Shuttle, an industry-leading designer and manufacturer of small form factor (SFF) PC solutions and mobile internet devices, is highlighting its latest innovations during Computex 2014. Shuttle is showcasing its high-performance XPCs, digital signage players, its EDUPAL education solution, as well as its ODM designs at their head office on June 2-7, 2014.In 2010, the consumer PC manufacturer launched its "Application PC for Business" platform and has seen great success across vertical markets. Rooted in 30 years of SFF research and design, the company has demonstrated its ability to provide reliable products that can be integrated with a variety of software to meet the needs of diverse industries.New from ShuttleMini-computer hardware for vertical ARM-based signage hardware: DSA2LS and DSA2LVIn response to growing market demand for cost-effective media players, Shuttle designed an ARM-based player and motherboard solution. The series includes the DSA2LS signage player and DSA2LV motherboard both made to deliver quality media with a Freescale i.MX6DL 1Ghx dual-core processor and Full-HD 1080p playback capability.Windows-based signage players: Entry-level to high-performanceShuttle has a number of signage players, including players made to drive video walls with 4K imaging, support fanless Intel Bay Trail technology and high-performance Intel Haswell/Haswell Refresh technology, and players made to connect with multiple peripherals. Whether for entry-level or high-performance applications, Shuttle has built in as much flexibility and performance into each product as possible to support the latest digital signage innovations in each segment.EDUPAL Smart School SolutionEDUPAL is the most holistic solution in today's education market. Over the past five years, Shuttle's R&D team has worked meticulously on their education solution, EDUPAL. EDUPAL is an industry-leading Android-based educational solution designed with innovative and user-friendly UI with proven success to enhance the learning process in school systems.For classroom useEDUPAL Classroom is dedicated to teachers and students in their daily classroom process. It includes two classroom management interfaces, "PC to Pad" or "Pad to Pad", allowing teachers to effectively manage classrooms while better understanding a student's learning process in class.For school managementEDUPAL School is for school administrators and is designed to create a modern learning environment that syncs teachers, students, and parents on an easy-to-manage digital platform. It includes EDUPAL Classroom management products with options for E-Library and Homework expansion packs to enhance students' reading and out-of-class learning.For government and large scale education institutionsEDUPAL Cloud integrates is a complete package which includes EDUPAL School and EDUPAL Classroom products and is made to help governments and educational institutions manage multiple school districts. EDUPAL Cloud helps build up smart school education systems that sync the classroom, the school, and the department of education together on a digital cloud.Digital library in schoolEDUPAL Library features a strong content management backend system which supports e-reader tool and helps publishers and school administrators build a content protected platform to manage digital content. For end-users like teachers and students, EDUPAL Library provides a resource that is easily accessible from mobile devices anywhere.Shuttle ODM 2-in-1 and Windows-ARM tabletShuttle's ODM business has been focusing on the LOEM market sector since 2010, while gradually gaining worldwide LOEM customers' recognition for its innovative ecosystem. Shuttle has improved its supply-chain and generated new SPA (Shuttle Standard PCBA) form factor technology, providing its customers a more competitive ODM service. This COMPUTEX Shuttle is going to introduce its latest product line-up which includes 2-in-1 tablets and Windows-ARM tablets made with sleek IDs and competitive cost structure.Shuttle introduces its first ARM-based digital signage solution with Android operating systemPhoto: CompanyMore than 4,000 teachers and students use EDUPAL solution in daily teaching and learningPhoto: CompanyAbout ShuttleFounded in 1983 in Taiwan, Shuttle Inc. is one of the world's leading electronics manufacturers in providing trusted and innovative computing hardware and software solutions for home, business, and vertical application.With 30 years' motherboard and graphics card manufacturing and leading in small form factor barebone design, Shuttle now offers a full product line of consumer and commercial electronics, including barebone, All-in-One PCs, NAS, notebooks, tablets, digital signage players, facial recognition systems, educational turnkey solution and others. For more information, visit www.shuttle.com

Over the past 10 years the commercial computing market has been enamored with the idea of being able to move data and heavy computation to a central resource, where it can be accessible by the many rather than just the one. You hear about it when companies trumpet cloud computing and discuss virtualization, especially in the context of virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI), client consolidation infrastructure (CCI) and hosted virtual desktops (HVD). While the market potential for virtualization is huge, it has remained widely untapped. However, when NVIDIA launched its Kepler-based GRID virtual GPU (vGPU) solutions last year, for the first time, the market saw true hardware virtualization of the GPU. Since then, an excited ecosystem has been gearing up for a much wider virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) in the corporate PC market. NVIDIA has made key partnership deals with hypervisor suppliers Citrix and VMware, OEM server hardware suppliers IBM, Dell, HP among others, and NVIDIA is now inviting the market to test drive NVIDIA GRID virtual GPUs with their favorite software free of charge. The company recently launched an online trial of GRID technology and Taiwan are the first markets outside of the U.S. to have access. Solving the Challenges of Virtualization There are currently more than 700 million PCs available in the commercial PC market but the penetration rate for virtualization has remained low at only 3.5%, even as more and more enterprises are realizing the benefits of leaving big data in a central datacenter, rendering it on a server, and shipping only encoded rendered pixels to the client. The main issue with virtualization is that computing is a visual experience and up to this point using a virtual desktop interface (or VDI) has delivered less than stellar results in terms of giving users a level of visual experience they have grown accustomed to on their PCs. To put it more precisely, every PC has a graphics processor of some kind, even tablets and smartphones have a graphics processor - customers wouldn't use them otherwise, but VDI continues to be driven by CPU-centric server designs. Under such a scenario, a hypervisor sits on the server and runs virtual machines whose graphics are rendered by the server CPU. This method is incredibly inefficient. Even running a Microsoft Windows 7 desktop requires DirectX 9 support, meaning it needs to be rendered on a GPU. To do that in a data center requires a large amount of server resources and this has not really been a financially attractive option for enterprises. So as a result, the VDI market has mostly targeted the 100 million or so PCs that focus on data input and simple office productivity applications - the realm of the task worker. The rest of the market - the more than 600 million knowledge workers, power users and even designers have been left mostly untapped. Kepler the key ingredient It is a bit misleading