Moor Insights & Strategy Two-Week Update Ending on March 26, 2021

By Patrick Moorhead - March 28, 2021

I hope you all had a great couple of weeks!

Last week, I attended Oracle Live Fusion Cloud and Intel Unleashed events. Melody was a speaker at the Lendit Fintech Conference and American Banker's Leader Forum on Collaboration of Fintechs and Incumbents.

This week, several of us will be attending Cisco Live (myself, Matt, Steve, and Will). Will will be attending CCA Mobile Carriers Show. Anshel Sag and I will be attending Arm Vision.

Our MI&S team published 27 deliverables over the last two weeks:

The press quoted us with 29 citations and 1 CNBC video. Journalists wanted to hear about Baidu, Cloud, Cisco, Dell, Google, Intel, Nokia, 5G, NXP, and Samsung. Paul's blog, Quantum USA Vs. Quantum China: The World's Most Important Technology Race was cited in three reports: HOMELAND SECURITY ADVISORY COUNCIL Final Report, NATO Science & Technology Trends 2020 – 2040, and Preparation of Strongly Correlated Superconducting States on a Quantum Computer with Hints of Quantum Advantage (Department of Chemistry and The James Franck Institute, The University of Chicago).

Quick Insights:

AR/VR (Anshel Sag)

Sandbox V.R. will start taking over some of TheVOID's location-based V.R. entertainment businesses, beginning with the Las Vegas location.
PlayStation is giving away 5 top PSVR titles
RecRoom, the social V.R. application, raised $100M, bringing its valuation to $1.25 billion
Half LIfe Alyx had its 1st anniversary, and Valve discounted it 40%
AppliedVR has secured $29M in funding to pursue FDA approvals for V.R. pain management
Nintendo and Niantic have partnered together to launch a Pikmin AR title this year
Sony has announced that PSVR 2 will have new dedicated V.R. controllers. This is a huge step forward for the industry because Sony's PSVR is one of the biggest V.R. platforms, and last generation was repurposed 'Move' controllers.

Carrier/Wireless (Will Townsend)

China announced its intention this week to accelerate research and development efforts in 6G over the next five years. Focusing on 6G so soon is not a wise endeavor, given 5G has a long deployment road ahead of it with elements such as standalone, network slicing, and new service delivery. Jumping the gun on 6G will serve to dilute the efforts for 5G. With that said, this is likely politically motivated given the continued pressure by the U.S. on Chinese networking infrastructure companies such as Huawei.
Nokia held its Capital Markets Day event this week. I thought that Nokia's CEO Pekka Lundmark did an excellent job highlighting its strengths in fixed wireless access, optical, private wireless, and Open RAN. I also believe that Nokia's customer and partner realignment efforts to focus on best-of-breed solutions versus end-to-end offerings is the right strategy to generate revenue growth, profitability and increase shareholder value. The reality is that disaggregation and carrier use of multiple infrastructure vendors for supply chain continuity and cost containment better aligns to best-of-breed.

Datacenter:

Storage- (Steve McDowell)
- The big news in the storage world is Micron's abandonment of 3D XPOINT development and manufacturing. The company said in a conference call that the market for the technology, which Micron jointly developed with Intel, simply isn't emerging, that the 3D XPOINT technology can't compete with aggressively-priced DRAM and 3D NAND. Instead, Micron shifts its R&D focus to CXL-connected memory and storage devices and sells its 3D XPOINT Fab. No public reaction from Intel as yet. There are many implications around this story, and we'll be talking about them in due time.
- NetApp continues to demonstrate its devotion to cloud-native and container, this week unveiling its new Spot Wave data management service for Apache Spark. NetApp also added Azure Kubernetes Service to the services supported by its Spot Ocean container orchestration app. NetApp stands alone in its view of the container ecosystem as simply an expanded pool of data to manage, but its view has some merit. We're still taking a wait-and-see position as I.T. buyers digest what NetApp's moves mean and how they are best positioned within the cloud-native ecosystem. 1-(Cloud/Storage) Amazon AWS continues to cut storage prices. Just a week after updating its Amazon EFS offerings, the cloud giant slashes its Amazon S3 Glacier data movement prices by 40%.
Networking- (Will Townsend)
- Cisco and Google Cloud announced a partnership this week to develop an industry-first application-centric multi-cloud networking fabric. From my perspective, this should facilitate improved agility and scalability by extending Cisco's hybrid and multi-cloud reach. The development will also integrate Cisco's SD-WAN and Google Cloud platforms and provide total wide-area networking application integration with cloud workloads. It is a compelling set of announcements that should set the stage for more news at the signature Cisco Live! event at the end of March.
- Juniper Networks recently made two announcements that have the potential to dramatically accelerate the sales of its automation and AI-driven enterprise networking platforms. First, it just aligned its automation platform's positioning under a single Paragon brand that better integrates its Netrounds acquisition delivering assurance and Anuta Networks partnership that supports closed-loop automation. Second, the company has integrated the A.I. features from Mist Systems' purchase into some new switch and SD-Branch offerings. In summary, both announcements better position Juniper in the enterprise segment, an area that has languished behind its traditionally strong service provider business.
Server- (Matt Kimball)
- Intel's Pat Gelsinger delivered a presentation on the future of Intel that was quite interesting to watch. It's all about foundries. At first thought, this may seem not so interesting to an audience wanting to hear about 128 cores on a tiny package and the like. I believe Intel is making a move that puts it ahead of the game. Custom silicon and chips to meet the specific needs of customers of all types – other (potentially competitive) chip manufacturers, cloud providers, government entities. When one sits back and thinks about the massive opportunity for silicon across the government alone – from labs to weapons systems to the clouds that drive the business of the government business every day – the opportunity – both in terms of customization (requirements) and requirements around security (on-chip, in supply chain). Intel has made a run at such a service before, but I believe the company is far better suited now. And more importantly, I think the market is ready for such a service.
- Coincidentally, Google announced that it would be designing its CPUs (SoCs) to power its datacenter. The details aren't clear – what architecture, what functions will be brought on chip. While the company brought on an ex-Intel designer (Uri Frank) to head up development, it is hard to know where the company is going. The company explicitly stated power consumption as a significant factor in its decision to begin custom design. Arm has been the darling of cloud (AWS, Equinix, Oracle Cloud planned) due to its power envelope and ability to quickly design based on Arm architectural I.P. Additionally; the company is a founding member of RISC-V foundation. Whatever direction it takes, Google's announcement is certain to continue the trend started by AWS around custom silicon design and development – and this will have significant impacts on the industry as a whole.
- Suppose I work for an enterprise I.T. organization looking to expand my data reporting/analytics/management capabilities to the business units. In that case, I'm going to first look at what my current database provider is doing for "as-a-service," which is why we should all keep an eye on Oracle. The company's customer base for RDMS is 97% of the Global 100. And used by enterprises on a large scale. The company has quietly built-in support for various data types and models (e.g., JSON, graph, spatial, etc.). And integration capabilities that remove the very heavy and complex effort of tying back-end data sources. One of the barriers for Oracle, being adopted outside of large enterprise, was cost and complexity. Direct and indirect (licensing, certified DBAs, etc.), along with the constant tuning required to make such a powerful platform run optimally. With the company's current offerings around Autonomous Database, these barriers go away. And the result? Strong growth in its latest reporting (55% YoY).
- AMD Launched its 3rd Generation EPYC processor, taking direct aim at enterprise I.T. organizations. While the top-line specs of Milan look the same as its predecessor, this CPU has shown impressive performance gains, sitting at about 20% for IPC, Floating point, and integer. But most importantly, the company did two things that I believe are going to help it make substantial gains in the enterprise datacenter in 2021 –
  - Further developed its IHV and ISV ecosystem support. CPUs are only as good as the servers they sit in, and servers are just as good as the workloads they support. With this new generation of EPYC, AMD partners increased portfolios with new offerings. HPE doubled its ProLiant lineup based on Milan. Dell EMC launched its "A.I. Infrastructure without compromise" in the XE8545, and Lenovo boasts an EPYC portfolio of 10 systems spanning servers to ready solutions spanning the enterprise workload need. OEM support? Check.
  - The company was laser-focused on demonstrating enterprise relevancy. From talking points to performance claims to the partners, it brought on stage. Hearing the talking points and seeing the performance numbers that show this CPU can power the line of business applications and new workloads powering an enterprise is critical to building confidence with those customers. While AMD has been moving toward this position, it has arrived with Milan.
- It should be fun to see this all play out as Intel nears its launch of "Ice Lake."
- AWS launched new instances based on Graviton2 – X2gd. AWS claims up to 55% better price-performance relative to previous x86 X1 instances – positioning these instances at key enterprise workloads such as relational database, electronic design automation (EDA), and real-time analytics. The rollout of X2gd speaks volumes to the popularity of AWS's Graviton-based instances. The company has been very prescriptive and measured in its support, supporting workloads with lower barriers to adoption, such as cloud-native. This enabled customers (and the market) to gain confidence and familiarity with the use of an architecture that was somewhat new to enterprise workloads. X2gd opens up Graviton2 (an Arm-based CPU) to the broader enterprise market. AWS will first make these instances available in the U.S. East and Europe (Ireland). I would expect these instances to expand across all regions quickly.

