
Search results for 'Business' - Page: 5
| PC World - 7 Feb (PC World)Qualcomm said Wednesday that it has made strong progress against its goals for Snapdragon PCs, and that its ongoing litigation with Arm had wrapped up.
Specifically, according to Circana — which owns the NPD Group — Qualcomm captured more than a 10 percent share of all of the Windows laptops sold in the United States priced higher than $800, Cristiano Amon, the chief executive of Qualcomm, told investors.
Though Qualcomm will have a ways to go to usurp AMD and Intel from the laptop market, it’s a good start. Amon said that more than 80 PC designs using the Snapdragon X Elite or one of its derivatives were either in production or development, and the company is targeting more than 100 designs to be commercialized through 2026.
“We look forward to PCs powered by Snapdragon X from leading OEMs including Acer, ASUS, Dell, HP, and Lenovo in the coming months,” Amon said.
More importantly, the Windows on Arm ecosystem continues to work hard to alleviate any concerns of compatibility, one of the sticking points for some customers as they consider moving from Windows on X86 to Windows on Arm.
“The broader app ecosystem continues to expand with Snapdragon native apps now including 20 of the most popular VPNs, 50 of the most popular security and cloud storage apps, as well as new applications for creators,” Amon said, adding that an additional 50 AI applications are now optimized for Windows running natively on Snapdragon.
However, Qualcomm did not specifically break out the number of PCs sold with Qualcomm chips inside. The company recorded that as part of its QCT segment, specifically the IoT portion. Qualcomm said that its IoT business recorded $1.549 billion on revenue, up 36 percent from a year ago. Overall, Qualcomm recorded profits of $3.180 billion, up 15 percent, on revenue of $11.669 billion, up 17 percent.
“We’re still starting,” Amon told investors of its PC strategy. “As I said, we’ll continue to expand new markets. We like the results today. And the design traction is continuing to increase. The first wave was consumer. Now it’s being deployed towards commercial.”
Arm-Qualcomm legal issues appear finished
Qualcomm also indicated that its legal dispute with Arm, the company which develops the cores used in Qualcomm’s chips, was essentially over.
Arm sued Qualcomm in Sept. 2022 over a licensing dispute that involved Nuvia, the company Qualcomm acquired in part to develop the Snapdragon X Elite chip. Last December Qualcomm prevailed on two of the three issues at the heart of the suit, but not the third. At CES, Arm executives said that the issue was “unresolved.”
At stake was the ability for Qualcomm to develop its own CPUs that were compatible with Arm’s instruction system, which now apparently is not at issue.
“The jury’s verdict vindicated Qualcomm’s CPU innovations and affirmed that Qualcomm’s contract with Arm provides a license for Qualcomm’s products containing our proprietary Oryon CPUs in industries such as smartphones, automotive, next generation PCs, IoT, and data center,” Amon said during the call,” transcribed by Seeking Alpha. “In addition, ARM recently notified us that it was withdrawing its October 22nd, 2024 notice of breach and indicated that it has no current plan to terminate the Qualcomm architecture license agreement. We’re excited to continue to develop performance leading, world-class products that benefit consumers worldwide that include our incredible Oryon custom CPUs.” Read...Newslink ©2025 to PC World |  |
|  | | PC World - 7 Feb (PC World)Last week I spent a few days watching the Asus and Best Buy websites like a hawk, waiting for that slinky little Zenbook A14 to start shipping. It’s a really cool, lightweight laptop with battery life for days, literally. But it has one design problem that I see all too often on otherwise good laptops: The USB-C ports are only on one side.
This sucks. Allow me to use several hundred words to explain why.
There are a lot of great things about USB-C. Access to incredibly fast data transfers. Video capabilities on a (somewhat) universal standard. But the greatest for me, by a wide margin, is that you can use it to charge up almost any device with the same cable. I want every single device that I own with a battery to allow charging via a USB-C port.
And we’re almost there. My phone, my tablet, my laptop, my headphones, even my portable batteries that I use to charge all of them on the go, each one uses USB-C. All of this is good. But for most of the time, a phone, a tablet, headphones, et cetera only need one USB-C port. That’s all that’s practical for these devices.
A laptop needs multiple ports. At least two, if only so you can charge it up and use one extra device like a flash drive without needing to bring along a dongle. And at least one of those should be on both sides of the laptop.
Flexible charging is important
In my case, this is specifically so that you can charge it up from the left or the right. And it’s important for laptops in particular, because laptops are mobile devices, and mobile devices that are bigger and bulkier than phones and tablets.
