neXt Curve Insights for December 2024

Welcome to the December 2024 edition of neXt Curve Insights. This monthly newsletter is a compilation of articles, media, and news that have been curated by the research team at neXt Curve with contributions from partner analysts as well as business and technology leaders.

The goal of neXt Curve Insights is to provide our readers with a regular cadence of coverage of the industry and tech trends and events that matter with the intent of fostering constructive discussion and debate on the future of technology, innovation, and the continuous reinvention of enterprise, industry, society, and our lives. 

I hope that you find this edition informative and inspiring.

Leonard Lee, Executive Analyst of neXt Curve

NOTICE:

neXt Curve analysis content is only available in the full version of the newsletter that can be found on the neXt Curve research portal at www.next-curve.com.

We appreciate your readership. Please contact Leonard Lee, Executive Analyst of neXt Curve for any advisory needs.

Top Posts

Check out the top social media posts on LinkedIn by neXt Curve analysts, associates, and partners. Follow neXt Curve and Leonard Lee on LinkedIn and be part of the conversation. Click on the image to view the post.

“Apple‘s Vision Pro took a 5% market share, becoming the third-largest player in the VR/MR market.”

That translates into around 40+% revenue share for the global XR market and probably all of the profit share. Sound familiar?

Qualcomm prevailed in their legal battle with Arm in a court case that played out this week in Delaware.

Semi-kudos to Google for seeking consent from its YouTube content before providing third parties with access to their creations for training AI models. 

Personally, I can’t imagine any creator providing consent for this purpose.

Over the weekend I picked up a Meta Quest 3S unit to test out and possibly keep if I found it worth the $300.

Samsung Electronics announced their collaboration with Qualcomm and Google at Galaxy Unpacked 2023 to bring a premium XR response to the Apple Vision Pro and a counterpoint to Meta low-end approach which has found some success in Ray-Ban smart glasses (smartphone peripherals) powered by Snapdragon AR1 Gen1 processor.

OK, I was messing around with Apple Intelligence Playground and it produced this. 🤣 Apple must have a Samsung bias!

Google’s press release on Willow goes viral and spurs speculation and excitement. Is quantum computing the next mega hype being teed up alongside Generative AI? 

Is the post-GenAI pivot in play?

What do you think?

Congrats to Mavenir for making the cut! This is the bit I think is super interesting. “All open radios will be managed by Ericsson’s Intelligent Automation Platform (EIAP) via open management interfaces.”

I had a chance to spend quite a bit of time with Ericsson leadership to delve a bit deeper into the recently announced NewCo JV with Erik Ekudden, Global CTO of Ericsson .

It’s arrived, the Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Carbon Gen 13 Aura Edition powered by Intel Corporation‘s Core Ultra Series 2 (Lunar Lake) processor!

Kicking of Amazon Web Services (AWS) re:Invent 2024 with a breakfast with the telco executive and AR team and a group of my analyst colleagues from around the world. Thanks to Chivas Nambiar and Ishwar Parulkar for spending time with us.

Pat Gelsinger retires as of today, Monday, December 1. I’m sure the semiconductor world will be talking up this news.

Happy 2-year anniversary, ChatGPT. “The big picture: OpenAI’s ChatGPT turns two years old today. Outside a handful of specific fields, it’s hard to make the case that it has transformed the world the way its promoters promise. But the possibilities its power unlocks — both good and bad — have come into sharp view.” – Megan Morrone, Axios

IoT Stars has launched its new website for the new year and the 10th anniversary of this wonderful organization that has been a huge boon for the IoT community through the thick and the thin of the decade or a revolution in waiting.

If you don’t know about IoT Stars it is a safe house from the hype.

reThink Insights

Check out the articles and the research notes that neXt Curve published this month as well as press quotes by the media on topics related to our research agenda.

“The first rule of IoT: you do not talk about IoT” (November 29, 2024) by Ignacio Siccardi , Wevolver

“The Internet of Things (IoT) is transforming industries worldwide, offering innovative solutions and new business opportunities. However, running an IoT business requires more than just developing connected devices; it demands a strategic focus on value creation, security and seamless integration into customer workflows.”

