Recently the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) group announced that its low-cost laptop would be raised from $100 up to $175 , Closer to home a Chennai based company has introduced a PC for INR 4500 ( Around $100) and is all set to market it to a potential 10 million customers across the Globe , Net PC as they call it is a network computer, designed on a completely new hardware platform without using any of the typical PC or thin client components. The hardware design instead uses components designed and developed for advanced electronic and digital devices. The devices come as a single or a dual processor solution and can be connected to a basic home TV which serves as the display. For as little as $10 a month the company provides access to all the basic computing functions and also provides a broadband connection . There is no local storage though and all storage is done on a remote server maintained by the company . I won’t get into the technical details of the product , visit the Novatium site for more information ,you can download the product specifications there . I believe this is a great initiative especially for developing countries where a PC is still a luxury and not a necessity . Maybe the OLPC guys can take a few hints from this
Computing has come a long way , remember the cray-1, it could do one Gigaflop . Recently AMD announced Teraflop in a box : One Opteron processor and two R600 Gpu’s combining to dish out more than 1 trillion floating-point calculations per second using a general “multiply-add” calculation . Intel at their Beijing IDF showed off their concept 80 core teraflop processor . The Cell B.E is a multicore processor of sorts with one PPE and eight SPE’s capable of crunching out 256Gflops . Teraflop scale processing is already happening on the cell with folding@home and the PS3 and according to reports its showing some great results.
With the industry moving towards this parallel processing revolution , the development on the software side of things seems to be remarkably slow , What I mean here is that the software which uses these multicore processors should be optimized for the same , Most of the ISV’s don’t have in-house programming expertize to do multithreading applications.Switching from one core to many core presents its own set of developmental , and debugging challenges and a large percentage of mission-critical enterprise applications are not “multi-core optimized ” leading to applications not showing any kind of performance boost when switched to multicore processors and in some cases showing even poorer performance, this happens because a single-threaded application can’t utilize the additional cores in the processor efficiently without sacrificing ordered processing. This results in a huge drop in performance due to cores being not optimally utilized . Currently there are no automated compilers for multicore processors , then there is the problem of application priority, there are many such issues which need to be sorted out before the transition to multicore can be complete.
Moving further,The Cell B.E is going mainstream slowly with IBM announcing a new line of servers powered by the Cell B.E . Researchers have already released initial details about the EDGE processor architecture , which stands for Explicit Data Graph Execution.Instead of one instruction at a time, EDGE handles large blocks of data all at once. Using many copies of a small number of replicated tiles, the target for TRIPS ( the first prototype chip on the EDGE architecture ) by 2009 is to hit 5 TFLOPs on 32nm manufacturing. Intel is also looking at Larabee to give them similar numbers.
In the future , there is a good chance that we will be moving to some non X-86 ISA processor , which does the job in a better more efficient way.
I am a staunch supporter of Sony and I am appreciative of the fact that they have put in a lot of money and time to deliver a machine which is truly outstanding . Every day I read about the Cell B.E breaking new ground , proving again that the PS3 has a lot of horsepower which is currently underutilized . This is an argument I hear from the fanboys a lot , they say that the PS3 packs more power , has the next generation blu-ray drive and has the mother of all CPU’s in the Cell, and in the next two years it will kick everybody’s butt from the XBox360 to the Nintendo Wii and even HD-DVD . I seriously hope so because I wish well for the PS3 , but consider this ..
The PS2 currently has an install base of around 110 million and that is a monstrous number , if the PS3 had been launched alongside the Xbox 360 as a competing console in the same price range rather than a year later , The number of Xbox 360 ’s sold would have been less than a million till date.I am sure 90% of the people who own an Xbox360 now have owned PS2’s before , and they bought their 360’s because there was nothing available in the market which could compete with it, If they had a better option from Sony they would have bought that. So was it a good decision to include the blu-ray player ? it would have been if Sony could deliver it on time and at the same price range of a 360 . but once they realized that it would not match the competition from the cost perspective and also would be late to the market , they should have gone with the standard dual layer DVD format , once they had the blu-ray diode mess sorted out they could have launched another version with the blu-ray for a higher price point . All this time without a competitor has given MS a good install base which third party developers just can’t neglect . If multiple platforms for DMC4 can move another 1 million units for Capcom then it makes sense to them financially, because in the end its all about the money .
Another factor is the cost .. here in India a PS3 costs Rs40000 ($1000) and an Xbox 360 basic costs Rs20000 ($500) , the difference is humongous , The consoles don’t sell in the millions here but if someone wants to buy one which one would it be ? any guesses !! . But I still have hope for the PS3 because all rumors point to a price drop of at least $100 , starting in June, the blue-violet laser diodes will only cost 900 yen to produce (about $8). Last year, the Blu-ray player itself was estimated to cost $125 — a good chunk of that was probably the diodes.
