decoding for live streaming and local/network backup support.Video Streaming & Recording Performance

Live Stream: (Channels/Resolution/Bitrate) Playback Frame Rate/Stream Recording Performance
1ch 1080p @ 8Mbps 30fps 1Ch 1080p @8Mbps
4ch 720p @ 4Mbps 30fps 4Ch 1080p @8Mbps

Live Playback Layouts

VMS-Layout

Wireless IP Cameras

The starter kit includes 4 validated IP cameras featuring OmniVision’s OV9712 CameraChip™ sensor, developed with their proprietary OmniPixel3-HS™ high sensitivity pixel technology to provide excellent scene reproduction in both extremely high and low-light environments, and their OV788 video signal processor for video compression, 720p HD video streaming, and AES-256 encryption over any Wi-Fi network, the system offers ‘instant-on’ crisp HD video and streaming capabilities in an extremely power-efficient, battery operated package.

Which is related to the
April 8, 2015: OmniVision and VIA Announce Partnership to Develop Battery-Powered Wireless HD Video Monitoring Solution news release as well

Customizable Android™ Based Reference Design to Accelerate Time to Market, Optimize Home and Small Business Monitoring Systems

SANTA CLARA, Calif., April 6, 2015 — OmniVision Technologies Inc. (NASDAQ: OVTI), a leading developer of advanced digital imaging solutions, and VIA Technologies, Inc., a leader in embedded IoT and M2M platform innovation, today announced a partnership to develop a battery-powered high definition (HD) video monitoring solution that enables OEMs to dramatically reduce time-to-market for wireless multi-node monitoring systems in homes and small businesses.

“This partnership between OmniVision and VIA Technologies exemplifies both companies’ desire to meet the rapidly growing demand for turnkey solutions that can give OEMs the ability to quickly and cost-effectively bring innovative smart devices to market,” said Paul Gallagher, senior director of marketing at OmniVision. “By offering ‘instant-on’ crisp HD video and streaming capabilities in an extremely power-efficient, battery operated package, OmniVision’s OV9712 and OV788 video signal processor together provide excellent capabilities for the advanced solution now under development.”

“By combining OmniVision’s industry-leading imaging technologies with VIA’s advanced video processing technologies and embedded Android system design capabilities, we have produced a highly competitive turnkey solution,” said Epan Wu, head of VIA Embedded. “We look forward to collaborating with OmniVision and driving the development of new and innovative technologies for the rapidly growing market for home and commercial monitoring systems.”

Utilizing the OV9712 CameraChip™ sensor developed with OmniVision’s proprietary OmniPixel3-HS™ high sensitivity pixel technology, the solution will be designed to achieve excellent scene reproduction in both extremely high- and low-light environments. The OV9712 will operate in conjunction with OmniVision’s ultra-low power OV788 video signal processor. That processor will provide video compression, 720p HD video streaming, and AES-256 encryption over any Wi-Fi network, thus allowing users to quickly stream high quality video content using the video monitoring solution.

About OmniVision

OmniVision Technologies (NASDAQ: OVTI) is a leading developer of advanced digital imaging solutions. Its award-winning CMOS imaging technology enables superior image quality in many of today’s consumer and commercial applications, including mobile phones, notebooks, tablets and webcams, digital still and video cameras, security and surveillance, entertainment devices, automotive and medical imaging systems. Find out more at: www.ovt.com

With DragonBoard™ 410c Qualcomm is pioneering the high performance, 64-bit capable, low cost ARM based platform market for communities of embedded developers, educators, makers et al.

June 22, 2015 7:20 pm / Leave a comment

This is Qualcomm’s first initiative to target the communities. Since the company’s Snapdragon 410 SoC had already been designed into no less than 291 smartphones available on the market community members are assured of getting their costs incredibly low. In addition to that Cortex-A53 is used alone in higher and higher-end devices as the result of increased competition between MediaTek and Qualcomm, which will assure the communities a continuous supply of leading edge SoCs in the future. Read that companion post of mine in which you could also find the basic facts about the advantages of the Cortex-A53 cores vs. the earlier designs from ARM.

Charbax from Maker Fair Shenzhen 2015 (June 19-21, 2015)

Qualcomm DragonBoard 410c is a credit card sized http://96Boards.org compliant development board based on a Qualcomm Snapdragon 410 processor, with I/O like USB device, 1080P HDMI, micro USB port, support WiFi, Bluetooth, GPS, support Android, linux, planned to support windows 10 in the near future. The DragonBoard 410c is designed to support rapid software development, education and prototyping, including the next generation of robotics, cameras, medical devices, vending machines, smart buildings, digital signage, casino gaming consoles, and much more. At Maker Fair Shenzhen, Qualcomm is showing off how easy it is to get going with development using their new DragonBoard 410c, being released now

June 18, 2015: Welcome to the DragonBoard™ 410c

Available now! The DragonBoard™ 410c by Arrow Electronics is the first development board based on a mid-tier Qualcomm® Snapdragon™ 400 series processor. The board is designed to build a software ecosystem around the Snapdragon 410 processor, as well as offering uses in education, prototyping, and commercial embedded computing products. Featuring the 64-bit capable Snapdragon 410 quad-core ARM® Cortex® A53 processor, the DragonBoard 410c supports Android 5.1, Linux based on Ubuntu and there are plans to offer support for Windows 10. It offers advanced processing power, integrated WiFi, Bluetooth, and GPS, all packed into a board the size of a credit card. The board supports feature-rich functionality, including multimedia, with the Adreno™ 306 GPU for PC-class graphics, integrated ISP with up to 13 MP camera support, and 1080p HD video playback and capture with H.264 (AVC).

The DragonBoard 410c is an ideal foundation for prototyping and includes 1GB 533MHz LPDDR3 memory, 8GB eMMC 4.5 storage and a micro SD card slot, as well as one 40-pin low speed and one 60-pin high speed expansion connector, and the footprint for an optional analog expansion connector for stereo headset/line-out, speakers and analog line-in. The board can be made compatible with Arduino using an add-on mezzanine board.

The DragonBoard 410c has the rich feature set and mid-tier accessibility to enable wide-ranging embedded and Internet of Everything (IoE) applications, including the next generation of robotics, cameras, medical devices, vending machines, smart buildings, digital signage, casino gaming consoles, and much more.

March 18, 2015: Qualcomm Announces Support of Windows 10 for the DragonBoard 410c Development Platform and Mobile Device Reference Designs

Support brings OEMs and developers high-performance Snapdragon enabled platform to help accelerate development for Windows 10 mobile and Windows 10 IoT devices

Qualcomm Technologies, Inc. (QTI), a subsidiary of Qualcomm Incorporated (NASDAQ: QCOM), today announced its support for Microsoft Windows 10 for IoT devices and Internet of Everything (IoE) applications with the DragonBoard™ 410c development board. Based on the Qualcomm® Snapdragon™ 410 processor by QTI, the DragonBoard 410c platform has superior functionality and computing capabilities, as well as Wi-Fi, Bluetooth and GPS, and is one of the world’s first high performance, low cost ARM®-based platforms for Windows 10.  It is a credit card-sized development kit designed to support rapid software development and prototyping for commercializing new inventions and products, such as the next generation of robotics, cameras, set-top-boxes, wearables, medical devices, vending machines, building automation, industrial control, digital signage, and casino gaming consoles.

“Qualcomm Technologies continues to offer the mobile device and development community the foundation and resources they need to build their portfolio of Windows devices across smartphones, tablets and IoE applications,” said Jason Bremner, senior vice president of product management for Qualcomm Technologies. “We are thrilled to demo DragonBoard 410c running Windows 10 IoT at WinHEC. DragonBoard 410c is an ARMv8-based development platform which is designed to support a wide array of embedded computing and IoE devices, drivers and application development.”

“Microsoft is committed to advancing the Internet of Things with Windows 10 and Azure Cloud Services. Our collaboration with Qualcomm Technologies to provide Windows 10 for the DragonBoard 410c is an important milestone in realizing a new device-as-a-service proposition for device builders,” said Kevin Dallas, general manager, IoT Team, Operating Systems Group, Microsoft. “Combining Windows 10 with the performance of Qualcomm Snapdragon 410 processors will help the ecosystem realize robust, feature-rich use cases and enable developers to quickly commercialize their hardware products.”

The first live demos on the DragonBoard 410c will occur at WinHEC on March 18-19, 2015, in Shenzhen. The event will also feature technical sessions on Qualcomm Reference Designs (QRD) by QTI, as well as a QRD-based Windows Phone device display. For more information on WinHEC, please visit www.winhec.com. Additional information about QRD can be found at https://qrd.qualcomm.com/, or on the DragonBoard 410c at http://developer.qualcomm.com/dragonboard410c.  The DragonBoard 410c is anticipated to be made commercially available by third party distributors this summer.

In addition to the introduction of Windows 10 support for the DragonBoard 410c, QTI’s long-standing collaboration with Microsoft has resulted in 25 OEMs developing over 30 new Windows Phones based on various Qualcomm Reference Designs to date. The Qualcomm Snapdragon 210 processor-based reference design will be the first reference design from Qualcomm Technologies to support the new Windows 10 operating system, with both phone and tablet reference designs to help manufacturers quickly introduce feature-rich Windows mobile devices.

About the Qualcomm Reference Design Program

To date, the Qualcomm Reference Design program by QTI has helped OEMs and ODMs around the world to accelerate their product development time and reduce related costs.  More than 1,080 commercial QRD-based devices have been shipped or are in the pipeline across 21 countries. Additionally, there are more than 270 commercial QRD-based LTE devices with more than 180 designs in the pipeline, helping provide consumers with more connected devices around the world.

March 19, 2015: DragonBoard 410c for Embedded Computing and IoE bí Leon Farasati, senior product manager at Qualcomm CDMA Technologies (QCT) responsible for Snapdragon Mobile Development Platforms

What will you build with this dragon?

As mobile devices powered by Qualcomm® Snapdragon™ processors have grown in functionality and number, the processor has become attractive to manufacturers of adjacent products like robots, kiosks, display signage and arcade machines.

Most of the interest has come from companies in embedded computing, where applications are more often industrial than consumer-facing and require parts designed for longevity, so they have often lacked features we take for granted in mobile, like a small footprint and low power consumption.

It turns out that Snapdragon processors have been quite a nice surprise for them.

Why Snapdragon processors for embedded computing?

As the Internet of Everything (IoE) takes off, manufacturers of embedded products are looking at everything they can do with Snapdragon processors, including HD video, Wi-Fi, multimedia, computer vision and cameras. They like what they see, and they really like that they can build those functions into embedded products with greater energy efficiency, no fans, no noise and a low thermal profile.

We’ve been working with them for the last few years with tools, kits and platforms that the hardware ecosystem has rolled out based on Snapdragon 800 and 600 series processors. Now we’re gearing up to support Snapdragon processors for a broader group of developers, makers and manufacturers with a new low-cost development board design based on the 64-bit capable Qualcomm® Snapdragon™ 410 processor which has been designed for longevity.

DragonBoard™ 410c

The “c” is for “community”, and that’s exactly what this board is intended to support. The DragonBoard 410c is one of the world’s first high performance, 64-bit capable, low cost ARM based platforms. It has integrated Wi-Fi, Bluetooth® and GPS, all in a board the size of a credit card. It’s designed to be compatible with the 96Boards Consumer Edition, which supports the hardware community to develop a range of compatible add-on products, shields and accessories. 96Boards is the open platform specification for high-performance development boards supported by Linaro.

DragonBoard based on Snapdragon 410

The DragonBoard 410c has support for Android, Linux and Windows 10, providing incredible options for software solutions. And as you would expect with any Snapdragon processor, it’s well equipped to support rich multimedia applications with an Adreno™ 306 GPU, 1080p HD video playback and capture with H.264 (AVC) and integrated ISP with support for 13 MP camera.

It also comes equipped with high- and low-speed expansion connectors, analog expansion connector for headset, speakers and FM, plus I/O interfaces for HDMI, USB 2.0 and micro SD card slot. All said, we believe this will make a great platform for rapid prototyping and commercializing a broad range of new inventions. The path to commercial devices is supported by an established ecosystem of embedded solutions providers who provide off-the-shelf or custom system-on-modules, support and design services for commercial deployments.

Last week we announced DragonBoard 410c. This week we are showing the first live demos of it at Microsoft-hosted WinHEC, and this summer DragonBoard 410c is anticipated to be commercially available through third party distributors.

Next Steps

With DragonBoard 410c we’re working to make made-for-mobile Snapdragon features a lot more accessible to help fuel innovation of embedded products. Adjacent products can benefit from AllJoyn™, Adreno GPU, Fast CV™, Vuforia™, audio and video features that seemed far beyond embedded computing just a couple of processor-generations ago. We can’t wait to see what you’ll invent.

Related Blogs:

Satya Nadella on “Digital Work and Life Experiences” supported by “Cloud OS” and “Device OS and Hardware” platforms–all from Microsoft

July 23, 2014 2:53 pm / 1 Comment on Satya Nadella on “Digital Work and Life Experiences” supported by “Cloud OS” and “Device OS and Hardware” platforms–all from Microsoft

Update: Gates Says He’s Very Happy With Microsoft’s Nadella [Bloomberg TV, Oct 2, 2014] + Bill Gates is trying to make Microsoft Office ‘dramatically better’ [The Verge, Oct 3, 2014]

This is the essence of Microsoft Fiscal Year 2014 Fourth Quarter Earnings Conference Call(see also the Press Release and Download Files) for me, as the new, extremely encouraging, overall setup of Microsoft in strategic terms (the below table is mine based on what Satya Nadella told on the conference call):

image

These are extremely encouraging strategic advancements vis–à–vis previously publicized ones here in the following, Microsoft related posts of mine:

I see, however, particularly challenging the continuation of the Lumia story with the above strategy, as with the previous, combined Ballmer/Elop(Nokia) strategy the results were extremely weak:

image

Worthwhile to include here the videos Bloomberg was publishing simultaneously with Microsoft Fourth Quarter Earnings Conference Call:

Inside Microsoft’s Secret Surface Labs [Bloomberg News, July 22, 2014]

July 22 (Bloomberg) — When Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella defined the future of his company in a memo to his 127,100 employees, he singled out the struggling Surface tablet as key to a future built around the cloud and productivity. Microsoft assembled an elite team of designers, engineers, and programmers to spend years holed up in Redmond, Washington to come up with a tablet to take on Apple, Samsung, and Amazon. Bloomberg’s Cory Johnson got an inside look at the Surface labs.

Will Microsoft Kinect Be a Medical Game-Changer? [Bloomberg News, July 22, 2014]

July 23 (Bloomberg) — Microsoft’s motion detecting camera was thought to be a game changer for the video gaming world when it was launched in 2010. While appetite for it has since decreased, Microsoft sees the technology as vital in its broader offering as it explores other sectors like 3d mapping and live surgery. (Source: Bloomberg

Why Microsoft Puts GPS In Meat For Alligators [Bloomberg News, July 22, 2014]

July 23 (Bloomberg) — At the Microsoft Research Lab in Cambridge, scientists track animals and map climate change all on the off chance they’ll stumble across the next big thing. (Source: Bloomberg)

To this it is important to add: How Pier 1 is using the Microsoft Cloud to build a better relationship with their customers [Microsoft Server and Cloud YouTube channel, July 21, 2014]

In this video, Pier 1 Imports discuss how they are using Microsoft Cloud technologies such as Azure Machine Learning to to predict which the product the customer might want to purchase next, helping to build a better relationship with their customers. Learn more: http://www.azure.com/ml

as well as:
Microsoft Surface Pro 3 vs. MacBook Air 13″ 2014 [CNET YouTube channel, July 21, 2014]

http://cnet.co/1nOygqh Microsoft made a direct comparison between the Surface Pro 3 and the MacBook Air 13″, so we’re throwing them into the Prizefight Ring to settle the score once and for all. Let’s get it on!

Surface Pro 3 vs. MacBook Air (2014) [CTNtechnologynews YouTube channel, July 1, 2014]

The Surface Pro 3 may not be the perfect laptop. But Apple’s MacBook Air is pretty boring. Let’s see which is the better device!

In addition here are some explanatory quotes (for the new overall setup of Microsoft) worth to include here from the Q&A part of Microsoft’s (MSFT) CEO Satya Nadella on Q4 2014 Results – Earnings Call Transcript [Seeking Alpha, Jul. 22, 2014 10:59 PM ET]

…

Mark Moerdler – Sanford Bernstein

Thank you. And Amy one quick question, we saw a significant acceleration this quarter in cloud revenue, or I guess Amy or Satya. You saw acceleration in cloud revenue year-over-year what’s – is this Office for the iPad, is this Azure, what’s driving the acceleration and how long do you think we can keep this going?

Amy Hood

Mark, I will take it and if Satya wants to add, obviously, he should do that. In general, I wouldn’t point to one product area. It was across Office 365, Azure and even CRM online. I think some of the important dynamics that you could point to particularly in Office 365; I really think over the course of the year, we saw an acceleration in moving the product down the market into increasing what we would call the mid-market and even small business at a pace. That’s a particular place I would tie back to some of the things Satya mentioned in the answer to your first question.

Improvements to analytics, improvements to understanding the use scenarios, improving the product in real-time, understanding trial ease of use, ease of sign-up all of these things actually can afford us the ability to go to different categories, go to different geos into different segments. And in addition, I think what you will see more as we initially moved many of our customers to Office 365, it came on one workload. And I think what we’ve increasingly seen is our ability to add more workloads and sell the entirety of the suite through that process. I also mentioned in Azure, our increased ability to sell some of these higher value services. So while, I can speak broadly but all of them, I think I would generally think about the strength of being both completion of our product suite ability to enter new segments and ability to sell new workloads.

Satya Nadella

The only thing I would add is it’s the combination of our SaaS like Dynamics in Office 365, a public cloud offering in Azure. But also our private and hybrid cloud infrastructure which also benefits, because they run on our servers, cloud runs on our servers. So it’s that combination which makes us both unique and reinforcing. And the best example is what we are doing with Azure active directory, the fact that somebody gets on-boarded to Office 365 means that tenant information is in Azure AD that fact that the tenant information is in Azure AD is what makes EMS or our Enterprise Mobility Suite more attractive to a customer manager iOS, Android or Windows devices. That network effect is really now helping us a lot across all of our cloud efforts.

…

Keith Weiss – Morgan Stanley

Excellent, thank you for the question and a very nice quarter. First, I think to talk a little bit about the growth strategy of Nokia, you guys look to cut expenses pretty aggressively there, but this is – particularly smartphones is a very competitive marketplace, can you tell us a little bit about sort of the strategy to how you actually start to gain share with Lumia on a going forward basis? And may be give us an idea of what levels of share or what levels of kind unit volumes are you going to need to hit to get to that breakeven in FY16?

Satya Nadella

Let me start and Amy you can even add. So overall, we are very focused on I would say thinking about mobility share across the entire Windows family. I already talked about in my remarks about how mobility for us even goes beyond devices, but for this specific question I would even say that, we want to think about mobility not just one form factor of a mobile device because I think that’s where the ultimate price is.

But that said, we are even year-over-year basis seen increased volume for Lumia, it’s coming at the low end in the entry smartphone market and we are pleased with it. It’s come in many markets we now have over 10% that’s the first market I would sort of say that we need to track country-by-country. And the key places where we are going to differentiate is looking at productivity scenarios or the digital work and life scenario that we can light up on our phone in unique ways.

