AllThingsD » Nvidia http://allthingsd.com Sat, 26 May 2012 14:31:31 +0000 en hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.3.2 http://allthingsd.com/theme/images/logo-rss.jpg All Things Digital http://allthingsd.com/ 144 22 Nvidia, Intellectual Ventures Scoop Up Some Wireless Patents as Land Grab Continues http://allthingsd.com/20120514/nvidia-intellectual-ventures-scoop-up-some-wireless-patents-as-land-grab-continues/ http://allthingsd.com/20120514/nvidia-intellectual-ventures-scoop-up-some-wireless-patents-as-land-grab-continues/#comments Mon, 14 May 2012 16:58:41 +0000 Ina Fried http://allthingsd.com/?p=207715 The market for wireless patents continues to be hot, hot, hot.

The latest evidence came Monday, as Nathan Myhrvold’s Intellectual Ventures teamed with chipmaker Nvidia to buy approximately 500 patents from IPWireless.

The patents include some related to 3G and 4G technologies, including LTE, the companies said. Terms of the deal, which closed at the end of last month, were not disclosed.

Ownership of the patents will be split between Nvidia and Intellectual Ventures, with Nvidia getting license to all of the patents it didn’t get to purchase.

Intellectual Ventures has already sued several major carriers over patents. In Febuary, it sued Sprint, T-Mobile and AT&T, and last week it added U.S. Cellular to the proceedings. (Verizon Wireless, not named in the suit, is a licensee of Intellectual Ventures.)

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20120514/nvidia-intellectual-ventures-scoop-up-some-wireless-patents-as-land-grab-continues/feed/ 0 Nvidia Shares Soar on Earnings Beat, Bullish Outlook http://allthingsd.com/20120511/nvidia-shares-soar-on-earnings-beat-bullish-outlook/ http://allthingsd.com/20120511/nvidia-shares-soar-on-earnings-beat-bullish-outlook/#comments Fri, 11 May 2012 14:16:57 +0000 Arik Hesseldahl http://allthingsd.com/?p=206928 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.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20120511/nvidia-shares-soar-on-earnings-beat-bullish-outlook/feed/ 0 Bye-Bye, Thrive Tablets; Hello, Toshiba Excite http://allthingsd.com/20120410/bye-bye-thrive-tablets-hello-toshiba-excite/ http://allthingsd.com/20120410/bye-bye-thrive-tablets-hello-toshiba-excite/#comments Tue, 10 Apr 2012 12:00:04 +0000 Lauren Goode http://allthingsd.com/?p=194713 Despite efforts to differentiate its offerings from Apple’s iPad with tablets that offered some PC-like features, Toshiba is phasing out its 7- and 10-inch Thrive tablets and replacing them with a new line of lightweight tablet devices.

Toshiba’s new Excite line, which the Japanese electronics maker is officially announcing today, will include 7.7-inch, 10-inch and 13-inch models. All three Wi-Fi-only tablets are running Google’s Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich operating system; they are aluminum-encased, have Gorilla Glass displays, come with a five-megapixel rear camera and a two-megapixel front-facing camera, and include new Nvidia TegraTM 3 processors.

The Excite 7.7 also has an AMOLED display, a micro-USB port and a micro-SD card slot; while the Excite 10 has an LED-backlit display, micro-USB and micro-HDMI ports, and a full-sized SD card slot. At 1.32 pounds, the new 10-inch weighs just slightly less than Toshiba’s last tablet.

Most interesting might be Toshiba’s 13-inch entrant into the tablet market. The device has a 13.3-inch diagonal LED-backlit display and weighs 2.2 pounds. At first glance, it looks gigantic, but it isn’t really meant to be a take-it-with-you tablet. Toshiba’s aiming this one at tablet users who rarely, if ever, use their devices out of the home; the computer maker has said it envisions the Excite 13 as a kitchen-counter or coffee-table device.

The Excite 10 will hit the market on May 6, priced at $450 for a 16 gigabyte model — still $50 less than the starting price of the new LTE iPad — while the Exite 7.7 and Excite 13 tablets will go on sale June 10. Those base models will cost $500 and $650, respectively.

And at that point, Toshiba’s Thrive tablets will go away.

Toshiba first introduced its Thrive tablet in July of last year, and attempted to set its product apart from the iPad by incorporating some features one might expect on a PC. As AllThingsD’s Walt Mossberg pointed out in his review of the Thrive, the 10-inch Android tablet came with a full-sized USB port and HDMI port, a removable battery and a full-sized SD slot for flash-memory cards. Its base model originally cost $430 at launch, though Toshiba later lowered the price.

In September, Toshiba introduced the 7-inch version of the Thrive, again with easy connectivity through other devices, though with micro-versions of the USB, HDMI and SD card ports. That product just came to market in late 2011.

In addition to the new tablets, Toshiba is also introducing a redesigned HD All-in-One desktop computer, two new Qosmio gaming laptops, and a stable of upgraded laptops from the Satellite P and Satellite S series, as well as new, slightly lower-priced Satellite L and Satellite C Series laptops.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20120410/bye-bye-thrive-tablets-hello-toshiba-excite/feed/ 14 Cloud-Paging Start-Up Numecent Emerges From Stealth, Spins Off Gaming Unit Approxy (Video) http://allthingsd.com/20120305/cloud-paging-startup-numecent-emerges-from-stealth-spins-off-gaming-startup-approxy/ http://allthingsd.com/20120305/cloud-paging-startup-numecent-emerges-from-stealth-spins-off-gaming-startup-approxy/#comments Mon, 05 Mar 2012 16:59:19 +0000 Arik Hesseldahl http://allthingsd.com/?p=180623 When you think about the way cloud computing works, there’s a progression to it, which, when taken to a logical extreme, looks a little like this: First your data migrates to the cloud and you interact with it via software that runs locally on your own machine. Then your applications go to the cloud and you run full-featured software via a browser. This is the classic software-as-a-service approach.

Now, there are lots of X-as-a-service plays in the IT world, and one of them is the desktop-as-a-service approach, where everything you need for a workaday PC can run on a virtualized server in the cloud, and all the user sees is a keyboard, mouse and screen. It’s efficient, easier and less costly to support than desktop PCs. But? You need to fully license every instance of software you use, in much the same way you would with an old-school desktop. And then there’s always the latency that comes from delivering something via the pipes, which are never quite fast enough, no matter what you do.

