AllThingsD » ARM

Nvidia Shares Soar on Earnings Beat, Bullish Outlook

Arik Hesseldahl — Fri, 11 May 2012 14:16:57 +0000

Shares of graphics and mobile chipmaker Nvidia are rising by nearly 10 percent in early trading this morning, after its outlook for the quarter ahead soundly beat the consensus of analysts.

Nvidia said it expects sales in the second quarter to come in between $990 million and $1.05 billion, well ahead of the the $976 million analysts had forecast.

And the cheerful forecast came on top of earnings that also beat expectations. Sales in the first quarter fell to $925 million from $962 million a year earlier, which, despite the drop, was better than the $916 million consensus.

Nvidia’s profits were $60 million, or 10 cents on a per-share basis, which was also a drop from 22 cents in the year-ago period. A rather hefty fall at that, but it was in line with expectations.

It looks like Nvidia is scoring some important wins in the desktop space, now that Windows 8 — which supports variants of ARM-based chips and not just x86-type chips from Intel and Advanced Micro Devices — is coming. Also, notebook graphics chips are growing. Nvidia also landed a version of its Tegra chip inside a phone from HTC that launched with 22 carriers in Europe and Asia.

Intel CEO Shows Off the Lava Xolo Handset (Video)

Arik Hesseldahl — Wed, 25 Apr 2012 19:18:13 +0000

Chipmaker Intel finally has a win to call its own in the smartphone market. Earlier this week, it entered into a partnership with the Indian handset maker Lava to supply chips for the Xolo handset. And, naturally, Intel CEO Paul Otellini had one to show off during an appearance on CNBC yesterday.

He calls it “the highest-performing handset on the market, as far as we can tell.” It has taken a few years to get to this point, but there’s a two-billion-unit addressable market to be carved out.

In the video below, Otellini also talks about the competitive threat — though he seems not to consider it much of a threat at all — coming from Microsoft’s Windows 8 and its variant that will support chips running the ARM architecture. How much market share does he expect to lose? None. Intel’s chips can offer the same performance and power efficiency that ARM chips do, while being 100 percent compatible with existing PC software. See the full interview below:

Microchip Demand Boosts ARM

Lilly Vitorovich — Tue, 24 Apr 2012 11:00:42 +0000

ARM Holdings on Tuesday posted a strong increase in first-quarter revenue and profit, driven by demand for its microchip designs, and said annual revenue will be in line with market expectations.

ARM produces microchip blueprints found in most mobile phones, including Apple Inc.’s iPhone, as well as tablets, computers, household goods and even cars.

Read the rest of this post on the original site »

Coming Soon: Phones That Learn to Rest When You Do

Ina Fried — Wed, 29 Feb 2012 21:50:52 +0000

Even though many of us feel as though we are on our phones 24 hours a day, the fact is we aren’t.

Yet, in many cases, our phones keep working even when they’re sitting in a pocket, stuffed in a bag or resting on a table.

With battery life increasingly precious, phone and device makers are taking a number of steps to reduce the waste.

Qualcomm has an initiative, dubbed Consia, that monitors a user’s activities and learns when and where Wi-Fi is available, when the busy times are and when it’s bedtime. After a couple of weeks, the phone can decide when to connect and disconnect and when to fetch information in the background.

“People’s patterns are very different, but individually our behaviors are very predictable,” Qualcomm’s Rob Chandhok said in an interview at Mobile World Congress on Tuesday.

To protect privacy, the information is stored securely on the device and all the calculations are done locally.

Qualcomm is not alone in looking to find ways to help smartphone owners go longer between charges.

Chip companies such as Nvidia and ARM are switching from multiple fast cores to fewer or lower-power engines. Motorola’s phones suggest “smart actions” to reduce battery use, and more power-saving techniques are on their way.

ARM has an initiative called “Big, Little” that encourages its chipmaker licensees to pair a low-power A7 core with a high-power A15 engine, allowing the mobile operating system to shuttle between them as needed.

“The concept really is getting the right size processor to do the right job,” ARM’s Jeff Chu told AllThingsD. “Most of the time you are doing things that don’t need all that performance.”

Switching to the “little” core can reduce energy use as much as 70 percent, Chu said.

Phones with ARM’s new design, though, aren’t expected to start showing up until next year at the earliest.

Nvidia is taking a somewhat similar approach with its quad-core Tegra 3 processor. The chip actually has five cores — the four main ones and a fifth that can be used in place of the other four when less horsepower is needed.

Here’s Qualcomm’s video about Consia:

View More Qualcomm Videos

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Seven Questions for ARM CEO Warren East

Arik Hesseldahl — Mon, 13 Feb 2012 14:26:25 +0000

It’s kind of hard these days to avoid an ARM chip. There are probably five or more inside your mobile phone alone, a few in your car, some in your PC, and several more in places you wouldn’t think of, like your coffeemaker.

Things are good for ARM Holdings, the British chip company whose designs are central to so many of the chips that make modern life modern. In 2011, some 7.9 billion chips with ARM cores in them were shipped. And yet it’s not a very big company. Where Intel clocked sales of $54 billion, ARM finished the year with sales of $777 million (491.8 million pounds). It all has to do with the differences in how they do business. ARM sells the blueprints to make a core — the central brain of a chip — and then those who buy that blueprint can build their own custom parts of a chip around it.

That means an ARM-based chip from Samsung can be significantly different from an ARM chip from Broadcom or Nvidia. And yet designers from either company could probably exchange jobs, because they’re both familiar with the basic designs. ARM has become something of a lingua franca of electronics design, except in the world of personal computers and servers. Yet with Microsoft set to release a new ARM-friendly version of Windows for notebooks and tablets, and the chip firm Calxeda working on bringing ARM chips to servers, ARM’s influence is growing.

I caught up with ARM CEO Warren East over dinner in New York last week, and we talked about how its business model is going strong, and where the ARM architecture is going.

AllThingsD: When people ask me what ARM is, I tend to liken it to a recipe for cake — a cake for which you buy the basic recipe, but which you can then enhance anyway you like. Is that a fair analogy?

East: Exactly, and the doing whatever you like is very important for our business model. If you couldn’t, and we were like Intel, say, and you had to do this one thing, the only thing our licensees could — if you were to apply a licensing model to that — the only thing they could use to compete against each other is price. Whereas this way, they can do their own stuff around the basic recipe, they can differentiate. But because it’s the same microprocessor architecture, your cake recipe, then investments they make in software, or if you’re using a combination of chips from Samsung and Nivida and Qualcomm, any investment you make toward using Samsung chips is equally applicable to the others.

And you can switch to another vendor later if you like, correct?

You can, because they all do different things. If your product is about video, then Texas Instruments’ video accelerator is very good. If it’s about 3-D graphics, then Nvidia’s chips are very good. If it’s a modem you need, then Qualcomm’s chip is very good. So you can mix and match.

And it’s not uncommon for many manufacturers, whether they’re making phones or something else, to have several ARM-based chips doing many things. In a phone, the main microprocessor will be an ARM-based chip, but then also the surrounding chips doing specialized functions will be ARM chips, as well, correct?

Right. The typical smartphone will have four or five ARM chips in it. There’s the main processor, the thing you interact with as the user. Then there’s the modem, which connects to the phone network. And then there’s a connectivity processor that handles the Bluetooth and the Wi-Fi or both. And then there may be a power management processor, or a touchscreen controller, a camera, or GPS, and so on. And the next one that’s being integrated is NFC, or Near Field Communications, for payments by phone. And your 8-bit processor in the SIM card is turning into a 32-bit microprocessor, and that will likely be an ARM, as well.