“Why 2025 will be the year Arm dominates PCs” (December 30, 2024) by Matthew S Smith , PCWorld

“When it comes to the hardware, though, Snapdragon X Elite has proven its worth with reviewers, analysts, and enthusiasts. Lee says Snapdragon improved the performance-per-watt for Windows laptops, regardless of AI workloads. If you want a laptop with high performance and ample battery life, those Snapdragon PCs are modern trailblazers.”

“5G APIs for 2025? Analysts agree fraud protection works” (December 13, 2024) by Dan Jones , Fierce Network

““I think there will be a gradual uptake and end market interest in network-based capabilities, both informational and connectivity related in 2025,” At the moment, awareness and appreciation of network capabilities and what can be exposed and interfaced with by developer through APIs is largely lacking.”

“Network slicing slides more vigorously into 2025” (December 10, 2024) by Dan Jones , Fierce Network

“There is still the open question of what the generally monetizable services will be and the scenarios that make them viable. This, each operator will be answering for themselves on their own timeline. For outside observers, it will be like watching a kettle boil,”

Go to our neXt Curve reThink research portal for more content and insights associated with our research agenda.

neXt Curve Monthly Musings

Check out this month’s musings on all things in tech and industry that matter to technology and business leaders by neXt Curve’s Executive Analyst, Leonard Lee.

For real-time insights and commentary from Leonard Lee, follow him on LinkedIn and on Twitter.

Better to Rip n' Replace Late than Never

“The US House of Representatives will reportedly vote on a new defence bill that could provide telecoms companies in the country more than $3 billion, aiding efforts to strip out kit made by Chinese companies Huawei and ZTE.

The vote is one of many provisions included in an 1800-page document seen by Reuters, aimed directly at China. The report apparently includes an intelligence assessment on the state of China’s biotechnology capabilities and a look into alleged efforts to avoid US security regulations.

Funding for US’ rip and replace programme has been a hot topic. Federal Communications Commission (FCC) chair Jessica Rosenworcel has long-lobbied for the US government to approve more than $3 billion in funding to remove equipment deemed a security risk.” – “US to vote on boosting rip and replace funding” by Kavit Majithia, Mobile World Live, December 9, 2024

neXt Curve MUSING

neXt Curve Musings are available in the full version of the report 👉 CLICK HERE!

REFERENCE

• “US to vote on boosting rip and replace funding” by Kavit Majithia , Mobile World Live , December 9, 2024 (link)
• “Rip-and-Replace Opens the Door for Wireless Industry” by John Baker , Mavenir , March 23, 2021 (link)
• “Here is every company asking for FCC ‘rip and replace’ money” by Mike Dano , Light Reading , February 9, 2022 (link)

Lenovo X1 Gen 3 Aura Edition AI PC

It’s arrived, the Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Carbon Gen 13 Aura Edition powered by Intel Corporation’s Core Ultra Series 2 (Lunar Lake) processor that provides 48 TOPS of NPU compute and will support Microsoft’s Copilot+PC feature with what I anticipate will be some surprising battery life.

The materials used in the packaging are on message with Lenovo’s strong sustainability and ESG branding and commitments. Lenovo does a great job of making the unpacking experience “organically elegant.”

Out of the box, this laptop is incredibly light at less than 1kg. It’s noticeably lighter than my ThinkPad X1 Carbon 30th Edition though a bit smaller with the same screen size. Much lighter than my Yoga 7 Slim and smaller with a similar screen size.

The display is a 14″ OLED with an anti-glare, anti-reflection screen that delivers rich colors and contrast with the customary “eye candy” settings. Regardless, the display impresses and is easy on the eyes so far.

The keyboard is inspirational and is one of the trademark highlights of the ThinkPad X1 generation after generation. 

Battery life and heavy productivity and some media production performance will be the priorities of my evaluation as well as general usability and reliability in normal business use.

I’m particularly curious how a laptop fitted with the latest Intel Core Ultra 7 based on Lunar Lake performs versus the Yoga 7 Slim with Qualcomm’s Snapdragon X Elite.

This model of the ThinkPad X1 Carbon is the Aura Edition which comes with some exclusive features available only in Intel versions of this iconic laptop including Smart Share, Smart Modes and Smart Care. 

Find out more here: Lenovo Aura Edition imagined with Intel 

I’m looking forward to testing this devices out and sharing my feedback.