But what if you could deliver a full computing experience — operating systems, applications, gaming, the whole enchilada — virtually? Two weeks ago, I saw a demonstration of just such a service that kind of blew my mind. And today the company behind it, Numecent, is coming out of stealth mode and also announcing a spinoff.

First, let’s cover the basics: Numecent is a start-up run by Osman Kent, the onetime CEO and co-founder of 3Dlabs, the company that in the 1990s more or less started the graphics processor industry, which Nvidia and Advanced Micro Devices are the leaders of today. The company has a bunch of undisclosed investors, but last month TechCrunch reported that it had raised $2 million in a series A that was part of a larger $10 million funding round. I’m told there are 107 individual shareholders in the company.

So what does Numecent’s Technology do? It calls its technology “cloud paging,” and in its corporate literature it takes pains to explain that it is nothing like “pixel streaming,” a technique in which applications, mostly games, run on a cloud server and deliver the experience of the game — literally the pixels of a gaming environment — to a PC over the Internet. This is essentially how OnLive, a gaming outfit, works.

The fundamental problem here is that while the cloud is good for streaming linear content like movies and music, where one bit follows logically after another, it’s less good at nonlinear stuff, like applications. One bit doesn’t necessarily follow in a logical order from another, because users jump around from one process or feature to another. So if you’re trying to run a software application via the cloud, you can run into trouble pretty easily if it’s a processor-heavy program.

Cloud paging, as best I understand it, uses the Internet to transmit x86 chip instructions — basically telling the Intel or AMD processor in a PC what to do remotely. What this allows is something Numecent describes as “friction-free” computing. What that means in practice is that you could run any application on your local system from the cloud, in an almost-instant, on-demand manner. And when you’re done using it you just shut it down and your local system is left more or less untouched. When you’re done using it, it’s as if the software had never been on your PC.

Numecent’s cloud-paging scheme breaks software up into small pieces, called “pages,” that can then be pushed out dynamically. The user’s machine creates what’s called a virtual memory management unit, which handles the job of requesting the pages that are delivered. Connections between the client machine and the server are also strongly encrypted.

The end result, the company says, is a reduction by as much as 60x in deployment and delivery time of applications. And there’s also nothing to maintain. When the user is done using the virtual application or machine, there’s nothing left on the client machine.

Let’s say you’re a part-time graphic designer who works for a company only two days a week. The company would normally have to pay for you to have Adobe Creative Suite installed on the machine you use. This can easily run a few thousand dollars. But if you could check it out for a few hours and run it on a cloud server, with the same features and the same native speed, as though it were installed on your local system, it would cost your employer a lot less.

Central to all this are 10 patents that Numecent has on its cloud-paging technology. I’m told that these are battle-tested patents, and that Microsoft and Citrix Systems are among its licensees.

The same experience can be applied to games. Most games worth having can be bought from download stores today, but they’re huge and take a lot of time to download and then install. What if you could just play whatever game you wanted, pay for the time you use it, and then stop paying when you’re done? That’s sort of the idea behind Approxy, a spinoff that Numecent is launching today, as well. Yavuz Ahiska, another 3Dlabs alum, is taking it out of Numecent, and plans to offer a white-labeled cloud gaming service that gaming companies can license. Approxy is described in a lot more detail in the video (below) that Numecent shared with me exclusively.

Numecent’s plan is to essentially spin out different companies that put its cloud-paging technology to work in different contexts.

Approxy from Arik Hesseldahl on Vimeo.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20120305/cloud-paging-startup-numecent-emerges-from-stealth-spins-off-gaming-startup-approxy/feed/ 0 Coming Soon: Phones That Learn to Rest When You Do http://allthingsd.com/20120229/coming-soon-phones-that-learn-to-rest-when-you-do/ http://allthingsd.com/20120229/coming-soon-phones-that-learn-to-rest-when-you-do/#comments Wed, 29 Feb 2012 21:50:52 +0000 Ina Fried http://allthingsd.com/?p=178811 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:

RELATED POSTS:

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20120229/coming-soon-phones-that-learn-to-rest-when-you-do/feed/ 0 LG Keeps the Pre-Barcelona Announcements Coming, This Time With Quad-Core Phone http://allthingsd.com/20120223/lg-keeps-the-pre-barcelona-announcements-coming-this-time-with-quad-core-phone/ http://allthingsd.com/20120223/lg-keeps-the-pre-barcelona-announcements-coming-this-time-with-quad-core-phone/#comments Thu, 23 Feb 2012 10:26:41 +0000 Ina Fried http://allthingsd.com/?p=177194 Clearly looking to beat the Mobile World Congress onslaught, LG Mobile announced its fourth phone of the week, this time the quad-core LG Optimus 4X HD.

In addition to the 1.5GHz Nvidia Tegra 3 chip, the Optimus 4X boasts a 4.7-inch screen, an 8 megapixel camera and the Ice Cream Sandwich version of Android. Pricing and availability were not announced.

The Optimus 4X is the latest pre-Barcelona announcement from LG, which has also announced a new 3-D phone, an NFC-equipped device, and a 5-inch device that fits into the emerging “phablet” category. LG has also promised a new look for its phones, which have been struggling amid fierce competition in the Android business.

LG is having a press conference at Mobile World Congress, but it’s not clear if there will be any new devices left to announce.

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]]> http://allthingsd.com/20120223/lg-keeps-the-pre-barcelona-announcements-coming-this-time-with-quad-core-phone/feed/ 0 After Slow Start, Nvidia Hopes to Drive Tegra 2 Into the Smartphone Mainstream http://allthingsd.com/20120220/after-slow-start-nvidia-hopes-to-drive-tegra-2-into-the-smartphone-mainstream/ http://allthingsd.com/20120220/after-slow-start-nvidia-hopes-to-drive-tegra-2-into-the-smartphone-mainstream/#comments Tue, 21 Feb 2012 01:30:32 +0000 Ina Fried http://allthingsd.com/?p=176106 When Nvidia first launched its Tegra 2 processor, there was no doubt it had a place inside some of the highest end phones and tablets of its time.

The issue came, several months later, as it had lost that performance crown and yet wasn’t ready with its quad-core Tegra 3 processor. Indeed, slower than expected Tegra 2 sales were among the factors that led Nvidia to post disappointing December quarter results.

Nvidia executives concede now they just didn’t move fast enough to drive the chip into the mainstream of the market.