When you think about competitors, who is it? Is it MIPS? Is it Intel, perhaps, down the road?

When you think about the consumer electronics space, TVs and the like, MIPS has been very strong in that space. Increasingly, as the TVs become smarter and more connected then they start to look more and more like a smartphone with a 46-inch screen. And so, actually, the infrastructure that exists around ARM makes it very compelling to put an ARM chip in there. In the computing world then, the competition is really Intel and AMD x86 chips.

Speaking of AMD, its CEO, Rory Read, raised some eyebrows at its analyst meeting recently when he mentioned ARM and described a new “ambidextrous” approach to its chips, implying, many think, that AMD might combine its x86 cores in some way with an ARM core. Can you give any visibility into what he might mean?

We can’t tell you really anything about it. But I will say something that we’ve said about this before, when people had picked up similar noises about something like this. AMD is in the business of selling microprocessors. We’re in the business of selling microprocessor designs. We wouldn’t be doing our job properly if we weren’t at least talking to them. And so we have been, for the last 10 years or so. If those discussions go anywhere, and if and when there’s something to announce to the world, we’ll do so.

How many licensees are there? Are there any that surprise you because they’re unusual or unique?

Now there are 290 licensees. It’s a good question, and one we don’t get very often. There are all sorts of weird applications. There’s a glaucoma monitor chip that’s a cubic millimeter. It’s a pressure sensor, a solar panel, a microprocessor and a radio and a battery, all in that space, so it can be fitted inside the eye so you can be tested for glaucoma. On the other extreme, we’re in a neutrino detector that’s in a kilometers-long chain of sensors, with another sensor every few meters, down in the Antarctic. So we’re in applications that are as small as a cubic millimeter to as large as several square kilometers. Looking forward, one of the ones I’m intrigued about at the moment is with a company that makes concrete. The idea is it concerns networks of sensors that would be embedded directly in the concrete. But you get the feeling that one company is going to pour the concrete and another is going to place the sensors. But this company wants to put the sensors in in the first place. We’ll just pour the concrete with the sensors already there. It’s all about energy harvesting from the vibrations in the concrete. The processors come with little wireless communications [abilities], and use hardly any energy, because the communication is only from one sensor to the next. That one is probably a few years off, but the fact that a concrete company is thinking about this is very interesting.

The next big thing is that ARM chips are coming to traditional PCs running Windows. We’ve been hearing about it for more than a year now, and Microsoft is starting to show Windows 8. Is the opportunity for ARM in PCs real, and is it going to happen?

It’s real and it’s going to happen, and it’s absolutely on track. Obviously, the detailed timeline is a matter for Microsoft and not for us. Metro is happening. It’s a big change to the user interface. They have pioneered Metro in their mobile offering, and you can sort of see where they’re going with it. But Windows 8 is going to be about Metro. That lends itself a little more to tablets in a way that they haven’t been before. That is clearly going to happen. For us and for Microsoft there are two different objectives. For them, it’s about getting a route to support the billions of Internet-connected screens that are going to appear over the next decade or so. Most of them are going to have an ARM processor in them. Without Windows on ARM, Microsoft is excluded from those products, so they need Windows on ARM. For us, a great side effect is getting into the PC world where, outside of Apple, Windows is everything, and it has been inextricably linked to Intel and x86. So now if Windows appears on ARM, we can address those 300 million PCs that are sold each year. And for us, it’s like having an extra 300 million smartphones. It’s certainly nice to have.

More on Windows on ARM: Highlights From Sinofsky's 8,600-Word Opus

Ina Fried — Thu, 09 Feb 2012 18:27:22 +0000

We’ve already covered the highlights of Microsoft’s Windows-on-ARM news Thursday, namely that it will have a desktop mode, but only for Office, Internet Explorer and Windows itself.

However, there are some other interesting nuggets amid Steven Sinofsky’s epic blog post, which just posted.

There won’t be an “off” button for Windows-on-ARM (WOA), nor will there be various sleep modes.

One of the new aspects of WOA you will notice is that you don’t turn off a WOA PC. WOA PCs will not have the traditional hibernate and sleep options with which we are familiar. Instead, WOA PCs always operate in the newly designed Connected Standby power mode, similar to the way you use a mobile phone today. When the screen is on, you have access to the full power and capabilities of the WOA PC. When the screen goes dark (by pressing the power button or timer), the PC enters a new, very low-power mode that enables the battery to last for weeks.

Microsoft wants a say in how the Windows-on-ARM hardware works, much as it does with Windows Phone.

To those familiar with the Windows Phone 7 approach, the chassis specification, WOA shares some of those elements. The specifications being implemented for WOA allow for more diversity across many dimensions, combined with the same commitment to engineering and product excellence—all while running the same OS binaries across WOA PCs.

In order to test Windows-on-ARM, Microsoft first had to do so on phones, since no ARM tablets yet existed.

Early in the development of WOA, the only hardware we had were existing ARM devices such as phones (ARM tablets didn’t yet exist). We just thought you would enjoy a few fairly early photos I captured of debug WOA all loaded in RAM (unretouched). Note: This is not a product plan or even a hint at a product.

Sinofsky defends Microsoft’s decision not to let more existing Windows programs run in the Windows desktop.

If we enabled the broad porting of existing code we would fail to deliver on our commitment to longer battery life, predictable performance, and especially a reliable experience over time. The conventions used by today’s Windows apps do not necessarily provide this, whether it is background processes, polling loops, timers, system hooks, startup programs, registry changes, kernel mode code, admin rights, unsigned drivers, add-ins, or a host of other common techniques.

Microsoft is making some test Windows-on-ARM machines available to developers, but they don’t give much of an idea what real ARM-based Windows devices will look like.

To run this release, a low volume of test PCs specifically designed for WOA will be made available starting around the next Windows 8 milestone. These devices are for developers and hardware partners, and do not represent consumer form factors, by any stretch of the imagination. They have diagnostic tools and ports. They are designed to be opened and debugged. They do not have the final components or firmware (or power or thermal management) that a commercially available device will use. They are made of low-cost plastic. You might have seen devices similar to these on display at CES or demonstrated there, and all of our previous demonstrations have used some form of these test PCs. These PCs do represent WOA and the experience—but they no more represent the final experience than does the current state of x86/64 Windows 8. They will be running the same branch of Windows that will be made available to x86/64 testers at our forthcoming development milestone.

Tilera's Server Chip Challenges Intel, Sort Of

Arik Hesseldahl — Mon, 30 Jan 2012 14:44:45 +0000

It’s been awhile since there was a new chip on the scene to get excited about; one that didn’t come from Intel, and wasn’t aimed at a mobile phone. It’s been even longer since there was a chip aimed at servers. Today is one of those days.

A start-up called Tilera today unveiled a chip it calls the TILE-Gx. Essentially, it’s a super-chip with 36 cores which — so the company claims — beats a traditional Intel server chip on the key metric of performance per watt.

For those who don’t keep score in the arcane world of semiconductors, I’ll revisit some of the basics of the above paragraph. We all know that Intel and its one main rival, Advanced Micro Devices, sell chips for servers. Those chips, and those that go into PCs, are generally known as x86 chips, a name derived from the instruction set they share.

On the other hand, there are ARM chips, which are a different breed, and exist in a very different ecosystem. Scores of companies make ARM-based chips for all kinds of different uses, and they license the basics of the designs from ARM, the company, which last year did $636 million in revenue.

