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Tuesday, 06 September 2011 21:38

nVidia looking for the mobile market to grow

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News_nvidia_sh2About two years ago, roughly the same time as the ZuneHD hit the market with the first Tegra inside, nVidia CEO Jen-Hsun Huang made a prediction of sorts. He stated that he envisioned a time when the GPU was not the bread and butter of nVidia. Instead he saw the mobile CPU and the SoC (system on chip) as the wave of the future. Of course he could not get away from his graphical legacy, so his vision also included an nVidia GPU (or two) along with the mobile CPU. At the time the press sort of overlooked the story. It was not that news worthy. After all the Tegra only had one well known design win (there were others but many never reached the market) the ZuneHD. Arguably it was (and still is) a great product, it just was marketed VERY poorly and was going head to head with the greatest show on Earth; the Apple marketing team.

Jump forward to today and we find the Tegra and the Tegra 2 in many devices. In fact one of the best-selling Android tablets on the market today has a Tegra 2 dual core SoC inside (for those of you that do not know it is the Galaxy Tab 10.1) this is followed by devices like the Asus EEE Pad Tansformer and others. They really have come a very long way in terms of the smartphone and tablet market.  Of course they still have Apple to contend with (and their legal and marketing teams) so the battle is not won just yet. However, what we are seeing is that Huang’s vision is coming to pass. nVidia just might find itself earning more than 50% of their income from the tiny SoC and not their high-end GPUs.  
Still the road ahead is not completely clear, nVidia will face competition in the form of Qualcom (which just bought BigFoot Networks), as well as Samsung and Even Apple (to a lesser degree) in this new market. As for Intel, Huang says they are not worried about them because the Atom is not an ARM CPU and is not even “speaking the same language”. He feels that the lower cost ARM based tablets will be more attractive to the consumer looking for a small and light system. With the advent of Windows 8 for ARM people will also gain the ability to move back and forth between ARM and x86 keeping things on almost the same platform.  This will help to bring the more “desktop centric” consumers into the fold especially with the prospect of a quad core ARM CPU running Windows 8 on the horizon.

It is when companies have to innovate to survive that some of the coolest things arise. I wonder what we will see from Tegra in near future and what lessons from Tegra will nVidia take to other departments to help improve them?

Source CNET

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692gr-03One of the nice things about the latest generation of the 802.11 wireless specification (802.11n) is that there is a lot of headroom available in it before there is a need to move to a new generation. When 802.11n first hit the market it was limited to around 150Mbps. This was due to quite a few factors, most notable of these was the use of spatial streams (breaking the signal into separate streams and reassembling them in proper order at the far end. Once this was combined with MIMO (Multiple In Multiple Out) things really took off. Now we are hitting the upper edge of the 802.11n spectrum with the 450Mbps routers and adapters. This new line is getting up there and finally pushing the upper limits of what you can do with this latest revision of the 802.11 protocol. We have another one of TRENDNet’s 450Mbps wireless routers in the lab. This time it is the TEW-692GR a 450Mbps concurrent dual band gaming router with a price tag of around $135. So follow along as we find out if this is really worth your time and money.

Sunday, 04 September 2011 20:46

nVidia to go down the External Graphics Road

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nV_LogoIt seems like companies are determined to re-vsit old ideas these days. We see VMWare trying to recreate a wheel that was pioneered by Citrix. Apple is always redoing an old idea and presenting it like it is a new concept and now we see nVidia going down a road that has been traveled more than once before. The road in question is external video devices; not monitors or splitters or anything like that, but we are talking about external video cards. This is something that has been done before and did not go over all that well. I ccan remember when people were buying PCMCIA cards for use with video editing software. These would work for a while, but the cards would often die (and be replaced) or the inconvinience of using this would become so great we would end up building them a desktop system to replace the laptop they had just bought.

Still if the word from Fudzilla is to be believed this is something that nVidia will be producing and they are even excited about the prospect. We think that this will go the same way that AMD's external grpahics has gone. It is a VERY niche product and one that not only has a limited number of partners (Sony) but also has a very limited market vertical. The problem is that most of the markets where this would be desired already have mobile systems with impressive discrete graphics all on there own. If this is reall a direction that nVidia is going down, they will have a rought road ahead.

