Moor Insights & Strategy Analyst Weekly Update September 11, 2020

By Patrick Moorhead - September 14, 2020

I hope you all had a great week!

We continue to attend our events virtually during Covid-19 and have found it to be very successful but I would love to get back on the road once it becomes safe. Last week, I attended Silicon Labs Smart Home Developer Conference, Google Cloud Next Week 9, and attended two days of advisory. Matt attended Nutanix. NEXT. This week, Matt and I will be virtually attending Cloudera Now and I will attend Box's analyst summit and Box Works. Will will be attending the MVNO World Congress, and Mark will be attending CEDIA Expo. Anshel will be attending Facebook Connect.

Our MI&S team published 13 deliverables last week:

The press quoted us with 6 citations. Journalists wanted to hear about AMD, AI, HPE Kneron, Roku, and SMIC.

Quick Hit Insights:

AR/VR (Anshel Sag)

Carrier/Wireless (Will Townsend)

Samsung Networks and Verizon announced a partnership this week that will yield $6.6B in infrastructure spend. This builds upon an already fruitful collaboration between the two to accelerate 5G service delivery. Verizon would be wise to also provide Samsung 5G connectivity to power smart manufacturing of its semiconductor, infrastructure, and end device businesses. These could also serve as excellent proof of concepts to drive additional enterprise service revenue for the carrier.

Cloud Services/Enterprise apps (Rhett Dillingham)

AWS's addition of a second local zone in the Los Angeles area offers local customers in southern California much more flexibility to deploy its applications with high availability architectures for all but the few apps designed for replication across at least three zones. This becomes the first full cloud computing provider test of demand for more localized compute capability (split from object storage) to reduce network latency to on-premises applications and data as well as network latency to local users of those applications in use cases not easily served content via CDN.

Datacenter:

Storage- (Steve McDowell)
- N/A
Networking- (Will Townsend)
- I continue to be impressed with Cisco’s efforts to bridge the unconnected. Astonishingly nearly half the world does not have access to the Internet. Their rural broadband announcement this week includes a lab effort and compliments an established Country Digital Acceleration program to truly help bridge the digital divide. The economic and AgTech benefits will be a game-changer.
Server- (Matt Kimball)
- Infrastructure matters. Server hardware matters. CPUs matter. While the IT consumer may have started procuring these things differently – through the lens of solution stacks – hardware has arguably never mattered more. Per core performance, accelerator support, faster I/O pipes through newer generation PCIe, etc. These are all features that matter to application performance. However, customers don’t want to hear it. Time to value. Lower overall cost. Greater agility. Future-proofing for the next trend. Security and integrity of the supply chain. These are the topics that matter to IT execs. These are the messages server vendors should be aligned to, along with its silicon partners and OSV/ISV ecosystem.
- What is the number one concern of enterprise IT execs utilizing the cloud? Not data privacy. Not security. Managing cost. In an era that saw 33% YoY growth of cloud services (due in large part to Covid-19), many organizations are seeing cost overruns tied to the over-provisioning of cloud resources. This perhaps sounds like a very well-known secret. However, enterprise IT still doesn’t seem to get it. There is an opportunity for solutions providers to directly address these concerns with the management tools in its portfolios, and the delivery of consumption-based computing. And the recent quarterly earnings from Dell Technologies and HPE show that the market is responding positively to the latter.

Home Automation/ Smart Home (Mark Vena)

Microsoft finally reveals launch timing and pricing of new Xbox consoles: Microsoft's next-gen Xbox Series X console will arrive November 10 and cost $499 the company announced earlier in the week; that's the same launch day as the stripped-down Xbox Series S, which will cost $299.
Apple put augmented reality front and center with invitations to its September 15 event; if you tapped on the Apple logo, it would turn on your phone's camera and start showing an image on your desk, or underneath a tree, or next to your refrigerator -- anywhere you happened to be pointing your phone.
This is concerning: Citizen, an app that lets you see unverified crime reports in your neighborhood, has often been used to advance false claims; one egregious example: a tiger reportedly loose in Manhattan that turned out to be a raccoon; now the company wants to help cities track cases of Covid-19; Los Angeles County said this week it's partnering with Citizen for its contact tracing app SafePass; the app, unveiled in August, works as a digital pass for logging your symptoms and location. It uses Bluetooth and GPS to track your interactions with other people using the app.
Finally: in a bid to make its service more secure, Zoom Video Communications began this week expanding support for two-factor authentication for logging in to its platform.
Apple's changing its App Store rules to allow game streaming services, which allow people to play video games over the internet in similar ways it streams movies from Netflix, marking Apple's acknowledgment of the changing ways some people are playing video games.

