AllThingsD » CPU

Samsung Launches Series 5 Ultra Ultrabooks

Lauren Goode — Mon, 12 Dec 2011 15:02:25 +0000

The ramp-up toward The Year of Too Many Ultrabooks continues: Now Samsung is getting into the game.

Today, on its Web site, the Korean electronics company unveiled the Series 5 Ultra, a 14-inch, 20.9mm aluminum laptop that’s large enough to accomodate an optical disc drive. It offers up to a terabyte of hard disk space, as well as solid-state drive storage options, reports The Verge.

It’s not the most lightweight of ultrabooks, though, in an emerging category of laptops known for thinness and portability: It weighs 1.8 kg, compared to the standard 1.5 kg. But the Series 5 Ultra comes equipped with both HDMI and Ethernet ports, as well as an option for a Radeon HD 7550M GPU.

The 14-inch model costs $1,345; Samsung is also offering a 13-inch Series 5 Ultra, just 14.9mm thick, for $1,300. The laptops are launching first in Korea, and are expected to ship in late December. No word on when these will become available in the U.S., but with the annual Consumer Electronics Show coming up in January, more info can’t be far behind.

Intel's Plan to Remain the Supercomputing King

Arik Hesseldahl — Tue, 15 Nov 2011 23:11:13 +0000

As I wrote on Monday, this is a big week for supercomputing. The latest list of the world’s 500 most powerful supercomputers was released, and while the Top 10 didn’t change, some important barriers, like the 10 petaflop level, were broken.

And while it was Fujitsu, using SPARC chips, that made the top of the list, you couldn’t help noticing how many machines used chips from Intel. Of the 500 supercomputers on the list, 384 of them use chips from the semiconductor giant.

At the SC11 Supercomputing conference in Seattle today, Intel is making some important disclosures about what it is doing to maintain its role as the chip vendor of choice, and also offering its competitive response to a potential threat from the graphics chip specialist Nvidia.

As I’ve explained a few times before, the graphics chips, or GPUs, that Nvidia makes are starting to make some inroads into supercomputing and high-performance computing environments, thanks to their ability to handle floating point computations at a high rate of speed. Sometime next year, at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee, a machine called Titan, using a combination of chips from Advanced Micro Devices and Nvidia, is expected to break the 20 petaflop barrier when it begins operation.

The narrative that has emerged recently is that GPUs are generally better at the floating point operations that are increasingly used in supercomputing — better in many cases than traditional x86 chips from Intel and AMD. Even so, if you add up the number of systems on the Top 500 list using Intel and AMD chips, you’d hit a percentage that’s just shy of 90.

In a presentation today (on what just happens to be the 40th birthday of the Intel microprocessor — hence the two people I saw today outside the “Today” show at Rockefeller Center on my way to work), Rajeeb Hazra, Intel’s general manager of Technical Computing, detailed Intel’s response. First off, Intel is supporting a new technology, called PCI Express 3.0, that will speed up the ability of chips inside a supercomputer to share data. In systems this big, and working on such large amounts of data at once, the processors spend a lot of time tapping their feet and waiting for data to work on. Engineers call this latency, and the point of the new interconnect technology is to cut latency by doubling the bandwidth available. The result is an improvement in the raw FLOPS (floating point operations) available by 2.1 times in lab tests, and a 70 percent improvement in real-world workload tests. In supercomputing terms, that’s real progress, and it effectively means getting answers to big questions faster.

Another advance that Intel talked about today is a chip bearing the codename “Knight’s Corner.” It’s a coprocessor, meaning it’s an additional chip that would be added to a computer to boost its performance. Intel says it can do a full teraflop — a trillion floating point operations a second — and that’s just the result of demonstrations from the first silicon. When in full production, it will probably do even better.

And not only will it do a teraflop on a single chip, it will perform those calculations to what engineers call “double precision,” which is a fancy way of saying the result of each operation will be accurate to a higher level of granularity. As John Hengeveld, Intel’s director of technical computer marketing, told me last week, the rule of thumb in these matters says that moving from single to double precision boosts the amount of time you have to wait by four times.

Why is that important, when an off-the-shelf GPU from Nvidia can do 2 teraflops — though only at the single-point precision? Programming. If you’re a scientist who 10 years ago wrote a program to simulate weather patterns or nuclear explosions or some other classic supercomputing problem to run on systems running Intel chips, there’s nothing new to learn in terms of programming. While the GPUs are great, there are new programming rules to learn.

Finally, Intel is reiterating its plan to keep working on the exascale problem, which is the next great summit in supercomputing. Right now the world’s top supercomputer maxes out at 10.51 petaflops, and a candidate to top the list next year will go north of 20 petaflops, or quadrillions of floating point operations. Sometime this decade — say, about 2018 or so — the hope is that supercomputers will break the exaflop barrier, where machines will run quintillions of FLOPs.

The fundamental problem there isn’t the computing so much as it is power, as in electrical power. Already some of these machines consume as much power as a small city. Getting to exascale will require chips and other components that can run full out at speeds we can as yet only imagine, but doing it consuming a lot less power than they would otherwise be expected to. Think in terms of a Prius that could win the Indy 500 — and not just by a hair, but by a long mile — and do it day after day without really using much more gas than the other cars. It’s kind of like that.

Anyhow, Intel has said that it plans to enable exascale supercomputing that will require only a doubling of the power needed, rather than, say, 10 times as much. To that end, it said today it will open its fourth research lab in Europe. This one is in Barcelona and joins one in Paris; another in Juelich, Germany; and a third in Lueven, Belgium. They’ll all have a lot of work to do between now and 2018.

Fujitsu Supercomputer Remains World Champ, but IBM and Intel Are the Real Computing Kings

Arik Hesseldahl — Mon, 14 Nov 2011 13:58:39 +0000

Today is a big day of the year for those who keep score on the world’s most powerful computers. It’s one of the two days each year that the Top 500 list of the world’s most powerful, publicly known supercomputers is released by researchers at the University of Mannheim in Germany, the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in California and the University of Tennessee in Knoxville.

If you’re a regular AllThingsD reader, you’ve already been introduced to the world’s most power supercomputer: It is the Fujitsu K Computer, which the Japanese computing concern disclosed earlier this month, and it runs in Japan’s quasi-public research institution RIKEN. That’s it in the picture above.

It’s capable of performance as high as 10.51 petaflops, or 10.51 quadrillion floating point operations per second. The same machine had been rated in the top spot on the list before, but was less powerful then, because it was still being assembled, and then capable of only 8.16 petaflops.

The machine is based on SPARC chips — the chips for which Sun Microsystems, now part of Oracle, gained such renown. Fujitsu has been building SPARC chips under license and using them in its own servers and supercomputers for years. In this case, there are 705,024 SPARC64 processing cores in action. And if my memory is correct, the chips in question each have four cores on board, meaning there are 176,256 individual processing chips in the machine.

It’s the first machine on the Top 500 list to venture past the 10-petaflop milestone; however, work is underway in the U.S. on a machine known as Titan, which will supposedly break the 20-petaflop mark sometime next year.

In the meantime, the second most powerful machine in the world is in China. The Tianhe-1A system took the top spot on the list a year ago — and in the process, caused President Obama such consternation about the state of American leadership in innovation that he mentioned it in his State of the Union address to Congress. Its performance reaches 2.57 petaflops and it’s powered by a combination of Intel-made Xeon processors and Nvidia graphical processing units.

In fact, the supercomputers in the top 10 spots on the list are otherwise unchanged from the list released in June.

At No. 3 is Jaguar, the system at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory that is being rebuilt into the machine called Titan, which I mentioned before. It’s a system built by Cray primarily around Nvidia GPUs and Opteron processors from Advanced Micro Devices. Its current performance is just shy of 1.8 petaflops.

The No. 4 system is in China. It’s called Nebulae and is at the National Supercomputing Centre in Shenzen. Its performance is just short of the 1.3-petaflop mark. No. 5 is called Tsubame 2.0, and is at the Tokyo Institute of Technology in Japan.