FinTech (Melody Brue)

The next wave of government stimulus checks has started to be distributed, stimulating not only the economy but, by extension, many fintech companies. Fintechs like Chime and CashApp float stimulus money to a customer that it knows will arrive shortly. Larger banks are challenged to do this because of the significant liquidity issue it would cause. Still, for the neo-banks with a smaller customer base, this early-access is a customer acquisition mechanism and a revenue source when fees are collected to deposit the money in users' accounts. Fintechs are also benefitting from the influx of cash in people's digital wallets, as it has fueled the shift of debit card usage over credit cards. Much of the rescue money is transferred via prepaid debit cards or checking accounts linked to debit cards, and fees are collected when the cards are used.
SPACs (Special Purpose Acquisition Companies) or "blank-check" company stocks, including many of those of Fintech companies, slumped this week after a report that U.S. regulators are on a fact-finding mission to scrutinize one of the hottest vehicles in the equity market. Wall Street's biggest banks expect oversight of the red-hot SPACs market to heat up from the SEC, which could have a chilling effect on the market.
$73 billion from investors through 226 offerings has already been raised just the first three months into the year - accounting for more than 70% of the market for initial public offerings. $83.3 billion was raised from 248 SPACs in 2020 and $13.6 billion from 59 deals in 2019.
Several notable Fintech companies are currently in the de-SPAC phase, including SoFi, whose sponsor is Social Capital Hedosophia, a partnership between serial dealmakers Chamath Palihapitiya and Ian Osborne. The holding company saw a more than 8% hit earlier Thursday but was recovering slightly by Friday. Blank-check companies' shares declined in general, with the IPOX SPAC Index 1.1% down.

Home Automation/ Smart Home (Mark Vena)