My ThinkPad X1 Nano, pictured above, was considered pretty premium when it came out three years ago. It’s super lightweight and designed for business travel. And yet both of its USB-C ports — its only ports — are on the left side. Extremely frustrating!
Pexels/Thirdman
When you’re on the go and you need a charge, you can’t always find an ideal spot for it. Maybe you’re in a cafe and the charger is on one side of the table against the wall. Or in a hotel where it’s only on one side of the bed. A bus where the outlet beneath your seat is busted and you have to ask your fellow passenger if you can politely invade their space. (Fix your busses, Martz, the Wi-Fi hasn’t worked in years.)
The point is that if you can only charge on one side of your laptop, you’re going to be put in an awkward position up to half of the time. You can twist yourself into an uncomfortable pretzel, or just get a super-long charging cable and carry it with you. And I’ll point out that both of those were solutions from the Before Times, when every brand had its own barrel port or proprietary charger.
But you shouldn’t have to — laptops should be designed with this basic use case in mind. Some are, but many aren’t, even “premium” designs like that aforementioned Zenbook A14, which only features a lonely little USB-A port on the right (which can’t charge up the device).
Even Apple, a company that proclaims its meticulous design process in its advertising, has USB-C ports on only one side of the MacBook Air. If you want the basic creature comfort of charging on either side, you have to step up to the MacBook Pro.
Foundry
Here’s what really steams me. When I’m travelling I often carry a USB-C monitor, specifically a ThinkVision M14. This is made by Lenovo, the same company that made my laptop. And it has USB-C ports on both sides, specifically to make it easier to charge, both for itself and its pass-through laptop charging feature.
Why are laptops like this?
I’ve spoken about this little pet peeve with many of my fellow tech writers, and plenty of regular laptop users too. I’ve never met one who didn’t agree with my viewpoint. So I’m absolutely certain that laptop makers are aware of our desires here. In fact, I know it: I spoke to a former tech writer person I’d worked with, who now works for a PC manufacturer and asked them if they’d raised the point with their new employer.
They said that yes, they had in fact spoken with the engineering teams that decide where to put laptop ports and told them that people want USB-C charging on both sides. The engineers responded that it added expense to the design, so it doesn’t make it into some models.
Mattias Inghe
I’m sure that’s true. My own knowledge of the ins and outs of electronics design is just enough that I don’t doubt it. A modern USB-C port is complicated — it needs extra design work and electronics elements for battery charging, for video output, for standards like Thunderbolt and the fastest data. Every small adjustment, every tiny decision made in the design process has a cost that affects the final manufacturing and, thus the eventual retail price of a product.
But I reject this as a definitive reason to make this choice. You can say the same thing about tons of other elements of laptop design — say, using a trackpad that supports multi-touch gestures or a keyboard that has LED backlighting. Asus told me it spent a huge amount of time and resources engineering the hinge on the Zenbook A14, to make sure it can easily open with just one finger. And the presenter was immensely proud of the “Ceraluminum” coating on the entire laptop — as they should be, it’s really nice!
None of these elements are strictly necessary. You can operate a laptop without them. But all of them add to the overall experience of a product. Little things that we as end users barely think about, sometimes don’t even notice, can have a huge impact on our final impression of a device.
It’s worth the extra work
However much extra it might cost to get a USB-C port on both sides of a laptop, it’s worth it. Again, that’s according to me, every other tech writer who reviews laptops, and everyone else they’ve spoken to on the subject. Note that both the Framework Laptop and Intel’s new modular guidelines allow for full-power USB-C on both sides of the laptop, and these devices are made for sustainability with far more engineering necessary than a permanently soldered port.
And while I don’t have a component breakdown to make my case, I’m pretty darn confident that it’s not an unattainable design goal for laptops, especially once you get out of the budget category. Allow me to illustrate.
This is a Lenovo Legion Go. It costs $700. It has a USB-C port on the top and on the bottom.
Mattias Inghe
This is the Asus ROG Gaming Phone. It costs $849. It has two USB-C ports, one on the side and one on the bottom, and I’m pretty sure it takes a lot more engineering work to fit two ports on a phone than on a laptop.
