Computer trends 2017

I did not have time to post my computer technologies predictions t the ends of 2016. Because I missed the year end deadline, I though that there is no point on posting anything before the news from CES 2017 have been published. Here are some of myck picks on the current computer technologies trends:

CES 2017 had 3 significant technology trends: deep learning goes deep, Alexa everywhere and Wi-Fi gets meshy. The PC sector seemed to be pretty boring.

Gartner expects that IT sales will growth (2.7%) but hardware sales will not have any growth – can drop this year. TEKsystems 2017 IT forecast shows IT budgets rebounding from a slump in 2016, and IT leaders’ confidence high going into the new year. But challenges around talent acquisition and organizational alignment will persist. Programming and software development continue to be among the most crucial and hard-to-find IT skill sets.

Smart phones sales (expected to be 1.89 billion) and PC sales (expected to be 432 million) do not grow in 2017. According to IDC PC shipments declined for a fifth consecutive year in 2016 as the industry continued to suffer from stagnation and lack of compelling drivers for upgrades. Both Gartner and IDC estimated that PC shipments declined about 6% in 2016.Revenue in the traditional (non-cloud) IT infrastructure segment decreased 10.8 per cent year over year in the third quarter of 2016. Only PC category that has potential for growth is ultramobile (includes Microsoft Surface ja Apple MacBook Air). Need for memory chips is increasing.

Browser suffers from JavaScript-creep disease: This causes that the browing experience seems to be become slower even though computer and broadband connections are getting faster all the time. Bloat on web pages has been going on for ages, and this trend seems to continue.

Microsoft tries all it can to make people to switch from older Windows versions to Windows 10. Microsoft says that continued usage of Windows 7 increases maintenance and operating costs for businesses as malware attacks that could have been avoided by upgrading to Windows 10. Microsoft says that continued usage of Windows 7 increases maintenance and operating costs for businesses. Microsoft: Windows 7 Does Not Meet the Demands of Modern Technology; Recommends Windows 10. On February 2017 Microsoft stops the 20 year long tradition of monthly security updates. Windows 10 “Creators Update” coming early 2017 for free, featuring 3D and mixed reality, 4K gaming, more.

Microsoft plans to emulate x86 instructions on ARM chips, throwing a compatibility lifeline to future Windows tablets and phones. Microsoft’s x86 on ARM64 Emulation is coming in 2017. This capability is coming to Windows 10, though not until “Redstone 3″ in the Fall of 2017

Parents should worry less about the amount of time their children spend using smartphones, computers and playing video games because screen time is actually beneficial, the University of Oxford has concluded. 257 minutes is the time teens can spend on computers each day before harming wellbeing.

Outsourcing IT operations to foreign countries is not trendy anymore and companied live at uncertain times. India’s $150 billion outsourcing industry stares at an uncertain future. In the past five years, revenue and profit growth for the top five companies listed on the BSE have halved. Industry leader TCS too felt the impact as it made a shift in business model towards software platforms and chased digital contacts.

Containers will become hot this year and cloud will stay hot. Research firm 451 Research predicts this year containerization will be US $ 762 million business and that Containers will become 2.6 billion worth of software business in 2020. (40 per cent a year growth rate).

Cloud services are expected to have  22 percent annual growth rate. By 2020, the sector would grow from the current 22.2 billion to $ 46 billion. In Finland 30% of companies now prefer to buy cloud services when buying IT (20 per cent of IT budget goes to cloud).Cloud spend to make up over a third of IT budgets by 2017. Cloud and hosting services will be responsible for 34% of IT budgets by 2017, up from 28% by the end of 2016, according to 451 Research. Cloud services have many advantages, but cloud services have also disadvantages. In five years, SaaS will be the cloud that matters.

When cloud is growing, so is the spending on cloud hardware by the cloud companies. Cloud hardware spend hits US$8.4bn/quarter, as traditional kit sinks – 2017 forecast to see cloud kit clock $11bn every 90 days. In 2016′s third quarter vendor revenue from sales of infrastructure products (server, storage, and Ethernet switch) for cloud IT, including public and private cloud, grew by 8.1 per cent year over year to $8.4 billion. Private cloud accounted for $3.3 billion with the rest going to public clouds. Data centers need lower latency components so Google Searches for Better Silicon.

The first signs of the decline and fall of the 20+ year x86 hegemony will appear in 2017. The availability of industry leading fab processes will allow other processor architectures (including AMD x86, ARM, Open Power and even the new RISC-V architecture) to compete with Intel on a level playing field.

USB-C will now come to screens – C-type USB connector promises to really become the only all equipment for the physical interface.The HDMI connection will be lost from laptops in the future. Thunderbolt 3 is arranged to work with USB Type-C,  but it’s not the same thing (Thunderbolt is four times faster than USB 3.1).

World’s first ‘exascale’ supercomputer prototype will be ready by the end of 2017, says China

It seems that Oracle Begins Aggressively Pursuing Java Licensing Fees in 2017. Java SE is free, but Java SE Suite and various flavors of Java SE Advanced are not. Oracle is massively ramping up audits of Java customers it claims are in breach of its licences – six years after it bought Sun Microsystems. Huge sums of money are at stake. The version of Java in contention is Java SE, with three paid flavours that range from $40 to $300 per named user and from $5,000 to $15,000 for a processor licence. If you download Java, you get everything – and you need to make sure you are installing only the components you are entitled to and you need to remove the bits you aren’t using.

Your Year in Review, Unsung Hero article sees the following trends in 2017:

  • A battle between ASICs, GPUs, and FPGAs to run emerging workloads in artificial intelligence
  • A race to create the first generation of 5G silicon
  • Continued efforts to define new memories that have meaningful impact
  • New players trying to take share in the huge market for smartphones
  • An emerging market for VR gaining critical mass

Virtual Reality Will Stay Hot on both PC and mobile.“VR is the heaviest heterogeneous workload we encounter in mobile—there’s a lot going on, much more than in a standard app,” said Tim Leland, a vice president for graphics and imaging at Qualcomm. The challenges are in the needs to calculate data from multiple sensors and respond to it with updated visuals in less than 18 ms to keep up with the viewer’s head motions so the CPUs, GPUs, DSPs, sensor fusion core, display engine, and video-decoding block are all running at close to full tilt.

 


932 Comments

  1. Tomi Engdahl says:

    Welcome to the Age of Continuous Innovation
    http://www.eetimes.com/author.asp?section_id=36&doc_id=1331529&

    Modern applications now are comprised of pre-fab code snippets representing atomized functions delivered as microservices packaged within containers.

    Technology stories regularly focus on macro trends including the Internet of Things, Big Data, Mobile, Cloud Computing, and Artificial Intelligence. On their own, each of these trends leads to massive changes in how fast information flows and brings about new applications and services. Taken together, they constitute radical changes in information technology — we are witnessing a new information age.

    Modern applications now are comprised of pre-fab code snippets representing atomized functions delivered as microservices packaged within containers. These containers are deployed across “server-less” clusters using orchestration platforms that automate the capacity, scaling, patching, and administration of the infrastructure. Combined with a distributed computing architecture, this represents a massive paradigm shift in IT practice and infrastructure that has occurred in only the last several years in both application development and operations.