Google is reportedly working on a new feature for Assistant called Memory, a combination of a to-do list, a notes app, a Pocket-like reading list, and a Pinterest-style collection board into a single overarching digital locker integrated into the broader Google Assistant app. News reports indicate that the product is in "dogfood" testing for Google employees. While Assistant already has a Memory feature for saving information (like a bike lock combination or a favorite flavor of cake), the new iteration of Memory appears to be a significant upgrade. It seems to integrate the "Collections" feature that preceded it and be given top billing on the main menu bar alongside Assistant's daily snapshot view.
Dyson has a new flagship vacuum cleaner, the $699 V15 Detect, which adds a laser dust detection system that's designed to illuminate the dust on your floors so you can better clean it. Based on Dyson's images showing how the laser works, though, it looks like the V15 Detect will primarily help you feel a sense of guilt (or horror) at just how dusty your kitchen floor is. Unlike most vacuums with lights on the cleaning head — which help you see where you're vacuuming — the new lasers are designed to help you know what you're vacuuming.
Amazon is getting more aggressive about its live streaming plans for professional sports: New York Yankees baseball is coming to Amazon Prime, at least for those in the New York area. On Wednesday, the e-commerce giant announced that it would be offering 21 regular-season broadcasts of Yankees games to Prime members in New York state, Connecticut, northeast Pennsylvania, and north and central New Jersey.
According to rumors, Apple had been expected to hold its next big event earlier this week. The product announcement, which could have included devices such as the long-rumored smart tracker tag, the AirPods 3, or an iPad Pro update, was rumored to be taking place Tuesday, March 23. But a subsequent report cast doubt on that rumor, pointing to an April iPad unveiling instead.
Nintendo's rumored Switch update may feature a new NVIDIA chip, according to news reports. Nintendo is working with the chipmaker on incorporating a more powerful processor that could support higher resolution gameplay, the publication says. Per the report, the new Switch will make use of NVIDIA's Deep Learning Super Sampling technology to "deliver higher-fidelity graphics more efficiently." The outlet notes that this feature should allow Nintendo to output games in 4K when the new Switch is connected to a T.V.
Back in December, Amazon launched an ad-sponsored news app on its Fire T.V. platform. At that time, the app offered local news coverage in 12 cities, including New York, San Francisco, Dallas, Miami, and more. But earlier this week, Amazon said it's expanding local news to "88 major cities" across the U.S., "including popular local stations from news distributors such as ABC Owned Television Stations, CBSN, TEGNA, Cox, The E.W. Scripps Company, and Altice USA."
NVIDIA earlier this week announced a new subscription tier for its GeForce Now cloud gaming service called Priority that will replace its existing paid Founders tier and contain the same perks like extended session length and RTX support. The catch: the change will come with a price increase, from what used to be a $4.99-per-month subscription to what will now be a $9.99-per-month one for new subscribers. NVIDIA will also start offering a $99.99-per-year Priority subscription.
Sony is revealing its new V.R. controllers for the PS5 today. The orb-shaped controllers look more like typical V.R. controllers than existing PlayStation Move motion controllers, and they also include the same adaptive trigger technology found on the DualSense PS5 controller. Each controller has tensions in the triggers, and Sony uses this tech in future V.R. games.
The PlayStation 5 has lived up to its reputation as a forward-looking next-gen console. The powerful new PlayStation 5 console towers over its predecessor, both physically and in its forward-looking graphics capabilities. The design is bold, and the new controller is a big step forward, both in ergonomics and features. But that doesn't mean the PS5 is flawless. An early issue with machines going into rest mode has been fixed, and after being nearly forgotten at launch, we finally have our first look at what virtual reality on the PS5 will look like, thanks to some new PSVR 2 controller images. Another (significant) new wrinkle is the potential loss of future Bethesda games, now that the Fallout and Elder Scrolls publisher is part of the Microsoft empire.
Amazon Prime Video has locked up the national rights to the NFL's Thursday Night Football games, the biggest sports deal with a streaming service so far. Amazon's deal is part of a complex matrix of licensing arrangements the NFL unveiled Thursday. As a whole, the deals meaningfully broaden the online availability of many of the NFL's games while still essentially keeping the league partnered with traditional media companies and their regular T.V. networks (Amazon being the major exception).

IIoT and IoT (Bill Curtis)

A few weeks ago, Siemens and IBM announced an expanded alliance aimed at deploying MindSphere on OpenShift (Red Hat's Kubernetes orchestrator). Customers build containerized industrial IoT applications in the IBM cloud, including MindSphere components for data collection and real-time analysis. OpenShift then deploys containerized components on-prem to gather and process data locally, all managed from the cloud. This is further evidence of IoT platform consolidation – the most significant 2021 IoT megatrend. 1.2 Microsoft announced the acquisition of Marsden Group, a firm specializing in designing and prototyping complex industrial IoT solutions. IoT platform consolidation is accelerating as horizontal frameworks like Azure IoT expand vertically by seamlessly integrating domain-specific capabilities, which dramatically simplifies customization and deployment.

Machine Learning/ Artificial Intelligence (Paul Smith-Goodson)

Trained dogs can detect prostate cancer with a 99% success rate by sniffing urine samples. MIT researchers have recently developed a system that can detect chemical and microbial content of an air sample with even greater sensitivity than a dog's nose. By using machine-learning, characteristics of the disease-bearing samples can be identified. If the size could be reduced, a prostate cancer detection system could be incorporated in a hand-held device for wide-spread use.
Two months ago, OpenAI announced CLIP, a general-purpose vision system a few months ago. Last week, OpenAI discovered multimodal neurons in CLIP. One of them is a "Spider-Man" neuron, similar to the famous Halle Berry" neuron. It responds to an image of a spider, an image of the text "spider," and an illustration of the comic book "Spider-Man." It may be that abstraction is a common mechanism of synthetic and natural vision systems—abstraction

Personal Computing/ Collaboration (Anshel Sag)