Chip companies in particular like to crow about the use of their products in the systems that wind up on the list. That makes this a banner day for Intel. Of the 500 systems on the list, 384 of them — 77 percent — use Intel chips. Chips from AMD, Intel’s main rival, are in 63 systems.

It’s a banner day for Nvidia, too. Its GPU chips can be found in 35 systems, more than double the number from the previous list. GPUs were invented to make the graphics in computer games more stunning and realistic; as such, it meant they were, from the beginning, pretty good at performing a certain type of math problem known as a floating point operation. It turns out that the people who run supercomputers do a lot of floating point operations — or FLOPs — too. So as GPUs have gotten more powerful, they’re finding their way into an ever-larger number of the world’s top supercomputers. Two supercomputers on the list use GPU chips from AMD’s graphics chip unit, ATI. Two more use IBM’s PowerCell architecture, which is a sibling of the Cell processor chip found in the Sony PlayStation 3.

President Obama shouldn’t feel so bad about the U.S. not being in the top spot. For one thing, practically all of the systems on the list are built on American-made technology. And among the systems that can reach 1 petaflop in performance or more, the U.S. has five, more than any other country. China and Japan have two each, and France has one. And the U.S. has more supercomputers on the list than any other country: 263. European countries have a combined 127; China has 75 and Japan has 30.

Intel may furnish more chips to the Top 500 list than anyone, but the king of the systems vendors on the list is unquestionably IBM, followed by Hewlett-Packard. IBM built 223, or more than 44 percent, of the machines on the list; HP built 140 of them. IBM also led the performance pack: Its machines are responsible for more than 27 percent of the total. Fujitsu, which made the list-topping K Computer, was in second place, with 14.7 percent. Cray and HP were in a statistical dead heat, with about 14 percent each.

Here’s a link to the full list, and a bunch of other things related to supercomputing.

Nvidia Chips to Power World's Most Powerful Supercomputer

Arik Hesseldahl — Tue, 11 Oct 2011 11:00:52 +0000

Oak Ridge National Lab's "Jaguar" computer

It has been about a year since the United States lost its title as the home of the world’s most powerful publicly known supercomputer. Last November, the “Jaguar” computer based at the U.S. government’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory found itself supplanted by a computer in China in the top spot on the closely watched Top 500 list of the world’s most muscular supercomputers.

Despite the fact that the Chinese system was built largely with American-made or American-designed components, the news came as a bit of a blow to American pride, and even caught the attention of President Obama, who kvetched about it in January’s State of the Union address.

By June (the list is updated twice a year) the Chinese machine had fallen to second place, its crown seized by a supercomputer in Japan, relegating the top supercomputer in the U.S. to third place.

Today, the Oak Ridge National Lab in Tennessee, part of the U.S. Department of Energy, will announce plans to build a system that has a good shot at reclaiming the top spot. The machine will be named “Titan,” and its primary computing engine will be the Tesla chip from Nvidia, the company best known for turning out chips that enhance the graphics of games on personal computers.

Nvidia has been making inroads in high-performance computing for some time. Earlier this year I wrote about how the Tesla chips were helping Lucasfilm make movies faster.

I talked with Steve Scott, the CTO of Nvidia’s Tesla business unit, who told me that the Titan machine will be 10 times more powerful than the current Jaguar machine, and that 85 percent of its computing power will come from Nvidia chips, while the remaining portion will come from conventional CPU chips from Advanced Micro Devices.

Why GPUs and not CPUs? It turns out that graphics chips are really good at doing a certain kind of math known as a floating point operation, much faster than a typical CPU chip from Intel or AMD found inside a PC or server.

It’s also an issue of power. For years, as chips and the transistors on them have shrunk, the amount of power required to send pulsing through them has dropped as well. Scott says that is no longer the case. “We’ve reached the point where processors have become power constrained. If you pack all the transistors that you can onto a chip and run it as fast as you can, the chip will melt. We’ve entered a time where performance is constrained by power, and its only going to get worse, so you need processors that are power efficient,” he says. “It’s a fundamental sea change in the underlying technology of high performance computing.”

GPUs, originally designed for gaming and professional graphics applications like editing movies and visualizing complex problems for engineers and scientists, are inherently designed to perform several repetitive tasks at once. In explaining this, I always think back to the old saying “many hands make light work,” though here it’s applied to computing. Two people who divide up the task of folding a pile of laundry get it done faster than one. And four people will get it done faster than two.

Basically, a GPU chip is designed to render what happens to every pixel of a computer screen 50 times a second or even faster. Essentially, lots of small computational jobs are carried out at once. It’s called parallel computing, and, fundamentally, CPUs chips aren’t as good at it as GPU chips. CPUs are better at doing one job at a time, getting it done really fast, and then moving on to the next one. Generally speaking, Scott says, GPUs are about eight times faster at floating point operations than CPUs.

For Nvidia it will be a return trip to the top spot. China’s supercomputing champ, the Tianhe-1A at National Supercomputing Center in Tianjin, which is now ranked No. 2 in the world, uses Nvidia GPUs. This certainly got the world’s attention concerning the potential for GPUs in high performance computing.

The plan at Oak Ridge calls for Titan to have 18,000 nodes, each with an AMD CPU chip coupled with an Nvidia Tesla GPU. Most of the heavy lifting will be done by the GPUs, Scott says. Its total computing capacity will top out at 20 petaflops. FLOPS are floating point operations per second. “Peta” refers to how many the system can do every second: In this case, the answer is 20 quadrillion. Just because I can — and because it’s one of the rare cases where I get to use a number that’s larger than the national debt — I’m going to write that number out: 20,000,000,000,000,000.

And what will it be used for? While many of the Department of Energy’s computers are used to simulate nuclear explosions that are no longer allowed thanks to the Test Ban Treaty, this one won’t be. The mission at Oak Ridge, Scott says, is to advance the boundaries of science. Scientists will use it to model climate change, and to predict the results of different methods of mitigating it. They’ll also use it to design engines, study biology and genetics, and explore the possibilities of using nuclear fusion for energy. If you have interesting scientific work to do that requires this kind of computing oomph, you can even write a proposal explaining how you’d use it.

In the first phase of Titan’s deployment, which is already under way, Oak Ridge will upgrade its existing Jaguar supercomputer with 960 new Tesla chips. In a second phase, expected to start next year, Oak Ridge plans to deploy the 18,000-node Tesla-based system.

Down the road, the hope within supercomputing circles is that performance improves to the point where we’re no longer talking petaflops, but exaflops, or quintillions of floating point operations every second. The government is already working on that, and earlier this year President Obama asked Congress for $126 million in the federal budget to begin research to work on ways to get there by 2018. The biggest problem: How to supply enough electrical power while delivering the computing muscle. Today’s announcement by Oak Ridge is a big step in that direction, but there are still 981 more petaflops to conquer.

The Secret to Some of Lucasfilm's Magic: Nvidia's GPU Chips

Arik Hesseldahl — Wed, 30 Mar 2011 23:45:04 +0000

Like the visual effects you’ve been seeing in movies these days? Of course, you already know that in most cases they’re computer-generated. And as you’ve seen over the last few days during my visit to Lucasfilm’s Industrial Light and Magic, the computing power used to render the visual effects isn’t exactly consumer grade.

But as I learned, the effects wizards at ILM have a secret weapon that shares a lot in common with your PC at home. If you play any graphics-heavy games, your PC probably has a graphics processing unit in it, and chances are pretty good that GPU card came from Nvidia. As you might expect, displaying ever-more realistic scenes in a PC game is similar in many respects to what you need to make a wicked cool effect in a movie. And in certain cases they’re better than even the most powerful traditional CPU chips from the likes of Intel or Advanced Micro Devices.

The story goes that when he was working on a scene for “Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince,” Chris Horvath was asked to create a “tornado of fire” (the picture above is borrowed from that scene). At the time, the conventional way of doing it just didn’t produce a satisfying result. “We needed to do this very complicated fire simulation and we just didn’t have a solution to do it,” said Craig Hammack, an ILM visual effects supervisor who was sitting near Horvath at the time.

