Gadgetory

everyone welcome back to another hardware news recap for the week in this one we're talking about Softbank one of Nvidia's the biggest investors selling out its shares Thermaltake legally posturing against Mayhem's the liquid cooling manufacturer competing liquid cooling manufacturer gigabyte might be laying off some of its workforce it looks like and NVIDIA also seems to have not known or not shown the true impact of cryptocurrency on its revenue because it was looking significant based on some new financial reports and then there's also updates on Intel's Oregon expansions a Zen architecture driving market share growth or AMD and Adobe alluding to ARM processors before that this video is brought to you by us and the GN store we recently added a modified disappointment shirt that we're calling the GPU artifact in shirt designed with XTS and Space Invaders you'd get in real GP artifacting we also have our critically acclaimed PC building mod mats GN cobalt blue beer glasses with gold trim and black and blue light weight hoodies for cool weather go to store documents nexus net to pick something up and support GN today it's first up for this week Softbank selling its shares back in december we mentioned one of Nvidia's biggest investors Softbank which had about a three billion dollar stake 3.6 billion dollars in the company was looking to get out and this was December this is no longer a consideration because the sale has gone through at this point so in third quarter 19 earnings Softbank said that it sold its entire 3.6 billion dollar investment finalized On January 10th which is sort of another blow to Nvidia in what's been a turbulent past couple of quarters here some of which has been due to cryptocurrency fall off and others due to product launches on our previous episode we detailed Nvidia's struggle with slow RT x sales and the continued decline of its fourth quarter revenue guidance so NVIDIA has been struggling in China as have a lot of tech companies at this point and videos also had issues of course with its RT X launch with Pascal still flooding the market at the time it launched it's mostly gone now though and the company is is dealing with the consequences of going pretty much all in on the crypto currency we'll talk about that last point more in a moment for the next news item though thermaltake is legally posturing against Mayhem's friend of the site vs g one of the writers over at tech power up just published a piece on a brewing a legal dispute over the usage of pastel as a name for cooling products essentially this boils down to every cool ins company in the industry EK thermaltake and alpha cool included all wanting to use the same word to describe their coolants of pastel colors despite Mayhem's technically being the first that we know of and having a trademark in the UK in two of those instances Mayhem's granted EK and alpha kool permission to use the pastel name and Thermaltake situation Thermaltake is insisting that pastel is a generic name and should not be trademarked and so seeks to challenge the requirement of permission in order to use the UK registered trademark or likely trying to invalidate it now international legal battles are expensive and difficult especially for the smaller of the two companies so we'll see where this goes the obvious first choice for any sort of dispute like this is to reach a reasonable agreement between two parties a settlement before going to any kind of legal proceedings as we understand it Mayhem's did reach out to Thermaltake and did try to reach an agreement Thermaltake has apparently not responded in any meaningful fashion VSG and the tech power up also reached out to third we'll take for comments on this story and thermaltake did not provide one at time of filming our news recap anyway so what happens next well Mayhem's posted a comment on the story and did state that the UK registered trademark relates specifically to coolant and chemicals for cooling responding to some comments that were questioning whether the word pastel which is to be fair a generic word should really be trademarked and their defense was well we want a trademark it for this specific use case and and that was sort of the defense for that so by this reasoning that it is inherently non-genetic generous it's trademarked for a specific product or use case Mayhem's reportedly made several offers to Thermaltake to license the name including one that asks Thermaltake to make a 100 british pound nation to charity in exchange for the ability to use that name so this is where it's it's almost like a mind games play here because if their own take says no or reject that offer then thermaltake just kind of looks like it's being a dick if we're honest it's not really it's not really a good move ever just say you know what we're not gonna give money to charity take that at the same time though it is reasonable potentially from thermal takes positioning to say no if they're gonna take believes that the trademark is invalid because saying yes to this offer although it would be good publicity for everybody it would also probably indicate that the trademark is valid it would be a a legal statement effectively from Thermaltake say and we will give this money to charity and license your trademark thereby echnology in the trademark is valid so it's it's an interesting play from Mayhem's it's kind of a good play from a mind game standpoint in a publicity standpoint because it really puts thermaltake in that awkward position of do you want to look extremely bad to the public but reject continue to reject the validity of the trademark or do you want to just accept it and have good publicity for everybody maybe even raise them on it or one-up them on the donation amount so very interesting choices now we'll see where this goes VSG says the story is developing Theron will take does have a troubled legal past many of you are likely aware previously embattled with case labs now defunct and also accused several times of sort of lifting case designs for its own so it's a troublesome spot fourth on all take to be in once again they keep finding themselves in this position and that's probably a bad thing because just in terms of public perception it's not great now the third we'll take is one of our advertisers and it's sometimes very unfortunate that they they're dealing with this while trying to run ads because well I mean they are now a controversial company that won't take make some genuinely good products we do think that Corp III is good unfortunately obviously don't necessarily agree what their