Lockheed Martin and Omnispace are working together to bring 5G to Space
OnePlus launched the OnePlus 9 and OnePlus 9 Pro with Hasselblad camera technology, which received high marks from reviewers and just gained support for Verizon the day consumers are expected to get devices in hand.
Marvell and Samsung have partnered together to build custom SoCs for 4G and 5G infrastructure
Intel has announced that it will be massively increasing Fab capacity and expanding its Foundry business into a separate P&L and will be calling it Intel Foundry Services
Huawei is beginning to start charging competitors for 5G standard-essential patents
Facebook is exploring how to use wearables in A.R. to advance user interactions
Alienware and Cherry have announced a new ultra-low-profile mechanical switch that will be going first into Alienware's m15 and 17 notebooks
The United States Space Force is using Oculus Quest 2 to train operators with virtual replicas of space stations, satellites, and control rooms
AMD's new Radeon R.X. 6700XT has arrived with 12 G.B. of VRAM and performance somewhere between a 3060 Ti and a 3070 and sold out almost immediately upon release.
Intel has a new campaign out with Justin Long, formerly of the Mac commercials, to talk about how much better a P.C. is than a Mac, especially Apple's new M1 Mac

Quantum Computing (Paul Smith-Goodson)

Last week I talked to Christopher Savoie, CEO of Zapata Computing, about his new partnership with Middle East-based King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST). KAUST will be a licensed user of Orquestra, Zapata's workflow-based platform. KAUST is trying to determine quantum's potential for Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) applications for airplane and automobile aerodynamic design. This middle-Eastern relationship represents the first in others to come.
I talked with Zlatko Minev in IBM Research about the new tool he designed. Until now, designing and simulating a quantum chip was a time-consuming process requiring many complicated steps involving the use of several software suites. Under Minev's project leadership, IBM officially released QisKit Metal to simplify the design process - even for novice designers. It is the first electronic design automation (EDA) tool for quantum computers. Qiskit Metal has its library that allows a superconducting device to be built using the user's specifications with either pre-built or custom components. I'm sure this innovative tool will be heavily used.
Affectiva Automotive A.I. combines deep learning and computer vision (using in-vehicle cameras) to analyze states of the car's driver and its occupants in real-time. According to a study, human error causes 95% of all auto accidents. Affectiva was awarded six patents that relate to monitoring the physical and emotional states of car occupants. That brings Affectiva's patent total to 39, with more than 25 still pending.
Using graphene as an alternative to silicon for hosting spin qubits isn't a new idea. There literally have been hundreds of papers written about the technology. The Office of Naval Research has awarded some serious money to determine if we can build a quantum computer using graphene qubits - "Topological Spin Qubits Based on Graphene Nanoribbons." The Office of Naval Research recently awarded $7.5 million to a research team led by Jeremy Levy, Distinguished Professor of Condensed Matter Physics at the University of Pittsburgh. The team includes four other universities.
SQC is working with silicon spin qubits and is a very complex process. The Navy graphene project is worth watching.

Podcasts:

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

Episode 44 - March 26, 2021
- China accelerates R&D focus on 6G over the next five years - is it a wise move?
- Lockheed Martin and Omnispace Partner on 5G Network in Space
- T-Mobile 5G Open Innovation Lab opening - what are AT&T and Verizon doing as well?
- AT&T and Verizon Standalone 5G Timelines Drifting
- Samsung Networks to supply Docomo with 5G Open RAN - what's the impact on the Japanese market?
- Marvell and Samsung Chip News, Intel Fab Efforts $20B in Az, More chip news down the pipe
Episode 43 – March 19, 2021
- Nokia Capital Markets Day recap and insights & AT&T and Nokia 5 year CBand deal
- New Samsung A52, A52 5G, and A72 Devices Powered by Qualcomm Snapdragon
- Airspan Networks and NBA SPAC announcement and my conversation with CEO Eric Stonestrom; Airspan and Rakuten Open RAN announcement
- Huawei to Start Charging 5G Royalties
- U.K. operator mid-band 5G spectrum auction insights 1,4B £ low/ mid and US 3.45-3.55 auction in October
- The State of 5G in Early 2021 Report, Part 1 and 2 Now Available on Forbes

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

AMD Launches its EPYC New Server CPU
- AMD continues its impressive run at conquering the server market as it introduces its latest generation EPYC processor, "Milan."
- What AMD's launch means to the server industry.
- The latest infrastructure market numbers.