“We gapped out getting Tegra 2 from the top end to the mainstream,” mobile unit general manager Mike Rayfield said in an interview. “That was kind of our bad”

The company aims to change that, starting with a Tegra 2 design in a phone from China’s ZTE. The phone, aimed at the sub-$200 unsubsidized smartphone market packs the latest version of Android and other high-end features but is priced solidly at the mainstream. It’s due to arrive around the second quarter of the year.

“We’ve been in the high-end phones since the start,” Rayfield said. “As you’d imagine that’s where we’d start. We’re now working hard to push down into what is the mainstream.”

The ZTE phone is another milestone for Nvidia. It’s also the first phone to incorporate the Icera software modem that Nvidia acquired last year.

Meanwhile, for ZTE, the Mimosa X is the latest step in the company’s effort to broaden its reach. Earlier this month ZTE introduced its first U.S. tablet, the Optik for Sprint.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20120220/after-slow-start-nvidia-hopes-to-drive-tegra-2-into-the-smartphone-mainstream/feed/ 0 Nvidia Falters on Weak Outlook http://allthingsd.com/20120215/nvidia-falters-on-weak-outlook/ http://allthingsd.com/20120215/nvidia-falters-on-weak-outlook/#comments Wed, 15 Feb 2012 22:18:16 +0000 John Murrell http://allthingsd.com/?p=175051 Shares in chipmaker Nvidia were down about four percent in after-hours trading today after the company reported quarterly results roughly in line with lowered market expectations, but came in low on its guidance for the current quarter.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20120215/nvidia-falters-on-weak-outlook/feed/ 0 Seven Questions for ARM CEO Warren East http://allthingsd.com/20120213/seven-questions-for-arm-ceo-warren-east/ http://allthingsd.com/20120213/seven-questions-for-arm-ceo-warren-east/#comments Mon, 13 Feb 2012 14:26:25 +0000 Arik Hesseldahl http://allthingsd.com/?p=173935 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.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20120213/seven-questions-for-arm-ceo-warren-east/feed/ 0 Windows on ARM, Complete With Next Version of Office, to Arrive With Rest of Windows 8 http://allthingsd.com/20120209/windows-on-arm-complete-with-next-version-of-office-to-arrive-with-rest-of-windows-8/ http://allthingsd.com/20120209/windows-on-arm-complete-with-next-version-of-office-to-arrive-with-rest-of-windows-8/#comments Thu, 09 Feb 2012 18:01:50 +0000 Ina Fried http://allthingsd.com/?p=172871 After being somewhat less than clear about its Windows-on-ARM plans, Microsoft answered a number of lingering questions on Thursday.

In an interview, Windows unit President Steven Sinofsky said that the first ARM-based machines running Windows 8 should show up around the same time as the first Windows 8 machines running traditional PC processors from Intel and AMD. He didn’t give a time frame for when that would be, but PC manufacturers and chipmakers have said they expect it to arrive later this year.

Sinofsky also said that the Windows-on-ARM machines will come with several Office apps — Word, PowerPoint, Excel and OneNote — that have been tuned to run in a very battery-efficient manner. But Sinofsky said that, although those applications will run in the traditional Windows desktop, they will be the only programs allowed to do so, other than components of Windows itself.

“There are no other compiled dekstop apps that are available,” Sinofsky told AllThingsD. All of the other apps for Windows on ARM will be the new-style “Metro” apps.

Windows 8 for Intel and AMD chips, by contrast, will be able to run all of the kinds of programs that have traditionally run on Windows, inside a Windows 7-like desktop environment.

Although Microsoft has said that its focus around Windows 8 would be around new-style “Metro” apps, there had been significant question as to whether, and under what circumstances, programs designed to run in a classic Windows desktop might be able to run.

Windows on ARM will have the desktop as an option for Internet Explorer, the Office apps and various system functions, such as the control panel, file management and other built-in features of Windows. Sinofsky also said that the version of Internet Explorer for Windows on ARM won’t support plugins such as Adobe Flash, noting the trend in the industry away from supporting Flash on mobile devices.

Sinofsky is also penning a several-thousand-word blog post on the subject — long even for someone known for his lengthy posts. In it, Sinofsky said, he goes into more detail on the company’s plans for Windows on ARM, as well as its rationale for some of the decisions it has made.

“There have been a lot of questions,” Sinofsky said. “I want to do my best to answer them.”

Sinofsky had already ruled out some sort of emulation mode for running older Windows apps on ARM chips, noting that the whole point of running Windows on the same kinds of ARM-based chips used for phones and tablets was to gain the kind of power efficiency those chips can deliver.

Microsoft has said it will deliver an updated “consumer preview” test version of Windows 8 on Feb. 29, with plans to tout the software at an event in Barcelona. However, that test version, like a developer preview released last fall, will be available only for machines running traditional Intel and AMD chips.

Sinofsky said the company is working with chipmakers Nvidia, Qualcomm and Texas Instruments to provide a limited number of test machines to those that make software, hardware and peripherals. The machines are aimed at developers, though, with easy access to the internals, and the company has no plans to make those machines available to enthusiasts, corporate customers or other testers.

Microsoft first announced its plans to allow Windows 8 to run on ARM-based machines at CES 2011.

At the time, it showed a demo of some Office apps running on ARM chips, but showed little else of its plans for the operating system. Months before, it talked about other features of the operating system. Several months later, at our D9 conference, it showed the new Metro interface for Windows, as well as its plans to feature a whole new kind of application, and its plans for a built-in store to sell these new apps.

While the goal is to have Windows-on-ARM machines out at the same time Windows 8 lands on new traditional PCs, Sinofsky noted that there is a lot of work to be done to get the entire PC ecosystem ready.

“We’re building a whole new product, on a new platform, with new partners,” he said.

Update: Sinofsky’s blog post is up, all 8,610 words of it.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20120209/windows-on-arm-complete-with-next-version-of-office-to-arrive-with-rest-of-windows-8/feed/ 0 Tilera's Server Chip Challenges Intel, Sort Of http://allthingsd.com/20120130/tileras-server-chip-challenges-intel-sort-of/ http://allthingsd.com/20120130/tileras-server-chip-challenges-intel-sort-of/#comments Mon, 30 Jan 2012 14:44:45 +0000 Arik Hesseldahl http://allthingsd.com/?p=168642 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.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20120130/tileras-server-chip-challenges-intel-sort-of/feed/ 0 Nvidia Cuts Sales Forecast, Blaming Hard-Drive Shortage, Tegra 2 Decline http://allthingsd.com/20120124/nvidia-cuts-sales-forecast-blaming-hard-drive-shortage-slow-pc-sales/ http://allthingsd.com/20120124/nvidia-cuts-sales-forecast-blaming-hard-drive-shortage-slow-pc-sales/#comments Wed, 25 Jan 2012 00:59:09 +0000 Ina Fried http://allthingsd.com/?p=167204 Chipmaker Nvidia warned on Tuesday that its current quarter’s sales would fall short of expectations.