Someone suggested to Horvath that he try working with GPUs, and not only that but writing an effects program to take advantage of their unique computing capabilities. (Horvath tells the story in the video below.) The result was a piece of internal ILM software called Verté that reduced the desired fire effects to a series of flat two-dimensional images linked together to look like they were 3-D.

Next came a new tool called Plume, used to simulate the movements of fluids. It’s written to take advantage of a newer Nvidia parallel computing technology called CUDA. Suddenly, the work required to create deeply complex visual effects involving images of fire or water sped up considerably because the software written for Plume could talk directly to the graphics chip itself.

“We used to have a smoke simulation engine that we had been using for I don’t know how long, and it rendered on CPUs, and the turnaround time was about a day,” Kirk Haller, ILM’s director of research and development told me. “You’d have to set things up and feel pretty confident that you were doing the right things,” because you wouldn’t see the result until the day after.

Plume changed the game in a big way. Developed first for use on “The Last Airbender,”, it allowed artists working on simulations to mess around with them on the fly, literally changing settings on software dials. “It’s a very friendly system. People who aren’t experts and don’t know exactly what numbers and settings to put in on the old system could tweak the settings and learn how it behaves, and get the artistic refinement and the look that they want,” Haller told me.

Plume sped things up so much on “Airbender” that effects artists were able to work with director M. Night Shyamalan in near real-time, allowing him to have input on how the simulated fire and water and air would look in each shot and how it would affect the characters on the screen, Olivier Maury, a research and development engineer at ILM, told me. Instead of waiting a day to see the results of each day’s work, an artist could work up as many as several versions of a complex simulation every day.

That’s why Plume–which is a proprietary tool–is now being used on every film currently in the works at ILM. And that’s a lengthy list, including “Cowboys and Aliens,” “Pirates of the Caribbean 4” and “Transformers 3,” to name but a few.

Plume simulation renders are run on a rack of 12 Nvidia Quadroplex 2200′s. Each machine in the rack contains two GPU chips, but each chip has 240 cores, the central computing brain of the chip. That means this rack has 5,760 computing brains jamming on simulations and effects shots at any time. That’s some serious horsepower. The rack is situated only steps away from the “Death Star” rack I showed you last week, though, silly me, I didn’t have the presence of mind to shoot any footage of it.

I wasn’t able to shoot any video to demonstrate any of this. But the folks from ILM like the results they’re getting from the Nvidia GPUs so much they appeared in a video about it last year that coincided with the release of “Airbender,” and it shows a good bit of the evolution of the process from “Potter 6″ to “Airbender.” Chances are you’ll be seeing a lot of shots first created in Plume in movies coming this summer.

PREVIOUSLY:

A Virtual Tour of the Town of Dirt, from the Animated Film “Rango”

Lucasfilm’s Data Center, and an Encounter With the Real Death Star

Meet Kevin Clark, Master Not of the Force, but of Data

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 ]

Intel Will Pay Nvidia $1.5 Billion to "Maintain Patent Peace"

Arik Hesseldahl — Mon, 10 Jan 2011 21:36:57 +0000

Intel has agreed to pay Nvidia $1.5 billion to settle their long-simmering legal dispute that had been set to go before a Delaware Chancery Court in December.

Intel will pay Nvidia in five annual installments beginning Jan. 18, and in return will receive full access to Nvidia’s full range of patents, which had been part of the dispute. Nvidia will retain use of certain Intel patents that had also been in dispute.

“This agreement ends the legal dispute between the companies, preserves patent peace and provides protections that allow for continued freedom in product design,” said Doug Melamed, Intel senior vice president and general counsel, in a statement.

The fight had been over the terms of a 2004 agreement under which Intel granted Nvidia access to some of Intel’s technology for use in its chipsets, the chips that sit between the microprocessor and the graphics chip like connecting tissue. The cross-licensing agreement allowed Nvidia to make chipsets that were compatible with Intel microprocessors.

The trouble began in 2008, when Intel released its Nehalem generation of PC chips. The two companies disagreed over whether the 2004 agreement allowed Nvidia to make chipsets that would work with Nehalem chips and generations of chips that would follow. They filed dueling lawsuits in the Delaware Court of Chancery in early 2009. Intel asked a judge to rule that the agreement didn’t cover Nehalem and future generations of chips, while Nvidia sued for breach of contract, and sought to terminate Intel’s right to use some Nvidia patents that had been part of the agreement.

As I reported last December for Businessweek, the dispute caught the attention of the Federal Trade Commission, which added it to an antitrust complaint that was later settled.

The larger backdrop here is the growing threat Nvidia’s chips, known as graphics processing units (or GPUs), pose to Intel’s chips in servers and supercomputers. Engineers often refer to this as the CPU-GPU debate, where Intel’s chips are referred to as CPUs.

GPUs are common in most PCs, and usually handle the processing required to make games look good and run smoothly, working in concert with the CPU.

Since GPU chips do certain kind of math known as a floating point operation a lot faster than a CPU, they’re increasingly being used in systems that Intel has traditionally considered its primary domain: Heavy-duty financial modeling (oil and gas exploration is a good example). They’re also making a huge splash in the rarefied world of supercomputing: Nvidia GPU chips are being used in three of the top five systems on the elite Top 500 list of the world’s most powerful supercomputers. And as we all saw at CES last week, they’re starting to show up in tablet and other PC-like devices running Windows with the full support of Microsoft.

The dispute between them, which effectively put Nvidia out of the business of making chipsets that were compatible with Intel chips, certainly hurt. Though for Intel’s part, losing the Nvidia patents in question could have conceivably hurt its new Sandy Bridge chips, which combine a GPU and a CPU into one single component. Intel formally launched Sandy Bridge at CES last week.

And as recently as last week, sources familiar with the matter were saying that a new trial date was scheduled for February. Nvidia CEO Jen-Hsun Huang was careful not to directly answer a question about that from Mobilized’s Ina Fried in an interview at our D@CES event last week:

[ See post to watch video ]

Intel and Nvidia had mysteriously withdrawn the case from the court’s calendar days before opening arguments were set to get underway on Dec. 6. Bloomberg News then reported that settlement talks were underway, though by mid-December there were signs that those talks had stalled, and sources said that a new trial date had been agreed to. That was until today, when sources at both companies started to drop hints that news was imminent.

A Phone That's a Beauty on the Outside–A Monster Inside

Tricia Duryee — Wed, 05 Jan 2011 21:10:45 +0000

At Nvidia’s press conference today, CEO and co-founder Jen-Hsun Huang admitted this was going to be a promiscuous CES for the company.

Nvidia, which builds tiny computer processors to help devices display graphics, games, video and more on phones, will be found all over the show floor, demonstrating products in conjunction with wireless carriers, automotive makers, handset makers and others.

And for those looking for even more from Huang –and maybe a demo that works– he’ll be appearing on stage with my colleague Ina Fried at our own D at CES event on Friday.

The biggest partnership of all, however, was not announced–a rumored relationship with Microsoft that will likely be unveiled later today, Huang hinted. [Update: that news can be found here.]

What Nvidia was willing to talk about was its plans to build high-performance ARM-based CPU cores, designed to support future products ranging from personal computers and servers to workstations and supercomputers. Up until now, the project was code-named “Project Denver.”

However, Nvidia spent most of the time talking about its new Tegra 2 processor, which is designed to efficiently display Internet content and games–on par with the quality of a console–on a cellphone. That means a compact design that provides the same quality but helps preserve battery life.

Nvidia’s Huang demonstrated the capabilities of the chip with the help of LG, which made an appearance onstage to show off the new Optimus 2X, a new Android phone. Loaded with a Tegra 2, one of the head honchos from LG described the phone as “a beauty on the outside–a monster on the inside.”

Huang plugged the phone into a giant HDTV to demonstrate the chip’s capabilities. He played Angry Birds and navigated a few apps on the homescreen.

But one of the big pushes is in viewing Adobe Flash, and the demo gods were against them. The wireless network was slow, prompting Huang to ask the packed crowd of reporters to spare a bit of bandwidth for him.