ARM chips show up in phones and tablets from the likes of Broadcom, Qualcomm, Texas Instruments and Nvidia, but not so much in PCs and servers. ARM is even the basis for Apple’s A4 and A5 chips. At CES last year, Microsoft said it would create a version of Windows 8 that will support ARM chips. And a company called Calxeda (which I initially got mixed up with Tilera) is aiming to bring ARM cores to chips running in servers.

Tilera, based in San Jose, Calif., is backed by investments from Bessemer Venture Partners, Walden International, Columbia Capital and VentureTech Alliance; plus a trio of strategic investors, Quanta Computer, NTT Finance and Broadcom. Its new chip is based around an entirely new architecture developed by Tilera’s CTO Anant Agarwal, a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. It forgoes both the traditional x86 and ARM architectures. Aimed squarely at servers, its intention is to get the same work done that a traditional Intel server chip does, while using less power to do it.

That’s not a trivial benefit, especially in data center environments where servers are bunched together and pushed to the performance limit. The biggest operational expense in running them is going to be power. So it’s on this point that server vendors and chip vendors obsess over saving a watt here and there — over the machine’s useful lifetime, the costs will add up considerably.

How it does this is what makes it interesting. Essentially, the cores on the chip do something that an Intel chip can’t do: They communicate among themselves. The way I understand it — and I admit I’m simplifying it greatly — the cores on an x86 chip rely on a single communications channel, called the Bus, to communicate. The Tilera architecture allows each core to communicate directly with the other cores, thus eliminating the need for the Bus and cutting back on the need for power.

The top-end chip — there are two versions — has 36 cores. A core is essentially the main computing engine on a chip. If you’re reading this on a PC, chances are the chip inside it has two cores, maybe four. It used to be that chips had only one core, until it became logical to put two or more on a single chip. I’ve always compared multicore chips to roommates folding laundry together. When there’s a big pile of laundry to be folded, one person can certainly do it, but two or four get it done faster and with less effort. Multicore chips basically prove the old adage that many hands make for fast work.

There’s an obvious appeal to a chip like this, but there are a lot of strikes against it. First, much of the server ecosystem is pretty well entrenched. Companies run what applications they already have, and are usually loath to mess with their computing environments much. Changing the architecture of the CPU chip inside the servers is about as major a decision as a CIO may ever make, and one they don’t make lightly. First they’ll have to test it and run it for awhile, and then see how it interacts with other systems. It’s not the sort of decision that happens just overnight. Also, a new architecture brings with it a lot of software compatibility questions that will give many IT departments pause.

Meanwhile, Intel, which sells chips that go into most of the world’s mainstream servers, will continue to push its power consumption down. At the same time, it’s been trying like crazy to use its Atom line of chips to mount an attack on ARM’s territory and win business from phone and tablet vendors. That effort is just now seeing its first early successes. If there’s a great long-term story in chips that bears watching, the grappling between Intel and the ever-expanding universe of ARM vendors is certainly it.

Correction: I initially thought the Tilera chip was based on the ARM architecture. I’ve revised the story to correct that.

Former Apple CEO Says Newton "Scribble Thing" Was 15 Years Ahead of Its Time

John Paczkowski — Fri, 13 Jan 2012 18:15:00 +0000

When Apple co-founder Steve Jobs returned to Apple in 1997, he famously killed off a number of products for the good of the company. Top among them was the Newton, for which Jobs had a profound distaste.

Asked what he thought of the device during a Q&A at Apple’s Worldwide Developer Conference that year, Jobs slagged it as worthless, in a remark oddly prefigurative of the iPhone (see video below).

“I tried a Newton,” he said. “I bought one of the early ones; I thought it was a piece of junk, I threw it away. I bought one of the Motorola Envoys; I thought it was a piece of junk after three months and threw it away. … Here’s my problem [with these devices]: My problem is, to me, the high-order bit is connectivity. The high-order bit is being in touch, connected to a network. … What I want is this little thing that I carry around with me that’s got a keyboard on it — because to do email you need a keyboard. … And it needs to be connected to the Net. So if somebody would just make a little thing where you’re connected to the Net at all times, and you’ve got a little keyboard. God, I’d love to buy one. But I don’t see one of those out there. And I don’t care what OS it has in it. So, you know, I don’t want a little scribble thing. But that’s just me.”

Jobs’s issue with the Newton then was that it failed as a product — it wasn’t useful. But to former Apple CEO John Sculley, under whose watch the Newton was developed, the reason the device didn’t succeed was because it was too far ahead of its time, “too ambitious.”

“Newton was probably 15 years too early,” Sculley told the BBC. “I’m not a technologist. I didn’t have the experience to make that judgment, but we were, I think, right on many of the concepts. The product clearly failed in terms of taking on such an ambitious goal. I think, in hindsight, there is a lot of good legacy there with the Newton. Even if the product itself never survived, the technology did.”

Specifically, ARM, which is still in wide use today.

Said Scully, “ARM not only was the key technology behind the Newton, but it eventually became the key technology behind every mobile device in the world today, including the iPhone and the iPad.”

Interview: Microsoft's Steven Sinofsky on Why a Windows Store Makes Sense

Ina Fried — Wed, 07 Dec 2011 11:00:39 +0000

Although Windows 8’s built-in app store represents a big shift for how developers sell their wares, Microsoft’s top operating-system executive characterized it as a natural evolution.

Users had been accustomed to scouring retail store shelves, but Windows President Steven Sinofsky said expectations have shifted, and consumers are looking to download the programs they need.

“What has dramatically changed over the years is digital distribution of software,” Sinofsky told AllThingsD in an interview Tuesday, shortly after Microsoft announced its plans for the marketplace at an event in San Francisco.

The Windows Store is a key component of Microsoft’s biggest overhaul in years for its flagship operating system. In addition to changing the way apps are sold, Microsoft is also changing the way they are programmed, and expanding the types of chips on which programs will run.

Microsoft is looking to deliver the operating system in fairly short order — on Tuesday, the company said a beta would be available in late February. Windows 8 is widely expected to arrive late next year, though Sinofsky declined to say anything about when the final version would ship.

Well, I asked, is it fair to say that things are going well?

“I always feel great,” Sinofsky said. “I get to come to work every day and see the build from the night before, and every day we do more stuff.”

I also got clarifications on a few nerdy details.

First of all, Microsoft has not changed its plans to make the store mandatory for developers looking to sell new-style Windows 8 apps to individuals. Businesses and developers will have their own means for delivering programs to users, though Sinofsky said Microsoft is not yet ready to detail just how that will work.

“When we get to beta, we will detail the mechanism,” he said.

Sinofsky also clarified that the Windows Store won’t be ported backward to run on older Windows versions. Though understandable, given that the marketplace is designed for all-new apps, the move means that Microsoft will have to build from the ground up when it comes to recruiting developers and building a user base.

That leaves Microsoft vulnerable to a chicken-or-egg problem at launch, though it can count on the fact that hundreds of millions of machines are sold each year, with the vast majority running the latest version of Windows.

Sinofsky would not address a question that has been making the rounds on Windows sites in recent days — whether Windows 8 machines running ARM processors will be able to run classic desktop-style applications.

Microsoft has demonstrated a classic desktop running on an ARM chip, though the company stressed that was merely a technology demonstration; Sinofsky declined to comment on Microsoft’s plans in that area.

And while Microsoft detailed the cut it expects to take from the Windows store (30 percent on apps or 20 percent once they generate $25,000 in sales), the company isn’t offering any guesses on just how big that business could be.

At last January’s CES, Microsoft confirmed its plans to have Windows 8 run on the ARM-based chips that power smartphones and tablets, along with the Intel and AMD chips that have traditionally been used. At our D9 conference in June, Sinofsky showed off the new look of Windows 8; the company added further technical details and issued an early preview release at its Build developer conference in September.

