Google has made changes to its Google One plans yet again, although this time around, its customers are actually getting more for their money. For those not familiar with the Google One service, it's Google's Dropbox, Microsoft's OneDrive and Apple's iCloud. However, Google has included things like support for its services though its One service and higher tiers have seen added benefits beyond more storage space, such as free access to Google's VPN service. Now the company has decided to give those on its 100 GB US$1.99 and 200 GB US$2.99 service tiers access to not only its VPN service, but has also added what the company calls a dark web report.

The dark web report allows you to search for potential stolen private information on the dark web, or rather, Google does the searching for you and tells you if there are any results in a report. The tricky part here is that you need to have the right info to search for in the first place, but it could be something simple like your email address or phone number, but it could also be your credit card details. The VPN service is for the time being limited to 22 countries that you can find in the screenshot below. It's unlikely that Google offers the best VPN service out there, but it could help protect against man in the middle attacks when using public WiFi if nothing else and it's a decent perk if you're already paying for the Google One service.

For more than a decade, Intel and its partners have been on a mission to virtualize the world's networks, from the core to the RAN (radio access network) and out to the edge, moving them from fixed-function hardware onto programmable, software-defined platforms, making networks more agile while driving down their complexity and cost.

Now operators are looking to cross the next chasm in delivering cloud-native functionality for automating, managing and responding to an increasingly diverse mix of data and services, providing organizations with the intelligence needed at the edge of their operations. Today, Intel announced a range of products and solutions driving this transition and broad industry support from leading operators, original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) and independent software vendors (ISVs).

NVIDIA has recently reported its Q4 earnings, and the earnings call following the report contains exciting details about the company and its plans to open up to new possibilities. NVIDIA's CEO Jensen Huang has stated that the company is on track to become an AI-as-a-Service (AIaaS) provider, which technically makes it a cloud service provider (CSP). "Today, I want to share with you the next level of our business model to help put AI within reach of every enterprise customer. We are partnering with major service -- cloud service providers to offer NVIDIA AI cloud services, offered directly by NVIDIA and through our network of go-to-market partners, and hosted within the world's largest clouds." Said Mr. Huang, adding that "NVIDIA AI as a service offers enterprises easy access to the world's most advanced AI platform, while remaining close to the storage, networking, security and cloud services offered by the world's most advanced clouds. Customers can engage NVIDIA AI cloud services at the AI supercomputer, acceleration library software, or pretrained AI model layers."

In addition to enrolling other CSPs into the race, NVIDIA is also going to offer DGX machines on demand in the cloud. Using select CSPs, you can get access to an entire DGX and harness the computing power for AI research purposes. Mr. Huang noted "NVIDIA DGX is an AI supercomputer, and the blueprint of AI factories being built around the world. AI supercomputers are hard and time-consuming to build. Today, we are announcing the NVIDIA DGX Cloud, the fastest and easiest way to have your own DGX AI supercomputer, just open your browser. NVIDIA DGX Cloud is already available through Oracle Cloud Infrastructure and Microsoft Azure, Google GCP, and others on the way."

Marvell Technology, Inc., a leader in data infrastructure semiconductor solutions, announced today that it has selected Amazon Web Services, Inc. (AWS) as its cloud provider for electronic design automation (EDA). A cloud-first approach helps Marvell to rapidly and securely scale its service on the world's leading cloud, rise to the challenges brought by increasingly complex chip design processes, and deliver continuous innovation for the expanding needs across the automotive, carrier, data center, and enterprise infrastructure markets it serves. The work extends the longstanding relationship between the two companies—Marvell is also a key semiconductor supplier for AWS, helping the company support the design and rapid delivery of cloud services that best meet customers' demanding requirements.

EDA refers to the specialized and compute-intensive processes used in chip making and is a critical piece of Marvell's R&D. Over the years, the number of transistors on an integrated chip has increased exponentially. Each advance in chip design calls for a calculated application of software modules overseeing logic design, debugging, component placement, wire routing, optimization of time and power consumption, and verification. Due to the computationally intensive nature of EDA workloads, it is no longer cost-effective or timely to run EDA on premises. By powering its EDA with AWS, Marvell leverages an unmatched portfolio of services including secure, elastic, high-performance compute capacity in the cloud to solve challenges around speed, latency, security of IP, and data transfer.