to say that GPUS have not been used in the datacenter for certain applications and that deployment in these areas can be effective; however they do have limitations. One solution being used is GPU sharing, where the hypervisor lets the client application behave as though it has its own dedicated GPU, while the server GPU responds to one master host. GPU sharing has been a reasonable solution for some companies, but it not ideal. Since a shim driver lives in the guest OS instead of a native graphics driver, not all applications are served well by that shim driver. And, when an enterprise has a long list of applications that need to be compatible with the virtualized environment, the GPU sharing method becomes difficult to manage. An alternative solution has been to provide dedicated physical GPUs in servers implementing GPU pass-through. Unlike the rest of the physical system components, which are represented as multiple virtual instances to multiple clients by the hypervisor, the pass-through GPU is not abstracted at all, but remains one physical device. Each hosted virtual machine gets its own dedicated GPU, eliminating the software abstraction and the performance penalty that goes with it. However, shortcomings in both models have prevented widespread deployment. For, example, the software overhead for GPU sharing constrains performance as the user count rises. And the physically dedicated GPU relationship of GPU pass-through misses out on the point of large-scale virtualization - the ability to supporting multiple clients with one shared computing resource. With GRID, however, NVIDIA has been able to deliver 2D/3D imaging and 100% API support, while being able to scale with the number of concurrent users (CCUs), thus giving GPU-accelerated rendering broader appeal. The key has been Kepler, which implements a Memory Management Unit (MMU) that maps and translates a host's virtual address to the system's physical address, with each process working in its own virtual address space. Kepler also has 256 independent input buffers, each dedicated to a different host, separating each VM's command stream into independent rendering contexts. This combination of an address-space unifying MMU and a VM-specific MMU provides for a true virtual GPU that can serve multiple CCUs without the performance and latency penalty of excessive software overhead. Expanding the market Under a VDI using GRID vGPUs, NVIDIA has made it possible for all graphics to be rendered in the cloud, freeing up the end point device from having to have specific requirements. What is displayed on the client is can be as simple as an h.264 stream, meaning anything that can play a YouTube video can view and modify the file. This could revolutionize some key industries such as 3D designing and video processing that are used to copying data to the client for processing. These industries are seeing dramatic growth in the volume of visual computing data that needs to be processed and the manipulation of files that measure in the hundreds of gigabytes if not terabytes. Copying the raw data from datacenter to datacenter can waste a lot of time. It makes much more sense to leave big data in a central datacenter, rendering it on a server, and then ship only the rendered pixels to the client. Moreover, peripheral business users, such as in marketing, sales engineering departments and in procurement departments, will be able to access the visual data remotely to tap into a single, up-to-date project database at any point in the workflow. These power users and knowledge workers may not be directly engaged in product creation, but their work still depends on being able to quickly, accurately view and mark up project material. In terms of market opportunities, it may seem easy to understand the opportunities for 3D engineering but what is much harder to understand and what the industry has been missing for quite a while is the benefits for average workers and their reliance on Microsoft Windows 7, which is the most pervasive graphics application in the world. The Windows 7 desktop requires DirectX 9, while office productivity applications also increasingly rely on multimedia and complex graphics. Even Internet usage without HTML 5.0 support is not visually compelling. So, while a single user may be able to get away with a CPU-based VDI or previous versions of shared GPU, such solutions cannot scale for larger enterprises, which was a previous sticking point for companies looking at virtualization. With GRID vGPUs, performance results will improve to the point where companies can make decisions on considerations other than "it just doesn't look good." This means the market is moving to a new opportunity whereby not only the 225 million designers and power users could benefit, but the 600 million knowledge workers could benefit from virtualization as well. Building an ecosystem No company had ever been able to virtualize a GPU before NVIDIA released its GRID vGPUs so there was no widespread ecosystem support. NVIDIA has been working closely with industry partners over the past year to transition the market and make GRID vGPU a viable solution for the enterprise. Hypervisor vendors need to build vGPU support into their technology, while server OEMs need to include GRID vGPUs in their servers. NVIDIA has also been working with customers to implement test trials. In terms of hypervisor support, Citrix was agile and quickly began supporting NVIDIA GRID vGPUs with its Citrix XenServer. Citrix's support helped NVIDIA grow its base of company trials by 10-fold in one year, from a handful of trials to to over 500 enterprises now. VMware announced it will begin supporting NVIDIA GRID vGPU later this year, and with the market share of its VMware ESX hypervisor approaching 80%, it should spur even more interest in NVIDIA GRID. Under NVIDIA'S relationship with VMware, In addition to providing virtualization of GPU under a private data center scenario, it will also support VMware's Horizon DaaS (Desktop as a Service) platform that can support public and hybrid clouds. Currently, VMware supports about 19 partners, with Navasite currently being first in the process of deploying NVIDIA GRID for enabling virtual desktops. This opens up the opportunity for deploying a hybrid cloud, which would consist of an onsite premise deployment and then additional capacity for customers would be deployed by using a cloud hosted environment. On the hardware side, NVIDIA has signed up all the major global hardware OEMs to deliver GRID vGPUs installed. Cisco, Dell, IBM, Fujitsu, HP, Asustek, TYAN, Supermicro and Quanta Cloud Technology(QCT) are all supporting GRID. These products are not just niche products. The HP ProLiant DL380 is the number one server in the world in terms of shipments and the Dell PowerEdge R720 is right behind. These are the models that are supporting NVIDIA GRID. Test drive NVIDIA GRID virtual GPUs Because the virtual GPU market is so new, NVIDIA realizes that customers are struggling with believing the benefits of VDI due to their previous disappointing results with virtualization. Therefore, NVIDIA is now offering customers the ability totest-drive its cloud-delivered graphics acceleration for enterprise applications. Customers no longer need to invest large amounts of time or money to build a proof-of-concept private cloud; they can simply test benefits of graphics acceleration for virtualized desktops. NVIDIA is confident that it can deliver a better experience for remote desktops and applications, can run graphics-rich applications in a virtualized environment, and can handles complex graphics files and images. Customers are invited to take the free GRID test drive at http://www.nvidia.com/trygrid. Will Wade, Director, GRID Product Line, NVIDIAPhoto: Company