When I can take my Office Lens App use the camera on the phone take a picture of anything and have it automatically OCR recognized and into OneNote in searchable fashion that’s the unique scenario. What we have done with Surface and PPI shows us the way that there is a lot more we can do with phones by broadly thinking about productivity. So this is not about just a Word or Excel on your phone, it is about thinking about Cortana and Office Lens and those kinds of scenarios in compelling ways. And that’s what at the end of the day is going to drive our differentiation and higher end Lumia phones.

Amy Hood

And Keith to answer your specific question, regarding FY16, I think we’ve made the difficult choices to get the cost base to a place where we can deliver, on the exact scenario Satya as outlined, and we do assume that we continue to grow our units through the year and into 2016 in order to get to breakeven.

…

Rick Sherlund – Nomura

Thanks. I’m wondering if you could talk about the Office for a moment. I’m curious whether you think we’ve seen the worst for Office here with the consumer fall off. In Office 365 growth in margins expanding their – just sort of if you can look through the dynamics and give us a sense, do you think you are actually turned the corner there and we may be seeing the worse in terms of Office growth and margins?

Satya Nadella

Rick, let me just start qualitatively in terms of how I view Office, the category and how it relates to productivity broadly and then I’ll have Amy even specifically talk about margins and what we are seeing in terms of I’m assuming Office renewals is that probably the question. First of all, I believe the category that Office is in, which is productivity broadly for people, the group as well as organization is something that we are investing significantly and seeing significant growth in.

On one end you have new things that we are doing like Cortana. This is for individuals on new form factors like the phones where it’s not about anything that application, but an intelligent agent that knows everything about my calendar, everything about my life and tries to help me with my everyday task.

On the other end, it’s something like Delve which is a completely new tool that’s taking some – what is enterprise search and making it more like the Facebook news feed where it has a graph of all my artifacts, all my people, all my group and uses that graph to give me relevant information and discover. Same thing with Power Q&A and Power BI, it’s a part of Office 365. So we have a pretty expansive view of how we look at Office and what it can do. So that’s the growth strategy and now specifically on Office renewals.

Amy Hood

And I would say in general, let me make two comments. In terms of Office on the consumer side between what we sold on prem as well as the Home and Personal we feel quite good with attach continuing to grow and increasing the value prop. So I think that’s to address the consumer portion.

On the commercial portion, we actually saw Office grow as you said this quarter; I think the broader definition that Satya spoke to the Office value prop and we continued to see Office renewed in our enterprise agreement. So in general, I think I feel like we’re in a growth phase for that franchise.

…

Walter Pritchard – Citigroup

Hi, thanks. Satya, I wanted to ask you about two statements that you made, one around responsibly making the market for Windows Phone, just kind of following on Keith’s question here. And that’s a – it’s a really competitive market it feels like ultimately you need to be a very, very meaningful share player in that market to have value for developer to leverage the universal apps that you’re talking about in terms of presentations you’ve given and build in and so forth.

And I’m trying to understand how you can do both of those things once and in terms of responsibly making the market for Windows Phone, it feels difficult given your nearest competitors there are doing things that you might argue or irresponsible in terms of making their market given that they monetize it in different ways?

Satya Nadella

Yes. One of beauties of universal Windows app is, it aggregates for the first time for us all of our Windows volume. The fact that even what is an app that runs with a mouse and keyboard on the desktop can be in the store and you can have the same app run in the touch-first on a mobile-first way gives developers the entire volume of Windows which is 300 plus million units as opposed to just our 4% share of mobile in the U.S. or 10% in some country.

So that’s really the reason why we are actively making sure that universal Windows apps is available and developers are taking advantage of it, we have great tooling. Because that’s the way we are going to be able to create the broadest opportunity to your very point about developers getting an ROI for building to Windows. For that’s how I think we will do it in a responsible way.

Heather Bellini – Goldman Sachs

Great. Thank you so much for your time. I wanted to ask a question about – Satya your comments about combining the next version of Windows and to one for all devices and just wondering if you look out, I mean you’ve got kind of different SKU segmentations right now, you’ve got enterprise, you’ve got consumer less than 9 inches for free, the offering that you mentioned earlier that you recently announced. How do we think about when you come out with this one version for all devices, how do you see this changing kind of the go-to-market and also kind of a traditional SKU segmentation and pricing that we’ve seen in the past?

Satya Nadella

Yes. My statement Heather was more to do with just even the engineering approach. The reality is that we actually did not have one Windows; we had multiple Windows operating systems inside of Microsoft. We had one for phone, one for tablets and PCs, one for Xbox, one for even embedded. So we had many, many of these efforts. So now we have one team with the layered architecture that enables us to in fact one for developers bring that collective opportunity with one store, one commerce system, one discoverability mechanism. It also allows us to scale the UI across all screen sizes; it allows us to create this notion of universal Windows apps and being coherent there.

So that’s what more I was referencing and our SKU strategy will remain by segment, we will have multiple SKUs for enterprises, we will have for OEM, we will have for end-users. And so we will – be disclosing and talking about our SKUs as we get further along, but this my statement was more to do with how we are bringing teams together to approach Windows as one ecosystem very differently than we ourselves have done in the past.

Ed Maguire – CLSA

Hi, good afternoon. Satya you made some comments about harmonizing some of the different products across consumer and enterprise and I was curious what your approach is to viewing your different hardware offerings both in phone and with Surface, how you’re go-to-market may change around that and also since you decided to make the operating system for sub 9-inch devices free, how you see the value proposition and your ability to monetize that user base evolving over time?

Satya Nadella

Yes. The statement I made about bringing together our productivity applications across work and life is to really reflect the notion of dual use because when I think about productivity it doesn’t separate out what I use as a tool for communication with my family and what I use to collaborate at work. So that’s why having this one team that thinks about outlook.com as well as Exchange helps us think about those dual use. Same thing with files and OneDrive and OneDrive for business because we want to have the software have the smart about separating out the state carrying about IT control and data protection while me as an end user get to have the experiences that I want. That’s how we are thinking about harmonizing those digital life and work experiences.

On the hardware side, we would continue to build hardware that fits with these experiences if I understand your question right, which is how will be differentiate our first party hardware, we will build first party hardware that’s creating category, a good example is what we have done with Surface Pro 3. And in other places where we have really changed the Windows business model to encourage a plethora of OEMs to build great hardware and we are seeing that in fact in this holiday season, I think you will see a lot of value notebooks, you will see clamshells. So we will have the full price range of our hardware offering enabled by this new windows business model.

And I think the last part was how will we monetize? Of course, we will again have a combination, we will have our OEM monetization and some of these new business models are about monetizing on the backend with Bing integration as well as our services attached and that’s the reason fundamentally why we have these zero-priced Windows SKUs today.

…

Altera will use Intel Custom Foundry’s 14 nm Tri-Gate (FinFET) process services to produce its new high-end SoC FPGA with 64-bit ARM Cortex-A53 IP

November 1, 2013 2:57 pm / Leave a comment

With Stratix® 10 high-end and Arria® 10 mid-range FPGA and SoC FPGA products Altera wants to surge ahead of Xilinx in critical infrastructure—such as wireless remote radio units (RRUs), 100G/400G wireline channel (line) cards and data centers—as well as military, medical and broadcast scenarios by relying on ARM Cortex-A53 IP (Intellectual Property) and Intel Custom Foundry’s 14 nm Tri-Gate (FinFET) process services for Stratix 10, and ARM Cortex-A9 IP and TSMC 20 nm 20SoC process for Arria 10 with OpenCL for FPGAs capability for both. It will also be possible to begin designs with the Arria 10 portfolio of 20 nm FPGA devices, and then take advantage of pin-for-pin design migration pathways from Arria 10 FPGA and SoC products to Stratix 10 FPGA and SoC products as they become available.

This was my conclusion when the news came out that Altera Announces Quad-Core 64-bit ARM Cortex-A53 for Stratix 10 SoCs [press release, Oct 29, 2013] and then I answered three questions for myself, followed by understanding a little bit more deeply two other issues as well:

  1. Why FPGAs? Why more FPGAs?
  2. Why SoC FPGAs?
  3. Why ARM with FPGA on the Intel Tri-Gate (FinFET) process, and why now?
  4. OpenCL for FPGAs
  5. Altera SoC FPGAs

For introduction here is Altera Stratix 10 SoC & ARM perspective – ARM TechCon ’13 [ARMflix YouTube channel, Oct 31, 2013]

Altera’s Chris Balough tells us about the Stratix 10 series, then ARM’s Ian Ferguson discusses what this provides for various applications. http://www.altera.com/devices/fpga/stratix-fpgas/stratix10/stx10-index.jsp

To shed more light on the direction of breakthrough by Altera, here is additional introductory information from: Arria 10 Device Overview* [Altera, Sept 4, 2013]
*As there is no similar document yet for Stratix 10

Altera’s Arria® FPGAs and SoCs deliver optimal performance and power efficiency in the midrange. By using TSMC’s 20-nm process technology on a high-performance architecture, Arria 10 FPGAs and SoCs deliver higher performance than previous-generation high-end FPGAs while simultaneously reducing power by offering a comprehensive set of power-saving technologies. Altera’s Arria 10 family is reinventing the midrange.
Altera’s Arria 10 SoCs offer a second generation SoC product that both demonstrates a long-term commitment to the SoC product line and extends Altera’s leadership in programmable devices that feature the ARM-based hard processor system (HPS).
Important innovations in Arria 10 devices include:
– Enhanced core architecture delivering 60% higher performance than the previous generation midrange (15% higher performance than previous fastest high-end FPGAs)
– Integrated transceivers with short reach rates up to 28.05 Gbps and backplane capability up to 17.4 Gbps
– Hard PCI Express Gen3 intellectual property (IP) blocks
– Hard memory controllers and PHY up to 2666 Mbps
– Variable precision digital signal processing (DSP) blocks
– Fractional synthesis PLLs
– Up to 40% lower power compared to prior midrange FPGAs and up to 60% lower power compared to prior generation high-end FPGAs due to a comprehensive set of advanced power-saving features
– 2nd generation ARM® Cortex™-A9 hard processor system (HPS) for SoC variants
– Integrated 10GBASE-KR/40GBASE-KR4 Forward Error Correction (FEC)
Arria 10 devices are ideally suited for high performance, power-sensitive, midrange applications in such diverse markets as:
– Wireless—for channel and switch cards in remote radio heads and mobile backhaul
– Broadcast—for studio switches, servers and transport, videoconferencing, and pro audio/video
– Wireline—for 40G/100G muxponders and transponders, 100G line cards, bridging, and aggregation
– Compute and Storage—for flash cache, cloud computing servers, and server acceleration
– Medical—for diagnostic scanners and diagnostic imaging
– Military—for missile guidance and control, radar, electronic warfare, and secure communications
…
Target Markets for Arria 10 FPGAs and SoCs
Arria 10 devices meet the performance, power, and bandwidth requirements of next generation wireless infrastructure, broadcast, compute and storage, networking, and medical and military equipment.
By providing such a highly integrated device, Arria 10 FPGAs and SoCs significantly reduce BOM cost, form factor, and power consumption. Arria 10 devices allow you to differentiate your product through customization by implementing your intellectual property in both hardware and software.
For these applications, Arria 10 devices integrate both logic functions and processor functions in a highly integrated single device. The integrated ARM-based SoCs provide all the functionality of traditional FPGAs, eliminate the need for a local processor, and increase system performance by taking advantage of the tightly coupled high bandwidth interface between the core fabric and the hard processor system.

image

  • For Wireless infrastructure particularly remote radio unit, the industry has standardized onARM-based ASSPs and SoCs for several generations. ARM is widely recognized as the industry leader in low power solutions. At 20 nm, the Dual ARM Cortex MPCore provides the best power efficiency of any GHz class of process. When combined with Altera’s industry leading programmable technology, this provides an ideal platform to address the performance, power, and form factor requirements of wireless remote radio unit and small cell base stations.
  • For Wireline communication equipment such as access, metro, core,and transmission equipment where the FPGA performs critical functions such as protocol bridging, packet framing, aggregation, and I/O expansion, SoCs now offer all this as well as integrated intelligent controland link management, sometimes referred to as Operations, Administration, and Maintenance (OAM). OAM typically is software that executes when a link is established or fails during operation. The integrated ARM processor can also be used for statistics and error monitoring and minimize system downtime when a link is compromised or oversubscribed. Tight coupling of the processor and the data path (implemented in the core logic) saves time and results in significant savings in terms of operating expenses associated with system downtime and loss of quality of service.
  • For Compute and storage equipment, flash cache storage, the integrated ARM processor can be used to manage Flash sectors and improve overall life and reliability as well as offload the host processor and provide control for search and hardware acceleration functions for cloud storage equipment. The integrated ARM based HPS can configure the hard PCIe interfaces in PCIe root port configuration and also run link layers for SAS and SATA interfaces.
  • For Next generation Broadcast equipment, where “4K readiness” is the key technology driver, the integrated ARM processor subsystem eliminates the need for a local GHz class processor, which is commonly used for functions such as audio processing, video compression, video link management, and PCIe root port.
  • For Military applications, new security features such as Secure Boot, Encryption, and Authentication have been introduced for secure wireless and wireline communications, military radar, military intelligence equipment.
  • For Test and Medical applications, combining ARM HPS with support for high speed memory devices such as DDR4, and Hybrid Memory Cube (HMC) as well as high speed transceivers and embedded controllers such as PCIe Gen3, Arria 10 SoCs are ideal for next generation test and medical equipment.
Then you can also read The Next-Node Battle Begins – Altera Announces “Generation 10” [EE Journal, June 11, 2013] from I will quote here the following:
For the past three nodes or so, we’ve seen a back-and-forth battle between Altera and Xilinx. Most people think that Altera got the upper hand in 40/45nm products with their Stratix IV family. Two years later, Xilinx struck back hard at 28nm with Virtex-7. Now, it’s time for the “next” generation, and Altera is apparently ready to get the party started. The company has just announced their upcoming “Generation 10” FPGA families – and it looks like this node is gonna be a doozy!
as well as the ARMing a New Generation – Altera Announces Processor Architecture for Gen X [EE Journal, Oct 29, 2013] from which it is wort to quote the following:
Altera is currently in a race with archrival Xilinx, whose first FinFET FPGAs will be riding in on TSMC’s 16nm FinFET process. Which horse is faster? Intel is widely believed to have superior process technology and has already been shipping 22nm FinFET-based devices. Those points go to Intel. TSMC, on the other hand, has vastly more experience as a merchant fab and has announced that they are working closely with Xilinx to accelerate their FinFET program, in a blitz whose marketing name is “FinFAST.”
At this point, therefore, it is unclear who will be shipping first, (and, except for bragging rights between the two companies, probably few people care.) It is likely that we will not see production devices from either company before 2015, so we are definitely in “future” mode here. It is also unclear how the performance attributes of the two companies’ offerings will stack up. Altera has shown more of their hand thus far, and their predictions are impressive – up to four million LUT-4 equivalent 1GHz programmable fabric, 56Gbps SerDes, better power efficiency, tons-o-RAM – and a high-powered processing subsystem in the SoC version. What’s the processing subsystem look like? That’s why we are gathered here today.
There was speculation that the architecture might be other-than-ARM since the manufacturer is none-other-than-Intel. As far as we know, Intel hasn’t historically been too keen on manufacturing competing processor architectures. However, two other, more important market forces are at work in this situation. First, Altera has made a huge commitment to the ARM architecture with their current-generation SoC FPGAs. Getting their customers committed to the ARM/FPGA architecture and then jumping ship and forcing them to migrate after only one generation would be a major inconvenience, and it would be a big black eye for Altera. It would have been very unlikely that Altera would have inked the Intel deal knowing that they couldn’t continue their ARM commitment.
Second, Intel is obviously trying to make a go at it in the merchant fab business. If the company had a hard-and-fast policy of never manufacturing a chip with an ARM architecture on board, they’d be severely limiting their market. While Intel has already been building FPGAs for both Tabula and Achronix, getting Altera in their stable is a whole ‘nuther deal. Putting aside petty concerns about processor architecture is a small price to pay for better street cred in the merchant fab business.

1. Why FPGAs? Why more FPGAs?

As one of the greatest strengths of the FPGA is its ability to perform highly pipelined and complex algorithmic computations on the data brought onchip Altera says that we can do better with explicit parallelism on FPGAs than on GPUs:

imageThe spectrum of software-programmable devices is now evolving significantly. The emphasis is shifting from automatically extracting instruction-level parallelism at run time to explicitly identifying thread-level parallelism at coding time. Highly parallel multicore devices are beginning to emerge with a general trend of containing multiple simpler processors where more of the transistors are dedicated to computation rather than caching and extraction of parallelism. These devices range from multicore CPUs, which commonly have 2, 4, or 8 cores, to GPUs consisting of hundreds of simple cores optimized for data-parallel computation. To achieve high performance on these multicore devices, the programmer must explicitly code their applications in a parallel fashion. Each core must be assigned work in such a way that all cores can cooperate to execute a particular computation. This is also exactly what FPGA designers do to create their high-level system architectures.
(Source: Implementing FPGA Design with the OpenCL Standard
(v. 2.0 Altera whitepaper, November 2012])
Field Programmable Gate Arrays
FPGAs are integrated circuits that can be configured repeatedly to perform an infinite number of functions. Low level operations such as bit masking, shifting, and addition are all configurable and can be assembled in any order. FPGAs achieve a high level of programmability by integrating combinations of lookup tables (LUTs), registers, on-chip memories, and arithmetic hardware (for example, digital signal processor (DSP) blocks) through a network of reconfigurable connections to implement computation pipelines. LUTs are responsible for implementing various logic functions. For example, reprogramming a LUT can change an operation from a bitwise AND logic function to a bit-wise XOR logic function.
The key benefit in using FPGAs for algorithm acceleration is that they support wide and heterogeneous pipelines. Each pipeline implemented in the FPGA fabric can be wide and unique. This characteristic is in contrast to many different types of processing units such as symmetric multiprocessors (SMPs), DSPs, and graphics processing units (GPUs). In these types of devices, parallelism is achieved by replicating the same generic computation hardware multiple times. In FPGAs, however, parallelism can be achieved by duplicating only the logic that will be exercised by your algorithm.
A processor implements an instruction set that limits the amount of work that can be performed each clock cycle. For example, most processors do not have a dedicated instruction that can execute the following C code:
E = ((((A + B) ^ C) & D) >> 2;
Without a dedicated instruction for this C code example, a CPU, DSP, or GPU must execute multiple instructions to perform the operation. You can configure an FPGA to perform a sequence of operations that implements the code above in a single clock cycle. An FPGA implementation connects specialized addition hardware with a LUT that performs the bit-wise XOR and AND operations. The device then leverages its programmable connections to perform a right shift by two bits without consuming any hardware resources. The result of this operation can be connected to subsequent operations to form complex pipelines. You may think of an FPGA as a hardware platform that can implement any instruction set that your software algorithm requires.
…
Altera SDK for OpenCL Pipeline Approach
The key difference between the pipeline generated by the Altera Offline Compiler (AOC) and a typical processor pipeline is that the FPGA pipeline is not limited to a statically defined set of pipeline stages or instruction set.
…
The custom pipeline structure provided by the AOC speeds up computation by allowing operations within a large number of threads to occur concurrently.
(Source: Altera SDK for OpenCL Optimization Guide
[for v. 13.0 SP1.0 by Altera, June 2013])
GPU and FPGA Design Methodology
GPUs are programmed using either Nvidia’s proprietary CUDA language, or an open standard OpenCL language. These languages are very similar in capability, with the biggest difference being that CUDA can only be used on Nvidia GPUs.
FPGAs are typically programmed using HDL languages Verilog or VHDL. Neither of these languages is well suited to supporting floating-point designs, although the latest versions do incorporate definition, though not necessarily synthesis, of floating-point numbers. For example, in System Verilog, a short real variable is analogue to an IEEE single (float), and real to an IEEE double.
OpenCL for FPGAs
OpenCL is familiar to GPU programmers. An OpenCL Compiler for FPGAs means that OpenCL code written for AMD or Nvidia GPUs can be compiled onto an FPGA. In addition, an OpenCL Compiler from Altera enables GPU programs to use FPGAs, without the necessity of developing the typical FPGA design skill set.
Using OpenCL with FPGAs offers several key advantages over GPUs. First, GPUs tend to be I/O limited. All input and output data must be passed by the host CPU through the PCI Express® (PCIe®) interface. The resulting delays can stall the GPU processing engines, resulting in lower performance
OpenCL Extensions for FPGAs
FPGAs are well known for their wide variety of high-bandwidth I/O capabilities. These capabilities allow data to stream in and out of the FPGA over Gigabit Ethernet (GbE), Serial RapidIO® (SRIO), or directly from analog-to-digital converters (ADCs) and digital-to-analog converters (DACs). Altera has defined a vendor-specific extension of the OpenCL standard to support streaming operations. …
FPGAs can also offer a much lower processing latency than a GPU, even independent of I/O bottlenecks. It is well known that GPUs must operate on many thousands of threads to perform efficiently, due to the extremely long latencies to and from memory and even between the many processing cores of the GPU. In effect, the GPU must operate many, many tasks to keep the processing cores from stalling as they await data, which results in very long latency for any given task.
The FPGA uses a “coarse-grained parallelism” architecture instead. It creates multiple optimized and parallel datapaths, each of which outputs one result per clock cycle. The number of instances of the datapath depends upon the FPGA resources, but is typically much less than the number of GPU cores. However, each datapath instance has a much higher throughput than a GPU core. The primary benefit of this approach is low latency, a critical performance advantage in many applications.
Another advantage of FPGAs is their much lower power consumption, resulting in dramatically lower GFLOPs/W. FPGA power measurements using development boards show 5-6 GFLOPs/W for algorithms such as Cholesky and QRD, and about 10 GFLOPs/W for simpler algorithms such as FFTs. GPU energy efficiency measurements are much hard to find, but using the GPU performance of 50 GFLOPs for Cholesky and a typical power consumption of 200 W, results in 0.25 GFLOPs/W, which is twenty times more power consumed per useful FLOPs.
(Source: Radar Processing: FPGAs or GPUs? (v. 2.0 Altera whitepaper, May 2013])

Altera also says that the need for ever-increasing bandwidth and flexibility drives the need for a breakthrough in capability:

The increased capabilities in smartphones and other portable devices are the reason for the dramatic leap in system performance that we will see in next-generation FPGAs. The explosion of mobility bandwidth requirements are putting a huge demand on the wireless, wired, and data center infrastructure capabilities. While the number of smartphones is growing at single digit percentage rates, the customers of these devices continue to drive more bandwidth with the ever-increasing smartphone capability. Much of this is due to the increased video content. In 2012, average smartphone data usage grew by 81 percent. Cisco expects mobile traffic to increase 66 percent per year through 2017 and two-thirds of all mobile traffic will be video content. At this time, mobile network speed is expected to increase by seven times and 4G networks to comprise 45 percent of all traffic (1) (see Figure 1).

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A brief overview of three infrastructure applications below are examples of why hardware and software developers are looking to FPGAs to address their next-generation products bandwidth, performance, power, and cost goals.
■ Wireless remote radio units
■ 400G wireline channel cards
■ Data centers
Wireless Remote Radio Units
In the capital-intensive wireless infrastructure market, telecommunications operators desire to provide more bandwidth faster and cheaper. The faster these operators can do cost reductions, the more deployments they can do, the more area they can cover, and the faster they can serve customers—a huge advantage. The product strategy of these companies is to keep the datapath width the same and increase the clock frequency for as many generations as they can. Upcoming remote radio units will look for FPGAs to push close to 500 MHz of core performance for complex functions, such as implementing digital pre-distortion algorithms. This will preserve their investment in their radio architecture and allow them to cover a broader spectrum of radio frequency (RF) bandwidth. In doing so they look to have a better return on investment because less work needs to be done re-architecting a solution. Furthermore, their time-to-market advantage improves by getting these new products out faster. They must also lower their operating costs to drive cost per bit down because revenues per mobile subscriber grow at a far less rate than the data traffic per subscriber. Thus by not widening their datapath, and creating power efficient designs on smaller more power-efficient FPGAs, allows them to achieve this goal.
400G Channel Cards
Another driving force in improving FPGA performance is the need to upgrade the network communications infrastructure. Next-generation 400G versus existing 100G channel cards will dramatically push system capabilities. The bandwidth jump of four times in the next-generation systems is much greater than in previous iterations. Because the market for this is still new, companies cannot risk building ASICs or ASSPs to achieve this goal. Integration of multiple 56 gigabits per second (Gbps) and 28 Gbps transceiver solutions to accommodate this level of bandwidth is needed, but only a part of the solution. More and faster logic to accommodate this higher bandwidth is also required. However since the dimensions of the chassis do not change, the power envelope is limited. The network infrastructure cannot tolerate solutions where power increases at a linear rate with bandwidth capability. For packet processing and traffic management applications at 400G bandwidth at 600 million packets per second, scaling the data path width and frequency can relieve the data path processing function but cannot scale for control path processing such as scheduling. Therefore high performance in all aspects of device capability is required: processing, memory interfacing, IO interfaces, and others. FPGAs remain the most attractive solution, but companies will need investments in higher performance per watt architectures, transceivers, and process technology to address this large leap in capabilities and challenges.
Data Centers
All the data and video that are being pushed and downloaded from these new wireless deployments and transported through the new 400G packet processing infrastructure also needs to be stored and processed. Computations per watt and computations per dollar is a key metric in data centers. FPGA’s are increasingly used in the data center for data access, algorithm, and networking acceleration. Data center servers are bottlenecked getting access to data. The latest processors have more and more cores, but the bandwidth to external memory and data is not keeping pace with the increase in computing power. Many of these servers are running at average utilization rates and are well under peak processing power. These servers are good candidates for FPGA acceleration. Hardware acceleration through FPGAs becomes an attractive alternative to replacing these processors by focusing on the performance bottlenecks that software on processors cannot overcome.
Other applications are also looking to FPGAs to support their increased bandwidth requirements, such as video content providers moving to 4K video, cloud computing, and intelligence applications in defense. These applications face similar issues. (Source: Expect a Breakthrough Advantage in Next-Generation FPGAs (v. 1.0 Altera whitepaper, June 2013])

2. Why SoC FPGAs?

Altera’s Vision of Silicon Convergence: system solutions by merging coarse and fine grained programmable hardware [IEEE Computer Society Santa Clara Valley YouTube channel, recorded on Sept 10, 2012, published on June 10, 2013]

Recorded: Monday, September 10, 2012 Speaker: Ty Garibay, Altera Corporation. Event page: http://sites.ieee.org/scv-cs/archives/silicon-convergence-creating-system-solutions-by-merging-coarse-and-fine-grained-programming-model Slide deck: http://sites.ieee.org/scv-cs/files/2012/09/Garibay-IEEE-0910121.pdf While continuing semiconductor miniaturization enables ever more complex systems, the cost and complexity of system innovation becomes increasingly out of reach. A standard solution consisting of high performance processors, hardened peripherals, and a programmable logic fabric is ideal to address system integration challenges. Complementary to similar advances in software, a host of hardware design tools and high-level programming methodologies are also making system design more user-friendly. Together these industry advances allow design teams to flexibly implement any system to achieve the sweet spot of performance and power dissipation according to team capabilities. In his talk, Ty Garibay shares Altera’s view on silicon convergence, the integration of SoC and FPGA, and the direction the company is taking to increase system design efficiency through the use of high-level design languages and tools.

From the slide deck:

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What Is a PLD?

  • A programmable logic device (PLD) is a type of semiconductor
  • Most semiconductors can be programmed only once to perform a specific function
  • PLDs are reprogrammable—functions can be changed or enhanced during development or after manufacturing

Flexibility Makes PLDs Lower Risk and Faster to
Design Than Other Types of Semiconductors

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3. Why ARM with FPGA on the Intel Tri-Gate (FinFET) process, and why now?

Altera Announces Quad-Core 64-bit ARM Cortex-A53 for Stratix 10 SoCs [press release, Oct 29, 2013]

Manufactured on Intel’s 14 nm Tri-Gate Process, Altera Stratix® 10 SoCs Will Deliver Industry’s Most Versatile Heterogeneous Computing Platform
Altera Corporation (NASDAQ: ALTR) today announced that its Stratix 10 SoC devices, manufactured on Intel’s 14 nm Tri-Gate process, will incorporate a high-performance, quad-core 64-bit ARM Cortex™-A53 processor system, complementing the device’s floating-point digital signal processing (DSP) blocks and high-performance FPGA fabric. Coupled with Altera’s advanced system-level design tools, including OpenCL, this versatile heterogeneous computing platform will offer exceptional adaptability, performance, power efficiency and design productivity for a broad range of applications, including data center computing acceleration, radar systems and communications infrastructure.
The ARM Cortex-A53 processor, the first 64-bit processor used on a SoC FPGA, is an ideal fit for use in Stratix 10 SoCs due to its performance, power efficiency, data throughput and advanced features. The Cortex-A53 is among the most power efficient of ARM’s application-class processors, and when delivered on the 14 nm Tri-Gate process will achieve more than six times more data throughput compared to today’s highest performing SoC FPGAs. The Cortex-A53 also delivers important features, such as virtualization support, 256TB memory reach and error correction code (ECC) on L1 and L2 caches. Furthermore, the Cortex-A53 core can run in 32-bit mode, which will run Cortex-A9 operating systems and code unmodified, allowing a smooth upgrade path from Altera’s 28 nm and 20 nm SoC FPGAs.
“ARM is pleased to see Altera adopting the lowest power 64-bit architecture as an ideal complement to DSP and FPGA processing elements to create a cutting-edge heterogeneous computing platform,” said Tom Cronk, executive vice president and general manager, Processor Division, ARM. “The Cortex-A53 processor delivers industry-leading power efficiency and outstanding performance levels, and it is supported by the ARM ecosystem and its innovative software community.”
Leveraging Intel’s 14 nm Tri-Gate process and an enhanced high-performance architecture, Altera Stratix 10 SoCs will have a programmable-logic performance level of more than 1GHz; two times the core performance of current high-end 28 nm FPGAs.
“High-end networking and communications infrastructure are rapidly migrating toward heterogeneous computing architectures to achieve maximum system performance and power efficiency,” said Linley Gwennap, principal analyst at The Linley Group, a leading embedded research firm. “What Altera is doing with its Stratix 10 SoC, both in terms of silicon convergence and high-level design tool support, puts the company at the forefront of delivering heterogeneous computing platforms and positions them well to capitalize on myriad opportunities.”
By standardizing on ARM processors across its three-generation SoC portfolio, Altera will offer software compatibility and a common ARM ecosystem of tools and operating system support. Embedded developers will be able to accelerate debug cycles with Altera’s SoC Embedded Design Suite (EDS) featuring the ARM Development Studio 5 (DS-5™) Altera® Edition toolkit, the industry’s only FPGA-adaptive debug tool, as well as use Altera’s software development kit (SDK) for OpenCL to create heterogeneous implementations using the OpenCL high-level design language.
“With Stratix 10 SoCs, designers will have a versatile and powerful heterogeneous compute platform enabling them to innovate and get to market faster,” said Danny Biran, senior vice president, corporate strategy and marketing at Altera. “This will be very exciting for customers as converged silicon continues to be the best solution for complex, high-performance applications.”
About Altera
Altera® programmable solutions enable designers of electronic systems to rapidly and cost effectively innovate, differentiate and win in their markets. Altera offers FPGAs, SoCs, CPLDs, ASICs and complementary technologies, such as power management, to provide high-value solutions to customers worldwide. Follow Altera viaFacebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Google+ and RSS, andsubscribe to product update emails and newsletters.  altera.com

Altera to Build Next-Generation, High-Performance FPGAs on Intel’s 14 nm Tri-Gate Technology [alteracorp YouTube channel, March 11, 2013]

Industry leaders discuss the impact of the Altera and Intel foundry relationship and the future manufacture of Altera FPGAs on Intel’s 14 nm tri-gate transistor technology. These next-generation products, which target ultra-high-performance systems for military, wireline communications, cloud networking, and compute and storage applications, will enable breakthrough levels of performance and power efficiencies not otherwise possible.

From: Intel takes big step in chip foundry business [Reuters, Feb 25, 2013]

Altera Chief Executive John Daane told Reuters in a phone interview that Altera, which depends on communications infrastructure for about half of its business, is the only major programmable chipmaker that will have access to Intel’s plants.

“We are essentially getting access like an extra division of Intel. As soon as they’re making the technology available to their various groups to do design work, we’re getting the same,” he said.

Daane said Intel’s manufacturing technology will give Altera’s chips a several-year advantage against Xilinx, its main competitor in programmable chips. He said Altera would continue to make other chips with TSMC, its long-time foundry.

Altera to Build Next-Generation, High-Performance FPGAs on Intel’s 14 nm Tri-Gate Technology [press release, Feb 25, 2013]

Altera Corporation and Intel Corporation today announced that the companies have entered into an agreement for the future manufacture of Altera FPGAs on Intel’s 14 nm tri-gate transistor technology. These next-generation products, which target ultra high-performance systems for military, wireline communications, cloud networking, and compute and storage applications, will enable breakthrough levels of performance and power efficiencies not otherwise possible.
“Altera’s FPGAs using Intel 14 nm technology will enable customers to design with the most advanced, highest-performing FPGAs in the industry,” said John Daane, president, CEO and chairman of Altera. “In addition, Altera gains a tremendous competitive advantage at the high end in that we are the only major FPGA company with access to this technology.”
Altera’s next-generation products will now include 14 nm, in addition to previously announced 20 nm technologies, extending the company’s tailored product portfolio that meets myriad customer needs for performance, bandwidth and power efficiency across diverse end applications.
“We look forward to collaborating with Altera on manufacturing leading-edge FPGAs, leveraging Intel’s leadership in process technology,” said Brian Krzanich, chief operating officer, Intel.  “Next-generation products from Altera require the highest performance and most power-efficient technology available, and Intel is well positioned to provide the most advanced offerings.”
Adding this world-class manufacturer to Altera’s strong foundation of leading-edge suppliers and partners furthers the company’s ability to deliver on the promise of silicon convergence; to integrate hardware and software programmability, microprocessors, digital signal processing, and ASIC capability into a single device; and deliver a more flexible and economical alternative to traditional ASICs and ASSPs.

Altera claims that only Intel’s 14 nm Tri-Gate Process offers a second generation of proven production technology:

Transistor Design Background
In 1947 the first transistor, a germanium ‘point-contact’ structure, was demonstrated at Bell Laboratories. Silicon was first used to produce bipolar transistors in 1954, but it was not until 1960 that the first silicon metal oxide semiconductor field-effect transistor (MOSFET) was built. The earliest MOSFETs were 2D planar devices with current flowing along the surface of the silicon under the gate. The basic structure of MOSFET devices has remained substantially unchanged for over 50 years.
Since the prediction or proclamation of Moore’s Law in 1965, many additional enhancements and improvements have been made to the manufacture and optimization of MOSFET technology in order to enshrine Moore’s Law in the vocabulary and product planning cycles of the semiconductor industry. In the last 10 years, the continued improvement in MOSFET performance and power has been achieved by breakthroughs in strained silicon, and High-K metal gate technology.
It was not until the publication of a paper by Digh Hisamoto and a team of other researchers at Hitachi Central Research Laboratory in 1991 that the potential for 3-D, or ‘wraparound’ gate transistor technology, to enhance MOSFET performance and eliminate short channel effects, was recognized. This paper called the proposed 3-D structure ‘depleted lean-channel transistor’, or DELTA(1). In 1997 the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) awarded a contract to a research group at the University of California, Berkeley, to develop a deep sub-micron transistor based on the DELTA concept. One of the earliest publications resulting from this research in 1999 dubbed the device a ‘FinFET’ for the fin-like structure at the center of the transistor geometry(2).
Important Turning Point in Transistor Technology
Continued optimization and manufacturability studies on 3-D transistor structures continued at research and development organizations in leading semiconductor companies. Some of the process and patent development has been published and publicly shared, and some development remained in corporate labs.
The research investment interests of the semiconductor industry are driven by the International Technology Roadmap for Semiconductors (ITRS), which is coordinated and published by a consortium of manufacturers, suppliers, and research institutes. The ITRS defines transistor technology requirements to achieve continued improvement in performance, power, and density along with options which should be explored to achieve the goals. The ITRS and its public documentation captures conclusions and recommendations regarding manufacturing capabilities like strained silicon and High-K metal gate, and now the use of 3-D transistor technologies to maintain the benefits of Moore’s law. Based on documents produced by the ITRS and an examination of academic papers and patent filings, research into 3-D transistor technologies has grown dramatically in the last decade.
Adoption and Research
Two important pronouncements occurred in the last two years that have propelled the 3-D transistor structure into the industry spotlight, and into a permanent place in the technology story of MOSFET transistors.
The first announcement was by Intel Corporation on 4th of May, 2011, about their Tri-Gate transistor design that had been selected for the design and manufacture of their 22 nm semiconductor products. This was preceded by a decade of research and development taking advantage of the work of Hisamoto and others in FinFET development and optimization. It represented both a solid acknowledgment of the feasibility and cost-effectiveness of the the Tri-Gate transistor structure in semiconductor production, as well as a continued declaration of leadership by Intel in semiconductor technology.
The second announcement was the publication of ITRS technology roadmaps, with contributions from many other semiconductor manufacturing companies that identified 3-D transistor technology as the primary enabler of all incremental semiconductor improvement beyond the 20 nm or 22 nm design node.