This is the Nintendo Switch 2. I don’t know how much it costs yet, but given Nintendo’s mass-market savvy and the price of the original, I’d be flabbergasted if it’ll launch at anything north of $500. It has USB-C ports on the top and bottom.
Nintendo
This is the Lenovo Chromebook Duet, a small, cheap, ChromeOS-powered tablet, topping out at $399 for the most expensive model. How many USB-C ports does it have? I’ll give you three guesses, but you’ll only need one, because it’s two. Two USB-C ports, on two different sides. And again, this is the same company that made my laptop in the header image, equipping a cheaper device with this handy design feature.
Michael Crider/IDG
I think I’ve made my point. If all of these devices can fit a secondary USB-C charging port, into both their design and their budget, there’s no reason that manufacturers can’t do this for every laptop with USB-C capability. And they absolutely should. Read...Newslink ©2025 to PC World |  |
|  | | ITBrief - 6 Feb (ITBrief) UBS has launched its first Global Entrepreneur Report, revealing that 62% of entrepreneurs see AI as their greatest business opportunity amidst economic uncertainties. Read...Newslink ©2025 to ITBrief |  |
|  | | BBCWorld - 6 Feb (BBCWorld)This isn`t the first time he has seen a foreign policy problem as a business opportunity, writes Anthony Zurcher. Read...Newslink ©2025 to BBCWorld |  |
|  | | PC World - 6 Feb (PC World)PC gamers are getting pretty darn antsy for new desktop GPUs. Nvidia’s newest cards sold out pretty much instantly worldwide despite astronomical prices, and AMD failing to show off its new Radeon designs at CES 2025 last month was seen as a snub. But it looks like we won’t have to wait much longer for the RX 9070 and 9070 XT — because they’re hitting shelves “in early March,” according to the CEO.
The initial announcement had the next-gen Radeon cards landing in “Q1,” which would set the end of March as a deadline. Then, a couple of weeks ago, AMD doubled down on March as a target. As of yesterday’s earnings call, we can now narrow that down to the earlier half of the month, so you could be holding a new Radeon GPU in just a few weeks.
“RDNA 4 delivers significantly better ray tracing performance and adds support for AI-powered upscaling technology that will bring high-quality 4K gaming to mainstream players when the first Radeon 9070 series GPUs go on sale in early March,” said Dr. Lisa Su, AMD’s CEO.
The earnings call also highlighted great sales for desktop CPUs, like the in-demand Ryzen 9 9800X3D, with client segment revenue climbing 58 percent year over year. That’s overshadowed by a precipitous drop in the gaming sector, as Nvidia dominates the GPU space on PCs and demand for current-gen consoles wanes. (Both the Xbox Series X/S and PlayStation 5 are based on AMD chip designs.) The next generation of Radeon cards could be a make-or-break moment for AMD. The company is planning on combining reports for the Ryzen CPU and Radeon GPU sections of its business in the future.
Of course, that doesn’t mean a lot for end users who are looking forward to the RX 9070 and 9070 XT as a (hopefully) budget alternative to those new Nvidia cards. We don’t know much about these new cards yet, aside from the fact that they’re based on the new RDNA 4 architecture. An event is rumored for later in February, so far unconfirmed.
How much will they cost? That’s hard to say without knowing more about the hardware inside. The model number scheme has changed, and AMD’s positioning the new cards as replacements for the RX 7900 XT, 7900 GRE, and 7800 XT ($900, $550, and $500 at launch, respectively). It’s a wide range. And with world trade currently being thrown into chaos by active and insipient tariffs from the Trump regime, it’s anyone’s guess how much more expensive new electronics will be a month from now. Read...Newslink ©2025 to PC World |  |
|  | | ITBrief - 5 Feb (ITBrief) A new study by Celonis reveals that 89% of business leaders believe AI needs Process Intelligence for effectiveness, as 58% express concerns over process inefficiencies. Read...Newslink ©2025 to ITBrief |  |
|  | | BBCWorld - 5 Feb (BBCWorld)Cristiano Ronaldo is celebrating his 40th birthday and showing no sign of stopping any time soon. Read...Newslink ©2025 to BBCWorld |  |
|  | | ITBrief - 5 Feb (ITBrief) A Forrester report highlights the crucial role of agile methodologies in modern business, with 95% recognising its importance amid evolving technology and AI. Read...Newslink ©2025 to ITBrief |  |
|  | | BBCWorld - 5 Feb (BBCWorld)Mussie Imnetu worked under Gordon Ramsay and Marcus Wareing and was in the UK on a business trip. Read...Newslink ©2025 to BBCWorld |  |
|  | | RadioNZ - 5 Feb (RadioNZ) Banks are avoiding lending to mining companies to avoid risk - not to intentionally drive them out of business, an expert says. Read...Newslink ©2025 to RadioNZ |  |
|  |  |
|
 |
 | Top Stories |

RUGBY
A mad dash to Dublin airport has hit the mark for Irish amateur darts player Michael Flynn More...
|

BUSINESS
Australia's Reserve Bank has lowered its interest rates for the first time since 2020 More...
|

|

 | Today's News |

 | News Search |
|
 |