    Reply
  2. Tomi Engdahl says:

    Y’know CSS was to kill off HTML table layout? Well, second time’s a charm: Meet CSS Grid
    Browser makers unite to make web design great again
    https://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/03/31/css_grids_browser_support/

    With the release of Safari 10.1 this week, four major browsers in the space of a month have implemented support for CSS Grid, an emerging standard for two-dimensional grid layouts in web applications.

    CSS Grid Layout
    https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/CSS/CSS_Grid_Layout

    CSS Grid layout has been designed to provide a two-dimensional layout method for CSS, with the ability to lay out items in rows and columns. A CSS grid can be used to achieve many different layouts. It excels at dividing a page into major regions, or defining the relationship in terms of size, position, and layer, between parts of a control built from HTML primitives.

    Like tables, grid layout enables an author to align elements into columns and rows. However, unlike tables, grid layout doesn’t have content structure, therefore enabling a wide variety of layouts not possible in tables. For example, a grid container’s child elements could position themselves so they actually overlap and layer, similar to CSS positioned elements.

    Reply
  3. Tomi Engdahl says:

    Study: Most manufacturers overstate how long laptop batteries will last
    http://www.digitaltrends.com/computing/battery-life-lie/

    A new study has found that the battery life estimates made by manufacturers of laptops rarely have much bearing on reality. Although Apple’s battery life claims were the closest to reality, in the case of some other manufacturers, their laptops lasted hours less than the stated time.

    In its testing, Which looked at the battery life claims of 67 different laptop models from manufacturers as diverse as Asus, Apple, Acer, HP, Dell, Lenovo, and Toshiba — some of the world’s most popular laptop makers. It found that while Apple’s average claim of 10 hours was proven correct — and was even slightly better in some cases — Dell’s claims were overstated by more than four hours, and HP, close to five.

    Laptop manufacturers overstate battery life, Which? tests find
    You may only achieve half the stated battery life on many laptops
    http://www.which.co.uk/news/2017/03/which-laptop-battery-tests-manufacturers-overstate/

    Manufacturer claims vs reality

    We’ve compared the stated manufacturer claims against our laptop tests over the past year, comparing 67 models. Overall we found that manufacturers are missing their claims not by minutes, but by hours. The most optimistic laptop manufacturers are overstating their battery life by 50% or more, leaving you searching for the power cable twice as often as you’d expect.

    The Which? battery test

    Each laptop we judge goes through our battery tests at least three times. We don’t simply trust battery capacity claims: we actually drain the whole battery from start to finish, several times over, during various tasks. One test involves watching films until the battery finally shuts down, another continually browsing websites over wi-fi.

    We believe that that these tests are representative of the real world use that a laptop would get.

    Reply
  4. Tomi Engdahl says:

    The Great Machine Learning Race
    Chip industry repositions as technology begins to take shape; no clear winners yet.
    http://semiengineering.com/the-great-machine-learning-race/

    Processor makers, tools vendors, and packaging houses are racing to position themselves for a role in machine learning, despite the fact that no one is quite sure which architecture is best for this technology or what ultimately will be successful.

    Rather than dampen investments, the uncertainty is fueling a frenzy. Money is pouring in from all sides. According to a new Moor Insights report, as of February 2017 there were more than 1,700 machine learning startups and 2,300 investors. The focus ranges from relatively simple dynamic network optimization to military drones using real-time information to avoid fire and adjust their targets.

    Reply
  5. Tomi Engdahl says:

    Five Reasons to Switch to Flash Storage
    http://www.linuxjournal.com/content/five-reasons-switch-flash-storage

    By now you have heard your peers raving about flash storage. But perhaps you have not made the switch from your enterprise HDD storage solution yet, because of nagging questions you may have, about the cost of flash storage or its technical capabilities. Well here is a quick look at five compelling reasons why you should switch your enterprise storage from HDD to flash.

    Performance
    Price
    Capacity
    Reliability
    Increased Workloads

    Together, these five reasons for switching from HDD to flash storage for your enterprise storage solution (and each reason is a compelling justification on its own), translate into an overall lower Total Cost of Ownership. When you can improve the ability of your infrastructure to handle increasingly demanding workloads in real-time, improve storage reliability, increase the available storage capacity while decreasing your data center footprint and energy consumption, and do it all for a lower capital price, what would be the reason not to?

    Reply
  6. Tomi Engdahl says:

    Some Hackathon Hustlers Make Their Living From Corporate Coding Contests
    https://news.slashdot.org/story/17/04/04/153236/some-hackathon-hustlers-make-their-living-from-corporate-coding-contests

    Some coders go from one marathon hacking session to another, subsisting on prize money and schwag. From a feature article on Bloomberg:
    Peter Ma looked around his San Francisco condo and realized he’d won everything in it. His flat-screen TV, home theater system, 3D printers, phones, tablets, computers and furniture were either hackathon prizes or purchased with hackathon earnings.

    These Hackathon Hustlers Make Their Living From Corporate Coding Contests
    https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2017-04-04/these-hackathon-hustlers-make-their-living-from-corporate-coding-contests

    Some coders go from one marathon hacking session to another, subsisting on prize money and schwag.

    Over the past three years, Ma has traveled to more than 100 hackathons, and his strategy is down to a science. He knows how to maximize his time and prizes. He enters competitions based on the quality of the sponsors (read: big money), the location (unless airfare is covered, he’s not inclined to leave the Bay Area) and which of his friends are planning to go.

    The cooler and newer the technology being promoted, the more interesting the hackathon is. Ma and Clark both look for events that will help them continue their education by practicing new skills.

    A few days before each hackathon, Ma checks that all his favorite programs and tools are up to date. Usually updates take 15 to 30 minutes, but sometimes there’s a glitch, a program fails and an update can take a couple of hours. The times he hasn’t done the prep work, like at a Smart Cities event at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, have created chaos during the hackathon.

    “We didn’t know we needed an update and all the sample code stopped working,” said Ma. The oversight cost his team several hours to correct. “You know how a soldier goes to battle with a sword? Our weapons are our laptops.”

    Reply
  7. Tomi Engdahl says:

    More Than a Hoodie: How We Talk About Developers
    https://developers.slashdot.org/story/17/04/04/1913238/more-than-a-hoodie-how-we-talk-about-developers

    For generations, movies, video games, and tv shows have portrayed the developer as either an awkward hoodie-wearing nerd, or an insane and menacing basement dweller (or both). From Ace Ventura to Silicon Valley, everyone has had their chance to portray the developer. Few actors do this with the same grace they’d reserve for a role portraying a doctor. [...] I think it’s time for all of us to try and elevate our understanding of what a developer is. If you are a tech company who markets to developers, or is hoping to hire developers this is doubly true.

    More than a hoodie: how we talk about developers
    https://medium.com/the-mission/more-than-a-hoodie-how-we-talk-about-developers-f6075495b2e5

    For generations, movies, video games, and tv shows have portrayed the developer as either an awkward hoodie-wearing nerd, or an insane and menacing basement dweller (or both). From Ace Ventura to Silicon Valley, everyone has had their chance to portray the developer. Few actors do this with the same grace they’d reserve for a role portraying a doctor.

