TechEye |  |
- Facebook makes a killing
- Qualcomm’s bottom line slumped thanks to China
- Huawei’s next chipset will be tough to beat
- Intel’s 3D XPoint fixes bottlenecks
- Fourth youth arrested over TalkTalk hack
- Apple dominates the tablet market
- UHD LCD panels to dominate market next year
- UK introduces new surveillance bill
| Posted: 05 Nov 2015 01:32 AM PST
Total revenue jumped to $4.50 billion in the third quarter, from $3.20 billion a year earlier. Analysts had expected revenue of $4.37 billion. Net income attributable to stockholders rose to $891 million, from $802 million. Rather than people leaving the site, it grew even larger, with a spike in mobile users and advertising that lifted its stock to an all-time high. The figures suggest it is poised to take on mainstream media as an advertising force, helping investors to overlook Facebook’s huge spending on hiring and building data centres. Facebook now has eight billion video views per day from 500 million people, compared with four billion views in April. Chief Operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg said that Facebook’s website and Instagram photo-sharing app account for more than one in five minutes spent on mobile devices in the United States. “In the medium to long run, we believe that we’re not competing between Facebook and Instagram. We’re competing with other forms of media,” Sandberg said. Facebook had 1.55 billion monthly active users as of September 30, up 14 percent from a year earlier. Of these, 1.39 billion used the service on mobile devices. Ad revenue grew 45.4 percent to $4.30 billion, with 78 percent of that coming from mobile versus 66 percent in the year-ago quarter. Part of the upside came from Instagram. The social notworking site did not say Instagram’s ad sales figures, but it is expected to bring in $595 million in mobile ad revenues this year, and its ad revenue is projected to grow to $2.8 billion by 2017. Facebook’s spend of $3 billion, up 68 percent from the third quarter last year, did not seem to worry investors or analysts. |
| Qualcomm’s bottom line slumped thanks to China Posted: 05 Nov 2015 01:31 AM PST
Qualcomm reported its fiscal fourth-quarter earnings fell to $1.1 billion from $1.9 billion a year ago. Revenue fell 18 per cent to $5.5 billion. Analysts had projected $5.21 billion. This was all better than analysts expected, thanks mostly to reduced costs, but the problem appears to be in the future. The company is facing huge delays in closing Chinese licensing agreements with its two main Chinese customers. President Derek Aberle said some Chinese customers were “improperly withholding” royalties on Qualcomm’s patents by changing the way they report sales. The company had half of its fiscal 2014 revenue from Chinese customers, so this was a big deal. Qualcomm is expected to announce job cuts and other cost cutting steps in the face of stiff competition. Things are expected to get worse as chipmakers consolidate. On the bright side demand for the new version of its flagship Snapdragon mobile chips was stronger than it had expected in the fourth quarter. The company was hurt earlier this year by Samsung Electronics decision to use an internally developed processor, instead of the Snapdragon chips, in its Galaxy S6 smartphones. Samsung had not ruled out using Qualcomm’s chips in the future and media reported last month that the South Korean company’s Galaxy S7 phones for the US and China markets were expected to use Snapdragon 820 chips. The net income attributable to the company fell 44 percent to $1.06 billion. |
| Huawei’s next chipset will be tough to beat Posted: 05 Nov 2015 01:30 AM PST
The chipset is one of the first to use TSMC’s 16nm FinFET Plus process for improved efficiency. It also has a tarted up octa-core processor. The cores are arranged 4 x Cortex-A72 and 4 x Cortex-A53 instead of the old mid-range offering of just eight Cortex-A53 cores. The chipset uses ARM’s flagship Mali-T880 GPU so the pictures should look pretty. Then there is the faster LPDDR4 RAM and the new i5 sensor hub that’s apparently 90 percent more efficient. There is a more powerful image signal processor and a single-chip radio solution that still supports carrier aggregation and global bands. Perhaps more importantly for users like us is that the Kirin 950 will maintain a 60fps UI rendering in most scenarios and a battery life of up to two days. Either way it is an impressive chipset spec and if Huawei manages to turn the rest of the product into something good then there will be some smartphone companies out there who will be in a bit of a spin. |
