Qualcomm Technologies, Inc., a subsidiary of Qualcomm Incorporated, announced in conjunction with Lenovo the world's first 5G PC2 today at its Computex Press Conference. Project Limitless encompasses a strong technology collaboration between Qualcomm Technologies, Inc. a leader in 5G connectivity, and Lenovo, the leader in PCs, to bring innovation to the always on, always connected PC ecosystem. Project Limitless is powered by the Qualcomm Snapdragon 8cx 5G compute platform and is the world's first 7nm platform purpose-built for PCs that offers 5G connectivity.

The new platform is running on Windows 10 for ARM. It promises multi-day battery life and 7GBps transfer speeds with a Snapdragon x55 5G modem.Image Source: Tom's Hardware

Intel today revealed plans for Project Athena Open Labs in Taipei, Shanghai and Folsom, California, to support performance and low-power optimization of vendor components for laptops built to Project Athena design specifications and target experiences in 2020. Located in key ecosystem hubs and operated by teams of Intel engineers with system-on-chip (SOC) and platform power optimization expertise, the three Open Labs sites will begin operating in June 2019 to enable and optimize components.

"Across the industry, we each play an important role in delivering the advanced laptops of today and the future. Project Athena Open Labs are a critical step in enabling more extensive, day-to-day collaboration with the components ecosystem to continuously raise the bar for innovation across the platform," said Josh Newman, Intel vice president and general manager of PC Innovation Segments, Client Computing Group.

Intel Corporation today announced its intention to exit the 5G smartphone modem business and complete an assessment of the opportunities for 4G and 5G modems in PCs, internet of things devices and other data-centric devices. Intel will also continue to invest in its 5G network infrastructure business. The company will continue to meet current customer commitments for its existing 4G smartphone modem product line, but does not expect to launch 5G modem products in the smartphone space, including those originally planned for launches in 2020.

"We are very excited about the opportunity in 5G and the 'cloudification' of the network, but in the smartphone modem business it has become apparent that there is no clear path to profitability and positive returns," said Intel CEO Bob Swan. "5G continues to be a strategic priority across Intel, and our team has developed a valuable portfolio of wireless products and intellectual property. We are assessing our options to realize the value we have created, including the opportunities in a wide variety of data-centric platforms and devices in a 5G world." Intel expects to provide additional details in its upcoming first-quarter 2019 earnings release and conference call, scheduled for April 25.

NETGEAR , Inc., the industry's leading provider of leading-edge networking products for the home and office, has announced the availability of four new routers that support the latest and fastest Wi-Fi networking standard - Wi-Fi 6 (802.11ax).

Today's households are dealing with an increasing number of connected devices and an increasing demand for greater bandwidth from streaming video, audio and online gaming. Add to this the plethora of smart home devices from IP cameras, voice assistants, smart thermostats and appliances, all of which are dependent on a constant connection to the cloud. These devices just increase the complexity of a network as they compete for bandwidth, pushing wireless home networks beyond the technical threshold for the current generation of Wi-Fi. NETGEAR has solved for this modern-day dilemma with the introduction of a full suite of ultra-fast Wi-Fi 6 routers.

Today at Mobile World Congress (MWC) 2019, Intel announced the Intel FPGA Programmable Acceleration Card N3000 (Intel FPGA PAC N3000), designed for service providers to enable 5G next-generation core and virtualized radio access network solutions. The Intel FPGA PAC N3000 accelerates many virtualized workloads, ranging from 5G radio access networks to core network applications.

"As the mobile and telecommunications industry gears up for an explosion in internet protocol traffic and 5G rollouts, we designed the Intel FPGA PAC N3000 to provide the programmability and flexibility with the performance, power efficiency, density and system integration capabilities the market needs to fully support the capabilities of 5G networks," said Reynette Au, Intel vice president of marketing, Programmable Solutions Group.