Stay tuned…..

Meta Quest 3s - Is Cheaper Better?

Over the weekend I picked up a Meta Quest 3S unit to test out and possibly keep if I found it worth the $300. Earlier in the year I picked up a Quest 3 to compare with the Apple Vision Pro which I purchased and kept.

Both the Quest 3S and Quest 3 priced starting at $300 and $500 respectively, are heavily subsidized devices as Meta continues to take on billions in losses a year on their Metaverse bet.

To be honest, I thought Meta Quest 3 was the bottom of low you would want to take the VR/MR experience. I was curious how taking things even lower impact the quality of the device, the experience, and the sense of value. 

The question is is cheap XR even worth the $300?

It’s obvious that Google, Samsung Electronics and Qualcomm are looking to fast follow Apple in delivering premium XR experiences with Android XR and Project Moohan. Though we don’t know how the Moohan device will be priced, Samsung does not seem to view bottom feeding as the future of XR. They have already tried this approach to limit success.

I also picked up an Insta360 X4 camera to take some 8K 360 video to test on both units. The results are already very telling for the potential for cheap VR headsets that fall well below the bar set by Apple Vision Pro albeit at more than 10 times the price.

A couple of early observations:

• Though feeling lighter (and cheaper) than the Vision Pro, the Meta Quest 3s oddly weighs on your face very quickly. I experienced this with the Quest 3 as well. It could be the shape of my face (flat-ish with less of a nose bridge), points where the fitting is off become painful pressure points as the weight of the device concentrate at those locations on your face. The Vision Pro is “custom” fitted (should be at over $3,500), but tends to distribute the relatively heavier weight of device better across your face. Notice in the image above how much further out the Quest 3s extends out from your face compared to the Vision Pro. I think this explains why a lighter device (which includes the battery in the visor) puts more pressure on your face. Probably why Apple went with a tethered battery design.
• The display quality of the Meta Quest 3s is noticeably poorer than the Quest 3. Passthrough has the same quality issues (grainy, low-res, and pixelation and shimmering) as the Quest 3 but with subtle but noticeable screen door and grid effect. You apparently get your money’s worth with the display.
• If you like games, Meta Quest 3s has titles, the controllers. It does make for a nice portable gaming device. Gaming is different with the Vision Pro.

Stay tuned for a more seasoned review next month and my view on cheap XR.

Pat Gelsinger Retires from Intel

There is a lot of debate about the sudden departure of Pat Gelsinger, now former CEO of Intel. Pat took the helm in February of 2021 (link) at a critical time for Intel which was facing increasing competition from AMD in both data center and client computing as they struggled with their process technology and expressing manufacturing and design leadership in their products. 

At the time and in retrospect, many will argue Pat was handed a poor hand to play, but he was also deemed the steady hand and keen mind that Intel needed to turn the company around. The cornerstones of his turnaround were: 

• IDM 2.0 – Intel’s strategy to expand its foundry business with massive investments and build out of fabs in the U.S. (in Arizona, Ohio), and Europe, and to (once again) open up their manufacturing to external customers to become an alternative leading edge manufacturing source to Asia-based TSMC and Samsung (link).
• 5 Nodes in 4 Years (5N4Y) – Intel’s foundry roadmap to restore the company’s process technology leadership bringing leading edge chip manufacturing to Intel product groups and external customers culminating with 18A which Pat claimed would usher in the Angstrom Era (note that 20A was deprecated). This pillar would be the enabler of Intel product leadership. (link)
• XPU – Though it is not mentioned much, Intel’s XPU strategy represented a move away from CPU-centricity which has characterized Intel for decades toward heterogeneous compute, integration, and packaging at a time when chiplets and SOC architectures from mobile were picking up steam. (link)

It’s also important to remember that Pat came onboard as the Coronavirus Pandemic continued to ebb and flow and geopolitical and tech trade tensions between the U.S. and China further escalated. While there might have been a chip shortage (largely mature node) that came and went, Intel faced persistent headwinds that worked against its business and its ability to up its competitiveness all while course correcting its complex business.

And of course, there was the CHIPS Act and its complex mission to restore chip manufacturing leadership, supply chain resiliency, and technological security and sovereignty in the U.S. Intel was and continues to be the critical centerpiece and to date, Pat has been the architect.

