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Global Tablet Shipments to Decline 4.3% in 2018; Huawei to Become 3rd Largest Manufacturer Surpassing <span style='color:red'>Amazon</span>

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Global Tablet Shipments to Decline 4.3% in 2018; Huawei to Become 3rd Largest Manufacturer Surpassing Amazon

The global tablet shipments are expected to decline 4.3% YoY in 2018 to 145.5 million units, as the shipments of entry-level devices are on pace to grow weaker due to the rise of smart speakers and unfavorable currency exchange rates, according to TrendForce.“With the launch of new devices in the coming era of 5G, the tablet category will still help the brands build a strategic future, retaining their customer bases and becoming more influential in the global IoT network,” says Kou-Han Tseng, TrendForce notebook analyst. Therefore, major brands will not give up their tablet product lines, even at the expense of downsizing their entry-level product ranges. Particularly, Google continues the ambitions about its tablet business and Huawei expands fast in this segment, whose growth momentum jointly remains key to the overall performance of the tablet market. For 2019, TrendForce forecasts the global tablet shipments at 139.6 million units, a YoY decline of 4%.Huawei’s tablet shipments rise by over 30%, Apple’s growth momentum grows conservativeAmid the overall decline of tablet sales worldwide, brands tend to offer lower prices to retain customers and invest less in new tablet development. In contrast, Huawei appears to be rather positive in developing new mobile devices, including both smartphones and tablets. Huawei’s shipments of tablets for 2018 are expected to rise by over 30% to more than 14 million units, with a market share of 9.8%, 2.6 percentage points up from last year. The impressive shipments will also enable Huawei to become the 3rd largest tablet manufacturer this year, surpassing Amazon.Amazon’s growth momentum for tablet grows conservative as the brand shifts some focus to its smart speaker business. The company expects a fall in its annual tablet shipments for 2018, although it has been adjusting its product portfolio faster and increasing the share of its 8-inch and larger products. After three years of strong growth, Amazon is expected to record a more conservative shipment of 13.4 million units this year, a YoY decline of 1%.The leading tablet maker Apple has revealed its new 11-inch and 12.9-inch iPad Pro models ahead of the coming holiday sales in Europe and the U.S. However, its launch not long after new iPhones and the premium price tags, 25% higher than its ancestors, may prevent the new iPad series from achieving mass market success. As the result, TrendForce expects the iPad shipment to fall by 2% YoY, recording 43 million units for 2018.

Key word：

Market trend

Release time：2018-11-13 00:00 reading：1221 Continue reading>>

<span style='color:red'>Amazon</span>, Qualcomm partner to put Alexa assistant in more headphones

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Amazon, Qualcomm partner to put Alexa assistant in more headphones

Microchip firm Qualcomm is joining Amazon to spread the use of Amazon's Alexa voice assistant in wireless headphones, the companies said on Monday.Under the deal, Qualcomm will release a set of chips that any maker of Bluetooth headphones can use to embed Alexa directly into the device.When the headphones are paired to a phone with the Alexa app on it, users will be able to talk to the voice assistant by tapping a button on the headphones.The functionality would be similar to Apple's AirPods wireless earbuds, which enable users can tap the devices to talk to Apple's virtual assistant, Siri.Amazon and Alphabet's Google, whose voice assistants have most often been found in their respective smart speakers for the home, are rushing to partner with headphone makers.Models from Bose and Jabra feature Alexa built in, and Sony said earlier this year that a software update will make some of its headphone models work with Alexa. Google Assistant can be used on headphones from Bose, JBL. OnePlus and Sony, along with Google's own Pixel Buds.The Qualcomm partnership could expand that lineup. Qualcomm has developed a pre-made circuit that headphone makers can drop into their device to imbue it with Alexa."This radically reduces their cost and time to market," Anthony Murray, senior vice president and general manager of voice and music for Qualcomm, told Reuters in an interview. "It makes it simple for the industry to adopt this."Murray declined to comment on whether Qualcomm would make a similar offering for Google Assistant but said the chip firm plans to support other partners in the future.The move is part of a broader push by Qualcomm to diversify away from its dependence on processor and modem chips for mobile phones. That business proved lucrative for Qualcomm, but its patent licensing model drew regulatory fines and lawsuits from customers such as Apple.At a conference in Hong Kong slated for early Tuesday local time, Qualcomm also said it is working with action camera maker GoPro to put more Qualcomm chips for image processing in the devices. The firm has said it expects about $5 billion in revenue from non-mobile sources this year, or more than 20% of the $22.4 billion in sales that analysts expect.

