Tantra's Mantra with Prakash Sangam

Intel Foundry Services (IFS) marked a significant milestone on Feb 21, 2024, with its highly anticipated debut event, where the company unveiled its comprehensive strategy and roadmap. The occasion was also highlighted by the enthusiastic backing from its key customers and partners.

In this episode, Bob O'Donnell, President and Chief Analyst at TECHnalysis Research, and I analyze  IFS's present status. We explore the challenges and opportunities that lie ahead for them, shedding light on the dynamic landscape of their business. Additionally, we examine CEO Patrick Gelsinger's pivotal role in orchestrating the IFS's transformative journey.

Apple's Vision Pro has the potential to change the XR landscape entirely because of its high-end feature set, pricing point, and ecosystem. Its impact on the consumer market is very profound. But not yet clear on the Enterprise market. 

In this episode, I talk to Vishal Shah, GM of XR and Metaverse business for Lenovo, about the needs of the enterprise market, the impact of Vision Pro, and how Lenovo differentiates its XR offerings. 

In this episode, fellow analyst Leonard Lee from Next Curve and I discuss our impressions and the key takeaways from the recently held Industry Analyst Day 2023 of Marvell Technology.

Marvell executives pitched how they are well positioned to exploit the massive surge in interest in Gen AI through their custom silicon and interconnect offerings. They also talked about the roadmap for leadership in  Automotive Ethernet. 

Recent market developments, like license litigations and the need for high-performance, low-power processors, have heightened the focus on RISC-V, the open standard Instruction Set Architecture (ISA).In this wide-ranging discussion with the RISC-V International CEO, Calista Redwood, I discuss where the ISA currently stands, how the ecosystem is expanding, what the challenges are, and when the market can expect RISC-V to support more complex, high-performance workloads, and be a formidable competitor for the incumbent Intel's X-86 and Arm architectures.

While everyone is looking for the proliferation of 5G IoT, LoRAWAN has been revolutionizing the low-power, long-range IoT industry for a long time.

In this episode, I discuss with Donna Moore, the CEO and chairwoman of LoRa Alliance, the current state of LoRa WAN, its unique characteristics, the most suitable use cases, how it complements 5G IoT, and how the Alliance is helping the ecosystem. 

Apple's announcement of the Vision Pro XR headset fundamentally changed the dynamics of the XR industry. My good friend and fellow analyst Leonard Lee from Next Curve and I discuss Apple's positioning of the device, its impact on the XR industry, especially existing players, and strategies they can utilize to compete with Apple.

As the vRAN / Open RAN deployments are slowly ramping up, there are a lot of questions on the best compute architecture to use, especially for L-1 processing. The objective is to utilize the most power-efficient, cost-effective, and scalable option. The popular choice seems to be using optimized silicon instead of a generic CPU.

In this episode, I talk to Joel Brand of Marvell Technology about why silicon optimized for radio workloads such as DSP-based accelerator is better. Joe also shared details about their Octeon10 Fusion processor announced at MWC 2023 and their partnership with Nokia, Samsung, and others. 

My article on the subject:

What is the best compute architecture for vRAN/open RAN?

This episode was recorded at Verizon's 5G Innovation Lab in San Francisco, during its inauguration event.

I spoke to Brian Mecum, VP of Device Technology and Sports Innovation at Verizon, regarding the lab, partners, applications/services developed there that have become commercial, next phase of 5G for Verizon and more. 

The recent bursting of the Metaverse hype bubble has allowed the AR/VR/XR/MR discussions to be real applications, services and use cases rather than hyperbole. 

In this episode, I had the pleasure of speaking with Thomas Dexmier, Country Head for Australia and New Zealand at HTC VIVE. We discussed the current status of the XR market, the challenges and opportunities that it presents, as well as the exciting launch of the XR Elite headset by HTC VIVE. Additionally, we delved into the rumors surrounding Apple's potential entry into the XR market, and what that could mean for the industry.

In this episode, I talk to Brad Robbins, CEO of Lite Point, a leading test and measurement (T&M) vendor that offers mass market Wi-Fi and 5G solutions.

Brad and I discuss the role of T&M in the technology/product life cycle, Lite Point's business strategy, differentiation, its Wi-Fi 7 and 6G journey, challenges in the year ahead, and more. 

Questions about 5G's RoI and monetization opportunities beyond smartphone and Fixed Wireless Access (FWA) market are lingering. At the same time, 5G Advanced is brewing up, and discussions on 6G are starting.

In this episode, I talk to Stephen Rose, GM of IBM for Global Telco, Media, Entertainment & Distribution verticals, on what cellular operators should do and what opportunities lie ahead.

Open RAN Layer-1 workload that performs and manages most of the radio functions is one of to critical blocks. It is highly complicated and requires real-time processing. The complexity only increases with advanced features such as massive MIMO, carrier aggregation, URLLC, etc. The debate in the industry is whether general compute or optimized accelerators are the most cost and power-efficient solutions. In this episode, I speak with Joel Brand of Marvell Semiconductor on his views on this debate.

Relates articles to the subject:

http://bit.ly/TA-Insights (click on vRAN/Open RAN tab)

After much back and forth, the US government passed the CHIPS and Science Act of 2022. The act provides $280 billion in funding to the US semiconductor industry. A significant part of the funding (> $50 billion) goes to fab companies for establishing new fabs in the USA, bringing much-needed resiliency to the semiconductor supply chain. The remaining funding is earmarked for various foundational, long, and short-term science and technology programs.

In this episode, I discuss what is included in the act and when we can see the law's impact in real-life, with the veteran semiconductor policy expert Falan Yinug of Qualcomm. 

This discussion is based on a comprehensive report on the semiconductor value chain publsihed by Accenure, commissioned by Qualcomm. Here is a link to the full report:

Harnessing the power of the semiconductor value chain 

Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) has been a growing trend recently and became a norm during the pandemic. The biggest driver for this trend has been the upfront cost savings for the enterprises. A recent Oxford Economics report commissioned by Samsung analyzes the phenomenon with Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) approach and casts doubt on the perceived cost savings. In this episode, I discuss the study's findings with Chris Balcik, VP of B2B Sales at Samsung USA. 

Here is the link to download the full report:

Maximizing mobile value - BYOD or not to BYOD (sign-up required)

Forbes: What It Takes To Build Modern 5G Open Radio Networks (Open RAN) 

HPE and Qualcomm announcement signifies the role of cloud and telco collaboration in Open RAN  

Podcast: Qualcomm re-entering cellular infra business with 5G RAN Solutions - How, What and Why?

Samsung Networks had lots of news before, during and after Mobile World Congress 2002. I go behind the headlines with its head of Marketing and Business Development, Derek Johnston to discuss what that means for the company and the industry at large. 

Check out this article on Samsung Networks' growth tragectery - https://bit.ly/3GSI2YY 

In this episode, I discuss the mmWave RoI report and its specifics with its lead author Stephen Rose of Bell Labs Consulting. The discussion revolves around the methodology, findings, and the value of the report cellular operators and industry at large.

As a reference, here is my article summarizing the findings of the report published on RCR Wireless News

Can 5G mmWave deployments be profitable? Yes! Says Bell Labs Consulting