Until recently, Vitesse Semiconductor saw its core market as being the carrier Ethernet market, particularly what it calls the IP edge, which is anything from base stations to picocells to backhaul microwave/milliwave small cells, as well as routers and switches in the aggregation network. However, the company has noticed that there is demand for its chips and reference designs in the industrial segment, as that market is migrating from proprietary protocols toward Ethernet, and Vitesse has been able to provide timing and low power solutions that fit market needs.Digitimes spoke with Vitesse CTO Martin Nuss just before Computex to discuss the industrial space, which he describes as the part of the IoT (Internet of Things) market where revenue can be found today.Q: How has your work in the telecom business brought you into the industrial market?A: We noticed that there was demand for our chips and devices in the industrial segment because we provide standardized Ethernet solutions. What I mean is that there are a ton of protocols on the industrial side of the market. There is the EtherCAT (Ethernet for Control Automation Technology) fieldbus system. There is Profinet for industrial automation. There are a number of proprietary or semi-proprietary busses out there. The interesting thing is that many of them are still using Ethernet at the physical layer, but then they say Ethernet doesn't do x or y, such as providing ring protection or delivering a solution that is more deterministic - and Ethernet doesn't have that. So they put some proprietary features in there to make it more deterministic in the delivery of packets.But on the carrier side of the telecom industry, we've already worked out a lot of these technologies and implemented them into our Ethernet solutions. We have ring protection and we know how to do timing, which is a key aspect of deterministic Ethernet. We have resolved the reliable delivery of packets in the carrier space over the last year or two, so now customers on the industrial side are realizing they no longer have to only deal with proprietary solutions. They can take advantage of the ecosystem and chip designs that were developed on the telecom side. So, you are seeing increased scale and more new players developing more standardized solutions rather than essentially having 10 little companies delivering solutions at 10x the price.Q: What are some of the key applications in the industrial space that you are targeting?A: Some key areas are transportation, energy and factory automation. For example, if you look at a typical factory automation application these days, pretty much everything is wired by Ethernet, but as I said previously, sometimes there is proprietary stuff placed on top. They used to have proprietary protocols on top to get resiliency. If one thing fails, some other things come up but that is all being done by standard Ethernet today.Q: You also spoke about determinism in Ethernet being a key requirement in the industrial space. Can you speak more about that?A: What I am describing is a system that is predictable and consistent; one that is in sync. And the key is timing. Take a look at high-speed manufacturing lines, such as a high-speed printing press. There are hundreds of motors that need to be synchronized very tightly. This goes for any high speed manufacturing line in general. You have to synchronize events within nanosecond or sub-nanosecond accuracy. If one of them is out of sync, the whole system becomes a disaster.The key to having deterministic Ethernet is the Precision Time Protocol (PTP) or IEEE 1588 timing. For 1588 timing, you send out time stamped packets and there is a grand master clock that puts a time stamp into a 1588 packet (which is an Ethernet packet) and it gets transported through the network. At the slave, the time is determined through a two way handshake protocol between the master and the slave.Previously, problems in a typical packet network were introduced at the hub. You ended up getting packet delay variations or maybe asymmetry. The 1588 protocol, however, relies on symmetry between upstream and downstream and much of this has been worked out in the telecom world, where two new clock classes – the bounded clock and the transparent clock – were implemented in 1588 aware routers and switches to keep errors to a minimum. The first application that actually did that in Ethernet was wireless mobile backhaul. Timing over networks is very time sensitive and while there are no specifications in the ITU for this, base stations have to be synchronized to within a half hundred nanosecond accuracy for LTE, TD-LTE, LTE TDD and LTE Advanced. In the smart energy area, the IEEE has defined a power profile that is fairly similar and which leads to no more than 50ns timing errors. And now we are seeing timing becoming more important in factory automation.It is kind of ironic that 1588 is increasingly being worked into Ethernet. Vitesse comes out of the telecom side which first developed under synchronized SONET/SDH networks where everything was on the same clock but then the whole market moved to Ethernet where everything is packet based and queued. Now the Ethernet world is going back to where they want to have every network element accurately timed down to a nanosecond. The rest of the deterministic equation, where you need to know what time it is so you can determine whether you have to send a packet out within x amount of microseconds, whatever the requirement is, and get it all lined up, is done through timing.Q: Vitesse also speaks about power efficiency; this seems strange when speaking about factory automation. What is your message there?A: Well, lower power means lower costs. But what we are also talking about is being in sync with customer needs and providing the right solution. For example, our main competitors in this segment are companies like Broadcom and Marvell. With their product offerings, solutions scale up evenly, so you can go with a solution that has lower bandwidth, a lower port count and a lower feature portfolio. If you need more features such as service delivery, 1588 timing, security, quality of service (QoS), you need to buy into an architecture that is much higher in capacity and much higher in power consumption. Our strategy is to focus on lower- to medium-range capacity; for example below 100Gbit, but supplied with the full feature set, typically beyond what the competitors offer in terms of feature sets. That is why we end up being much more power efficient without making any compromises on feature sets.And this works for us because in the industrial space you don't need to be applying an 80-100Gbit solution to a 10Gbit problem. For example, industrial applications like printing presses, robotics and high-speed manufacturing feature solutions typically have 3-5 ports of Gb Ethernet. So you are talking about a requirement of less than 10Gbit Ethernet capacity. The industry is a little overpowered from the capacity/feature perspective. Customers don't want to pay for a 48 port switch at 15 watts when they can get a 6-8 port from Vitesse at much lower cost and much lower power with a better feature set and at a tenth of the power.Q: You mentioned how Vitesse is helping firms in the industrial space scale. Can you speak a bit about how that is affecting Taiwan ODMs?A: If you look at the enterprise turnkey model, a lot of low-end enterprise switches from the big vendors are being manufactured by Taiwan ODMs, with those solutions basically being Broadcom and Vitesse reference designs running slightly modified software to fit into the Hewlett-Parker (HP) or some other vendor's ecosystem. This business model makes sense on the industrial side as well, where ODMs partner with Vitesse on the design. They then get their hardware certified to run in rugged conditions while having the ability to slightly modify the API layer to tailor the solution to the end customer.Vitesse CTO Martin NussPhoto: Company

