D2D Highlights
This is a digest of highlights from our blog posts on Digits to Dollars and other news we found interesting recently. Feel free to forward or drop us a line if you would like to subscribe.
Highlights from our Blog
We got back from Mobile World Congress last week, and had a few things to say about the show.
We went in looking for a few topics, but as usual found a whole other host of things to talk about.
In many ways, this year’s MWC was lacking on news, at least exciting news. Probably the most important event was just the fact that the show is back to its pre-pandemic levels of activity and relevance.
The wireless operators continue their decades long disassembly. The Cloud, APIs and software have all moved to center stage, and this likely means the companies that capture value are shifting as well. That poses serious threats to incumbent equipment providers like Nokia and Ericsson, who seem strategically adrift, searching for their role in the world.
We worked really hard to get a fix on the state of the Open RAN initiative, but could not find two people who agreed on a common view of its progress. We think it is unlikely Open RAN will ever achieve full, truly Open deployment, and instead we will see pieces of it adopted gradually.
There is a good old-fashioned fight for semis dominance in wireless networking featuring Marvell’s highly flexible, semi-custom products, Intel’s CPU-heavy approach, start-up Picocom carving out its niche, and Qualcomm which has a great product but whose dedication to the market we question.
How will RISC V build it’s software ecosystem? So far, it seems to be getting a lot of help from the broader open source ecosystem.
Other News
Semis and Wireless
We all know how dependent the world is on TSMC, but a big part of their competitive barrier is the number of EDA tools with which they have integrated their process software. Digitimes gave us a list of 16 members of TSMC’s EDA Alliance. Bookmark this one, this will be a bigger story some day.
Intel has taped out its advanced nodes, including the critical 20A. They did announce it publicly, but we honestly cannot understand why they didn’t turn the full force of their PR team to broadcast this story everywhere.
We think one of the most important aspects of the US Chip sanctions on China is the status of Intellectual Property (IP), about which the latest rules are totally silent. Reuters is on this story too, with a look at the role of open source software in the trade war. This is story is not solely about semis, but just replace the words open source software with RISC V and the semis angle is clear.
Almost no one understands the nomenclature for Arm’s product families. We know Arm employees who get it confused. We had hoped that this story entitled “Disambiguating Arm” would make it all clearer. Instead, it just illustrates how confusing it is. Arm v9 is different from Arm9… In fairness, there is a lot going on under the hood at Arm and there is probably no easy way to break this all down.
How many base stations are there in the world? We get asked this question a lot. The answer is about 10 million.
MIT researchers have found a way to improve radio signals with a new chip. This is not a huge story, but in times like this we like to point out good news when we see it.
Another example of Arm CPUs (in this case AWS’s Graviton) outperforming Intel. This author says raw performance is better, factor in power savings and it looks like a big advantage for Graviton.
Two stories about RISC V. First, someone has created an open source RISC V Virtual Machine, an important piece of infrastructure software. On the other hand, someone tested a RISC V alternative to Raspberry Pi, and found it to be promising but still immature on many fronts, not least software and usability.
Industry 4.0 is a hot subject in many marketing circles, despite being maddeningly imprecise. Here is a better example of what the advances in AI can do to improve efficiencies in manufacturing.
Networking and the Cloud
Telegeogrpahy makes interesting maps about data connections. This is a story about how they built the latest version of their submarine cable map.
A few years ago, the very hot subject in networking was the transition to IPv6, which among other things, greatly expanded the address space for the Internet. Even for people in the industry it all felt a bit abstract. Here is one example of a company paying a real financial cost for the limits of IPv4 with Roku as the main culprit and Apple to the resuce.
An interesting study in how one company builds on-premise hardware with a fully remote team. Interesting management approach, coupled with the irony of a cloud-based team building hardware for companies to move away from the cloud. And one more company saving hundreds of millions of dollars by not moving to the public cloud.
Nvidia built a LoRa sensor network in Antarctica. This article combines most of our favorite things.
MWC Round-up
There was a lot of news coming out of Mobile World Congress. Here are a few highlights
Digitimes on Qualcomm and Mediatek’s announcements.
APIs are becoming more important with telcos. Light Reading thinks Microsoft’s Azure is well positioned for that future. And another piece on Azure, GCP and Oracle’s telco cloud efforts. And finally, Did AWS win MWC? With Amazon relentlessly adding features for telcos including a managed service for running telco clouds, and a host of new customers.
We have not written anything about satellites from MWC yet, but it was a major topic as the handset ecosystem moves to catch up with Apple.
Other Noteworthy Things
Off topic, but a big area of interest for us is why infrastructure is so expensive in America. Slate blames “Consultants”, which is not a bad place to start untangling the problem.
Boeing engineers set a world record for paper airplane flight.
It is very depressing to still see Cloud cost comparison as hardware + electricity vs. Cloud bill in 2023 on a fixed capacity in a respectable newsletter.