Things heated up in Q420 as businesses resigned themselves to a new normal, and planned accordingly.
October 2020
- AMD unveils the AMD Radeon RX 6000 Series of graphics cards, which offer 4K resolution performance for AAA (top-tier) gaming, and the AMD Ryzen 5000 series of desktop processors, billed as "the fastest gaming CPUs in the world"1.
- AMD said it would acquire Xilinx, an adaptive computing solution provider. The move would xpand its data centre business, AMD said.
- Apple introduces the iPhone 12 family, which supports 5G technology.
- Dell launches Project APEX, which combines its as-a-service and cloud strategy, offerings and go-to-market under a single intiative.
"Project APEX is our strategy for delivering a radically simplified as-a-aervice and cloud experience to our customers and partners. This spans PCs and IT infrastructure and it’s all from one trusted partner—unmatched in the industry," said Dell Technologies COO and Vice Chairman Jeff Clarke in a blog post.
- Google launches Google Workspace, a productivity platform that integrates the company's productivity apps, or "everything you need to get anything done, now in one place".
The Hong Kong government releases the Smart City Blueprint for Hong Kong 2.0 (Blueprint 2.0) with more than 130 smart city initiatives. The blueprint is a follow-on from the Smart City Blueprint for Hong Kong , which listed 76 initiatives under Smart Mobility, Smart Living, Smart Environment, Smart People, Smart Government and Smart Economy, with a view to addressing the challenges of city management and improving people's livelihood through innovation and technology (I&T).
Blueprint 2.0 includes smart village pilot initiatives to explore the use of technologies to address daily life issues faced by residents living in the countryside and further remote areas, such as medical consultation for the elderly and traffic arrangements. The new chapter covers work implemented or being planned, including:
- Deployment of the StayHomeSafe home quarantine system;
- Deployment of the LeaveHomeSafe exposure notification and mobile app;
- Promotion of contactless payments in public markets; and
- Establishing the COVID-19 Online Dispute Resolution Scheme.
- The HUAWEI Health Lab in Xi’an, China is launched to enhance the company's R&D capabilities in smart wearables and health technology.
- MEF and TM Forum complete initial efforts to ensure that both organisations are aligned to use open standard APIs to automate interprovider services for digital transformation. This collaboration will help service providers accelerate their transition from operating within limited ecosystems/islands to operate within a worldwide federation of networks supporting on-demand digital services across multiple providers.
- Microsoft launches Azure Space - cloud capabilities that meet the unique needs of space. A partnership with SpaceX Starlink was announced, as well as support for more connectivity under an existing Azure Orbital partneship with SES.
"With Azure Space we have ambition to make space connectivity and compute increasingly attainable across industries including agriculture, energy, telecommunications, and government," said Tom Keane, Corporate VP, Azure Global in a blog post.
- Nutanix released what is said is the first cloud agnostic multi-database management solution. Era 2.0 extends the Nutanix database management solution across clouds and clusters to simplify operations, with increased scale and reduced costs for IT and database teams.
- NVIDIA debuts the DGX Station A100, a supercomputer that plugs into a standard wall socket to let data scientists do world-class work in artificial intelligence (AI).
- NVIDIA also introduces the Omniverse, an open platform that allows creators, engineers and researchers to collaborate virtually, with real-time photorealistic rendering. The Omniverse goes into open beta in December 2020.
- OPPO sets up a lab for 5G research and development in India. The company said another three labs are planned, for cameras, power and batteries, as well as performance.
- Singapore’s Safer Cyberspace Masterplan 2020 is launched. The plan has three thrusts, to:
- Secure Singapore's core digital infrastructure;
- Safeguard the country's cyberspace activities; and
- Empower the cyber-savvy population.
- The Singapore-Australia Digital Economy Agreement (SADEA), entered into force. The agreement will establish a seamless digital trading environment between the two countries. The SADEA will also enable seamless and trusted cross-border data flows without costly data localisation requirements, while protecting the personal data of consumers.
- Singapore's SG Women in Tech movement marks its first anniversary, having brought together over 600 women in the tech workforce and launching its first SG 100 Women in Tech List.
- Singtel deploys the nation’s first 5G standalone trial network for enterprises at its 5G Garage testing facility. The network, which utilises 3.5 GHz spectrum and Ericsson’s Massive MIMO (multiple-input multiple-output) technology to deliver high speeds and fast response times, provides enterprises with early access to 5G to develop and trial 5G solutions.
