LG Electronics will introduce the world’s lightest 17-inch laptop during CES in January. The new LG gram 17 weighs a mere 1,340 grams (as compared to the 2,000+ grams of comparable laptops), while offering a 17-inch WQXGA 16:10 display featuring 2560 x 1600 resolution, making it ideal for streaming video, playing games and editing multiple documents simultaneously. The company will also unveil the 14-inch LG gram 2-in-1 convertible with digital pen support that features a 360-degree hinge, enabling it to function as a laptop or a tablet. Both devices have been named 2019 CES Innovation Award winners. Continue reading LG to Unveil the Market’s Lightest 17-Inch Laptop PC at CES

Apple announced yesterday that it plans to spend $1 billion on a new campus in Austin, Texas to accommodate up to 15,000 employees. Over the next three years, the company also plans to add hundreds of workers to its offices in Boulder, Colorado; Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania and New York, while opening 1,000-worker operations in Culver City, California; Seattle, Washington and San Diego, California. Major tech players such as Apple, Amazon and Google are increasingly moving beyond Silicon Valley as part of strategic expansion plans and the ongoing search for new tech talent. Continue reading Apple Reveals Plans for Texas Campus and Major Expansion

Several new Apple job listings give the strong impression that the Silicon Valley company is getting ready to make its own modem, in direct competition with Qualcomm. The posted job listings are for engineers that can design and develop a layer 1 cellular PHY chip, which implies physical networking hardware. Two other job posts are for cellular modem systems architects, one for Santa Clara and the second for San Diego, where Qualcomm is headquartered. Apple also posted a job opening in San Diego for RF design engineers. Continue reading Apple Job Postings Suggest Development of Its Own Modems

Amazon revealed last month that it had spent the previous few years building a chip for use in its worldwide data centers. It’s not alone; Apple and Google also seek to design and manufacture their own chips, as part of a cost-saving strategy. Intel, which thus far hasn’t had much competition, will feel the impact as its own customers undercut the company’s annual $412 billion in sales. Amazon’s massive need for chips means it will likely continue to buy from Intel, with which it will enjoy a better bargaining position. Continue reading Tech Companies Challenge Intel by Building Their Own Chips

According to market research Newzoo, the West’s four largest eSports tournaments on Twitch and YouTube garnered 190.1 million hours of live viewership, up 6.9 percent from a year earlier. That reflected professional eSports’ ELEAGUE Major: Boston for “Counter-Strike: Global Offensive,” The International (“Dota 2”) and the Overwatch League Finals. But not all tournaments fared equally, with the largest event, the League of Legends World Championship dipping from 86 million hours in 2017 to 81.1 million hours this year. Continue reading Major eSports Tournaments Rack Up 190+ Million Live Views

CES 2019 in January will highlight discussions about what we can expect with 5G next year and beyond. Fifth-generation mobile communications brings faster speeds, lower latency and the ability to connect more devices, meaning it will not simply speed up mobile phones but power nascent digital technologies from VR and IoT to autonomous vehicles and smart cities. CES 2019 offers a Wednesday 5G summit, and the first 5G products will be sprinkled across the show floor. The ETCentric team will be in Las Vegas reporting on a number of companies in this space. Continue reading CES: Understanding the 5G Ecosystem in 2019 and Beyond

Apple is not expected to produce a 5G-capable iPhone until at least 2020, according to sources, although Samsung Electronics has already stated that it plans to release a 5G smartphone next year. A 5G network will offer significantly increased mobile data speed, but Apple will hold off — as it did with new 3G and 4G mobile networks — to wait until new network problems are ironed out. The move will put Apple behind its competition, and, with 5G, some experts say the big speed upgrade makes that wait riskier. Continue reading Samsung to Introduce 5G Phone Next Year Ahead of Apple