Facing global economic headwinds, the four major North American cloud service providers (CSPs) have scaled back their server procurement quantities for 2023 and could make further downward corrections in the future. Meta is the leader among the four in terms of server demand reduction, followed by Microsoft, Google, and AWS. TrendForce has lowered the YoY growth rate of their total server procurement quantity for this year from the original projection of 6.9% to the latest projection of 4.4%. With CSPs cutting demand, global server shipments are now estimated to grow by just 1.87% YoY for 2023. Regarding the server DRAM market, prices there are estimated to drop by around 20~25% QoQ for 1Q23 as CSPs' downward corrections exacerbate the oversupply situation.

Looking at the four CSPs individually, the YoY decline of Meta's server procurement quantity has been widened to 3.0% and could get larger. The instability of the global economy remains the largest variable for all CSPs. Besides this, Meta has also encountered a notable obstacle in expanding its operation in Europe. Specifically, its data center in Denmark has not met the regional standard for emissions. This issue is expected to hinder its progress in setting up additional data centers across the EU. Moreover, businesses related to e-commerce account for about 98% of Meta's revenue. Therefore, the decline in e-commerce activities amidst the recent easing of the COVID-19 pandemic has impacted Meta's growth momentum. Additionally, Meta's server demand has been affected by the high level of component inventory held by server ODMs.

Intel Corporation today reported fourth-quarter and full-year 2022 financial results. The company also announced that its board of directors has declared a quarterly dividend of $0.365 per share on the company's common stock, which will be payable on March 1, 2023, to shareholders of record as of February 7, 2023.

"Despite the economic and market headwinds, we continued to make good progress on our strategic transformation in Q4, including advancing our product roadmap and improving our operational structure and processes to drive efficiencies while delivering at the low-end of our guided range," said Pat Gelsinger, Intel CEO. "In 2023, we will continue to navigate the short-term challenges while striving to meet our long-term commitments, including delivering leadership products anchored on open and secure platforms, powered by at-scale manufacturing and supercharged by our incredible team."

Dell Technologies expands the industry's top selling server portfolio, with an additional 13 next-generation Dell PowerEdge servers, designed to accelerate performance and reliability for powerful computing across core data centers, large-scale public clouds and edge locations. Next-generation rack, tower and multi-node PowerEdge servers, with 4th Gen Intel Xeon Scalable processors, include Dell software and engineering advancements, such as a new Smart Flow design, to improve energy and cost efficiency. Expanded Dell APEX capabilities will help organizations take an as-a-Service approach, allowing for more effective IT operations that make the most of compute resources while minimizing risk.

"Customers come to Dell for easily managed yet sophisticated and efficient servers with advanced capabilities to power their business-critical workloads," said Jeff Boudreau, president and general manager, Infrastructure Solutions Group, Dell Technologies. "Our next-generation Dell PowerEdge servers offer unmatched innovation that raises the bar in power efficiency, performance and reliability while simplifying how customers can implement a Zero Trust approach for greater security throughout their IT environments."

IceWhale Technologies has launched ZimaBoard, a low-cost single board server that functions as personal cloud storage and software router, and allows users to set up a VPN, stream 4K video, access media collections, and reinvent smart home projects on Amazon. Three models with tiered processing power are available in the brand's shop for US customers: ZimaBoard 216 (2 GB RAM, 16 GB eMMC storage, dual-core Intel Celeron processor) is $139.99 USD, ZimaBoard 432 (4 GB RAM, 32 GB eMMC storage, quad-core Intel Celeron processor) is $169.99 USD, and ZimaBoad 832 (8 GB RAM, 32 GB eMMC storage, quad-core Intel Celeron processor) is $229.99 USD.

"Following our Kickstarter campaign and fulfillment to backers in July, we're excited to announce our move to Amazon," said founder Lauren Pan. "Getting here was no small feat, especially after more than a year of chip shortages and unpredictable lockdowns, but here we are. ZimaBoard is one board to rule them all—one that puts individuals back in control."

Innodisk, a leading global provider of industrial-grade flash storage, DRAM memory and embedded peripherals, has announced its latest step into the AI market, with the launch of EXMU-X261, an FPGA Machine Vision Platform. Powered by AMD's Xilinx Kria K26 SOM, which was designed to enable smart city and smart factory applications, Innodisk's FPGA Machine Vision Platform is set to lead the way for industrial system integrators looking to develop machine vision applications.

Automated defect inspection, a key machine vision application, is an essential technology in modern manufacturing. Automated visual inspection guarantees that the product works as expected and meets specifications. In these cases, it is vital that a fast and highly accurate inspection system is used. Without AI, operators must manually inspect each product, taking an average of three seconds per item. Now, with the help of AI solutions such as Innodisk's FPGA Machine Vision Platform, product inspection in factories can be automated, and the end result is not only faster and cheaper, but can be completely free of human error.