The company, whose fourth quarter ends Jan. 29, said it now expects quarterly revenue of about $950 million, as compared with its original expectation of approximately $1.066 billion.

Nvidia said the shortfall was caused in part by the PC-market impact from a global hard-drive shortage brought on by flooding in Thailand. As a result, fewer systems were shipped, and some PC makers opted to scale back on graphics to account for their higher hard-drive costs.

Nvidia also said that its Tegra 2 mobile chip business declined more rapidly than it had expected. The company is currently ramping production for the successor to that chip — the quad-core Tegra 3.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20120124/nvidia-cuts-sales-forecast-blaming-hard-drive-shortage-slow-pc-sales/feed/ 0 Intel Shows Just How It Plans to Get Into Phones (Video) http://allthingsd.com/20120110/intel-shows-just-how-it-plans-to-get-into-phones-video/ http://allthingsd.com/20120110/intel-shows-just-how-it-plans-to-get-into-phones-video/#comments Wed, 11 Jan 2012 01:00:34 +0000 Ina Fried http://allthingsd.com/?p=162455 For years, Intel has talked about using its chips to power smartphones. Now it actually has something in its hands.

At the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, Intel is showing a working reference design that it is offering to any phone maker that wants to use its chips. The phone itself packs a 1.6GHz single-core Atom chip along with an array of sensors and radios.

“The sample platform we have is fully buzzword compliant,” General Manager Mike Bell said in an interview.

The company has been testing thousands of phones internally and says the performance is top of class, with battery life at least as good as most Android devices.

“We are not the best at power, but we are definitely very, very competitive,” Bell said.

Compatibility is another issue that Bell said he is asked about a lot. Nearly all Java-based Android apps should run, as well as a good number of those designed specifically for chips based on cores from rival ARM.

“We think that gets rid of the last argument people have,” Bell said.

Of course, Intel faces plenty of competition in the phone chip space, including existing Android chip providers Qualcomm, Nvidia, Texas Instruments and other challengers, such as Broadcom.

Intel is announcing two phone customers running its chips — a Lenovo phone for China slated to be released in the first half of the year and a multi-year, multi-device alliance with Motorola Mobility that will begin with a phone in the second half of the year.

Although Intel announced only the two customers, Bell indicated more names will be coming soon. (Think next month’s Mobile World Congress for an update.)

“You can imagine our business is all about scale,” he said, declining to say how many phone designs are being built around its chips, or how many customers it has.

In a roundtable with reporters, Motorola CEO Sanjay Jha said he was attracted to the chipmaker by both its roadmap and its approach, which focuses as much on running multiple instructions on a single chip core as it does on packing in as many cores as possible.

“What they have done is multithreading vs. multicore,” Jha said, noting there is a big debate in computer science as to which is better. Jha said that, along with other innovations like three-dimensional transistors, this will be important as the laws of physics prevent rapid performance gains just by shrinking the size of transistors.

Intel has focused its phone efforts entirely on Android for now, noting that it believes it has more people working on Android than Google does.


[ See post to watch video ]

MORE CES NEWS:

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20120110/intel-shows-just-how-it-plans-to-get-into-phones-video/feed/ 0 Nvidia's Tegra 3 Tries to Save Battery in All Sorts of Different Ways http://allthingsd.com/20120109/nvidias-tegra-3-tries-to-save-battery-in-all-sorts-of-different-ways/ http://allthingsd.com/20120109/nvidias-tegra-3-tries-to-save-battery-in-all-sorts-of-different-ways/#comments Tue, 10 Jan 2012 00:30:52 +0000 Ina Fried http://allthingsd.com/?p=161404 Well, the Tegra 3 is just full of surprises.

Nvidia has already disclosed that its quad-core chip also packs a low-power fifth core that can be used in place of the other four to save power. On Monday, Nvidia shared a few more secrets about its latest smartphone and tablet processor.

Among its other power-conserving superpowers is the ability to reduce the amount of backlighting needed. It does this by looking frame by frame at what is being displayed and, when possible, opening up pixels and turning down the backlight where possible.

“That adds a significant amount of battery life to these mobile devices,” Nvidia mobile unit head Mike Rayfield said in an interview, noting that backlights are one of the bigger drains on battery life. In addition to the backlight trick and the low-power core, Rayfield said the Tegra 3 also eliminates the need for a separate controller to process input on a touchscreen.

The Tegra 3 is already shipping in Asus’s Transformer Prime (a device first shown at AsiaD). At this week’s Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, Nvidia is showing the Tegra 3 in action on a bunch of other devices.

Nvidia isn’t the only chipmaker trying to make a case for its processors this week. Both Intel CEO Paul Otellini and Qualcomm CEO Paul Jacobs are slated to deliver keynote speeches on Tuesday.

All three companies are trying to make the case for why their processors should be the brains of device makers’ next mobile gadgets. And they aren’t the only ones: Texas Instruments, MediaTek and Broadcom are also angling for different segments of the market.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20120109/nvidias-tegra-3-tries-to-save-battery-in-all-sorts-of-different-ways/feed/ 0 Intel to Detail Its Phone Plans at CES Next Month http://allthingsd.com/20111221/intel-to-detail-its-phone-plans-at-ces-next-month/ http://allthingsd.com/20111221/intel-to-detail-its-phone-plans-at-ces-next-month/#comments Wed, 21 Dec 2011 18:17:30 +0000 Ina Fried http://allthingsd.com/?p=155876 Intel plans to use next month’s Consumer Electronics Show as the launching point for its effort to get serious in the market for the chips that power smartphones.

The company has come up with an iPhone-esque prototype of an Android device running its chip. More than just a concept device, though, the phone (pictured here) is a fully baked design that Intel is making freely available for phone makers to use in whole or in part.