Paul Otellini Busts Some Myths About Intel

Arik Hesseldahl — Wed, 30 Nov 2011 00:47:33 +0000

Chipmaker Intel has suffered from the notion that since it isn’t having much success in either the smartphone or tablet computing space, its growth prospects in the so-called post-PC era are limited.

That, said Intel CEO Paul Otellini, is one of three myths he aimed to bust today in a speech at a Credit Suisse technology conference in Phoenix.

First off, he pointed to the emerging markets. Intel is seeing significant growth in countries like Argentina, where the market for PCs grew 38 percent in 2011; Venezuela, where it grew 34 percent; and Russia, which grew 26 percent. “This emerging market trend is real,” Otellini said. And it’s not likely to end anytime soon: In 2010, the top five PC markets by country were the U.S., China, Germany, Japan and Brazil. In 2015, Intel forecasts suggest, the top five will be China, the U.S., Brazil, Russia and Germany.

With all the attention on phones and tablets, especially Apple’s iPad and various Android devices, the PC has gotten a little stale, Otellini conceded, so it’s time to make it exciting again. Intel’s answer is the Ultrabook. Thinner, sleeker notebooks that boot up fast and have touch-enabled screens and long battery lives will get consumers excited again, he said.

And don’t forget the part that Intel plays in the cloud: Most of the servers running cloud services have Intel chips inside them. And Intel’s data center business has doubled over five years and will double again in the next five. “This is where we see more and more of our customers buying from us direct. They’re building custom boards to run the data centers at Facebook, at Amazon, at Google, at Baidu and Alibaba,” he said.

Myth No. 2: Intel chips are too power-hungry for mobile devices.

Moore’s Law is still alive and well, Otellini said. In 1997, Intel built a supercomputer called ASCI Red that could compute one teraflop. It required 2,500 square feet of space and 9,298 chips to get the number crunching done. Earlier this month, Intel announced a chip codenamed Knight’s Corner that can do a teraflop by itself. In the mainstream marketplace, today’s notebooks are 300 times more powerful than notebooks built in 1995.

Intel, Otellini says, has built its own demonstration Android smartphone to show off the upcoming Medfield generation of its Atom processor, due in 2012. When its power consumption during basic phone functions like things like standby, audio and HD video playback is measured, Intel isn’t the best, but it’s not the worst, either. It usually comes in second or third place when compared against smartphones already in the market, but ahead of others, though Otellini didn’t say which phones it beat and which ones it didn’t.

And on three computing performance benchmarks it beats the others hands down: When using a browser on a phone, the Intel chip smokes the others. It also wins on GLBench, a graphics metric, and SunSpider, a Java test.

Myth No. 3: Intel can’t compete with ARM.

Yes, it’s true that ARM-based chips are everywhere that Intel would like its Atom chips to be and are showing no signs of giving ground.

But, noted Otellini, despite the growth of newer platforms, Intel and its x86 instruction set still command the largest army of software developers — north of 14 million — and the largest body of software created so far — more than 6 million applications. “As we come into these markets we’re bringing an incredible legacy of people that know Intel and know the Intel architecture.”

Then there’s Windows 8. Otellini called it “one of the best things that has ever happened to our company.” It will allow tablets to gain mainstream acceptance, especially in the enterprise that they don’t have today. “A lot of IT managers are worried about security and about porting their legacy applications to an Android tablet or an iPad. What Microsoft is doing is making that seamless for them.”

Finally, he said, Intel has a history of entering markets dominated by someone else and dominating them over time. In the early 1980s as the first Intel chips went into PCs, the dominant machines on the market were the VIC-20 and the Apple II. In the early 1990s, when Intel first went after servers, the dominant chips came from Sun Microsystems and IBM. Now Intel rules both markets. And the same thing has happened in supercomputing. (See the slide from Otellini’s presentation below, though someone needs to check the first field at left because the VIC-20 appears twice.)

Did his mythbusting work? Intel shares rose a bit today, closing up 12 cents to $23.58, and the shares are up 12 percent so far this year. We’ll see how right he was in 2012.

Update: Intel has corrected Otellini’s slide. No longer does it show the VIC-20 occupying two market segments. Well, it was kinda popular.

Is Windows 8 Just the Bold Bet That Microsoft Needed?

Ina Fried — Thu, 15 Sep 2011 12:30:53 +0000

For years, Microsoft has prided itself on being able to show the latest version of Windows running even the oldest of applications.

This week, however, Redmond is striking a very different tone in introducing Windows 8. Although any programs that ran in Windows 7 should do just fine in the new release, Microsoft is putting nearly all of its energy around a whole new type of application that is quite unlike the Windows programs of yesteryear.

A scan of the session list at Microsoft’s Build developer conference in Anaheim, Calif., reveals dozens designed around building the new “Metro-style” applications, and almost no programs focused on traditional Windows applications.

Also, as one reporter pointed out to me, it’s worth noting that the new-look Windows has no windows. Nor do the new kind of apps have visible menus or other hallmarks of the venerable desktop operating system. Instead, new Windows applications fill the entire screen and are navigated largely through touch, with needed commands brought up with the swipe of a finger.

And although Windows 8 will run older programs, there are clear signs that Microsoft is ready to break with tradition. Older Windows apps share space on one screen — the desktop. That’s the same amount of screen real estate that all other apps have to themselves. And while both new and old apps will run on Intel-based Windows 8 machines, Microsoft is only promising that new-style programs will run on the forthcoming machines using ARM-based chips from Nvidia, Qualcomm and Texas Instruments.

It’s a major shift that Microsoft has resisted making for many years. Even as rivals like Apple and Palm went back to the drawing board and redesigned their operating systems for the Internet age, Microsoft chose to make evolutionary improvements to Windows while maintaining nearly full compatibility with the past.

[ See post to watch video ]

Change is clearly needed. After years of dominating the computing universe, Microsoft has seen a number of incursions into its core business. A resurgent Mac has grabbed a significant share of the computer market, while the iPad and other mobile devices have also taken momentum and sales away from the traditional computer business.

And as much as Microsoft needs an answer to the iPad — and it clearly does — the threat posed to today’s Windows extends far beyond the tablet. The type of mobile computing that dominates the smartphone and tablet markets today is poised to move into laptops and desktops, as well. On the laptop side, in particular, customers clearly want the same thinness and long battery life that is found on tablets.

The only way for Microsoft to get there with Windows was to break with the past. Microsoft indicated its willingness to go in new directions back in January, when it announced that Windows 8 would support ARM-based processors. With this week’s announcement, Microsoft is showing that it is willing to go a step further and sacrifice some backward compatibility to produce more competitive products.

Intel Working With Google to Optimize Android for Its Chips

Shara Tibken — Tue, 13 Sep 2011 21:49:10 +0000

Intel Corp. has formed a partnership with Google Inc. to optimize the Android operating system for its processors, with hopes the move will help the chip giant make inroads into the mobile market and have everything from servers to smartphones running on its technology.

While the Santa Clara, Calif., company dominates the PC and server markets, it has struggled to make inroads in smartphones and tablets because its chips are viewed as too power-hungry compared to designs based on ARM Holdings PLC architecture. But Intel hopes new lower-power chips and advanced-process technology will help it break into the market.

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Windows 8 Forces Some Compromises After All

Ina Fried — Tue, 13 Sep 2011 19:39:10 +0000

Steven Sinofsky talks about Windows 8 as a “no compromise” operating system, but the fact is there are some trade-offs to be made.

