The smart TV market will grow from 67 million units shipped in 2012 to 134 million shipped in 2015. As it expands, a simultaneous transition to higher-speed Wi-Fi connections based on a new standard — 802.11ac — will translate to fast growth for the new wireless technology in the TV space. Read more at GigaOM Pro »
After years of prepping for this moment, the world’s first ARM-based servers have been deployed in a production environment. Chinese search giant Baidu is using Marvell’s chips in a cloud storage application. Read more »
The fourth quarter in cleantech saw attention paid to two prominent, publicly traded companies: EV maker Tesla and newly minted public listing SolarCity. It remains a transitional period for the sector as investment declines, with a shift toward those companies able to scale with little additional capital. Read more »
AMD, which has fallen behind its chief rival Intel in the x86 processor business, announced on Monday plans to make new 64-bit chips based on ARM’s chip technology that will target data center and cloud computing companies. AMD will continue to make x86 processors as well. Read more »
Cloud computing is changing the world of microprocessor-chip design. Soon we will see a division between the traditional players (typified by Intel and AMD) and a group of new incumbents (Tilera and others) that offer fresh solutions to make the world’s microprocessor chips as efficient as possible. Read more at GigaOM Pro »
Discussions about the cloud now involve more than just the IT department. New developments in hardware architectures, more-energy-efficient data centers, regulatory concerns and simplifying analytics are all discussions currently circling through the industry. Here’s what to consider when thinking about your business in the cloud. Read more at GigaOM Pro »
The compute and server world is changing rapidly, with webscale companies such as Facebook and Amazon dominating the web and creating new lines of business. With that comes change to the value chain of server and silicon companies, and we now stand at an inflection point ... Read more at GigaOM Pro »
Along with our latest gadgets, cell phones, electrical meters and cars, light bulbs and lighting systems, are increasingly getting embedded with chips, connected to wireless networks and moving into the Internet age. Here are some examples from the annual lighting convention Lightfair this week. Read more »
As the needs for performance and power efficiency become more important, figuring out how to get the best hardware on the job without having to rewrite all your code becomes a problem computer science must solve. Is abstraction the answer? Read more »
Greentech marked its best year ever in 2010, and part of that is thanks to the wealth of activity across sectors during the fourth quarter. Global investment in clean energy surged, and while wind power remained the biggest greentech area, solar power saw the fastest growth. The energy efficiency sector appears to have more room for smaller players to make their mark amidst a rapidly maturing market. Meanwhile, China’s stance as a growing greentech giant continued to complicate its relationship with the United States. Companies mentioned in this report include General Electric, Intel, ZigBee, iControl, People Power and EnerNOC. For a full list of companies, and to read the full report, sign up for a free trial. Read more at GigaOM Pro »
Green IT – doing more computing for less energy — has a couple of potential breakthroughs brewing in 2011. That might give the IT industry a better view of just how important saving energy is for their customers. Read more »
Some might call this past quarter in the infrastructure space transformative. The rise of ARM-based processing suggests the days of x86 dominance might be coming to an end, while the Amazon Web Services-WikiLeaks controversy cast new light on the legal aspects of cloud computing. Big data got bigger, meanwhile, as the Hadoop ecosystem expanded, and amid all these cutting-edge technologies, two archaic topics — Novell and Java — proved they aren’t going anywhere soon. Companies mentioned in this report include Intel, AMD, Amazon Web Services, IBM, Yahoo, Appistry, VMware, Joyent and Microsoft. For a full list of companies, and to read the full report, sign up for a free trial. Read more at GigaOM Pro »
Marvell said today that it has built a chip designed for servers that uses the same architecture as chips inside cell phones. As vendors release ARM-based server chips, and challenge Intel and AMD’s dominance it opens the server market to more competition and innovation. Read more »
The second quarter of 2010 belonged to the little guys and the new guys. Almost across the board, from processors to virtualization to cloud services, relatively small vendors and startups had the market cornered on innovation and mindshare. And where there’s tinder in the forms of customer demand, products, funding and a greater societal movement toward environmentalism, something is bound to catch fire. Read more at GigaOM Pro »
Marvell is going to Hollywood next week in an effort to show the film industry what it’s missing because the U.S. has such slow broadband speeds. The chip firm wants the film industry to agitate for broadband speeds of up to 2.5 gigabits per second. Read more »
