(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.

VIA Technologies, Inc., today announced the launch of the VIA ALTA DS 3 Edge AI system. Powered by the Qualcomm Snapdragon 820E Embedded Platform, the system enables the rapid development and deployment of intelligent signage, kiosk, and access control devices that require real-time image and video capture, processing, and display capabilities.

The VIA ALTA DS 3 harnesses the cutting-edge compute, graphics, and AI processing capabilities of the Qualcomm Snapdragon 820E Embedded Platform to facilitate the creation of vibrant new user experiences by allowing customers to combine their own AI applications with immersive multimedia signage display content in a compact, low-power system.

Since its inception in 2006, the Republic of Gamers has pursued a mandate to push boundaries to deliver a better gaming experience. We started with motherboards, spread to virtually every DIY desktop component, and have been building hardcore gaming laptops for more than a decade.

The smartphones in that early era barely qualified as such, but they started a revolution that transformed the computing landscape. We watched closely as these digital sidearms became increasingly capable gaming machines and all-around computers, and we saw how developers harnessed their growing power to take mobile gameplay and graphics to the next level. We also gained insight from esports professionals, regular players, and game developers on how mobile gaming devices could be improved.

Qualcomm Technologies, Inc., a subsidiary of Qualcomm Incorporated, debuted the Qualcomm Snapdragon XR1 Platform, the world's first dedicated Extended Reality (XR) platform during a launch event leading up to the Augmented World Expo (AWE). XR1 is a next-generation platform offering mainstream users high-quality XR experiences while enabling OEMs to develop mainstream devices. The XR1 platform also has special optimizations for Augmented Reality (AR) experiences with Artificial Intelligence (AI) capabilities offering better interactivity, power consumption and thermal efficiency. Qualcomm Technologies also announced that Original Equipment Manufacturers (OEMs) Meta, VIVE, Vuzix and Picoare already developing on the first dedicated XR1 platform.

"As technology evolves and consumer demand grows, we envision XR devices playing a wider variety of roles in consumers' and workers' daily lives," said Alex Katouzian, senior vice president and general manager, Mobile Business Unit, Qualcomm Technologies, Inc. "By integrating powerful visuals, high-fidelity audio, and rich interactive experiences, XR1 will help create a new era of high-quality, mainstream XR devices for consumers."

VIA Technologies, Inc., today announced the launch of the VIA Edge AI Developer Kit, a highly-integrated package powered by the Qualcomm Snapdragon 820E Embedded Platform that simplifies the design, testing, and deployment of intelligent Edge AI systems and devices.

The kit combines the VIA SOM-9X20 SOM Module and SOMDB2 Carrier Board with a 13MP camera module that is optimized for intelligent real-time video capture, processing, and edge analysis. Edge AI application development is enabled by an Android 8.0 BSP, which includes support for the Snapdragon Neural Processing Engine (NPE) and full acceleration of the Qualcomm Hexagon DSP, Qualcomm Adreno 530 GPU, or Qualcomm Kryo CPU to power AI applications. A Linux BSP based on Yocto 2.0.3 is set to be released in June this year.

Samsung Electronics, a world leader in advanced semiconductor technology, and Qualcomm Technologies, Inc., a subsidiary of Qualcomm Incorporated, today announced the intention to expand their decade-long foundry relationship into EUV (extreme ultra violet) lithography process technology, including the manufacture of future Qualcomm Snapdragon 5G mobile chipsets using Samsung's 7-nanometer (nm) LPP (Low Power Plus) EUV process technology.

Using 7LPP EUV process technology, Snapdragon 5G mobile chipsets will offer a smaller chip footprint, giving OEMs more usable space inside upcoming products to support larger batteries or slimmer designs. Process improvements, combined with a more advanced chip design, are expected to bring significant improvements in battery life.

HTC Corporation, a pioneer in innovative, smart mobile and virtual reality (VR) technologies, today announced that its highly-anticipated premium standalone VR headset for the China market, the VIVE FOCUS, will be available for pre-order at 12:00 a.m. on December 12th (Beijing time) in most of China's major online stores (i.e. Vive.com, JD.com, Tmall.com) and offline sales channels (i.e. Gome, Suning). Initial customer deliveries are expected in January 2018.

