IF / News

Still not yet fully recovered from last week tidal wave of info, this week has ended already:

Headlines:

• Siemens AG is nearing a deal to buy Mentor Graphics Corp for USD4.5B~4.6B in cash
• Samsung plans on installing its latest Exynos 9 chipset that will include the so-called Shannon 359 modem
• Qualcomm Snapdragon 835, which will be built on Samsung’s 10nm FinFET node
• 5G development – Japan’s NTT DoCoMo announced completed 5G trial with Samsung and Huawei, separately; Australia carrier Optus and Huawei completed a 5G trial; BMW Korea and SK Telecom introducing the world’s first 5G connected car; AT&T and Verizon have asked 3GPP members to push through an early version of the official 5G standard by Dec. 2017;
• AI development – IBM (Watson), Nvidia battles cancer with AI; Intel acquires Nervana; Microsoft partnering with OpenAI; Google has been busy acquiring a number of AI-related companies;
• Dolby sues OPPO and vivo over patent infringement in India;
• Huawei’s Richard Yu believes in 3-5 years, most of the Chinese smartphone vendors would “disappear”;
• Samsung reportedly might be contemplating selling refurbished Galaxy Note 7 units starting from 2017;
• Apple is reportedly working on a set of smart glasses;
• China’s Lenovo Capital and Incubator Group have made strategic investment in VR content production start-up SoReal
• Google Earth is now available in virtual reality, available for HTC Vive via Steam;

Numbers:

• TrendForce estimates that global tablet shipments for 2016 will total around 154.5M units
• IC Insights released top-20 2016 semiconductor suppliers – 8 US, 3 JP, 3 EU, 3 CN, 3 TW, 2 KR
• According to IDC, smartphone market in India crossed the 30M unit shipments in 3Q16

Products:

Huawei Mate 9 Pro with 5.5” QHD AMOLED display, Gionee S9 with dual-camera; vivo X9 and X9 Plus with dual-camera at the front; vivo Xplay 6 with dual-camera at the back; etc.