Google's Stadia cloud gaming service promises low-latency

Google unveiled its Stadia cloud gaming service at the Game Developers Conference (GDC) in San Francisco.

Stadia is a cloud streaming service "for all types of devices capable of running a Chrome browser" and not requiring a gaming console.

Stadia will launch later this year in the U.S., Canada, UK, and Europe. Stadia will support up to 4K HDR at 60 FPS. An Internet connection of at least 25 Mbps downstream is required. Eventually, Stadia expects to support up to 8K resolutions and 120 fps. In addition to the 4K 60 FPS connection to the player, the Stadia network can also deliver a 4K 60 FPS stream to YouTube so that the action can be saved and shared as a video.

To deliver the service, Google will leverage its global backbone and its 8,500 edge node locations around the world. Google is working with AMD to produce a 10.7 teraflop GPU that will be custom servers its data centers and edge locations.

Read More

Tencent Cloud builds a global ecosystem for gaming

Tencent is showcasing its global cloud ecosystem at this week's Game Developers Conference (GDC) in San Francisco.

Tencent Cloud's global cloud infrastructure currently operates 53 availability zones in 25 countries and regions worldwide, offering high concurrency, rapid elastic expansion, anti-DDoS protection, and solutions tailored to various game genres.

Tencent highlighted its Game Multimedia Engine (GME), which provides multiplayer voice chat, voice messaging, voice-to-text conversion and features such as 3D positional voice for gaming and other applications, and Global Application Acceleration Platform (GAAP), which reduces latency and achieves industry-leading performance for real-time interactive games and applications, especially those that serve many concurrent users across long geographical distance.

Both GME and GAAP have successfully served numerous popular games to date. One of the most well-known titles that has adopted GAAP is Tencent's Arena of Valor, the second-highest-grossing free-to-play title in 2018 after Fortnite. PUBG MOBILE, winner of the 2018 Joystick Awards' Mobile Game of the Year and King of Avalon, which has over 60 million registered users globally are another two titles that have adopted GAAP to improve user experience.

Tencent's solutions ensure quality and consistent gameplay for gamers worldwide, including in China, where Honor of Kings and PUBG MOBILE enjoy immense popularity. The Chinese online game market boasts over 500 million active players and is expected to grow to US$42 billion, or 27% of the global market, within the foreseeable future. Tencent Cloud's ecosystem provides unique access to this market, offering seamless integration with platforms and services from other arms of Tencent's business.

Two of these, Tencent Games and social media platform WeChat, will also showcase their offerings for the gaming sector at GDC.

Read More

GSMA: China’s mobile ecosystem equivalent to 5.5% of China’s GDP

China’s mobile ecosystem added RMB5.2 trillion ($750 billion) in value to the country’s economy last year, equivalent to 5.5 percent of China’s GDP in 20181, according to a new GSMA report.

Highlights:

• China is the largest mobile market in the world, home to almost 1.2 billion unique mobile subscribers2 at the end of 2018, representing 82 percent of the country’s population;
• More than two thirds (69 percent) of mobile connections in China3 are smartphones, with smartphone adoption expected to reach 88 percent of connections by 2025;
• 77 percent of China’s connections are currently running on 4G networks – 4G adoption will peak in the coming years before falling as consumers migrate to next-generation mobile services;
• China is set to become one of the world’s leading 5G markets with 460 million 5G connections forecast by 2025, which would account for 28 percent of China’s total connections by this point;
• The RMB5.2 trillion ($750 billion) economic contribution by China’s mobile ecosystem in 2018 is forecast to grow to RMB6 trillion ($870 billion) by 2023;
• China’s mobile ecosystem, directly and indirectly, supported 8.5 million jobs in 2018 and made a tax contribution to the public finances of government of RMB583 billion ($84 billion).
• The number of licensed cellular IoT connections in China stood at 672 million at the end of 2018, supporting various industrial and smart cities applications.

The new report ‘The Mobile Economy China 2019’ is authored by GSMA Intelligence, the research arm of the GSMA.

“Our new report outlines how China’s mobile industry has been a key driver of economic growth, inclusion and modernisation – creating a new generation of digital consumers and transforming industry and society,” said Mats Granryd, Director General of the GSMA. “After spending billions over the last decade deploying 4G networks to all corners of the country, Chinese mobile operators are now set to invest a further RMB401 billion ($58 billion) over the next two years to prepare for and begin 5G rollouts, laying the groundwork for China to become one of the world’s leading 5G markets.”



https://www.gsma.com/r/mobileeconomy/china/

Read More

China Telecom's service revenue grew 5.9% in 2018

China Telecom reported 2018 operating revenues of RMB377.1 billion, of which, service revenues amounted to RMB350.4 billion, representing an increase of 5.9% compared to 2017. EBITDA reached RMB104.2 billion, representing an increase of 2.0% over the same period last year. Net profit amounted to RMB21.2 billion, representing an increase
of 13.9% compared to last year, while basic earnings per share were RMB0.262, achieving rapid growth. Capital expenditure was RMB74.9 billion, representing a decrease of 15.5% compared to last year, the third consecutive annual decline.