Key word：

Instant news

Release time：2018-10-25 00:00 reading：1174 Continue reading>>

Apple, <span style='color:red'>Amazon</span> Refute China Chip Hacking Story

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Apple, Amazon Refute China Chip Hacking Story

Tech giants Apple and Amazon are denying a report by Bloomberg Businessweek that they are among nearly 30 companies that had their hardware compromised by Chinese spies that allegedly implanted tiny microchips for the purpose of accessing their networks.Both Apple and Amazon, as well as server vendor Super Micro Inc., issued statements Thursday that strongly refuted the report, which said the attacks were first discovered in 2015.The Bloomberg report — based on interviews with 17 people, including two Amazon Web Services insiders, three Apple insiders and six U.S. government officials — the U.S. is still conducting a top-secret investigation of the incidents more than three years later. Investigators have determined that the chips let attackers create a stealth doorway into any network that included the compromised servers, according to the report.Sources told Bloomberg that the chips — about the size of a grain of rice and not part of the servers' original design — were inserted at factories run by manufacturing subcontractors in China. The attacks were made on servers sold by Supermicro, according to the report.The report comes at a time when tensions between the U.S. and China are high. The world's two largest economies are currently embroiled in a trade war, and the U.S. has accused China of involvement in hacking and cybercrimes, including the recent suggestion by U.S. President Donald Trump that China is interfering in the U.S. election process.Most allegations of espionage-related security breaches involve remote hackers gaining access to networks and systems through operating systems and other software. The allegations in the Businessweek story are unusual because they involve the physical placement of an IC on a board by a government agency.Super Micro, based in San Jose, Calif., said it "strongly refutes reports that servers it sold to customers contained malicious microchips in the motherboards of those systems."Super Micro went on to say it "has never found any malicious chips, nor been informed by any customer that such chips have been found."Apple said it has been contacted by Bloomberg multiple times with claims of alleged security incidents. The company said it has conducted rigorous internal investigations which have not yielded any evidence to support the claims."On this we can be very clear: Apple has never found malicious chips, 'hardware manipulations' or vulnerabilities purposely planted in any server," Apple said in a statement "Apple never had any contact with the FBI or any other agency about such an incident. We are not aware of any investigation by the FBI, nor are our contacts in law enforcement."Amazon said there were "many inaccuracies" in the Bloomberg article. The article stated that Amazon discovered the implanted chips when it was working with Elemental Technologies — which it later acquired — in 2015, after Elemental sent several servers to a third-party tech security firm, which discovered the tiny chips.Amazon said Thursday that the third-party's report did not identify any issues with modified chips or hardware, but instead made some typical recommendations for shoring up security that Amazon implemented prior to finalizing the deal to buy Elemental. Bloomberg, Amazon said, has admittedly never seen the results of the report from the third-party vendor."Amazon employs stringent security standards across our supply chain – investigating all hardware and software prior to going into production and performing regular security audits internally and with our supply chain partners," Amazon said in a statement. "We further strengthen our security posture by implementing our own hardware designs for critical components such as processors, servers, storage systems, and networking equipment."