During the Snapdragon Summit 2022, Qualcomm Technologies, Inc. and Adobe announced an expanded collaboration to support creative experiences on Snapdragon powered devices across mobile, compute, and XR platforms. Together, the companies will push the boundaries of creativity and document productivity for Snapdragon users.

Building on the rich experiences already found with Adobe Photoshop and Adobe Lightroom for Windows on Snapdragon devices, Adobe remains committed to bringing the best of Creative Cloud natively to the Snapdragon platform, including Adobe Fresco and Adobe Acrobat. Bringing the strength of Adobe Sensei, Adobe's artificial intelligence (AI) technologies, alongside the dedicated on-device Qualcomm AI Engine on Snapdragon compute platforms, users can experience enhanced device performance for creative workflows and tasks including super-resolution, background removal and color enhancement, editing content on-the-go, and more.

HyperX, the gaming peripherals team at HP Inc. and brand leader in gaming and esports, today announced the release of the HyperX Cloud Stinger 2 wireless gaming headset. Offering signature HyperX comfort and durability with soft memory foam and premium leatherette, the Cloud Stinger 2 wireless includes DTS Headphone:X Spatial Audio for improved 3D audio spatialization and localization accuracy and up to 20 hours of battery life for cable-free gaming.

Cloud Stinger 2 wireless utilizes large 50 mm drivers to provide clearer audio with DTS Headphone:X virtual spatial audio to deliver an immersive 7.1 sound environment. The headset also features easy-access audio controls on the earcup and a swivel-to-mute, noise-canceling flexible microphone for added convenience, reduced background noise and clearer voice quality.

Rescale, the leader in high performance computing built for the cloud to accelerate engineering innovation, today announced it is teaming with NVIDIA to integrate the NVIDIA AI platform into Rescale's HPC-as-a-Service offering. The integration is designed to advance computational engineering simulation with AI and machine learning, helping enterprises commercialize new product innovations faster, more efficiently and at less cost.

Additionally, Rescale announced the world's first Compute Recommendation Engine (CRE) to power Intelligent Computing for HPC and AI workloads. Optimizing workload performance can be prohibitively complex as organizations seek to balance decisions among architectures, geographic regions, price points, scalability, service levels, compliance, and sustainability objectives. Developed using machine learning on NVIDIA architectures with infrastructure telemetry, industry benchmarks, and full-stack metadata spanning over 100 million production HPC workloads, Rescale CRE provides customers unprecedented insight to optimize overall performance.

The demand for data is insatiable, from 5G to the cloud to smart cities. As a society we want more autonomy, information to fuel our decisions and habits, and connection - to people, stories, and experiences.

To address these demands, the cloud infrastructure of tomorrow will need to handle the coming data explosion and the effective processing of evermore complex workloads … all while increasing power efficiency and minimizing carbon footprint. It's why the industry is increasingly looking to the performance, power efficiency, specialized processing and workload acceleration enabled by Arm Neoverse to redefine and transform the world's computing infrastructure.

Marvell today unveiled its LiquidSecurity 2 (LS2) hardware security module (HSM) adapter, the industry's most advanced solution for enabling encryption, key management, authentication and other HSM services in the cloud. LS2 is a converged security platform for payment, privacy compliance, and general purpose applications, and is powered by a cloud-optimized Marvell OCTEON data processing unit (DPU), proven at scale across the world's largest hyperscale clouds. The new Marvell HSM adapter offers the industry's highest performing cryptographic acceleration and processing, including hardware-secured storage of up to one million keys for AES, RSA and ECC encryption algorithms, and 45 partitions for robust multi-tenant use cases.

As enterprises migrate from on-premises to private- or multi-cloud environments, the industry-leading Marvell LiquidSecurity platform empowers cloud service providers and large enterprises to create HSM-as-a-service clouds. Marvell's HSM adapters have the latest FIPS-certified security boundary, designed for the most demanding applications deployed at cloud-scale while offering best-in-class cost, performance and energy efficiency for both public and private clouds.

Cloud storage provider Backblaze is one of the industry players providing insightful reports into the health and reliability of the storage mediums they invest in to support their business. In its most recent report, the company shared data that may finally be pointing towards the general perception (and one of SSD's call to fame upon their introduction): that they boast of higher reliability and lower failure rates than HDDs.