And that brings me to the last and most important factor - content , the DS sells far more than the superior PSP because it has excellent content available for it , the iPod sold 100 million because Apple has developed an entire ecosystem around the product , and likewise PS2 sold millions because of the content which came out for it over the years . When the demand for PS3 content increases , the PS3 will start to sell more.
I wouldn’t count the PS3 out because its an amazing piece of hardware and has had a good reception in most places it has launched , I won’t be surprised if it indeed emerges as the next gen leader
nVidia has strapped on 2 Quadro FX5600 GPU’s ( OpenGl version of the mighty 8800GTX) onto thier already impressive line of Quadro plex VCS ( Visual computing system) . Looks like they are getting ready to take on the emerging GPCPU market as the new workstations support GPU computing with nVidia’s CUDA programming.
GPCPU has become a lucrative market for the future and a lot of big names are pouring money into it , recently Rapidmind , a startup grabbed $10 million of VC money for their GPCPU platform, keeping in pace nVidia is pushing its graphics cards hard as a platform for massively multi-threaded processing applications.
With the new GPU’s, the total frame buffer goes up to 3Gb (1.5 Gb per GPU) FSAA (full screen anti-aliasing) goes up to 64X , and as with the 8800GTX , the GPU’s have a unified shader architecture and fully support shader model 4.0 . Now comes my favorite part - performance stats 64x SLI FSAA,16 synchronized output channels,8 HD SDI channels,60 billion pixels/sec fill rate,1 billion triangles/sec geometry performance and is able to handle up to 148 megapixels display walls. and you can have many of these Quadro Plex boxes in your visualization cluster for scalability. Oh ! I forgot to mention they cost $18000 a piece.
Going off the topic a bit , this is something interesting I read recently . A joint group from the Tokyo Institute of Technology and the National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology (AIST) has devised a way to enhance the extraction process of gold from electronic components.
Gold, platinum and other precious metals are used in components for PCs, mobile phones and other electronic goods . But recovering these valuable minerals once the hardware is retired has never been cost effective or practical at a large scale, so there are currently trillions of micro sized gold nuggets hidden in refuse and landfill sites. The new process involves dissolving the metals from old electronic products in acid, extracting the precious metals into a second liquid and then recovering them using plant-derived tannin,By using a sulphide-type diamide as the extracting agent, the group is able to extract over 50 per cent of the gold from the acid solution !!!.
So no more throwing away old parts as there is gold to be found in them
Don’t get your expectations very high , I know Halo 2 is a Vista exclusive and I know so is DX10, from the time we first heard about DX10 Microsoft has repeatedly said that it would be an integral part of Vista,and it could not be implemented onto any other operating system. The reason for this being the approach of DirectX 10 inside the Vista kernel, with a more console-style approach to hardware.
The Alky project intends to change all that , these guys have started Falling Leaf systems and their first release claims to be able to run a number of examples from the DirectX SDK on Windows XP.These libraries will allow the use of DirectX 10 games on platforms other than Microsoft Vista, and increase hardware compatibility even on Vista, by compiling the Geometry Shaders down to native machine code for execution where hardware isn’t capable of running it. The good news does not end here , they plan to port these games on to Mac-OS and Linux in the future. Sounds too good to be true ? If you are interested in the concept then join their sapling program which gives you access to some exclusive content in the months to come. A free for all preview build is available here complete with instructions on where to install the files and how to get started.
April 23rd marked the fourth anniversary for the chipmaker’s Opteron and the ground-breaking AMD64 architecture , and to mark the occasion AMD announced widespread availability and pricing for the latest range of AMD Opteron dual-core server processors . AMD also revealed updated performance numbers for its upcoming Quad-Core AMD Opteron™ processors, code-named ‘Barcelona.’ The new Barcelona projections show that AMD expects to have up to a 50 percent advantage in floating point performance and 20 percent in integer performance over the Intel’s “clovertown” quad-core processor at any given common clock frequency.AMD did not specify the clock speed of Barcelona. Intel’s Clovertown currently tops the chart at 2.66 GHz.
As for the performance of the new AMD Opteron Model 2222 and 8222 SE x86 dual-core server processors . AMD claims and I quote their website
“Under the newest SPECcpu2006 benchmarks, AMD Opteron™ processors continue to set the standard in x86 dual-core processor performance—besting our competitor by up to 15%. We credit that to our superior native dual-core design, with its Direct Connect Architecture, DDR2 memory, and industry-leading performance-per-watt. All with a clear migration path to native Quad-Core. It’s all proof positive that customer-centric innovation wins over hype.”