Intel revealed that it has made progress in an anonymized, encrypted method of model training. Industries such as healthcare that need a way to use AI tools on sensitive, personally identifiable information have been waiting for just such a capability. At the NeurIPS 2018 conference in Montreal, Intel showed off its open-sourced HE-Transformer that works as a backend to its nGraph neural network compiler, allowing AI models to work on encrypted data. HE-Transformer is also based on a Microsoft Research encryption library. Continue reading Intel Describes Tool to Train AI Models with Encrypted Data

In a surprise announcement, Amazon revealed that it is making its own chips, dubbed Graviton, for its cloud computing division. Similarly, Google also recently stated its plans to create chips for artificial intelligence algorithms in its data center. Amazon’s chips are likewise targeting its data centers, where the company hopes to better integrate software and hardware, resulting in less expensive services for customers. Typically, companies like Amazon and Google would use AMD or Intel’s off-the-shelf chips. Continue reading Amazon Unveils Graviton, Its Own ARM Chips for Data Centers

Intel just announced its latest invention: the Neural Compute Stick 2 (NCS2), a self-contained neural network on a thumb drive. NCS2 is intended to make the process of embedding intelligence into Internet of Things and network edge devices faster and easier. Edge devices, which include routers, switches, gateways and a range of IoT devices, are defined as any hardware that controls the flow of data between the boundaries of two networks. The announcement came just before Intel’s first AI developers’ conference in Beijing. Continue reading Intel Launches Neural Network Stick to Embed AI in IoT Devices

Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) debuted Zen 2 processor architecture, a follow-up to the Zen design introduced in March 2017, to be launched beginning in 2019. AMD chief executive Lisa Su said the Zen 2 doubles performance of the first Zen generation, which itself could process 52 percent more instructions per clock cycle than its previous generation. The company hopes its new processors will help it surpass or at least maintain parity with Intel processors. AMD is also relying on new chiplet design to maintain growth. Continue reading AMD Debuts Zen 2 Chip Architecture, Turns to Chiplet Design

Intel and China’s Tencent have partnered to create two AI-powered products. Announced at Tencent’s Global Partner conference, the two companies revealed DeepGaze, which uses artificial intelligence to track customers in brick-and-mortar stores, and YouBox, also designed for use in retail settings, an on-premises server that uses AI to input real-time feeds from up to 16 cameras. Both products were developed in Tencent’s YouTu Lab for computer vision research, and sport Intel’s Movidius Myriad chips. Continue reading Intel, Tencent Partner on New AI Products to Advance Retail

People typically associate 5G with ultra-fast high-bandwidth Internet connections, but few realize it will also impact how we watch video and could lead to a range of privacy concerns. With 5G, truly interactive television programming can become a reality, with minimal latency enabling content to respond quickly to the viewer’s emotional and physical responses. According to interactive video company Wirewax co-founder Dan Garraway, the video becomes “a two-way conversation.” In other words, while we watch 5G content, it watches back. Continue reading 5G Could Enable Interactive Video But Raise Privacy Issues

Despite delays in launching its next-gen processors, Intel posted a robust 19 percent growth in revenue, with profits soaring 42 percent. The red-hot market for PCs pressured Intel’s factories, but its focus on servers and high-end PCs boosted its positive numbers. The company’s revenue in Q3 was $19.16 billion — more than the $18.1 billion predicted by analysts, and up from $16.2 billion a year earlier. Intel partnered with Streamlabs to offer stream-capable hardware and software to third-party device manufacturers. Continue reading Intel Benefits from Hot PC Market, Partners with Streamlabs

Semiconductor manufacturer ARM, a division of Japan’s SoftBank, and Silicon Valley tech giant Intel have put aside a longstanding rivalry in order to forge a strategic partnership that will adopt common standards developed by Intel for the Internet of Things. The lack of such standards to manage the security of IoT devices, networks and data has been a stumbling block to the growth of the sector. Gartner analyst Bill Ray explains that NXP Semiconductors, Renesas Electronics and Microchip Technology’s Atmel rely on ARM designs, while Intel’s processors dominate today’s cloud data center market. Continue reading ARM and Intel Team on Common Standards for IoT Devices