Our Blog
20 May RESEARCH NOTE: SKAA Wireless Audio Standard
Two dominant consumer wireless audio standards exist in the installed base today, Bluetooth and Apple’s Airplay. In spite of their popularity, neither standard was developed to deliver minimal setup, high quality audio across a myriad of different products. SKAA is an alternative wireless audio standard that could challenge both Bluetooth and AirPlay. The two primary [...]
16 May What Does Parallelism Mean?
“You keep using that word, I do not think it means what you think it means.” – From the movie “The Princess Bride” (1987) This blog picks up where my previous Slashdot articles left off. Mobile processors are integrating interesting compute offload hardware – GPUs, DSPs, fixed function blocks, etc. – and it is reasonable [...]
15 May Why I Prefer PC Convertibles Over Traditional Notebooks
Ever since Microsoft MSFT +0.6% unveiled Windows 8 at the BUILD event in 2011, it was apparent that the Windows PC future was touch, gestures, tablets, convertibles, and hybrids. Intel INTC +0.92%’s unveiling the following year at Computex 2012 with Microsoft Surface Pro a plethora of form factors solidified that future. To predict the future of PCs, one must have an opinion [...]
14 May Only Apple Can Play Apple
It has been a challenging few days in the press for the Microsoft camp. In a positive move, Tami Reller, CFO and head of marketing for Windows, gave more details on how many Windows 8 licenses had been sold, details on what they had learned from Windows 8, and what they intended to do to improve the [...]
13 May Why Is Intel Investing In Big Media?
Since Intel INTC +0.84%’s Erik Huggers got on stage at D’s Dive Into Media announcing details of their media strategy, there has been a lot of conversation on why Intel is doing it and if they will succeed. Some of it has been high valueconversation, some it is a bit uninformed. It’s easy to criticize Intel if you consider Intel’s ViiV, [...]
30 Apr Big-Box Retailers are Not Helping PC Sales
Last week, I wrote about the “softer” and arguably some of the more important PC attributes. Toward the end of that column, I threw out there a few examples of how U.S. big-box retail isn’t helping market those softer features. I want to dive a bit deeper into that this week as I think U.S. big-box retail shares a [...]
26 Apr The Soft Improvements in new PCs Could be their Biggest Draw
Last week was an ugly week for the computer world. The IDC figures that came out for Q1 said that it was the biggest contraction the PC market that had ever been seen since their tracking began. The best Apple could muster was a slight YOY decrease in Mac sales, which looked great compared to the rest of the [...]
24 Apr AMD SeaMicro Disaggregation: A Threat to Facebook’s OCP?
The disaggregated server concept designs floated at Open Compute Project (OCP) Summit last January are designed for datacenters built at frighteningly large scale, but don’t scale down to small installations very well. AMD SeaMicro’s chassis was designed as a disaggregated server and it provides disaggregation benefits for small server deployments, down to 10 rack unit [...]
24 Apr WHITE PAPER: AMD’s Disaggregated Servers
AMD SeaMicro’s disaggregated server enables large and small data center operators to optimize their hardware performance profile for specific applications. Today’s modular x86 servers are compute-centric, designed as a least common denominator to support a wide range of IT workloads. Those generic, virtualized IT workloads have much different resource optimization requirements than hyperscale and cloud [...]