The AMD site also says
“Saying you’re the “World’s Best Processor” is one thing.
Actually being the “World’s Best Processor” is another.”
Considering their Dismal Q1 results , I would consider it a bold statement
A few days back I had written about Blu-Ray outselling HD-DVD in the first quarter of 2007 , but looks like the HD-DVD camp is gaining momentum now . The Toshiba Website lists a HD-DVD player(Toshiba HD-A2) for as low as $399 and it has all the Bells and whistles for a true HD home theater experience . Rumors have started rolling in that Toshiba has outsourced a chunk of their manufacturing to China and thus have gained a significant cost advantage , another rumor suggests that a $200-$300 HD-DVD player will soon be hitting the markets with the first consignment arriving at WalMart as soon as mid may 2007 .
On the other hand the only blu-ray option available for anything under $600 is the PS3 , Sony has plans for a $499 blu-ray player for late this year, but anyone who is not a hardcore gamer and knows a wee bit of math will and I reinforce WILL go for HD-DVD , this has very serious implications for the blu-ray camp and especially so for Sony as they need blu-ray to accepted as the next generation media format for the PS3 to succeed in the long run . If the prices of blu-ray players do not come down by Mid 2007 then HD-DVD may start gaining widespread acceptance and if that happens then Sony will be left with another dead format and a bricked game console.
The demand for smaller-sized, high-speed, high-density multi-chip packages (MCP) is growing by the day . Stacking Silicon to increase packing density in IC’s is not a new concept, but recently stacking has gained a new level of importance as the process is being introduced to make microprocessors and is slated to come into the mainstream by 2008,Currently chip components are connected by wire bonding, requiring vertical spacing between dies that is tens of microns deep and horizontal spacing on the package board hundreds of microns wide for the die-connecting wires.Stacked silicon, rather than placed side-by-side shortens on chip data travel distances, ultimately saving a whole lot of space on chip and offering an opportunity to drive Moore’s law forward .
“Through-silicon vias” (TSV) is the technology employed for stacking ,which uses vertical connections etched through the silicon wafer and filled with metal. This concept has been described by other chip manufacturers before . Intel revealed thier plans for TSV at the spring IDF 2005 and most recently Samsung announced that it has developed the first all-DRAM stacked memory package using TSV technology, which will soon result in memory packages that are faster, smaller and consume less power, Samsung’s technology forms laser-cut micron-sized holes that penetrate the silicon vertically to connect the memory circuits directly with a copper filling, eliminating the need for gaps of extra space and wires protruding beyond the sides of the dies. While TSV is still in its early stages, the technology represents the next step in innovative packaging solutions which have become increasingly important to enable high-speed, high-density and high- performance Semiconductor solutions .
Via Technologies , the Taiwanese manufacturer of Integrated circuits who also happen to be the world’s largest independent manufacturer of motherboard chipsets , have announced the IT industry’s smallest mainboard form factor specification and they call it Pico-ITX , at 10cm x 7.2cm it measures in slightly bigger than a regular playing card , Pico-ITX is currently the smallest complete x86 mainboard in the industry, smaller than all existing ATX, BTX and ITX form factors.
Designed for the Via range of processors such as the C7 processor , Pico-ITX mainboard form factor will provide system developers and with a standardized, ultra compact and highly integrated platform that can be utilized across multiple embedded PC, system and appliance designs. Some examples where these can be used may be PCs embedded within dashboards or in-flight entertainment systems and industrial automation systems , Integrated multimedia devices and even ultra portable entertainment devices, Pico-ITX can enable the design of full x86 computing devices in form factors which were previously not practical due to size limitations. Though I don’t see the design being utilized to its full potential in the very near future but come 2008 one can expect a lot of movement in the UMPC sector . The reference design specification has the following key components
Processor :VIA C7/VIA Eden V4 bus processor
•NanoBGA2 package up to 1.5GHz
• 128K L1 and 128K L2 cache
Core Logic: VIA VX700 all-in-one system media processor
Main Memory : • 1 DDR2 400/533 So-DIMM socket
• Up to 1GB memory size
Graphics: • Integrated VIA UniChrome™ Pro II 3D/2D AGP graphics with MPEG-2/4 and WMV9 video decoder
• Integrated LVDS and DVI interface • VIP port for video overlay function
Storage (ATA) • UltraDMA 133/100/66/33
• One 44-pin right-angle IDE connector
• One SATA connector
Audio System: VIA VT1708A
• 7.1 channels high definition audio codec
• 7.1 channels audio out and SPDIF in header
• Sound Blaster, Sound Blaster Pro compatible
Ethernet: (LAN) VIA VT6106S
• 10/100Mbps Ethernet Controller
