I hope you all had a great week!  

We continue to attend conferences virtually. 

This week Will and I will be attending Marvell's 2020 Industry Analyst Day and Intel 2020 Industry Analyst Summit.  Will will also be attending the 5G A.I. Telco Summit NYC.  Anshel and Mark will be attending Intel Analyst Summit.  Karl will be attending the Neurips conference.  Paul will be attending Q2B Practical Quantum Computing by QC Ware.  I will be joining Cisco WebexONE and SAP TechEd to round out the week.

Last week, I participated at the Qualcomm Snapdragon Tech Conference, AWS re:Invent analyst conference(with Steve and Will), and Salesforce Dreamforce. 

Our MI&S team published 31 deliverables last week: 

• 11 Forbes columns 
• 14 MI&S blogs
• 6 podcasts   

The press quoted us with 15 citations. Journalists wanted to hear about Amazon, Dell, 5G, HPE, Intel, Qualcomm, and Salesforce.

Quick Insights:

AR/VR (Anshel Sag)

• Facebook is gaining scrutiny for its VR strategy and how the company engages with partners and competitors in ways that the DOJ is investigating as potentially anti-competitive
• Varjo launched the new XR-3 and VR-3 headsets, which bring significantly higher quality and wider FoV, all while having the price of entry for enterprise customers. It also added LiDar tracking to the XR-3 in addition to inside-out and hand tracking
• Half Life Alyx, one of the few AAA titles created exclusively for VR, has passed over 2 million owners, indicating that the size of the PC VR market continues to grow as content improves in quality

Carrier/Wireless (Will Townsend) 

• I continue to be impressed with Nokia as it continues to drive momentum for private cellular networking. This week Bosch Global announced the infrastructure provider is helping it deploy 250 5G networks to facilitate manufacturing automation.

Cloud Services (Rhett Dillingham) 

• N/A

Datacenter: 

• Storage- (Steve McDowell) 
  • All-flash arrays are a hot commodity right now as NetApp and Pure Storage both beat estimates with substantial growth bolstered by AFA sales, while HPE showed 7% growth in its storage business.  This all stands in stark contrast to Dell, which led to declining overall revenue in its storage business. It's too early to judge the overall macro environment for the enterprise storage market for 2H20, but the signs are encouraging.  
  • Lenovo announced a new addition to its storage portfolio; the all-flash, all NVME, Lenovo DM5100F.  This new offering delivers a compelling all-flash solution for file, block, and S3 objects.  Lenovo also announced a new fibre channel switch and management software.  This is notable, as this bolsters Lenovo's overall portfolio with important storage capabilities.  Lenovo continues to grow as an enterprise infrastructure provider. 
  • We didn't expect much storage news at this week's AWS re:Invent, as Amazon hosted its AWS Storage Day just a few weeks ago. Amazon surprised us, delivering new performance-driven storage capabilities. It's new io2 Block Express offers SAN-level performance capabilities for EBS volumes (no doubt leveraging its IP acquisition with its E8 purchase last year). In contrast, gp3 SSD-backed volumes allow customers to buy performance storage without heavy capacity commitments. The cadence of innovation at AWS continues to impress.       
• Networking- (Will Townsend) 
  • HPE posted decent growth in 4Q despite Covid-19 softness with double-digit edge performance thanks to its Aruba division. I also believe the company's telco division will be a long-term growth driver tied to 5G.
• Server- (Matt Kimball) 
  • N/A

Home Automation/ Smart Home (Mark Vena) 

• The net neutrality fight is about to come roaring back as FCC Chairman Ajit Pai will step down when President-elect Joe Biden takes office in January. That's likely to reignite an old debate over who should police the internet.
• Hackers are going after the Covid-19 vaccine's rollout.  The cyberattacks are targeting companies that will distribute and store the vaccines that can end the coronavirus pandemic.
• YouTube announced it would start asking commenters to reconsider posting something before it goes up. If Google's artificial intelligence identifies that comment as potentially offensive, YouTube said earlier in the week.  The new YouTube prompt suggests that commenters review the company's community guidelines if they're "not sure whether the post is respectful," and then gives the option to either edit the content or post anyway.
• Two of the holiday season's most coveted gifts went on sale in November. Microsoft rolled out its Xbox Series X|S video game consoles, and Sony debuting the rival PlayStation 5.  The only problem: finding one of the $499 devices in stock, and this condition will continue through early 2021.