| Intel’s 3D XPoint fixes bottlenecks Posted: 05 Nov 2015 01:29 AM PST
Until now details of the project have been kept under wraps, but now it seems the pair are keen to talk about it. All Intel would say is that it promised about 1,000 times the performance of NAND flash, 1,000 times the endurance of NAND flash, and about 10 times the density of DRAM. 3D XPoint technology is a 3D stacked memory with high-speed interconnects that can be used like DRAM and like flash storage. Intel CEO Brian Krzanich is now saying that Intel will sell the memory under the Optane brand, and The Next Platform. Memory is a bottleneck forcing CPUs to wait. Krzanich Optane would speed things up so processors are no longer waiting for data to arrive from memory or storage, in this case flash drives. Krzanich showed a pair of matching servers. One server had Intel’s P3700 NAND PCI Express SSD and the other was a prototype Optane SSD. The Optane SSD outperformed the P3700 by 4.4 times in IOPS with 6.4 times less latency. He said that Intel would release Optane next year and will “transform how we think about data and memory and storage.” The company will also come out with Optane DIMMs later this year for early testers. These will combine the performance of DRAM with the capacity and cost of flash. A two-socket server with Optane DIMMS will have a total of 6 TB of addressable memory, “virtually eliminating paging between memory and storage, taking performance truly to a whole new level.” |
| Fourth youth arrested over TalkTalk hack Posted: 04 Nov 2015 07:02 AM PST
The boy is the fourth to be arrested in the inquiry into the hack, which saw TalkTalk data filched in the attack. TalkTalk claims that the hack was much smaller than it had originally thought. All four young men have been arrested and released on bail while police inquiries continue. Meanwhile British MPs are setting up their own inquiry into TalkTalk. The Culture, Media and Sport Committee wants to investigate how firms like TalkTalk store customer data. |
| Apple dominates the tablet market Posted: 04 Nov 2015 06:54 AM PST
Digitimes Research said that Apple represents 23.9 percent of shipments, followed by Samsung at 14.5 percent of the market. But the remaining places are disappointing for other vendors, with Microsoft only having 2.3 percent of the market, Amazon 4.8 percent, Lenovo 5.3 percent, and Acer 1.3 percent. The market research firm said that of the 38.5 million tablets it estimates will ship in this fourth quarter, 30.3 percent will have seven inch screens, 18.3 percent nine inch screens,, 5.3 percent eight inch screens and 9.2 percent tablets with eleven inch screens or above. While Apple is doing well on shipments, in operating system terms it's good for Android (56.8%), and Apple iOS 36.4 percent. MIcrosoft has a miniscule 6.9 percent of the market with Windows. The market research outfit said that sales have fallen 22.6 percent, compared to the same quarter last year. |
| UHD LCD panels to dominate market next year Posted: 04 Nov 2015 06:47 AM PST
IHS Technology defines UHD panels as including 4K TV, wide viewing angle, high dynamic range and other features. UHD panels, it said, are in demand because they suit large screens and have higher pixel densities. TV panel prices have fallen and that's also generating demand from customers and encouraging vendors to increase supplies. IHS estimates that as many as 40 million units will ship this year. Ricky Park a senior analyst at IHS, said: "The increased supply of LCD TV panels has caused a downturn in panel prices, providing consumers with a cheaper selection of wide screen TVs and whetting their appetites for even larger TVs with higher resolution." He said increased demand has caused prices to fall and demand means 67 million units are likely to ship next year. |
| UK introduces new surveillance bill Posted: 04 Nov 2015 06:39 AM PST
The draft bill, called the Investigatory Powers Bill will allow police to obtain warrants to examine the activity of people it or the other British security authorities. But the warrants will have to be endorsed by specially trained judges. The bill will also allow the authorities to hack peoples' devices and to search vast amounts of data flowing through the internet. GCHQ had already been doing this secretly, until whistleblower Edward Snowden revealed its activity. Previous acts of Parliament had allowed councils to access data but they won't be able to monitor internet data that service providers store. |
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