WD, a Western Digital (NASDAQ: WDC) company, and world leader in storage solutions, will be demonstrating the first PCI Express hard drives at Computex Taipei, June 3-4, 2014. Enabled with key technology partners, WD's prototype introduces the new SATA Express interface, a form of PCI Express technology, which is offered on recently launched Intel series-9 chipset motherboard platforms. The SATA Express interface provides a roadmap for faster speeds, lower power consumption and increased flexibility for future OEM designs.The road to the world's first demonstration of SATA Express has been in development for almost 3 years. In 2011, SATA-IO, the group responsible for charting the future of SATA, announced that it was developing a new specification that would fundamentally change the core technology behind SATA by melding it with the more advanced PCI Express computer interface. In 2013, the SATA Express specification was announced; and just one year later, WD and selected partners have realized a prototype of what is expected to be the next generation of storage technology.By moving to PCI Express, the industry marries the world's most popular storage bus with the world's most popular computer bus. This union provides a solid growth path to innovate new capability, while preserving the ability to plug legacy SATA drives into new SATA Express based computers. In another innovation, SATA Express allows cable connections with lower costs, by removing the PCI Express Sync line via SRIS (Separate RefClock with Independent SSC), which lowers the overall cable cost."WD has been at the forefront of SATA technology, and we see a vibrant growth path for adoption of the future SATA Express Roadmap," said Matt Rutledge, senior vice president, storage technology, WD. "SATA will remain a standard for many years in many applications, and for customers who want to discuss a future beyond vanilla SATA, WD is ready to plan the future with them."The SATA Express interface will be demonstrated in systems from WD's key partners at Computex to show the operational interface with their new platforms. This new SATA Express infrastructure allows customers to work with SSDs, SSHDs, and HDDs on a single common bus.WD's demonstration prototype leverages standard AHCI drivers and is compatible with all known, currently supported client operating system releases."SATA Express is a breakthrough interface for internal storage. As a pioneer and leading provider of SATA Express host solutions, ASUS is glad to see exciting new devices demonstrated in the market. The SRIS-enabled SATA Express technology has been carefully engineered in selected ASUS 9 Series motherboards for great compatibility with SATA Express devices. The complete ASUS SATA Express solution together with the WD hard drive will be showcased at the ASUS booth M0410," said Joe Hsieh, Corporate Vice President and General Manager of ASUS Motherboard Business Unit and Desktop Business Unit."With the launch of the Intel 9 series chipset, GIGABYTE is excited to bring several new motherboards to the market that supports the very latest SATA Express technology," commented Colin Brix, Director of Marketing of GIGABYTE Motherboard Business Unit. "As an industry leader in the storage space, WD is one of the first vendors to demonstrate SATA Express devices, and GIGABYTE is thrilled to be able to demo one of their latest drives at Computex so we can show our customers just how much faster PCI Express based SATA Express is than previous generations."Kevin Peterson, WD's Senior Director of Platform Engineering showcasing the first PCI Express hard drive, equipped with the new SATA Express interface.Photo: CompanyAbout WDWD, a Western Digital company, is a long-time innovator and storage industry leader. As a storage technology pacesetter, the company produces reliable, high-performance hard disk drives and solid state drives. These drives are deployed by OEMs and integrators in desktop and mobile computers, enterprise computing systems, embedded systems and consumer electronics applications, as well as by the company in providing its own storage products. WD's leading storage devices and systems, networking products, media players and software solutions empower people around the world to easily save, store, protect, share and experience their content on multiple devices. WD was established in 1970 and is headquartered in Irvine, California. For more information, please visit the company's website at www.wd.com.Western Digital Corp. (NASDAQ: WDC), Irvine, Calif., is a global provider of products and services that empower people to create, manage, experience and preserve digital content. Its companies design and manufacture storage devices, networking equipment and home entertainment products under the WD, HGST and G-Technology brands. Visit the Investor section of the company's website (www.westerndigital.com) to access a variety of financial and investor information.

Although not best known for its notebooks, Gigabyte Technology has been operating in the notebook business for quite a while and entered the gaming notebook business two years ago.As one of the top-tier motherboard players, Gigabyte is known for its technological leadership in areas such as cooling and overclocking. These advantages have given the company competitiveness in the gaming notebook industry and helped the company earn recognition from consumers.For 2014, Gigabyte created Aorus, an independent gaming brand and will sell its top-tier products designed specifically for gamers under the brand. The company will continue to release Gigabyte branded notebooks and tablets, but they will be mainly focused on general purpose usage.For Computex 2014, Gigabyte is hosting a booth at Taipei World Trade Center (TWTC) Exhibition Hall 1 to showcase its new products. To learn about Gigabyte's latest gaming notebook strategy and the reasons behind the creation of Aorus, Digitimes recently sat down with Vincent Liu, director of Gigabyte's sales division to talk about the gaming notebook industry.Q: What are Gigabyte's plans for Computex 2014?A: Gigabyte is showcasing its latest gaming notebook products including several top-end models under the company's newly created Aorus brand as well as regular high-end models such as the P34- and P35-series, which are branded under Gigabyte.Gigabyte has three notebooks under Aorus: the X7, X3 and X3 Plus. These devices are our latest innovations and designed specifically for gamers. We have equipped them with top-end hardware and compared to our competitors, they also feature competitive price/performance ratios.Q: What are Gigabyte's strategies for the notebook industry? Will the company be developing anything new for the traditional notebook industry?A: For our notebook business, we currently have two brands: the newly created Aorus and Gigabyte. The gaming notebook market is now the main focus of our notebook division (G-Style) and we have grown professionally over the past two years in regards to the manufacture of gaming notebooks.Compared to the gaming notebook models we released two years ago, our new gaming products are thinner and lighter with new in-house developed cooling designs.Traditional notebook shipments have been dropping for several quarters and Gigabyte, as a latecomer, is at a disadvantage competing against other first-tier players in the market because the competition has already turned to economies of scale instead of innovation. For Gigabyte, which started with strong R&D capabilities, the gaming notebook market, which requires high