IIoT and IoT (Bill Curtis)

This week, Gartner issued a new Supply Chain Strategy hype cycle analysis showing IoT at the bottom of the “trough of disillusionment.” Like we say here in Texas, this is like closing the gate after the cows have already wandered away. IoT actually hit the trough two years ago when industry deployments failed to match predictions of massive growth. Gartner, like almost all other analysts, still overlooks the fundamental reason for deflated expectations: customization. IoT will never scale up as expected until we clean up the “wild west” situation at the edge of IT civilization. Barriers such as unpredictable cost, high business risk, grave security concerns, and nonstandard manageability will continue to inhibit IoT growth until edge devices are built at a massive scale using industry-standard hardware, OSs, IP networks, and application orchestration. The transition from customized, application-specific devices to standard, application-agnostic platforms is already underway and it’s a game-changer.

Machine Learning/ Artificial Intelligence (Karl Freund)

It is shaping up to be a busy fall, and not just for the US elections. I expect many startups to make AI ASIC announcements over the next two months. Watch for possible updates or launches from Tenstorrent, Google TPUV4, SambaNova, AWS Inferentia, Groq, Cerebras, Qualcomm, and others including Chinese players Huawei and Alibaba. Blaize and Graphcore already launched its AI platforms, but Graphcore failed to present any secured customer wins including Azure and Dell, which already support its 1st gen chip. I'm unsure where Intel is with Habana Labs Gaudi chip for training, which Intel acquired for $2B and jettisoned its Nervana Labs designs last December. I am hoping we will get some clarity from the firm in the next couple of months. All this activity coincides with the AI HW Summit and SuperComputing 2020. Meanwhile, I expect more success stories and major installations from NVIDIA for its Ampere-based GPUS and DGX systems, especially around their GTC conference and SC2020. NVIDIA is still unassailable over the next 12-24 months in the datacenter AI space

Personal Computing/ Collaboration (Anshel Sag)

T-Mobile tested 2.5 GHz with 16-Layer MU-MIMO and was able to serve 8 users simultaneously with 700 Mbps per second over the same cell which translates to 5.6 Gbps on a single cell.
Casa Systems announced their high-power mmWave 5G CPE,. This is the same company that just announced the results of a trial where they achieved a 2.4 mile mmWave transmission.
Microsoft Announced new Xbox pricing and the All Access program which bundles the Xbox Game Pass with either of the new Xbox's for a simple monthly price.
nReal Raised $40M in a series B round, which I believe will help the company expand internationally and partner with more OEMs and operators to get the Light glasses to market.
The NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3080 came out from under wraps and benchmarks are expected next week, the review date is Sept 16th
Rumors that Apple will not be shipping a 120 Hz display in the new iPhone are spreading, which would be unfortunate, considering how many of the competition.
The Microsoft Surface Duo is a fantastic device for productivity and got a lot of harsh reviews from early samples, but mine has mostly been bug-free.
The Surface Duo has grown quite a bit on me, but I do wish it had more/better cameras, 5G and the latest SoC with more than 6GB of RAM.

Quantum Computing (Paul Smith-Goodson)

Google team used 12 qubits from its 54-qubit Sycamore (same one used for quantum supremacy) processor for modeling a record chemical reaction involving a 12 hydrogen chain. Each qubit represented a single-electron wavefunction. A series of rotation logic gates were used to rewrite the system’s wavefunction as a sum of those individual wave functions. The wavefunction sum was measured, then a classical computer repeatedly tweaked the system until the minimum energy was found. Keep in mind, even though this is groundbreaking for a quantum machine, we're still at the point that a classical computer could have done the same simulation.
This week I discussed Xanadu Quantum Computing and its roadmap to a million qubits in a Forbes.com article. Keep in mind that Google has also discussed its million-qubit roadmap by 2029. It recently released a set of videos from its Quantum Summer Symposium detailing the steps in this effort. In my interview with Professor John Martinis, who led Google's quantum development, he also mentioned that. If there are no unforeseen science problems, quantum will make our world a lot of different 10 years from now. Likewise, Honeywell and IBM also have technology roadmaps.
It’s a long way off but quantum computers will eventually be able to defeat RSA and other public keys. For post-quantum cryptography, NIST has determined 7 finalists for new digital signatures and public keys. It is expected to make its final decision within 18 to 24 months. Prior to then, I will provide a Forbes.com article providing more details. I had a good conversation with the CEO and founder of PQshield who is a finalist in both digital signature and public key.