    Talk about the work

    First, we should talk about how important their work is. Programming is one of the fastest growing industries in the world as it serves a role in every part of society. Developers maintain and build critical parts of our infrastructure. They keep our businesses online, our power on and our water running. If you look deeper into the tools you use everyday to communicate, travel, eat or sleep, you’ll find a developer behind every one.

    Show some code

    Second, we need to talk about the craft of what they do… we need to show more code. Every developer may use a different set of tools, but across the board their craft is evolving at increasing rates. There are more tools available every day.

    So what if we could do better? What if we could better connect with developers? I’d imagine we’d start by throwing out some of the old tropes:

    We’d show developers that aren’t bearded men or punk-clad women
    We’d market our conferences by assuming not all developers love video games and techno
    We’d take a hiatus on offering developers just hoodies (but if we do — offer women’s sizes ;))
    We’d offer more than Mountain Dew, Red Bull and Pizza at our events
    We’d stop pitching developers on work = life, some of us enjoy farming, ya’ know
    We’d stop showing developers drinking beer and playing ping-pong while waiting for a deploy
    We’d stop assuming all developers do deploys

    I think we can drop developer stereotypes all together at this point. It’s a job people know — it’s time to add some vitamins to that kool-aid. After all, we’re just like lawyers, librarians, electricians and cab drivers… we’re just people, totally unique and different people.

    Reply
  8. Tomi Engdahl says:

    This is difficult for teachers: Installing and Upgrading of mobile applications

    Schools into the digital skills should be taught, but all too often the subjects taught are better things than the teacher got to the bottom. And the point should be to teach children programming.

    Digi time elementary school project, has determined what types of skills taught to children. it turns out that the main gaps in teachers’ skills related to programming preliminary findings.

    If this is not surprising, what about this? The weakest teachers dominate in addition to programming the installation and updating of mobile applications. In general, successful installation of one-touch, and updates are dropping off of himself. If this causes problems, mobile programming is really long.

    It is comforting, the study indicated that teachers dominate the digital communications and networking, office applications, as well as the basic operation of the equipment.

    Source: http://www.tivi.fi/Kaikki_uutiset/tama-on-vaikeaa-opettajille-mobiilisovellusten-asentaminen-ja-paivittaminen-takkuaa-6639030

    Reply
  9. Tomi Engdahl says:

    Windows 10 is still rare in companies

    Windows 10 operating system is fast approaching the age of two, but the companies of its popularity is still quite weak. An American survey found that only one in ten corporate machine has been upgraded or delivered to a new Windows 10.

    Texan IT community Spice Works under Windows 10 market share in corporate machines at the end of March by 9 per cent. Windows 7 is still clearly the most popular enterprise operating system. Its share is 69 percent.

    Source: http://www.etn.fi/index.php/13-news/6127-windows-10-edelleen-harvinainen-yrityksissa

    Reply
  10. Tomi Engdahl says:

    Kevin Gallo / Windows Blog:
    Windows 10 Creators Update and Creators Update SDK are available for download now — This is a big day! Today we opened access to download the Windows 10 Creators Update and, along with it, the Creators Update SDK. And today is a great day for all Windows developers to get the SDK …

    Windows 10 Creators Update and Creators Update SDK are Released
    https://blogs.windows.com/buildingapps/2017/04/05/windows-10-creators-update-creators-update-sdk-released/

    Reply
  11. Tomi Engdahl says:

    Jon Brodkin / Ars Technica:
    Canonical will discontinue its Unity desktop interface, focusing on GNOME instead, and will shutter its mobile projects — Ubuntu phones and tablets are dead, but the desktop, server, and cloud live on. — Six years after making Unity the default user interface on Ubuntu desktops …

    Ubuntu Unity is dead: Desktop will switch back to GNOME next year
    Ubuntu phones and tablets also dead, but the desktop, server, and cloud live on.
    https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2017/04/ubuntu-unity-is-dead-desktop-will-switch-back-to-gnome-next-year/

    Six years after making Unity the default user interface on Ubuntu desktops, Canonical is giving up on the project and will switch the default Ubuntu desktop back to GNOME next year. Canonical is also ending development of Ubuntu software for phones and tablets, spelling doom for the goal of creating a converged experience with phones acting as desktops when docked with the right equipment.

    Canonical founder Mark Shuttleworth explained the move in a blog post Wednesday. “I’m writing to let you know that we will end our investment in Unity8, the phone and convergence shell,” he wrote. “We will shift our default Ubuntu desktop back to GNOME for Ubuntu 18.04 LTS,” which will ship in April 2018.

    Growing Ubuntu for cloud and IoT, rather than phone and convergence
    https://insights.ubuntu.com/2017/04/05/growing-ubuntu-for-cloud-and-iot-rather-than-phone-and-convergence/

    Reply
  12. Tomi Engdahl says:

    Google Details Tensor Chip Powers
    http://spectrum.ieee.org/tech-talk/computing/hardware/google-details-tensor-chip-powers

    Yesterday, Google released a fairly detailed description of the TPU and its performance relative to CPUs and GPUs.

    The TPU is built for doing inference, having hardware that operates on 8-bit integers rather than higher-precision floating-point numbers.

    “The TPU is an order of magnitude faster than contemporary CPUs and GPUs and its relative performance per watt is even larger.”

    For example, compared with a contemporary GPU, the TPU is said to offer 83 times the performance per watt. That might be something of an exaggeration

    The range of improvement for total performance is less: from 14 to 16 times better for the TPU compared with that of a GPU.

    These researchers are comparing their 8-bit TPU with higher-precision GPUs and CPUs, which are just not well suited to inference calculations. The GPU exemplar Google used in its report is Nvidia’s K80 board, which performs both single-precision (32-bit) and double-precision (64-bit) calculations. While they’re often important for training neural networks, such levels of precision aren’t typically needed for inference.

    Reply
  13. Tomi Engdahl says:

    How IT can foster a spirit of ‘intrapreneurship’
    http://www.cio.com/article/3187407/leadership-management/how-it-can-foster-a-spirit-of-intrapreneurship.html

    Corporations don’t have to look outside for fresh and innovative ideas. Instead, businesses can foster intrapreneurship by encouraging better communication between IT and other departments.

    Entrepreneurship is typically associated with startup companies, and the eager, driven and innovative minds that start them. But there’s another type of entrepreneurship, and it lives inside established organizations.

    Intrapreneurs are already employed in your organization — they’re workers with progressive ideas that will benefit the company. The only problem is, these intrapreneurs often struggle to find the right channels to see their ideas realized.

    “These are the employees who want to get their hands dirty and are often the first people to volunteer for a job. Intrapreneurs are not content with the status quo. They often see how things could be part of a bigger picture and come up with ideas to realize this new vision,” says Tim Beerman, CTO at Ensono, a company that offers mainframe and hybrid IT solutions.