technological involvement, is a more suitable direction to expand into.Gigabyte-branded notebooks are currently being promoted mainly for general purposes include gaming, enterprise-usage as well as traditional applications. For traditional mainstream models, we are offering them mainly to satisfy client demand and will not push them aggressively.Gigabyte's high-end notebooks are all manufactured at our plaints in Taiwan, while design and development of all our notebooks is conducted at our Taiwan headquarters. Through the strategy, we hope to maintain quality and stability, and fulfill our social responsibility to Taiwan.Q: What does Gigabyte think about the gaming notebook industry and its future?A: We are optimistic about the gaming notebook industry's future and are seeing the industry advance and evolve rapidly.Gigabyte is a latecomer to the gaming notebook industry and is facing fierce competition, but our business strategy of delivering the best out of the hardware we use has earned recognition from many consumers and gamers.Gigabyte's goal is to give users the best performance in each price segment, and we have developed many technologies and done product differentiation to accomplish this target.Compared to our competitors, the scale of Gigabyte's gaming notebook business is actually rather small, but after two years of operation, our technologies have started to be recognized by consumers. For now, we are not looking to experience an immediate and large shipment growth, but are instead focusing on earning consumers' trust.Building products that consumers can trust has always been the motto of Gigabyte, and is the business direction we will continue to follow. Despite the fierce competition, we will continue to offer reliable products to consumers.Q: Why is Gigabyte releasing a new brand name for its gaming notebooks? What benefits does Gigabyte expect to see from the new brand?A: Aorus is an independent brand and we will not market the brand as part of Gigabyte; therefore, you will not see Gigabyte's logo on Aorus-branded products. We created Aorus for professional gamers and in addition to notebooks, we also brand our best keyboards, mice and earphones under the brand.Aorus-branded notebook industrial designs also look different to models branded under Gigabyte. Aorus-brand notebook designs look powerful and futuristic, which we are confident will attract gamers. In fact, we have received good feedback from our channel retail partners as well as consumers about our product designs.We have equipped the best hardware in the Aorus X7 notebook such as Intel's fourth-generation Core i7 processor and dual-Nvidia graphics cards with SLI support. To keep its thin and light characteristics, we have designed a cooling module, which features five heat pipes, four air vents, three controllable fan settings and two fans to efficiently dissipate heat generated by the two GPUs.We are releasing our new Aorus X3 during Computex 2014 also featuring top-end hardware.We expect these gaming notebooks to help us advance further in the market as well as keep us ahead of our competitors.Q: Does the company have any new plans for tablets? What does Gigabyte think about the tablet industry?A: Gigabyte has a business unit that handles ARM/Android-based tablets and may showcase some products at the show.As for Wintel-based tablets, Gigabyte has no plans to release related devices. As I said previously, competition over economies of scale is not really something that Gigabyte is good at, and the Wintel tablet industry is currently in such a situation.Therefore, the market will not become a focus for Gigabyte. We will keep all our attention on developing the gaming notebook business.However, we are still shipping existing Wintel-based tablets launched a few years ago, to some enterprise customers and the procurement market as we still see good demand from these segments.Q: What are Gigabyte's long-term plans?A: Gigabyte's notebook business operations will be driven by our brand strategy. Aorus, as an independent brand, will continue to represent our top-end product line, and in addition to notebooks, Gigabyte will continue to add more products under the brand as long as those devices meet the qualifications of Aorus: top-end products designed specifically for enthusiast gamers.As for the Gigabyte brand, we wish to maintain its trusted image and will continue to strengthen related products with quality and stability, but still maintain a high price-performance ratio.Vincent Liu, Gigabyte director of sales divisionPhoto: Joseph Tsai, Digitimes, June 2014

Intel president Renee James has unveiled several new innovations at Computex 2014 including a SoC platform for entry-level mobile devices, 14nm fanless mobile PC reference design, new CPUs and technologies.Noting progress toward bringing the company's first integrated mobile SoC platform for entry and value smartphones and tablets to market in the fourth quarter of this year (2014), James made the first public phone call using a smartphone reference design based on the dual-core Intel SoFIA 3G solution. Intel will also bring a quad-core SoFIA LTE part to market in the first half of 2015 and last week announced a strategic agreement with Rockchip to add a quad-core SoFIA 3G derivative for entry-level tablets to the SoFIA family, also due in the first half of next year.James also revealed the company's 14nm fanless mobile PC reference design. The 2-in-1 is a 12.5-inch screen that is 7.2mm thin with keyboard detached and weighs 670g. It includes a media dock that provides additional cooling. The design is based on the first of Intel's next-generation 14nm Broadwell processors that are purpose-built for 2-in-1s and will be in market later this year. The reference design is powered by Intel's Core M processor for energy efficiency.James introduced the fourth-generation Intel Core i7 and i5 processors "K" SKU, deliver four cores at up to 4GHz base frequency. The desktop processor, built for enthusiasts will start production shipments begin in June of this year.For the data center I/O needs, James introduced the Intel Solid-State Drive Data Center Family for PCIe to meet the increasing need for high-performance, consistent and reliable storage solutions in the data center while helping to lower total cost of ownership. The drives will be broadly available in the third quarter of this year.In order for computing to become more personal, James said it needs to meet people on their own terms, making interaction more natural and intuitive. She highlighted collaborations and new advances to bring Intel RealSense technology and 3D cameras and supporting applications to a growing number of 2-in-1, all-in-one, tablet and other personal computing devices.James said that the Intel RealSense software development kit 2014 will be made available to developers in the third quarter of 2014, providing opportunity for developers of all skill levels to create natural, intuitive user interfaces.Intel 14nm fanless mobile PC reference designPhoto: Company