Key word：

Apple, Amazon

Release time：2018-10-08 00:00 reading：948 Continue reading>>

Inside Lab126 with <span style='color:red'>Amazon</span>'s Alexa

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Inside Lab126 with Amazon's Alexa

　　In a rare move, Amazon escorted a dozen tech journalists into the secretive bowels of Lab126, its client hardware division here. Its aim was to tell the world that it’s ready to let anyone make any kind of Alexa device they can think of — and fast.　　The smart voice interface is arguably Amazon’s first hit in client devices. Its Kindle peaked early with the e-book category as a whole, and it largely struck out with its Fire tablets and smartphones.　　With a big lead over rivals, the promise of Alexa-powered devices is rising. But it’s still an emerging market that’s a long way from Amazon’s home-run vision — becoming the next interface of choice for client devices and end-user queries.　　In the last-generation battle of operating systems, Windows won the PC and Apple and Google tied in smartphones. Amazon is betting that the next battle is the voice user interface and that Alexa will draw the world to its massive data centers. Google,China’s Alibaba and Baidu, and many others are chasing a similar dream.　　Amazon now supports nearly 100 third-party Alexa products from light switches and thermostats to smoke alarms, HP notebooks, and cars. It offers hardware reference designs from 10 semiconductor companies and two of its own design that have sold in thousands since October 2016. Altogether, millions of Alexa systems have shipped across 11 countries.　　“The velocity is really increasing, and we have an amazing pipeline … so many different form factors will be coming out — that’s what’s exciting,” said Pete Thompson, who joined six months ago to lead Amazon Voice Services, the division driving Alexa into partner products. “I’ve been involved with a lot of developer networks, and you never know what you will get.”　　One of the latest is the Eufy Genie, a smart Alexa speaker that can also control home appliances. Thompson proudly reports that it took just seven months from the first meeting with the startup until they shipped a product.　　“In the hardware world, that is extremely quick, and we continue to try to take parts out of the process so we can go faster,” said Thompson, who led work on Microsoft’s touch-based tabletop computer, the original Surface, announced about the same time as the iPhone.　　“Everybody thought you couldn’t design a device that used only a touch interface, but now that’s a natural part of our lives,” he said, suggesting that the next big thing is letting users speak to computers all around them.　　That concept, borrowed from the TV series “Star Trek,” inspired the original Amazon Echo, said an Amazon executive in an interview last month. Indeed, one of the four approved wake words that Amazon allows includes the “Star Trek,” command, “Computer!”　　Amazon believes that it now has a full a la carte menu of cloud APIs, reference designs, developer’s kits, modules, and ODMs. It also provides engineering services to help OEMs select hardware, refine user experiences, and run performance tests.　　Basically, any technology that Amazon’s design team has or is developing for its products will be made available to third parties. Some still require “some packaging,” said Thompson, referring to Alexa calling/texting services and devices with displays.　　Chipmakers powering Alexa reference designs include Cirrus Logic, Intel, Mediatek, NXP, Qualcomm, Synaptics, Texas Instruments, and Xmos. For those who prefer an SoC to an ARM core and separate DSP, Allwinner and Amlogic offer chips and designs.　　They range from designs supporting beam-forming across eight mics listening across a 360-degree range to a single directional mic. Amazon worked with Amlogic to remove GPU and HDMI blocks from an existing design to create an audio-only chip for lower cost.　　Amazon works with transducer companies on producing smaller, better speakers. It also developed techniques for shielding mics from the distractions of a smart speaker playing music.　　“There’s a huge number of products coming with audio and low cost in mind,” said Chris Hagler, director of hardware for Amazon’s core Alexa team, who worked on its first Echo product.　　One thing that none of the designs use so far is any logic dedicated to accelerating machine learning.　　“That’s a good idea,” quipped Hagler, declining to give details of what client AI acceleration Amazon will deliver or when.　　“We are trying to design and seed smaller lower-power and -cost devices, so having accelerators is really important — some are DSPs and may have extra blocks. We want it as low in power as we can get. I can’t get into the architecture, but we do have some ideas for it.”