…

Intel’s Leadership in Transistor Technologies
In several public forums, including the Intel Developer’s Forums and investor’s conferences, Intel identifies where they have demonstrated technology leadership in a variety of advances that have sustained the pace of Moore’s Law. As shown in Figure 3, Intel has identified the number of years of production leadership they have achieved in bringing strained silicon and High-K metal gate technology to full production. In the case of 3-D Tri-Gate transistor technology, Intel estimates a lead of up to four years based on their production rollout of Tri-Gate technology at 22 nm in 2011.
According to former Intel CEO, Paul Otellini in their 16 April 2013 Earnings Call(8):
“In the first quarter [of 2013], we shipped our 100 millionth 22 nanometer [Tri-Gate] processor, using our revolutionary 3-D transistor technology, while the rest of the industry works to ship its first unit.”
Another leadership advantage that will be held by Intel in their rollout of 14 nm technology can be traced to their very public ‘Tick-Tock’ strategy in process and microarchitecture introduction. A ‘tick’ cycle of product introduction relies on the implementation of microarchitecture changes in their CPU products, followed by a ‘tock’ cycle of semiconductor process manufacturing geometry shrink. Intel is firmly committed to a full process shrink in their move from 22 nm to 14 nm; comparable semiconductor technology processes in development at other manufacturers have been less clear whether their process roadmaps include the benefits of a process shrink.
image(Source: The Breakthrough Advantage for FPGAs with Tri-Gate Technology (v. 1.0 Altera whitepaper, June 2013])

Altera says beginning with 14 nm Tri-Gate technology, the highest performance FPGAs will simply be the ones built on demonstrably superior transistor technology:

Accessing the Benefits of Tri-Gate Technology Through Altera FPGAs
Taking advantage of the significant benefits of Intel’s Tri-Gate technology is only possible for users of Altera® high-density and high-performance FPGAs on the 14 nm technology process. This is the result of an exclusive manufacturing partnership between the two companies referenced in the introduction to this paper.
The substantial advantages of Tri-Gate silicon technologies will allow Altera to deliver previously unimaginable performance in FPGA and SoC products. This will include a historic doubling of core performance as compared to other high-end FPGAs, bringing FPGAs to the Gigahertz performance level. Overall active and static power numbers will reduce by 70 percent through a combination of process, architecture, and software advances.
Although the details and schedules of the 14 nm manufacturing process are not yet publicly available from Intel Corporation, Altera users can begin designs today that take advantage of the significant performance and power efficiency benefits of  Tri-Gate technology in FPGAs. This is possible by beginning designs with the Arria® 10 portfolio of 20 nm FPGA devices. Users can then take advantage of pin-for-pin design migration pathways from Arria 10 FPGA and SoC products to Stratix® 10 FPGA and SoC products as they become available.
This allows you, as an FPGA user and system architect, to begin designing products that can accommodate both the Arria 10 and Stratix 10 product families with minimal changes, modifications, and reengineering. This will allow you to get products to market with the highest performance and lowest power FPGAs that leverage 20 nm process technology and power reduction techniques, then advance these same products to the previously unimaginable performance and power efficiency of Intel’s 14 nm Tri-Gate manufacturing process.
(Source: The Breakthrough Advantage for FPGAs with Tri-Gate Technology (v. 1.0 Altera whitepaper, June 2013])

Altera Announces Breakthrough Advantages with Generation 10 [press release, June 10, 2013]

  • Stratix 10 FPGAs and SoCs leverage Intel’s 14 nm Tri-Gate process and an enhanced architecture to deliver core performance two times higher than current high-end FPGAs, while enabling up to 70 percent power savings.
  • Arria 10 FPGAs and SoCs reinvent the midrange by simultaneously surpassing high-end FPGAs in performance while delivering 40 percent lower power than today’s midrange devices.
Altera Corporation (NASDAQ: ALTR) today introduced its Generation 10 FPGAs and SoCs, offering system developers breakthrough levels of performance and power efficiencies. Generation 10 devices are optimized based on process technology and architecture to deliver the industry’s highest performance and highest levels of system integration at the lowest power. Initial Generation 10 families include Arria® 10 and Stratix® 10 FPGAs and SoCs with embedded processors. Generation 10 devices leverage the most advanced process technologies in the industry, including Intel’s 14-nm Tri-Gate process and TSMC’s 20 nm process. Early access customers are currently using the Quartus® II software for Generation 10 product development.
“Our Generation 10 products will strengthen the penetration of programmable logic into new markets and applications and further accelerate the implementation of FPGAs into systems traditionally served by ASSPs and ASICs,” said Patrick Dorsey, senior director of product marketing at Altera. “The optimizations we made in our Generation 10 devices allow customers to develop highly customized solutions that dramatically increase system performance and system integration while lowering operating expenses.”
Delivering the Unimaginable with Stratix 10 FPGAs and SoCs
Stratix 10 FPGAs and SoCs are designed to enable the most advanced, highest performance applications in the communications, military, broadcast and compute and storage markets, while slashing system power. Leveraging Intel’s 14 nm Tri-Gate process and an enhanced high-performance architecture, Stratix 10 FPGAs and SoCs have an operating frequency over one gigahertz, 2X the core performance of current high-end 28 nm FPGAs. For high-performance systems that have the most strict power budgets, Stratix 10 devices allow customers to achieve up to a 70 percent reduction in power consumption at performance levels equivalent to the previous generation.
Altera is announcing the technology details of Stratix 10 FPGAs and SoCs today as part of the Generation 10 portfolio introduction, and will disclose more details on the product at a later date. Stratix 10 FPGAs and SoCs provide the industry’s highest performance and highest levels of system integration, including:
    • More than four million logic elements (LEs) on a single die
    • 56-Gbps transceivers
    • More than 10-TeraFLOPs single-precision digital signal processing
    • A third-generation ultra-high-performance processor system
    • Multi-die 3D solutions capable of integrating SRAM, DRAM and ASICs
    Reinventing the Midrange with Arria 10 FPGAs and SoCs
    Arria 10 FPGAs and SoCs are the first device families to roll out as part of the Generation 10 portfolio. The device family sets a new bar for midrange programmable devices, delivering both the performance and capabilities of current high-end FPGAs at the lowest midrange power. Leveraging an enhanced architecture that is optimized for TSMC’s 20 nm process, Arria 10 FPGAs and SoCs deliver higher performance at up to 40 percent lower power compared to the previous device family.
    Arria 10 devices offer more features and capabilities than today’s current high-end FPGAs, at 15 percent higher performance. Reflecting the trend toward silicon convergence, Arria 10 FPGAs and SoCs offer the highest degree of system integration available in midrange devices, including 1.15 million LEs, integrated hard intellectual property and a second-generation processor system that features a 1.5 GHz dual-core ARM® Cortex™-A9 processor. Arria 10 FPGAs and SoCs also provide 4X greater bandwidth compared to the current generation, including 28-Gbps transceivers, and 3X higher system performance, including 2666 Mbps DDR4 support and up to 15-Gbps Hybrid Memory Cube support.
    Development Suite Delivers Breakthrough Productivity to Generation 10
    Generation 10 devices are supported by Altera’s Quartus II development software and tools for higher level design flows that include a software development kit for OpenCL™, a SoC Embedded Design Suite and DSP Builder tool. This leading-edge development tool suite enables design teams to maximize productivity while making it easier for new design teams to adopt Generation 10 FPGAs and SoCs in their next-generation systems. The Quartus II software will continue to deliver the industry’s fastest compile times by providing Generation 10 FPGAs and SoCs an 8X improvement in compile times versus the previous generation. The substantial reduction in compile times is the result of leading-edge software algorithms that take advantage of modern multi-core computing technologies.
    Availability
    Early access customers are currently using the Quartus II software for development of Arria 10 FPGA and SoCs. Initial samples of Arria 10 devices will be available in early 2014. Altera will have 14 nm Stratix 10 FPGA test chips in 2013 and Quartus II software support for Stratix 10 FPGAs and SoCs in 2014. For more information, visit www.altera.com/gen10, or contact your local Altera sales representative.

    Altera and TSMC Continue Long-Term Partnership [press release, Feb 25, 2013]

    Altera Corporation (NASDAQ: ALTR) and TSMC (TWSE: 2330, NYSE: TSM) today reaffirmed their commitment to a long-term partnership to set new milestones in FPGA innovation. TSMC is Altera’s primary foundry, supplying a wide array of processes to fulfill Altera’s product portfolio, including soon-to-be released 20 nm products, existing mainstream products, and long-lived legacy components.

    Altera is fully engaged with TSMC on developing products based on next-generation process technologies. Altera’s next major product family leverages TSMC’s cost-effective 20SoC process for optimal power and performance and will include several significant product and technology innovations for both companies. Altera will continue to leverage future TSMC process technologies in its tailored product portfolio for performance, bandwidth, and power efficiency needs across diverse end applications. 

    “Over the course of our 20-year collaboration, Altera and TSMC have achieved many industry milestones that have greatly benefitted both companies,” said John Daane, president, CEO and chairman of Altera. “TSMC remains an important part of our future product development. We look forward to continuing our close partnership to jointly develop technologies for next-generation products.”

    Morris Chang, TSMC’s chairman and CEO added,”The history of collaboration between Altera and TSMC has exemplified the way fabless and foundry have nurtured each other to become a powerful force in the semiconductor industry.  TSMC would not be where it is today without customers like Altera, and I firmly believe this partnership will continue to flourish.”

    Altera Demonstrates Industry’s First 32-Gbps Transceiver with Leading-Edge 20 nm Device [press release, April 8, 2013]

    Demonstration Highlights Latest Success in Altera’s 20 nm FPGA Early Access Program
    San Jose, Calif., April 8, 2013– Altera Corporation (NASDAQ: ALTR) today announced the company achieved another significant milestone in transceiver technology by demonstrating the industry’s first programmable device with 32-Gbps transceiver capabilities. The demonstration uses a 20 nm device based on TSMC’s 20SoC process technology. This achievement validates the performance capabilities of 20 nm silicon and is a positive indicator to the more than 500 customers in Altera’s early access program who are looking to use next-generation Altera devices in the development of performance demanding, bandwidth-centric applications. A demonstration video showing the industry’s first operational 20 nm transceiver technology operating at 32 Gbps is available for viewing on Altera’s website at www.altera.com/32gbps-20nm.
    Demonstrating 32-Gbps transceiver data rates provides Altera insight into how high-performance transceiver designs behave on TSMC’s 20SoC process. The transceiver technology Altera is demonstrating today will be integrated into its 20 nm FPGA products, fabricated on TSMC’s 20SoC process. These devices enable customers to design next-generation serial links with the lowest power consumption, fastest timing closure and the highest quality signal integrity. Altera has a proven track record in integrating leading-edge transceiver technology into its devices. Altera is the only company today shipping production 28 nm FPGAs with monolithically integrated low-power transceivers operating at 28 Gbps. Being the first FPGA vendor to reach the 32-Gbps milestone in 20 nm silicon further extends Altera’s leadership in transceiver technology.
    The demonstration video on Altera’s web site shows 20 nm transceivers operating at 32 Gbps with just over nine picoseconds of total jitter and extremely low random jitter of 240 femtoseconds. The results show good margin to key industry specifications requited for next-generation 100G systems.
    “Today’s news represents a significant milestone for the industry and for the transceiver development team at Altera,” said Vince Hu, vice president of product and corporate marketing at Altera. “These 20 nm devices contain the key IP components that will be included in our next-generation FPGAs and validating them now provides us confidence we will deliver to the market 20 nm FPGAs on schedule.”
    Altera’s next-generation transceiver innovations enable system developers to support the rapidly increasing amount of data that is being transmitted through the world’s networks. The transceivers in Altera’s next-generation devices will drive more bandwidth with lower power per channel versus the previous nodes and will support increasing port density by interfacing directly to 100G CPF2 optical modules.

    Altera and Micron Lead Industry with FPGA and Hybrid Memory Cube Interoperability [joint press release, Sept 4, 2013]

    Altera Corporation (NASDAQ: ALTR) and Micron Technology, Inc.(NASDAQ: MU) (“Micron”) today announced they have jointly demonstrated successful interoperability between Altera Stratix® V FPGAs and Micron’s Hybrid Memory Cube (HMC). This technology achievement enables system designers to evaluate today the benefits of HMC with FPGAs and SoCs for next-generation communications and high-performance computing designs. The demonstration provides an early proof point that production support of HMC will be delivered with Altera’s Generation 10 portfolio, in alignment with market timing, and includes both Stratix 10 and Arria 10 FPGAs and SoCs.
    HMC has been recognized by industry leaders and influencers as the long-awaited answer to address the limitations imposed by conventional memory technology, and provides ultra-high system performance with significantly lower power-per-bit. HMC delivers up to 15 times the bandwidth of a DDR3 module and uses 70 percent less energy and 90 percent less space than existing technologies. HMC’s abstracted memory allows designers to devote more time leveraging HMC’s revolutionary features and performance and less time navigating the multitude of memory parameters required to implement basic functions. It also manages error correction, resiliency, refresh, and other parameters exacerbated by memory process variation. Micron expects to begin sampling HMC later this year with volume production ramping in 2014.
    “As one of the founding developers of the HMC Consortium, Altera’s support for and involvement with HMC has been invaluable,” said Brian Shirley, vice president of DRAM solutions for Micron Technology. “The combination of Altera FPGAs with Micron’s HMC solution will help customers leverage the technology’s performance and efficiency in a wide range of next generation networking and computing applications.”
    Altera’s 28 nm Stratix V FPGAs are an ideal demonstration of HMC technology since they are the highest performance FPGAs in the industry with a two speed-grade advantage over the nearest competitor. This performance enables the FPGA to leverage the full bandwidth, efficiency and power benefits of HMC by using a full 16 transceiver HMC link.
    “By demonstrating Stratix V and HMC working together now, we are enabling our customers to leverage their current development with Stratix V FPGAs and prepare for production deployment in Altera’s Generation 10 devices, knowing they will have proven HMC support,” said Danny Biran, senior vice president of marketing and corporate strategy at Altera. “The partnership between Altera and Micron to deliver this capability puts our customers at the forefront of innovation.”
    Altera’s Generation 10 Devices Deliver Performance
    Arria 10 FPGAs and SoCs are the first device families in the Generation 10 portfolio and will be the first devices to support HMC technology in volume production. Leveraging an enhanced architecture optimized for TSMC’s 20 nm process, Arria 10 FPGAs and SoCs will use HMC to extend the benefits by providing both 15 percent higher core performance than today’s highest performance Stratix V FPGAs and up to 40 percent lower power compared to the lowest power Arria V midrange FPGAs. Arria 10 FPGAs and SoCs will offer up to 96 transceiver channels, enabling customers to take full advantage of the bandwidth that HMC has to offer.
    Stratix 10 FPGAs and SoCs will enable the most advanced, highest performance applications across communications, military, broadcast and compute and storage markets. These high-performance applications often require the highest memory bandwidth, which drives the need for an HMC-ready architecture. Leveraging Intel’s 14 nm Tri-Gate process and an enhanced high-performance architecture that integrates with HMC technology, Stratix 10 FPGAs and SoCs will enable system solutions with an operating frequency over one gigahertz, and two times the core performance of current high-end 28 nm FPGAs. Stratix 10 devices will also allow customers to achieve up to a 70 percent reduction in power consumption at performance levels equivalent to the previous generation.

    4. OpenCL for FPGAs

    Altera SDK for OpenCL is First in Industry to Achieve Khronos Conformance for FPGAs [press release, Oct 16, 2013]

    Altera Passes OpenCL Conformance with High-Performance Stratix V FPGA and Demonstrates SDK for OpenCL on ARM-based Cyclone V SoCs
    San Jose, Calif., October 16, 2013—Altera Corporation (NASDAQ: ALTR) today announced its SDK for OpenCL is conformant to the OpenCL 1.0 standard and is now included on the Khronos Group list of OpenCL conformant products. Altera is the only company to offer an FPGA-optimized OpenCL solution, allowing software developers to harness the massively parallel architecture of an FPGA for system acceleration. Altera will demonstrate its OpenCL solutions at the 2013 Linley Processor Conference, being held October 16-17 in Santa Clara, Calif.
    Achieving conformance allows Altera to provide a validated cross-platform programming environment that can be used to dramatically accelerate algorithms at significantly lower power versus alternative computer hardware architectures. To become conformant, Altera successfully completed more than 8500 conformance tests using its SDK for OpenCL, targeting a high-performance Stratix® V FPGA. The tests involved continuously running a Stratix V FPGA accelerator card in a server farm resulting in zero errors.
    “Our continued investment in OpenCL is enabling Altera to drive the industry toward using FPGAs for acceleration of computationally-intensive applications,” said Alex Grbic, director of software, IP and DSP marketing at Altera. “Our SDK for OpenCL is used by some of the world’s leading developers of high-performance computing systems. These developers require Khronos group OpenCL conformance and Altera is the only FPGA vendor to achieve it, proving the readiness of our solution.”
    Software developers can easily take advantage of the high-performance, low-power that FPGAs offer. Altera’s SDK for OpenCL provides an industry-standard open source programming interface and Altera’s Preferred Board Partner Program for OpenCL provides off-the-shelf FPGA boards that are optimized for Altera devices. A list of preferred board partners, as well as a variety of design examples that demonstrate the advantages of using FPGAs in high-performance systems, can be found at www.altera.com/opencl.
    OpenCL Ray Tracer Demonstration Targeting Single-chip SoCs
    In addition to support for its high-performance Stratix V FPGAs, Altera developed its SDK for OpenCL to support its low-power, low-cost Cyclone® V SoCs, which integrates an ARM® Cortex®-A9 processor into a 28 nm FPGA. Altera recently used its SDK for OpenCL to develop and demonstrate a complete heterogeneous system using a Cyclone V SoC. The demonstration shows how a ray tracing algorithm used to render 3D graphics can be accelerated using the Altera SDK for OpenCL and a Cyclone V SoC – achieving a speed up of 40X in comparison to running the same algorithm purely on a discrete ARM processor system. For software developers unfamiliar with hardware design languages, no hardware expertise is required to implement the OpenCL kernels.
    Altera SDK for OpenCL at Linley Processor Conference
    Altera will demonstrate its OpenCL solutions at the 2013 Linley Tech Processor Conference, being held October 16-17 in Santa Clara, Calif. Altera’s participation includes a presentation titled “Implementing Deep Packet Inspection Using OpenCL Channels” that will show how to express a DPI application using OpenCL with Altera FPGAs. Altera will also  demonstrate its SDK for OpenCL solutions to attendees.
    Pricing and Availability
    The Altera SDK for OpenCL is currently available for download on Altera’s website or through the purchase of an Altera Preferred Partner OpenCL board. The annual software subscription for the SDK for OpenCL is $995. For additional information please visit the OpenCL section on Altera’s website.