Although the new Windows offers a number of upsides, including the fact it runs on a wider range of processors, such flexibility comes at a cost.

Systems that run Windows 8 using low-power ARM processors will be able to run all of the new-style Windows applications, but it appears few traditional Windows programs will run. Microsoft demonstrated a technology preview of Office running on ARM back in January, but Sinofsky said that in general older Windows applications won’t run on ARM-based machines.

That’s not to say Microsoft didn’t make the right choices when it comes to Windows 8. Were Microsoft to have brought over all of its legacy to the new chips, it might well have lost the long battery life and other benefits that ARM-based systems can provide.

A strong case can be made that this break with the past is exactly what Microsoft needed in order to compete with a new generation of devices running operating systems designed with mobility in mind.

However, the choice means that Microsoft and its partners will need lots of new apps to make Windows 8 a success. Indeed, a big part of this week’s Build conference will be equipping developers with the tools they need to write such programs and convincing them of the upside of doing so.

Recognizing this, some of Redmond’s partners are taking matters into their own hands. Nvidia, for example, plans its own program to convince developers to write new-style Windows apps.

“We’re going to be investing in our own effort to get developers on board,” Nvidia General Manager Rene Haas said in an interview.

But if the company faces challenges getting developers to write the new apps, Haas said he is not worried about finding PC makers willing to make machines with the ARM-based processors. Such systems, he said, can be slimmer and cheaper and offer better battery life than those running traditional PC processors from Intel and AMD, he said.

“We’ve seen very big OEM interest,” Haas said, using the industry term for PC makers. “Virtually every OEM around the world wants to do something with Windows-on-ARM.”

Gearing Up for Microsoft's Big Week

Ina Fried — Mon, 12 Sep 2011 12:30:39 +0000

For years, Microsoft has faced the theoretical concern of Windows becoming less relevant in a world where the computer was one device among many, rather than the centerpiece.

With the rise of the smartphone and the emergence of the tablet, that threat has become real. Now, as the pressure mounts, Microsoft is due to make its case for why Windows can not only hang on to the desktop, but finally deliver on the tablet promises it has been making for a decade.

At a developer conference in Anaheim, Calif., the company is expected to offer a great deal more detail on Windows 8 — the next version of the operating system first shown at our D9 event in June. Windows 8 boasts a touchy-feely new interface, literally, along with a whole new means for writing Windows apps. Also, in a shift, Windows will run on the same kinds of ARM chips that power many of today’s smartphones and tablets.

With the changes, Windows chief Steven Sinofsky says Microsoft is in a position to deliver a “no compromise” operating system that is equally at home on small tablets and powerful desktops.

Some are hoping that Microsoft would go a step further and announce some sort of plan to allow Windows Phone apps to run on Windows 8. That, however, seems unlikely. While Windows and Windows Phone may someday converge, for now the two remain on different architectures.

Whatever Microsoft has to say, AllThingsD will be on hand to make sure our readers don’t miss a beat.

Redmond will also be talking about its bottom line, holding a financial analysts’ meeting on Wednesday. And since it is bringing out its big guns, AllThingsD is doing the same, with Kara Swisher joining me in Anaheim to bring her wit and wisdom to that part.

Amid Slower PC Sales, Chip Makers Intel and AMD Report Earnings

Arik Hesseldahl — Wed, 20 Jul 2011 14:06:51 +0000

Chip maker Intel will today report results of its second fiscal quarter after the close of markets today, and the expectations aren’t exactly great.

Doug Freedman, an analyst who covers the chip sector for Gleacher & Co. in San Francisco, trimmed his estimates on both Intel and on its smaller rival Advanced Micro Devices amid a weakened PC market that is running well behind the typical seasonal patterns. Last week, market researcher Gartner reported that worldwide PC shipments grew less than three percent over the year-ago period, as consumers remain focused on tablets and smartphones and hold off on upgrading their desktops and notebooks.

At a high level, that’s not good news for Intel and AMD, both of which have yet to penetrate the tablet market in any meaningful way. And both are grappling with the impending entrance of competing chips — based on designs from ARM, from vendors like Nvidia and Qualcomm — burrowing their way into new consumer notebooks.

In a July 15 note to clients, Freedman cut his estimates on both Intel and AMD for the quarter ending in June and the quarter ending in September. He expects Intel to report sales of $12.7 billion, which is about $100 million below the street consensus of $12.8 billion. He also expects Intel to report per-share earnings of 53 cents, which would amount to a two-cent improvement over the year-ago quarter.

The quarter being reported today isn’t the story, however: It’s September. Typically it’s a seasonally strong quarter, as college students head back to school with new notebooks under their arms. This year Freedman thinks PC sales will lag behind historical patterns. He trimmed his September quarter revenue forecast to $13.16 billion, down from $13.43 billion — or $300 million below the street view — and knocked it down by two cents to 59 cents, a penny above the street.

Intel has, in recent quarters, taken a fairly aggressive stance on the state of the PC market, and has criticized analysts for fanning investor fears. “Management should offer more subdued PC unit growth expectations thereby alleviating investor fear that Intel is setting its bar too high,” Freedman wrote. One other thing Intel has in its favor is that the average selling price of chips is edging upward, which should give it a slight hedge against the weaker market. This should help keep gross margins — a key metric for Intel — in the higher end of the 59 to 63 percent range the company said to expect. He also says that Intel could deliver a surprise with better-than-expected results from other parts of its operations, namely its flash memory unit, which makes solid-state hard drives.

For AMD, which reports its results tomorrow, the picture is a mixed bag. The search for a new CEO is now in its sixth month, with no sign of being resolved anytime soon. Freedman doesn’t expect a CEO to be named today nor in the near term. Finding an external candidate is proving harder than expected. (Note to Freedman: You don’t say.) Pressure on its share price, thanks to short-sellers, has created a buying opportunity in the near term.

Even so, Freedman trimmed his estimates for AMD’s June and September quarters. He expects AMD to report sales of $1.55 billion, down from $1.6 billion previously, which would amount to a four percent decline in year-on-year sales. He also shaved a penny off his EPS estimate to nine cents from 10. For September, he expects AMD to report sales of $1.63 billion, down from $1.7 billion before, and cut his EPS estimate to 16 cents from 20.

I’ll be back later today to cover Intel earnings live. See you then.

Still Missing a CEO, AMD Is Hammered on a Downgrade

Arik Hesseldahl — Mon, 11 Jul 2011 20:44:52 +0000

Shares of the chipmaker Advanced Micro Devices plunged by more than 2 percent today following a downgrade by an analyst who said that sales of its latest chip platform aren’t meeting expectations.

Alex Gauna of JMP Securities cut his rating on AMD to “market underperform,” arguing that its Fusion line of chips isn’t winning sufficient business from PC makers. Having interviewed people at PC retailers and at PC manufacturers, he concludes Fusion is going nowhere. He says he was unable to purchase a Fusion-based PC from Dell via its Web site.

AMD’s Fusion processors aren’t winning many positive reviews, Gauna says, indicating a “lack of market interest.” Sales representatives at various online retailers steered his researchers “away from AMD platforms.”

As you might expect, it doesn’t take much to send AMD shares south these days. Intel is far and away the king of the hill in PC and server microprocessors, and chips from companies like Nvidia and Qualcomm based on the designs of ARM Holdings are coming into notebooks and tablets, minimizing AMD’s chances to win business there. He slashed his target price on AMD to $4.50 a share, which would constitute a drastic drop from the $6.80 at which it opened today, having closed Friday at $6.95. By today’s close of regular trading, investors knocked AMD’s shares down to $6.76, a drop of nearly 3 percent.