“I feel like I am on 56K here,” Huang said. “Oh you guys suck,” he joked.

Huang said the company brought in technology to block others from hogging the bandwidth, but people were using it anyway. “You guys really suck,” he said to more laughs.

More demonstrations were made with videogames, and even other demos failed, including a video chat over Skype.

After it was all said and done, Nvidia served lunch.

Crisis in Computing

Andy Keane — Thu, 09 Sep 2010 23:20:29 +0000

It may not be obvious, but if you’ve checked the weather today, ridden in a car or an airplane, made a phone call, or used any number of consumer products, down to the clothing you wear and the detergents that keep them clean, you’ve relied on a supercomputer.

Virtual design, forecasting and simulations are now essential for smarter science, faster innovation and better product development. Which means that High Performance Computing (HPC) is critical to U.S. competitiveness and standards of living.
But the traditional CPU-based technology that once put America in the lead is now the anchor holding us back. Our legacy computing is no longer scaling cost-effectively and power-efficiently enough. The effects of this lost leadership will soon be severely felt in every aspect of American business and economic life unless we decide to do something about it.
It’s past time for private industry and the public sector to get our HPC act together, before other nations steal the show.
We want safer oil and gas discovery, workable alternative fuels, lower emission combustion engines, more efficient electricity production and smart grid management. We know we need to forecast weather, understand climate change and design micro-organisms to absorb environmental wastes. Doctors want better tumor models and surgical decision support, and they’re racing to understand the molecular mechanisms underlying diseases like Alzheimer’s. Across these and any number of medical, manufacturing, services and research applications, our ability to design better, safer and more cost-effective processes and products and find the energy to make and move them–all of which generate business activity, domestic jobs and economic growth–depends on our HPC capacity.

So, you’d think we’d stay on top of our game. Instead, we’re getting jumped by moves we invented.

From nearly a standing start in 2005, by this November China is expected to have developed the world’s fastest computer–based, ironically, on our own American hybrid parallel processors that are far more cost-effective and power-efficient than traditional CPU chips. Tokyo Institute of Technology, CSIRO in Australia and CEA France are similarly focused. They’re not hamstrung by legacy CPU-based computing. They’re jumping straight into next-generation, hybrid HPC by adding graphics processing units (GPUs) to drive far better price, efficiency and performance. The result? Our competitors are securing the same capabilities at a fraction of the cost.

Typically, where technology leadership is concerned, most of us think first of education as the bottleneck. But we Americans are completely missing a second critical choke-point in computing capacity and infrastructure. Most of our government’s research-oriented supercomputers are already 2X over-subscribed at our current level of demand. And before the next decade, our level of science will be 1,000-fold in its computational demands.

To sustain and extend our lead in High Performance Computing, we don’t have to revive the decades-old debate about industrial policy and the government picking winners through massive bets on industry sectors. We just need to spend smarter to get cost-effective hybrid HPC on the national agenda, and equip our best minds with the computing capacity they need to innovate and create jobs.

The Council on Competitiveness and its HPC initiative are a great place to see how organizations are accelerating innovation, advancing R&D, and reducing new product cycle time to drive revenue and reduce costs.

The Senate should get behind Senator Mark Warner (D-VA) and his amendment to the reauthorization of the America Competes Act. Government agencies need to coordinate around the opportunity that GPUs and hybrid architectures offer. And the business community should be clearer with the public about what’s at stake. The first large-scale hybrid GPU hosted cloud was launched just last month. With more and more companies moving data and software to cloud computing services, HPC ushers in huge operating advantages for oil and gas, finance, medical devices and services, and any sector with massive quantities of data that can be crunched more efficiently with hybrid parallel processors, significantly reducing costs. Why would we allow our position as world leader in HPC to slip, the way we have with automobiles, battery technology and memory chips? Why would we surrender the business growth, job creation, and competitiveness delivered by supercomputing in a vast range of affected industries?

As U.S. Undersecretary of Energy Steven Koonin put it last month at a conference of computer scientists, “High Performance Computing feeds itself. Once you fall off the curve, it’s really hard to get back on.”

If we don’t decide to win at this game, we will be pushed out of the way.

AMD Riding Intel's Coattails, but Will It Last?

Alexander Eule — Wed, 14 Apr 2010 22:20:14 +0000

Shares of Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) are up with much of the chip sector today, as investors look for ways to play Intel’s (INTC) strong results.

AMD is scheduled to report its first-quarter Thursday after the close.

Auriga USA analyst Daniel Berenbaum, though, is holding onto a Sell rating and $6 price target. He cautions investors about making assumptions about broader chip strength.

“We think this risks misinterpreting AMD’s competitive positioning. AMD has gained share in graphics from Nvidia (NVDA)–good for sales but below corporate average gross margin–but its CPU roadmap looks weak, particularly in high-ASP/high-margin servers where checks suggest that Intel’s Nehalem product continues to gain market share.”

Read the rest of this post on the original site

Liveblog From Apple iPhone OS Event in Cupertino

Drake Martinet — Thu, 08 Apr 2010 15:30:59 +0000

What do you do when you’ve just stepped out on a limb and released a new class of computer that you’re calling both magical and amazing but that runs on software designed over three years ago for entirely different hardware?

If you are Apple (AAPL), you sound the trumpets and assemble the techie press at your Cupertino HQ as soon as possible to preview the new operating system you hope will bring even more powerful magic to your latest creation.

As soon as possible was this morning, and AllThingsD‘s Drake Martinet was there to liveblog the event, which announced, among other things, iPad sales of more than 450,000, a new app-based mobile advertising platform, and long-awaited multitasking functionality for the iPhone operating system. The liveblog is below.

9:11 am: We’ve arrived at Apple’s Town Hall at Cupertino HQ. The electricity John Paczkowski described in his liveblog from the iPad event is missing today.

9:57 am: Just walked in. Room is pretty full. Empty stage, with the standard Apple setup: Apple logo backdrop for the slideshow. Music a la an iPod commercial playing in the auditorium.

10:00 am: Voice on the loudspeakers: “Please turn your electronic devices to silent, we are about to begin.”

10:03 am: Steve Jobs takes the stage and gets down to it. “The next generation of the most advanced mobile operating system in the world.”

10:04 am: Jobs opens with a quote from Walt Mossberg’s review. Says he will get to OS 4, but first, shares some iPad numbers. As of today, he says, Apple has sold 450,000 iPads, 300,000 on the first day. Over 600,000 iBooks downloaded as of today. And I Pad apps? Jobs says that 3.5 million have been downloaded so far.

10:06 am: Jobs says, “When you create something, you really have butterflies when you create things and put them out into the world. We are feeling really good about this.”

He then moves on to the App Store. Users have downloaded 4.5 billion apps as of today. Jobs is now showcasing some screenshots of apps.

10:09 am: Jobs is running through media apps.
Now, he’s getting to the iPhone.

10:10 am: Says Apple has just won its third J.D. Power award for the iphone.

“What is the real measure of usage? iPhone has a 64 percent browser share; everyone else together is half of the iPhone,” says Jobs.

85 million iPhones and iPod touches sold to date.

10:12 am: Now the subject is iPhone OS 4.

Developers can now access the calender, photo library, SMS, full map overlays. In total, they will have access to 1500 APIs. There are over 100 new user features.

10:13 am: Users will be able to change home screen wallpaper, use a spell checker, tap to focus video, create playlists.

10:14 am: Jobs says there will be multitasking.

“We weren’t the first to this party, but we will be the best,” he says, with a nod to Google’s (GOOG) Android.

10:15 am: Jobs demos multitasking. No exposed interface. The active window lifts vertically and a slider of all the apps running appears.

10:17 am: Jobs shows that multitasking takes you back to the exact place in the app where you were when you left, including games.

“That, is our multitasking UI. We’ve been using it a lot and it really changes the way you use the iPhone.”

10:19 am: Jobs leaves and Scott Forstall, Senior VP of Software, takes the stage.

He’s here to talk about the nitty-gritty.

Seven mutlitasking services will be available to developers.

First: Background audio.