    LEAP 2013 : Developing High-Performance Low-Power Solutions using FPGAs and OpenCL by Craig Davis — Altera Corporation [LEAPconf YouTube channel, recorded on May 21, 2013, published on Sept 12, 2013]

    Using OpenCL and Altera FPGAs can offer significantly higher performance and lower power consumption than alternate hardware architectures such as: CPUs, GPUs and DSPs. The heterogeneous computing architecture offered by x86 processor and FPGA in server based systems and Altera SoC devices (low-power FPGA and ARM Cortex A9 hard processors) are perfect platforms for developing with an OpenCL flow. This article outlines the development flow and the benefits of OpenCL for FPGAs and will show an application example to demonstrate this. Speaker Bio: Craig Davis joined Altera’s European marketing team in 2003. While at Altera, Mr Davis has been responsible for the technical marketing of company’s high-performance Stratix FPGAs. Currently, Mr Davis is also the market development manager for the European Computer & Storage market. Mr Davis has over eighteen years of experience in the electronics industry within design, applications, and product management roles, including systems design with embedded processors and programmable logic. Mr Davis holds a Masters degree in Electronic Engineering from Southampton University

    From presentation slides (PDF) I will copy here the following ones:

    image

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    Programming Models

    FPGA programming model: RTL
     Involves state machines, datapaths, arbitration, buffering, and others 
    Processor programming model: C/C++
     Typically sequential, involves subroutines and functions
    Need a programming model that represents a heterogeneous system (CPU + FPGA)
     A processor with hardware accelerators
     A configurable multicore device 
    The goal
     An ideal single hardware and software design environment

    image

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    More information: Implementing FPGA Design with the OpenCL Standard (v. 2.0 Altera whitepaper, November 2012]

    Unified Heterogeneous Programmability of OpenCL [alteracorp YouTube channel, Nov 5, 2012]

    Watch how OpenCL provides a unified platform for heterogeneous computing. In this demo, we retarget NVIDIA code written for a GPU to a Stratix V FPGA. Read more: http://bit.ly/U4tIgR

    Altera Opens the World of FPGAs to Software Programmers with Broad Availability of SDK and Off-the-Shelf Boards for OpenCL [press release, May 6, 2013]

    Altera SDK for OpenCL Combined with an Ecosystem of Development Boards Delivers Power-efficient, High-performance Solution for Heterogeneous Computing
    Altera Corporation (NASDAQ: ALTR) today announced the broad availability of its SDK for OpenCL™ and supported third-party production boards. Availability of the SDK for OpenCL enables software programmers to access the high-performance capabilities of programmable logic devices. Also part of today’s news, Altera announced a Preferred Board Partner Program, allowing third-party board vendors to work closely with Altera to design optimized production boards based on Altera’s programmable devices. The availability of supported third-party boards through the Preferred Board Partner Program and an SDK for OpenCL enables software programmers to easily target high-performance FPGAs using a high-level language.
    Altera’s SDK for OpenCL allows software programmers to take their OpenCL code and easily exploit the massively parallel architecture of an FPGA. Software programmers targeting FPGAs achieve higher performance at significantly lower power compared to alternative hardware architectures.
    “Because FPGAs enable parallel processing, they are critical for specialized server workloads that demand real-time performance. We are pleased that our clients are now able to take full advantage of this technology on Power Systems using Altera’s SDK for OpenCL,” said Robert L. Swann, vice president, IBM Power Systems. “With this standards-based approach, our clients can leverage a vibrant ecosystem of commercial and research contributions to accelerate emerging compute intensive workloads.”
    The SDK for OpenCL is designed to increase system performance in highly data-parallel computing applications featured in financial, military, broadcast, medical and a variety of other markets. Altera’s OpenCL solutions are supported by a robust ecosystem consisting of board partners, design partners, software tools and university collaboration. Altera and its partners provide the tools, hardware, libraries, reference designs and design resources necessary for developers to implement their OpenCL designs into FPGAs and reduce time-to-market.
    The Altera Preferred Board Partner Program for OpenCL ensures third-party production boards are optimized for current Altera device architectures. Initial preferred board partners included in the program are BittWare, Nallatech and PLDA, with additional board partners to be added in the future.
    “For years, Altera and BittWare have partnered to deliver timely high-end signal processing board-level solutions that significantly reduce technology risk for our mutual customers,” said Darren Taylor, senior vice president of sales and marketing at BittWare. “Leveraging the latest hardware technology from Altera, which now includes an SDK for OpenCL, we are able to dramatically reduce the complexity for applications in the computing, financial and military markets.”
    “An OpenCL implementation provides an ideal fit for Nallatech’s hardware-accelerated computing solutions,” said Allan Cantle, president and founder of Nallatech. “We simplify the deployment of FPGAs in heterogeneous platforms via direct purchase of our cards or pre-integrated in leading vendors’ high density servers and blades. Customers developing high-performance computing applications using Altera’s SDK for OpenCL will benefit from a dramatic increase in performance per watt, per dollar over traditional computing architectures.”
    “PLDA has a successful track record of supporting Altera’s customers with their high-performance applications,” said Stephane Hauradou, vice president and CTO of PLDA. “The SDK for OpenCL will open up a significantly broader group of software developers who can now fully leverage Altera’s leading-edge solutions.”
    Pricing and Availability
    The Altera SDK for OpenCL is currently available for download on Altera’s website. The annual software subscription for the SDK for OpenCL is $995 for a node-locked PC license. For additional information about the Altera Preferred Board Partner Program for OpenCL and its partner members, or to see a list of all supported boards and links to purchase, visit the OpenCL section on Altera’s website.

    Altera Announces Industry’s First FPGA Support for OpenCL – Eases the Adoption of FPGAs for Accelerating Heterogeneous Systems [press release, Nov 5, 2012]

    Software Development Kit for OpenCL Enables Developers to Take Advantage of the Performance and Power-efficiencies of FPGAs
    Altera Corporation (Nasdaq: ALTR) today announced the FPGA industry’s first Software Development Kit (SDK) for OpenCL™ (Open Computing Language) which combines the massively parallel architecture of an FPGA with the OpenCL parallel programming model. The SDK allows system developers and programmers familiar with C to quickly and easily develop high-performance, power-efficient FPGA-based applications in a high-level language. The Altera SDK for OpenCL enables FPGAs to work in concert with the host processor to accelerate parallel computation, at a fraction of the power compared to hardware alternatives. Altera will demonstrate the performance and productivity benefits of OpenCL for FPGAs at SuperComputing 2012 in booth #430.
    “The industry’s approach for boosting system performance has evolved over time from increasing frequency in single-core CPUs, to using multi-core CPUs, to using parallel processor arrays,” said Vince Hu, vice president of product and corporate marketing at Altera. “This evolution leads us to today’s modern FPGAs, which are fine-grained, massively parallel digital logic arrays architected to execute computations in parallel. Our SDK for OpenCL enables customers to easily adopt FPGAs and leverage the performance and power benefits the devices provide.”
    Altera SDK for OpenCL Design Flow
    OpenCL is an open, royalty-free standard for cross-platform, parallel programming of hardware accelerators, including CPUs, GPGPUs and FPGAs.  The Altera SDK for OpenCL offers a unified, high-level design flow for hardware and software development that automates the time-consuming tasks required in typical hardware-design language (HDL) flows. The OpenCL tool flow automatically converts OpenCL kernel functions into custom FPGA hardware accelerators, adds interface IPs, builds interconnect logic and generates the FPGA programming file. The SDK includes libraries that link to OpenCL API calls within a host program running on the CPU. By automatically handling these steps, designers are able to focus their development efforts on defining and iterating their algorithms rather than designing hardware.
    The portability of the OpenCL code enables users to migrate their designs to different FPGAs or SoC FPGAs as their application requirements evolve. With SoC FPGAs, the CPU host is embedded into the FPGA, providing a single-chip solution that delivers significantly higher bandwidth and lower latency between the CPU host and the FPGA compared to using two discrete devices.
    Using FPGAs to Extract Maximum Parallelism in Heterogeneous Platforms
    The Altera SDK for OpenCL enables programmers to leverage the massively parallel, fine-grained architectures featured in FPGAs to accelerate parallel computation. Unlike CPUs and GPGPUs, where parallel threads are executed across an array of cores, FPGAs allow kernel functions to be transformed into dedicated, deeply pipelined hardware circuits that are multithreaded using the concept of pipeline parallelism. Each of these pipelines can be replicated many times to provide even more parallelism by allowing multiple threads to execute in parallel. The result is an FPGA-based solution that can deliver >5X performance/Watt compared to alternative hardware implementations.
    Altera is working with several board partners to deliver COTS board solutions to customers. Currently, boards from BittWare and Nallatech are designed to support Altera OpenCL. Additional third-party boards will be supported with future releases of the SDK.
    Altera has performed a variety of benchmarks that show the productivity savings and the performance and power efficiency gained by using an OpenCL framework for FPGA development. Based on early benchmarks and working with customers in a variety of markets, the SDK shaved months off one customer’s development time for their video processing application and boosted performance by 9X versus a CPU in another customer’s financial application.
    Availability
    The Altera SDK for OpenCL is production ready and is available to customers through an early access program. To discover the high performance, power-efficient acceleration that OpenCL provides with FPGAs, contact a local Altera sales representative. For additional information regarding OpenCL and the benefits of targeting FPGA through an OpenCL implementation, visithttp://www.altera.com/products/software/opencl/opencl-index.html.

    OpenCL for Altera FPGAs: Accelerating Performance and Design Productivity [Altera, Nov 5, 2012]

    Combining the Open Computing Language (OpenCL™) programming model with Altera’s massively parallel FPGA architecture provides a powerful solution for system acceleration. The Altera® SDK for OpenCL* provides a design environment for you to easily implement OpenCL applications on FPGAs.

    Benefits of OpenCL on FPGAs

    Software Developer

    As a software developer, how can you benefit from OpenCL on FPGAs?

    As the “power wall” continues to prevent higher frequencies to be achieved in processors, multi-core processors have become the norm. This has opened the door for parallel processing techniques and thus FPGAs, which are inherently parallel, to start playing a bigger role in the embedded systems world.

    The approaches to finding parallelism can be a different way of thinking for some software programmers, where FPGA designers tend to naturally think this way. You can take the scatter-gather approach for data parallelism, sending input data to the appropriate parallel resources and combining the results later, or the divide and conquer method for task parallelism, where you decompose the problem into sub problems and run them on the appropriate resources.

    Using OpenCL, you continue to develop your code in the familiar C programming language but target certain functions as OpenCL kernels using the additional OpenCL constructs. Then these kernels can be sent to the available system resources, such as an FPGA, without having to learn the low level Hardware Description Language (HDL) coding practices of FPGA designers.

    • HDL coding is the equivalent to coding in assembly to software developers. OpenCL keeps you in a higher level coding language that you are already familiar with, C, with some new OpenCL construct.
    • Profile your code and determine the performance intensive inner loop functions that make sense to hardware accelerate as kernels in an FPGA.
    • It’s about performance per watt. You’re balancing high performance with a power-efficient solution in an FPGA.
    • With the FPGAs fine-grain parallelism architecture, the Altera SDK for OpenCL generates only the logic you need to deliver with as low as 1/5 of the power of other hardware alternatives.
    • Kernels can target FPGAs, CPUs, GPUs, and DSPs seamlessly to produce a truly heterogamous system.

    FPGA Developer

    As an Embedded or DSP Designer, how can you benefit from OpenCL on FPGAs?

    • Achieve significantly faster time to market compared to the traditional FPGA design flow.
    • Describe your algorithms using the OpenCL C (based on ANSI C) parallel programming language instead of the traditional low-level HDL.
    • Perform design exploration quickly by staying at a higher level of design abstraction.
    • Obsolescence-proof your designs as you can retarget your OpenCL C code to current and future FPGAs.
    • Obsolescence-proof your designs as you can retarget your OpenCL C code to current and future FPGAs.
    • Generate an FPGA implementation of your OpenCL C code in a single step, bypassing the manual timing closure efforts and implementation of communication interfaces between the FPGA, host, and external memories.

    The growing need for higher performance and faster time to market through parallel programming in software is seen in many markets, including the Computer & Storage, Military, Medical, and Broadcast markets.

    Next Steps
    • Buy a board from one of our preferred partners
    • Download the Altera SDK for OpenCL
    • Take an OpenCL training course
    • Register for updates on Altera’s OpenCL solution for FPGAs

    White Papers

    Computer and Storage [Altera, Nov 5, 2012]

    Computer and storage technology is evolving rapidly. Today, cloud computing is enabling the consolidation of traditional IT functions with entirely new capabilities. For example, many large-scale data centers are now providing traditional IT services along with new data analytics services.

    Hence, these large-scale data centers require highly efficient server and storage systems. Traditional CPU technology limits performance, as the use of frequency scaling as a way to increase performance has ended. The end of frequency scaling has caused a shift to multicore processing. However, multicore processing has diminishing returns in terms of increasing true application performance due to limits in I/O and memory bandwidth.

    Altera® FPGAs can be used to accelerate the performance of large-scale data systems. Altera FPGAs enable higher speed data processing by providing customized high-bandwidth, low-latency connections to network and storage systems. In addition, Altera FPGAs provide compression, data filtering, and algorithmic acceleration.

    With the Altera SDK for OpenCLTM, you can now rapidly develop acceleration solutions for computer and storage systems. The Altera SDK for OpenCL enables even software developers to easily design with FPGAs by allowing them to utilize a high-level programming language for developing acceleration functions.

    OpenCL and the OpenCL logo are trademarks of Apple Inc. used by permission by Khronos.

    OpenCL for Military [Altera, Oct 10, 2013]

    Radar backend processing is a compute-intensive operation using various algorithms such as a FIR filter, which utilize custom pipeline parallelism. Increased performance is achieved by off loading from the host processor onto an FPGA.

    Custom processors can be created using the OpenCL™ toolflow that are more efficient than multicore CPUs or GPUs both in computational capability and power requirements.

    Figure 1: Radar Back-End Processing Alternatives Using OpenCL

    image

    For more information regarding Altera’s OpenCL for Military, please contact us at mil@altera.com.

    Medical: Hardware Acceleration with OpenCL [Altera, Feb 16, 2013]

    Ultrasound, X-ray, CT, and PET applications all require intensive back-end compute operations for algorithms such as fast Fourier transform (FFT) using custom pipeline parallelism. Increased algorithm performance is achieved by off loading from the host processor onto an FPGA.

    Custom processors created using the OpenCL™ toolflow are more efficient than multicore CPUs or GPUs, both in computational capability and power requirements.

    image

    Related Links

    Broadcast: Advanced Systems Development Kit [Altera, Oct 25, 2012]

    The Advanced Systems Development Kit is a platform that can pack multi-channel 4K video ingest, processing, and streaming into a server-ready board. It features industry-leading PCIe gen3x16 interface, plus over 1 million FPGA Logic Elements to handle the toughest video processing algorithms, matched by over 1500Gbps of external memory bandwidth – enough to tackle 4 channels of 4K UHDTV video streams. This platform provides an order of magnitude improvement in existing development kit hardware capabilities; in addition to innovations in the soft content and business model that come together to significantly accelerate end-product deployment.

    Figure 1: Altera’s Advanced Systems Development Kit

    image

    Typical development kits are intended for lab-use only, because they lack the on-board resources to develop the entire end product. It is common for engineers to design their own board and software from scratch – until now. The Advanced Systems Development Kit breaks through all those barriers and significantly shortens your design cycle in many ways, including:

    • A complete OmniTek BSP (board support package) for video applications, with firmware, and Windows and Linux drivers
    • An evaluation design featuring OmniTek’s PCI Express DMA engine that efficiently streams multiple channels of videos between I/O and host memory
    • A flexible front-panel FMC I/O expansion connector, allowing for connectivity to popular standards such as SFP+, fiber, QSFP, gigabit Ethernet, etc.
    • Dual Stratix V FPGAs to integrate functions such as multi-channel format conversions, video codecs, ingest/playout connectivity, etc.
    • Over 1500Gbps of external memory bandwidth – enough to handle multiple 4k channels
    • PCIe gen3x16 to handle even the most demanding video streaming and acceleration
    • PCIe form-factor compliant for use in both custom-built chassis and commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) servers
    • Licensable full manufacturing rights to the board design, which enables you to easily make cost-optimizations and derivatives for rapid deployment of your products.

    The Advanced Systems Development Kit resolves common broadcast challenges related to:

    • Increased channel density
    • 4K and beyond-HD resolutions
    • High frame rate applications
    • The fine balance between future-proofing and cost-efficiency

    A rich partner ecosystem significantly accelerates and simplifies system-level advanced development. For example, Embrionix’s emSFP modules convert SDI to a number of physical layer standards, allowing you to rapidly release products and still future-proof the hardware with a simple upgrade of the emSFP. This provides a new level of flexibility for manufacturers. The combination of capabilities and physical design positions this platform perfectly for the convergence of broadcast and IT technologies.

    Figure 2: Embrionix’s embedded SFP modules for high-density video connectivity

    image

    Altera’s OpenCL Toolflow

    In addition to accelerating hardware designs, the Advanced Systems Development Kit will also support Altera’s unique OpenCL™ toolflow to elevate software productivity. OpenCL enables viable software implementations of complex video algorithms, and dramatically lowers the cost of the end product. Examples of broadcast applications include:

    • Acquisition: Real-time debayering of raw camera data, scaling for multiviewers, etc.
    • Post-production: Color grading, motion estimation, special effects rendering, etc.
    • Distribution: 3D/temporal noise reduction, H.264 compression, etc.
    • Consumption: JPEG2000 decoding for 4K digital cinema playout, block artifact reduction filters, etc.

    The OpenCL toolflow leverages parallel processing on the underlying hardware, and achieves an order of magnitude performance improvement compared to sequential CPU processing. Furthermore, running OpenCL on the Advanced Systems Development Kit gives you several unique advantages including:

    • The best performance per watt consumed, so you enjoy OpenCL’s benefits without power and heat issues from GPUs
    • The ability to assimilate, manipulate, and transport multichannel video on a single board
    • The highest level of integration to achieve maximum channel density for your end product

    OpenCL and the OpenCL logo are trademarks of Apple Inc. used by permission by Khronos.

    Related Links

    EEVblog #496 – What Is An FPGA? [EEVblog YouTube channel, July 19, 2013]

    What is an FPGA, and how does it compare to a microcontroller? A basic introduction to what Field Programmable Gate Arrays are and how they work, and the advantages and disadvantages. FPGA Stuff in Dave’s Amazon store: http://bit.ly/1ayoNiV FPGA Implementation Tutorial: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7AFGcAyK7kE Forum: http://www.eevblog.com/forum/blog/eevblog-496-what-is-an-fpga/ EEVblog Main Web Site: http://www.eevblog.com EEVblog Amazon Store: http://astore.amazon.com/eevblogstore-20 Donations: http://www.eevblog.com/donations/ Projects: http://www.eevblog.com/projects/ Electronics Info Wiki: http://www.eevblog.com/wiki/

    5. Altera SoC FPGAs

    It goes back to Altera SoC FPGAs – ARM TechCon 2011 [ARMflix YouTube channel, Oct 25, 2011]

    Chris Balough of Altera gives us details on the recently announced SoC FPGA offerings – Arria V and Cyclone V – at ARM TechCon 2011.

    with current state as Altera showcases Soc devices at Embedded world [embeddednewstv YouTube channel, Oct 21, 2013]

    Find out what key SoC device demonstrations Altera hosted at embedded world and learn about the ARM DS-5 Altera edition debugger.

    Generation 10 FPGAs and SoCs [Altera, May 16, 2013]

    Altera’s Generation 10 FPGAs and SoCs optimize process technology and architecture to deliver the industry’s highest performance and highest levels of system integration at the lowest power. Initial Generation 10 families include Stratix® 10 and Arria® 10 FPGAs and SoCs with embedded processors.