    “When intrapreneurs and IT teams are communicating regularly, there are more windows of opportunity for collaboration. Innovation and collaboration will eventually become business as usual, once initial bridges are crossed,”

    Reply
  14. Tomi Engdahl says:

    Darrell Etherington / TechCrunch:
    Uber expands its open source data visualization tool beyond mapping to other visual datasets, including network traffic

    Uber’s open source data visualization tool now goes beyond maps
    https://techcrunch.com/2017/04/06/ubers-open-source-data-visualization-tool-now-goes-beyond-maps/

    You may not be aware, but Uber offers an open source version of the data visualization framework it uses internally, called deck.gl. The tool was made available to anyone via open source license last November, and now it’s getting some key updates that should help make it more useful to external teams and individuals looking for interesting ways to take their data and turn it into compelling visual representations.

    “The main idea behind this library is that it’s a WebGL-powered framework that is designed for exploring and visualizing data assets at scale,” explains Nicolas Garcia Belmonte, Uber’s head of data visualization, regarding why the tool exists to begin with. “There’s a lot of geospatial stuff that we do here, as well, as you can probably imagine from the core business, so we visualize a lot of data on maps.”

    https://uber.github.io/deck.gl/

    Reply
  15. Tomi Engdahl says:

    Google Research Blog:
    Google’s testing Federated Learning, a new approach to machine learning that keeps user data as well as model training on users’ devices, with Gboard on Android

    Federated Learning: Collaborative Machine Learning without Centralized Training Data
    http://research.googleblog.com/2017/04/federated-learning-collaborative.html

    Standard machine learning approaches require centralizing the training data on one machine or in a datacenter. And Google has built one of the most secure and robust cloud infrastructures for processing this data to make our services better. Now for models trained from user interaction with mobile devices, we’re introducing an additional approach: Federated Learning.

    Federated Learning enables mobile phones to collaboratively learn a shared prediction model while keeping all the training data on device, decoupling the ability to do machine learning from the need to store the data in the cloud. This goes beyond the use of local models that make predictions on mobile devices (like the Mobile Vision API and On-Device Smart Reply) by bringing model training to the device as well.

    Reply
  16. Tomi Engdahl says:

    Richard Leadbetter / Eurogamer.net:
    Project Scorpio, which is at least six months away from release, shows impressive performance based on a game demo and detailed look at the tech inside the box — Digital Foundry has the specs, has seen it running, and has talked to the people who built it.

    Inside the next Xbox: Project Scorpio tech revealed
    Digital Foundry has the specs, has seen it running, and has talked to the people who built it.
    http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/digitalfoundry-2017-project-scorpio-tech-revealed

    Last week, Digital Foundry was invited to Microsoft’s Redmond campus for an exclusive preview of the technology in the next Xbox, codenamed Project Scorpio. As specs reveals go, this one is unprecedented: it’s a first in terms of early access to key system architects, and one of a kind in terms of timing. Scorpio is seemingly running ahead of schedule, to the point where we’re likely six months away from release at least, and we’ve already seen impressive software running beautifully on production silicon.

    Jason Schreier / Kotaku:
    Microsoft reveals Project Scorpio specs: 8-core 2.3GHz CPU, custom GPU comprised of 40 units, 12GB GDDR5 RAM, 1TB hard drive, and 4K UHD Blu-ray drive

    Microsoft Reveals Xbox Scorpio’s Impressive Specs
    http://kotaku.com/microsoft-reveals-xbox-scorpios-impressive-specs-1794069652

    Reply
  17. Tomi Engdahl says:

    Microsoft’s new hardware: eight x86 cores, 40 GPU cores
    Damn. It’s the next XBOX, not a Surface and it’s going to 4k things up nicely
    https://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/04/07/xbox_project_scorpio_specs/

    Microsoft’s revealed the specs for some forthcoming hardware and the tale of the tape is impressive.

    At the heart of the device will be a system-on-chip packing eight custom x86 CPU cores clocking up to 2.3GHz apiece, plus 40 (yes forty) GPU cores at 1172MHz apiece for a total of over six teraflops of graphics-crunching capacity. 12GB of GDDR5 RAM will enjoy memory bandwidth of 326GB/s. A 1.2TB hard disk and 4K Blu-Ray rounds things out.

    Sadly this is not a new Surface Studio or cloud server: it’s the next XBOX, aka “Project Scorpio”.

    Microsoft revealed the specs detailed above today to Eurogamer.

    AMD looks to have again scored the gig of making the XBOX’s SoC, as Eurogamer says the GPU cores are Radeons.

    http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/digitalfoundry-2017-project-scorpio-tech-revealed

    Reply
  18. Tomi Engdahl says:

    Big-in-Japan AI code ‘Chainer’ shows how Intel will gun for GPUs
    Chainer makes Tensor Flow look like treacle, but until this week it didn’t speak Xeon
    https://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/04/07/intel_chainer_ai_day/

    Emergent Tech Arrow Artificial Intelligence
    Big-in-Japan AI code ‘Chainer’ shows how Intel will gun for GPUs
    Chainer makes Tensor Flow look like treacle, but until this week it didn’t speak Xeon
    Maricar.com Mario Kart tour of Tokyo
    AI day took place in Tokyo, where the author managed to come across a real-live Mario Kart tour
    reddit
    Twitter
    Facebook
    linkedin
    7 Apr 2017 at 07:32, Simon Sharwood

    Ever heard of “Chainer”, the open-source framework for creating neural networks?

    I hadn’t either until yesterday Intel decided to give it a big hug, taking Chainer from being big in Japan, where its parent company Preferred Networks works with the likes of Toyota on secret projects, to rather greater prominence.

    Chainer can use the help: launched in 2015 and open-sourced last year, the tool’s GitHub repo is busy but hardly the most lively place on the internet

    http://chainer.org/

    Reply
  19. Tomi Engdahl says:

    Microsoft’s Project Scorpio: More Hardware Details Revealed
    by Ian Cutress on April 6, 2017 11:00 AM EST
    http://www.anandtech.com/show/11250/microsofts-project-scorpio-more-hardware-details-revealed

    Reply
  20. Tomi Engdahl says:

    JEDEC: DDR5 to Double Bandwidth Over DDR4, NVDIMM-P Specification Due Next Year
    by Anton Shilov on April 3, 2017 9:00 AM EST
    http://www.anandtech.com/show/11238/ddr5-to-double-bandwidth-over-ddr4-specification-due-next-year

    JEDEC made two important announcements about the future of DRAM and non-volatile DIMMs for servers last week. Development of both is proceeding as planned and JEDEC intends to preview them in the middle of this year and publish the final specifications sometimes in 2018.

    Traditionally each new successive DRAM memory standard aims for consistent jumps: doubling the bandwidth per pin, reducing power consumption by dropping Vdd/Vddq voltage, and increasing the maximum capacity of memory ICs (integrated circuits). DDR5 will follow this trend and JEDEC last week confirmed that it would double the bandwidth and density over DDR4, improve performance, and power efficiency.

