Moor Insights & Strategy analysts research and write by-lined, public and private white paper analysis on certain topics such as disruptive trends, usage models, technologies, products and companies.  Here are a few of our latest public notes and white papers.

SKAA: Premium Wireless Audio Standard Compared to AirPlay and Bluetooth (May 21, 2013)

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 reasons for this are SKAA’s focus on ease of connection, synchronized broadcast capability and quality of service.  Moor Insights & Strategy is recommending that the consumer audio ecosystem take another look at the SKAA consumer wireless audio standard for their implementations. Moor Insights & Strategy look at the pros and cons of Bluetooth, Airplay and the potential for SKAA to emerge as a premium wireless audio standard. You can download this note as a PDF  here.

AMD SeaMicro: An Accelerator for Hyperscale Workloads (April 24, 2013) 

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 applications. They have resulted in a “one size fits all” enterprise IT architecture that is not optimized for a specific set of IT workloads, and especially not emerging hyperscale workloads, such as web applications, big data, and object storage.  Moor Insights & Strategy takes a look at AMD SeaMicro’s disaggregated servers and you can download the white paper here. 

HP Moonshot: An Accelerator for Hyperscale Workloads (April 8, 2013)

Datacenters are unprepared for the upcoming onslaught of future mobile connected devices.  These are more than smartphones, they are a new category of connectedness called IoT, or Internet of Things. With today’s 24 year old architecture, it will be impossible to meet the datacenters needs.  HP’s solution to this is HP Moonsot system, a modular and ecosystem approach, targeted at specific workloads.  In this white paper, Moor Insights & Strategy examines HP’s new Moonshot  system and servers in the context of the scale-out datacenter challenges, needs, megatrends and innovations.  You can download the white paper here.   

The Latest, Extreme Low Power Windows Tablet Now Ready for the Enterprise (March 18, 2013)

The Apple iPad had nearly a three year head start in the enterprise in extreme low power tablets.  While Windows tablets have been around for over 20 years, they never were able to crack into the enterprise in significant volumes.  They were heavy, thick, fragile, expensive with limited battery life.  Even though enterprise IT had to incrementally spend time and resources, they deployed iPads because there was no viable alternative. With the combination of Intel’s Clover Trail-based Atom Z2760 and Windows 8 Pro, HP, Dell and Lenovo have introduced a new breed of tablets that have the end user benefits of the iPad but with the enterprise friendliness of a Windows PC.   Moor Insights & Strategy take a look at these new enterprise tablets, compare and contrast them to Apple’s iPad, and make recommendations to enterprise IT. Click here to download this paper.

NextIO Enables Multivendor Converged Datacenters (January 2013)

Industry standard x86 server node performance has been improving at an increased pace as core counts and memory capacities have increased. This rapidly increasing compute density is driving a commensurate increase in the costs of implementing in-rack network architectures. The challenge is how to maintain a multivendor, best-in-class datacenter. One good solution is to consolidate first level network and storage resources in a manner that is transparent to existing software stacks. NextIO’s vNET I/O virtualization and consolidation appliances are a well-positioned, practical solution to this challenge.  Click here to download this paper.

Mobility is Not PC: Technology-Driven Differentiation in a PC+ World (January 2013)

PC and mobility technologies may look similar today, but come from very different beginnings and points of differentiation. The two market’s manufacturers and technologies have been on a collision course for years, but finally intersected in 2012 with NVIDIA’s and Qualcomm’s PC attack with Windows RT, and Intel’s launch of Medfield and Clover Trail into mobile markets.  This paper analyzes mobility and PC industry players, their strengths and weaknesses, history, technologies, and finally, future differentiating technologies required to win in the market. Click here to download this paper.

NVIDIA’s 2nd Generation Maximus: Dawn of the “Hybrid Designer” (November 2012)

NVIDIA is shipping their latest Kepler-based, 2nd generation Maximus solution.  Maximus utilizes Quadro and Tesla cards inside workstations combining visualization with compute for manufacturing, media and entertainment, and energy markets.  The 2nd generation Maximus solution enables the melding of design and simulation, resulting in substantial enterprise value but also ecosystem disruption.  Moor Insights & Strategy explores NVIDIA’s vision, the challenges Maximus solves, the improvements over 1st generation Maximus, potential for a new category of designer and the ecosystem impacts.

HSA Foundation: Purpose and Outlook (November 2012)

AMD, ARM, Imagination Technologies, MediaTek, Qualcomm, Samsung and Texas Instruments have come together to found the HSA (Heterogeneous System Architecture) Foundation, or the HSAF. The HSAF is an open, industry standard consortium founded to define and deliver open standards and tools for hardware and software to fully take advantage of high performance of parallel compute engines, and do so in the lowest possible power envelope.  This new environment aims to enable rich new user experiences never been seen before, and done at incredibly low power.  Moor Insights & Strategy looks at the HSAF goals, benefits and risks, and the paper can be downloaded here.

Calxeda: Rack Trumps the Chip (October 2012)

Calxeda has designed an innovative rack-level network fabric architecture for these new IT Services datacenters.  Calxeda’s architecture today connects dozens of densely packed, independent server nodes, and will scale in the future to deliver greater operational efficiencies across these new service-oriented mega-datacenters. Moor Insights & Strategy analyzes the new Calxeda roadmap and technologies in the context of the needs of the largest data centers and you can download the research note here.

NVIDIA VGX Technology (May 2012)

NVIDIA  launched one of the most significant initiatives in the history of the company that, if delivered as promised, could propel them into a position as a top enterprise technology player. NVIDIA launched VGX at their annual GPU Technology Conference (GTC). Moor Insights & Strategy analyzes the new NVIDIA VGX platform and you can download the white paper here.