SuperMicro may not be household name in consumer motherboards right now, but they once were a decent alternative in the market - or so I've been told by people much more knowledgeable than me in that regard, as I never laid my hands on one. The company is now more known for its server products, where it has focused most of its attention in the past decade - an effort that gave it a good, third-place hold in that market. And if the company can command such a market share in a much more requirements-heavy environment such as the server market demands, then it's likely those design decisions and developments will find themselves trickling down to the consumer side in any sort of consumer, gaming-grade product the company decided to tackle.

To that end, SuperMicro is gearing up to re introduce themselves to the consumer market, accompanying the wave of new technologies coming to the market in a few years - namely, PCIe Gen 4 and DDR5 memory. The company seems to think that this will mark a perfect opportunity for a strong comeback to the consumer market - where they now only offer a handful of motherboard solutions for Intel's CPUs. One such example is the C9Z390-PGW motherboard, based on Intel's Z390 chipset - with its 10-phase VRM design, PLC chip for doubling of PCIe lanes, and 10 Gigabit Lan. But not only on said "typical" consumer motherboard techonologies will SuperMicro be delivering - if the company has its way, anything from 5G, IoT, Mission Learning and Artificial Intelligence can be incorporated for some use case or another on consumer-grade motherboards, thus providing an axis of penetration for SuperMicro - and its entire partner eco-system.

The gift that is CES keeps on giving! We go over the NETGEAR suite, and it was more of an entire floor, in this article with the company showing off their involvement in every networking sector imaginable- the professional environment, consumer and retail networking solutions, and smart home devices. Indeed, stepping off the elevator itself led to a hallway lined with Meural canvasses, which are very well built frames that have an integrated display to show off images of your choosing. This public hallway had generation 2.0 canvasses, with the new-for-CES generation 3.0 series inside the show room that encompasses four different frame options in two different sizes- the currently available 27" version, and the newer 21.5" size for those wanting something smaller.

Meural canvasses can be used in landscape or portrait configurations, and supports a library of over 30,000 curated art images at an optional membership cost of $49.95/year. The new generation is available from August 2019, with the new screens having a wider color gamut and a truer-to-life display, that was impressive. These are definitely for a niche audience, however, but I can appreciate NETGEAR wanting to provide more use cases for their networking solutions. The current Gen 2.0 27" canvas starts at $595 (dimensions with the frame are larger than 27"), and an optional pivoting stand with more display I/O options is an additional $49.95 for when you want to have your own images connected to it. For the rest of the tour, be sure to read past the break!

(Editor's Note: This new wireless technology and particular frequency of operation make it especially interesting for VR scenarios, since the high data throughput within an enclosed space seems to be one of the ideal applications for this technology.)

Qualcomm Technologies today announced a family of 60GHz Wi-Fi chipsets, the QCA64x8 and QCA64x1, delivering 10+ gigabit-per-second (Gbps) network speeds and wire-equivalent latency, while setting the industry low-power benchmark for extended device battery life. As a new connectivity era dawns, reliance on high-bandwidth mmWave spectrum will increase, bringing powerful new wireless experiences like ultra-high-definition video streaming, Virtual/Augmented Reality (VR/AR), mobile screen casting and fixed wireless mesh backhaul.

Razer , the leading global lifestyle brand for gamers, today announced the Razer Sila, a high-performance WiFi router designed for home users requiring WiFi service optimized for high-performance gaming, streaming and downloading multimedia content. With the upsurge in mobile gaming, and with many homes unable to run a wired network to every room, fast and reliable WiFi is more important than ever. The Razer Sila router is designed to deliver lag-free gaming and smooth, interruption-free streaming over a fast wireless network, meeting the needs of today's mobile, console and laptop users.

The Razer Sila features a suite of technologies designed to give gamers the fastest, most reliable WiFi connection within their home or office with Razer FasTrack, Multi-Channel ZeroWait DFS and Mesh capability with a dedicated backhaul. Setup and management through a mobile app makes Sila installation and use simple and quick. The Razer FasTrack software featured in the Razer Sila is a proprietary QoS engine for smart traffic management. By using deep packet inspection and adaptive learning technology, Razer FasTrack allows users to prioritize traffic based on application and device types, from mobile phones and smart TVs through to laptops, PCs or consoles. With built-in detection for PlayStation, Xbox and Switch consoles, users can easily fine tune their networks for the smoothest gaming or streaming experiences. Razer FasTrack also features a one-touch gaming mode, to automatically reserve bandwidth for online gaming.