Security (Chris Wilder)

Podcasts:

The G2 on 5G by Moor Insights & Strategy, with Anshel Sag and Will Townsend

Episode 20 September 11th 2020

Cisco’s rural broadband efforts - can Open RAN help?
Casa Systems AurusAI High-Power mmWave CPE for 5G
Samsung and Verizon partner on a $6.6B infrastructure deal to support next-generation 5G services
T-Mobile MU-MIMO 2.5 GHz 5G - 8 Users @ 700 Mbps, Peak throughput of 5.6 Gbps with a 16-layers of MU-MIMO (currently only 8 streams, expected in 2021)
U.S. government to invest $1B in 5G and other emerging technologies with lab efforts at major universities
nReal raises $40 million, is partnered with LG U Plus on 5G. LG U Plus spearheaded an XR content alliance on 5G networks with Qualcomm, KDDI, Bell, China Telecom and Felix and Paul

DataCentric Podcast by Moor Insights & Strategy, with Matt Kimball and Steve McDowell

Supercomputing Invades the Enterprise with Penguin's SVP of Strategic Solutions Kevin Tubbs
- What matters when thinking about technical computing in the enterprise.

SmartTechCheck Podcast by Moor Insights & Strategy, with Mark Vena

The Six Five Podcast by Moor Insights & Strategy and Futurum Research, with Patrick Moorhead and Daniel Newman

New Chips About to Eat the World
- Cisco Desk Pro First Impression Experiences
- Intel 11th Generation and EVO
- Amazon SMB Commitment
- NVIDIA RTX 30 Series
- Cloudera Earnings
- Samsung Galaxy Segmentation

Press Citations:

AMD, Navi, Radeon/ IDG Connect: https://www.idgconnect.com/news/1506065/finally-amd-big-navi-radeon-rx-6000-gpus-coming-october
AI, development, cloud/ Enterprise AI: https://www.enterpriseai.news/2020/09/07/taking-ai-development-and-test-to-the-cloud/
HPE, Aruba, AI (Will Townsend)/ IoT Evolution World: https://www.iotevolutionworld.com/fog/articles/446530-aruba-boosts-ai-driven-itot-iot-edge-into.htm
Kneron, K270 (Karl Freund)/ Enterprise AI: https://www.enterpriseai.news/2020/09/09/knerons-latest-kl720-ai-chip-aims-to-expand-enterprise-ai-use-cases/
Roku, Viva Entertainment Group, Inc./ Insider Financial: https://insiderfinancial.com/viva-entertainment-group-inc-otcmktsottv-about-to-break-higher/173121/
SMIC, US sanctions/ SiliconAngle: https://siliconangle.com/2020/09/07/report-u-s-threatens-sanction-chinese-chipmaker-smic/

New Gear or Software We are Using and Testing that is Public Knowledge:

Apple iPad Pro, iPhone XS Max, iPhone SE, Watch Series 5
BMW X3 Infotainment and ADAS
Cisco Desk Pro
Cocopar 17” portable display
Dell XPS 17
Google Pixel 4a
Intel/Rivet Networks AX1650
Lenovo Flex 5G
Microsoft Surface Duo
NVIDIA Shield
Oura Ring
Samsung Galaxy Z Fold2, Note20 Ultra, Buds Live, Watch 3
Surface Duo

Events MI&S Plans on Attending In-Person or Virtually (New):