The day ended however, with AMD shares being defended by analyst JoAnne Feeney at Longbow Research. Dell is not an early adopter of the AMD technology, she says, but will be offering systems using AMD’s Fusion chips — the codename of the specific AMD product is Llano — soon. I heard the same thing from a source at AMD. On top of that, Toshiba and Lenovo are happy AMD customers. Tiernan Ray at Barron’s has a little more on Feeney’s note.

The downgrade came 10 days before AMD is due to report quarterly earnings and amid growing speculation on the company’s ongoing search to find a new CEO to replace the ousted Dirk Meyer. The search is about to drag into its sixth month, and I’m told it won’t be resolved before earnings are announced.

There were reports last month that several A-list executives, none of whom would have realistically considered the job in the first place — Oracle’s Mark Hurd, Apple’s Tim Cook — had turned down approaches by AMD’s recruiting agency, Heidrick & Struggles. Another who topped AMD’s list early on, Pat Gelsinger, the former Intel CTO who’s now in line to succeed Joe Tucci as the CEO of storage giant EMC, even said he told AMD no not once but twice. A lot of those people, Hurd and Cook especially, are really just names that any recruiter looking to fill a senior position would call in the course of building a list, just to make sure they’ve covered their bases.

The sense of urgency to find a new CEO seems to have dissipated at AMD, though not entirely. With the company running a profit again — its most recent quarter showed a $510 million profit on sales of $1.6 billion — it may be that directors feel they have the luxury of time in finding the right candidate, so they don’t have to rush the process, though obviously they’ll want to get it done soon. Expect the company to face a lot of questions from analysts when it reports earnings on July 21.

ARM Twisting: Intel to Fab Chips for Apple?

John Paczkowski — Tue, 07 Jun 2011 20:15:37 +0000

Intel’s hunt for new foundry business may well end in a deal with Apple to fab the company’s “A” series chips. That’s the word on the street, anyway, most recently codified by Citigroup analyst Glen Yeung, who says the supply chain chatter he’s hearing suggests a foundry partnership between the two companies may be in the offing.

“We believe a foundry relationship may be forming between Intel and Apple,” Yeung says. “Our discussions with the hardware supply chain tend to support this belief. Intel has previously acknowledged they would be amenable to such a relationship, under the right conditions.”

Among those conditions, says Yeung: An agreement from Apple to someday convert from an ARM-based core for handsets and tablets to x86, which would essentially give Intel Apple’s chip business. That would obviously be a huge win for Intel, as it stands to gain much from Apple’s market share in smartphones and tablets.

But there is one problem. Apple’s A4 and A5 chips are based on an ARM design and Intel isn’t exactly a big fan of ARM. Asked during Intel’s recent investor meeting if the company would consider fabbing chips based on the ARM architecture, CEO Paul Otellini had this to say: “The short answer is ‘No.’”

A foundry partnership with Apple would require a rethinking of that answer, at least for the short term. And Intel certainly could do it. It has the necessary ARM licenses. It just needs to convince Apple to dump Samsung, which currently handles chip fabrication for it, and migrate its mobile devices over to its forthcoming low-power x86-based chips next year.

Everybody Chill! The Nvidia-Microsoft Pact Is Actually 11 Years Old.

Arik Hesseldahl — Sat, 04 Jun 2011 20:55:07 +0000

Information Week is reporting a peculiar story about a deal between the graphics chip maker Nvidia and software giant Microsoft that effectively gives Redmond the right to match any offer for a stake worth 30 percent or more of Nvidia’s outstanding shares by any other company.

In light of recent events, in particular Nvidia agreeing to make ARM-based chips that will be used in forthcoming notebooks and tablet devices and thus setting up a new competitive dynamic with chip giant Intel, the revelation takes on new significance. Note my use of the word “new,” which this arrangement is not. (Update: An Nvidia spokesman tells me the arrangement between Nvidia and Microsoft has been disclosed every quarterly filing for more than a decade.)

Listed in the “Risk Factors” section–“buried deep” as Information Week puts it–of Nvidia’s most recent 10-K filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission is the following text:

On March 5, 2000, we entered into an agreement with Microsoft in which we agreed to develop and sell graphics chips and to license certain technology to Microsoft and its licensees for use in the Xbox. Under the agreement, if an individual or corporation makes an offer to purchase shares equal to or greater than 30% of the outstanding shares of our common stock, Microsoft may have first and last rights of refusal to purchase the stock. The Microsoft provision and the other factors listed above could also delay or prevent a change in control of NVIDIA.

When I first read it, I thought the date was a typo. Surely this deal was struck in 2011? Then I started looking back through filings from prior years. I went all the way back to the year 2000, when Nvidia filed a 10-K405, a variant of the 10-K that before 2003 indicated that the filing company hadn’t reported its insider trading activity in a timely manner. Here’s the relevant text from that year:

On March 5, 2000, the Company entered into an agreement with Microsoft in which the Company agreed to develop and sell graphics chips and to license certain technology to Microsoft and its licensees for use in a product under development by Microsoft. The agreement provides that in April 2000, Microsoft will pay the Company $200 million as an advance against graphics chip purchases and for licensing the Company’s technology. Microsoft may terminate the agreement at any time and if termination occurs prior to offset in full of the advance payments, the Company would be required to return to Microsoft up to $100 million of the prepayment and to convert the remainder into preferred stock of the Company at a 30% premium to the 30-day average trading price of the common stock.

So for whatever reason Information Week has decided to call attention to an 11-year-old arrangement. If its news to you, you probably don’t have any reason to read Nvidia’s SEC filings. Having been disclosed something like 55 times (five times a year give or take over 11 years), it’s obviously not news to anyone who routinely does read them, such as analysts, investors and pretty much anyone who pays reasonably close attention to Nvidia.

What the arrangement does explain is this, which may be a revelation–if you’re just tuning in to the Nvidia story: Why it hasn’t ever been acquired, or even come close. Nvidia has over the years been the target of repeated takeover speculation, occasionally with Apple or Intel named as the possible acquirer. Robert Cringely wrote just such a column in 2009, arguing that Intel would step up. To Information Week’s credit, Cringely seemed unaware of the role that Microsoft would necessarily play in such an attempted transaction. Speculation about Nvidia being targeted for a buyout has tended to ebb and flow with Nvidia’s stock price since 2006 when its main rival, ATI Technologies, was taken by Advanced Micro Devices.

The arrangement states that if a third party offers enough cash for a stake in Nvidia that amounts to at least 30 percent of the equity, Microsoft has the right to match that offer before Nvidia accepts it. And it is still in force. But it’s helpful to consider it against the backdrop of what was going on in 2000. Permit me, then, to revisit some ancient history.

In 2000, Microsoft put up $200 million to help Nvidia, then a young company with only $375 million in annual sales, to design a chip for what would eventually be called the XBox. In the six days after the deal was concluded, Nvidia’s share price nearly tripled, while trading volume in the shares surged by a factor of six. In fact, it was such a big deal for the company that an Nvidia employee got in trouble with the SEC for insider trading.

Nvidia was a participant in a graphics chip business during a period that proved extremely volatile. Companies that had led the segment were going out of business or splitting into pieces. Later in 2000, Nvidia would go on to buy out the assets of its bankrupt rival 3Dfx Interactive. Another graphics outfit, S3, broke up into pieces, one portion of which wound up in the hands of VIA Technologies, the Taiwanese chipmaker, while the other pieces became SonicBlue, a consumer electronics concern that before the age of the iPod was notable for acquiring the maker of the original Rio MP3 player. (I did say it was ancient history, didn’t I?)