Intel today announced details on the expansion of its portfolio of 100G silicon photonics transceivers beyond the data center and into the network edge. At the European Conference on Optical Communication (ECOC) in Rome, Intel unveiled specifics on new silicon photonics products that are optimized to accelerate the movement of massive amounts of data being generated by new 5G use cases and Internet of Things (IoT) applications. The latest 100G silicon photonics transceivers are optimized to meet the bandwidth requirements of next-generation communications infrastructure while withstanding harsh environmental conditions.

"Our hyperscale cloud customers are currently using Intel's 100G silicon photonics transceivers to deliver high-performance data center infrastructure at scale. By extending this technology outside the data center and into 5G infrastructure at the edge of the network, we can provide the same benefits to communications service providers while supporting 5G fronthaul bandwidth needs," said Dr. Hong Hou, vice president and general manager of Intel's Silicon Photonics Product Division.

The Joint Photographic Experts Group (JPEG), an international committee headed by an EPFL professor, has just unveiled JPEG XS. A new time of higher amounts of content consumption - and the ways we consume it - requires a new way to send its data. With this new format, the image-compression process uses less energy, and higher-quality images can be sent with low latency over broadband networks like 5G. JPEG XS will have applications in areas such as virtual reality, augmented reality, space imagery, self-driving cars and professional movie editing.

Headed by Touradj Ebrahimi, a professor in EPFL's School of Engineering (STI), the JPEG XS format was essentially designed to stream live video and VR - it's not a replacement to JPEG, and file-sizes will actually end up being slightly bigger. The big push with this format is lower compression and decompression latency, as well as energy efficiency of the decompression process itself. The fact that it's open source and has a universal HDR coding format also means that its uptake should be relatively high.

Today, Intel announced it is collaborating with Dell, HP, Lenovo and Microsoft to bring 5G connectivity to Windows PCs with Intel XMM 8000 series commercial 5G modems. Intel expects the first high-performing 5G-connected PCs to surface in the market in the second half of 2019.

Mobile World Congress (MWC) attendees will get a first sneak peek at a concept 5G-connected PC - a detachable 2 in 1 - connected by an early 5G modem and powered by 8th Generation Intel Core i5 processors. At MWC, Intel will showcase the power of 5G on a PC by livestreaming video over the 5G network. This concept is one of many stepping stones for moving the industry forward in what's possible for 5G-enabled PCs.

5G is not just another generation of wireless connectivity. It promises new opportunities for technology innovation across the computing and connectivity landscape from the cloud to the network and the client.

Micron Technology, Inc., a leading memory and storage provider, today announced with Rambus Inc., Northwest Logic and Avery Design, their efforts to deliver a comprehensive solution for GDDR6, the world's fastest discrete memory. This first-of-its-kind solution would enable GDDR6 use in advanced applications such as high-performance networking, autonomous vehicles, artificial intelligence and 5G infrastructure. Prior generations of GDDR memories, enabled by GPU vendors, were focused exclusively on the graphics market. While this allowed graphics and game console designs to take advantage of the significant performance advantage offered by GDDR, other applications could not because the necessary building blocks were not available.

TPCAST, the Wireless VR Solutions leader, announces its Next-Generation Wireless VR Technologies, TPCAST ​​2.0, which utilize the new generation ultra-low latency codec technology and an upgraded TPCAST ​​real-time data control protocol. These combined technologies pave the way to allow TPCAST to continue to deliver high video quality, low latency, and real-time data transmission. The introduction of these new technologies, supporting short, mid and long-range distances and covering multiple VR deployment ranges, strategically places TPCAST in the forefront of the future evolution of the Wireless VR Market.