The company's latest reports shows that SSDs have entered their fifth operating year without an escalation in failure rates: something that seems to plague HDDs pretty heavily starting from year 4. The idea is simple: SSDs should be more reliable because there are no moving part (no platters and no read/write heads that can fail). However, SSDs do have other points of failure, such as NAND itself (the reason there's TBW ratings) or its controller. Backblaze's data does however show that those concerns may be overrated. Of course, there's a chance that SSDs employed by Backblaze will hit a "reliability" wall of the sort that HDDs seem to enter in year four of their operation, where failure rates increase immensely. More data throughout a larger span of time will be welcome, but for now, it does seem that SSDs are the best way for users to keep their data available.

LG Electronics (LG) is expanding the gaming experience on its latest TVs, adding new cloud-gaming services to give users more choice, and a UI update that makes it easier to get in the game. These latest upgrades are representative of LG's continuing commitment to bringing gamer-centric content and capabilities to its industry-leading TVs.

Requiring no PC, console or game installations, cloud-gaming platforms make gaming more accessible than ever. Blacknut and Utomik Cloud, arriving on LG TVs in September and November, respectively, deliver a wealth of titles spanning classic AAA games, indie favorites, story-driven adventures, sports, strategy and more. Via monthly subscriptions, the two apps offer users the ability to select and instantly play any game from their extensive catalogs - both of which welcome new titles monthly.

AMD announced that the AMD Pensando Distributed Services Card, powered by the industry's most advanced data processing unit (DPU)1, will be one of the first DPU solutions to support VMware vSphere 8 available from leading server vendors including Dell Technologies, HPE and Lenovo.

As data center applications grow in scale and sophistication, the resulting workloads increase the demand on infrastructure services as well as crucial CPU resources. VMware vSphere 8 aims to reimagine IT infrastructure as a composable architecture with a goal of offloading infrastructure workloads such as networking, storage, and security from the CPU by leveraging the new vSphere Distributed Services Engine, freeing up valuable CPU cycles to be used for business functions and revenue generating applications.

Microsoft is announcing the general availability of the latest Azure Virtual Machines featuring the Ampere Altra Arm-based processor. The new virtual machines will be generally available on September 1, and customers can now launch them in 10 Azure regions and multiple availability zones around the world. In addition, the Arm-based virtual machines can be included in Kubernetes clusters managed using Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS). This ability has been in preview and will be generally available over the coming weeks in all the regions that offer the new virtual machines.

Earlier this year, we launched the preview of the new general-purpose Dpsv5 and Dplsv5 and memory optimized Epsv5 Azure Virtual Machine series, built on the Ampere Altra processor. These new virtual machines have been engineered to efficiently run scale-out, cloud-native workloads. Since then, hundreds of customers have tested and experienced firsthand the excellent price-performance that the Arm architecture can provide for web and application servers, open-source databases, microservices, Java and.NET applications, gaming, media servers, and more. Starting today, all Azure customers can deploy these new virtual machines using the Azure portal, SDKs, API, PowerShell, and the command-line interface (CLI).

Phison Electronics Corp., a global leader in NAND flash controller and storage solutions, today announced the launch of its X1 controller based solid state drive (SSD) platform that delivers the industry's most advanced enterprise SSD solution. Engineered with Phison's technology to meet the evolving demands of faster and smarter global data-center infrastructures, the X1 SSD platform was designed in partnership with Seagate Technology Holdings plc, a world leader in mass-data storage infrastructure solutions. The X1 SSD customizable platform offers more computing with less energy consumption. With a cost-effective solution that eliminates bottlenecks and improves quality of service, the X1 offers more than a 30 percent increase in data reads than existing market competitors for the same power used.

"We combined Seagate's proprietary data management and customer integration capabilities with Phison's cutting-edge technology to create highly customized SSDs that meet the ever-evolving needs of the enterprise storage market," said Sai Varanasi, senior vice president of product and business marketing at Seagate Technology. "Seagate is excited to partner with Phison on developing advanced SSD technology to provide the industry with increased density, higher performance and power efficiency for all mass capacity storage providers."

MaxLinear Inc. today announced the availability of Panther III, the latest in the company's Panther series of storage accelerators. The company is showcasing this product at the Flash Memory Summit in Santa Clara, CA, August 2 - 4. Booth 111. Businesses need immediate access to larger and larger amounts of data and, at the same time, are faced with security and CAPEX costs challenges. With its 16 nanometer (nm) DPU architecture, Panther III provides breakthrough data reduction, encryption, deduplication, and data protection and sets a new standard in storage acceleration with a high throughput of 200 Gbps and ultra-low single-pass transformation latency.