Anyhow, Microsoft needed a hedge in case Nvidia failed to deliver the needed chip. As you can read above, the original terms called for Nvidia to pay back $100 million in cash, and the rest in equity, in the event that Nvidia failed to meet its commitment. Once it delivered and became a strategically important supplier, the deal terms changed to allow Microsoft the right of first refusal in the event that Nvidia was approached for an acquisition, or an investment stake of 30 percent or more.

Also at the time, it was still being prosecuted by the federal government for alleged violations of antitrust laws, making an attempt at an outright acquisition on Nvidia out of the question. In making a big bet on Nvidia’s technology, Microsoft would have wanted to ensure that the young company wasn’t vulnerable to an easy takeover by someone, say Sony, who might have endangered Microsoft’s supply of a critical component.

Fast forward to today. Before its $8.5 billion deal to acquire Skype, Microsoft had more than $50 billion in combined cash and short-term investments, and could, at least on paper, put up the $15 billion or so that would be required to acquire Nvidia if it came to that, which it won’t.

Why not? First off, any such deal wouldn’t likely pass muster with antitrust regulators. The U.S. Department of Justice and Federal Trade Commission might sign off on it, but does anyone believe that the hypersensitive European Commission would be so willing? With Nvidia mounting a reasonable challenge to Intel, it would seem to tighten an integration of hardware and software in one place (Apple notwithstanding). This is, after all, the same European Commission that set a record with the $1.45 billion fine it dealt Intel in 2009 just for playing super-tough against AMD. Forget it.

And if that’s not reason enough to doubt a potential takeover of Nividia by Microsoft, or anyone else for that matter, look at Nividia’s share price. The time for an acquirer to move on Nvidia was a little less than a year ago, when its shares were trading at less than $10 and the company had a market capitalization of less than $6 billion. Now trading at a valuation north of $11 billion, reporting decent profits and holding about $2.7 billion in cash as of May 1, Nvidia is doing just fine on its own. Though CEO Jen-Hsun Huang, who was interviewed by ATD’s own Ina Fried at D@CES earlier this year, probably looks back fondly on the $200 million he got from Microsoft 11 years ago.

So? Everyone chill out. There’s really nothing new to see here. Instead, listen to this great, aptly named John Lee Hooker tune, with Carlos Santana sitting in on guitar. It’s not new either. But it’s a lot more interesting.

Three Things We Still Don't Know About Windows 8

Ina Fried — Wed, 01 Jun 2011 23:15:16 +0000

Although we learned a bunch of things about Windows 8 on Wednesday, there is still a lot that we don’t know.

In an exclusive demo at D9, we did get a good look at the Windows 8 desktop as well as the guiding principles for the operating system as a whole. Microsoft showed an operating system that borrows much from Windows Phone 7 on the design side and aims to be equally at home on a tablet, desktop or laptop.

But there are many questions about Windows 8 that remain unanswered. Here are just a few key ones.

1. When will Windows 8 ship?

2. Where will competitors be by that time?

3. How well will these Windows 8 machines work when running a whole bunch of old programs?

There’s also the question of just how well–even when running on ARM-based chips–Windows 8 will do when it comes to characteristics like long battery life and instant boot-up that have been hallmarks of iOS and Android devices.

Also unclear is what else Microsoft has in store for Windows 8. In an interview, Steven Sinofsky stressed that this is a major release of Windows and there are a lot more changes being made throughout the operating system. Expect to learn a lot more about those at Microsoft’s mid-September developer conference in Anaheim, Calif.

Exclusive: Making Sense of Our First Look at Windows 8

Ina Fried — Wed, 01 Jun 2011 23:00:00 +0000

On Wednesday, Microsoft offered the first glimpse of Windows 8, a sneak peek that reveals much about both the influences and the strategic goals of the major overhaul of Microsoft’s 25-year-old operating system.

The fundamental goal with the new operating system, which is being shown for the first time at D9, is to create something that is equally well at home on an 8-inch tablet as it is on a powerful desktop attached to a huge monitor.

“It’s ‘no compromise’ and that’s really important to us,” Windows President Steven Sinofsky said in an interview with AllThingsD.

At the heart of the new interface is a new start screen that draws heavily on the tile-based interface that Microsoft has used with Windows Phone 7. All of a user’s programs can be viewed as tiles and clicked on with the touch of a finger.

Windows 8 essentially supports two kinds of applications. One is the classic Windows application, which runs in a desktop very similar to the Windows 7 desktop.

The other type of application, which has to be written in HTML5 and Javascript, looks more like a mobile application, filling the full screen. Internet Explorer 10, which is part of Windows 8, has already been configured to run in this mode, as have several widget-like apps for checking stock prices and weather.

Although Microsoft didn’t offer any details, the start screen that it is showing on Wednesday includes a prominent link to a store, ostensibly confirming that Microsoft plans to get in the business of directly distributing Windows programs, much as Apple has on both the iPhone and Mac.

Sinofsky noted that there were a few things that the iPad showed were missing from Windows–most notably a touch-first interface and an app distribution mechanism and new business model for developers. Windows 8, as the product is currently code-named, is designed to address all three of those issues, while preserving compatibility with decades of existing Windows programs.

Although Windows 8 is clearly influenced by the iPad and other mobile devices, the plan for the new operating system has been in the works since Windows 7 shipped in July 2009–several months before the iPad was first shown.

“We really did take a step back after Windows 7,” Sinofsky said. “We were clearly influenced ourselves by phones.”

Microsoft has also done work with the classic Windows desktop to make it more touch friendly, including using a new kind of “fuzzy hit targeting” to adjust for the fact that fingers are far less precise than a mouse. The goal, says chief designer Julie Larson-Green, is that classic apps, though designed for a keyboard and mouse, work well with touch. Apps taking advantage of the new programming layer, she said, are designed for touch first, but also work well with a keyboard and mouse.

Windows is growing more flexible in other ways. Microsoft said back in January that the next version of Windows would support ARM-based chips from Nvidia, Texas Instruments and Qualcomm, in addition to the traditional Windows processors from Intel and AMD. Though Sinofsky and Green used Intel-based machines for Wednesday’s demo at D, Microsoft plans to demonstrate some of the ARM-based designs later today at the Computex trade show in Taiwan.

On a technical note, Sinofsky stressed that after decades of ever-increasing system requirements that characterized Windows releases through Vista, Microsoft is once again building an operating system that demands fewer resources than its predecessor–a trend started with Windows 7, which worked on all Vista-compatible systems.

A key question is how well this new Windows will stack up against a new generation of “post-PC” devices running Android, Apple’s iOS and other operating systems.

There are other unanswered questions as well, including just when Windows 8 will be ready. Sinofsky declined to say, but said Microsoft will have a lot more to say about Windows 8 at a developer conference in mid-September in Anaheim, Calif.

Microsoft, Intel Don’t Entirely Agree on Next Windows

Don Clark — Thu, 19 May 2011 13:50:22 +0000

Intel had one key mission at its analyst meeting this week: convincing investors that it can still catch up to rival ARM Holdings in the mobile market. One of its arguments seems to have miffed longtime partner Microsoft.

Chips based on ARM designs power Apple’s popular iPhone and iPad devices and devices that run Google’s Android software. Intel’s perceived momentum took another blow in January, when Microsoft said the next version of its mainstream Windows operating system will for the first time work on ARM chips as well as the x86 design sold by Intel and AMD.