10:21 am: Forstall introduces Tim Westergren, founder of Pandora, who is talking about how his streaming radio service will make use of background audio.

Basically, users will now be able to use Pandora or other background audio apps just as they can use the iPod function.

He showcases how users will be able to buy songs from iTunes while Pandora is still playing the song.

10:24 am: Forstall retakes the stage.

“Next service is VoIP,” he says.

“Now, when you’re on the iPhone, you can run Skype in the background.”

10:26 am: David Ponsford of Skype comes onstage.

Skype now can run in the background and receive calls when you are using other apps.

He switches to Yelp while still in Skype call.

10:28 am: Forstall back now; he says the next major change is background location data.

He uses TomTom as an example. TomTom can be getting location data while you are listening music.

“There’s another class of application that wants to use your location all the time, but isn’t used while you are plugged in.”

The new OS will use less accurate cell towers (which uses less power) when doing background location features in social networking apps.

There will be a new icon on the taskbar showing that there are background apps currently using their locations.

10:32 am: Next feature up: Push notifications.

Now there will be “local notifications.” These will come from the apps themselves, rather than from outside servers.

10:33 am: Now talking about task completion.

Forstall says task completion will allow apps to complete tasks, like photo uploads, in the background.

He finishes with “fast app switching.”

“The app moves into a quiescent state in the background and uses no CPU power.”

10:34 am: Jobs retakes the stage to talk about the next major push.

Says there will be App folders.

10:35 am: “We came up with a really beautiful implementation of folders.”

The process of creating folders seems pretty easy. Just drag apps on top of each other and a folder is created.

Folders can then be dragged around like apps.

10:37 am: Jobs now shows us what the wallpaper selection function looks like. Feels like a mix of iPad and OS X.

His wallpaper now matches his pants.

Now, with folders, uses could store over 5,000 apps on their phones.

10:39 am: Jobs moves on to the next new feature, the unified inbox.

Multiple accounts feeding to one mail inbox.

“We’ve also added the ability to organize by thread, so you can follow conversations much easier.”

“And, open attachments. Now you can download an attachment and open it with an app from the App Store.”

10:41 am: Number four is iBooks. Jobs says Apple is adding iBooks to the iPhone, just like the iPad.

“Its a delightful e-book reader, and you can buy the books once and read them anywhere.”

They will wirelessly synch your current page between devices.

Also, free Winnie the Pooh, just as on the iPad.

10:43 am: Forstall retakes the stage to talk about enterprise.

10:43 am: The new OS allows encryption of email and data inside apps.

OS 4 will allow for mobile device management.

Also big for enterprise: Wireless app distribution. “A company can wirelessly distribute apps from its own servers to iPhones anywhere in the world.

Also adding SSL VPN from both Cisco (CSCO) and Juniper Networks (JNPR).

10:45 am: Now talking about something called, “Game Center.” This is the gaming push analysts were predicting.

OS 4 will have a social gaming portal that allows friends to invite you to play games, or will match make you with opponents.

10:47 am: Jobs retakes the stage. “It’s called iAd.”

10:47 am: “There are lots of apps in the App Store for free.”

“Developers are starting to put ads into apps, but we think most of these really suck.”

Jobs says, “On desktops, search is where its at. That hasn’t happened on mobile. On mobile, apps are where it’s at.”

10:49 am: “This is a pretty serious opportunity, says Jobs.

He says this could open over one billion impressions per day.

“What we want to do with iAds, we want to deliver interactivity and emotion.”

The ads keep you in your app, versus getting “yanked out of your app” like before.

“Because iAd is in the OS itself, we have figured out how to deliver that ad.”

Apple will sell and distribute the ads.

Apple will give developers 60 percent of iAd revenue.

10:53 am: Jobs demos ads, starts with a “Toy Story 3″ ad. Says he’s seen the movie, which comes out in June. Crowd laughs.

He adds that, “it’s all done in HTML5, by the way.” More laughter at his point because the audience is well aware that Jobs is not a fan of Adobe’s (ADBE) Flash.

10:55 am: The ad Jobs is showing is really more like a mini app, with streaming video, interactivity, a game, posters, background wallpapers and ability to buy app right from the iAd.

“Users like free stuff.”

“Have you ever seen an ad like this? Anything even close?”

10:57 am: Next up, Jobs shows an ad for Nike, reiterating that these ads were created by Apple “just because we really like these brands.”

He showcases how iAds have access to location and the accelerometer. No word on whether that location data the iAd gets is user-selectable.

11:00 am: “iAd is built into the OS, and the developer will get the majority of the revenue.”

Jobs goes into review mode.

11:01 am: A developer preview will be released today.

Jobs says Apple will release the new OS in summer.

OS 4 will be for 3GS and third-gen iPod touch.

Older devices will get some upgrades, but hardware won’t allow all features like multitasking.

OS 4 wont make it to the iPad till the fall.

11:04 am: Jobs thanks everyone, and leaves the stage.
Lights up, music back on, press starts milling.

11:06 am: Takeaways:

There are obvious concerns about what multitasking will do to battery life, though Jobs emphasized that Apple has figured out a way to offer multitasking without using too much more battery.

Job’s didn’t get into specifics on how.

Forstall emphasized that implementing the new features was easy for developers, saying things like, “they added this [feature] in a single afternoon.”

11:09 am: Now Jobs, Forstall and Phil Schiller take the stage for a Q&A.

There’s a question about multitasking using more AT&T (T) data. Jobs says that it won’t be a big deal, adding that multitasking doesn’t up the amount of use.

He emphasizes that video is the big data draw, and you don’t use more than one video at a time.

11:11 am: Question about whether there will be an approval process for iAds as there is for the App Store?

Jobs pauses, “I’m not sure its going to be any more than a light touch.”

11:13 am: Question about development of iAds.
Job: “No development environment for iAds, just HTML5.”

11:14 am: Jobs says, “So far the ads haven’t been rich enough to warrant a world class ad agency. For the first time, they can bring their storytelling skills. I think this can be a whole new avenue for the advertising industry, because for the first time you can take advantage of the skills of an add agency in the digital world.”

11:16 am: Schiller has yet to take a question.

11:17 am: Question about widgets and glance-able information. Jobs says, “Anything’s possible.”

11:18 am: Of OS 4′s way to switch apps, called “fast-app switching,” Jobs says, “Our competitors are tripping all over themselves to copy it.”

11:20 am: Jobs on iAd: “iPhone customers are among the most desirable demographics in all of advertising.

Schiller gets a word in edgewise: “On the phone, you have apps that help you do things. That becomes the customer’s way into information. Ads attached to those are potentially more interesting than ads just attached to search. “

Jobs: “This is the first time in history that this has ever existed. We have all these apps and a friction-free way to deliver them right to the phone. This has never existed before on PCs, still doesn’t.”

Jobs: “We tried to buy a company named AdMob, but Google came in and snatched them from us. So we bought Quattro, and they are teaching us we are making ads that are different than anything I’ve ever seen.”

11:24 am: Jobs: “This is not a get-rich-quick scheme for Apple. This is to help our developers survive.”

11:29 am: Question about running unsigned apps. Jobs shuts it down saying that there is a porn app store for Android, and Apple doesn’t want to go there.

11:30 am: Jobs brings up Walt Mossberg again, saying how impressed he is with how fast people are “getting it” with the iPad.

Schiller reiterates that the speed of adoption of the iPad, especially with the developers, has been incredible.

11:32 am: Jobs, continuing on the iPad: “If our competitors ever release a device like the iPad, they will be hoping for 3,500 apps in a year. We have that in the first week.”

11:34 am: Jobs, on the App Store: “I’m now seeing an infrastructure being developed through other mediums (blogs, etc.) that help with app discoverability.” This is in response to a question about the app store getting crowded and dense.

11:36 am: This question comes up: “How do you close an app?”

11:39 am: Jobs: “on the iPad, if you saw a stylus, they blew it. On this, if you see a task manager, they blew it.”

He doesn’t really answer, saying you never really have to close an app. Doesn’t elaborate.

11:41 am: Packing up, Q&A over.