    Read the White paper: Expect a Breakthrough Advantage in Next-Generation FPGAs (PDF) [June 2013]

    image

    Read the White paper: Meeting the Performance and Power Imperative of the Zettabyte Era with Generation 10 (PDF) [June 2013]
    Watch the video: Arria 10 FPGAs and SoCs — Reinventing the Midrange [June 2013]
    Read the White paper: The Breakthrough Advantage for FPGAs with Tri-Gate Technology (PDF)  [June 2013]

    image

    Generation 10 FPGAs and SoCs are supported by a leading-edge suite of development tools delivering:

    1. 8x improvements in compile times
    2. Higher level design flows that support hardware and software designers 

    Stratix 10 FPGAs and SoCs [Altera, June 10, 2013]

    Stratix® 10 FPGAs and SoCs offer breakthrough advantages in bandwidth and system integration, including the next-generation hard processor system (HPS), to deliver the industry’s highest performance and most power- efficient FPGAs and SoCs. Stratix 10 devices are manufactured on the revolutionary Intel 14 nm 3D Tri-Gate transistor technology, which delivers breakthrough levels of performance and power efficiencies that were previously unimaginable. When coupled with 64 bit quad-core ARM® CortexTM-A53 processors and advanced heterogeneous development and debug tools such as the Altera® SDK for OpenCLTM and SoC Embedded Design Suite (EDS), Stratix 10 devices offer the industry’s most versatile heterogeneous computing platform.

    White paper: The Breakthrough Advantage for FPGAs with Tri-Gate Technology pdf icon [June 2013]

    Industry’s First Gigahertz FPGAs and SoCs

    • New ultra-high performance FPGA architecture
    • 2x the core performance of prior generation high-end FPGAs
    • >10 TFLOPs of single-precision floating-point DSP performance
    • >4x processor data throughput of prior-generation SoCs

    Break the Bandwidth Barrier with Unimaginable High-Speed Interface Rates

    • 4x serial transceiver bandwidth from previous generation FPGAs for high port count designs
      • 28 Gbps backplane capability for versatile data switching applications
      • 56 Gbps chip-to-chip/module capability for leading edge interface standards
    • Over 2.5 Tbps bandwidth for serial memory with support for Hybrid Memory Cube
    • Over 1.3 Tbps bandwidth for parallel memory interfaces with support for DDR4 at 3200 Mbps

    Lower Capital Expenditures (CapEx)

    • Largest monolithic FPGA device with >4M logic elements offer an unprecedented level of integration capability
    • Heterogeneous multi-die 3D solutions including SRAM, DRAM, and ASICs
    • Next-generation HPS

    Lower Operating Expenses (OpEX)

    • Leveraging Intel’s leadership in process technology, Stratix 10 FPGAs offer the most power-efficient technologies
      • 70% lower power than prior generation high-end FPGAs and SoCs
      • 100 GFlops/Watt of single-pecision floating point efficiency
    • Integrated host processor for operation, administration, and maintenance minimizes system down time

    Versatile Heterogeneous Computing for Performance and Power-Efficient SoC Design

    • 64 bit quad-core ARM Cortex-A53 processor optimized for ultra-high performance per watt
    • Heterogeneous C-based modeling and hardware design with Altera SDK for OpenCL
    • Heterogeneous debug, profiling, and whole chip visualization with Altera SoC EDS featuring ARM Development Suite™ (DS-5™) Altera Edition Toolkit

    Reduce Time-to-Market

    • Fastest compile times in the industry
    • C-based design entry using the Altera SDK for OpenCL, offering a design environment that is easy to implement on FPGAs
    • Start developing with Arria 10 devices and then migrate to footprint-compatible Stratix 10 devices
    • Complementary Enpirion PowerSoCs will offer customers higher performance, lower system power, higher reliability, smaller footprint, and faster time-to-market to power Stratix 10 FPGAs and SoCs

    Altera to Build Next-Generation, High-Performance FPGAs on Intel’s 14nm Tri-Gate Technology

    Table 1. Stratix 10 Family Variantsimage

    Stratix 10 FPGAs and SoC family is ideal to meet your high-performance, high-bandwidth, and low power requirements in the communication infrastructure, cloud computing and data centers, high-performance computing, military, broadcast, test and measurement, and other applications.

    Related Links

    Arria 10 SoC [Altera, June 10, 2013]

    Arria 10 SoCs: Reinventing the Midrange

    The 20 nm Arria® 10 ARM-based SoCs deliver optimal performance, power efficiency, small form factor, and low cost for midrange applications. Arria 10 SoCs, based on TSMC’s 20 nm process technology, combine a dual-core ARM® Cortex™-A9 MPCore™ hard processor system (HPS) with industry-leading programmable logic technology. Arria 10 SoCs offer a processor with a rich feature set of embedded peripherals, variable-precision digital signal processing (DSP) blocks, embedded high-speed transceivers, hard memory controllers, and protocol IP controllers – all in a single highly integrated package.

    Arria 10 SoCs: Across-the Board Improvements

    Arria 10 SoCs combine architectural innovations with TSMC’s 20 nm process technology to deliver improvements in performance and power reduction:

    • 87% higher processor performance with up to 1.5 GHz CPU operation per core
    • 60% higher performance versus the previous generation, over 500 MHz-capable core performance (15% higher performance than previous SoC)
    • 4X more transceiver bandwidth versus the previous generation (2X more bandwidth versus previous high-end FPGAs)
    • 4X higher system performance (2666 Mbps DDR4, Hybrid Memory Cube support)
    • More than 3300 18×19 multipliers implemented on variable-precision DSP
    • 40% lower power with process technology improvement and innovative techniques for power reduction

    Table 1. Arria SoC Feature Comparisonimage

    Note: See full list of memory devices supported

    Designed for Productivity

    Design productivity is one of the driving philosophies of the Arria 10 SoC architecture. Arria 10 SoC offer full software compatibility with previous generation SoCs, a broad ecosystem of ARM software and tools, and the enhanced FPGA and DSP hardware design flow.

    • Extensive ecosystem of ARM for software development
    • Full software compatibility between 28 nm Cyclone V and Arria V SoCs and Arria 10 SoCs
    • Quartus® II FPGA Design Suite featuring:
      • High-level automated design flow with OpenCL™ compiler from Altera
      • Model-based DSP hardware design with Altera DSP Builder

    Target Markets

    image

    Arria 10 SoCs have been designed to meet the performance, power, and cost requirements for applications such as:

    • Wireless infrastructure equipment including remote radio unit and mobile backhaul
    • Compute and storage equipment including flash cache, cloud computing, and acceleration
    • Broadcast studio and distribution equipment including professional A/V and video conferencing
    • Military guidance, control and intelligence equipment
    • Wireline 100G line cards, bridges and aggregation, 40G GPON
    • Test and measurement equipment
    • Diagnostic medical imaging equipment

    Related Links

    Intel’s new era of integrated computing: Look inside, looking ahead by Renee James, President

    October 5, 2013 10:39 pm / Leave a comment

    Intel App Show for Developers – IDF 2013 Day 1 Keynote Review [intelswnetwork YouTube channel, published on Oct 2, 2013]

    Bob and Eric Mantion [Capt Geek] breakdown IDF13’s day one keynote and discuss why they believe this could be the best keynote in recent memory.
    imageFrom: 2013 Intel Developer Forum Opening Keynote [transcript, Sept. 10, 2013] Brian Krzanich, CEO, and Renee James, President
    Brian Krzanich: … to show just how far we’re looking ahead, it gives me great pleasure to introduce Intel’s newest president, Renee James. [The inserted images are from the presentation PDF]
    Renee James: Good morning. For 45 years, Intel’s been inventing the future. For 45 years, we’ve been building the foundation of this industry, which is the silicon transistor, which you just saw. And for 45 years, we have been doing the things that everybody said can’t be done.

    image

    Now, we’re going to lead the industry into a new era of computing, an era of computing where everything computes. And we’ll transition from worrying about the form factor, or the look and feel of the device, to the real problems that computing has solved for us — compute that’s integrated into the fabric of our daily lives, and assists us in solving problems, like managing huge global cities, or finding cures through personalized healthcare.
    We’ll be able to solve ordinary problems in extraordinary ways, and extraordinary problems will be solved in seemingly ordinary ways. It will be from the mundane to the miraculous, when integrated computing is in our future.
    For the rest of this talk, what I’m going to do is give you a glimpse of some of the projects that are started today using integrated computing to solve really tough problems that are out there, and give you a glimpse of what the world’s going to look like, from our point of view. But first, I’d like to take you back to the beginning, where all good stories start.
    image
    Forty-five years ago, when Intel was founded by Robert Noyce and Gordon Moore. Bob was the inventor of the silicon transition and integrated circuits, and he gave us a mandate, to go out and do something wonderful. Gordon gave us the compass for that mission with Moore’s Law, and since then Intel has been on the relentless pursuit of the essential underpinnings of this industry, improving the silicon transistor.
    All of you know this, because some of you have written it. Moore’s Law has been declared dead at least once a decade since I’ve been at Intel, and as you know, you heard from Brian, we have 14 nanometers working, and we can see beyond that. I assume you, it’s alive and well, and we’re going to enable many, many things with it.
    One of the things that Moore’s Law enables is the mobility that all of you are using to tweet and surf and text while I talk. We’re going to talk about that.
    image
    All right, today we work in the nano-world, and for those of you that aren’t big aficionados of semiconductor technology, I thought I’d take a second and just explain to you what it really is like. We build transistors atom by atom. Not long ago, we actually didn’t imagine how we would build a transistor that was smaller than 22 nanometers, and now you’ve seen 14 working in Brian’s talk this morning. So, if you don’t know how small that is, consider this. A nanometer is to a yardstick — let me get my marble — as this marble is to the planet earth, that’s how small.
    image
    And we build billions of those transistors on every chip, and hundreds of millions of those chips a year. At our scale, what we do is as complex as putting a man on the moon was in 1969, or putting a rover on Mars in the 21st century. What we do takes fundamental scientific breakthrough. Just to make a single new feature or a new product, something for example like HKMG [High-K Metal Gate] or a 3D transistor, both of which were research projects until Intel had fundamental breakthroughs that moved them into high production and scale.
    image
    These are a few of the additional technological breakthroughs that people said they were barriers. You can’t overcome them, it can’t be done. And the fact is, we have, and we’ve done it so consistently that we make it look easy. Every time you turn on your phone, your tablet, your PC, it just works. It seems easy. And behind that are tens of thousands of people fundamentally making scientific breakthrough so that works.
    These are the breakthroughs that fuel the entire industry, and they make the foundation of the compute platform that you as developers do your work on. And compute platforms and devices follow Moore’s Law as well, not just silicon transistors. They continue to evolve in power and features and performance, and it’s all based on that underlying progress that we make.
    image
    So, I want to give you some examples — they’ll be super fun. So, here’s one. I know all of you are going to recognize this. This — right, the DynaTAC 8000, Motorola phone. In 1980, this phone was built using 1500-nanometer technology, which was state of the art, for 22 nanometers today, right? Some of you remember this was your first cellphone, and it was super cool — not so much today. Today it looks like a prop from a movie. Wasn’t very pocket friendly. Battery life measured in — anybody? — minutes, exactly.
    Okay, here’s state of art today. This is an Intel-based phone, it’s a Lenovo K900. And this phone is state of the art. Twelve days in standby, 12 hours in talk time. So remember, until 1990, most phones were installed in cars permanently, because they needed a power source, right? And all you could do was make a voice call. Could you imagine buying a phone that could only do a voice call today? No one would buy that, right? Making a call is not the most extraordinary thing that this phone does.
    image
    So, let’s talk about what’s extraordinary about it. It has more performance than Pentium® 4. It runs at two gigahertz, that phone, which 12 years ago was the fastest desktop computer you could buy. This is the fundamental advancement of what Intel does. It’s what Moore’s Law brings you, and it’s what we’ve done to make that phone’s performance seem totally mundane.
    image
    We’ve driven three breakthroughs in computing. The first one was very much about task-based computing. And the next phase — the one that I think we’re living in today — I call is lifestyle computing. I’ll talk a little bit more about why. The next phase is very much about integrated computing.
    I’ll start with task-based. Task-based computing really started with origins with the mainframe. It was very much about the scarce resource, and your important task, and what you had to get done. In fact, Intel’s first significant products were memory products for working in mainframes.
    image
    The PC changed that. The PC democratized computing and allowed everybody to be able to do their own tasks. It was still very task-based. But, of course, the PC evolved. It evolved into the era that we’re in now, lifestyle computing. Lifestyle is very much about you, your data, wherever you want it, whenever you want it, to do what you need to get done.
    I want to just pause there and think about evolutions in computing. They don’t come that often. When they do, at the beginning, we think it’s the next big thing. Everything that came before it, dead. But that’s not true. Right? It’s an evolution. Evolutions in computing don’t end. What happens is they continue forward, like the mainframe does today, and they evolve, and they adapt. You should think about each new phase in computing as not an ending but the beginning of the next frontier of where we’re going to go.
    image
    So the next chapter. What happens in the next chapter of computing? We think that familiar objects that occur in your everyday life get new capabilities. So I’m going to give you a pretty mundane example — a car headlight. What has been the greatest breakthrough in the car headlight in the last decade? Not that much. But now we can add silicon-based sensors to them and make them smart so they can detect the rain. Okay. But I don’t need to detect the rain. I need to actually see individual raindrops so that they can shoot the headlight beams around them.
    What it allows you to do is, of course, safer driving, better clarity at night. Ordinary or extraordinary? Mundane or miraculous? Safer driving. When silicon can be made small enough, smart enough to transform a headlight, it can transform every other area of our life.
    Quark — which Brian just talked about — is our new family of products that are targeted at integrated computing. And I use that term to be inclusive of Internet of things, of wearables, of traditional embedded. All of these new areas, and some of the older areas in embedded technology, that are getting smarter, and they’re getting connected. All of them will be connected, all of it will compute.
    image
    So let me show you a few examples of what’s happening today. The city of Dublin, Ireland — not the one in the East Bay — has a program that’s called City Watch and City Sensing. And what they’re doing is they put sensors into the street drainage system, which sounds pretty boring. But it allows them to monitor the flood warnings in the city of Dublin. And it alerts the crews to what’s happening.
    But more importantly, it sends out some other information through their cloud servers. It sends out signals to the traffic system to divert [unintelligible] away from the high water area, and it also sends out a city map so that if you live in Dublin, Ireland, you can figure out what’s going on. And the citizens get to participate because, of course, there’s an app for that. There’s a City Watch app. And so they submit real time update reports. And they basically use all of that data together in a crowd sourcing way to put real time status as to what’s going on in the city of Dublin.
    Most people don’t even know what’s happened. They don’t know that there’s sensors in their street. They don’t know that the traffic lights are timing or diverting them in different places, getting multiple sources of data real time, being put into a cloud service and sent out back to their smartphones.
    image
    Why is this important? Because by 2050, 70 percent of the world’s population are going to live in these megacities — Dublin not being one of the biggest ones, of course. And something as mundane as a clogged drain becomes more than an annoyance. It becomes a systemic problem that needs the ability to fix it quickly, to manage massive amounts of data, to alert a huge number of populations.
    Imagine, as developers, for you, what this means. Whole new platforms that we haven’t even thought about as compute platforms. Brand new kinds of applications that can be built. And managing [mega]cities is just one of those examples.
    The other really interesting example — and there are so many that we actually had to pare it down so we could get it into this time slot — is in healthcare. 70 percent of these people that I was talking about that are going to be living in big cities, they’re going to be aging — as am I. We have these questions that we keep asking. Are we going to have enough hospitals? Will we have enough clinics? Will we be able to train enough doctors with this aging population?
    They need more than just hospitals and clinics and doctors. They need care that’s affordable and is easy to administer. And the era of integrated computing allows us to offer some new answers to those old questions.
    image
    What if we’ve moved healthcare out of a hospital? [14:31]
    [This – for some unknown reason – was left out of the published keynote at http://intelstudios.edgesuite.net/idf/2013/sf/keynote/130910_rj/index.html 
    So here is that video part starting at [0:32] of this report:     Amazing New Wearable Devices demonstrated by Intel President Renée James at IDF 2013 [Santa Barbara Arts TV YouTube Partner Global News YouTube channel, Sept 10, 2013] covering eveything, except the dimmed two paragraphs in the end. 

    ] Brian talked about wearables, and you’ve seen kind of a glimpse of what’s coming. It’s going to be beyond jewelry and eyeglasses into devices like this one.

    image
    Let me show you this. This is a wearable from Sotera Wireless, in trials right now. I will put it on. I’m going to see if my heart rate’s really high here. What it’s doing is it’s taking a constant reading and transmitting reports wirelessly to a service. This is actually a real time EKG, blood pressure, and other vitals, just from a wristband. It is pretty big and unattractive but what this replaces is an entire — on this table, on the end — bunch of equipment that you would have to have in a medical clinic, and it gives you real time results to the doctor.
    Here is another example of innovation in medicine by MC10. Through the magic of what silicon and transistor technology, in the future, this patch — this prototype silicon-based patch – could take the wonderful innovation shown by Sotera and perhaps even do much of the same in an even smaller package. This will be directly on your skin. This patch will perform all of the same functions that that wearable does today. This is from a company called MC10, and it’s a prototype right now.
    So why is this important? That little patch thing is like a Band-Aid. You just peel it off and stick it on. So why is it important?
    Because it’s a constant data stream that your doctor can see, that if something’s wrong it’s immediate, it’s up-to-date and accurate. And it allows us to move into the most exciting phase of healthcare that I think is in this frontier for us, and that is moving into customized care.
    image
    [14:31] Care that’s actually tailored to the things that are going on in your body. There are a tremendous number of other devices and other applications — injectables, ingestibles — that we’ve looked at. I didn’t have time for all of them today. But all based on a fundamental, foundational building block of this industry, which is the silicon transistor.
    Customized care, with your own genomic data, is the pinnacle of healthcare. And we first mapped the human genome using an Intel high performance computer, a Xeon-based computer. That’s pretty exciting for us. And as you can imagine – as we like to talk about Big Data – there is one Big Data challenge.

    image

    I’d like to share how big a Big Data problem. One person’s genomic map is a petabyte of data. That’s 1000 terabytes for one person, enough to fill 20 filing cabinets of information. And through the work that we do, the advancements in price performance, Moore’s Law, what we do every single day, we’ve transformed the ability to sequence. And what used to take years in 2000 is now down to two weeks, and we’re working to get that down to days and hours.

    image

    But more importantly, a single sequence used to be $70 million. It’s now less than $5,000 to do one sequence, and we are on route to make that $1,000, which means personalized genomic sequencing is within our reach. And it’s moving faster than the rate of Moore’s Law.
    But let’s think about the benefits of that. Why are we excited? Why am I excited about that? Why do we get up every day and say, you know what, working with Intel, working at Intel, it’s pretty excited because we get to change the world? Why?
    image
    One-third of all women and half of all men are going to be diagnosed with cancer, right? Early detection and treatment is the way to solve cancer in most cases, and it’s customized to that individual, it makes the profoundest difference in its effectiveness. And that’s where we can make a difference.
    image
    Using high-performance computers, the Knight Center for Cancer Research at the Oregon Health Sciences University is working on analyzing human genomic profiles and creating searchable DNA, customized DNA maps. And what I’d like to do is share directly from them with you what they’re doing. [17:15]
    [Video plays.]
    image
    [19:21] Renee James: As doctor Drucker said, in this next era, we’re moving the biology problem to a computational problem in the treatment of cancer.
    Computing doesn’t get any more personal than when it saves your life, so I’d like to share another story with you. And it’s the story about an Intel employee, in fact, one of our fellows, who’s here with us at IDF. He fought a 24-year battle with cancer. When he was a young man in college, he was diagnosed with kidney cancer, and he was given a few years to live. And he went through dozens and dozens of debilitating cancer therapies, and he was very brave, and he defined all his doctors’ odds with his longevity, but in the end, the cancer never went away, and his kidneys did eventually fail.
    Recently, in his work that he’s been doing, he was visiting a genomic company, and they asked if they could sequence his tumor. And he said yes. He allowed them to do it. And what they did is they shared that data with all of his doctors. I’m not going to tell you the end of this story. I would like you to help me welcome Intel fellow Eric Fishman to tell his story.

