By
Chimamanda U. Martha
March 11th, 2024
Amazon is partnering with Verizon to incorporate WaveLength technology which will help to transfer data from the cloud at much higher speeds.
Qualcomm on Tuesday officially announced its next-generation flagship processor for phones. Dubbed the Snapdragon 865 the processor is still in need of a separate 5G modem to enable 5G instead of an integrated 5G modem built right into the chipset. Traditionally, that means more expensive, power-hungry phones than an integrated solution.
However, at the Amazon’s event held in Las Vegas called AWS re:Invent, there were plenty of other solutions. Verizon CEO Hans Vestberg went on to discuss the company’s partnership with the Amazon-owned cloud computing giant. As part of Verizon’s upcoming focus on 5G edge computing, the company will be the first to use the newly announced AWS Wavelength.
The platform is made in a way it enables developers to create super-low-latency apps for 5G devices.
For now, the pilot of this project was introduced in Chicago with numerous high-profile partners, including the NFL and Bethesda, the game developer behind Fallout and Elder Scrolls. However, there are still no details about those specific applications (we can only presume that the remote gaming and live streaming could be one of those), but potential future uses include things like smart cars, IoT devices, AR/VR, etc.
AWS CEO Andy Jassy said:
“AWS Wavelength provides the same AWS environment — APIs, management console and tools — that they’re using today at the edge of the 5G network. Starting with Verizon’s 5G network locations in the US, customers will be able to deploy the latency-sensitive portions of an application at the edge to provide single-digit millisecond latency to mobile and connected devices.”
Qualcomm’s CNO Nicki Palmer spoke on a different conference in Hawaii about the carrier’s mmwave (millimeter wave spectrum is the band of spectrum between 30 GHz and 300 GHz) approach to the next-gen wireless. There were some questions raised regarding the coverage area. Verizon has tried to somewhat solve this making partnership with third-parties like Boingo. One of the biggest benefits that comes with 5G is definitely a lower latency, meaning it doesn’t take as long for devices to communicate with each other. For users, it results in fewer disturbances and shorter lag times when streaming videos, among other applications.
The company plans to have coverage in 30 U.S. cities by end of the year.
Kendra – Machine Learning Language Search
In Vegas AWS introduced a new search tool called Kendra, which provides natural language search through a bunch of content repositories using machine learning.
AWS VP of artificial intelligence Matt Wood said the new search tool uses machine learning even though it doesn’t need machine learning expertise of any kind because Amazon is taking care of that for customers.
First, you identify your content repositories by using pre-built connectors from AWS, then you give your credentials and finally connect to all of these different tools.
Kendra then builds an index based on the content found in the connected repositories that then enables users to interact with the search tool using natural language inquires. Based on simple feedback from a user, like a happy or sad face emoji, this tool learns which answers are good and which ones need some more development, and it does this automatically for the search team.
On the same event, AWS also announced the next generation of its ARM processors, the Graviton2. This is a custom chip design with a 7nm architecture, based on 64-bit ARM Neoverse cores. The company also revealed it is working on three types of Graviton2 EC2 instances that should be soon obtainable. Products with a “g” suffix are powered by Graviton2 chips. If they have a “d” suffix, it means that they have NVMe local storage.
At the time of writing Amazon (AMZN) stocks were down 0.11% in premarket trading, selling for $1,769.96 while Verizon (VZ) was slightly up at the same time by 0.1% to $60.14.
But let’s not forget that a year ago, Amazon was trading at $1668. Despite some ups and downs ($1343 at the end of last December and $2017 in July), it is on the rise 12 months later. As for Verizon, the situation is a little bit similar. Last December it was trading at $58 which is quite close to today’s price. However, within the last 12 months, there were several periods when the value of the stock was lower than $54.