September 2020
- Apple Event, Sep 15 (Patrick Moorhead, Anshel Sag)
- Box Industry Analyst Summit, Sep. 16 (Patrick Moorhead)
- BoxWorks Digital, Sep 17 (Patrick Moorhead)
- MVNO World Congress, virtual, Sept 15-17 (Will Townsend)
- CEDIA Expo, Sept 15-17 (Mark Vena)
- Facebook Connect, Sept 16 (Anshel Sag)
- Cloudera Now, Sep 16-17 (Matt Kimball, Patrick Moorhead)
- Schneider-Electric, Sept. 20 (Mark Vena)
- Evercore Mobile AI, presenting, Sept 20-21 (Karl Freund)
- 2nd International Conference on Quantum Natural Language Processing, Virtual, Sept 21 (Paul Smith-Goodson)
- Oracle Open World, Sep 21-23 (Patrick Moorhead)
- Huawei Connect, virtual, Sept 23-26 (Will Townsend)
- 4th International Workshop on Quantum Compilation, Virtual, Sept 24 (Paul Smith-Goodson)
- GlobalFoundries GTC, Sept 24 (Patrick Moorhead)
- Quantum Computing for Quantum Chemistry, Virtual, Sept 25 (Paul Smith-Goodson)
- AI HW Summit, September 28-29 and Oct 6-7, (Karl Freund – presenting a keynote and hosting a panel)
- C-V2X Summit, Sept 29 (Anshel Sag)
- VMWorld, virtual, Sept 29-Oct 1 (Matt Kimball, Rhett Dillingham, Will Townsend, Patrick Moorhead)
October 2020
- Quantum Industry Day in Switzerland 2020, Oct 2 (Paul Smith-Goodson)
- Dell Technologies Summit, Oct 5-7 (Matt Kimball, Patrick Moorhead, Matt Kimball, Will Townsend)
- NVIDIA GTC, Oct 5-9 (Karl Freund)
- Arm DevSummit Virtual, Oct 6-8 (Patrick Moorhead, Matt Kimball)
- 5G Americas - Oct 7-8 (Anshel Sag)
- CALIX Partner Event (Mark Vena)
- Adobe MAX Oct 20-22 (Anshel Sag)
- Qualcomm 5G Summit, Oct 20-21 (Anshel Sag)
- Dell Technologies World, Oct 21-22, virtual (Matt Kimball, Rhett Dillingham)
November 2020
- 5G Core Summit panel, Nov 2 (Will Townsend)
- Quantum Techniques in Machine Learning, Virtual, Nov 11 (Paul Smith-Goodson)
- 5G AI Telco Summit World panel, Nov 11 (Will Townsend)
- 5G Techritory, Riga, Nov 11-12 (Will Townsend)
December 2020
- Q2B Practical Quantum Computing by QC Ware, December 8-10 (Paul Smith-Goodson)
- 5G AI Telco Summit NYC, Dec 9 (Will Townsend)
- 2020 Intel Industry Analyst Summit, Santa Clara, Dec 9-10 (Patrick Moorhead)
January 2020
- CES Virtual, Jan 11-14 (Patrick Moorhead, Mark Vena, Anshel Sag)
February 2020
- 24th Annual Conference on Quantum Information Processing, Feb 1-3 (Paul Smith-Goodson)

The Team

Analysts and Analysts In-Residence

Patrick Moorhead, Founder, President, Principal Analyst; Broad technology coverage and deep insights into Personal Computing, IoT, Semiconductors, Cloud, Automotive
Bill Curtis, Analyst In-Residence, IIoT, and deep IoT technology
Rhett Dillingham, Senior Analyst, Cloud Services
Karl Freund, Senior Analyst, HPC, and Deep Learning
Matt Kimball, Senior Analyst, Datacenter Servers, CI, and HCI
Steve McDowell, Senior Analyst, Datacenter Storage, and Storage Technologies
Anshel Sag, Analyst; VR, PC Gaming, Mobile Platforms
Paul Smith-Goodson, Senior Analyst; Quantum Computing
Will Townsend, Senior Analyst; Carrier Equipment and Services, DC Networking
Chris Wilder, Senior Analyst, Security
Mark Vena, Senior Analyst, Smart Home, and Home Security

Operations

Dan Pickens, Business Director
Paula Moorhead, Marketing Director, Website, and Social Media
Walker Pickens, Media Relations, and Writer
Zane Pickett, Office Manager, AP, AR, travel, writer
Lee LeClercq Williams, Business Associate

Patrick Moorhead

+ posts

Patrick founded the firm based on his real-world world technology experiences with the understanding of what he wasn’t getting from analysts and consultants. Ten years later, Patrick is ranked #1 among technology industry analysts in terms of “power” (ARInsights) in “press citations” (Apollo Research). Moorhead is a contributor at Forbes and frequently appears on CNBC. He is a broad-based analyst covering a wide variety of topics including the cloud, enterprise SaaS, collaboration, client computing, and semiconductors. He has 30 years of experience including 15 years of executive experience at high tech companies (NCR, AT&T, Compaq, now HP, and AMD) leading strategy, product management, product marketing, and corporate marketing, including three industry board appointments.