More iPad Coverage »

Intel's Hardcore Six-Core

John Paczkowski — Tue, 16 Mar 2010 21:10:24 +0000

Looks like the CPU refresh cycle is officially underway. This morning, Intel (INTC) formally launched its new six-core Westmere EP Xeon processor, and according to the company, vendors like Dell (DELL), IBM (IBM) and Hewlett-Packard (HPQ) are already gobbling them up.

Said Intel exec Boyd Davis: “We’ve already shipped hundreds of thousands of these (processors).” And for good reason. Built using the company’s 32-nanometer processor technology, these Xeon 5600 series chips promise to deliver greater performance and energy efficiency than their predecessors. With luck, they’ll help drive new equipment spending in enterprise, which would obviously be good for both the server and chip markets.

Adobe: Flash for Mac Is Getting Better–Really!

John Paczkowski — Mon, 08 Feb 2010 23:51:16 +0000

“We are ready to enable Flash in the browser on [the iPhone and iPad] if and when Apple chooses to allow that for its users, but to date we have not had the required cooperation from Apple to make this happen.”

– Adobe CTO Kevin Lynch

Apple’s refusal to support Flash on the iPhone–and soon the iPad as well–might not be a death knell for Flash, but it will surely hasten its decline, if Adobe isn’t careful.

Certainly, the fact that the iPhone’s lack of Flash hasn’t really hurt it suggests that Flash may not be quite as important for the Web as Adobe (ADBE) would like us all to think. And now, with some new video players ably demonstrating the promise of HTML5–like this one–the company is clearly worried about Apple’s (AAPL) unflagging exclusion of Flash and CEO Steve Jobs’s recent, and quite vicious, dismissal of it.

So much so that Adobe is publicly promising to improve Flash’s performance on Mac systems. In comments appended to a blog post about the iPad’s lack of Flash support, Adobe CTO Kevin Lynch said his company is working to improve Flash performance on the Mac.

“Flash Player on Windows has historically been faster than the Mac, and it is for the most part the same code running in Flash for each operating system,” he wrote. “We have and continue to invest significant effort to make Mac OS optimizations to close this gap, and Apple has been helpful in working with us on this.”

Elaborating, Lynch catalogs progress to date. “Vector graphics rendering in Flash Player 10 now runs almost exactly the same in terms of CPU usage across Mac and Windows, which is due to this work. In Flash Player 10.1 we are moving to CoreAnimation, which will further reduce CPU usage and we believe will get us to the point where Mac will be faster than Windows for graphics rendering….With Flash Player 10.1, we are optimizing video rendering further on the Mac and expect to reduce CPU usage by half, bringing Mac and Windows closer to parity for video.”

Welcome news. But enough to prompt Apple to suddenly reverse course and begin supporting Flash on its mobile devices? That seems unlikely. Apple’s repudiation of Flash on the iPhone and iPad seems–to me, anyway–quite a bit like its repudiation of floppy drives in the first iMacs. It’s a move that inevitably generates great controversy and criticism, but ultimately proves to be ahead of its time.

FTC Sues Intel (Plus Full Text of Complaint)

John Paczkowski — Wed, 16 Dec 2009 14:21:52 +0000

It’s going to be a long, cold winter for Intel legal.

The Federal Trade Commission filed suit against Intel (INTC) this morning, accusing the company of waging “a systematic campaign to shut out rivals’ competing microchips by cutting off their access to the marketplace.”

In its complaint (full text below), the FTC claims Intel used threats and bundled prices or other offers to encourage exclusive deals, hamper competition or unfairly manipulate the chip market.

The agency also alleges that Intel secretly redesigned certain compiler software in a way that deliberately stunted the performance of competitors’ chips. Intel then claimed the software performed better on its chips than on those of competitors, neglecting to disclose that performance differences were due largely to its compiler design.

“Intel has engaged in a deliberate campaign to hamstring competitive threats to its monopoly,” said Richard A. Feinstein, director of the FTC’s Bureau of Competition. “It’s been running roughshod over the principles of fair play and the laws protecting competition on the merits. The Commission’s action today seeks to remedy the damage that Intel has done to competition, innovation, and, ultimately, the American consumer.”

Significantly, the FTC complaint also takes issue with Intel’s behavior in graphics, accusing the chip maker of attempting to extend its monopoly to graphics processing units, which have become an increasingly important part of the PC industry.

“Having succeeded in slowing adoption of competing CPU chips over the past decade until it could catch up to competitors like Advanced Micro Devices, Intel allegedly once again finds itself falling behind the competition–this time in the critical market for graphics processing units, commonly known as GPUs, as well as some other related markets,” the FTC claims. “These products have lessened the need for CPUs, and therefore pose a threat to Intel’s monopoly power.”

The FTC charges that Intel has responded to this competitive challenge by embarking on a similar anticompetitive strategy, which aims to preserve its CPU monopoly by smothering potential competition from GPU chips such as those made by Nvidia. As part of this latest campaign, Intel misled and deceived potential competitors in order to protect its monopoly, the complaint alleges, adding that there is a dangerous probability that Intel’s unfair methods of competition could allow it to extend its monopoly into the GPU chip markets.

The FTC is seeking an order that would prevent Intel from using threats, bundled prices and similar tactics to encourage exclusive deals and hamper competition. The Commission’s action against Intel comes about a month after the chip maker settled its long-running antitrust dispute with rival AMD (AMD) for $1.25 billion.

Reached for comment, Intel called the suit “misguided” and “based largely on claims that the FTC added at the last minute and has not investigated.”

“This case could have, and should have, been settled,” said Intel general counsel Doug Melamed. “Settlement talks had progressed very far but stalled when the FTC insisted on unprecedented remedies–including the restrictions on lawful price competition and enforcement of intellectual property rights set forth in the complaint–that would make it impossible for Intel to conduct business.”

Melamed further asserts that “The FTC’s rush to file this case will cost taxpayers tens of millions of dollars to litigate issues that the FTC has not fully investigated. It is the normal practice of antitrust enforcement agencies to investigate the facts before filing suit. The Commission did not do that in this case.”

The company’s statement in full, below:

Intel Comments on FTC Suit

SANTA CLARA, Calif., December 16, 2009 – Intel Corporation issued the following statement regarding the suit filed by the U.S. Federal Trade Commission (FTC): “Intel has competed fairly and lawfully. Its actions have benefitted consumers. The highly competitive microprocessor industry, of which Intel is a key part, has kept innovation robust and prices declining at a faster rate than any other industry. The FTC’s case is misguided. It is based largely on claims that the FTC added at the last minute and has not investigated. In addition, it is explicitly not based on existing law but is instead intended to make new rules for regulating business conduct. These new rules would harm consumers by reducing innovation and raising prices.”

Intel senior vice president and general counsel Doug Melamed added, “This case could have, and should have, been settled. Settlement talks had progressed very far but stalled when the FTC insisted on unprecedented remedies–including the restrictions on lawful price competition and innovation set forth in the complaint–that would make it impossible for Intel to conduct business.”

“The FTC’s rush to file this case will cost taxpayers tens of millions of dollars to litigate issues that the FTC has not fully investigated. It is the normal practice of antitrust enforcement agencies to investigate the facts before filing suit. The Commission did not do that in this case,” said Melamed.

And the FTC’s complaint:

091216intelcmpt –

Just Slap the Thing in a MacBook, Already, Will Ya?

John Paczkowski — Wed, 02 Dec 2009 22:12:40 +0000

With 1.3-billion transistors and a 48-core processor, Intel’s new “Single-chip Cloud Computer” could power a formidable computer indeed. But it will be a while before the SCC reaches market, if ever.

Uncrated at an event in San Francisco Wednesday, the next-generation chip boasts approximately 10 to 20 times the processing power found inside current Intel (INTC) “Core” CPUs. And it can operate on as little as 25 watts, or at 125 watts when running at maximum performance–about the amount of energy consumed by two household light bulbs.

“With a chip like this, you could imagine a cloud datacenter of the future which will be an order of magnitude more energy efficient than what exists today, saving significant resources on space and power costs,” said Justin Rattner, head of Intel Labs and Intel’s chief technology officer. “Over time, I expect these advanced concepts to find their way into mainstream devices.”