    image

    Eric Dishman: Thank you. Alive and well. I think I’ve had more predictions of my death than maybe even Moore’s Law.
    Renee James: [Moore’s Law, alive and well, ladies and gentlemen.]
    Eric Dishman: [Unintelligible.]
    Renee James: Why don’t you tell everybody what happened the day that you showed up to your doctors and they had your tumor sequence?
    Eric Dishman: It was just miraculous. At that point, I was so sick, I was going to the doctor twice a week. So it was my Thursday appointment, and I walk in, and they’ve got some of my East Coast physicians on Skype and some doctors on the phone, and all my doctors are working together, and I’m like, uh oh. And then they basically tell me that 90 percent of the drugs that they’ve put me on were never going to work because this genomic map had revealed this to them. And they basically admitted that they had mischaracterized and sort of misunderstood my cancer for over two decades.
    Renee James: And then what happened?
    Eric Dishman: Well, at that point, then they had the good news, which was we think we understand enough about your cancer, and it’s really Eric’s cancer, it’s unique, like the [physician] said, we’re going to put you on this drug for completely different organs and see how it goes. Four months later, I walk into my diagnostics, the technicians, you know, looking in shock at the scans, they do them again, and they’re like you’re cancer free, you can start the whole kidney transplant process at this point in time.
    Renee James: That is miraculous.  And I want you to share with us how now your work at Intel is about scaling that out, so that other people can have this experience.
    Eric Dishman: That is exactly true, and scale is the thing. That’s one of the reasons I work at Intel. [I mean], probably less than 50,000 people on the planet have had access to the kind of whole genome sequencing that I’ve had, and that’s generated about 2.5 petabytes of data. If we had every cancer patient today having a whole genome sequence like once every two weeks, which is what they would ultimately want to do, we’d generate 500 exabytes of data, and that’s just in the U.S.
    So as we think about this globally, how do we scale? So we’ve got our product teams in there working on the fabric, the storage, the compute, I mean, the whole system — how’s it possibly going to be done? On the policy side, we’re working on how do we deal with the privacy and the security and the ethical issues of sort of scaling this?
    On the R&D side, it’s everything like you showed, from biochips to Big Data and solving breakthroughs there. And then, finally, on the sort of human and sort of education side, we’ve got to figure out how we’re going to create a genome-ready workforce, train a million doctors on how to incorporate this data and move forward on getting biologists to understand programming and programmers to understand biology.
    Renee James: Wow. Thank you for sharing your very personal story with the audience, and congratulations on being cancer free.
    Eric Dishman: Thank you.
    Renee James: Thank you. So 20 years of ineffective therapies at an expense and certainly the worry of what Eric went through, all of that changed by the benefits of personalized medicine and cost-effective integrated computing. Affordable genomics,  cities that reroute traffic and alert you to problems — a few years ago, a lot of what I talked about seemed like science fiction, and today, you can see it’s in our near future.
    It’s the future before us when computing becomes truly integrated into our lives. For 45 years, Intel has done the things that everybody said couldn’t be done, and we’ve invented the future time and time again. I’d like to close by saying, in the words of Intel founder Bob Noyce, I’d like to invite all of you to not be encumbered by history and to go off and do something wonderful. Thank you.

    image

    [End of presentation.]

    IDF13 Day 1 Keynote Highlights & Takeaways [by CaptGeek [Eric Mantion] (Intel) on Intel® Developer Zone, Sept 10, 2013]

    So, this is not my first rodeo (as the saying goes) – in fact, I’ve been going to IDF, on and off, for over 10 years, starting with my time when I was a semiconductor analyst. And, yes, I now work for Intel, so some may feel my opinion is biased, but, regardless, here it is anyway:
         This morning was the best IDF Keynote I’ve ever seen
    What made this morning better? If I had to summarize it, I’d say it breaks down into 3 things: Intimacy, Lifestyle, and Leadership. Let me explain…
    Intimacy
    The very first thing I noticed this morning was, before Brian Krzanich said his first word was how he was dressed. Not only did he not wear a tie, but he didn’t even wear a jacket. The tone was very casual, but not in a lazy way. When he spoke, on stage, he went right out to he front of it, basically as far out to the audience as he could, as if he wanted to say “I am one of you – I’m a Geek & I’m proud of it.” Now, someone will say that a slight shift to a dress code & positioning on stage doesn’t much matter, but I would completely disagree because, before joining Intel in 2005, I knew well the biggest criticisms of Intel. In one word, it would have been Arrogance. In three words, it would have been “Intel Doesn’t Listen.” Now, I think that is changing, which I think is a great thing. But it wasn’t just the lack of a jacking and where he stood – the subtleties continued when our new President, Renée James did her keynote. Not once did she hold up a wafer. Not once did she say the word Gigahertz. But, what she did talk about was how Intel was making life better. During Brian’s portion, he talked about the   Intel Quark SoC, which is planned to be 1/5th the size of Intel Atom processors and 1/10th the power consumption. But when Renée spoke, she addressed the why wearables mattered. A great example was what I called a “Hospital-in-a-Patch” that didn’t look much different thank an anti-smoking patch, but would be able to monitor several of your medical vitals no matter where you were. While still in development, it shows the amazing promise of the not-too-distant-future. But she didn’t just pontificate, she brought out an Intel Fellow, Eric Dishman who told a very personal story. Arguably, it was the most personal story a person could tell because it was not only about his own 24-year battle with Cancer, but also how mapping his genome has led his doctors to a path that, thankfully, gave them the opportunity to tell him the magical words: “Eric, you’re cancer free.” I don’t know how you can get more personal, more intimate that that in a story. But it didn’t stop there. Then Renée was finished, Brian re-joined her on stage for the first-ever, “open Q&A with the CEO and the President of Intel.” This has never been done in the history of IDF, but I loved that it did. To me, it signaled change. To me, it was a message: “Yes, we know we make amazing silicon, but none of it means anything if we don’t have get hardware partners to put them into products and great software partners that make the magic happen. In short, Intel is nothing without our partners, so we want you to know that we care, deeply, about you. We want to have a closer, more intimate relationship with you and do amazing, wonderful things together…
    Lifestyle
    What is the difference between Ordinary and Extraordinary. Renée said it best: Intelligence. What happens when everything gets smarter? The simple answer is life gets better. Whether it is critical technology like the Hospital-in-a-Patch mentioned above or just convenient technology, as things get smarter, life gets better. For example, what if every parking meter was smarter? What if, before you leave your car, you put your smart phone next to the NFC sensor on the parking meter to register your phone. Then, if your meal is running long, it sends you a quick message of “your meter is running low, would you like to refill it?” and, with a simple press of the button, you can. How great would that be? When I was trying to explain the implications today at lunch, I used the table we were eating at as an example. What if, when you sat down, your table was your menu? Instead of the wait staff having to go back and forth, asking if you were ready to order, as soon as you were, you ordered. Also, the moment the kitchen runs out of “Catfish” then all the menus are automatically updated so that option would be grayed out. Also, as soon as you were ready to pay your bill, you could, right on the table, with the NFC on your phone. Or, if you wanted some help, you could just push a button like you do on an airplane & your server could come right out. But this doesn’t just help customers, it would help the restaurateurs as well. If you could save 10 minutes for every customer, a eating establish might be able to fit an entirely extra sitting in the course of a dining cycle. For the fixed costs of the chief & kitchen staff, that could be the difference between being profitable and closing your doors. But these types of “Lifestyle Computing” – or integrated computing, depending on how you looked at it – wasn’t just about tiny, minuscule computers, but also on the other end, the Big Data server rooms. For example, you want better healthcare, then your doctors need to get to know you better, and far better than you can do from just a form. They need to map your Genome, which, if your curious, is about a Petabyte of Data. For those not so familiar with these prefixes, that is around a thousand Terabytes or around a million Gigabytes. So, take that smart phone with 1GB of memory & put it in a pile with a million other phones – that’s the data required to map EVERY person’s genome. Multiple that by the 1/3 of all women and 1/2 of all men that will be diagnosed with cancer in their lifetime and you get to the legal definition of a “butt-load of data.” But, never fear, the new i5 Xeon processors being launched this week are up to that task. So, your lifestyle computing – whether it is wearables devices or warehouse of servers, Intel has got you covered. And that brings us to our last category…
    Leadership
    It was subtle, but our new CEO – affectionately called “BK” in the halls of Intel – put all Intel employees on notice:
    • If it computers, we will lead
    To me, that is vision. That is leadership. There was no squishy areas there, no caveats, no outs. It was simple, straight-forward, and to the point. If it computes, than Intel will do its best so serve that market segment as well as we can. Oh, and, if you missed it, in the future, everything will compute. Your grandpa’s favorite recliner won’t just recline, but rather it will watch him. It will monitor his vitals it will check to see if he’s been siting there past when he was supposed to take his medication and alert him if it needs to. And, heaven forbid, he should have a heart attack while sitting there in an empty house, he will be helped, immediately, even faster than if you were in the next room. In essence, in the future, no seasoned citizen will ever be sitting in an empty house again, but houses, furniture, kitchens, everything will be smarter and connected. Making your life, my life, and most importantly, the lives of the people we love, not only better, but, ideally, longer – as long as possible. Roughly a century ago, we were went through an important transformation – an electrical one. Instead of candles, we gained electric lights. Instead of washboards, we gained washing machines. Instead of a hand pump in your kitchen, we gained running water. Now we are on the cusp of the next transformation: Intelligence. Instead of an electric light, we’ll get a smart one – that turns itself off when not needed (like when no one is in the room) and turns itself on when needed. Instead of washing machines, we’ll get smart ones that analyses the soiling of your clothes and put in the right combination of detergent chemicals to optimize the cleaning. Instead of running water, we’ll gain smart faucets that automatically detects if the water coming out has a higher than allowable amount of harmful chemicals. It doesn’t matter what you pick – a bed, a pool, and gym, with greater intelligence comes a better life, just as electricity has been improving life for the last century or more. General Electrics’ age old tag line has been “We bring good things to life.” Perhaps Intel should adopt: “We bring better things to life,” because, as we lead in everything that computes, from wearables to phones to tablets to 2in1s and Ultrabooks to desktop PCs, and, of course, servers, life will get better, for everyone. And I, as one particularly proud Intel employee, doesn’t mind saying, that is a future that feels wonderful. Which, as it happens, was one of the pieces of closing advice from this morning’s keynote – a quote from one of our founders, Robert Noyce:

    Q&A: Intel president Renee James on wearables [CITEworld, Sept 11, 2013]

    After calculators, PCs and mobile phones, Intel is now jumping into wearable devices with an extremely low-power chip called Quark, which was big news at the company’s annual Intel Developer Forum in San Francisco. Leading the charge into the new market is Intel’s new leadership team consisting of CEO Brian Krzanich and President Renee James, who also articulated on plans to achieve fast growth in the mobile market while trying to reinvigorate PC sales.
    It’s been an especially busy few months for James, who became Intel’s president on May 2 after running the company’s software unit as executive vice president and general manager of the software and services group. She is laying the groundwork for Quark chips to succeed in areas such as eye wear, personalized medicine and cloud services. In an interview with the IDG News Service, she talked about the wearable market, Quark and partner relationships.
    IDGNS: Where do you see the wearable market going?
    James: I think it’s way beyond wearables, I think it’s about integrated computing. I don’t think we know the boundaries of that. The silicon patch — the thought of just ripping something off like a band-aid, putting it on your arm, your doctor being able to know what your vitals are at that moment, that sounds like science fiction, but it’s real. That’s where we are at. That’s today’s outer boundary of where we are going with computing.
    IDGNS: When do you see integrated computing becoming a practical market for Intel?
    James: For Intel it is a practical market right now, we have different products and platforms that are being developed. That is why we introduced Quark. We believe in the things that you saw — they are not three, five or 10 years out, they are in the next 12 to 18 months.
    IDGNS: Will you sell wearables directly to consumers? Intel is already planning to launch a TV service.
    James: We tend to believe that our business model is best helping other people build things. It’s in these really highly integrated designs, you need to build one to know that everything is working systemically. We tend to build reference platforms, and we’re going to stick with that.

    Insert of mine: nScreen Noise: Intel Media, UK kids love tablets 10/4/13 [Colin Dixon YouTube, Oct 3, 2013]

    Lots of bad news for Intel Media’s OnCue virtual pay-TV operator service. Will it every launch? OfCom in UK says kids love tablets. Same in the US?
    IDGNS: Quark is really low-power, but will it replace the Atom platform?
    James: No. It’s the low Atom. You should think of Core, Atom, Quark. I love the Quark name, it’s so nerdy and funny. Quark is intended to look below Atom. It’s 10 times more power efficient, and it’s five times smaller. Atom is teeny, Quark is the smallest thing we’ve ever built.
    IDGNS: Intel and low-power still raise a question mark today. How will Intel achieve low-power on Quark?
    James: No, no, Intel and low power are not a question mark. We have lots of low-power products. It’s not a question at all. Maybe that was five years ago. If you look… at Haswell 22-nanometer, that product is a four-watt product with Core i5 performance and Core i5-level graphics in fanless [devices]. That’s the most [power-efficient] product ever built, anywhere.
    IDGNS: Are you offering licensing or customizing Quark chips for third parties?
    James: What we are offering is the ability to connect their intellectual property around ours. We also are offering fully designed products as well. It’s a broad range that we’re going to offer to customers in this category.
    IDGNS: Intel is looking beyond Windows and moving to Android and Chrome for tablets and PCs. How is your relationship with Microsoft?
    James: Our relationship with Microsoft is as good as ever. They are going to participate in IDF and you will hear from them about what’s going on with Windows 8.1. I think it’s just a matter of balance. Microsoft is not the only client operating system anymore. The same way for years and years Microsoft balanced between Intel and AMD, we’re in the same situation now. Our customers want choice, and we offer choice.
    IDGNS: What’s the next big thing for Intel?
    James: Integrated computing is the next big thing, I think it is the future of what we are going to do. It’s not going to be necessarily about this device or that device, it’s going to be about what problems we solve through computation. The final barriers, the things we don’t understand, and what does it mean to have a mesh network of connected devices with cloud services and how does it change what we think about. That’s the final frontier.
    IDGNS: How important is your software background in leading a company that is traditionally focused on chips?
    James: It’s actually more useful than people would imagine. It’s very relevant to the level of integrated platforms that we see people starting to build, even the way PCs are built now, servers, different workloads, what happens in the cloud. More so than ever on a forward-looking basis, the way computing is developing is going to be about the application, the workload, the right kind of compute for the right kind of task. The other thing is building system-on-chips and products today is very software oriented.
    IDGNS: What is Intel’s direction in chip development?
    James: The direction for us is to continue with “tick-tock” for the microarchitecture, but to consider how to do derivatives… using the system-on-chip methodology.

    Intel President Renee James: Interview with the Wall Street Journal [Intel® Developer Zone, Aug 28, 2013] i.e. Intel’s own report 2 weeks later

    Intel President Renee James recently sat down for a video interview with the Wall Street Journal’s Rolfe Winkler. In this interview, Ms. James discussed a wide range of issues around Intel’s computing strategy, anything from mobile to what’s coming up at IDF in September. You can watch the entire video below:
    Intel’s New President Outlines Company’s Plans
    [WSJDigitalNetwork YouTube channel, Aug 14, 2013]
    Renee James sits down for a Big Interview with Rolfe Winkler. Photo: Getty Images.
    On mobile:
    Ms. James has been with Intel for 26 years, and worked closely with former Intel CEO Andrew Grove. She recently was named Intel President, and directs company-wide strategy with CEO Brian Krzanich. She noted that Intel wants people to know that “we love computing”, and aim to serve every segment, not just PCs.
    Intel’s new focus is on mobile, especially on the Atom power line for ultramobility. There will be increased efforts on Android, with an equalization of efforts between Windows and Android. Everyone currently in this market space has advantages, and Intel’s is design and integrated manufacturing, the combination of process technology, and communications. It’s the integration that counts; the combination of all these elements that makes Intel the winner in the market.
    In many ways Intel has led the exploration into mobility. James noted that “sometimes you don’t always know about the next thing being a disruption….it wasn’t the form factor, it was how people using computing changed – touch, voice, app models, all of that shifted. That combination with the new form factor really changed the way we look at computing.”
    On IDF:
    Intel’s premier developer conference is coming up September 10-12. There will be a lot of new things to see and talk about there as far as mobility, where Intel believes computing is heading, and future predictions on computer/human interactions.
    On Atom:
    Atom is a smaller, less expensive chip. James noted that the Intel point of view with this chip was that you didn’t need all the features and performance you need in more expensive chips since Atom is primarliy for phones, but now as mobile devices are becoming more important and prevalent, it’s also taken on more importance. Intel is building parts of Atom that come all the way up to the Core family with greater compatibility. All new Atom products run Windows.
    On transparent computing:
    People want their apps to perform no matter what platform they might be using. This aligns with the “Internet of Things” mentality; consumers want lower cost devices, but are also looking for compatiability with the rest of the software ecosystem.
    On the shift to a more mobile computing ecosystem:
    Mr. Winkler posed an interesting question: “As PCs are increasingly replaced by mobile devices, how do you navigate that transition?” Ms. James answered that Intel does not believe that PCs will ever be replaced, rather, different form factors will continue to emerge with the performance of the core product line in mobile devices. There are also different modes of usability in form factors such as the tablet, PC, 2 in 1’s, etc. It’s not a “one for one” replacement; James noted that these form factors are refreshing the market.
    On form factors:
    James noted there is a segmentation of tablets – the ones on the higher price point side generally offer more performance, and the ones on the lower price point side offer less. Intel has created Atom products that scale all the way up and down this ladder, with Haswell core-based products as well. These form factors overlap with price points, and some cannibalization is expected, but Intel is looking to create devices at every price point for more customer availability, opportunities, and innovation.
    On Moore’s Law
    When asked if Intel sees a finite ceiling as to how small chips can be produced, Ms. James replied that “we don’t see that”. There is more performance in a lower power envelope, and Intel has moved ahead multiple generations, becoming much more competitive in the mobile landscape.
    How small can the chips actually get? James replied that Intel has “line of sight” for a couple more generations, but after that the future is unclear.
    Data center
    The data center arm of Intel is an important business, currently holding a 90% market share and bringing in substantial profits for Intel. Mr. Winkler asked about avoiding server upsets, and Ms. James noted that there is a market shift with new competitors, and the way you react initially is how the dynamic is going to go. She mentioned that “it’s good for Intel to have competitors” because it makes the company as a whole better. Intel is not waiting for the industry to change, and has already announced SOC server products based on the Atom family.
    On Intel television
    What does Intel plan to bring in the television space? James replied that just like everything else, television has gone digital. It’s delivered over an IP network, which is an opportunity for data to be broadcast to devices. Intel can bring tech integration and leadership to this area, making it more cost effective. It’s also a new market opportunity and area of growth.
    Exciting times for Intel
    This interview with Ms. James was extremely informative, and gave a great overview of where Intel is headed. Be sure to register for IDF 2013 and hear more from Intel leadership on the future of the company.