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| Source: Tata Communications. Srinivasan. |
"Asia Pacific is truly spearheading the launch and adoption of 5G on the global stage, with major cities across the region rolling out 5G networks in 2020. One of these recent developments is the launch of Singapore’s first 5G standalone trial network, which provides enterprises with access to 5G networks so that they can start developing and trialling 5G solutions.
"This is a significant milestone that will not only enable enterprises to start developing 5G applications but also maximise the potential of existing technologies, such as AI, cloud and IoT."- Srinivasan CR, Chief Digital Officer, Tata Communications. IoT stands for the Internet of Things.
- Singtel launched the iPhone 12 and iPhone 12 Pro on its 5G network. Singtel’s 5G network utilises the 3.5 GHz frequency, in addition to the existing 2,100 MHz to offer mobile speeds of more than 1.2 Gbps on the iPhone 12 lineup.
Korea's SK hynix will pay US$9 billion for the Intel NAND memory and storage business, which includes the NAND SSD business, the NAND component and wafer business, and the Dalian NAND memory manufacturing facility in China. Intel will retain its Intel Optane business.
November 2020
- AMD announces a new GPU for machine learning and high-performance computing (HPC). AMD's Instinct MI100 accelerator is the world’s fastest HPC GPU and the first x86 server GPU to surpass the 10 teraflops (FP64) performance barrier. AMD Ryzen Embedded V2000 Series processors are launched the same month.
- AMD also announces an agreement with IBM to enhance and extend the security and artificial intelligence offerings of both companies. The companies will build on open-source software, open standards and open system architectures to drive confidential computing in hybrid cloud environments; support accelerators for HPC, and enterprise-critical capabilities like virtualisation and encryption.
- Alibaba announces that its 11.11 Global Shopping Festival wrapped up with a record US$74.1 billion in gross merchandise volume (GMV).
- The big four banks in Australia are legally required to make consumer usage data available to consumers on mortgage and personal loan products as part of Consumer Data Right regulations.
- Google announces limits users to 15 GB free storage. Users had previously enjoyed much more storage for various free services.
- Intel says its upcoming Ice Lake server processors will deliver better performance for HPC with increased memory bandwidth, a new high-performance Sunny Cove core architecture, increased processor core count and support for PCIe Gen4. Early adopters in Asia Pacific include the Korea Meteorological Administration, The University of Tokyo and Osaka University.
- The Sony PlayStation5 is launched.
December 2020
- Research from IBM Security X-Force warns that a phishing campaign is targeting the temperature-controlled supply chain set up to distribute vaccines, and said it was likely a state-sponsored attack.
- Infineon announces that Singapore will be its global AI innovation hub by 2023. The company also announced collaborations with AI Singapore, the NUS Institute of System Science, SGInnovate and Tata Consultancy Services Asia Pacific.
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| Source: Intel. The Intel Optane SSD P5800X with next-generation Optane memory and an advanced controller delivers 'no-compromise' input-output (I/O) performance and high endurance. |
- Microsoft reveals that a cyberattack on FireEye using SolarWinds' software as a vector is part of a massive offensive - now dubbed Sunburst - that is wide-ranging, on-going, backed by a nation-state and affects many major national capitals, including the UAE.
"The initial list of victims includes not only government agencies, but security and other technology firms as well as non-governmental organisations," said Microsoft President Brad Smith in a blog post.
"While the most recent attack appears to reflect a particular focus on the United States and many other democracies, it also provides a powerful reminder that people in virtually every country are at risk and need protection irrespective of the governments they live under."
"On the week of December 13th, US government offices exposed they were targeted by a series of mega cyberattacks, allegedly related to state-sponsored threat organisations. Those attacks targeted government, technology and enterprise organisations worldwide. This series of attacks was made possible when hackers were able to embed a backdoor into SolarWinds software updates. Over 18,000 companies and government offices downloaded what seemed to be a regular software update on their computers, but was actually a Trojan horse.
"Researchers, who have named the hack Sunburst, say it could take years to fully comprehend the severity of this large scale cyberattack. It could take months for security professionals in the affected organisations to discover which emails were read, what documents were stolen and which passwords are compromised because of the hack."
- Check Point
“Nation-states have means of stealing information through traditional espionage. They could bribe or extort company employees or even place operatives within the organisation. The reason we are seeing an uptick in sophisticated cyberattacks is geopolitical. That is, for better or worse, it's accepted that nation-states can operate in the cybertheatre with relative impunity. Until this changes, companies should expect more of these operations.