As part of Toshiba, OCZ Storage Solutions is able to leverage Toshiba's NAND and combine it with its proprietary controllers, firmware and software. Toshiba's financial strength has also put OCZ in a better position to compete in the rapidly growing SSD market.Alex Mei, CMO at OCZ Storage Solutions recently spoke about the company's plans during Computex Taipei 2014 and its outlook for the year ahead.Q: What are the hot products OCZ will be showcasing at Computex 2014?A: We are excited to return to Computex as this is always a good show for us in terms of meeting with our partners, customers and media. This year we are showcasing our complete line of client and enterprise solid state solutions including our recently launched RevoDrive 350 PCIe SSD as well as our enterprise class Intrepid SATA series. We are also unveiling our latest addition to the award winning Vector SATA SSD family, the Vector 180 which leverages our proprietary Barefoot 3 controller with the latest generation Toshiba NAND and adds new enterprise features including partial PFAIL protection. We are seeing the lines blur between high end workstation drives and hyperscale/datacenter server SSDs and this product is designed to bridge that gap.Q: Recently OCZ launched a new PCIe SSD (RevoDrive 350), what is the main significant advantage using PCIe interface? What is the difference compared to other SSD using SATA Express standard?A: The RevoDrive 350 is designed for customers requiring high performance and is able to achieve three times the performance of SATA-based SSDs, delivering RAID like performance in a single easy to deploy single card solution. The RevoDrive 350 is based on our proven performance architecture and features 19nm Toshiba NAND to complete our portfolio transition to in-house flash, offering a high-performance yet cost-efficient SSD for bandwidth-intensive applications. This exciting new drive provides customers with workstation-grade design capabilities and maximum performance for professional content creation, multimedia, and extreme gaming. RevoDrive 350 is able to reach up up to 1.8GB/s sequential speeds and up to 140,000 4K random write IOPS thanks to the PCIe Gen. 2 x8 interface and multiple LSI SF-2282 processors to offer more bandwidth than the previous generation. Enabling both performance and functionality for applications ranging from scientific computing to extreme gaming systems, this workstation-class storage product also leverages our unique and proprietary Virtualized Controller Architecture (VCA) 2.0 to deliver highly efficient performance aggregation while reducing the burden on host resources, effectively accelerating application performance and taking full advantage of today's multithreaded processors and software. RevoDrive 350 also supports up to 50GB of host writes per day for 3 years to provide leading endurance for media professionals over less robust consumer SSDs.Q: How did OCZ and the storage market as a whole perform over the past year?A: The entire market for SSDs continues to grow and it is great to see the technology being utilized in everything from OEM laptops to enterprise cloud computing applications. There are so many demand drivers for SSDs that we are seeing adoption only accelerate as the need to store and manage data continues to grow. Last year was a transition period for OCZ and while we had the controller, firmware and application software technology already in-house it was becoming increasingly difficult to compete without the direct access to NAND. Today as part of the Toshiba Group we now have all the necessary technology pieces and are once again able to focus on delivering leading-edge products for our client and enterprise customers.Q: After the Toshiba-OCZ combination, what advantages bring to OCZ?A: Now that we are a Toshiba Group Company, one of the most exciting things about OCZ Storage Solutions is that we have been infused with even greater resources to develop next generation products. Toshiba acquired all of the company's R&D and engineering assets and not only kept them completely intact, but enabled these teams to refocus their efforts on developing our own next generation in-house controller, firmware, and enterprise software. These teams will continue to create products that are specifically designed for our target audience. As part of Toshiba we also have earlier and greater access to next generation NAND which allows OCZ optimize our next generation controllers and firmware to take advantage of the complete range of features, and opens the door to further enhance performance and endurance in future client and enterprise drives. This early access can also potentially accelerate the design cycle making it possible to release innovative products with even better time to market.Q: What are the fastest growing SSD interfaces in the enterprise segment? Is PCIe gaining traction?A: SATA continues to be the lion's share of the market but we have seen a continued ramp on PCIe SSDs both in the workstation and enterprise markets. With our current controller technology we are already at the point where we are saturating the SATA III bus so PCIe is a natural transition for customers looking for more bandwidth. We are already well along the design of our next generation controllers that are both native SATA and PCIe and I think that in the future we will see many PCIe SSDs in form factors beyond edge cards as customers seek the ideal combination of performance, density, reliability and ease of deployment.Q: Where does Taiwan fit into OCZ's operations?A: Taiwan has always been our APAC operations headquarters and continues to be home for our sales and marketing functions in the region. Our manufacturing operation in Taiwan has been absorbed by a Toshiba manufacturing partner and will continue to produce our drives. This organization has a wealth of expertise in the manufacture of storage products for Toshiba and is infusing additional resources into the operation. As we ramp both our client and enterprise businesses there is a major push to continually improve quality throughout the organization and our local team in Taiwan continues to play a key role in this regard.Q: Can you tell us more about your enterprise SSD strategy?A: The enterprise market continues to be a key growth area for us and where we are investing a lot of our resources on the R&D side. We have been refining our solution offering to build products that our customers are specifically asking for, in some cases this includes adding new enterprise features, something that we are able to do because we have our own controllers and firmware. We are also continuing to push are total solutions approach, like our newest ZD-XL SQL Accelerator 1.5 which is a tightly integrated hardware/software plug-and-play acceleration solution optimized for Microsoft SQL Server applications. This solution leverages OCZ's industry-proven PCIe SSD hardware and application-tuned software to deliver low latency flash that resolves potential SQL Server bottleneck issues enabling the flash to be deployed as a local flash volume, a flash cache for HDD volumes, or as a combination of both. The solution includes a combination of fast flash performance, a unique cache mechanism that makes advanced and statistically-optimized decisions on what data to cache, and a dynamic cache warm-up scheduler that enables workloads to be placed on flash cache in advance of demanding and critical jobs. Solutions like this make it easier to deploy and leverage the benefits of SSD technology and we are continuing to make investments in this arena, making it easier for enterprise customers to address their enterprise storage challenges no matter what the application may be.Q: Can you share your views about the outlook for SSD? What is your business outlook for 2014? Which are the most exciting challenges ahead of OCZ short-term, mid-term as well as long-term?A: While there is no doubt there will continue to be consolidation in the SSD market I expect that the NAND Fabs will continue to become the key players in this space. I believe we will continue to see a surge in adoption in both the PC and Data Center space with the most growth in the mainstream PC segment as drives only become more affordable. OCZ is back with a renewed focus and our most exciting short term challenges are mostly behind us as we have transitioned our portfolio to Toshiba NAND, and we were able to retain almost our entire team through the transition to let us hit the ground running. Mid-term and long term our challenges are on building back our business with all of our valued customers and partners across all regions, as well as accelerating our product development to leverage cutting edge TLC and 3D NAND technologies. OCZ has always pushed the performance envelope and we are committed to continue to support both the client and enterprise markets with quality SSD products. This is both a very exciting time for the maturing SSD market as well as our own organization, and with Toshiba's support we now have even more resources in which to bring to market innovative solutions that address our customer's requirements head on.OCZ Storage Solutions launched a new PCIe SSD RevoDrive 350Photo: Company