own takes reasoning to continue to get into legal battles when it could just for instance pick a different name seems like a pretty easy way to sidestep the entire issue there are other words than pastel to use to name your product simple as that so I you know thermal takes a very frustrating company in a lot of ways despite being an advertiser and going off-script a bit here if they don't take does some things where it's like been the the US team that we work with it seems like you guys really want to make a good product you're trying hard but you're getting so much pushback from everybody else in the company and then you have the the legal team I guess which is a completely different group than the product team and the PR teams that is also extremely aggressive and not particularly good for publicity I guess so it's whether or not Thermaltake is in the right on this one and I have no present opinion on this but I would be curious to hear your thoughts below it does seem like given the company's current controversial status it would have been better to avoid the issue entirely by just at least for now using a different name just because again from a PR standpoint if thermal takes trying to claw backs from ground here and some goodwill with the community and this does poor things against that effort so even if titi thinks it is correct then you know maybe just challenge it another time when you have some more goodwill I guess so anyway the result of all this is that you should read vsts article it's a great article it's great write-up of the events thus far and I believe it was an exclusives attack power up so please read their article will link it in the show notes below VSG did speak with a number of retailers in the space and x case labs employees and has some additional reporting in quotes from those vendors and retailers what they think of this situation the short of it is that many of the retailers are planning to refuse to sell the Thermaltake pastel line in a sort of sort of show of support to Mayhem's for having been while first and as many of you commenters can agree that is the most important thing in the world and also having a trademark on it so that's where it stands now Rita's article for the rest we are curious your thoughts as well please leave them below I have no present position until we see this develop further but my position other than that outs externally from this issue is that I wish Thermaltake would be a less frustrating company because they have some things that are just genuinely good and then they do these really weird screwy things that kind of overshadow the genuinely good efforts to the extent that people don't even care anymore because they're so focused on the the legal and battlements and things like that so anyway next news item gigabyte could be laying off 10% of its workforce here so in a recent report by digital times which is typically ends up being accurate and just about everything that publishes that at least that we show here so in the report gigabyte is allegedly looking to reduce fiscal expenses for 2019 primarily in its motherboard segment and this is due to weak motherboard sales so gigabyte could be laying off five to ten percent of its workforce depending on how it wants to cut these expenses marketing expenses are also on the table for discussion allegedly anyway and gigabyte motherboard sales have been steadily declining since 2016 that decline is predicted to perpetuate throughout 2019 as such gigabyte is aiming for a modest 10 million units in sales for the year previously issues an MSI also acknowledged their own struggles with motherboards sales and part of this is because of the well-documented Intel Seabee shortage that has played really no small part in the wider impact of the industry see our previous week's coverage for the look at how Microsoft is partly blaming Intel for a lack of Windows adoption as Intel CPUs have it slowed down in sales due to the shortages so back to Nvidia back that first news item here Nvidia by now is no stranger to the sort of unforgiving headwinds in the market caused by cryptocurrency in general the company like a of the end others did well last year and the year prior as a result of the crypto mining boom but is now paying a bit that tax for having invested so much so post crypto mining boom and Vidya has struggled significantly with lower revenue guidance continually adjusting it the most recent adjustment was a subtraction of about 500 million dollars in expected revenue for for the quarter and part of this was a challenge due to excess past gala cards in the channel that were produced to meet this demand but the company's total exposure to the cryptocurrency market may have been more masks than let on presumably to avoid a heavier stock crash or decline so Royal Bank of Canada capital market analyst Mitch Steves said the following we think Nvidia generated one point nine five billion dollars in total revenue related to crypto and blockchain this compares to company's statement that it generated around six hundred and two million over the same period according to Steve's no not not those Steve's according to Steve his total revenue for cryptocurrency should have been about two point seven five billion from April 2017 so we're going back a bit here to July 2018 and video speculated to have captured about three quarters of that mark about seventy-five percent of that market where obviously that would leave AMD with the remaining twenty five percent of total revenue from the cryptocurrency market so what this amounts to is that the companies had more of a stake in crypto than may have been led on Steve's up sites am these recent earnings report as a source of credence to his theory where I am the lowered its own quarter one revenue guidance to 1.25 billion a twenty four percent decline year-over-year this implies that potentially am the accounted for two hundred thirty four million dollars of crypto revenue in 2018 which would it roughly equate to twenty five percent of the total revenue according to Amit Steve's there's no real way to confirm these numbers and this is a fact that the RBC analyst admits that said it should be taken with a grain of salt and not as an absolute but either way it is probably likely or probable at least that the companies did make quite a bit from crypto and blockchain so it's not unreasonable to expect that they made more than perhaps was accounted for in the public reports and investor meetings part of this challenge is because it is to be fair difficult to differentiate between a user purchasing