    Which was reported by The Wall Street Journal as Intel Chips Away at Mobile, Wearable Computing [The CIO Report – WSJ, Aug 14, 2013] in the following way

    As consumers shift spending to smartphones and tablets from PCs, mobile processors made by rivals have chipped away at Intel Corp.’s sales and profits. Intel in July reported $2 billion in profit for the second quarter, a drop of 29% from a year earlier, on sales of $12.8 billion, down 5% for the same period. The chipmaker, which once milked its Intel Inside brand, can no longer rely as much on PC chips as its cash cow. While PC sales decline, rivals building low-cost, low-power chips based onARM Holdings plc. designs dominate the mobile chip market.
    Intel President Renee J. James admitted in an interview, Wednesday, that chips, as well as software for smartphones, tablets and embedded systems, are “markets that we need to go win.” Ms. James, who assumed her role in May after 25 years in various management roles at Intel, is particularly keen on Bay Trail, energy efficient chips she said will appear in tablets and convertible PCs this holiday season. Intel will unveil some of these products – and possible show off a wearable computer – at its developer forum next month. This is an edited transcript of a Q&A conducted with Wall Street Journal reporters and editors.
    As you push harder into mobile, you also have to keep a strong hold on the PC. What is your strategy there?
    We don’t see the PC going away overnight, but we do see a blending across the bottom end of [PC chips] and the high-end of the Bay Trail chips. You have to recreate the segmentation because [PCs and tablets] are overlapping now [with the proliferation of two-in-one, or convertible computers]. And 7-inch tablets and below are very much like phones and we have an objective in that market as well. By blending and having a shared goal for total compute, you start to think creatively about managing the transition. The suppliers and customers are the same.
    How do you steal market share from ARM?
    We believe we have better products, but we know we have better process technology. It will take us some time to get to the lowest end, but we have every intention of having products at every price point.
    What was gist of the presentation you and new CEO Brian Krzanich gave to the board of directors on how to point Intel in the right direction?
    We talked about getting back into the role of technology leader and really making sure that we’re leading into the next generation of where computing gets used. There’s a tremendous explosion in embedded computing, and the way people are thinking about computing, and we hear a lot about wearables, and there’s experimentation and new products like Google’s Glass. Our strategy is to win in every segment of computing and grow our share in overall compute. If it computes, we want to be in that market.
    Do you have any wearable computers now?
    None that are announced, but you should come to our developer conference in September. We’re going to be talking about where we see computing is going, where Intel is going, and a lot more about how we think computing will be used in the future, beyond the form factors you see today.
    What are you doing to advance the Internet of Things?
    We bought embedded software leader Wind River Systems, so we’ve done a lot of work creating combined product lines between Wind River and our embedded systems group. We’ve focused our work on specific vertical segments, such as in-vehicle entertainment, retail, point of sale and digital signage and infrastructure projects.
    What about Internet of Things in the home?
    We have not done as much in the home. I’m sure the team is working on things I don’t know about but… it’s a big opportunity.

    With Android and forked Android smartphones as the industry standard Nokia relegated to a niche market status while Apple should radically alter its previous premium strategy for long term

    August 17, 2013 2:55 pm / 4 Comments on With Android and forked Android smartphones as the industry standard Nokia relegated to a niche market status while Apple should radically alter its previous premium strategy for long term

    Here is the chart reflecting the performance of the market-leading mobile phones upto Q2’13:

    From this the most visible things are:

    • Android and Android-forked (Xiaomi etc.) smartphones are the undisputed industry standards to dominate the market in years to come
    • Both the Symbian to Windows Phone and S40 to Asha Full Touch smartphone platform transition strategies from Nokia could survive the continued Android onslaught but only in a niche market status
    • There is no room for Apple’s further growth, and both the platform and the company could face a gradual decline in the smartphone market

    My other observations about the state of the smartphone market after Q2’13 were already presented in the following posts:

    In essence we came to a point when the superphone market came down in price to as low as $110 and up, while the entry-level segment of good quality came down to a $65+ price level. Also the smartphone market became saturated in all segments which brings an end to Samsung’s ability to base its premium profitability ambitions on smartphones alone (almost), as it was reflected in 20 years of Samsung “New Management” as manifested by the latest, June 20th GALAXY & ATIV innovations [‘Experiencing the Cloud’, July 2-26, 2013]:

    … innovations in the broadest sense of the world: technology, hardware and software engineering and design, marketing in general and branding in particular etc.

    Updates: Q2 record-high operating profit + smartphone worries deepen + overall business situation + nonproportionally high capex of the semiconductor business +  the #2 capex beneficiary, the Display Panel Segment

    These observations also led to much greater conclusions about the upcoming changes:

    Below I will assess the ‘Nokia Q2’13 market situation and changes’ as well as include ‘Gartner’s own assessment of the Q2’13 overall market situation and the changes’ to complete the picture.

    Nokia Q2’13 market situation and changes:

    Looking at the progress of Nokia Symbian to Windows Phone transformation Q2’13 was a straight continuation of the trends noted for Q1’13 in Nokia: Continued moderate progress with Lumia, urgent Asha Touch refresh and new innovations to come against the onslaught of unbranded Android and forked Android players in China and India [‘Experiencing the Cloud’, April 18, 2013] as you could also well observe from the chart included here as well:

    Nokia was extensively discussing its Windows Phone transition in Nokia Corporation Interim Report for Q2 2013 and January-June 2013 [press release, July 18, 2013]:

      • Lumia Q2 volumes increased 32% quarter-on-quarter to 7.4 million units, reflecting strong demand from customers for a broadened Lumia product range.
      • Commenting on the second quarter results, Stephen Elop, Nokia CEO, said: “ … In our Smart Devices business unit, we continue to focus on delivering meaningful differentiation to consumers around the world. We are very proud of the recent creations by our Lumia team, from the Lumia 520 – our most affordable Windows Phone 8 product which has enjoyed a strong start in markets like China, France, India, Thailand, the UK, the US and Vietnam – to the Lumia 1020, our star imaging product which we unveiled to the world last week. Overall, Lumia volumes grew to 7.4 million in the second quarter, the highest for any quarter so far and showing increasing momentum for the ecosystem. During the third quarter, we expect that our new Lumia products will drive a significant part of our Smart Devices revenue.”
      • In the third quarter 2013, supported by the wider availability of recently announced Lumia products as well as recently announced Mobile Phones products, Nokia expects higher Devices & Services net sales, compared to the second quarter 2013.
      • The year-on-year decline in our Smart Devices volumes in the second quarter 2013 continued to be driven by the strong momentum of competing smartphone platforms and our portfolio transition from Symbian products to Lumia products. The decline was primarily due to lower Symbian volumes, partially offset by higher Lumia volumes. Our Symbian volumes decreased from 6 million units in the second quarter 2012 to approximately zero in the second quarter 2013. Our Lumia volumes increased from 4.0 million in the second quarter 2012 to 7.4 million in the second quarter 2013.
      • On a sequential basis, the increase in our Smart Devices volumes in the second quarter 2013 was due to higher Lumia volumes, as we started shipping the Lumia 520 and 720 in significant volumes. In the second quarter 2013, the vast majority of Smart Devices volumes were from Windows Phone 8-based Lumia products.
      • The year-on-year increase in our Smart Devices ASP in the second quarter 2013 was primarily due to a positive mix shift towards sales of our Lumia products which carry a higher ASP than our Symbian products, partially offset by our pricing actions. Sequentially, the decrease in our Smart Devices ASP in the second quarter 2013 was primarily due to a negative mix shift towards sales of our lower priced Windows Phone 8-based Lumia products as well as our pricing actions.
      • Nokia announced and started shipments in select markets of the Nokia Lumia 925, a new interpretation of its award-winning flagship, the Nokia Lumia 920. The Nokia Lumia 925 introduces metal for the first time to the Nokia Lumia range and includes the most advanced lens technology and next-generation imaging software to capture clearer and sharper pictures and video even in low light conditions. The Nokia Lumia 925 offers a variety of exclusive services such as Nokia Music for unlimited streaming of free playlists, integrated HERE services, and the option to add wireless charging with a snap-on wireless charging cover.
      • Nokia announced the Nokia Lumia 928 smartphone, exclusive to Verizon Wireless. With a 8.7MP camera and Nokia’s PureView imaging innovation, the Nokia Lumia 928 delivers superior imaging and video performance that enables people to capture bright, blur free photos and videos, even in low light conditions. The sleek and stylish smartphone comes with the latest high-end Nokia Lumia experiences, including Nokia Music, HERE services, and built-in wireless charging.
      • Nokia started shipping in volumes the Nokia Lumia 520, its most affordable Windows Phone 8 smartphone, delivering experiences normally found only in high-end smartphones, such as the same digital camera lenses found on the Nokia Lumia 920, Nokia Music for free music out of the box and even offline, and HERE services.
      • Nokia’s Lumia range of smartphones continued to attract businesses, including Miele & Cie. KG, a global leader in domestic appliances and commercial machinery, which has chosen the Nokia Lumia range as the smartphone of choice for its global employees.
      • The Windows Phone Store continued to strengthen in terms of the quantity and quality of applications. The Windows Phone Store today offers more than 165 000 applications and games.

    The Q2’13-related improvements mentioned above and influencing the below chart were even more extensively discussed in my earlier posts:

    while the Q3’13-related actions of improvements in these posts:

    Now look again at the performance chart for the reflections:

    image

    From the further decline of Asha Full Touch you could see that the Temporary Nokia setback in India [‘Experiencing the Cloud’, April 28, 2013] continued into the Q2’13 as well as the result of entry-level local brand Android smartphones being in heavy price competition with Nokia Asha Full Touch during Q2 while having superior hardware specifications. Even Samsung’s REX 70 competed in price with Asha Full Touch.

    Nokia was talking in his Nokia Corporation Interim Report for Q2 2013 and January-June 2013 [press release, July 18, 2013] only about the following future-oriented actions that were introduced in Q2 in order to remedy this situation:

    • In Devices & Services, our Mobile Phones business unit started to demonstrate some signs of recovery in the latter part of the second quarter following a difficult start to the year. Also, towards the end of the second quarter, we started to ship the Asha 501, which brings a new design and user experience to the highly competitive sub-100 USD market. While we are very encouraged by the consumer response to our innovations in this price category, our Mobile Phones business unit is planning to take actions to focus its product offering and improve product competitiveness.
    • On a year-on-year basis, our Mobile Phones volumes in the second quarter 2013 were negatively affected by competitive industry dynamics, including intense smartphone competition at increasingly lower price points and intense competition at the low end of our product portfolio. Compared to the second quarter 2012, our Mobile Phones volumes declined across our portfolio, most notably for our non-full-touch devices that we sell to our customers for above EUR 30, partially offset by higher sales volumes of Asha full-touch smartphones.
    • Nokia started production at its new manufacturing facility in Hanoi, Vietnam. The new site has been established to produce our most affordable Asha smartphones and feature phones.
    • Nokia announced and started shipments of the Nokia Asha 501, the first of a new generation of smartphones to run on the new Asha platform. Retailing at a suggested price of USD 99, the Nokia Asha 501 offers users affordable smartphone design with bold color, a high-quality build and an innovative user interface. The new Asha platform also allows developers who write applications for the Nokia Asha 501 to reach all smartphones based on the new Asha platform without having to re-write code.

    These things were already extensively discussed in my earlier posts:

    And here is how Gartner was assessing the Q2’13 overall market situation and the changes:

    Gartner Says Smartphone Sales Grew 46.5 Percent in Second Quarter of 2013 and Exceeded Feature Phone Sales for First Time [press release, Aug 14, 2013]

    • Worldwide Mobile Phone Sales Grew 3.6 Percent in Second Quarter of 2013
    • Microsoft Has Become the No. 3 Smartphone OS Overtaking BlackBerry

    Worldwide mobile phone sales to end users totaled 435 million units in the second quarter of 2013, an increase of 3.6 percent from the same period last year, according to Gartner, Inc. Worldwide smartphone sales to end users reached 225 million units, up 46.5 percent from the second quarter of 2012. Sales of feature phones to end users totaled 210 million units and declined 21 percent year-over-year. 

    “Smartphones accounted for 51.8 percent of mobile phone sales in the second quarter of 2013, resulting in smartphone sales surpassing feature phone sales for the first time,” said Anshul Gupta, principal research analyst at Gartner. Asia/Pacific, Latin America and Eastern Europe exhibited the highest smartphone growth rates of 74.1 percent, 55.7 percent and 31.6 percent respectively, as smartphone sales grew in all regions.

    Samsung maintained the No. 1 position in the global smartphone market, as its share of smartphone sales reached 31.7 percent, up from 29.7 percent in the second quarter of 2012 (see Table 1). Apple’s smartphone sales reached 32 million units in the second quarter of 2013, up 10.2 percent from a year ago. 

    Table 1

    Worldwide Smartphone Sales to End Users by Vendor in 2Q13 (Thousands of Units)

    Company

    2Q13 Units

    2Q13 Market Share (%)

    2Q12 Units

    2Q12 Market Share (%)

    Samsung

    71,380.9

    31.7

    45,603.8

    29.7

    Apple

    31,899.7

    14.2

    28,935.0

    18.8

    LG Electronics

    11,473.0

    5.1

    5,827.8

    3.8

    Lenovo

    10,671.4

    4.7

    4,370.9

    2.8

    ZTE

    9,687.6

    4.3

    6,331.4

    4.1

    Others

    90,213.6

    40.0

    62,704.0

    40.8

    Total

    225,326.2

    100.0

    153,772.9

    100.0

    Source: Gartner (August 2013)

    In the smartphone operating system (OS) market (see Table 2), Microsoft took over BlackBerry for the first time, taking the No. 3 spot with 3.3 percent market share in the second quarter of 2013. “While Microsoft has managed to increase share and volume in the quarter, Microsoft should continue to focus on growing interest from app developers to help grow its appeal among users,” said Mr. Gupta. Android continued to increase its lead, garnering 79 percent of the market in the second quarter. 

    Table 2

    Worldwide Smartphone Sales to End Users by Operating System in 2Q13 (Thousands of Units)

    Operating System

    2Q13 Units

    2Q13 Market Share (%)

    2Q12  Units

    2Q12 Market Share (%)

    Android

    177,898.2

    79.0

    98,664.0

    64.2

    iOS

    31,899.7

    14.2

    28,935.0

    18.8

    Microsoft

    7,407.6

    3.3

    4,039.1

    2.6

    BlackBerry

    6,180.0

    2.7

    7,991.2

    5.2

    Bada

    838.2

    0.4

    4,208.8

    2.7

    Symbian

    630.8

    0.3

    9,071.5

    5.9

    Others

    471.7

    0.2

    863.3

    0.6

    Total

    225,326.2

    100.0

    153,772.9

    100.0

    Source: Gartner (August 2013)

    Mobile Phone Vendor Perspective

    Samsung: Samsung remained in the No. 1 position in the overall mobile phone market, with sales to end users growing 19 percent in the second quarter of 2013 (see Table 3). “We see demand in the premium smartphone market come mainly from the lower end of this segment in the $400-and-below ASP mark. It will be critical for Samsung to step up its game in the mid-tier and also be more aggressive in emerging markets. Innovation cannot be limited to the high end,” said Mr. Gupta. 

    Nokia: Slowing demand of feature phone sales across many markets worldwide, and fierce competition in the smartphone segment, affected Nokia’s mobile phone sales in the second quarter of 2013. Nokia’s mobile phone sales totaled 61 million units, down from 83 million units a year ago. Nokia’s Lumia sales grew 112.7 percent in the second quarter of 2013 thanks to its expanded Lumia portfolio, which now include Lumia 520 and Lumia 720. “With the recent announcement of the Lumia 1020, Nokia has built a wide portfolio of devices at multiple price points, which should boost Lumia sales in the second half of 2013,” said Mr. Gupta. “However, Nokia is facing tough competition from Android devices, especially from regional and Chinese manufacturers which are more aggressive in terms of price points.” 

    Apple: While sales continued to grow, the company faced a significant drop in the ASP of its smartphones. Despite the iPhone 5 being the most popular model, its ASP declined to the lowest figure registered by Apple since the iPhone’s launch in 2007. The ASP reduction is due to strong sales of the iPhone 4, which is sold at a strongly discounted price. “While Apple’s ASP demonstrates the need for a new flagship model, it is risky for Apple to introduce a new lower-priced model too,” said Mr. Gupta. “Although the possible new lower-priced device may be priced similarly to the iPhone 4 at $300 to $400, the potential for cannibalization will be much greater than what is seen today with the iPhone 4. Despite being seen as the less expensive sibling of the flagship product, it would represent a new device with the hype of the marketing associated with it.” 

    Lenovo: Lenovo’s mobile phone sales grew 60.6 percent to reach 11 million units in the second quarter of 2013. Lenovo’s quarter performance was bolstered by smartphone sales. Its smartphone sales grew 144 percent year-over-year and helped it rise to the No. 4 spot in the worldwide smartphone market for the first time. Lenovo continues to rely heavily on its home market in China, which represents more than 95 percent of its sales. It remains challenging for Lenovo to expand outside China as it has to strengthen its direct channel as well as its relationships with communications service providers. 

    Table 3

    Worldwide Mobile Phone Sales to End Users by Vendor in 2Q13 (Thousands of Units)

    Company

    2Q13 Units

    2Q13 Market Share (%)

    2Q12 Units

    2Q12 Market Share (%)

    Samsung

    107,526.0

    24.7

    90,432.1

    21.5

    Nokia

    60,953.7

    14.0

    83,420.1

    19.9

    Apple

    31,899.7

    7.3

    28,935.0

    6.9

    LG Electronics

    17,016.4

    3.9

    14,345.4

    3.4

    ZTE

    15,280.7

    3.5

    17,198.2

    4.1

    Huawei

    11,275.1

    2.6

    10,894.2

    2.6

    Lenovo

    10,954.8

    2.5

    6,821.7

    1.6

    TCL Communi-cation [Alcatel]

    10,134.3

    2.3

    9,355.7

    2.2

    Sony Mobile Communications

    9,504.7

    2.2

    7,346.8

    1.7

    Yulong [Coolpad]

    7,911.5

    1.8

    4,016.2

    1.0

    Others

    152,701.5

    35.1

    147,354.60

    35.1

    Total

    435,158.4

    100.0

    420,120.0

    100.0

    Source: Gartner (August 2013)

    “With second quarter of 2013 sales broadly on track, we see little need to adjust our expectations for worldwide mobile phone sales forecast to total 1.82 billion units this year. Flagship devices brought to market in time for the holidays, and the continued price reduction of smartphones will drive consumer adoption in the second half of the year,” said Mr. Gupta. 

    Additional information is in the Gartner report “Market Share Analysis: Mobile Phones, Worldwide, 2Q13.” The report is available on Gartner’s website at http://www.gartner.com/document/2573119.

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