IIoT and IoT (Bill Curtis)

• AWS re:Invent was surprisingly light on IoT-related announcements. "Monitron" was the big one. Although the name sounds like a cheesy sci-fi movie, the technology is well thought-out and can dramatically accelerate predictive maintenance solution development. It's an end-to-end solution complete with off-the-shelf sensors (starter kit is $714 on Amazon), a gateway ($140 on Amazon), an ML-based cloud service, and a mobile app. I haven't tried it yet, but AWS claims customers can install the hardware "in minutes" and get ML-based analytics up and running on AWS with no need for AI expertise. Integrated solutions like this will accelerate industrial IoT by slashing solution development time, cost, and risk.
• Nordic Semiconductor announced production versions of the nRF5340TM, a dual Cortex-M33 wireless SoC with a full range of I/O interfaces, TrustZone and CryptoCell-312 security, and built-in support for Bluetooth/BLE, Bluetooth mesh, Thread, and Zigbee. Fully integrated chips like this one will rapidly replace older designs, resulting in a new generation of edge devices that are cheaper, smaller, faster, better connected, lower power, and more secure.

Machine Learning/ Artificial Intelligence (Karl Freund) 

• The Cambrian Explosion in AI begins to, well, explode!  AMZN & INTC, QCOM, Simple Machines, Mythic, Imagination all launch new AI silicon or IP recently:
  • Amazon AWS (AMZN) made two significant AI announcements on December 1 at the annual AWS re:Invent conference: First, Andy Jassy, AWS head, announced that the cloud leader would offer Intel Habana Gaudi in the elastic cloud,  the training chip which Intel spent $2B to acquire last year. AWS deployment is the first traction we have seen for Gaudi and is long-awaited good news for Intel. 
  • AWS: More surprisingly, Jassy announced that AWS would launch a chip it developed in-house for training, called "Trainium," in the 2nd half of 2021, claiming it would have the fastest chip for AI available in the cloud. Supporting Trainium and Gaudi and NVIDIA GPU's are a smart move and is consistent with AWS's strategy of offering customers various technologies to meet individual needs. 
  • Qualcomm (QCOM) introduced the latest generation of the popular Snapdragon, the model 888, at its annual Snapdragon Summit event in early December. The new mobile chip sports the 6th generation AI Engine, now a fused processing unit for AI that cranks out 26 TOPS of Int-8 performance. This engine streamlines the previous 3-domain device to support scalar, tensor, and vector operations and includes 16-times more on-chip memory to handle larger models.  
  • SimpleMachines has announced a chip for low power inference. The startup's chip looks attractive based on limited specs available: 35 8-bit TOPS at only 4 Watts. That's near the top of the heap! 
  • Mythic, the Austin, TX, startup that is going down the analog processing route for inference, has begun shipping samples to select customers. The company claims to deliver fifty times the density of a digital alternative (let's assume that was a T4, ok?) at 1/20th
  • That would be groundbreaking. The Mythic Analog Compute Engine looks to solve embedded and edge inference applications for 4- and 8-bit inference jobs. More details should be forthcoming, so watch this space.
  • Imagination, the Chinese-owned and UK-based provider of GPU and other IP for cell phones, has announced its AI Series 4 multicore NNA chip IP. A spokesperson said the company targets the Automotive market, making sense as there is no 800-pound gorilla to displace. The highly scalable IP, which SoC designers can license and embed in its silicon, looks surprisingly robust, at 30 TOPS/Watt, which to my knowledge is the most power-efficient DNN processor around.  I hope to dive deeper into this exciting development soon. 

Personal Computing/ Collaboration (Anshel Sag) 

• Qualcomm's Snapdragon 888 is the first to integrate a 3rd Generation 5G modem, which brings TDD and FDD carrier aggregation, meaning better speeds AND better coverage for devices using it in 2021
• Qualcomm is also bringing VRS to the Snapdragon 888 with the Adreno 660 GPU, which I believe will get significant performance improvements to games long term, improving performance as much as 65% over the Snapdragon 865 available today when you combine GPU performance and VRS performance improvements, all while lowering power consumption
• Qualcomm ALSO announced another major 5G mmWave milestone, delivering 1 Gbps in partnership with TIM at a range of over 6.5KM ~ 4 Miles, significantly proving the point that mmWave 5G is a massive opportunity for FWA and improving home broadband speeds and penetration
• OpenSignal reported that 5G speeds are much improved over earlier this year and that all three carriers are virtually neck and neck in average speeds as coverage improves as well
• The NVIDIA RTX 3060 Ti has come out and is delivering RTX 2080 Super performance at a $399 price point. I believe that when AMD comes to market with a competitive solution to the 3060 Ti, NVIDIA will likely cut this price to $349 or lower