Formosa Electronic Industries Inc. (8171:TT) is one of the earliest members of Wireless Power Consortium (WPC) in Taiwan, and also an Apple MFi qualified manufacturing licensee, authorized to produce Made for iPhone/iPad/iPod products for the mass market. FEii is a complete new brand launched by Formosa Electronic in the end of 2013 aiming to provide mobile power to people anywhere anytime, and bring them closer.This year at Computex, FEii is launching the world's first double approval wireless charging protective case certified by both WPC Qi and Apple MFi. These patented MFi products are the result of hundreds of hours of hard work and cooperation between Formosa Electronic(Feii), CviLux (Allsor), and Triangus Design Company. This 2-piece wireless charging protective case consists of a functional module and a standard cover which is part of an iPhone functional case system of various interchangeable functional modules and a standard iPhone back cover that are compatible with these modules. These current and future available functional modules includes: wireless charging receiver, external battery pack, in-car holder, external flash storage and amplifier.FEii has also developed a series of Qi wireless charging products to bring users a real wireless life. Including desktop wireless charging stand with movable charging coil to suit different smartphones, furniture embedded wireless charging pad for home or office use, multiple wireless charging pad, and many more. FEii is also introducing IPX7 water proof power bank NPI-1A/1B with a large capacity of 7800 mAh using grade A 18650 cells from Korean/Japanese companies. NPI-1B is also equipped with wireless charging receiver. Other power banks such as super slim power bank SLM-3700, SLM-6600 comes with aluminum housing in various colors and with 3700 mAh and 6600 mAh capacity respectively. BTP-5200, and BTP-4400 are another two new low cost power bank and has 5200 mAh & 4400 mAh capacity respectively. All of these power banks come with fast charging output of 5V2A for instant charge.Formosa Electronic is also the world leading OEM/ODM manufacturer for battery packs, wireless charging products, power bank/external batteries, adaptors for major technology firms worldwide. Its headquarters and R&D operations are based in Taipei, Taiwan, with its manufacturing site in Kunshan, just outside Shanghai. Formosa's Kunshan manufacturing site occupies 578,000 m2 and has 1200 staff members and 80 on-site R&D engineers. Its manufacturing site has passed ISO9000, ISO14000, QC080000, TS16949 and OSHA18000 professional certifications. Formosa not only cares about the quality of products and production but believes in providing a safe and comfortable place for its employees. It also takes the responsibility of protecting the environment. In order to satisfy the United Nations' safety regulations on transportation of potentially dangerous goods, Formosa Electronic has invested heavily to become one of the very few in-house UN38.8 lab which is according to ISO17025 control in China. All its battery products can be tested in house and it can issue UN38.8 certificates that are recognized by all airports, and airlines in China.Its multi-cell battery packs designed for notebooks, tablets and electronic motorcycles have passed TES/CNS15387 certificate.This year it is going to launch distributional energy systems which are compatible with many types of power sources such as solar panel, wind power generator, emergency generator, and 48V telecom backup power.Qi wireless receiver and external batteryPhoto: CompanyFormosa Electronic Industries Inc: Headquartered in Taipei.Kunshan manufacturing site: 578,000m2 in floor area; 1,200 employees; 80 R&D/engineers.Monthly capacity: Single cell battery pack, 3,000k; multi-cell pack 500k, power bank, 2,500k..Major customers: ASUS, Pegatron, HTC, Quanta, Mitac, TomTom, Xiaomi…etc.Motto: Trustful, ECO, Believe

Notebooks, tablets, and peripherals such as hard disk drives, cameras, and more recently displays have derived power over USB interfaces, enabling simple connections for power and data, eliminating the need for large cumbersome power adapters. Digital devices like smartphones are now almost exclusively USB for charging and data transfer.In fact, one of the downsides of USB is the relatively limited amount of power that can be transmitted through the cables. USB 2.0 only allowed for a 500 mA load if the device is also transmitting data, while USB 3.0 set the upper limit at 900 mA. Both standards can handle up to 1.5 amps strictly for charging purposes, but not while data is being transmitted. And USB Battery Charging 1.2 allows delivering 7.5W, offering 1500mA through 5V, which may be qualified for the need of power charging for small mobile devices but not bigger devices such as LCD displays or Notebooks.Today, the industry standard USB Power Delivery (USB PD) specification takes USB power to the next level, speeding the charging time of mobile devices and more than enough to power LCD panels, Notebooks, external hard drives, Blu-Ray DVD, DVD R/W, CD-R and other hardware without independent power cables and AC adapters. The next generation of USB standard named USB 3.1, which includes USB PD features and with full backwards compatibility with older USB specifications, opens the door to charge many kinds of smart devices including Notebooks, flat panel displays with one single cable only.More than that, however, USB PD is designed to be flexible at the port level, meaning you can plug a variety of devices into the system without worrying about one product burning out the rest of the devices. Hook up a notebook and a smartphone, in other words, and your smartphone won't get zapped by the notebook's far higher power draw. The idea is to create a flexible standard to specify six profiles for power. The intent is to deliver between 10W and 100W in steps. These six profiles are cleverly named Profile 0-5. It can ramp power up or down between profiles on the fly, and switch direction of power flow too. USB PD will detect and utilize current USB cables, and deliver up to 100W over newer PD spec cables.Before COMPUTEX Taipei 2014, DIGITIMES interviewed with Mr. Kenny Lin, Vice president of Good Way Technology to look at the USB PD solutions and future development. It is hoping to look at the trends and watch how market developed in USB power challenges.USB PD Docking station to accelerate business development of commercial notebook PC marketGood Way Technology's major launch this year in COMPUTEX is DU3710 USB PD Docking station and Display port, which is enabling power over USB PD for Notebooks, LCD monitors and other peripherals delivering up to 100 Watts at 20V, 10 times the power of existing power solutions, while enabling USB3.0 SuperSpeed data over the same cable. It equipped with three USB3.0 downstream ports, one HDMI port with resolution up to 2048x1152, one DVI-I port with same upper resolution limit of HDMI port, one stereo audio out and one mac in port and one Gigabyte Ethernet port. The AC power adaptor is 