    Given that official DDR4 standard covers chips with up to 16 Gb capacity and with up to 2133-3200 MT/s data rate per pin, doubling that means 32 Gb ICs with up to 4266-6400 MT/s data rate per pin. If DDR5 sustains 64-bit interface for memory modules, we will see single-sided 32 GB DDR5-6400 DIMMs with 51.2 GB/s bandwidth in the DDR5 era. Speaking of modules, it is interesting to note that among other things DDR5 promises “a more user-friendly interface”, which probably means a new retention mechanism or increased design configurability.

    Reply
  21. Tomi Engdahl says:

    ISPD Predicts Chip Futures
    Machine Learning to Determine Architectures
    http://www.eetimes.com/document.asp?doc_id=1331563&

    The paradigm of real-time machine learning is eliminating many of the human-driven elements in the physical design of microchips, according to speakers at the Association for Computing Machinery’s (ACM’s) International Symposium on Physical Design (ISPD).

    IEEE- and Intel-Fellow Pradeep Dubey of Intel’s Parallel Computing Lab outlined how cognitive computers will take over many human elements in his keynote presentation the Quest for the Ultimate Learning Machine.

    Reply
  22. Tomi Engdahl says:

    The traditional PC’s slow death continues

    The personal computer market has shrunk steadily for several years. According to Gartner, this year sold 205 million PC machine. Next year, the number drops below the 200 million mark, ie 196 million.

    However, consumers are buying an average of a little more expensive machines, so in terms of money value PC market turns to growth next year. This year, the microwave ovens are sold 163.4 million dollars and 166.3 million next year. In 2019 sales will grow slightly more than USD 169 million.

    Ultra mobile PC market is growing slightly at the same time.

    In practice, the figures mean that the PC market stopped growing. The traditional desktop or laptop ends up in more and more rare the buyer.

    smartphone market no longer grow. This year, the mobile phones sold more than 1.9 billion.
    Source: http://www.etn.fi/index.php/13-news/6141-perinteisen-pc-n-hidas-kuolema-jatkuu

    Reply
  23. Tomi Engdahl says:

    Google says its custom machine learning chips are often 15-30x faster than GPUs and CPUs
    https://techcrunch.com/2017/04/05/google-says-its-custom-machine-learning-chips-are-often-15-30x-faster-than-gpus-and-cpus/

    It’s no secret that Google has developed its own custom chips to accelerate its machine learning algorithms. The company first revealed those chips, called Tensor Processing Units (TPUs), at its I/O developer conference back in May 2016, but it never went into all that many details about them, except for saying that they were optimized around the company’s own TensorFlow machine-learning framework. Today, for the first time, it’s sharing more details and benchmarks about the project.

    Reply
  24. Tomi Engdahl says:

    Windows 10 Creators Update and Creators Update SDK are Released
    https://blogs.windows.com/buildingapps/2017/04/05/windows-10-creators-update-creators-update-sdk-released/

    This is a big day! Today we opened access to download the Windows 10 Creators Update and, along with it, the Creators Update SDK. And today is a great day for all Windows developers to get the SDK and start building amazing apps that take advantage of new platform capabilities to deliver experiences that you and your users will love.

    https://blogs.windows.com/buildingapps/2017/04/05/updating-tooling-windows-10-creators-update/

    Reply
  25. Tomi Engdahl says:

    Jay Greene / Wall Street Journal:
    Data center arms race: top cloud computing firms Amazon, Alphabet, and Microsoft spent a combined $31.5B in 2016 on capital expenses and leases, up 22% from ’15

    Tech’s High-Stakes Arms Race: Costly Data Centers
    Top three cloud-computing firms have spent $31.5 billion in 2016 on capital expenses and leases
    https://www.wsj.com/articles/techs-high-stakes-arms-race-costly-data-centers-1491557408?mod=e2fbd

    Just as oil and gas companies plow billions of dollars in searching for new energy reserves, big technology companies are spending lavishly on a global footprint of sophisticated computers

    Reply
  26. Tomi Engdahl says:

    Jay Greene / Wall Street Journal:
    Data center arms race: top cloud computing firms Amazon, Alphabet, and Microsoft spent a combined $31.5B in 2016 on capital expenses and leases, up 22% from ’15

    Tech’s High-Stakes Arms Race: Costly Data Centers
    Top three cloud-computing firms have spent $31.5 billion in 2016 on capital expenses and leases
    https://www.wsj.com/articles/techs-high-stakes-arms-race-costly-data-centers-1491557408?mod=e2fbd

    Just as oil and gas companies plow billions of dollars in searching for new energy reserves, big technology companies are spending lavishly on a global footprint of sophisticated computers

    These Hackathon Hustlers Make Their Living From Corporate Coding Contests
    https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2017-04-04/these-hackathon-hustlers-make-their-living-from-corporate-coding-contests

    Some coders go from one marathon hacking session to another, subsisting on prize money and schwag.

    Reply
  27. Tomi Engdahl says:

    TPU Beat Intel, Nvidia, says Google
    Machine-learning ASIC outran Haswell, K80
    http://www.eetimes.com/document.asp?doc_id=1331560

    Google’s Tensor Processing Unit beat Intel’s Xeon and Nvidia GPU in machine-learning tests by more than an order of magnitude, the web giant reported. A 17-page paper gives a deep dive into the TPU and benchmarks showing that it is at least 15 times faster and delivers 30 times more performance/watt than the merchant chips.

    In May, Google announced the ASIC designed to accelerate inference jobs for a wide range of applications on its data center servers. Now it is providing a first in-depth look at the chip and its performance in a paper to be presented at a computer architecture conference in June.

    Reply
  28. Tomi Engdahl says:

    Jay Greene / Wall Street Journal:
    Data center arms race: top cloud computing firms Amazon, Alphabet, and Microsoft spent a combined $31.5B in 2016 on capital expenses and leases, up 22% from ’15

    Tech’s High-Stakes Arms Race: Costly Data Centers
    Top three cloud-computing firms have spent $31.5 billion in 2016 on capital expenses and leases
    https://www.wsj.com/articles/techs-high-stakes-arms-race-costly-data-centers-1491557408?mod=e2fbd

    Just as oil and gas companies plow billions of dollars in searching for new energy reserves, big technology companies are spending lavishly on a global footprint of sophisticated computers

    Reply
  29. Tomi Engdahl says:

    Jamie Feltham / UploadVR:
    AMD buys Nitero for low latency wireless streaming tech to make desktop VR headset cables unnecessary — Nitero, a company working in the increasingly prevalent wireless desktop VR sector, has just been acquired by AMD. — AMD is best known for its CPUs that power VR-ready PCs …

    AMD Targets Wireless Desktop VR, Acquires Nitero
    https://uploadvr.com/amd-targets-wireless-desktop-vr-acquires-nitero/

    Nitero, a company working in the increasingly prevalent wireless desktop VR sector, has just been acquired by AMD.

    AMD is best known for its CPUs that power VR-ready PCs as well as popular home consoles, but this news sees the company make a surprising move towards wireless VR headsets. This has become an intriguing new area of the industry ever since TPCast’s wireless adapter for the HTC Vive was revealed back in November 2016. Financial details of the deal have not been disclosed.

