Displaying items by tag: Samsung

So Apple has released review samples to the press in order to build up interest in their entry into the smart watch market. It is an interesting move for Apple as they have sent out their $1,000 product to a select group of reviewers just to see what they think. After reading a number of them (some I could not get all the way through) it seems that Apple might not have the magnificent product they were hoping for and even the most Apple faithful sites had a hard time spinning the deficiencies that are there.

When it comes to competing in the CPU market, one of AMD’s big issues has been trying to get to the same process as Intel. Ever since the purchase of ATi by AMD they have always been one (and in some cases two) processes behind. What made this even worse was when AMD hit such bad financial times that they had to sell off their FABs just keep the lights on. They now had to deal with a fledgling foundry company that still had some of the same old managers. This has meant that even when AMD might have a design they were still going to be behind Intel when it came to performance per watt.

A couple of days ago Apple formally announced their Apple watch product along with specifications and pricing. The majority of the press and market analysts have been in a frenzy since the announcement and have tried to act like this product is more than a late comer to an already large vertical. According to people that were present at the event the announcement was met with very little excitement and the applause that happened for the Apple watch was very limited.

The concept of the fingerprint ID has been around for a long time and, for the most part, has been seen as a rather secure method of locking your things away. At least that is the way it is seen by the public. For most of the security crowd finger print ID as a security system have one major flaw in them, they are all little more than optical scanners. If you can fool the scanner, which does not do much more than compare one image to another, then you are in.

The US patent system is broken. There is not really much more to say about that it is and has been broken for many years and probably will continue to be broken for many years to come. Now why am I bringing this up? Well in looking over the way patents are filed, processed, and approved you will find that there are a large number of patents that are essentially the same thing just with a little twist. This type of patent allows for someone to put a legal hold on a very broad concept and then comeback and sue someone at a later date. Over the last few years we have watched a number of companies work the system with this type of patent and worse.

One of the biggest issues with wireless is that you never really get the speeds you are promised. Right now the maximum theoretical speed you can get in consumer wireless is about 1.3Gbps. This is assuming you are running the right router and wireless adapter which means that both have to support three antenna as well as the full 802.11ac spec. To be perfectly honest with you that is not likely to happen in the real world as most wireless adapters do not support AC1300 (full 1.3Gbps). Instead you end up getting AC800-900 with the rare AC1200 popping up now and then. Even if you have both ends at AC1300 you are still not likely to see the nirvana of 1.3Gbps wireless.

On Friday the big news was that NVIDIA had launched two separate suits against Samsung and Qualcomm for patent infringement (International Trade Commission (ITC) and the US District Court in Delaware). In the suits NVIDIA claims that the two companies have willfully infringed on their patented GPU technology and (of course) they would like to start banning devices. So far the list includes the yet to be released Note 4 and Note Edge. The patents in question appear to be Patent Nos. 6198488, 6992667, 7038685, 7015913, 6697063, 7209140 and 6690372.

Right now the going rumor is that Apple will unveil the world’s first true smart watch on September 9th (yes sarcasm). Just exactly what this new product will do has many blogs up all night in a lather of love for Apple. These sites comb through patent filings, rumors and even developer code to see if they can be the first to identify what Apple will really do when they finally get around to joining the rest of the world with a wearable product.

According to recent rumors it seems that TSMC and Samsung will be able to push out 14nm full node and 16nm half node FinFET products earlier than anticipated. This is certainly going to be good news for many customers of the two foundry companies including Apple and nVidia.

Virtual reality is one of the new “buzz” words in the industry these days and it seems that everyone wants to have a headset of their very own. So far in this round of VR (there have been companies doing VR before) we have seen the rise of Oculus as the leader despite not actually having a product on the market in any real form. Other players that have officially announced their intent are Sony, Google and Samsung.