150W (12V/12.5A).Take above picture as an example. In normal circumstance, a DU3710 USB PD Docking station works as a provider to offer power to connected display, notebook or hard disk drive (HDD); and HDD are consumers to receive power from DU3710. But if display and notebook both support USB Power Delivery, under this technique, they can both be provider and consumer. Therefore, when a notebook lacks power or not with power supply around, it can receive power directly through DU3710 and the display can always receive power from DU3710 without extra power adaptor. These two devices can also deliver power through USB interface to other devices like mobile phones or HDDs and transmit data at the same time. This architecture massively eliminates the lots of adaptor and power cords for your digital devices and the two-way usage makes USB Power Delivery become a new technical application that enabling the power ecosystems in your desktop.Use DU3710 USB PD Docking station not only consolidating all the power sources in one device, but also equipping with USB display capability to allow users to switch to different displays.Kenny Lin highlights the significant benefits of PD Docking station and is especially suit for commercial notebook segment users. There is limited profit margin on most of notebook PC segments. But the new commercial type of Notebooks featured USB PD and bundled with USB PD Docking station turns to a very attractive portfolio of higher end value-added notebook PC packages. Some major Japanese notebook PC brands have seen this business opportunity and opened several ODM projects to leverage unique product advantages of Good Way Technology. And one good news is that Taiwan notebook PC players starting to move the same direction.It has made it clear Kenny intend to watch the market developed for many years and witnessed not only how USB PD demands has developed, but also how companies compete amid increased competition in upcoming challenges.New Thunderbolt 2 Docking station boosting higher end 4K display solutions for both Mac and Windows systemsFor fulfilling the strong "always-increasing" demands of sharing higher resolution videos, Intel announced Thunderbolt 2 specification in 2013. Originally brought to market in conjunction with Apple, Thunderbolt is now a standard feature of Mac computers sold in the market today. The new Thunderbolt 2 controller was codenamed "Falcon Ridge" running at 20Gbs with bi-directional channel that can handle either data transfer or display, a doubling of the bandwidth over the original Thunderbolt.Moreover, Thunderbolt 2 will support DisplayPort 1.2 and 4K video. This result is great news for an industry on the cusp of widespread adoption of 4K video technologies. Good Way Technology has observed this trend for some time, and its Thunderbolt 2 Docking station expects to go into production by the third quarter of 2014. This product line has two models named DB2020 and DB 2120 with the features of three USB3.0 downstream ports, one Mini Display Port resolution up to 4K2K through Thunderbolt Port or Daisy chain with the same Thunderbolt Port, one HDMI port with same upper resolution limit of 4Kx2K, one stereo audio out and one mic in port and one Gigabyte Ethernet port.Good Way Technology is targeting the mass market with the Thunderbolt 2 Docking station, with more standard USB3.0 and HDMI ports and a desktop-friendly design. With Apple leading the position in Thunderbolt adoption, however, docking stations like Good Way Technology's Thunderbolt 2 Docking station offering could begin to hit retail market at increasingly affordable prices. The current MSRP price will be between US 200 to 300 dollars.Visit COMPUTEX Booth C0506 at Taipei World Trade Center Exhibition HallGood Way Technology will be demonstrating its USB PD Docking station, Thunderbolt 2 Docking and other 4K display solutions, which are the recent progress relating to new technologies of USB PD and Thunderbolt 2 development. In this year at COMPUTEX TAIPEI 2014, they will be showcasing the complete features in the booth of C0506 at Taipei World Trade Center Exhibition Hall. If you want to look at more information of other product lines of Good Way Technology, please logon the website at www.goodway.com.twThunderbolt Dock Eyco SystemThe USB PD Docking Station Connection and DeploymentPhoto: Company

For the first time presenting at Computex Taipei 2014, Vision Advance Technology (VATek) is about to reveal the whole series digital modulator chips. Other than the multi-format DTV modulator chip, world's first ENMODER (Encoder + Modulator) will be shown at the fair as well.Present multimedia connectivity, for commercial or home-use purposes, mostly is IP or WiFi based, yet bringing concerns about complicated set-up/settings and transmitting efficiency. VATeK released digital communication modulator chip Gen. I in 2013 as a low-cost, high-efficient solution for the dilemma. Gen. I features high bandwidth, long distance, anti interference, encryption, and it is able to carry out dual-mode (cable and wireless) communication. Except for being applied to FHD digital video data streaming transmission, it can also receive and launch Ethernet data in DTV communication way. As an all-round digital communication modulator chip, it modulates DTV signals in different formats (DVB-T/ATSC/DTMB/QAM) with ultra low power dissipation, and then transmits to display ports such as HD TV in the mode of digital broadcasting system. At last, through cable or wireless ways, data will simultaneously enter more than one receiver. It has been widely introduced into domestic agents and used on their high-end video products.By 2014, VATek launched the original single chip, integrated with video encoder and modulated - ENMODER, which relieved the inconvenience (high cost) brought by the previous separation way. ENMODER, with built-in video compressing units, supports MPEG-2/H.264 compressing units utilized by DTV system, and the maximum picture quality it reaches is 1080P. In addition, its (ENMODER) ultra-low-delay compressing effectiveness and ultra-low-power-dissipation performance will by all means take you by surprise. ENMODER is an amazing choice that perfectly goes with professional video equipments.Other than the ability to do multi-format modulation, indicated VATek, ENMODER's got compounded media interface so that it can do IPTV Stream, and hardware video capture. Possible applications of ENMODER are widely flexible. With mass production scheduled in the latter half of 2014, ENMODER is anticipated to shed an eye-catching light into the market, to which multimedia tool manufacturers are eagerly looking forward.Except these Gen. I and Gen. II chips, we are planning that starting from 2015, VATek will be launching several chips with integrated functions, DTV modulator and multimedia compression related, including ENMODER that supports UHD video compression as well as the second generation digital terrestrial TV standards(DVB-T2).Spectrum crunches is not a news as the ISM bands become overused and congested. With TVWS (TV White Space) new spectrum has become available to the wireless market. TVWS has been designated by the FCC to be a license-free application. VATek has introduced its Modulator into North American successfully, and has already being used in FCC approved TVWS products.Vision Advance Technology Inc. (VATek), founded in Jan, 2014, is the subsidiary of Feature Integration Technology Inc, one of the leading enterprises of IC design industry in Taiwan. VATek is currently devoted to designing and manufacturing digital communication chips that aim at multimedia modulation and video compression.Photo: CompanyMeet VATek in 2014 COMPUTEX Taipei - Hall 3 TWTC G0552Contact us: marketing@vatek.com.tw