"Two years ago, we delivered the first room-scale PC VR solution to the world; today, we're extremely excited to be, once again, the first to bring 6DoF 'world-scale' VR experiences in the form of the VIVE Focus to the VR market," said Alvin Wang Graylin, China Regional President of VIVE, HTC. "The combination of advanced capabilities, usability and comfort in an affordable package is unmatched in the current market. This signals the beginning of VR's entry into the mass consumer space in 2018."

HTC, a pioneer in innovative, smart mobile and virtual reality (VR) technologies, today held its VIVE Developer Conference 2017 (VDC2017), where it announced VIVE WAVE, a VR open platform and toolset that will open up the path to easy mobile VR content development and high-performance device optimization for third-party partners. 12 hardware partners, namely 360QIKU, Baofengmojing, Coocaa, EmdoorVR, Idealens, iQIYI, Juhaokan, Nubia, Pico, Pimax, Quanta and Thundercomm, announced their support for the integration of Vive Wave as well as the VIVEPORT VR content platform into their future products. Vive Wave is a clear step forward in bringing together the highly fragmented mobile VR market that has growth up in China the last several years. It saves tremendous efforts by allowing developers to create content for a common platform and storefront across disparate hardware vendors. Over 35 Chinese and global content developers have already built VR content optimized for Vive Wave, with 14 showing live demos at the event. Vive also unveiled the VIVE FOCUS, its highly anticipated premium standalone VR headset for the China market that is also based on the Vive Wave VR open platform.

Intel rigorously defends its hold over its core intellectual property, the x86 CPU machine-architecture. AMD is the only active licencee of x86, and has a competitive line of processors across market segments. It has been a long-cherished dream of chipmakers without an x86 license to have Microsoft, the world's leading PC operating system manufacturer, somehow emulate their Win32 API, which is inherently designed for the x86 architecture, on the more widely licensed ARM architecture. As one of the largest ARM chipmakers, Qualcomm pushed for 2-in-1 (notebook-to-tablet) convertible PCs driven by its Snapdragon processors, which run Windows 10, complete with support for Win32 software, besides Microsoft's UWP apps.

This Snapdragon + Windows 10 reference convertible is so impressive with its battery life and performance, that major PC OEMs such as Lenovo, HP, and ASUS have lined up to license the design and make their own designs. This would have been a licensable form-factor governed by Microsoft, much like how Intel governed the Ultrabook form-factor. This would hit hard at Intel's bottomline, because SoC makers with big R&D budgets like Qualcomm, Samsung, and NVIDIA, who each hold ARM licenses, could go on to power bigger and faster PCs which emulate x86, driving Intel out of the ecosystem. The company dropped the hammer earlier this week, in a passive-aggressive note without taking names, warning Microsoft and Qualcomm to cease from their efforts to build such a device.

After putting in work in the OpenGL, WebGL, and most recently, Vulkan APIs, the technology industry consortium Khronos Group is setting its sights on the VR industry and ecosystems. Their aim: to create a "cross-vendor, royalty-free, open standard" for the VR development community. This move is an effort to prevent the VR system from fragmenting itself towards an eventual collapse, considering the multiple engines to create content, platforms to sell that content through, and a few different hardware options with casuistically different requirements and tool-sets. As a result, for a developer to support SteamVR (OpenVR), Oculus (OVR), and OSVR, it has a lot of work to do, since each platform (with its unique runtime) interfaces with the game engine in a different way. Developers must account for the intricacies of each platform during the development process.

Japanese conglomerate Softbank acquired British CPU architecture designer ARM in a USD $32 billion deal on Monday. Softbank's bid of $32 billion is a 43 percent premium over ARM's current valuation of $22.3 billion, and the Cambridge-based firm will recommend its shareholders to approve of its acquisition. Shares of ARM surged 45% on the LSE, adding £7.56 billion to its market value. The company reported revenues of $1.49 billion in 2015. ARM founder Herman Hauser, however, isn't happy with the board's decision. "This is a sad day for me and a sad day for technology in Britain," he stated.

ARM designs CPU architectures, which it then licenses to other processor and SoC manufacturers, many of which are fabless themselves, making it an intellectual property giant. None of ARM's products are "tangible" or physical. While Intel, for example, designs CPU architectures (eg: x86), implements it (eg: Core i7, Celeron), and manufactures it (at its Costa Rica and Malaysia fabs) ARM's product is not tangible. It has a CPU architecture, which clients such as Samsung, Huawei, and Qualcomm license, implement (eg: Exynos, Kylin, Snapdragon), and contract-manufacture, through fabs such as GlobalFoundries, TSMC, and ST Microelectronics.