So, there is still a lot at stake. Despite less than perfect execution against what I considered a very aggressive roadmap and timeline, 2025 is set up to be the year that the Gelsinger strategy bears fruit and positions Intel in a parity or leadership manufacturing where Intel products such as the all-important Panther Lake will be able to land. 

Why all the theatrics at the last hour?

Regardless of the reason, Pat is out. Michelle Holthaus Johnson (MJ), EVP & GM of Intel’s Client Computing Group, and David Zinsner, CFO of Intel both share the interim co-CEO to shore up leadership at Intel.

Now there is a hunt for an external, permanent CEO and talks of a prevailing debate over spinning IF (Intel Foundry) off.

neXt Curve MUSING

neXt Curve Musings are available in the full version of the report 👉 CLICK HERE!

REFERENCE

• “Intel Announces Retirement of CEO Pat Gelsinger” by Intel, December 2, 2024 (link)
• “Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger Announces ‘IDM 2.0’ Strategy for Manufacturing, Innovation and Product Leadership” by Intel, March 23, 2021 (link)
• “Intel Accelerated” by Intel, July 26, 2021 (link)
• LinkedIn Post: “Big news coming out of Intel this morning!” by Leonard Lee, December 1, 2024 (link)

Arm vs. Qualcomm Trial: A Soft Conclusion

The month of December was packed with news pivotal to the semiconductor industry. One of those events as the Arm vs. Qualcomm trial which took place in a courtroom in Delaware on the 16th to the 20th of December.

I have the good fortune of having two analyst colleagues who were on location during the trial to pick up on the nuances of the proceedings and the action in the courtroom, Prakash Sangam of Tantra Analyst and Jim McGregor of TIRIAS Research .

Back in June of 2023, I penned an article in Bloomberg that provided my view of what was at stake with the eventual trial.

“If Nuvia’s technology and IP were to be destroyed—as Arm has demanded in its court filings—this would eliminate an essential domestic demand driver for the advanced semiconductor manufacturing base that the CHIPS Act urgently seeks to reconstitute in the US.

Moreover, it would weaken the overall US semiconductor industry’s ability to maintain its global leadership in increasingly competitive chip design. That would certainly be a risk to domestic semiconductor industry competitiveness and, arguably, national security.” – Leonard Lee, neXt Curve

Please, read the article for background on the case. (link)

neXt Curve MUSING

neXt Curve Musings are available in the full version of the report 👉 CLICK HERE!

REFERENCE

• “Arm-Qualcomm Lawsuit Could Muddle US Chip Design Leadership” by Leonard Lee, Bloomberg, June 13, 2023 (link)
• “Arm Squares Off Against Qualcomm: Day 1” by Jim McGregor, Forbes, December 17, 2024 (link)
• “Arm Squares Off Against Qualcomm: Day 2” by Jim McGregor, Forbes, December 18, 2024 (link)
• “Arm Squares Off Against Qualcomm: Day 3” by Jim McGregor, Forbes, December 19, 2024 (link)
• “Arm Squares Off Against Qualcomm: Day 4” by Jim McGregor, Forbes, December 20, 2024 (link)
• “Qualcomm vs. Arm trial, Day 1 – Opening statements and surprising revelations” by Prakash Sangam, Tantra Analyst, December 17, 2024 (link)
• “Qualcomm vs. Arm trial, Day 2 – Is processor design derivative of Instructing set architecture (ISA)?” by Prakash Sangam, Tantra Analyst, December 18, 2024 (link)
• “Qualcomm vs. Arm trial, Day 3 – Testimonies end, dispute funneled down to two key questions” by Prakash Sangam, Tantra Analyst, December 19, 2024 (link)
• “Qualcomm vs. Arm trial, Day 4 – Both parties rest their case, and jury deliberations begin.” by Prakash Sangam, Tantra Analyst, December 20, 2024 (link)
• “Qualcomm vs. Arm trial, Day 5 – Qualcomm wins!” by Prakash Sangam, Tantra Analyst, December 21, 2024 (link)
• neXt Curve reThink Podcast: “Semiconductor Industry & AI Highlights-December 2024” (with Karl Freund and Jim McGregor), December 30, 2024 (video) (audio)
• neXt Curve reThink Podcast: “Analysis: Arm vs Qualcomm Trial” (with Prakash Sangam), December 23, 2024 (video) (audio)