"The Sunburst back door is a supply-chain attack involving a Trojanised update to the popular SolarWinds Orion IT monitoring and management suite. The back door affects servers running the Orion software, which are often less defended than end-user laptops or critical applications.
"This vulnerability has a wide potential for damage due to the large installed base of SolarWinds Orion software. The attack appears to have been under way for some time. ExtraHop analysis of DNS registration information indicates that the Sunburst attack campaign can be traced back to February 26th, 2020. This appears to be when the command and control domain name avsvmcloud.com was first registered, and the site went active on April 15, 2020.
"Given the resources and sophistication of these threat actors, including the use of supply chain attacks against infrastructure and workloads, traditional defenses are ineffective and organisations should prioritise network detection. Because the network is as close to ground truth as you can get, difficult to evade, and impossible to turn off, sophisticated analysis of network data offers the best opportunity to detect, investigate, and respond to these threats before a breach can occur.”
- Jesse Rothstein, CTO and co-founder, ExtraHop, a network detection and response (NDR) company.
- NVIDIA introduces the GeForce RTX 3060 Ti, the first member of its RTX 3060 gaming GPU family. Priced at US$399, built on the world’s most powerful PC gaming platform and featuring ray tracing and AI-powered DLSS, the RTX 3060 Ti is faster than the previous generation GeForce RTX 2080 SUPER, priced at US$699, and delivers 1080p and 1440p gameplay.
- NVIDIA commits to speeding up artificial intelligence (AI) deployments with over 20 NVIDIA NGC software resources available in the AWS Marketplace. NVIDIA separately applies the adaptive discriminator augmentation (ADA) technique to its NVIDIA StyleGAN2 artificial intelligence model, enabling it to reduce the amount of data needed for training while still getting great results.
“These results mean people can use GANs to tackle problems where vast quantities of data are too time-consuming or difficult to obtain,” said David Luebke, VP of graphics research at NVIDIA in a blog post.
“I can’t wait to see what artists, medical experts and researchers use it for.”
- Singapore hands out licences for digital banks. The government also said it will sustain investments in research, innovation and enterprise (RIE) activities at about 1% of GDP, or S$25 billion, from 2021 to 2025.
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| Source: Finastra. Hovhannessian. |
- Luc Hovhannessian, MD, APAC, Finastra.
- NVIDIA signs a memorandum of understanding with Thai universities to drive research and accelerate scientific breakthroughs in artificial intelligence (AI) and high-performance computing (HPC).
- SAP and NTT announce that they will serve as each other’s customers, suppliers and co-innovators. NTT Data Services later announces it has adopted intelligent spend management solutions worth US$125 million from SAP.
Singtel said it is tapping on the 28 GHz mmWave band in addition to the 3.5 GHz and 2,100 MHz frequencies in its rollout of 5G speeds, with mmWave support already available in parts of Singapore.
Cryptocurrency and Blockchain in 2020
"The economic crisis and fears from global inflation and the pandemic propelled the acceptance of Bitcoin as one of the main assets that could protect investors. 2020 has also highlighted the importance of keeping up with local regulations for us to operate smoothly and minimal issues and challenges.
"In addition, cyberattacks remain as one of the biggest risks for Blockchain technology and while secure solutions (such as Fireblocks) which store and transfer digital assets exist and are well adopted by the industry, we still see a lot of exchanges and business transactions that lack the infrastructure for secure activity and adoption, which leads to potentially catastrophic cases of hacking.”
- Michael Shaulov, CEO and Co-Founder, Fireblocks.
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| Source: WOLOT Foundation. Chan. |
"Given the current and expected future abundance of liquidity released by major countries to stimulate their economies, especially the Western countries, cryptocurrencies will continue to experience high demand and thus prices. The current bull market since early 2020 is mainly fuelled by financial institutions looking to diversify their risk from the US dollar. This in turn will encourage more investment and innovation in Blockchain.
"Launching of central bank-backed digital currencies, expected in 2021, will bring on more legitimacy and confidence in this industry. However, the competition will heat up and only those projects with real applications will likely make it."
- Ben Chan, Chairman, WOLOT Foundation.
*Entries are listed in alphabetical order within the month. These milestones are not meant to be exhaustive and are TechTrade Asia's curated interpretation of the year's technology highlights.
1 Testing by AMD performance labs as of September 1 2020 measuring gaming performance of a Ryzen 9 5900X desktop processor vs a Ryzen 9 3900XT in 11 popular titles at 1920x1080, the High image quality preset, and the newest graphics API available for each title (e.g. DirectX 12 or Vulkan or DirectX 11). Results may vary.
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