SmartTechCheck Podcast by Moor Insights & Strategy, with Mark Vena

SmartTechCheck Podcast (3-23-21)
- Tech journalists Rob Pegoraro, John Quain, and Stewart Wolpin discuss the biggest consumer tech topics of the week

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

Chips and SaaS Kicking A$‪$
- Intel IDM 2.0 Strategy
- Oracle Updates ADW and SCM
- Lattice MVision and Sentry Updates
- AWS EC2 X2gd
- AMD 3rd Gen EPYC
- Intel Nabs Justin Long

Moor Insights & Strategy Podcast

Press Citations:

Baidu, AI, Chip/ SiliconAngle https://siliconangle.com/2021/03/15/baidus-ai-chip-business-kunlun-valued-2b-new-funding-round/
Cloud / SDXCentral https://www.sdxcentral.com/podcast/7-layers/multi-cloud-environment-from-multiple-angles/2021/03/
Cloud / CMSWire https://www.cmswire.com/information-management/future-proof-your-business-with-a-cloud-based-it-infrastructure/ (Steve McDowell)
Cisco, AMD / Fierceelectronics https://www.fierceelectronics.com/electronics/cisco-preps-rack-servers-amd-epyc-to-speed-up-electronic-trading
Dell, AMD / SiliconAngle https://siliconangle.com/2021/03/17/dell-debuts-refreshed-poweredge-server-line-based-amds-epyc-7003-server-cpus/
Dell / ChannelAsia https://www.channelasia.tech/article/687049/dell-directs-channel-server-portfolio-overhaul/
Dell/ ComputerWeekly https://www.computerweekly.com/microscope/news/252498086/Dell-arms-partners-with-refreshed-server-range
Dell, AI / Bloomberg https://www.bloomberg.com/press-releases/2021-03-17/dell-technologies-powers-ai-and-edge-computing-with-next-generation-poweredge-servers
Google, NVIDIA / SiliconAngle https://siliconangle.com/2021/03/18/google-debuts-a2-vms-powered-nvidia-a100-gpus-largest-cloud-instances-yet/
Intel/ Biz Journals https://www.bizjournals.com/portland/news/2021/03/23/intel-creates-foundry-business-launched-idm-2-0.html
Intel/ Barrons: https://www.barrons.com/news/intel-to-spend-20-bn-on-new-us-chip-plants-01616539205?tesla=y
Intel / SDXCentral https://www.sdxcentral.com/articles/news/analysts-applaud-intels-strategy-question-ability-to-execute/2021/03/
Intel / Livemint https://www.livemint.com/news/world/intel-to-spend-20-bn-on-new-us-chip-plants-11616545238382.html
Intel / Marketwatch https://www.marketwatch.com/story/intels-new-ceo-makes-bold-moves-in-manufacturing-11616550836
Intel / Fierce Eelectronics https://www.fierceelectronics.com/electronics/intel-plans-for-foundry-unit-and-20b-for-two-arizona-chip-fabs-prompt-hope
Intel / CNBC https://www.cnbc.com/2021/03/23/intel-makes-foundry-strategy-shift-under-new-ceo-pat-gelsinger-.html
Intel / InsideHPC https://insidehpc.com/2021/03/gelsinger-speaks-intels-new-ceo-debuts-today-what-will-he-say/
Intel, Chips / PCMAG https://www.pcmag.com/news/intels-7nm-pc-chip-will-arrive-in-2023-using-tsmcs-tech
Intel/ Silicon Angle: https://siliconangle.com/2021/03/23/strategic-shift-intel-ceo-pat-gelsinger-will-spend-20b-new-chip-foundry-business/
Intel, Chips / USNEWS https://www.usnews.com/news/top-news/articles/2021-03-23/intel-doubles-down-on-chip-manufacturing-plans-20-billion-for-new-arizona-sites
Intel/ Reuters https://financialpost.com/pmn/business-pmn/intel-to-spend-20-billion-on-u-s-chip-plants-as-ceo-challenges-asia-dominance-2
Intel / Venturebeat https://venturebeat.com/2021/03/23/intel-will-invest-in-factories-and-manufacture-chips-for-other-companies/
Intel/ RTE https://www.rte.ie/news/business/2021/0323/1205737-intel-to-create-1-600-new-jobs-at-leixlip-campus/
Nokia / TechTarget https://searchnetworking.techtarget.com/news/252497983/Nokia-to-cut-up-to-10000-jobs-over-two-years (Will Townsend)
5G / EETimes https://www.eetimes.com/huge-growth-seen-for-5g-mobile-devices/#
5G / Discover https://www.dhl.com/discover/business/productivity/5g-and-logistics
5G, RAN / SDXCentral https://www.sdxcentral.com/articles/news/us-carriers-diverge-on-mid-band-5g-ran-paths/2021/03/ (Will Townsend)
NXP, Austin / Austin American Statesman https://www.statesman.com/story/business/2021/03/12/nxp-could-lose-100-million-due-weather-shutdown-austin-plants/4664621001/
Samsung, Chip / SiliconAngle https://siliconangle.com/2021/03/17/samsung-may-not-launch-new-galaxy-note-year-chip-supply-problems-bite/