“You’ll see a number of Intel customers using the guts of this phone to go into the market in the first half of next year,” CEO Paul Otellini said at a Credit Suisse investor conference last month. “And we’ll have more announcements of that at CES.”

Otellini is slated to give a keynote speech at the Las Vegas event on Jan. 10, so that would be a logical place for any news, though the company has also scheduled a notebook-related press conference for the prior day.

Technology Review posted a story on Tuesday, talking about Intel’s efforts and quoting Intel as saying the phones should hit the market in the first half of 2012. However, Otellini suggested in his Credit Suisse speech that Intel is aiming to have products out there sooner rather than later.

“We’ll be shipping in the first quarter of next year,” Otellini said.

Intel has previously talked about its plans for phones, and Android in particular, including at its September developer conference, when Otellini invited Android chief Andy Rubin on stage to talk about Google’s work to make Intel chips a first-class citizen for future Android releases.

The chip giant faces a host of competitors as it enters the space, including the current Android leaders — Qualcomm, Texas Instruments and Nvidia. Broadcom has also said it has designs on the market, particularly the low end, an area dominated by MediaTek.

Though cognizant of the competition, Intel has said its tests show its reference design as a solid competitor not just on performance, but also in the all-important area of battery life, where many have felt that Intel could not compete with ARM-based processors.

The move is about more than phones, though. Intel already faces steep competition from ARM and Apple in the tablet arena, and with Windows 8 it will also see challenges on the PC side of things.

Leading Intel’s effort are former Infineon executive Hermann Eul, and former Apple and Palm executive Mike Bell. The chipmaker recently reorganized its mobile efforts, putting the two executives in charge of all aspects of the project.

After years of talking about being in the smartphone processor game, it will be interesting to see if Intel can actually make some headway.

MORE CES NEWS:

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20111221/intel-to-detail-its-phone-plans-at-ces-next-month/feed/ 0 Solid Keyboard Elevates This Tablet, Though Software Lags http://allthingsd.com/20111207/solid-keyboard-elevates-this-tablet-though-software-lags/ http://allthingsd.com/20111207/solid-keyboard-elevates-this-tablet-though-software-lags/#comments Thu, 08 Dec 2011 02:03:52 +0000 Walter S. Mossberg http://allthingsd.com/?p=151713 One of the biggest things that deters people from relying on tablets is the lack of a convenient physical keyboard. Now, Taiwan-based Asus is attacking this issue with a new Android-based tablet and accompanying keyboard dock, due on store shelves in the U.S. on Dec. 15.


[ See post to watch video ]

This 10-inch tablet, called the Eee Pad Transformer Prime, starts at $499, the same price as the market leader, Apple’s iPad 2. But it has twice the memory—32 gigabytes—at that price. The keyboard dock, with an additional battery and added ports, is an optional extra for $149.

The new Asus has another notable feature: It is the first tablet to use a new processor from chip maker Nvidia that has four cores, double what other recent tablets use.

Asus and Nvidia, which developed the product jointly, claim this processor, called the Tegra 3, offers more power when it’s needed, and the flexibility to sip less power when it’s not, for overall better performance and battery life. I expect this same chip to show up in other tablets in coming months.

I’ve been testing the Transformer Prime, and I found it to be the best standard Android tablet I’ve used. In my tests, the Prime had snappy performance, and decent battery life, though less than the iPad’s (more on that later). It is a tad lighter and thinner than the iPad 2 and has a sharp, pleasant screen.

PTECH

The Transformer Prime tablet starts at $499. Keyboard dock is an extra $149.

Plus, when the tablet is coupled with the keyboard dock, by nestling it into a hinge, it becomes the screen of what is essentially an Android netbook. When docked, the tablet even folds down over the keyboard like a lid. I found typing on the keyboard to be easy and accurate.

However, as with all other tablets based on Google’s Android platform, its weak point is software. The tablet-oriented Honeycomb version of Android on the Prime isn’t as slick or smooth as the iPad’s operating system, though the Prime’s potent processor makes it more fluid than is typical on such Android devices. And Google’s Android Market offers only a small number of tablet-optimized apps, compared with 140,000 for the iPad.

PTECHjp

The Transformer Prime

In addition, the Prime lacks access to a large, unified ecosystem of music, videos and books, unlike the Apple or Amazon’s Kindle Fire. It does offer Google’s new music store, and a movie-rental service. But, when I tried to rent two movies, neither would play.

The Prime will gain a fresh version of the Android operating system, called Ice Cream Sandwich, early next year, according to Asus. The company says early buyers of the Prime will be able to upgrade for free.

Fans of the iPad will point out that it, too, can work with optional physical keyboards. But Apple doesn’t make one that couples with the iPad 2 the way the Asus docking station mates with its tablet, and the extra battery in the Prime’s keyboard dock can supposedly add up to six hours of unplugged power, a claim I didn’t test. The Prime’s dock also has a USB port and a memory card slot.

The Prime is actually the third try by Asus to mate a tablet with a physical keyboard. An earlier, bulkier version of the Transformer wasn’t embraced by many consumers, and a thick tablet with a cramped slide-out keyboard, called the Slider, also hasn’t been a big hit. But Asus is hoping that the slimmer, lighter Prime and its dock will do the trick.

PTECHjp2

The Transformer Prime, when coupled with the keyboard dock, can fold down like a lid.

The stand-alone tablet is 0.33-inch thick and weighs 1.29 pounds. The dock adds 1.18 pounds and 0.4-inch of thickness. Together, they cost $648, just $49 more than the cheapest 32 GB iPad, but hundreds more than many standard 10-inch Windows netbooks.

The companies are stressing how the processor improves the graphics and speed of games on the tablet, and boast that the Prime can be used with gaming-console controllers. This is good news for tablet gamers, and, in my tests, some sample games the companies provided looked impressive. But I wasn’t blown away with their superiority over iPad games.

To me, the keyboard dock is the big story here. I found it to be a solid companion. Its keys were well spaced despite the unit’s small overall size, and the hinge that holds the tablet as a removable screen was sturdy. Special keys control Android functions such as Home, Back and Search. And there’s a roomy, responsive touch pad.

The screen was responsive and the speakers were good. In my tests, email, Web browsing, and streaming of music and videos worked well over good Wi-Fi connections. But the Prime lacks any cellular connectivity, meaning it is crippled when you’re out of Wi-Fi range. When I tested it at a hotel with slow Wi-Fi, the Prime was notably pokier at streaming the same YouTube video as an iPad 2 using Verizon’s 3G cellular network.