The TPCAST 2.0 technology includes three main features. The first element is the ultra-low latency codec, capable of compressing VR content on a 50:1 ratio which significantly reduces the bandwidth required for video data transmission while bounding the latency to 1ms. This easy-to-use, stable, and ultra-low latency codec enables TPCAST's product family to deliver consistently high-quality real-time video transmission. The second feature of the TPCAST 2.0 technology is its scalability making it easy to adapt to any headset including 3k, 4k, and 8k video resolution HMDs in the market. The third feature is the capability to preserve the user experience compared to a wired connection. TPCAST's proprietary technology, and accumulated VR knowledge base, gained by its long-term leading position in the Wireless VR space, enables TPCAST's products to deliver a stable and commercial-grade VR experience.

LG Electronics (LG) is partnering with HERE Technologies (HERE), a global provider of digital mapping and location services, to offer a next-generation telematics solution for autonomous vehicles. The solution combines LG's advanced telematics technology with high-precision map data and location services powered by the HERE Open Location Platform. Through their planned collaboration, the companies aim to support automakers globally with a robust and secure data communications hub for highly automated and fully autonomous cars.

Telematics is an industry that is defined as the integration of telecommunications and informatics to provide vehicle safety and entertainment services such as navigation, location confirmation and emergency dispatch through various communication technologies, from GPS and DMB (Digital Multimedia Broadcasting) networks to Bluetooth, Wi-Fi and mobile communication. LG, the leader in the global telematics market since 2013, is committed to introducing next-generation solutions that offer high-precision map information to meet the needs of the quickly expanding autonomous vehicle industry.

KDDI and Samsung Electronics have successfully completed the first 5G demonstration on a moving train traveling at over 100 km/hour (over 60 mph). This was achieved along a section of track where the distance between two stations was approximately 1.5km (nearly 1 mile). During the demonstration, the companies achieved a successful downlink and uplink handover as well as a peak speed of 1.7 Gbps. The tests were carried out from October 17th through the 19th in the city of Saitama in Japan, near Tokyo. For the tests, Samsung's 5G pre-commercial end-to-end solution was used, which is composed of a 5G router (CPE), radio access unit (5G Radio), virtualized RAN and virtualized core.

The demonstration leveraged capabilities driven by 5G, such as high throughput, low latency and massive connections, which verified potential services and use cases that would be highly-beneficial to passengers and operators of high-speed trains. This could pave the way to vastly improved backhaul for onboard WiFi, superior passenger infotainment and increased security and analytics.

Aquantia Corp., a leader in high-speed, Multi-Gigabit Ethernet connectivity solutions, today announced its plan to help PC gamers and hardware enthusiasts squeeze new levels of performance out of their systems. Today, Aquantia announced a special holiday promotion with international distribution partners Arrow, WPGA and WPI, to deliver the industry's fastest Ethernet adapters - Aquantia AQtion Network Interface Cards (NICs) - to gamers and performance PC users at a giftworthy price point for a limited time. The Aquantia AQtion AQN-108 5G NIC is now available for $59.00 and the Aquantia AQtion AQN-107 10G NIC is available for an unprecedented $69.00.

The super-low latency and in-game advantage that AQtion Multi-Gigabit NICs deliver make them the perfect holiday surprise for any hardware enthusiast. The performance PC user - whether a gamer, video editing enthusiast, designer, engineer or just a tried and true geek - wants the ability to move huge volumes of digital life data seamlessly and quickly. In a home or office, that seamless capability requires a 5G or even a 10G NIC card.

Intel today announced substantial advances in its wireless product roadmap to accelerate the adoption of 5G. Highlights include the introduction of the Intel XMM 8000 series, Intel's first family of 5G new radio (5G NR) multi-mode commercial modems, and Intel's latest LTE modem, the Intel XMM 7660. Intel also announced it has successfully completed a full end-to-end 5G call based on its early 5G silicon, the Intel 5G Modem - a key milestone in its development. Finally, the Intel XMM 7560 modem unveiled at Mobile World Congress 2017 has achieved gigabit-class speeds.

"Intel is committed to delivering leading 5G multi-mode modem technology and making sure the transition to 5G is smooth," said Dr. Cormac Conroy, Intel corporate vice president and general manager of the Communication and Devices Group. "Our investments in a full portfolio of modem technologies and products are critical to achieving the vision of seamless 5G connectivity."