Qualcomm, which holds a ton of ARM SoC patents, and put them to good use with its Snapdragon line of SoCs for smartphones, tablets, and convertible notebooks, is foraying into enterprise computing market. The company is ready with its first prototype of a 24-core high-performance CPU based on the 64-bit ARM machine architecture. ARM-based processors are picking up momentum in the server and micro-server markets owning to their low cost, low cooling requirements, and high energy-efficiency; and Qualcomm wants a slice of that pie. Most enterprise Linux and FreeBSD distributors have versions of their server operating systems for the 64-bit ARM architecture, as do most popular server software providers.

The prototype 24-core CPU is socketed, and ships in a large land-grid array (LGA) package, much like Intel's Xeon chips. The first production chips will have a lot more than 24 CPU cores, said Qualcomm senior vice president Anand Chandrasekhar. As a proof of concept, Qualcomm assembled three server blades using these chips, which were running Linux with a KVM hypervisor, streaming HD video to a PC using a LAMP stack (Linux + Apache + MySQL + PHP) built with OpenStack. Qualcomm's target consumers are big Internet companies like Google and Facebook, which purchase hundreds of thousands of CPUs each year to cope with growing user- and content-traffic.

Futuremark is proud to announce that Acer Incorporated, Intel, Qualcomm Incorporated and SingTel-Optus have joined its Benchmark Development Program to create a new 3DMark gaming benchmark for Android-based tablets and smartphones. The Futuremark Benchmark Development Program gathers input and expertise from the world's best and most technologically advanced companies to create industry standard benchmarks for performance measurement. 3DMark for Android is expected to be released later this year.

Jukka Makinen, Futuremark CEO said, "For more than 10 years, we have worked with the world's leading PC hardware manufacturers to create 3DMark and PCMark. As a result, Futuremark benchmarks are the industry standard for PC performance measurement used by hundreds of press publications and millions of end-users. As we bring 3DMark to a new OS for the first time, we are excited to expand our cooperation to include Acer, Intel, Qualcomm and SingTel-Optus, technology leaders who will bring unparalleled insight, experience and vision to the development of 3DMark for Android."

Qualcomm Atheros Inc., the networking and connectivity subsidiary of Qualcomm Incorporated, today at COMPUTEX TAIPEI demonstrated the industry's first solutions that integrate 802.11ac Wi-Fi and Bluetooth 4.0 connectivity for tablets and notebook computers. Qualcomm Atheros' 1-, 2- and 3-stream solutions are part of the company's end-to-end 802.11ac ecosystem, which is driving Gigabit-class wireless connectivity in mobile, computing, consumer electronics and networking products.

As consumers use tablets and notebooks to create, download and stream media files over wireless networks, Qualcomm Atheros' 802.11ac solutions are designed to deliver connectivity with the speed and reliability essential to today's mobile computing environments. Qualcomm Atheros' 802.11ac offers more than three times the Wi-Fi performance of 802.11n per stream and is capable of delivering up to 1.3 Gbps PHY rates with the company's 3-stream solutions. The new solutions also feature Bluetooth 4.0 with low-power mode for connecting mobile computers to wireless keyboards, headsets, speakers, printers and other peripherals while also conserving battery power.

Qualcomm Incorporated today announced that its Snapdragon processor will be joining Microsoft Corp.'s Windows on ARM developer seeding program. Qualcomm is working with Microsoft to provide test PCs to select developers in order to test and optimize apps for forthcoming Snapdragon-powered Windows on ARM PCs and tablets. This invitation-only program will combine a pre-release version of Windows on ARM with next-generation, high performance Snapdragon S4 test PCs. These test PCs are not representative of commercial form factors or the final Windows on ARM experience; they are designed to give developers early access to building and testing Windows Metro style apps on Qualcomm's latest technology.

The Windows on ARM developer seeding program will help ensure that Windows Metro style apps available in the Windows Store work great on all Windows 8-based PCs, including those with Qualcomm's ARM-compliant Snapdragon processors.