Quantum Computing (Paul Smith-Goodson)

• One of my favorite quantum conferences is next week.  Sponsored by QC Ware, Q2B2020 is from Dec 8-10. Its list of sponsors indicates its quality - IonQ, D-Wave, Google, Honeywell, IBM, Microsoft, Zapata, AWS, and Xanadu. New research and presentations by top researchers will be featured. If you only attend one quantum conference this year, then I recommend this one.  You can register here: Q2B20 Registration - Practical Quantum Computing.
• I've been following the excellent quantum research at ETH Zurich. It recently received a pledge of about USD 44 million from Martin Hoeffner, who heads the largest automotive group in Switzerland. The funds will be used to construct a specialized physics lab building on the ETH campus. Construction should be finished by 2028. The building will be built with underground labs to minimize environmental issues that affect quantum devices such as vibrations, electromagnetic signals, and particles from outer space.
• There are hints that Amazon may be preparing to build its quantum computer.  If so, it would be competing with quantum services on Amazon's cloud service called Braket, a platform housing quantum services from D-Wave, IonQ, and Rigetti. These services represent three technology platforms, quantum annealing, trapped-ion, and superconducting.  It seems reasonable to choose a less mature technology and one that wouldn't compete with the existing ones on Braket, such as photonic, silicon, etc. These technologies would be the easiest to catch in development.
  

Security (Chris Wilder)

• N/A

Columns Published (Forbes, UPLOAD VR, and others)        

1. Synaptics' Q1 Earnings Reinforce That It's An IoT Company, by Patrick Moorhead
2. What The Ryzen 5000 Series Desktop Processor Reviews Say About Its Performance, by Patrick Moorhead
3. 30 Years In And Arm Looks Stronger Than Ever, by Patrick Moorhead
4. Intel Announces Gold Release Of OneAPI Toolkits And New Intel Server GPU, by Patrick Moorhead
5. 5 "Smart" Stocking Stuffers Worth Your Attention This Holiday Season, by Mark Vena
6. Qualcomm's Snapdragon 888 Builds On Leadership In 5G, AI And Gaming Performance, by Anshel Sag
7. Pure Storage Beats The Odds, Again, by Steve McDowell
8. The Cambrian AI Explosion Ramps Up, by Karl Freund
9. Unfold Games' New Indie Competition Offers $170,000 In Prizes, by Zane Pickett
10. 5G And AI: Complementary Technologies Now And Into The Future, by Anshel Sag
11. Crestron Offers Its View Of The Smart Office In A Post Covid-19 World, by Mark Vena

Blogs Published (MI&S)                                                              

1. Apple MacBook Pro 13" M1 Review- Why You Might Want To Pass, by Patrick Moorhead
2. Just The Facts: T-Mobile Weighs In On 5G, by Anshel Sag and Will Townsend
3. AWS Inferentia Gathers More Steam With Alexa, Snap, Anthem, And Conde Nast, by Patrick Moorhead
4. The Future Of Industrial IoT Gateways: Civilizing The Wild West Of IoT, by Bill Curtis
5. Rackspace Technology Charges The Hill On Security In A Multicloud World, by Chris Wilder
6. NVIDIA's GeForce Now Frees IOS Gamers From Apple's Restrictive Store Policies, by Patrick Moorhead
7. XBOX Series X Console Review- The Next Generation Of Gaming, by Patrick Moorhead
8. AWS Storage Day Rich With Announcements, by Steve McDowell
9. NVIDIA Outperforms Itself Once Again, by Karl Freund
10. AMD Goes After NVIDIA With New GPU For The Datacenter, by Karl Freund
11. The Human Network: How Connectivity Will Change Lives, by Will Townsend
12. IBM Focuses On Container Data In Latest Announcements, by Steve McDowell
13. The New Xbox Series X: A Next-Gen Gaming Console That Radiates Power, by Mark Vena
14. The Good, Bad And The Ugly Of Apple's Mac Launch With M1 Processors, by Patrick Moorhead