Panther III opens new opportunities within the storage market, including all-flash-array and non-volatile memory express (NVMe) systems. As with previous generations of Panther products, Panther III offers powerful data reduction technology that intelligently offloads the CPU to open all tiers of storage to their full bandwidth potential with no CPU or software limitations. These capabilities enable intelligent and faster dataset delivery, high-performance analytics, and improved workload accuracy in fast-growing Edge to disaggregated computing of the public cloud.

Super Micro Computer, Inc., a global leader in enterprise computing, storage, networking, and green computing technology, is announcing future Total IT Solutions for availability with Android Cloud Gaming and Media Processing & Delivery. These new solutions will incorporate the Intel Data Center GPU, codenamed Arctic Sound-M, and will be supported on several Supermicro servers. Supermicro solutions that will contain the Intel Data Center GPUs codenamed Arctic Sound-M, include the 4U 10x GPU server for transcoding and media delivery, the Supermicro BigTwin system with up to eight Intel Data Center GPUs, codenamed Arctic Sound-M in 2U for media processing applications, the Supermicro CloudDC server for edge AI inferencing, and the Supermicro 2U 2-Node server with three Intel Data Center GPUs, codenamed Arctic Sound-M per node, optimized for cloud gaming. Additional systems will be made available later this year.

"Supermicro will extend our media processing solutions by incorporating the Intel Data Center GPU," said Charles Liang, President, and CEO, Supermicro. "The new solutions will increase video stream rates and enable lower latency Android cloud gaming. As a result, Android cloud gaming performance and interactivity will increase dramatically with the Supermicro BigTwin systems, while media delivery and transcoding will show dramatic improvements with the new Intel Data Center GPUs. The solutions will expand our market-leading accelerated computing offerings, including everything from Media Processing & Delivery to Collaboration, and HPC."

Microsoft Corp. today announced the following results for the quarter ended June 30, 2022, as compared to the corresponding period of last fiscal year:

• Revenue was $51.9 billion and increased 12% (up 16% in constant currency)
• Operating income was $20.5 billion and increased 8% (up 14% in constant currency)
• Net income was $16.7 billion and increased 2% (up 7% in constant currency)
• Diluted earnings per share was $2.23 and increased 3% (up 8% in constant currency)

"We see real opportunity to help every customer in every industry use digital technology to overcome today's challenges and emerge stronger," said Satya Nadella, chairman and chief executive officer of Microsoft. "No company is better positioned than Microsoft to help organizations deliver on their digital imperative - so they can do more with less."

The recent semiconductor shortage has put an unprecedented amount of focus on the industry. Both commercial and government entities have come to recognize the lack of advanced node semiconductor manufacturing capabilities onshore in the United States. Intel Foundry Services (IFS) entry into the commercial foundry space is poised to change all that. As part of IFS Accelerator program, Intel recently announced their new IFS Cloud Alliance program, with Microsoft Azure as one of the inaugural members.

This is the latest chapter in a partnership between Intel and Microsoft that stretches back decades all the way back to the early days of the personal computer. In the last few years, Intel and Microsoft have collaborated on advancing semiconductor design on the cloud by working together to bring out EDA centric cloud compute such as the FX series on Azure, working with EDA vendors to enhance their software to better take advantage of the elasticity of the Azure cloud, as well as collaborating on a secure cloud-based semiconductor development platform for the US Department of Defense RAMP and RAMP-C programs.

Hewlett Packard Enterprise (NYSE: HPE) today announced that it is the first major server provider to deliver a new line of cloud-native compute solutions using processors from Ampere. The new HPE solutions provide service providers and enterprises embracing cloud-native development with an agile, extensible, and trusted compute foundation to drive innovation.

Available in Q3 2022, the new HPE ProLiant RL300 Gen11 server is the first in a series of HPE ProLiant RL Gen11 servers that deliver next-generation compute performance with higher power efficiency using Ampere Altra and Ampere Altra Max cloud-native processors.

TerraMaster, a professional brand that specializes in providing innovative storage products for home, businesses and enterprises, announces the global availability of the new TOS 5 operating system - officially released on June 13, 2022. Compared to TOS 4, TerraMaster TOS 5 features more than 100 new functions that provided great improvements and tighter security for data storage. Some of the new feature functions for higher data protection includes WORM file system support, Security Isolation Mode, and OTP Authorization.