
Search results for 'Business' - Page: 11
| Stuff.co.nz - 22 Jan (Stuff.co.nz) The store will open its new Westwood site on February 5, joining several other big retailers at the business park. Read...Newslink ©2025 to Stuff.co.nz |  |
|  | | RadioNZ - 22 Jan (RadioNZ) There are 16 stores with about 70 permanent staff. Read...Newslink ©2025 to RadioNZ |  |
|  | | PC World - 22 Jan (PC World)CES 2025 set up an old-fashioned graphics card battle between Nvidia and AMD, even if the latter showed up a little late. We know when the new RTX 50 series GPUs will debut (at the end of January) and we now know when AMD’s Radeon RX 9070 and RX 9070 XT cards will hit store shelves: March.
If you want a more specific date, well, you aren’t alone. But that’s as much as AMD vice president David McAfee (whom we’ve spoken with on several occasions) is willing to share at the moment, only barely improving on the “Q1” date that was announced at CES.
A post on The Social Media Site Formerly Known as Twitter says this:
“Radeon 9000 series hardware and software are looking great and we are planning to have a wide assortment of cards available globally. Can’t wait for gamers to get their hands on the cards when they go on sale in March!”
AMD’s decision to launch the Radeon 9000 series at the xx70 level has been interpreted as an unspoken capitulation to Nvidia, who has dominated more expensive tiers of graphics cards for both industrial AI applications and consumer PCs. In the announcement (which strangely didn’t get a spot in AMD’s keynote presentation), AMD says that the new naming scheme is designed to “match direct competitor compare,” as well as align with the Ryzen 9000 CPU series.
Fighting for a more value-focused market makes a lot of sense, especially with Intel’s Arc discrete GPUs entering the market on the lower end. But that will make AMD’s pricing decisions for these cards that much more crucial, as PC gamers look for a cheaper alternative to the latest Nvidia RTX models. The RTX 5070 and 5070 Ti will cost $550 and $750 for the base models, for the sake of reference.
AMD Ryzen desktop CPUs, especially the gaming-focused X3D models, have been flying off the shelves. If AMD can deliver similar performance at a lower price, it could be a much-needed boost for the graphics card aspect of its business. Read...Newslink ©2025 to PC World |  |
|  | | ITBrief - 21 Jan (ITBrief) Recent shifts in business culture are elevating learning and development, with over 60% of leaders in Australia and New Zealand increasing budgets to enhance employee skills. Read...Newslink ©2025 to ITBrief |  |
|  | | RadioNZ - 20 Jan (RadioNZ) A Russian business that owns a high country station in Mid Canterbury now owns a slice of Ashburton`s CBD. Read...Newslink ©2025 to RadioNZ |  |
|  | | ITBrief - 20 Jan (ITBrief) Kusania Cairns has been appointed as Business Development Manager at Gallagher Security, aiming to strengthen partner relationships in the South Island. Read...Newslink ©2025 to ITBrief |  |
|  | | BBCWorld - 19 Jan (BBCWorld)The tabletop gaming company is a huge success story - but could it get even bigger? Read...Newslink ©2025 to BBCWorld |  |
|  | | RadioNZ - 18 Jan (RadioNZ) 2024 was tough, but `there`s more of an energy in the city` now the new year has dawned, owners say. Read...Newslink ©2025 to RadioNZ |  |
|  | | PC World - 18 Jan (PC World)What does a massive $150 billion corporation do when a law forces it to make slightly less money? It takes its ball and goes home. At least, that’s what AT&T chose to do, ending a long saga of New York state attempting to enforce its affordable broadband law. AT&T has completely withdrawn its 5G home internet service from the state in retaliation.
Technically, this counts as compliance with the law in a “you are free to leave” sort of way. But not for lack of trying to get around it. As Ars Technica reports, the New York law requiring internet service providers to offer plans as cheap as $15 per month to qualifying low-income households was actually put on the books way back in 2021. Lobbyists for AT&T and other ISPs sued, lost, and appealed all the way to the US Supreme Court, which declined to hear the case and effectively punted the ruling down to a previous loss.
New York began enforcing its Affordable Broadband Act earlier this week, at which point AT&T pulled its home wireless broadband out of the state completely. “New York’s broadband law imposes harmful rate regulations that make it uneconomical for AT&T to invest in and expand our broadband infrastructure in the state,” it said in a statement to Ars. Other internet service providers appear to be staying, at least for the moment. AT&T is able to so quickly withdraw New York service because it’s entirely wireless, built off the back of its existing mobile phone infrastructure.
Cell phone service will not be affected, and those who have AT&T hardware for 5G home internet will graciously be allowed to keep their now-useless boxes at no extra charge.
The Affordable Broadband Act requires ISPs to provide $15-a-month internet plans of at least 25Mbps, or $20-a-month for at least 200Mbps. But it isn’t a mandate that demands affordable internet for everyone, everywhere. To get access to these lower-priced plans, a New York resident needs to qualify for the National School Lunch Program or have gross household income below 185 percent of the federal poverty guidelines. ISPs need to provide regular documentation on the program, and can apply for exceptions in areas where providing service at those speeds simply isn’t practical.
These kinds of mandates for low-priced internet access to less affluent residents are hardly unprecedented. On the federal level, the Affordable Connectivity Program expanded broadband access to underserved and low-income communities across the US from 2021 to 2024, a subsidized plan which AT&T participated in. Various government-led programs have made similar attempts over the last few decades, notably the National Broadband Plan in 2009.