DeepSeek - Beyond Attention, Language

“DeepSeek, a Chinese AI startup, says it has trained an AI model comparable to the leading models from heavyweights like OpenAI, Meta, and Anthropic, but at an 11X reduction in the amount of GPU computing, and thus cost. The claims haven’t been fully validated yet, but the startling announcement suggests that while US sanctions have impacted the availability of AI hardware in China, clever scientists are working to extract the utmost performance from limited amounts of hardware to reduce the impact of choking off China’s supply of AI chips. The company has open-sourced the model and weights, so we can expect testing to emerge soon.

DeepSeek trained its DeepSeek-V3 Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) language model with 671 billion parameters using a cluster containing 2,048 Nvidia H800 GPUs in just two months, which means 2.8 million GPU hours, according to its paper. For comparison, it took Meta 11 times more compute power (30.8 million GPU hours) to train its Llama 3 with 405 billion parameters using a cluster containing 16,384 H100 GPUs over the course of 54 days.” – “Chinese AI company says breakthroughs enabled creating a leading-edge AI model with 11X less compute DeepSeek’s optimizations could highlight limits of US sanctions” by Anton Shilov, Tom’s Hardware, December 27, 2024

neXt Curve MUSING

neXt Curve Musings are available in the full version of the report 👉 CLICK HERE!

REFERENCE

• “Chinese AI company says breakthroughs enabled creating a leading-edge AI model with 11X less compute DeepSeek’s optimizations could highlight limits of US sanctions” by Anton Shilov , Tom's Hardware , December 27, 2024 (link)
• “DeepSeek-V3 Technical Report” by DEEPSEEK -AI, Aixin Liu, Bei Feng, Bing Xue, Bingxuan Wang, et al., ARVIX.com, December 27, 2024 (link)
• “Introducing Meta Llama 3: The most capable openly available LLM to date” by Meta, April 18, 2024 (link)

Media Highlights

This month, neXt Curve participated in the following internally produced and third-party media events. More media content featured by or featuring neXt Curve is available on our reThink YouTube channel and our media center.

AI or Not (hosted by Pamela Isom)

Discover the nuanced landscape of AI economics on the AI or Not podcast by Pamela Isom featuring Leonard Lee. Ever wondered if your business is chasing trends at the expense of true innovation?

Silicon Futures for December 2024 (with Karl Freund & Jim McGregor)

Jim McGregor of TIRIAS Research and Karl Freund of Cambrian-AI Research joined Leonard Lee to recap December 2024, another action-packed month in the world of semiconductors and AI.

The Year in Security & Trust (with Debbie Reynolds)

Debbie and Leonard recap security, trust, and privacy in 2024 where we saw some of the most catastrophic data breaches & cybersecurity incidents in recent memory and in many instances, history.

Analysis of Arm vs. Qualcomm (with Prakash Sangam)

Prakash shares his insights on the Arm vs. Qualcomm trial that took place in Delaware from December 16th to the 20th 2024 which he observed in person in the court room to its conclusion.

The Great M&M Tour 2024 (with Earl Lum)

Earl Lum of EJL Wireless Research joins Leonard to recap Marvell’s Industry Analyst Day 2024 and Mavenir’s Analyst Event that capped of an intense year of events.

Marvell Industry Analyst Day 2024 (with Prakash Sangam)

Prakash Sangam of Tantra Analyst joins Leonard to recap Marvell’s Industry Analyst Day 2024 for generative AI & custom accelerated infrastructure.

Event Highlights

This month, neXt Curve participated in the following virtual and in-person industry and technical events. For our full schedule of industry events refer to our event calendar. We also encourage you to follow neXt Curve’s LinkedIn company page.