Other/Video

CNBC/ Chip supply and Intel and Qualcomm https://www.cnbc.com/video/2021/03/22/expect-six-more-months-before-chip-demand-normalizes-says-moor-insights-patrick-moorhead.html

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

AMD Radeon RX 6700XT
Intel Core i9-11900K, Core i5-11600K
Microsoft HoloLens 2

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

March 2021
- Arm Vision March 29 (Patrick Moorhead)
- CCA Mobile Carriers Show - March 30-31 (Will Townsend)
- Cisco LIVE, March 30 – April 1 (Patrick Moorhead, Matt Kimball, Steve McDowell, Will Townsend)
- TBD Event, March 31 (Patrick Moorhead)
- CCA Mobile Carriers Show, March 30-31 (Will Townsend)
April 2021
- Intel Xeon (Ice Lake) launch event (Matt Kimball)
- Arm Infrastructure Virtual Tech Day, April 6-8 (Matt Kimball, Steve McDowell)
- Quantum Tech, April 12-14 (Paul Smith-Goodson)
- NVIDIA GTC, April 12-16 (Steve McDowell, Patrick Moorhead, Paul Smith-Goodson)
- Aruba Atmosphere, April 13-14 (Will Townsend)
- RedisConf 2021, April 20-21 (Steve McDowell)
- SNIA Persistent Memory + Computational Storage Summit, April 21-22 (Steve McDowell)
- RedHat Analyst Event, April 27-29 (Steve McDowell)
- MVNOs North America, April 28-29 (Will Townsend)
May 2021
- Dell Technologies World, May 5-6 (Steve McDowell)
- IBM Think, May 11-12 (Steve McDowell, Matt Kimball, Patrick Moorhead, Paul Smith-Goodson)
- Cloudera Briefing, May 14 (Matt Kimball)
- Inside Quantum Technology Conference, Panel Member Quantum Policy – China, May 20 (Paul Smith-Goodson)
- Spark + A.I. Summit, May 24-28 (Steve McDowell)
- Google Data Cloud Summit, May 26 (Matt Kimball)
June 2021
- NetApp Analyst Summit, June 8-9 (Steve McDowell)
- Google A.I. Summit, June 10 (Matt Kimball)
- HPE Discover, June 22 (Patrick Moorhead, Will Townsend)
July 2021
- Google Security Summit, July 14 (Matt Kimball)
August 2021
September 2021
- Storage Develop Conference, Sept 28-29 (Steve McDowell)
October 2021
- VMWorld, October 5-7 (Steve McDowell)
- NAB 2021, October 10-13, Las Vegas, in person (Steve McDowell)
- Nutanix .NEXT, October 12-14 (Steve McDowell)
- Google Next 21, October 14 (Matt Kimball)
- IEEE Quantum Week Oct 18-22 (Paul Smith-Goodson)

The Team

Analysts, Analysts In-Residence, Contributors

Patrick Moorhead, Founder, President, Principal Analyst; Broad technology coverage plus deep insights into Cloud & SaaS, IoT, Personal Computing, Semiconductors, Automotive
Bill Curtis, Analyst In-Residence, IIoT, and Deep IoT Technology
Matt Kimball, Senior Analyst, Datacenter Servers, CI, and HCI
Melody Brue, Senior Analyst, Financial Tech
Steve McDowell, Senior Analyst, Datacenter Storage, and Storage Technologies
Anshel Sag, Senior Analyst; V.R., P.C. Gaming, Mobile Platforms
Paul Smith-Goodson, Senior Analyst; Machine Learning, A.I. and Quantum Computing
Will Townsend, Senior Analyst; Security, Carrier Services, Networking
Chris Wilder, Contributor, 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, A.P., AR, travel, writer
Lee LeClercq Williams, Business Associate

Patrick Moorhead

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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.