But not yet. Right now, Intel is giving the chips to a few select research partners, who will use them to develop new software applications and programming models for future multicore processors. Said Ratner, “This is not a product. It never will be a product. But it provides a very good platform for conducting research.”

Almost Famous: Elemental Technologies' Sam Blackman

Drake Martinet — Fri, 20 Nov 2009 23:01:48 +0000

A new feature wherein All Things Digital looks at up-and-coming and innovative start-ups you should know about.

This week: We caught up with Sam Blackman, CEO of Elemental Technologies at the San Francisco NewTeeVee Live conference.

Elemental Technologies hopes to become a major player in the future of online and over-the-air video through its high-performance encoding technology.

Who: Sam Blackman

What: CEO and Chairman of Elemental Technologies.

Why: People want to watch live video on all their devices. Making a new version of a given video for every device is time- and processor-intensive. Elemental says it can replace up to five existing dedicated servers with one of its own, based on its proprietary software.

Where: @elementaltech (Twitter); company blog; Portland (analog place).

Who else: Sam says, “We’re the first-ever company to take advantage of GPUs for video processing,” but Nvidia (NVDA) is the key hardware player.

Five Stats You Won’t Find in His Facebook Profile

Worst Job: Barista. Late for the Trolley coffee. It had this really abusive owner. He’d yell at us if we gave a half-pump too much flavoring.

Gadget of the Moment: Lenovo X301. It’s all about the keyboard.

Early Geek Influence: Jack Dudman. He was a neighbor growing up and was Steve Jobs’s math teacher at Reed College.

Wishes There Was an App for That: A really smart public transit app. Like one that knows where I am and can tell me which of the options near me I can go to, to get to my destination fastest.

Sport You Can’t Live Without: Ultimate Frisbee

Bio in 140 Characters

Raised in Oregon. EE at Brown. Time at Intel, then Pixelworks. Left to start Elemental Technologies. Loves work, kids and Ultimate Frisbee.

The Five Questions

Elemental’s products seem pretty hardcore geeky. Break it down for me.

The man on the street today wants to view video on any device at any time. The content owners of that video need to be able to format the video differently for each type of device ["transcoding"]. We make that process much cheaper. At the beginning, we saw that there was going to be a huge increase in the amount of video produced out there, but that it was hard to distribute.

Right now it’s really hard [lots of equipment and time] to create, say, 240 versions of every video [so that they can be viewed quickly on an iPhone and in HD on a laptop, for instance]. Four to five regular CPU [central processing unit] servers can be replaced by one of our servers with a GPU [graphical processing unit] and our software. That means far less cost for businesses and many more video options for the consumer.

Device variations are just exploding. How do you see the changing landscape moving your business?

I don’t see the number of video formats decreasing at all. Every company that [produces] a device wants to control delivery to it. No one is going to dominate the cellphone market. It’s just too big. You can get three percent and have a nice business. As long as that is the way the game is played, our products will be very desirable.

Why are you going to be the first software company to acquire an auto body shop?

That’s my dream. The way our product works is, when we take an order, we just submit the hardware request to Dell (DELL). They plug in a GPU. We take the box and add our software.

The funny story is that we wanted a more custom look, so we found this auto body shop in Portland that takes the bezels [rack server face plates], sands them, cleans them, repaints them and sends them back. They look beautiful, like tons of engineering went into it. Dell will do that for you, but its 20 grand, and we’re a start-up. That’s my dream, a company that doesn’t have any employees who drive to work but owns an auto body shop.

Every geek has a memory where they saw something new and had to say to themselves, “Dang, I love living in the future.” What’s yours?

I know exactly what that was. Turtle graphics. My mother put me in a programming class in kindergarten, and there was this thing called LOGO [where you could use computer instructions to make an onscreen turtle draw something]. I had an hour class where I figured out how to draw a square. I went home that night and wrote down on paper a program that would draw the American flag.

My neighbor had an Apple (AAPL) IIc that I used to input that first program. I probably stayed up all night as a six-year-old doing that and that was it for me. What a genius idea. I mean, kids love seeing results, and there were no visual results [from programming] for a long time. LOGO was the first thing where you could spend about an hour and get visual results.

What tech war are you watching most closely?

There’s a battle looming between Intel (INTC) and Nvidia, as Intel releases their own GPU architecture. We’re trying to be really well-positioned to benefit from that arms race of the FLOPS [the processing performance unit].

The In Living Color Interview

[ See post to watch video ]

Can Adobe and Apple Play Nicely When–And If–The Tablet Shows Up?

Peter Kafka — Thu, 19 Nov 2009 23:33:07 +0000

Brief-ish follow-up to yesterday’s story about Condé Nast’s plan to create tablet-friendly editions of its magazines with the help of Adobe:

As many readers noted, one big problem–potentially–with the plan is that Adobe (ADBE) and Apple (AAPL) generally don’t play well together. And in the case of Apple’s iPhone, they don’t play at all: Adobe’s flash platform doesn’t work in the iPhone, which is why many video sites, which depend on flash, don’t work well on the gadget.

So what if this happens again with Apple’s tablet, if and when the thing finally arrives?

I noted this yesterday, but didn’t get to talk to Adobe and Condé about it until later. Now I have their responses. The short version: They sure hope it works out.

The longer version is that both Condé and Adobe plan on running on all sorts of devices. And there’s not a lot they can do to satisfy Apple’s (AAPL) tablet requirements in advance, since Apple won’t discuss the tablet or even acknowledge that the tablet is in the works.

Here’s Adobe’s official line, provided by Senior Experience Design Manager Jeremy Clark:

Adobe has taken initial steps to prepare Adobe AIR to support mobile with performance improvements (reductions in memory usage, runtime size, JavaScript CPU consumption, and reduced CPU usage for background applications), and support multi-touch input used by mobile phones and presumably a new generation of slate devices. In fact we just announced a beta for AIR 2.0 that incorporates many of these features.

Our job at Adobe is to help create a great digital publishing platform. If publishers like Conde Nast and NY Times are delivering brand-name content via Adobe AIR, we believe that the devices that will win in the marketplace, will be the ones that support this open format. It should also be noted that Adobe recently announced plans to enable Flash applications to be brought to iPhone and indeed several are available on the iTunes store.

So we’ll continue to look for ways to enable publishers to deliver their content to the widest possible range of platforms, even on platforms that don’t yet support our runtimes.

It’s a reasonable enough response, given the alternative, which is to wait around for Apple to bring forth the wondergadget–or not. And in the meantime, the companies would miss an opportunity to help set standards for other guys’ gadgets.

On the other hand, there’s the less politic response, which you’re not going to hear from either company on the record: “Boy oh boy, are we screwed if our stuff doesn’t work with the market leader.”

But here’s one version of that take, from Time Inc.’s Josh Quittner, who is working on producing tablet-ready magazines for the Time Warner (TWX) publishing unit:

I am a hyperbolic guy, not to mention a purple writer, but I think it’s conservative to say that in the miserable publishing business, there is no greater hope for salvation that the iThing. With visions of giant iPhones dancing in our heads, all of us are working on prototypes of magazines and newspapers that will work on 9.7-inch, multi-touch screens linked wirelessly to stores. And, while there are at least a dozen manufacturers heatedly working on their own iterations, we all await the iThing because history has shown us that Steve Jobs leads the parade. Chaos will ensue, with many idiotic and competing platforms drawing precious resources from content makers who have to try just about everything until a frontrunner emerges.

Oh. One more quick item: As Quittner says, there are lots of publishers working on this stuff, and I look forward to seeing all of their efforts. And in case anyone gets the idea that I’m only paying attention to the biggest dogs, here’s what FastCompany.com’s Noah Robischon has to say about his company’s digital plans:

We’re working on delivering the magazine in several different digital formats right now, including to e-readers. Assuming the iTablet is a real product, and it uses any of these formats–and I’ve got no inside knowledge, it’s all based on rumor and guesswork–then we’ll be on the device too.