Key word：

Amazon

Release time：2018-04-23 00:00 reading：1198 Continue reading>>

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Amazon on AI and Accelerators

　　Not quite 18 months into his job as Mr. AI for Amazon Web Services, Matt Wood is convinced the fledgling business will someday be bigger than the $20 billion/year AWS itself. At a corporate event in San Francisco, Wood talked with EE Times about the status and outlook of deep learning, what Amazon wants in semiconductors for it and his not-so-strange career path from genomics to cloud computing.　　After earning a PhD in bioinformatics in 2004, Wood went to work for a U.K. institute that handled a third of the initial work decoding the human genome.　　“It was just a sample to get a blueprint. We did 40 other species including zebra fish and the duck-billed platypus — an odd creature with 10 sex chromosomes,” Wood quipped.　　Technology caught up with what was a billion-dollar effort that took a decade. A nearby U.K. startup developed a $100,000 system that could sequence a genome in a week.　　“They were just around the corner, so they sent their first instrument over in the back of a taxi. Within six months we had 200 more, working on thousands of genomes and cell lines,” he recalled.　　The advance was opening the door to leaps such as personalized treatments for cancer. There was just one problem.　　“It was data-intensive — we generated several hundred terabytes a week. We had a data center, but we couldn’t get any more power on the site without spending tens of millions,” he said.　　“With no more storage on the premises, I called a friend who had just joined Amazon. It was around the time AWS was just getting started. They gave me a $300 credit in return for writing a white paper on how to start a clud-based genomics platform — I still haven’t finished the white paper,” he quipped.　　What he did get was “religion around cloud computing” and a phone call from AWS offering him a job.　　He helped set technical strategy for the team, and since 2008 has had a hand in launching a laundry list of AWS products including Lambda, which AWS pitches as the future of software development. He was also present at the birth of Alexa, Amazon’s virtual voice assistant, embedded in its Echo smart speaker.　　“Echo came from brainstorm about what things we could build if we had infinite compute. The original idea was like the Star Trek computer you talk to--that was the seed for what become Echo,” he said.　　Wood was tapped to head AWS’s AI efforts in part because of his genomics background.　　“Today’s machine learning uses the same foundational concepts we were using for folding proteins. The big change was in deep convolutions in the networks to build a hierarchical view for interpreting data such as images. Adding deep layers lets you fine tune a model to select images of cats from dogs, for example,” he said.　　So far Amazon seems happy with Nvidia’s Volta GPUs, but its open to whatever offers the best price/performance. It has not designed its own machine learning accelerator — yet — although it as designed several ASICs for its data centers.　　“What we’ve seen as of today is Volta is exceptionally effective for deep learning training, and in some cases for inference if you have the right workload. We packaged it to get a petaflop in a single instance — that’s materially larger than what is available anywhere else,” Wood said.　　Volta nearly doubles AI performance over Nvidia’s previous Pascal GPU and “there’s still performance to be wrung from optimizations,” he said. It’s “too early to tell” if Intel’s Nervana or chips from startups such as Graphcore, Wave Computing or Cerebras will offer anything better, he added.　　Google garnered significant attention with its machine-learning ASIC, the Tensor Processing Unit. So far, Amazon has focused on delivering excellent performance on GPUs and CPUs for jobs written in Google’s Tensor framework, but it has not crafted its own hardware accelerator.　　That’s not because Amazon is averse to designing chips. “We use custom accelerators across our platform for network security, network switching and for our underlying EC2 platform,” he said.　　AWS also worked with Intel to create an ASIC for DeepLens, a smart camera that runs machine learning inference tasks and connects to AWS services. DeepLens is based on a customized Intel Atom SoC that runs neural net jobs on its embedded GPU block.　　The ASIC in DeepLens re-encodes an H.264 video stream into MPEG and handles other image pre-processing jobs. But the core inferencing jobs run on the Intel GPU and model training is done on Amazon’s servers in the cloud.　　The device is designed to train a new generation of machine-learning developers. Amazon gave dozens away to coders when it was announced at an event last year. At the event here, it held more training sessions on the device and the AWS SageMaker cloud service that provides neural models users can customize.　　“Developers just need to write Lambda code, nothing else,” said Wood referring to the latest AWS development technique.　　Amazon already fields a version of Echo with a smart camera. Whether it plans more such consumer products is unclear.　　“We’ve worked with OEMs on the general flow of local inference on the edge device and offloading training to the cloud like Echo does. The components of DeepLens are all Amazon products or open source software,” he said, noting the exception of the image processing ASIC.　　Amazon’s overall model is clear. It wants to get as many people as possible using its data center computers and storage. The company has become at heart a massive collection of networked servers, and the beast needs to be fed.　　These days it's a data economy in which the company with the most servers and hard disks wins. So far, that’s Amazon by far. But it’s still early days for the data tsunami machine learning is expected to generate.　　“Machine learning is like a primordial soup with so many frameworks and algorithms — we want to make it all easy and available,” Wood said in a keynote here.　　Toward that goal, Amazon added new transcription and translation services to its portfolio of image and face recognition, text-to-speech and chatbot tools. It listed some three dozen deep learning customers from airlines to dating sites. They include Cathay Pacific, Dow Jones, Expedia, GE Healthcare, Intuit, Moody’s, the NFL, Tinder and Verizon.　　“It’s in every imaginable use case…I’m a bit biased, but I’m bullish that machine learning will be a larger business that AWS which is moving at a $20 billion run rate…we haven’t found the limits yet but we will in the fullness of time,” he said in an interview.　　The roadmap is more of everything. Wood’s group is working on optimizing support for all frameworks, creating more software platforms to supplement SageMaker and adding to its library of pre-packaged neural-network models.　　It’s an extension of Amazon’s overall model of disrupting the IT world with low cost, fast moving services. In his keynote, Werner Vogels, a chief technologist for Amazon and the public face of AWS, talked about having more, better and cheaper database services than IBM or Oracle and with AWS Lambda a lower cost development method than today’s containers.　　Some observers described Lambda as the ultimate in vendor lock ins, an approach that basically appropriated techniques a third party originally defined. Wood said Lambda represents a leap to simpler code he suggested is portable because it is generally based on Java.　　“It’s a new way of development, you don’t need to think about how many servers you need. It scales, it’s all taken care of for you,” Vogel said.　　What’s clear is that to stay ahead, AWS is rapidly filling out a portfolio of IT products from low-cost storage options to freely issued security certificates.　　“We’ve been architecting AWS to decompose services into small building blocks so you can pick what you need to get the job done instead of using large monolithic blocks. The cloud has revolutionized how we develop software,” Vogels said.

