Trony solutions

Intel’s venture-capital unit doesn’t plan to slow its activity in China despite the global crisis, company executives said as the fund announced three new investments in the country.

Cadol Cheung, managing director of the Asia and Pacific region for Intel Capital, said, “We believe a company with innovative technology will survive to be successful after the crisis is over.”

Echoing that sentiment, Intel President and Chief Executive Paul Otellini said at the media briefing that the global economic crisis will ‘not change our investment profile. I would expect to continue all our investments that we have committed to in China and elsewhere around the world.’

Intel Capital will invest $20 million in Shenzhen-based Trony Solar Holdings, a maker of thin-film solar-power equipment. Intel Capital said it also signed agreements to invest in NP Holdings, a maker of storage systems for renewable energy, and Viewhigh Technologies, a maker of health-care-related software. Intel didn’t provide financial details of those two investments.

Intel Capital’s second China Technology Fund was set up in April with $500 million to invest in Chinese start-ups. The first China Technology Fund was set up in June 2005 with $200 million, all of which was fully invested in Chinese companies.
Source:  Wall Street Journal

Computer factory in China

The growth rate of China’s IT industry slowed in the first three quarters, while full-year growth is estimated at around 20%, according to a report released by the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology.

But despite the overall slowdown, some IT sectors such as software are still gaining ground.

With the fall in exports and investments, the IT industry grew more slowly than the national average, continuing with the momentum of the last several quarters.

Between January and September, the combined core business revenues of major IT companies reached a total of RMB4.1 trillion ($600.3 billion), up 20.5% year-on-year. The full-year’s total sales are estimated at RMB6.7 trillion, according to Gao Sumei, a monitor of the industry operation monitoring agency with the Ministry.
Read more HERE.
Source: China Daily

Food security is vital

China Information Security Technology, a public security and geographic information system services provider in China, has received a $2.73 million contract to construct the 12315 PGIS platform for the Industry and Commerce Administrative Bureau, or ICAB, of Hainan Province.

The contract is expected to be completed in the second quarter of 2009.

The ICAB is a government agency in China that receives complaints from consumers who are unsatisfied with purchased products or services. Consumers call 12315 to contact their local ICAB to file a complaint, and the local ICAB conducts timely investigations and has the right to penalize vendors proved to have engaged in inappropriate conduct.

Under the 12315 PGIS contract, the company would combine all ICAB business information and digital resources within Hainan province using a combination of the company ’s existing PGIS platform and a newly developed module.
Source: RTT

Warren Buffet

In the world’s ultra-wealthy people Warren Buffet is the third man. He is a big mate of Bill Gates and he swore he would never invest in technology because he simply did not understand how it worked. That was then. Now is now.

Berkshire Hathaway — which is, to all intents and purposes Warren Buffet — has invested in BYD, a Chinese producer of rechargeable batteries, electric cars and car parts. It seems Berkshire Hathaway has bought a 10% stake in the firm.

Immediately the value of the shares surged 70% — Warren Buffet is buying 225 million of them therefore, by definition, they are a good buy.

Berkshire Hathaway is the Omaha investment firm led by the investor Warren Buffett, holding stakes in insurance and finance, utilities and energy, manufacturing, retailing and services and now, for the first time that can be ascertained, technology.

BYD’s Website says the company’s 130,000 workers produce information-technology products including nickel-cadmium and lithium-ion rechargeable batteries, mobile-phone displays, keypads and housings and laptop-computer keypads.
Source: MarketWatch

Fixed line wiring

China’s largest fixed-line telephone operator, China Telecom, wants the government to promote competition in the telecommunications sector. This is understandable from China Telecom’s point of view. Fixed line is slowly dying. Mobile is soaring.

Wang Xiaochu, chairman and chief executive of China Telecom, said more regulations are needed on resource sharing.

More than US$164 billion was spent on the construction of telecom infrastructure between 2002 and 2006, but only a third of telecom cables are used.

China Telecom acquired the CDMA business of China Unicom as part of an industry restructuring. Wang said

China Telecom hopes to see the sharing of resources, such as networks and transmission towers, to improve efficiency and increase fairness in price competition.

Last week, China Telecom reported a 2008 first-half net profit fall of 8.2% year-on-year, to US$1.84 billion, because of a significant decline in its core fixed-line business. Meanwhile, China Mobile, the country’s leading wireless operator, saw a 44.7% rise year-on-year to US$8.02 billion in its first-half net profit as its subscriber base grew rapidly.
Source: China Daily

Dawning 5000

China’s first over 100 trillion times/s computer, the Dawning 5000, developed and produced independently by the Institute of Computing Technology at the Chinese Academy of Sciences and Dawning, has been announced.

The announcement uses a speed measure which is somewhat misleading to people outside of the business. Thus a history of the Dawning may help.

The very first Dawning is Dawning No.1 (Shuguang Yihao) which was demonstrated in 1993 . This supercomputer achieved 640 million FLOPS. This FLOPS word is a measure of speed where FLOPS  are floating point operations per second; a measure of memory access performance. This  gives you the rate at which a machine can perform single-precision floating-point calculations.

This first supercomputer ran with Unix.

Dawning 1000 was originally called Dawning No.2 (Shuguang Erhao) and appeared in May, 1995. This could do a billion FLOPS which made it the first true Chinese built supercomputer.

In 2000 came the Dawning 2000, and a year later the Dawning 3000.

The Dawning 4000 was a huge leap forward. It started as one of the ten fastest supercomputers in the world and initially could do 806.1 billion FLOPS. Thus it was nearly a thousand times faster then the Dawning 1000.

Now comes the Dawning 5000 which is capable of 160 trillion FLOPS. It is probably the seventh fastest supercomputer in the world. This system will be installed at the Shanghai Supercomputer Center. What do you use the sort of speed for? Genome mapping, quake appraisal, precise weather forecast, mining survey and huge stock exchange data. You use it where you need massive computer processing power.

So where do we go from here?  Think first of a trillionFLOPS which is teraFLOP performance where a single teraFLOP is equal to 1000 (or 1024) gigaFLOPS.

About 2010 we should see petaFLOP performance where each petaFLOP is equal  to 1000 (or, to be very precise, 1,024) teraFLOPS.

China is the second country —  the US was first —  to have created and applied supercomputers of this sort of speed.

Is this as far as we can go? Not in naming and almost certainly not in experimentation. Speeds will inevitably increase.

After petaFLOPS, multiplying by 1,000 every time, we have exaFLOPS, zettaFLOPS and yottaFLOPS. We will not reach yottaFLOPS in your time. Possibly not even in mine.
Source: English People’s Daily Online

All electric car

The BYD Corporation — where BYD stands for Build Your Dream — has grown into the world’s second-largest battery producer in less than a decade of existence.

Now it plans to make a great leap forward.

Paul Lin, a marketing executive with the company, said, ‘We’d like to make a green energy car, a plug-in. We think we can do that.’

BYD has built a 148,000-square-meter auto assembly plant here and hired a team of Italian-trained car designers; it plans to build a green hybrid by the end of the year.

BYD was founded in 1995 by a scientist who studied metallurgy, the company has made lithium batteries, cell phones, camera equipment, auto parts and other components for Nokia, Motorola and Sony, among others, gaining experience in producing high-quality goods.

Paul Lin said, ‘The technology for a car is not that sophisticated. It’s big, but a lot of low technology.’
Source: New York Times