Podcasts:

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

• Episode 31 - December 4, 2020
  • Nokia helps Bosch Global launch 250 private 5G networks 
  • Qualcomm Snapdragon 888 with X60 5G Modem launch 
  • Dish pulls in its 5G deployment timeline with a new fiber plan 
  • 5G Faraday Cages on Amazon and upset users 
  • Where is my 5G? Will speaks to NPR Marketplace this past Monday 
  • Open Signal Reports 5G Speeds are similar across all three carriers

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

• Catching up on the IoT EdgeHow data protection for containers is different from more traditional architectures
  • This episode finds hosts Matt Kimball and Steve McDowell talking to Jim White, the CTO of IOTech Systems, about the trends and technologies that influence the evolution of the IoT-driven edge. The guys also talk about some of the pitfalls and challenges faced by IT teams as it takes on this challenging new area
• Catching up on High-Performance Computing, with Penguin Computing
  • In this episode of the DataCentric podcast, hosts Matt and Steve are joined by Penguin Computing's Chief Strategy Officer Matt Jacobs, and Penguin's Senior Vice President, Strategic Solutions Group, Kevin Tubbs.  The gang talks about hardware abstraction in HPC, hardware complexity and specialization, software-defined architectures, containers, and much, much more.

SmartTechCheck Podcast by Moor Insights & Strategy, with Mark Vena

• N/A

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

•  Six Five Podcast LIVE
  • Pure Storage Q3/21 Earnings $PSTG, Updated Pure as a Service
  • Splunk Flowmill Acquisition
  • Dell Tech Q3/21 Earnings $DELL
  • HP Inc Q4/20 $HPQ
  • Salesforce Buying Slack?
  • Analyst run-up EoY 
  • AWS re:Invent, Webex One, Qualcomm Snapdragon Summit, Pexip, Marvell, Intel  

The Moor Insights & Strategy Podcast, with Moor Insights & Strategy analysts 

• Six Five LIVE Podcast Ep 61
  • Amazon AWS re:Invent: EC2 & more
  • Qualcomm Snapdragon Tech Summit
  • Cloudera earnings $CLDR
  • Salesforce $CRM acquires Slack $WORK
  • HPE earnings $HPE
• "Women In Quantum", its upcoming Summit III w/ founder Denise Ruffner & analyst Paul Smith-Goodson
  • Denise Ruffner recently became VP Of Business Development for IonQ. She was previously the Chief Business Officer for Cambridge Quantum Computing. Prior to that, she was with IBM Quantum where she led the IBM Q Startup Program and IBM's global ambassador program and in charge of the quantum team’s sales strategies. Denise is also a Senior Advisor for the OneQuantum startup network, and she is the founder of Women in Quantum. 
    • What is Women in Quantum and why the need for such an organization?
    • What response has WIQ received from the quantum ecosystem?
    • What is the importance and role of the community in quantum technology?
    • Can you tell us more about the Women in Quantum summit?
    • I hear that you even have a 15-year-old speaker for the Summit?
    • What do you plan for the next WIQ?
    • What are you most excited by in quantum today, and what do you want women considering a career in quantum to know?

Press Citations: 