    Reply
  30. Tomi Engdahl says:

    Nate Lanxon / Bloomberg:
    Minecraft is adding a new marketplace with its own currency this spring, where creators can monetize their original content — Microsoft Corp. is adding a new marketplace — and a brand new currency — within the video-game Minecraft, opening up the opportunity for businesses to sell …

    Microsoft’s Minecraft Set to Launch its Own Currency
    https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-04-10/microsoft-s-minecraft-set-to-launch-its-own-currency

    Reply
  31. Tomi Engdahl says:

    Gartner halves tech splash forecasts, blames the US dollar
    Listen El Reg, our WW Spending Forecast is based on ‘proven methodologies… not guesswork. OK?’
    https://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/04/10/gartner_halves_tech_splash_forecasts_blames_us/

    Data druids at Gartner are defending their soothsaying abilities after being forced to halve the projected rise they forecast for global tech spending for 2017 when an expected slide in the value of the greenback didn’t materialise.

    “The strong US dollar has cut $67 billion out of our 2017 IT spending forecast,” said research veep John-David Lovelock. “We expect these currency headwinds to be a drag on earnings of US-based multinational IT vendors in 2017.”

    In the latest estimate, end-user businesses could splash $3.5trn on tech, which if correct will equate to a rise on 2016 of 1.4 per cent, almost half of the 2.7 per cent splurge Gartner predicted back in January.

    Gartner’s comms people told us the earlier forecast was predicated on the assumption the US dollar would depreciate

    The good folk at Gartner stated its Worldwide IT Spending Forecast remained “highly anticipated” and allowed businesses to “base their critical business decisions on proven methodologies rather than guesswork”. Well quite.

    Reply
  32. Tomi Engdahl says:

    Windows 10 Creators Update general rollout begins with a privacy dialogue
    Review your privacy settings, or no update for you
    https://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/04/11/windows_10_creators_update_general_rollout_begins_complete_with_privacy_dialog/

    Microsoft’s rollout of Windows 10 Creators Update has begun, complete with a privacy dialogue box shown by default to all users.

    When will you get the update? Microsoft says “the first phase will target newer devices … we will then expand the Creators Update release to additional devices based on the feedback.”

    The process will take “several months”, but if you are impatient, you can upgrade immediately using the Update Assistant.

    Windows 10 Mobile is also being updated, with rollout for phones beginning on April 25.

    Reply
  33. Tomi Engdahl says:

    Sales of PCs declined in the first quarter by 2.4 per cent from one year ago. According to Gartner, PCs have never been sold so little over three months.

    In January-March, sold 62.2 million a PCs. For the first time the sales volume was less than 63 million devices.

    According to the company, manufacturers are half sales picked up, a little bit, but it did not replace the ongoing slowdown in consumer interest. Basic buyer still does not want to replace the old personal computer.

    Lenovo and HP competed in the first year on a strict first manufacturer’s title. Chinese Manufacturer eventually took the title of scarce both sold a little more than 12 million computers during the quarter. Their market shares were 19.9 and 19.5 per cent.

    Source: http://www.etn.fi/index.php/13-news/6166-pc-myynti-on-ennatyksellisen-huonoa

    Reply
  34. Tomi Engdahl says:

    Microsoft’s own figures show Windows 10 losing market share, while Windows 7 is on the rise
    https://betanews.com/2017/04/10/microsofts-own-figures-show-windows-10-losing-market-share-while-windows-7-is-on-the-rise/

    According to NetMarketShare, Windows 10′s usage share growth has stalled recently. It lost some share in February, and made only very minor gains in March. The analyst firm’s numbers seem to suggest that Windows 10 has run out of steam.

    But that’s usage numbers — people using Windows regularly on a monthly basis — which isn’t quite the same as market share. If you want to know just how well Windows 10 is doing in that respect, Microsoft’s Windows Trends page has the figures you want, and they’re currently showing the new OS losing share to Windows 7.

    At the end of the last update, Microsoft had Windows 10 on 46 percent of the market, and Windows 7 on 39 percent.

    I remain to be convinced by the install base numbers Microsoft is claiming, but if they are even close to being accurate, then it’s interesting to see Windows 10 losing share while Windows 7 recoups some of its losses.

    Reply
  35. Tomi Engdahl says:

    Pirate Bay Founder: ‘I Have Given Up’
    https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/pirate-bay-founder-peter-sunde-i-have-given-up

    The socialist and filesharing pioneer Peter Sunde is not optimistic about the open internet.

    “The internet is shit today. It’s broken. It was probably always broken, but it’s worse than ever.”

    Reply
  36. Tomi Engdahl says:

    Frederic Lardinois / TechCrunch:
    Microsoft’s business-centric IFTTT competitor Flow updates with improved workflows for groups, and PowerApps platform gets Azure Functions integration

    Microsoft launches updates to PowerApps and Flow
    https://techcrunch.com/2017/04/17/microsoft-launches-updates-to-powerapps-and-flow/

    Microsoft’s business-centric IFTTT competitor Flow and its ‘low-code’ PowerApps platform are both getting major updates today. While these are obviously different services that solve different issues, both aim to help non-developers make better use of their existing data and services without having to write their own code. While Flow, at its core, uses the if-this-then-that model, PowerApps allows you to build your own desktop and mobile applications from scratch.

    Work less, do more
    Create automated workflows between your favorite apps and services to get notifications, synchronize files, collect data, and more
    https://flow.microsoft.com/en-us/

    Reply
  37. Tomi Engdahl says:

    Intel Discontinues the Intel Developer Forum; IDF17 Cancelled
    by Ryan Smith & Ian Cutress on April 17, 2017 11:15 AM EST
    http://www.anandtech.com/show/11279/intel-discontinues-the-intel-developer-forum-idf17-cancelled

    In an announcement posted on the IDF website, Intel has announced that IDF is no more, and that the entire IDF program is ending.

    IDF has been Intel’s yearly home to major product announcements. This has spanned from CPU announcements like Skylake and Kaby Lake, to storage products like Optane, to networking fabrics like Omni-Path. So the cancellation of IDF means that Intel no longer has a (currently scheduled) venue to announce new products and update the public and investors on their plans

    Update 13:26 ET (Ian): I just got off the phone with Intel, discussing why IDF is being cancelled. The main reason I was given is that Intel has been changing rapidly over the last two-to-three years, especially as they are changing from a PC-centric company to a data-centric company. With the rise of AI, FPGAs, Optane, IoT, wireless comms, automotive, and the other new areas that Intel is moving into, Intel felt that IDF no longer fills the need when it comes to giving out information. As a result, the decision has been made to find new ways to communicate with the audience (media, developers and companies) and the ecosystem with targeted events.

    Reply
  38. Tomi Engdahl says:

    Dieter Bohn / The Verge:
    How Google, Apple, and Microsoft and their operating systems are faring in their fight for the cheap computer market — The war for cheap computers is about to begin — It feels like a long time since we’ve had a great big knock-down, drag-out operating system battle.

