Kevin Fogarty

Experienced tech/science writer, editor, analyst

Experienced journalist proficient in breaking news and in providing cogent, clear, timely feature stories and analysis of technology and medical/science issues critical to specific audiences, including consumers, institutional investors, board-level executives and engineers. Current topics include the business and technology of semiconductors and the impact of Big Tech issues including 5G, artificial intelligence, datacenter and HPC computing, autonomous vehicles, IoT, IIoT and cybersecurity.

Kevin Fogarty

Experienced tech/science writer, editor, analyst

Nvidia seeks to straddle line between partner, competitor after Arm deal
As Nvidia Corp. prepares to acquire contract chip designer Arm Holdings Ltd, a new software agreement with VMware Inc. seems aimed at reassuring the industry that Nvidia can compartmentalize competing interests in its widening business portfolio. Unlike Nvidia and other chip companies that sell chips and other devices, Arm makes money by licensing patented designs for chips and electronic components to hardware-makers who pay a licensing fee and royalties on Arm designs they build into their own products.
Qualcomm's $1.4B Nuvia deal highlights chipmaker arms race, fueled by Apple, Arm
QUALCOMM Inc.' s pending $1.4 billion acquisition of startup Nuvia highlights the arms race touched off by Apple Inc.' s effort to sell its chips in laptops as well as smartphones. Apple's decision to power its laptops with its own M1 chip gave it an immediate foothold in a laptop market in which other smartphone chipmakers have had little success.
Information tech spending climbs as demand for cloud, advanced chips grows
Capital spending in the information technology sector has more than doubled during the past decade, primarily due to the cost of making semiconductors and building cloud-computing networks, according to an analysis by S&P Global Market Intelligence. The information technology companies with the highest capex for the 12 months ending March 30 were Intel Corp. at $16.16 billion; Microsoft Corp. at $14.75 billion; and Apple Inc. at $8.74 billion.
Making Autonomous Vehicles Safer
While self-driving vehicles are beta-tested on some public roads in real traffic situations, the semiconductor and automotive industries are still getting a grip on how to test and verify that vehicle electronics systems work as expected. Testing can be high stakes, especially when done in public.
FAA Traffic Management Anticipates Flying Cars
It may be a year or more before the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) changes its rules enough for Amazon or other hopefuls to deliver products by drones. The near-term goal is to provide safe, low-altitude operations for both drones and manned aircraft. The longer-term goal is to accommodate what is expected to be enormous growth in the use of commercial drones, in an efficient way, according to briefing materials from NASA.
Featured
Normality Sucks
Computerworld - Talking to some friends in the high-tech business the other day, I had a depressing flashback to the mid-'80s. Sitting in a barber's chair in the Rust Belt town I grew up in, the barber, a stranger, asked me, "So . . . you working?" Not what I did, not where, but was I working? With almost all the town's steel mills shut down and local unemployment topping 20%, he was right not to assume too much.
Computerworld
REI Datacenter-Cooling Upgrade Pays for Itself in a Year
Making datacenters more power efficient has become a priority for datacenter managers at most companies. Environmentally friendly power policies may be a little higher priority at companies like Recreational Equipment, Inc. (REI), the outdoor-equipment retailer whose support of environmental causes is tied closely to its brand image.
Dice News
Featured
Russian Cyberwar Force Intensifies ‘net Arms Race
On the same day the Obama Administration revealed its pick for the new head of the National Security Agency (NSA), Russian officials announced they will launch a new military unit devoted to keeping digital attacks from crippling the Russian military. The new cyberdefense unit, which is due to go into operation by 2017, will be created “to defend Russian armed forces’ critical infrastructure from computer attacks,” according to Maj.
Dice News
Gaps In 5G Test
Add one more industry to the long list that analysts expect 5G technology to disrupt—test. While the initial versions of this wireless technology will be little more than a faster version of 4G, concern is growing about exactly how to test the second phase of this technology, which will be based upon millimeter wave.
The NSA isn’t The Only Thing Spying on You
Infoworld ran a story today that will be old news to the paranoid, good news to self-obsessed fans of the data-driven life, and heresy to those who believe quantification and metrology are the only ways to know anything at all. Those enormous, unappreciated pockets of extremely personal data – to the extent they existed – used to be irrelevant to concerns about the violation of our privacy, theft of our identities and availability as marketing targets.
Dice News
Public cloud rumblings gathering force
From software providers looking for additional SaaS license revenue or the ability to integrate new capabilities to infrastructure players that may be looking to return to their services roots, all, he argues, must be prepared to offer enterprise class services. In Fogarty’s view, it’s not “the empty skate park after dark,” but rather “well-equipped data centre” with tools for monitoring and management that will push the last enterprise holdouts into the public cloud fold.
Why IIoT Security Is So Difficult
A fragmented market and ecosystem mean it will take at least five years to get security to a meaningful level. Despite the high risk of a market filled with billions of at least partially unprotected devices, it is likely to take five years or more to reach a “meaningful” level of security in the Industrial IoT.
Regulations Trail Autonomous Vehicles
Chipmakers will continue to benefit, but it will be a long road until autonomous vehicles dominate the roads. Fragmented regulations and unrealistic expectations may be the biggest hurdles for chipmakers selling into the market for self-driving cars during the next few years. Carmakers and the semiconductor industry have made tremendous progress building real-time vision systems and artificial intelligence into relatively traditional automobiles during the past decade or so.
Pushing DRAM’s Limits
Plumbing problems of the past continue to haunt chipmakers as gap grows between processor and memory speed. If humans ever do create a genuinely self-aware artificial intelligence, it may well exhibit the frustration of waiting for data arrive. The access bandwidth of DRAM-based computer memory has improved by a factor of 20x over the past two decades.
The Race To Better Batteries
$90B committed to chasing Tesla may also accelerate research toward a new generation of power pack. There is a new leader in the race to develop the best battery for smartphones, medical and IoT devices and all things related to information technology—Tesla. After almost a decade of making a big splash in the auto industry, though hardly a dent in its business, Tesla has succeeded in making electric vehicles attractive enough that automakers are following Tesla into the EV lane.
Imperfect Silicon, Near-Perfect Security
Some chipmakers, under pressure to add security to rapidly growing numbers of IoT devices, have rediscovered a “fingerprinting” technique used primarily as an anti-counterfeiting measure. Physically unclonable functions (PUFs) are used to assign a unique identification number based on inconsistencies in the speed with which current causes a series of logic gates to open or close.

About

Kevin Fogarty

Experienced Journalist proficient in breaking news and providing cogent, clear, timely information and analysis on technology issues critical to specific audiences, including consumers, institutional investors, board-level executives and engineers. Expertise in multiple roles, including:

Writer / Reporter
• News writing, features, headline writing, journalism driven by data analysis, white papers, business and financial coverage of technology industry and the social, political and economic impact of emerging technologies.

Editor and Editorial Manager
• Develop the work of mixed editorial staffs into high-quality content in competitive environments.
• Creative, entrepreneurial editor of successful editorial-product launches, events and the re-focus of existing titles.

Technology Analyst, Editor
• Write, edit and produce clear, insightful analysis of technology or business issues in quick-turnaround environments.
• Write, edit and project-manage production of white papers and high-value reports based on data analysis, surveys and other long-form analysis of business technology issues.