Some highlights from the company's financial presentation.

China Telecom's full 2018 slide deck is here: https://www.chinatelecom-h.com/en/ir/presentations/annpre190319.pdf

Read More

Samsung debuts "Flashbolt" High Bandwidth Memory- 3.2 Gbps per pin

Samsung Electronics Co. announced its new High Bandwidth Memory (HBM2E) which promises to deliver the highest DRAM performance levels for use in next-generation supercomputers, graphics systems, and artificial intelligence (AI).

The new Flashbolt DRAM is the industry’s first HBM2E to deliver a 3.2 Gbps data transfer speed per pin, which is 33 percent faster than the previous-generation HBM2.

Flashbolt has a density of 16Gb per die, double the capacity of the previous generation. With these improvements, a single Samsung HBM2E package will offer a 410 gigabytes-per-second (GBps) data bandwidth and 16GB of memory.

“Flashbolt’s industry-leading performance will enable enhanced solutions for next-generation data centers, artificial intelligence, machine learning, and graphics applications,” said Jinman Han, senior vice president of Memory Product Planning and Application Engineering Team at Samsung Electronics. “We will continue to expand our premium DRAM offering, and improve our ‘high-performance, high capacity, and low power’ memory segment to meet market demand.”

Read More

Huawei adopts Open Rack in its cloud data centers

Huawei Technologies will adopt Open Rack in its new public cloud data centers worldwide.

The Open Rack initiative proposed by the Open Compute Project (OCP) seeks to redefine the data center rack and is one of the most promising developments in the scale computing environment. It is the first rack standard that is designed for data centers, integrating the rack into the data center infrastructure, a holistic design process that considers the interdependence of everything from the power grid to the gates in the chips on each motherboard. Adopted by some of the world’s largest hyperscale internet service providers such as Facebook, Google and Microsoft, Open Rack is helping to lower total cost of ownership (TCO) and improve energy efficiency in the scale compute space.

“Huawei’s engineering and business leaders recognized the efficiency and flexibility that Open Rack offers, and the support that is available from a global supplier base. Providing cloud services to a global customer base creates certain challenges. The flexibility of the Open Rack specification and the ability to adapt for liquid cooling allows Huawei to service new geographies. Huawei’s decision to choose Open Rack is a great endorsement!” stated Bill Carter, Chief Technology Officer for the Open Compute Project Foundation.

“Huawei’s strategic investment and commitment to OCP is a win-win,” said Mr. Kenneth Zhang, General Manager of FusionServer, Huawei Intelligent Computing Business Department. “Combining Huawei’s extensive experience in Telco and Cloud deployments together with the knowledge of the vast OCP community will help Huawei to provide cutting edge, flexible and open solutions to its global customers. In turn, Huawei can leverage its market leadership and global datacenter infrastructure to help introduce OCP to new geographies and new market segments worldwide.”

Read More

DataGryd upgrades its data center at 60 Hudson in NYC

DataGryd, which is a leading data center provider in New York City, has selected Clune Construction to build out its MegaSuite 6 facility at the 60 Hudson Street building in Manhattan. The companies said the facility will be transformed into New York City’s most modern and efficient high-density, high-performance data center.

DataGryd’s MegaSuite 6 is expected to be ready for occupancy by the third quarter of 2019.

“DataGryd’s selection of Clune Construction as our general contractor for the build out of MegaSuite 6 is a testament to their outstanding track record for successfully delivering superior projects on time,” says Tom Brown, President and CEO of DataGryd. “As a result, we are committed to providing our customers near limitless scalability in the heart of New York City’s most concentrated hub of global data networking solutions.”

Upon completion of MegaSuite 6, DataGryd’s customers will benefit from cost-effective megawatt configurations, supported by 5,000 kilowatts (kW) of utility power generators and towers. Located within 60 Hudson Street, a globally renowned world-class carrier hotel, DataGryd’s customers will be able to directly connect to over 300 carriers, network providers, exchanges and more than six fully operational subsea systems anchored within the building without incurring monthly cross-connect fees.

Read More

Cohesity and SoftBank form joint venture for Japan

Cohesity, which specializes in hyperconverged secondary storage, has formed a joint venture with SoftBank Corp. to offer services in Japan. Secondary data includes data used for backups, archives, analytics, testing and development and other workloads and comprises 80 percent of an enterprise’s total data volume.

The joint venture operates under the name Cohesity Japan KK (“Cohesity Japan”). SoftBank and SoftBank C&S Corp. will distribute and resell Cohesity solutions in Japan, along with other partners including Networld Corporation and ITOCHU Techno-Solutions Corporation. Solutions from Cohesity are available today to Japanese enterprises.

Cohesity is a portfolio company of SoftBank Vision Fund.
 
“We are thrilled to collaborate with SoftBank in enabling Japanese enterprises to use modern data infrastructure to advance their digital transformation journeys,” said Mohit Aron, CEO and Founder, Cohesity. “SoftBank and Cohesity both believe that if enterprises can derive maximum insights from secondary data and applications, the possibilities are endless across a variety of industries including financial services, healthcare, public sector, life sciences, media, technology, telecommunications and education.”

Read More