    Apple vs. Google vs. Microsoft: who will get to the future of PCs first?
    The war for cheap computers is about to begin
    http://www.theverge.com/2017/4/14/15300824/cheap-pc-platform-war-apple-google-microsoft-chrome-ipad-surface

    It feels like a long time since we’ve had a great big knock-down, drag-out operating system battle.

    This time it’s happening in one specific place: cheap computers. And the fight for it is going to be as brutal and fascinating as the ones we’ve seen before. The players aren’t surprising at all: Google, Apple, and Microsoft. But this is a different kind of platform war, one where all three have a legitimate chance of coming out ahead.

    Over the past year, we’ve been watching the players line up. The operating systems and ecosystems that will be competing are the ones you’d probably guess:

    Google’s Chrome OS (with Android apps)
    Apple’s iOS (on the iPad)
    Microsoft’s Windows 10 Cloud (and new-style Windows apps)

    In all three cases, what you’re looking at are “underpowered” operating systems that most people think can’t be used as “real computers.” But in all three cases, those assumptions are based more on preexisting biases than fundamental flaws. More to the point, I think Google, Microsoft, and Apple each have a roadmap for eliminating those flaws.

    Reply
  39. Tomi Engdahl says:

    Lucas Matney / TechCrunch:
    Facebook debuts Spaces, its social VR platform that lets up to four users hang out in VR, available in beta for Oculus Rift, to expand to other VR platforms — More than three years after its acquisition of Oculus, Facebook is a product even more deeply intertwined with people’s online identities.

    Facebook launches beta of Spaces, its goofy and fun social VR platform
    https://techcrunch.com/2017/04/18/facebook-launches-beta-of-spaces-its-goofy-and-fun-social-vr-platform/

    Facebook Spaces launches in beta today on Oculus Rift + Touch. The product is a first taste of Facebook’s ambitions to bring social interaction into 3D virtual spaces.

    Reply
  40. Tomi Engdahl says:

    Narottam Medhora / Reuters:
    IBM misses with revenue of $18.2B, down 2.8% YoY, as demand for legacy products stagnates; revenue from cloud services, security software, data analytics up 12%

    IBM posts first revenue miss in five quarters, shares drop
    http://www.reuters.com/article/us-ibm-results-idUSKBN17K2E8

    Reply
  41. Tomi Engdahl says:

    Frederic Lardinois / TechCrunch:
    Facebook launches React VR, its JavaScript framework for building basic VR apps

    Facebook launches React VR, a new JavaScript framework for building basic VR apps
    https://techcrunch.com/2017/04/18/facebook-launches-react-vr-a-new-javascript-framework-for-building-basic-vr-apps/

    At its F8 developer conference, Facebook today announced the launch of React VR, a new JavaScript framework that lets developers build virtual reality experiences with the help of JavaScript. As its name implies, React VR takes its cues from Facebook’s existing React framework; just like with React for standard web apps, VR developers can now use the same declarative model to write apps for their 360-degree experiences.

    Reply
  42. Tomi Engdahl says:

    16-core server industry now fits in your palm

    PCI technology development organization PICMG (PCI Industrial Computer Manufacturers Group) is after a long work in adopting the new COM module standard. Type 7 cards with the COM Express -korttimoduulit suitable, for example, servers industrial networks.

    COM Express 3.0 standard has been working on for a long time. The first pre-standards support the cards were already available in more than a year ago. 3.0 standard adds a new Type 7 connector as well as support for server processors skill levels.

    The new standard supports four 10-Gigabit Ethernet interface.
    PCI Express has increased the number of lines to 32.

    COM Express Card dimensions are 95 x 125 millimeters. Type 7 card has been developed specifically for industrial air ventilation servers operating platform.

    Source: http://etn.fi/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=6177&via=n&datum=2017-04-13_15:04:13&mottagare=30929

    Reply
  43. Tomi Engdahl says:

    Cloud Computing Chips Changing
    As cloud services adoption soars, datacenter chip requirements are evolving.
    http://semiengineering.com/cloud-computing-chips-changing/

    An explosion in cloud services is making chip design for the server market more challenging, more diverse, and much more competitive.

    Unlike datacenter number crunching of the past, the cloud addresses a broad range of applications and data types. So while a server chip architecture may work well for one application, it may not be the optimal choice for another. And the more those tasks become segmented within a cloud operation, the greater that distinction becomes.

    increasingly the x86 architecture is being viewed as just one more option outside of its core number-crunching base. Cloud providers such as Amazon and Google already have started developing their own chip architectures. And ARM has been pushing for a slice of the server market based upon power efficient architectures.

    ARM’s push, in particular, is noteworthy because it is starting to gain traction in a number of vendors’ server plans. Microsoft said last month it would use ARM server chips in its Azure cloud business to cut costs.

    Whether ARM-based servers will succeed just because they use less power than an x86 chip for specific workloads isn’t entirely clear. Unlike consumer devices, which typically run in cycles of a couple years, battles among server vendors tend to move in slow motion—sometimes over a decade or more. But what is certain is that inside large datacenters, power expended for a given workload is a competitive metric. Powering and cooling thousands of server racks is expensive, and the ability to dial power up and down quickly and dynamically can save millions of dollars per year. Already, Google and Nvidia have publicly stated that a different architecture is required for machine learning and neural networking.

    In looking at the power performance tradeoffs, and how to target the designs properly, there are two distinct things that cloud has accelerated in both the multicore and networking space. “What is common between these chips is that they are pushing whatever the bleeding edge is of technology, such as 7nm,”

    Even today, datacenters use 2% of the power in the United States, so they are a humongous consumer. And when it comes to power, it’s not just how much power the chip uses, it’s the HVAC in order to keep the datacenter cool. In essence, you’ve got to keep the dynamic power under target workloads under control, and the area has to be absolutely as small as possible. Once you start replicating these things, it can make a tremendous difference in the cost of the chip overall.

    “While there is still a need for enterprise data centers to have a general server/traditional server primarily based on Intel Xeon-core-based processors with a separate NIC card connecting to external networking where the switching and routing occur, we see in these large-scale cloud datacenters that they have a number of specific applications that they feel can be optimized for those applications within the cloud, within that data center,” said Ron DiGiuseppe, senior strategic marketing manager in the Solutions Group at Synopsys.

    Seeing through the fog
    While equipping the datacenters is one trajectory, a second one is reducing the amount of data that floods into a datacenter. There is increasing interest to be able to use the network fabric to do at least some of the signal processing, data processing, and DSP processing to extract patterns and information from the data. So rather than pushing all of this data up through the pipe into the cloud, the better option is to refine that data so only a portion needs to be processed in the cloud servers.

    This requires looking at the compute equation from a local perspective, and it opens up even more opportunities for chipmakers.

    A change in thinking
    The key to success comes down to thinking about these chip designs very holistically, Kurisu added, “because when it comes to cloud in the datacenter, and if you think about Microsoft Azure or Amazon Web services or any of the others, the types of capabilities that are available from the cloud datacenter down to the actual embedded device, these things need to work in tandem. If you have a robot controller, and you need to do a firmware update—and you want to initiate that from the cloud—how that gets enabled on the end device is tied very explicitly into how the operation is invoked from the cloud side. What is your cloud solution? That’s going to drive what the embedded solution is. You’ve got to think of it as a system, and in that way the stuff that happens in the datacenter is very closely related to the things that might seem very disconnected on the edge. But how the IoT strategy is implemented is somewhat tied together so it all has to be considered together.”