One wonders how many millions of dollars AT&T has spent fighting this law in court and in courting legislators through entirely legal lobbying efforts. And one must then also wonder how many households could have been provided internet with those millions.
Most of the households that qualified for New York’s mandated lower rates wouldn’t have been able to afford AT&T’s rates anyway, so it’s not as if AT&T would be cannibalizing its own more lucrative customers. I suspect that a couple of other factors led the company to object so strongly, namely the text of the bill saying that forcibly bundling TV or phone services at these tiers isn’t allowed, and that any hardware rental (the 5G router, in this case) would need to be included in that $15 or $20 monthly charge, and that ISPs have to advertise the availability of these low-income plans. From the text of the law:
“Every person, business, corporation, or their agents providing or seeking to provide broadband service in New York state shall make all commercially reasonable efforts to promote and advertise the availability of broadband service for low-income consumers including, but not limited to, the prominent display of, and enrollment procedures for, such service on its website and in any written and commercial promotional materials developed to inform consumers who may be eligible for service pursuant to this section.”
ISPs have fought tooth and nail across the US to prevent any requirement to provide service for low-income households, while also fighting to prevent alternatives to local service monopolies from taking place, such as community-owned municipal broadband. Read...Newslink ©2025 to PC World |  |
|  | | PC World - 18 Jan (PC World)You would think that Arm, which arguably has been the vanguard in the smartphone and PC industry push for improved power efficiency, would double down on that strategy in its plans for 2025. Actually, it’s sort of the opposite.
PCWorld sat down at CES 2025 with Chris Bergey, senior vice president and general manager for Arm’s client line of business. Bergey is responsible for both the smartphone as well as the laptop and tablet business, where Arm’s designs are licensed by companies like Qualcomm and Apple, who tweak and eventually manufacture them as finished goods.
Arm provides multiple types of licenses, but the two most common types are a core license, where a customer will buy a verified core that includes an Arm Cortex CPU, Mali GPU, or other intellectual property. Arm also sells architectural licenses to companies like Apple, which gives them the freedom to design their own cores from scratch, though they must be fully compatible with the Arm architecture.
Arm’s RISC architecture is generally considered to be more power-efficient than the X86 architecture used by AMD and Intel, though it requires either that applications be natively coded for it or for an emulator like Microsoft’s Prism to step in and interpret the code for an X86 chip to understand. While the Arm chips are often more efficient — in terms of the work done per clock cycle (instructions per clock, or IPC) or per watt — they still can lag in overall performance. One exception has been Apple’s custom M4 chip, where its single-threaded performance is seen as especially competitive.
In 2025, the plan is to improve Arm’s own cores, Bergey said. And the first goal is simply to run them faster.
“We think that we are reaching, we’ve reached kind of IPC leadership, and now people are getting very aggressive on frequency, so we’re going to continue to really push there,” Bergey said.
“We’re leading on IPC on some of the products in the market,” Bergey said. “But we’re clocking at a lower frequency than some of those products. And so what I’m just suggesting is — you know, IPC times frequency, right, gets you to [higher] performance. We want to continue to provide the highest performance Arm cores, so we’ll continue to make those investments.”
Bergey said that Arm’s second priority is to accelerate AI workloads on its own designs, specifically on the CPU and GPU. On the CPU, that entails specific instruction capabilities that Arm is adding to the CPUs, progressing past Neon, its Scalable Vector Extensions (SVE), and 2021’s SVE2. These additional extensions will build off of SVE2 to accelerate some of these AI workloads, Bergey said.
Arm also plans to make additional investments in its GPU business — and, like its more established competitors in the PC space, to use AI to improve graphics. “In a mobile handset, you can render at 1080p, 60Hz right? But you could also render at 540p, 30Hz, and use AI to interpolate.”
That sort of approach should be very familiar to PC users who have bought graphics cards from AMD or Nvidia, and who will end up using technologies like DLSS 4’s neural rendering to ease the burden on a discrete GPU. In Arm’s case, using AI to interpolate or render an image is simply more power-efficient than directly rendering the image, Bergey said.
“We’re going to be a leader in trying to bring total processing to the GPUs in a mobile environment,” Bergey said.
Expect to see that as part of what Arm calls the Arm CSS for Client, its next-gen Arm compute platform.
“Basically, we’re making it easier for people to put the technology together, and do so to maximize the performance,” Bergey said. “So if you need to maximize that frequency and get to a four-gigahertz design, we’re going to be able to provide you that recipe for some of the latest [manufacturing] nodes.”
Arm’s litigation: It ain’t over ’til it’s over
Arm normally enjoys solid relationships with its licensing partners — save for Qualcomm, and an ongoing lawsuit that has simmered since 2022. Last October, that suit boiled over after Arm cancelled Qualcomm’s architectural licensing agreement. But when the suit reached court, a district judge found in favor of Qualcomm in two of the three issues, including that Qualcomm proved that the CPUs acquired via Nuvia are covered by its architectural license, and that Qualcomm did not breach the terms of the Nuvia license it acquired.
However, the jury could not come to a conclusion over whether Nuvia itself had breached the terms of its architectural license. According to Bergey, this leaves the case between the two companies “unresolved.” “It’s still an open issue that needs to be resolved between the two parties,” he said. He declined to comment further.
Qualcomm, for its part, was undeterred. “We’ve made a public statement that we are happy with the outcome of the case, and [the court] upheld that we have the right to innovate and to the technology that we are bringing, the disruption that we are creating in the marketplace,” said Nitin Kumar, senior director of product management, at CES last week. Read...Newslink ©2025 to PC World |  |
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