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Today’s topics include the rumors that Google will unveil a new smartphone and virtual reality headset at its Oct. 4 event, Oracle’s Larry Ellison says his company’s cloud platform outperforms Amazon Web Services’ capabilities, ARM’s new chip design focuses on safe autonomous car operation and the Industrial Internet Consortium’s framework for internet of things security.
For months, there have been rumors about Google’s upcoming Pixel smartphones, its Daydream VR headset and an improved Chromecast dongle. Now, Google has released a video teaser that shows an animated outline of a smartphone along with a notice about an Oct. 4 event where the company will likely announce the rumored new products.
People interested in Google Devices can enter their email addresses on the page and click the “Notify Me” to receive updates as Google rolls out the new products. The Oct. 4 event will be held in San Francisco but is also being live-streamed on YouTube.com/Google. The two Android smartphone models, which are reportedly called the Google Pixel and Pixel XL phones, have been designed by Google rather than third-party suppliers, but are built by HTC.
Oracle Executive Chairman Larry Ellison didn’t mince words during his Oracle OpenWorld keynote Sept. 20 when he said his company is in a perfect position to take down Amazon Web Services as the top cloud infrastructure provider. “Amazon is lower cost, right? Used to be, but not anymore,” said Ellison. And later: “Amazon is the leader in cloud infrastructure, right? That’s not true anymore.”
Point by point, Ellison aimed to paint a picture that AWS is slower, more resource-hungry, less open and more expensive than Oracle Cloud Services. He noted that unlike AWS, data and applications can be moved back and forth between Oracle Cloud or to on-premises data centers and the two environments can still interact.
ARM is looking to establish itself in the burgeoning autonomous car market with a new chip design that is aimed at addressing the high safety standards needed for not only driverless vehicles but also other areas such as industrial and medical robots. Company officials on Sept. 20 unveiled the Cortex-R52, a system-on-a-chip design built on the company’s ARMv8-R architecture.
It is designed to comply with a range of safety standards that apply to various internet of things components, such as autonomous cars and robots in health care settings, where safety and security is paramount in the interaction between humans and machines. This includes robots that assist doctors performing surgery and self-driving cars that need to react to various parameters in the environment around them and immediately react to ensure the safety of the drivers and the people around the cars.
The Industrial Internet Consortium has developed a framework that addresses the thorny and complex issues involving internet of things security. The consortium this week published the Industrial Internet Security Framework, a dense blueprint designed to address the broad array of security issues that relate to the increasingly connected and interconnected systems that run the world’s industrial systems.
The framework focuses on five characteristics—safety, reliability, resilience, security and privacy—that consortium officials said define industrial systems. It also lays out various risk, assessment, threat and performance indicators that managers can use to protect their companies.