Key word：

Amazon

Release time：2018-04-09 00:00 reading：1082 Continue reading>>

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Greengrass Embeds Amazon in IoT

　　Amazon Web Services can now run on a gateway or even a high-end node for the Internet of Things. Greengrass is a Linux runtime from the Web giant, aiming to extend its reach deeper into the IoT.　　The code aims to help businesses speed AWS-based IoT deployments. It uses Amazon’s familiar online tools to create programs that run on users’ local IoT networks, accessing and analyzing data from local IoT nodes. Since it's part of the AWS family, users can integrate with Amazon’s cloud services as needed.　　“There’s value in processing data at the source,” such as quick response and a known security model using AWS authentication and encryption, said Dirk Didascalou, vice president of AWS IoT at an event here. A Greengrass node also can synch a variety of other nodes when connectivity is intermittent, he added.　　The Web giant is perhaps the largest of more than 20 companies working on IoT software platforms for edge networks. It’s a hot area for a growing number of companies seeking their way into the Internet of Things such as Stanley Black & Decker.　　The tool maker selected AWS IoT as its preferred cloud services platform two years ago. It evaluated about eight edge-network IoT platforms 18 months ago and selected one from startup ClearBlade (Austin). More recently it added Greengrass, and it expects to continue evaluating the growing set of offerings.　　A 40-person central software team at Stanley Black & Decker sets software standards and develops code for business units trying to add digital services to their products. It helped create connected battery packs, vacuum cleaners and DIY apps among other projects to date.　　The fact that Greengrass requires a GHz processor with 128 Mbytes of memory and must be programmed, for now, in Python are not barriers, said Hamid Montazeri, director of software engineering for the tool maker. Such chips are becoming increasingly cheap and Stanley Black & Decker already has staff using Python in AWS, he said.　　Amazon attracted many partners for Greengrass given its clout in cloud computing.　　Intel, Qualcomm and Samsung are among chip makers that have ported Greengrass to their embedded processors. Set-top box maker Technicolor will start shipping gateways that support Greengrass to one customer later this year. Nokia has a gateway it says will support the code, too.　　Intel used Greengrass to bring up in two weeks an IoT use case for a mining company. Qualcomm showed a smart video camera from ThunderSoft using its Snapdragon 410E, supporting Greengrass. Samsung said its Artik 530 and 710 IoT modules support Greengrass.　　The chip makers typically are agnostic, supporting multiple IoT cloud services. Qualcomm, for example, also supports cloud services for Google’s Android Things as well as Verizon’s IoT initiative.　　Technicolor said it hopes Greengrass helps it address new vertical markets beyond the smart home. Separately, the set-top maker is already planning to integrate Amazon’s Alexa voice services in its products to help consumers set them up without the help of a technician.　　Other hardware companies who said they will work with Greengrass include Annapurna, Digi International, Lenovo and Wistron.