AWS re:Invent 2024

Date: January 6 to 12, 2024

Location: Las Vegas, NV

KEY TAKEAWAYS

• AWS re:Invent seemed take things back to its roots in “cloud” against the specter of high generative AI expectations with Matt Garmon’s keynote taking on a cloud first feel.
• AWS missed the opportunity to remind the industry about the value of “cloud” at the Expo by overemphasizing generative AI on the making it difficult to see and appreciate the underlying solutions regarding data management, storage, databases, and “really massive data” that mattered more.
• AWS re:Invent subliminally highlighted the difference between cloud repatriation and cloud optimization. One is customer-centric, the other is a problem of fitness for purpose and economics.
• AWS’s generative AI strategy is an apple that the industry tries to compare with a Microsoft orange with a Google pear. AWS is squarely focused on generative AI for the cloud and enterprise,… and then there is Amazon. Confused yet?
• Is AWS behind in “AI”. Depends how you define AI and what you are talking about how peers account for and represent their “AI” business. It’s obvious that good data (knowledge) is the big gap and prerequisite for enterprise AI. In this regard, AWS still leads based on our re:Invent 2024 observations.
• Generative AI is hard, and AWS continues to evolve its tooling to help their customers accelerate the realization of enterprise-grade, industrial-grade, telco-grade AI while deepening the integration of AWS AI frameworks and assets with their industry-leading IT solutions portfolio and cloud assets – the all-important plumbing needed for good AI.

EVENT SUMMARY

re:Invent, which is AWS’s marquee event of the year was in massive form. An estimated 60,,000 attendees and a record 80,000 badges picked up, making the 2024 the biggest year in the 13 years of the event.

neXt Curve had a very broad research agenda for re:Invent 2024 making the event intense. Our many focus areas included (but not exclusive to):

• Generative AI in Media Production: The use of generative AI in content creation, production-grade applications, and AWS’s stance on responsible AI.
• Cloud Studio for Media Production: Advancements in architectures for enhancing cloud studios, lessons learned from POCs and pilots, and notable production deployments in 2024.
• Edge Computing and 5G in Media: Changes in the use of edge computing infrastructure, the appeal of MEC, and the traction of immersive media and spatial media production.
• AWS Network APIs Strategy: AWS’s plans and actions regarding network APIs, including their G2M strategy and developer awareness approach.
• AWS Telco Team’s Stance on Open RAN and AI-RAN: Question about the telco team’s position on the Open RAN and AI-RAN trends and their anticipated impact on AWS’s telco strategy and solutions.
• AWS’s Industrial IoT Strategy: AWS’s strategy to position their cloud and AI solutions for industrial IoT and how they have tuned their G2M for 2024 and beyond.
• AWS GenAI Supercomputing Services & Silicon: AWS’s progress in advancing its portfolio of AI supercomputing silicon (Nitro, Trainium, Inferentia) and system and software frameworks (Bedrock + Sagemaker), as well as new developments in AWS’s enterprise-facing GenAI supercomputing and inference services.

For easy reference to the key announcements made by AWS at re:Invent 2024 are paraphrased below and include:

• Amazon Nova, Amazon’s new generation of foundation models – Amazon Nova-powered generative AI applications can understand videos, charts, and documents, or generate videos and other multimedia content. (link)
• New Amazon EC2 Trn2 instances – AWS’s newest Trainium2 AI chip, offer 30-40% better price performance than the current generation of GPU-based EC2 instances, and Trn2 UltraServers—a new offering—deliver the fastest training and inference performance on AWS delivering up to 83.2 petaflops of compute. (link)
• Amazon Aurora DSQL – AWS claims it is the fastest distributed SQL database able to provide 99.999% multi-region availability, virtually unlimited scalability, strong consistency, and zero infrastructure management. (link)
• Amazon Bedrock Automated Reasoning – This new capability checks and reduces errors due to model hallucinations. AWS claims that Amazon Bedrock can check whether factual statements made by models are accurate—based on sound mathematical verifications—and show exactly how it reached that conclusion. (link) 
• Amazon Bedrock Model Distillation – Makes it easy to transfer specific knowledge from a large, highly capable model to a smaller, more efficient one that AWS claims can be up to 500% faster and 75% cheaper to run. (link)
• Amazon Bedrock Agents – Now supports multi-agent collaboration, making it easy to build and coordinate specialized agents to execute complex workflows. (link)
• New capabilities for Amazon Q – AWS claims that Q provides customers with better insights across Amazon Q Business and Q in QuickSight, improve cross-app generative AI experiences, and a new automation capability that uses agents to help employees automate complex workflows. (link)
• New Amazon Q Developer transformation capabilities modernize Windows.NET applications up to four times faster, transform VMware workloads, and accelerate mainframe migrations starting with IBM z/OS mainframes. (link)
• The next generation of Amazon SageMaker – Includes the new SageMaker Unified Studio, which AWS claims makes it easy for its customers to access all the data in their organizations wherever it’s stored and act on it using the best tool for the job across a wide variety of use cases. (link)