    Reply
  44. Tomi Engdahl says:

    Mary Jo Foley / ZDNet:
    Microsoft says it will now roll out twice yearly updates for Windows and Office in March and September, starting with “Redstone 3” — IT Pros, mark your calendars. Starting in September 2017 with Windows 10 ‘Redstone 3,’ Microsoft will begin rolling out new feature updates …

    Microsoft to roll out new Windows 10, Office feature releases twice annually
    http://www.zdnet.com/article/microsoft-to-roll-out-new-windows-10-office-feature-releases-twice-annually/

    IT pros, mark your calendars. Starting in September 2017 with Windows 10 “Redstone 3,” Microsoft will begin rolling out new feature updates to Windows and Office 365 ProPlus together, twice a year.

    To date, predicting when Microsoft would roll out new feature upgrades to Windows 10 and Office has been a guessing game for IT pros. But starting this September, that situation should become more predictable.

    Microsoft is committing to delivering two Windows 10 and two Office client feature upgrades each year, with the target delivery dates being March and September, officials said today, April 20.

    Reply
  45. Tomi Engdahl says:

    Dual Ports Drive NVMe SSD Uptick
    http://www.eetimes.com/document.asp?doc_id=1331595&

    Solid state drives (SSDs) that use the Non-Volatile Memory Express (NVMe) interface haven’t been adopted as quickly as expected, but one storage startup sees the advent of dual port functionality as an opportunity to make inroads the enterprise storage market.

    Zivan Ori, CEO and co-founder of E8 Storage, told EE Times in a telephone interview that he sees the industry shifting toward NVMe on both the client and enterprise side. “There’s no longer a premium associated with NVMe,” Ori said.

    What’s changed, according to Ori, is the ability to share SSDs in the same enclosure by leveraging the interface. “That’s the market we are addressing,” he said.

    Reply
  46. Tomi Engdahl says:

    Daniel Rubino / Windows Central:
    Leaked document shows recommended minimum specs for Windows 10 Cloud OS devices: quad-core Celeron or better CPU, 4GB of RAM, 32GB of storage, 40 WHr+ battery

    Microsoft’s new push into education is the right move — at the right time
    http://www.windowscentral.com/microsofts-push-education-right-move-time

    A new low-cost Surface device and Windows 10 Cloud OS combo could do some serious damage to Google’s Chromebook ambitions in U.S. schools.

    On May 2, all eyes will be on Microsoft at its New York City event. Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella is expected to take the stage and unveil a new push into the education market, likely focused on the U.S. initially.

    Reply
  47. Tomi Engdahl says:

    Agam Shah / PCWorld:
    Qualcomm CEO: first Windows 10 PC with Snapdragon 835 is scheduled for Q4 2017

    Qualcomm: First Windows 10 ARM PC coming in the fourth quarter
    But don’t expect a flood of Windows 10 PCs based on ARM chips
    http://www.pcworld.com/article/3191401/computers/qualcomm-first-windows-10-arm-pc-coming-in-the-fourth-quarter.html

    If you want a Windows 10 PC that doesn’t have an x86 chip from Intel or AMD, your wish will be granted in the fourth quarter.

    Qualcomm said the first cellular laptop with Windows 10 and its ARM-based Snapdragon 835 will come by the end of the year.

    “Our Snapdragon 835 is expanding into mobile PC designs running Windows 10,” and it’s scheduled to launch in the fourth quarter, said Steve Mollenkopf, CEO of Qualcomm, according to a transcript of a Wednesday earnings call posted on Seeking Alpha.

    Until now, Windows 10 has worked only on x86 chips. Qualcomm and Microsoft are collaborating to make the ARM-based Windows 10 PCs.

    The thin-and-light device could be used as a tablet or laptop. It will take design cues from smartphones and is being called a cellular PC by Qualcomm and Microsoft.

    Reply
  48. Tomi Engdahl says:

    95% engineers in India unfit for software development jobs: study
    http://www.thehindubusinessline.com/info-tech/95-engineers-in-india-unfit-for-software-development-jobs-study/article9652211.ece

    New Delhi, Apr 20:

    Talent shortage is acute in the IT and data science ecosystem in India with a survey claiming that 95 per cent of engineers in the country are not fit to take up software development jobs.

    According to a study by employability assessment company Aspiring Minds, only 4.77 per cent candidates can write the correct logic for a programme — a minimum requirement for any programming job.

    Over 36,000 engineering students from IT related branches of over 500 colleges took Automata — a Machine Learning based assessment of software development skills — and over 2/3 could not even write code that compiles.

    The study further noted that while more than 60 per cent candidates cannot even write code that compiles, only 1.4 per cent can write functionally correct and efficient code.

    “Lack of programming skills is adversely impacting the IT and data science ecosystem in India. The world is moving towards introducing programming to three-year-old! India needs to catch up,” Aspiring Minds CTO and co-founder Varun Aggarwal said.

    The employability gap can be attributed to rote learning based approaches rather than actually writing programmes on a computer for different problems.

    Reply
  49. Tomi Engdahl says:

    The test testified: Intel’s new memory is overwhelmingly fast

    Intel’s and Micron’s jointly developed Xpoint memory technology will be available for data centers under the Optane name. Tom’s Hardware has compared the performance of the first Optane memory and, according to the results, is in the case of overwhelmingly high-speed memory.

    The DC P4800X has a price tag of just over $ 1,500. The capacity in memory is 375 gigabytes. The memory was originally to be sold by the end of 2016, but a small delay is not a big surprise. Micron’s own version of memory is coming to market with QuantX.

    The fastest SSDs on the market are at best at less than half the speed of Optima. At most, the difference is severalfold.

    Source: http://www.etn.fi/index.php/13-news/6210-testi-todisti-intelin-uusi-muisti-on-ylivoimaisen-nopea

    Reply
  50. Tomi Engdahl says:

    Windows is going to challenge Chromebooks

    Chrome platforms based on Google platform are the peak in PC manufacturers’ meat and therefore also a big problem for Microsoft. Now, according to US data, Microsoft is about to release its own version of Windows, which would be fully up to date with cloud services.

    For example, based on Windows Central, a new platform is called Windows 10 Cloud. Its details are being announced a week later, or immediately after the release.

    Some information has already come to shed publicity. Devices are based on Intel quad-core processors, the workstation needs to be at least four GB, storage space is SSD and the battery capacity must be less than 40 watt hours.

    With these specs, Microsoft would get on a device that would run for more than 10 hours with a single battery charge, start in 20 seconds, return to sleep mode in two seconds, and logging in to a new one would open the device in five seconds. The features are very close to the Chromebook.

    Source: http://www.etn.fi/index.php/13-news/6209-windows-aikoo-haastaa-chromebookit

    Reply

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