Gauging the battery life on this tablet is a bit complicated. I performed the same battery test I have used for every tablet since the original iPad appeared. In that test, I set the screen brightness to 75%, leave the wireless on and play locally stored videos back to back till the unit dies.

The Transformer Prime lasted just shy of seven hours, compared with slightly more than 10 hours for the iPad 2, a big difference. Still, that seven hours was better than many other full-size Android tablets have achieved in this test.

Asus and Nvidia build in three battery modes, and I tested only the one called Normal. Unfortunately, Nvidia now says that nomenclature is misleading, and that Normal is really meant for only high-performance tasks. So, early next year, when it switches to the next version of Android, it plans to rename Normal as “Performance,” to steer users to a less power-hungry mode called “Balanced.” I can’t say how the Prime’s battery will perform in that scenario with the new OS.

I still believe the iPad 2 is the best overall tablet available. However, if you’re looking for a model using Google’s Android interface and are yearning for a well-designed, easily integrated keyboard solution, or want to play more power-hungry games, the Transformer Prime is a good choice, as long as you can tolerate its software limitations.

Email Walt at mossberg@wsj.com.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20111207/solid-keyboard-elevates-this-tablet-though-software-lags/feed/ 0 Nvidia’s Jen-Hsun Huang on Superman Quad-Core Chip, Microsoft and Apple: The Full AsiaD Interview (Video) http://allthingsd.com/20111122/nvidia%e2%80%99s-jen-hsun-huang-on-superman-quad-core-chip-microsoft-and-apple-the-full-asiad-interview-video/ http://allthingsd.com/20111122/nvidia%e2%80%99s-jen-hsun-huang-on-superman-quad-core-chip-microsoft-and-apple-the-full-asiad-interview-video/#comments Tue, 22 Nov 2011 20:12:15 +0000 Kara Swisher http://allthingsd.com/?p=146698

We are now posting the full videos from the recent AsiaD conference, which took place in Hong Kong in October.

We’re following the schedule of the actual event. Up now: Nvidia’s CEO Jen-Hsun Huang.

An early pioneer in graphics chips, the tech company is now aiming at the market for processors driving smartphones, tablets and, soon, PCs. Nvidia’s latest effort is a quad-core chip code named Kal-El, which is the Krypton moniker of Superman.

Is Huang the Man of Steel? Or, at least, can he steal some of major rival Qualcomm’s thunder?

Here’s the video of his onstage interview with Walt Mossberg:


[ See post to watch video ]

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20111122/nvidia%e2%80%99s-jen-hsun-huang-on-superman-quad-core-chip-microsoft-and-apple-the-full-asiad-interview-video/feed/ 0 How Thrilled Is Texas Instruments to Have Its Chips in the Kindle Fire? http://allthingsd.com/20111118/how-thrilled-is-texas-instruments-to-have-its-chips-in-the-kindle-fire/ http://allthingsd.com/20111118/how-thrilled-is-texas-instruments-to-have-its-chips-in-the-kindle-fire/#comments Fri, 18 Nov 2011 18:03:18 +0000 Arik Hesseldahl http://allthingsd.com/?p=145720 This morning, I awoke to something I never thought I’d see. It was an email message, and what it contained was so rare that I thought I had to share it with you.

Yesterday, I published a story about the teardown analysis by IHS iSuppli of Amazon’s Kindle Fire tablet. And, as you may remember, the story related how, in the opinion of its analysts, it cost Amazon $201.70 to buy the parts and build the Fire — a sum which is only slightly above the $199 retail price of the device.

The other big news was how dominant the chipmaker Texas Instruments is among the suppliers. Its applications processor chip, wireless chips, and audio and power management chips add up to about $25, approximately 12 percent of the bill of materials (BOM), which is the aggregate cost of all the components. It’s a pretty solid victory for TI in the competitive tablet field, where, outside of Apple’s iPad, success has been rare.

Naturally, I asked Texas Instruments for a comment about this, and expected none. I’ve been writing teardown stories for six years (here’s the first I ever did); never once has the manufacturer of the device in question, nor any of its suppliers, given anything more than a “no comment.”

Manufacturers tend to hate teardowns because they’re invasive. Take a product apart and you find out who a company is working with — and you learn a lot about how they see things. With the Kindle Fire, for example, we learned that Amazon deliberately took a “less is more” approach to keep costs down, minimize its loss and pave the way to eventually selling the device at a profit.

Suppliers hate teardowns, too. There is nothing more secret — or more interesting to know — than what company is supplying a manufacturer with a key component. Companies can rise or fall on a strategic relationship with someone like Apple or HP — or Amazon. The first iPod, for example, put an otherwise unknown company named PortalPlayer on the map — until Apple replaced its chips with something else. Now that company is part of Nvidia.

Usually these suppliers are unwilling to rock the boat, and usually they’re covered by nondisclosure agreements. So when I do the typical reporter thing and call them for a comment, after a teardown clearly shows their chip or display or other component inside the product, the supplier always — 100 percent of the time, without exception — says, “No comment.” Probably they’d like nothing more than to brag about how their chip makes this or that product do amazing things, but usually they just can’t, won’t and just don’t say a word.

Until today. Today, in response to my questions of yesterday, I got a comment from Texas Instruments. And that meant I just had to share it. Here it is, courtesy of a company spokeswoman:

“We can confirm that TI’s OMAP4430 processor and WiLink 6.0 connectivity combo solution are inside of the Kindle Fire. … TI is thrilled to be a part of the Amazon Kindle Fire, which boasts powerful performance and engaging consumer experiences that are sure to make it a coveted device this holiday season.”

Not exactly riveting. But rare!