Key word：

Greengrass,Amazon

Release time：2017-06-09 00:00 reading：1108 Continue reading>>

Apple, <span style='color:red'>Amazon</span> to Join Foxconn's Toshiba Bid

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Apple, Amazon to Join Foxconn's Toshiba Bid

　　Apple and Amazon will pony up to pay a portion of contract manufacturer Foxconn's bid to acquire Toshiba's semiconductor business as the consumer electronics powerhouses move to secure a steady supply of NAND flash memory, Foxconn's cheif executive told the Nikkei news service.　　Apple and Amazon's names have surfaced before in connection with a possible bid to buy the chip unit, which Toshiba is selling to help offset massive losses incurred by its nuclear power business in the U.S. In March, Japan's Yomiuri Shimbun reported that Apple, Google and Amazon all three their hats in the ring as potential suitors.　　Apple and Amazon are dependent on NAND flash memory for their consumer electronics offerings, including iPhone, iPad and the Alexa-powered Amazon Echo. Many of these products are built by Foxconn. Last week, market research firm DRAMeXchange reported that contract prices for NAND rose 20 to 25 percent in the first quarter, stabilizing the price of NAND in what is traditionally a slower time of year for memory chip sales.　　Foxconn reportedly bid more than $27 billion, more than any other bidder is thought to have offered, to acquire the semiconductor business of Toshiba, which is second in NAND sales worldwide behind Samsung. However, Foxconn, which is based in Taiwan and has a large number of manufacturing facilities in China, is considered a longshot to land the asset because the Japanese government is wary of giving China access to Toshiba's NAND technology.　　Speculation has been that the participation of Apple and Amazon could give weight and credibility to the Foxconn bid, perhaps enough to soften concerns about China.　　Other bids that are reportedly still being considered include those made by Broadcom Corp. with private private equity investor Silver Lake Partners and another by South Korea's SK Hynix. A joint bid by private equity firm Kohlberg Kravis Roberts (KKR) and Innovation Network Corp. of Japan (INCJ) is also among those still being scrutinized by Toshiba and could have the inside track because of its participation by a Japanese public-private partnership.　　Western Digital Corp., Toshiba's partner in NAND technology development and manufacturing, has also decided to seek a smaller stake in Toshiba's chip business than originally planned, according to a report Monday (June 5) by the Japan Times. WD originally wanted to acquire a majority of the unit but has not decided to seek a 20 percent stake in an effort to reach a compromise with Toshiba, according to the report.　　WD last month requested an arbitration through the International Chamber of Commerce over Toshiba's plans to sell the chip business, saying Toshiba was contractually bound to seek WD's approval and give WD exclusive rights to negotiate the purchase of the business.

Key word：

Apple,Amazon

Release time：2017-06-06 00:00 reading：1090 Continue reading>>

model	brand	Quote
TL431ACLPR	Texas Instruments
RB751G-40T2R	ROHM Semiconductor
CDZVT2R20B	ROHM Semiconductor
MC33074DR2G	onsemi
BD71847AMWV-E2	ROHM Semiconductor

model	brand	To snap up
BU33JA2MNVX-CTL	ROHM Semiconductor
ESR03EZPJ151	ROHM Semiconductor
TPS63050YFFR	Texas Instruments
STM32F429IGT6	STMicroelectronics
BP3621	ROHM Semiconductor
IPZ40N04S5L4R8ATMA1	Infineon Technologies

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