We’ve been approached by a few different companies working on e-reader formats for magazine publishers, as well as a couple that want to create digital versions of the magazine pages for online display. So we’re evaluating our options now. This space has become very active in the last 6 months, and it’s great to have so many options.

So there you go. Next?

[Image credit: clarity]

Cloud Gaming?

John Paczkowski — Tue, 24 Mar 2009 18:00:22 +0000

[ See post to watch video ]

WebGameTV

John Paczkowski — Tue, 24 Mar 2009 15:35:13 +0000

The days of the traditional gaming console are coming to an end–according to entrepreneur Steve Perlman, anyway.

Later today, Perlman–former principal scientist at Apple (AAPL) and the founder of WebTV–will officially unveil OnLive, the online service with which he hopes to upend the $46 billion world-wide videogame market. Seven years in the making, OnLive promises to create an on-demand gaming experience that rivals those offered by dedicated videogame consoles. It’s capable of streaming even the most advanced, CPU-intensive games to television and computer–Macintosh or PC–without lag or a reduction in quality. “We’re providing you with the latest high-end titles, the exact same ones you would see at Target or Best Buy, in the same release windows,” Perlman told USA Today. “But what is really cool is you don’t need any high-end hardware to play them. There’s no physical media. It’s an all-digital platform. You never need to upgrade your equipment at home.”

A compelling proposition. A potentially disruptive one too, if OnLive is able to deliver it with the reliability and ease of use it promises. Said IDC analyst Billy Pidgeon, “It’s a good idea and has potential, but the thing I need reassurance on is being able to deliver this over the network. In games there’s no wiggle room–when you press a button to fire you want to fire,” he said. “But if it works, this could be a disruptive.”

Points Off for Windows?

John Paczkowski — Wed, 04 Mar 2009 18:00:40 +0000

Brave guy, Yair Reiner, for singlehandedly assailing the “Macs are more expensive” myth (or truism, depending on your particular worldview). In a research note on Apple’s new desktops, the Oppenheimer analyst compared, spec-by-spec, the new Apple (AAPL) iMac, Dell’s (DELL) XPS One 24 and Hewlett-Packard’s (HPQ) TouchSmart IQ800t and concluded that the iMac offers a better value (click on chart below to enlarge). “A side-by-side comparison suggests the new iMacs match up favorably against Dell and HP’s All-in-Ones on a price-to-performance basis,” Reiner wrote. “For example, the $1,499 model has a faster CPU and RAM with better or comparable graphics, and is still $100-$250 cheaper (though it lacks a TV Tuner, ~$60-$100 upgrade).”

Symantec Rewrites Its Security Suite To Curb Nuisances

Walter S. Mossberg — Thu, 18 Sep 2008 01:08:02 +0000

It can be awful to have your Windows computer infected with malicious software, but it is almost as bad suffering the daily burdens imposed by the security software designed to protect you.

Too often, security programs significantly slow down the computer, causing lags in booting up the machine, launching programs and receiving email. Not only that, they can be incredibly annoying, popping up frequent messages or asking questions in techie lingo.

The main screen of the 2009 version of Norton Internet Security is streamlined and even includes a gauge to show much drain the security program is placing on the computer.

Now, Symantec (SYMC) has decided to radically rewrite its main security suite for Windows to directly address these problems. And in my tests, this new product, Norton Internet Security 2009, largely succeeded. It isn’t perfect, but it is the fastest, simplest and least obtrusive security suite I have ever used.

Being quick and quiet is great, but, of course, a security product also has to be effective against the vast number of viruses, spyware programs and other malicious attacks aimed at Windows. I don’t have a security lab in which to test such effectiveness. But PC Magazine does, and the magazine called the new Norton suite’s spyware and virus protection “extremely effective.” The magazine’s tests are described at http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2330024,00.asp.

However, I wasn’t impressed with Norton’s optional antispam feature, which caused the only significant problem I ran into in my testing.

The new suite costs $70, and can be purchased at symantec.com and elsewhere. For that price, you get to install it on three PCs and you get a one-year subscription to its updates, which cost $60 thereafter.

Symantec is now including free support, even over the phone, though in my tests this support proved lousy. Norton Internet Security 2009 works only on Windows XP and Windows Vista.

I tested the new security suite on a Dell (DELL) desktop running Vista and on a Macintosh laptop running Windows XP as a “virtual machine,” meaning Windows and Windows programs ran simultaneously with the Mac operating system. Symantec assured me the program would run properly in this latter setup, and I had run the previous version of Norton successfully in the same environment.

The first thing you notice about NIS 2009 is the fast and simple installation. The process took under two minutes on each of my test machines.

File scanning is also much faster, partly because the new suite has a feature called Insight that allows it to skip the scanning and rescanning of many of your files. Insight gathers information about your installed programs and compares them against a list of programs Symantec knows are “trusted,” through either its own research or through scanning results voluntarily submitted by other users. These trusted programs are then exempted from future scans, saving a ton of time.

The new Norton suite has a feature called Insight which calculates how many of your programs it knows are trusted, and therefore needn’t be scanned repeatedly, saving time.

For instance, on my Dell running Vista, an immediate complete scan done before Insight analyzed the computer took more than an hour. But after Insight determined that over 70% of my programs were trusted, complete scans took 10 minutes or less. Of course, your data files, like Word documents and emails, still must be scanned, because they are typically unique.

To minimize the impact on users, the new Norton does scanning and other tasks only when it detects that the computer has been idle for at least 10 minutes. And new virus definitions trickle into your computer invisibly, in the background, rather than all at once in a major process.

Symantec is so certain that its product has a low impact on PC performance that it built a gauge into its new streamlined main screen that shows its drain on the main processor, or CPU.

NIS 2009 is also far less annoying than other suites I’ve used. In normal operation, it notifies you only when it has completed a background task or if there’s a threat or a repair that requires a user action, such as a reboot. And there’s an even quieter optional “silent mode” that can turn off nearly every nonurgent activity of Norton for up to six hours. Silent Mode is automatically activated during full-screen activities, such as playing games or watching movies.

The new suite has a bunch of other features, including a browser toolbar for Internet Explorer and Firefox that warns against fake and malicious Web pages, and that can securely enter your passwords and other information on Web sites. It also has an antispam feature for Microsoft (MSFT) Outlook and Outlook Express.

This antispam feature, which is off by default, was rated as weak by PC Magazine and, in my tests, it caused both Norton and Outlook Express to crash repeatedly in Windows XP running on my Mac. Symantec suspects this is a problem particular to running Windows the way I was on the Mac. After I reinstalled Norton and turned off the feature, all was well again.

But Symantec’s free tech-support service was not only unable to diagnose the problem, it didn’t even know the difference between Outlook and Outlook Express.

Despite this one glitch, I can recommend Norton Internet Security 2009 as a good way to protect your Windows computer with minimal impact on your time and attention.

Find all of Walt Mossberg’s columns and videos online, free, at the All Things Digital Web site, walt.allthingsd.com. Email him at mossberg@wsj.com.

Time to Get Rid of Those Two-Stroke Diesel Data Centers

John Paczkowski — Thu, 01 May 2008 20:26:14 +0000

Now that venture capitalists are so taken with green tech, perhaps they can push some VC dollars toward the development of a greener data center. Because according to consultancy McKinsey, data centers are fast becoming the Superfund sites of the tech industry. McKinsey found that data centers are responsible for 0.3% of the world’s carbon-dioxide emissions. That’s about half of what the airline industry generates–and by 2020 it will surpass it.

“The more you look, the more you find that the entirety of the IT stack, from the CPU up, is very inefficient,” said William Forrest, the associate principal for IT at McKinsey. “Data centers are becoming a major business issue. We think it’s going to become a regulatory concern that will drive scrutiny not just in (corporate) boardrooms but with regulators as well.”

So what’s to be done? McKinsey proposes that corporations at least double the efficiency of their data centers by 2012 and adopt its Corporate Average Data Efficiency metric, a sort of fuel efficiency standard for IT. Said Forrest, “It’s miles per gallon for data centers.“