What’s new? The 5G standard, a new AI and USB 4

20.03.2019

Our tech news in March: two interfaces become one and the 5G standard is on its way. We also discovered an interesting AI and report on our visits to the trade fair.

Goodbye Thunderbolt 3, hello USB 4

The USB Promoter Group recently announced the new USB 4 standard. This is based on Thunderbolt 3 and enables sensational data transfer rates of up to 40 GBit/s, which is twice as much as the current version USB 3.2 Gen2x2. The background: Intel is submitting its Thunderbolt specification to the USB-IF (Universal Serial Bus Implementers Forum). This will enable manufacturers to produce suitable chips in the future without having to pay the license fees required for Thunderbolt. What is also certain so far is that USB Type C is required in any case - but the new connection can also transmit DisplayPort 1.2 and HDMI signals and charge devices with up to 100 watts. It is not yet clear when the first devices with USB 4 will be developed. Perhaps with Intel's new Ice Lake CPU generation, which is due to arrive at the end of 2019.

Sources: golem.de, heise online, GameStar.

10 times as fast: the new 5G standard

The new 5G mobile communications standard was one of the major topics at the Mobile World Congress (MWC) in Barcelona at the end of February. Samsung, Huawei, LG and other manufacturers have already presented smartphones that support 5G. But what is the current status? The 5G standard is the successor to 4G/LTE and builds on it. With data rates of up to 20 Gbit/s, 10 times the LTE speed can be achieved. In Germany, the first mobile networks are due to be available from 2020, but the initial priority for expansion is to provide access to outlying towns and villages that do not yet have a mobile network. Faster mobile communication is less important for now. The expansion in Germany is further complicated by the fact that the auction of 5G frequencies has been delayed. Due to the strict coverage requirements, the major mobile network providers Telefรณnica, Vodafone and Telekom have requested that the auction be stopped for the time being.

Sources: golem.de, heise online. informationszentrum-mobilfunk.de also explains the three different application areas of the 5G network. 

Embedded World and Internet World: spo-comm on a trade fair visit

In the last few weeks, two exciting trade fairs have taken place in our area, which we naturally didn't want to miss. At the end of February, several colleagues from Sales, Marketing and Technology visited Embedded World in Nuremberg. There we learned about the latest trends in the industry and met some of our customers and partners.

In mid-March, our marketing team went to the Internet World Expo in Munich. We took advantage of the extensive range of presentations and listened to great speakers on topics such as SEO, SEA, UX and content marketing. We were able to take away many new ideas and suggestions and will certainly be implementing some of them in the coming weeks.

Fake faces non-stop: the possibilities of AI

Finally, a topic that shows the exciting possibilities of artificial intelligence and fascinated us greatly: the website ThisPersonDoesNotExist.com. With each update, it shows a new face that has been artificially created using AI, but looks so realistic that it cannot be distinguished from a real photo. The algorithm used here utilizes a so-called GAN (generative adversarial network), which creates new artificial examples from a large data set of real images. The StyleGAN algorithm was developed by NVIDIA and released as open source last year.

Source: The Verge.

Our spo-comm Mini-PCs

More on the topic