six video cards through newegg or something is that for mining is that for a small PC building business is it for personal use when you're buying multiple cards and reasonably at some point you can look at an order and say well that's for cryptocurrency but then again you can buy multiple cards for lots of things it might be for a rendering machine or for perhaps some sort of distributing computing model so distributed so difficult thing to measure but probably more than was led on Intel's Itanium processors if anyone remembers those will reach end-of-life in 2021 in this next news story so Intel announced that it's discontinuing the Itanium 9700 line of CPUs codenamed Kitson in 2021 the 9700 series not that 9700 are the last processors on the market to use Intel's Itanium architecture and the chips haven't seen a manufacturing node to shift since 2010 they're still being fabricated at 32 nanometers according to an attack which has a great write-up on this Intel's only customer using these chips is HP Enterprise so the impact is likely to be minimal to the market once-upon-a-time Itanium what was heralded as the future as the industry was moving from 32-bit to 64-bit computing Itanium was intended to transform the x86 architecture but ended up being not very x86 capable the VL IWR very long instruction word called ia-64 was hard to optimize x86 code for around the same time AMD's Opteron introduced AMD 64 its own version of 64-bit extensions to the x86 ISA or instruction set architecture and these 64 was completely backwards compatible with 32-bit x86 code and software so it quickly became the de facto standard and there's one that we still use today so it looks like Itanium is going to die out here and further on Intel Intel is at this point confirmed to be pushing its Oregon expansion that we've reported on the previous two weeks now so this is pretty big news Intel has confirmed its plans it is indicating that the company plans to build a large third phase through their Oregon d1x facility this is a fabrication plant obviously based in the US the third phase expected to be similar in size to the previous two phases that were added and its construction should begin this year 2019 so Intel has been vague overall about the details surrounding the project although several of them have leaked before official announcement and were then confirmed to be accurate the company has notified approximately 50 residents of the Ramla acres campus about the upcoming expansion so according to the Oregon or Oregon according to The Oregonian Intel says it's quote plans to remain contingent on unspecified business and economic factors so whatever that means it's probably something either way though the company is planning to expand its fabrication facilities and that is probably good news at this point given the shortages recently Zen architecture driving market share growth for Andy is one of our last two stories here and probably one of the more interesting and its recent earnings call AMD CEO dr. Lisa su highlighted key points in the company's trajectory such as reaching its highest profitability since 2011 now and also seen accelerated market share growth however she didn't elaborate on the latter so we'll have to wait to see more on that analysts at mercury research have released some data that better outlines those statements from the earnings calls and he currently holds 15.8% of the consumer PC market and that includes desktops which is a 3.9 percent gain year-over-year it also represents Andy's biggest slice held in the desktop PC market since about 2014 when it comes to notebooks AMD's adoption rate has been very slow but the company is making some inroads Andy has gained an impressive 5.3 percent market share year-over-year thanks in part to Intel's inability to deliver chips to OEMs Andy has been aggressively trying to invade the server space with epic where Intel has been comfortably sitting atop the food chain for some time and will remain for some time while enterprise and server clients are hesitant about investing in new platforms Andy has seen some success with epic especially with cloud service providers and ease at server market share has gone from 0.8 percent to 3.2 percent according to mercury research this growth has primarily been off the back of AMD's a zen based products and while Intel is still the dominant player the numbers indicate that Andy is clawing back a valuable market share in the desktop PC space and across some other segments of the market laptops to come and working more with sis or system integrators and OEMs also to come for Rison 3 or the Zen 2 architecture so this is looking like some true competition in the CPU space finally and a better back and forth volley of products if you haven't really been in the industry up until recently you missed the massive sort of role in development as we were stuck with the same really the same product from Intel year after year while I am the continually struggled to make FX work in a way that was good and competitive so it's quite a bit different now than it was a few years ago last one ant or adobe rather different a names company Adobe alludes to custom arm designs coming up at a conference Adobe CTO Ave Perez Ness saluted to a future interest in custom silicon for Adobe software and a story by Axios Fresnos is quoted as saying well quote do we need to become an arm licensee I don't have an answer but it is something that we are going to have to pay attention to you presence went on to say that arm does afford a model for a software company to package its technology much closer to silicon while expressing Adobe's interest in AI machine learning AR and VR see the CTO also stated that he believes the world is at the cusp of requiring more powerful hardware and he believes arm will be the future the last point being actually interesting in the previous point about the world needs more powerful hardware really not that surprising so now Adobe which makes the world's most reliable software can now make the most reliable seat well someone else to make the CPU but they'll they'll probably contribute and that might not be for the best based on our experience with Adobe so that's it for this week as always subscribe for more you can go to a store that gamers Nexus dotnet 2 helps out directly for example purchasing at one of our graph logo shirts which is primarily obstructed by my hair or you go to patreon.com/scishow his axis we recently published a behind-the-scenes video and a patrons ask GN over there and thank you for watching I'll see you all next time