DAY 1 – Pre-event Analyst-only Sessions

Day 1 of Amazon Web Services (AWS) re:Invent 2024 kicked off the Analyst Summit. Over 200 industry analyst from around the world were in attendance. The day started off with an analyst breakfast with AWS telco industry executives Chivas Nambiar and Ishwar Parulkar .

In the afternoon, analysts attended a plenary session on “Pioneering the next cloud computing frontier with AWS” which we expected would set the tone and priorities for what we would hear about in the next two days of the Analyst Summit program., 

An AWS expert panel moderated by Art Baudo with Willem Visser of Amazon EC2, Yasser A. of AWS IoT, Mick Matthews of Amazon Project Kuiper, and Richard Moulds of AWS Braket presented five areas that are driving its view on the frontier of cloud computing:

• Edge
• “The next frontier”
• Internet of Things
• Satellite Connectivity
• Quantum Computing

Portent of things in the week to come? I was surprised that generative AI was not called out specifically but it was packed in “the next frontier”.

For highlights and full summary of the AWS re:Invent 2024 event 👉 CLICK HERE!

• DAY 2 – re:Invent 2024 Kicks Off with CEO Keynote
• DAY 3 – Generative AI Day
• DAY 4 – Exploring the Expo Off-leash

Mentions:

• Matt Garman , CEO, AWS
• Ruba Borno , VP of the Global Specialist & Partner Organization, AWS
• Julie Neenan Souza , Global Head of Sports, AWS
• Swami Sivasubramanian , VP of AI and Data, AWS
• Paul Drennan , SVP Chief Data Science and AI Officer, The Hartford.
• Jason Demby , BD Leader of Generative AI for FS, AWS
• Werner Vogels , CTO, AWS
• Ken Lovell , SVP of Golf Technology, PGA TOUR ,
• David Lachanski, EVP Business Development & Innovation, National Hockey League (NHL)
• Hendrix Weber, SVP of Sport Technology and Innovation, DFL Deutsche Fußball Liga .

RELATED MEDIA & PRESS RELEASES

• AWS re:Invent 2024 Event site (link)
• LinkedIn: AWS re:Invent 2024 Agenda (link)
• LinkedIn: AWS re:Invent 2024 Day 1 (link)
• LinkedIn: AWS re:Invent 2024 Day 2 (link)
• LinkedIn: AWS re:Invent 2024 Day 3 (link)
• LinkedIn: AWS re:Invent 2024 Day 4 (link)
• LinkedIn: AWS Telco Analyst Breakfast (link)
• PRESS RELEASE: “Comcast Migrates its 5G Core Network to AWS” (link)
• PRESS RELEASE: “Introducing Amazon Nova: A New Generation of Foundation Models” (link)
• PRESS RELEASE: “Top announcements of AWS re:Invent 2024” (link)
• VIDEO SESSION: “Build transformative, AI-powered telco solutions with AWS” with Chivas Nambiar and Ishwar Parulkar (link)
• VIDEO SESSION: “O2 Telefonica Germany: 5G Core on AWS” (link)
• VIDEO SESSION: “Generative AI-powered graph for network digital twin” (link)
• VIDEO SESSION: “SK Telecom’s TelClaude: Redefining telco CX with generative AI on AWS” (link)
• VIDEO SESSION: “Breaking barriers: Harnessing generative AI in telecom” (link)
• VIDEO SESSION: “AI-managed telecom ecosystem: Closer than ever” (link)

COMPANIES ENGAGED: AWS, ServiceNow , IBM , Ericsson, Vonage , NVIDIA , AMD , Intel Corporation , HashiCorp , Ansys , Blue Planet , Ciena , The Hartford , Novo Nordisk , MongoDB , and Anthropic