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20111118/how-thrilled-is-texas-instruments-to-have-its-chips-in-the-kindle-fire/feed/ 0 Intel's Plan to Remain the Supercomputing King http://allthingsd.com/20111115/intels-plan-to-remain-the-supercomputing-king/ http://allthingsd.com/20111115/intels-plan-to-remain-the-supercomputing-king/#comments Tue, 15 Nov 2011 23:11:13 +0000 Arik Hesseldahl http://allthingsd.com/?p=144398 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.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20111115/intels-plan-to-remain-the-supercomputing-king/feed/ 0 Fujitsu Supercomputer Remains World Champ, but IBM and Intel Are the Real Computing Kings http://allthingsd.com/20111114/fujitsu-supercomputer-remains-world-champ-but-ibm-and-intel-are-the-real-computing-kings/ http://allthingsd.com/20111114/fujitsu-supercomputer-remains-world-champ-but-ibm-and-intel-are-the-real-computing-kings/#comments Mon, 14 Nov 2011 13:58:39 +0000 Arik Hesseldahl http://allthingsd.com/?p=143661 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.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20111114/fujitsu-supercomputer-remains-world-champ-but-ibm-and-intel-are-the-real-computing-kings/feed/ 0 Nvidia Earnings, Revenue Nudge Past Estimates on Strong Graphics and Mobile Business http://allthingsd.com/20111110/nvidia-earnings-revenue-nudge-past-estimates/ http://allthingsd.com/20111110/nvidia-earnings-revenue-nudge-past-estimates/#comments Thu, 10 Nov 2011 21:24:09 +0000 Ina Fried http://allthingsd.com/?p=143009 Nvidia on Thursday reported quarterly earnings that were just ahead of what analysts were expecting.

The chipmaker said it earned $178.3 million, or 29 cents per share, on revenue of $1.07 billion for the three months ended Oct. 30. Nvidia had been expected to post earnings of around 26 cents per share, on revenue of $1.06 billion, according to First Call.

For the current quarter, Nvidia said it sees its revenue staying roughly flat from the current quarter, give or take a percentage or two. Gross margins are expected to be steady or up half a percent.

“NVIDIA’s strategy is coming into its own, as the world becomes increasingly visual and mobile,” CEO Jen-Hsun Huang said in a statement. “Our GPU business accelerated in the third quarter, driven by strong demand from gamers and the professional market. And our mobile business benefited from new devices coming onto the market.”

Earlier this week, the company announced it is ready with its quad-core Tegra 3 chip, which will show up first in Asus’ Eee Pad Transformer Prime next month, and in other tablets and phones next year.

“With Tegra 3 phone wins well ahead of Tegra 2’s pace, we’re expecting strong growth in the year ahead,” Huang said.

For more on Nvidia, here’s what Huang had to say at our recent AsiaD conference:


[ See post to watch video ]

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20111110/nvidia-earnings-revenue-nudge-past-estimates/feed/ 0 Fujitsu Beefs Up Its Best Supercomputer http://allthingsd.com/20111102/fujitsu-beefs-up-its-best-supercomputer/ http://allthingsd.com/20111102/fujitsu-beefs-up-its-best-supercomputer/#comments Wed, 02 Nov 2011 22:53:27 +0000 Arik Hesseldahl http://allthingsd.com/?p=139643 It’s November, and in the rarefied world of supercomputing, it means that a new edition of the twice-a-year Top 500 list of the world’s most powerful publicly-known computers is due out any day now. That also means that the people who assemble the world’s most powerful bean counters are bragging about them and jockeying for placement on the list.

Today it was Fujitsu’s turn. The Japanese computing giant teamed up with RIKEN, the quasi-public Japanese research institution, to announce that they had built a machine they call the K Computer, which can perform 10.51 petaflops, or 10.51 quadrillion floating point operations per second.

And while all that may sound very impressive, it’s not quite as muscular as the Titan machine being assembled in the U.S. at the Oak Ridge National Labs, which can — or will — perform 20 petaflops.

The machine (pictured) is made up of 864 racks with 88,128 interconnected CPU chips, all of them based on the SPARC architecture for which Sun Microsystems, and therefore Oracle, are best known, though Fujitsu has long been a SPARC licensee. The new K Computer is basically an improvement and extension to the same K computer that took the top spot on the last Top 500 list in June, supplanting in the process a Chinese machine that had taken the crown last November.

Never mind that it contained all U.S.-made chips, the Chinese feat caused the leader of the free world to kvetch about the apparent sorry state of U.S. supercomputing, thus prompting, perhaps indirectly, the Titan machine at Oak Ridge.

It’s not as though China hasn’t been heard from on the supercomputing front recently. Last week its Sunway BlueLight MPP raised eyebrows not for its performance — a relatively pokey 795 teraflops — but rather for the fact that it’s built using all Chinese-made components.

So what will it be used for? Weather simulations, research into drugs and solar cells, and simulating earthquakes and tsunamis.

Here are the more formal descriptions from the announcement:

–Analyzing the behavior of nanomaterials through simulations and contributing to the early development of such next-generation semiconductor materials, particularly nanowires and carbon nanotubes, that are expected to lead to future fast-response, low-power devices.

–Predicting which compounds, from among a massive number of drug candidate molecules, will prevent illnesses by binding with active regions on the proteins that cause illnesses, as a way to reduce drug development times and costs (pharmaceutical applications).

–Simulating the actions of atoms and electrons in dye-sensitized solar cells to contribute to the development of solar cells with higher energy-conversion efficiency.

–Simulating seismic wave propagation, strong motion, and tsunamis to predict the effects they will have on human-made structures; predicting the extent of earthquake-impact zones for disaster prevention purposes; and contributing to the design of quake-resistant structures.

–Conducting high-resolution (400-m) simulations of atmospheric circulation models to provide detailed predictions of weather phenomena that elucidate localized effects, such as cloudbursts.

So what’s a petaflop anyway? A FLOP is a floating point operation. Its a type of mathematical function that involves decimal points. Adding 5.6 and 11.21 is a floating point operation and is therefore slightly more complicated from a computing standpoint than adding 11 and 5. But in computing, even day-to-day computing, it’s massively more complicated than all that.

A top-of-the-line NVidia GeForce GTX 590 graphics card, which specializes in floating point operations, can run about 2,400 gigaflops. Since a gigaflop is a billion flops, I guess that technically puts the GeForce GTX 590 into the teraflop, or trillion-flop range.

Petaflops are then in the quadrillion-flop territory, which as I noted before makes them fun because they’re among those rare numbers that are larger than the U.S. national debt. So 10.51 quadrillion flops gets written like so: 10,510,000,000,000,000. Didn’t I say this was fun?

All this is leading up to a big supercomputing conference starting in 10 days in Seattle. So expect lots more supercomputing news in the coming days!