1. Amazon, AWS, macOS instances/ SiliconAngle: https://siliconangle.com/2020/12/01/as-aws-reinvent-opens-amazon-debuts-first-ever-macos-instances-cloud/
2. Amazon, AWS, Gaudi (Karl Freund)/ HPC Wire: https://www.hpcwire.com/2020/12/02/aws-reveals-gaudi-based-ec2-instances-coming-in-2021/
3. AR/VR headsets (Anshel Sag)/ Tech News World: https://www.technewsworld.com/story/86936.html
4. 5G, rollout (Will Townsend)/ Marketplace: https://www.marketplace.org/2020/11/30/wheres-my-5g/
5. 5G, AI/ Mobile World Magazine: https://www.mobileworldmagazine.com/technology-and-ai-7/5g-and-ai-better-together-part-two
6. HPE, Houston headquarters (Mark Vena)/ Houston Chronicle: https://www.houstonchronicle.com/techburger/article/Hewlett-Packard-Enterprise-moving-its-global-15767477.php
7. HPE, NetApp, earnings/ Barrons: https://www.hpcwire.com/2020/12/02/aws-reveals-gaudi-based-ec2-instances-coming-in-2021/
8. Intel, AWS, Habana/ Barrons: https://www.barrons.com/articles/intel-partners-with-amazon-on-ai-deep-learning-technology-51606957702
9. Intel, Gaudi-based E2/ PC Mag: https://www.pcmag.com/opinions/qualcomm-is-a-little-too-unbothered-by-apples-m1-macs
10. Qualcomm, Snapdragon 888 (Anshel)/ Light Reading: https://www.lightreading.com/iot/qualcomm-hopes-snapdragon-888-will-widen-its-5g-lead/d/d-id/765799
11. Qualcomm, Snapdragon 888 (Anshel)/ Mobile World Live: https://www.mobileworldlive.com/featured-content/top-three/qualcomm-specs-up-snapdragon
12. Salesforce, Slack acquisition (Steve McDowell/ AFP (Yahoo News): https://news.yahoo.com/salesforce-buy-slack-27-7-215301647.html
13. Salesforce, Slack acquisition/ Computerworld: https://www.computerworld.com/article/3599337/salesforce-scoops-up-team-chat-pioneer-slack-for-27-7b.html

Company: 

1. Dell, intrinsic security/ https://corporate.delltechnologies.com/en-us/newsroom/announcements/detailpage.press-releases~usa~2020~12~20201203-dell-technologies-intrinsic-security-helps-businesses-build-cyber-resilience.htm#/filter-on/Country:en-us
2. HPE, HPC as a service (Karl Freund): https://www.hpe.com/us/en/insights/articles/hpc-as-a-service-high-performance-computing-2012.html

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

• Apple MacBook Pro 13" M1, MacBook Air M1, iPhone 12 mini 
• Brother DS-640 scanner
• Cable Matters Dual-Input USB-C Dock
• FLIR thermal sensing camera
• Huawei P40 Pro 
• IBM Qiskit software
• Intel ATX12VO motherboard & PSU
• Samsung Galaxy Z Fold2
• TCL 10 5G U.W.
• T-Mobile TVision
• Xbox Series X 

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

• December 2020 
  • Neurips conference, virtual, Dec 7-9 (Karl Freund)
  • Marvell's 2020 Industry Analyst Day, December 8 (Patrick Moorhead, Will Townsend)
  • Cisco Webex One (Patrick Moorhead)
  • SAP TechEd (Patrick Moorhead)
  • Q2B Practical Quantum Computing by QC Ware, December 8-10 (Paul Smith-Goodson)
  • Intel Analyst Summit, Dec 8-10 (Anshel Sag, Mark Vena, Patrick Moorhead, Will Townsend)
  • 5G A.I. Telco Summit NYC, December 9 (Will Townsend)
  • IDEX, virtual, December 15 (Mark Vena)
• 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)

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The Team 

Analysts and Analysts In-Residence

1. Patrick Moorhead, Founder, President, Principal Analyst; Broad technology coverage and deep insights into Cloud & SaaS, IoT, Personal Computing, Semiconductors, Automotive 
2. Bill Curtis, Analyst In-Residence, IIoT, and Deep IoT Technology 
3. Rhett Dillingham, Senior Analyst, Cloud Services 
4. Karl Freund, Senior Analyst, HPC, and Deep Learning 
5. Matt Kimball, Senior Analyst, Datacenter Servers, CI, and HCI 
6. Steve McDowell, Senior Analyst, Datacenter Storage, and Storage Technologies 
7. Anshel Sag, Senior Analyst; V.R., P.C. Gaming, Mobile Platforms 
8. Paul Smith-Goodson, Senior Analyst; Quantum Computing 
9. Will Townsend, Senior Analyst; Carrier Equipment and Services, DC Networking 
10. Chris Wilder, Senior Analyst, Security 
11. Mark Vena, Senior Analyst, Smart Home, and Home Security 

Operations 

1. Dan Pickens, Business Director 
2. Paula Moorhead, Marketing Director, Website, and Social Media 
3. Walker Pickens, Media Relations, and Writer 
4. Zane Pickett, Office Manager, A.P., AR, travel, writer 
5. Lee LeClercq Williams, Business Associate