Renee James, who runs Intel’s sizeable software efforts, took pains Tuesday to counter the perception that the forthcoming Windows 8 product is a problem for Intel.

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Strong ARM Delivers Results

Lilly Vitorovich — Wed, 27 Apr 2011 12:35:24 +0000

U.K. chip designer ARM once again delivered the goods, Wednesday reporting solid first quarter results ahead of market expectations on the back of its processor business. It’s also quietly confident about the outlook; reiterating its annual revenue guidance.

ARM’s performance mimics that of others in the semiconductor space, including STMicroelectronics, which Tuesday reported that first-quarter earnings nearly tripled from a year earlier. Intel and Apple have also posted strong numbers over the past week on the back of strong demand.

The FTSE 100 company, which is trading at 50 times its earnings, posted a 10 percent rise in first quarter net profit to £21.5 million on the back of a 26% increase in revenue to £116 million. It secured 39 processor licenses in the quarter ended March 31 after signing 35 processor licenses in the previous quarter.

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Intel Hits the Oak Trail but Has Its Eyes on the Cedar Trail

Arik Hesseldahl — Mon, 11 Apr 2011 20:06:43 +0000

The Intel Developer Forum is getting under way this week in Beijing, which means you can probably count on some kind of response to Oracle’s prodding of Intel and Hewlett-Packard about the Itanium chip last month.

Today, however, was about the Atom chip, the other chip on which Intel has pinned such hopes yet seen little payoff as yet. The company announced that the latest version of the Atom, known till now under the codename Oak Trail, is available beginning today.

The new chip is about 60 percent smaller, meaning it consumes less power than its predecessor to get the same level of computing work accomplished. Intel says it will be capable of delivering “all day” battery life in tablets and allow for a fanless design in small notebook PCs, meaning those devices will be both cooler and quieter. Intel has also added a feature called Deeper Sleep that conserves power during periods of inactivity.

And as is often the case when Intel debuts a new chip, it also points toward the near horizon. In this case, it’s Cedar Trail, yet another version of the Atom, this one built with a bleeding-edge 32-nanometer manufacturing process, which means all the elements on the chip will be even smaller yet. Intel’s current line of PC processors, the Sandy Bridge generation, is built on the same manufacturing technology. Cedar Trail will not only be smaller, but also will sport such things as a media engine for video playback at full HD resolution of 1080p.

Tablets and smartphones to this point have been another sore spot for Intel, where chips built on the core designs of U.K.-based ARM Holdings tend to hold sway. Intel’s chips have so far suffered from a nagging need to sip precious battery power far less greedily as compared to designs of ARM-based chips from the likes of Broadcom, Qualcomm, Samsung and others.

The new chip will run on tablets running Google’s Chrome and Android operating systems; MeeGo, the smartphone platform that Intel has been working on with Nokia (though its future is in question since Nokia’s decision to embrace Windows); and Microsoft’s Windows.

Meanwhile, Intel still has a lock on the market for traditional PC and server chips, though as we all know, tablets–one in particular–have been causing all kinds of troubles for the players in that end of the market.

The Nintendo 3DS Appears Pretty Profitable, Judging by the Teardown

Arik Hesseldahl — Mon, 28 Mar 2011 13:30:05 +0000

Nintendo’s latest handheld gaming device has hit the market in Europe and North America and as so often happens, before the weekend was over my in-box contained a detailed teardown report from the team at IHS iSuppli.

As usual, the idea behind the teardown is not only to figure out who Nintendo’s component suppliers are and what parts are being used, but to estimate how much all the components cost to help guess how much of a profit margin Nintendo is making on each unit. And it looks like a decent margin. ISuppli says the cost of all the parts in the device itself plus what’s in the box amount to $103.25 for a device that’s selling at retail for $249. The cost works out to an increase of about $25 over the Nintendo DSi, the most recent Nintendo handheld, released in 2009, which cost about $78, when iSuppli tore it apart that year.

While most of the components come from Japan, it’s not entirely clear if the supply of any of the parts used come from areas affected by the earthquake and tsunami, says Andrew Rassweiler, an iSuppli analyst who supervised the teardown. “Many of these component should have a greater risk exposure to supply chain problems, though we don’t know about any specific disruptions at this point,” he said.

The most expensive component, as is often the case with consumer electronics, is the displays. The 3DS uses two Sharp displays that cost a combined $33.80. The headliner is the top screen 3D. It’s a 3.5-inch 800-by-240 pixel display that uses an LCD-based parallax barrier panel sandwiched to the back of the color LCD which alternates between the left and right images at a high rate of speed to produce the 3D effect. “It looks like a conventional LCD from the outside, but when you open the display you see that on one side of the glass is essentially the conventional color element, and on the other side of the glass is a monochrome element,” Rassweiler told me. “It’s a clever bit of display engineering.”

The handheld’s main chip is an applications processor. It’s a custom ARM-based chip manufactured by Sharp, that at a cost of $10.02 is only slightly more expensive than the chip in the previous Nintendo DSi. However, Nintendo has quadrupled the amount of flash memory in the 3DS versus the DSi to 16 gigabytes, and Samsung, the world’s largest manufacturer of flash, supplied it. Fujitsu supplied another type of memory known as fast-cycle RAM. Rassweiler says for this particular type of memory, Nintendo has used a type of chip that’s only made by Fujitsu, which is odd because FCRAM is widely available, and its unusual for consumer electronics manufacturers to “single source”–that is, rely upon a single supplier for an important component. The combined cost of memory on the 3DS worked out to $8.36, more than twice the cost of the memory found on the DSi.

Three chips related to the user interface cost a combined $6.81: an accelerometer from STMicroelectroncis, a gyroscope from Invensense, and an audio chip from Texas Instruments. Atheros, the Wi-Fi chipmaker that’s being acquired by Qualcomm, supplied a $5 Wi-Fi chip. TI and NEC supplied power management chips that cost $3.63. The 3DS contains three cameras, and though it’s not clear who supplied them–camera suppliers have gone to great lengths to hide their identities in recent years–iSuppli reckons their combined cost at $4.70.

Since I often get asked this question, let me say that iSuppli’s analysis focuses strictly on the materials used and doesn’t account for the cost to develop software or to license any patents. Nor does it account for the cost of any shipping or distribution or marketing. It’s just the raw cost of the hardware.

Aiming to Power Ever More Complex Graphics, Nvidia Plans Quad-Core Mobile Chip This Year

Ina Fried — Wed, 16 Feb 2011 00:00:14 +0000

Chipmaker Nvidia plans this year to introduce a four-core processor, code-named Project Kal-El, that should offer roughly five times the processing power of its existing Tegra chip and, what it says, has significantly more horsepower than an Intel Core 2 Duo chip.

Briefing reporters at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, Nvidia said it plans to include a 12-core graphics processor along with the quad-core CPU. All that processing oomph should support “Extreme HD” graphics with a resolution of up to 2,560 by 1,600 pixels. The chip is now sampling to customers, Nvidia said.

The company has more ambitious goals for subsequent years, with plans to more than double performance in each of the next three years with chips code-named Wayne, Logan and Stark.

Nvidia’s current Tegra 2 chip is at the heart of many Android phones and a number of Android Honeycomb tablets, including the Motorola Xoom, LG G-Slate and the just-introduced Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1.

However, Nvidia isn’t the only company ramping things up. Qualcomm announced a new series of ARM-based chips on Monday, though its quad-core chip isn’t slated to arrive until 2012.

For more on Nvidia’s plans for the future, check out the onstage interview I did with CEO Jen-Hsun Huang at our D@CES event in January.

[ See post to watch video ]

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