Vik
Microsoft Announces Surface Enterprise Initiative, Partners With Dell, HP, And More
This morning, Corporate VP of the Windows and Devices Group Yusuf Mehdi made a fairly startling announcement. Microsoft has created a new partnership to help drive Windows 10 adoption in the enterprise, which the Surface Enterprise Initiative. You wil…
Microsoft Announces Surface Enterprise Initiative, Partners With Dell, HP, And More
This morning, Corporate VP of the Windows and Devices Group Yusuf Mehdi made a fairly startling announcement. Microsoft has created a new partnership to help drive Windows 10 adoption in the enterprise, which the Surface Enterprise Initiative. You wil…
Samsung Announces 12Gb LPDDR4 DRAM For Mobile Devices
Today Samsung Electronics announced that they have begun mass production of the memory industry’s first 12Gb LPDDR4 DRAM on their 20nm manufacturing process. These new chips offer 50% greater density than Samsung’s existing 8Gb chips.
The production of 12Gb chips opens up the possibility of smartphones and tablets with 6GB of RAM using a four 12Gb chip DRAM package, as well as 3GB using just two chips in a package. A 6GB package would also only take up the same amount of space as existing 3GB packages which use 6Gb chips. The new 12Gb chips also end up being very slightly more than 30% faster than their 8Gb chips, with a per-pin speed of 4266Mbps which would give 34Gbps of bandwidth over a 64bit bus. With Samsung beginning mass production of this new memory it’s only a matter of time before we start to see more devices move from 2GB to 3GB and from 4GB to 6GB of RAM.
Microsoft Announces VP9 Support Is Coming To Edge
Today Microsoft announced that support for VP9 and the WebM container is in development for the Microsoft Edge browser that ships with Windows 10. Over the past couple of years the WebM container has become something of a de facto successor to animated GIFs as it allows for clips that run for several minutes to be put into a relatively good quality file with a small size, and doesn’t suffer from the 256 color limit of standard animated GIFs. VP9 is also the default encoding used for videos on YouTube, which isn’t surprising given that the VP8 and VP9 standards are developed by Google.
With the fate of HEVC uncertain due to potential issues with the costs required to license patents related to it (e.g. the creation of the rival HEVC Advance consortium), the importance of royalty free video coding formats like VP9 may grow substantially in the near future. And while current hardware support for VP9 is virtually non-existant in the PC space, that’s slowly changing as the newest GPUs at least implement partial/hybrid support for the codec.
According to Microsoft, support for VP9 and the WebM container will be coming to Microsoft Insider builds of Windows 10 in the near future, with it rolling out to everyone else sometime later.