Marvell Industry Analyst Day 2024

Date: December 10, 2024

Location: Santa Clara, CA

KEY TAKEAWAYS

• As generative AI models rapidly ride up the maturity curve, hyperscalers are investing in custom supercomputing systems for their operational purposes and are driving the demand for purpose-built and design data centers from the chip to data center.
• Marvell’s data center opportunity is increasingly concentrated in custom GenAI supercomputing systems (silicon + interconnect + networking) driven by a small number of customers which include AWS and Meta.
• GenAI supercomputing’s outsized representation of Marvell’s business has put enterprise, automotive, and telco on the back burners. Data center is expected to be 71 percent of Marvell’s business but will margins be diluted? Risk of segment concentration depending on a few very large customers? 
• Marvell’s advanced packaging chops and their partnership with SK Hynix, Samsung, and Micron coming to market with a custom HBM computing architecture were key highlights.
• DCI networking looks like it will be big for Marvell and its peer in 2025 as hyperscaler customers seek to cluster geographically distributed data centers (multi-site superclusters) as they grapple with power availability challenges.

EVENT SUMMARY

The future is custom. This was the theme of Marvell Industry Analyst Day 2024. Indeed, it seems that custom AI (GenAI) supercomputing is about to see it time of day. This story was told over a grueling day of presentations, panels, and Q&A sessions.

neXt Curve went in with a research agenda that covered most of Marvell’s business from data center to telco:

• Marvell’s update on their accelerated infrastructure vision and outlook
• Update on their DSP portfolio
• Any nuggets related to their ASIC business and custom silicon?
• Data center interconnect for cloud and GenAI supercomputing 
• How is Marvell’s automotive networking business tracking and the state of SDV
• The state of Marvell’s enterprise business
• What’s going on in telco for Marvell?

The Marvell Industry Analyst Day 2024 agenda was dense and heavily slanted toward Marvell’s fast-growing data center business and generative AI supercomputing tech and custom solutions.

The agenda touched on the following topics:

•  “The Opportunity Ahead” presented by Chris Koopmans , Chief Operating Officer at Marvell
• “Leading the Custom AI Revolution” presented by Loi Nguyen, PhD , EVP & GM, Cloud Optics at Marvell
• “The Future is Custom” presented by Raghib Hussain , President, Products & Technologies at Marvell
• “Accelerated Infrastructure: Compute” presented by Will Chu , SVP & GM, Custom Compute & Storage at Marvell
• “Accelerated Infrastructure: Scale Up” presented by Nick Kusharewski, SVP & GM, Network Switching at Marvell
• “Accelerated Infrastructure: Scale Out” presented by Achyut Shah , SVP & GM, Connectivity at Marvell
• “Accelerating AI Innovation” presented by Sandeep Bharathi , Chief Development Officer at Marvell
• “Customize to Optimize: A Forward-looking View” presented by Noam Mizrahi , EVP, Corporate Chief Technology Officer at Marvell
• “Custom, IP, and Packaging: How to Outrun the (Moore’s) Law” presented by Mark Kuemerle , VP of Technology and Wolfgang Sauter , Senior Distinguished Engineer at Marvell

The official program of the day ended with an address and analyst Q&A session with Marvell CEO, Matt Murphy , who confirmed that he would not be going to Intel to replace Pat Gelsinger as rumors suggest.

For highlights and full summary of the Marvell Industry Analyst Day 2024 event 👉 CLICK HERE!

RELATED MEDIA & PRESS RELEASES

• Marvell Industry Analyst Day 2024 Event site (link)
• LinkedIn: Marvell Industry Analyst Day 2024 (link)
• PRESS RELEASE: “Marvell Announces Breakthrough Custom HBM Compute Architecture to Optimize Cloud AI Accelerators” (link)
• PRESS RELEASE: “Marvell Unveils Industry’s First 3nm 1.6 Tbps PAM4 Interconnect Platform to Scale Accelerated Infrastructure” (link)
• neXt Curve Podcast: “The M&M Tour 2024 Recap (with Earl Lum)” (audio) (video)
• neXt Curve Podcast: “Marvell Industry Analyst Day 2024 Recap (with Prakash Sangam) (audio) (video)

COMPANIES ENGAGED: Marvell Technologies, SK hynix , Amazon Web Services (AWS) , Samsung Semiconductor , Micron Technology , Meta

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