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20111102/fujitsu-beefs-up-its-best-supercomputer/feed/ 0 Chip Makers Post Weak Results http://allthingsd.com/20111027/chip-makers-post-weak-results/ http://allthingsd.com/20111027/chip-makers-post-weak-results/#comments Thu, 27 Oct 2011 18:30:49 +0000 Lorraine Luk http://allthingsd.com/?p=137435 Asian chip makers Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co., Hynix Semiconductor Inc. and Elpida Memory Inc. posted weak results on Thursday for the quarter ended Sept. 30 and some flagged that demand for chips will remain soft in coming months, highlighting how major component makers are suffering from slowing economies in Europe and the U.S.

TSMC, considered a bellwether for its client base, which includes U.S. technology companies Qualcomm Inc. and Nvidia Corp., reduced its capital-spending budget for the second time this year, citing deteriorating market conditions in a further sign of difficult times for chip makers. TSMC now expects its capital spending for this year to be $7.3 billion, down from $7.4 billion. The contract chip maker also trimmed its 2011 revenue growth target in U.S. dollar terms by half, after posting a worse-than-expected 35 percent decline in net profit for the third quarter.

Read the rest of this post on the original site »

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20111027/chip-makers-post-weak-results/feed/ 0 Jen-Hsun Huang: Highlights From AsiaD (Video) http://allthingsd.com/20111021/jen-hsun-huang-highlights-from-asiad-video/ http://allthingsd.com/20111021/jen-hsun-huang-highlights-from-asiad-video/#comments Fri, 21 Oct 2011 10:11:22 +0000 John Paczkowski http://allthingsd.com/?p=135382 Nvidia president and CEO Jen-Hsun Huang joined All Things Digital’s Walt Mossberg on the AsiaD stage today to talk about processors for post-PC devices and the Tegra 2, the world’s first dual-core graphics processor. Below, video highlights from the session:


[ See post to watch video ]

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20111021/jen-hsun-huang-highlights-from-asiad-video/feed/ 0 Nvidia's Jen-Hsun Huang Talks Quad-Core and Windows 8 at AsiaD http://allthingsd.com/20111020/nvidias-jen-hsun-huang-live-at-asiad/ http://allthingsd.com/20111020/nvidias-jen-hsun-huang-live-at-asiad/#comments Fri, 21 Oct 2011 04:09:24 +0000 Peter Kafka http://allthingsd.com/?p=135199 An early pioneer in graphics chips, Nvidia now finds its processors at the heart of smartphones, tablets and, soon, PCs.

Overseeing the expansion is the company’s dynamic leader Jen-Hsun Huang, who sees his chips going ever faster and in more places. Next up for the company is a quad-core chip code named Kal-El.

Welcome to the last session of AsiaD. Here’s Jen-Hsun Huang.

Walt: Al Gore talked for a long time. Anyway: You pivoted into processors for “post-PC devices.” How many devices are your chips in now?

Huang: We’re in about 70 percent of non-iPad tablets. Thirteen models of phones (?) around the world.

Walt: Who are your competitiors?

Huang: Qualcomm is a direct competitor. We started out as a graphics company, and evolved from serving gamers, designers, etc.

And we tried to grow initially by growing into the basic PC market by integrating chipsets. That didn’t work out for me, because “going toe-to-toe with Intel is not a good idea.” So now we’re trying increase the usefulness of GPUs in different products.

12:13 pm: Walt: Now the GPU for many PCs is more powerful and complicated than CPU, right?

Huang: Yep. And they can do lots of stuff now: Computer graphics, image processing. Stuff like what Lytro is doing with their camera.

And the second part of the strategy was backing away from the chipset business, and investing in mobile computing. Back to competitors: Qualcomm is direct. Apple is an indirect competitor.

We partner with device makers, so in a lot of ways I’ve adopted their competition.

12:16 pm: Walt: So what’s new?

Huang: When we first got into mobile, I started talking to the cellphone companies and telling them mobile devices would become a computer. And the iPhone proved that and woke people up. So our perspective is that these devices would be “rich computers — quite powerful computers” and that graphics would play an important role.

So we built the world’s first dual-core graphics processor, the Tegra 2, and that’s what we’re shipping today. And now we’re working on our first quad-core processor, Tegra 3, which is really going to be called Kal-El. Huang notes that Kal-El is Superman’s name, and that the rest of the product lineup is also based on comics: “Wayne” for Batman, etc.

Anyway: Getting performance is the easy part. The challenging part is delivering that performance with low power, and better and better efficiency. The low-power core with Kal-El is 20x “less hungry” for energy.

Second invention: Use the image-processing technique to look at the color content of an image. That allows us to save a ton of power that way.

It allows us to sort of “cheat” on colors and use similar colors, with different lighting — the human eye can’t tell.

12:24 pm: Walt: Aren’t your competitors doing quad-cores as well, and trying to reduce power, too?

Huang: Sure. “Our challenge is to create something surprising every generation … we’ll have to come up with something magical or something surprising every generation.”

Walt: Is it a disadvantage for Apple to design its own chips?

Huang: Apple’s Bob Mansfield is really good at chip design. Also, we sell them chips for their PCs.

Anyway, there are a lot of good reasons to build your own chips — they can control the vertical stack, and they might have good insights on bringing stuff to market, and not sharing that with third-party competitors is a fine idea. But R&D costs will go up — I’ve already spent $2 billion on Tegra. So it may become more difficult for companies to build for lots of different segments.

“There might come a time when it becomes important to buy some or build some. We’ll see.”

Walt: “And they know your number.”

Q&A

Q: Please talk about [something, sorry, didn't catch it]

Huang: We started completely focused on mobile phones. That was Tegra 2. Then we tweaked that for the tablet market. Now we’re clear that ARM is going to be a large ecosystem. It’s possible for us to extend that beyond phones to tablets and clamshells. Most likely Windows on ARM.

[Apologies. Really can't follow any of this]

Q: You talked about building processors for phones or tablets. Do you think tablet-specific processors are really coming?

A: There’s not enough volume with 60 million tablets to build tablet-specific chips. But you can imagine building a processor where some versions are perfect for tablets, and other versions are perfect for high-end smartphones. That’s how you can make the economics work.

Q: (Hey, it’s Joanna Stern!)

[Sorry, couldn't follow this question, either]

Huang is advising Microsoft to come out with tablets first, for Windows-on-ARMs, to establish that “these are not PCs.”

If Office could run on Windows-on-ARMs “that would be the killer app.”

And we’re done. Thanks for joining us in Hong Kong, all.

Jen-Hsun Huang Session Photos

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