Source Fudzilla

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Saturday, 03 September 2011 23:32

HP to split WebOS Business Unit

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HP-TouchPad-TabletNot all that long ago we talked about HP’s decision to pretty much kill off its WebOS platform and with it the HP TouchPad. Right after those announcements we saw the HP TouchPad prices drop down to $100 in some cases. There was a rush on them and people ran out to get them. Well now, thanks to precentral.net we are finding out a little more about what HP has in mind. It seems that the WebOS development team is heading to the Office of Strategic Technology while the hardware side gets left with the Personal Systems Group.

Of course these items lead to interesting questions. With WebOS going to the Strategic Technology Office will it end up being licensed out as a product on its own? Will we see the new owners of the TouchPad hardware (and the rest of the Personal Systems Group) buy this software from HP’s core business?

We do have some insight into the whys of this event, but the final outcome of everything is not clear. HP needed to do this to help prevent some liabilities that come from selling both hardware and software (that they own and license). But, what on earth does HP plan to do once this is all over? We know they do not have the moxie to go head to head with IBM (which appears to be who they are modeling themselves after) so why the shift and the drop of the consumer side of their company?

We will continue to see if we can find out some more solid answers than what is available at the moment. If you want to read the documents that appear to say this is going happen click the source link below.

Source precentral.net

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Saturday, 03 September 2011 08:56

Quantum Computing takes a leap forward

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leap1Back in the 1940s there was a technological breakthrough that allowed for the computers that we know today to be born. This was the mating of a computing processor with a memory component to store data on. This simple discovery helped to bring about the PC era.  Now 71 years later the world of quantum computing has had the same breakthrough as a group of University or California scientist managed to combine a quantum processor and memory. For those of you that are not familiar with quantum computing; here is a very simplified explanation. A normal computer has transistors that function in two states on or off these represent 1 and 0 in binary code. The speed of the computer is represented (in very basic terms) by how fast these transistors can switch on and off (and past that information along). In quantum computing each qubit can be both on and off having the data bits of both 1 and 0 present at the same time. This means that you can actually process significantly more information in the same time (and with the same number of computational components).

Now, before you get all excited about dropping this into your next home computer we should tell you that these types of computers are a little pricey. Right now the least expensive one goes for something like $10 million. The reason for this is that a quantum computer is not easy to make. To get true quantum computing you can do a few things (none of which are easy). You can suspend IONs or other Atoms in a magnetic field. You can also use conventional computer circuits made using the less fancy lithographic methods. These have to be cooled to almost absolute zero though (-273.15c sorry phase change guys).  This requires quite a bit of extra power (not to mention space). Once you reduce the temps down to that level then components exhibit new behaviors (called quantum effect) like superconducting. This is what allows the switch to be both on and off at the same time.  Or to put it in more technical terms; at Absolute Zero a system’s kinetic energy reaches zero and all thermal energy vanishes.  This allows the system to reach a zero-point energy state (or the energy of its ground state). It is the thermal energy which causes a lot of the leakage of the traditional circuit in a CPU and prevents it from operating at this superconductivity state. This temperature threshold where the system is too hot to operate efficiently is called entropy. Super cooling reduces the entropy level and allows for faster processing (more current and higher speeds).

Now quantum computing is nothing new, researchers have been doing this for at least the last 10 years. The cool thing about today is that this is the first time that anyone has built a quantum computer that works using the same architectural principal as a modern day computer with the memory linked to the processor. Who know, with the introduction of graphine, nanotubes and more advanced methods of cooling and transmission of power through a circuit we may see advances that start pushing the levels of quantum computing in the next 5-10 years. I wonder how well it will run Crysis (9).

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Friday, 02 September 2011 21:44

Will AT&T Offer a Compromise to the DOJ?

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fingersWell, well, well it looks like the folks at AT&T are going to have a go at settling the Anti-Trust suit brought by the DOJ. Originally some statements from the Telecommunications giant had indicated they would fight this in court. Now it according to a report from Reuters they are looking for a compromise that will allow the deal to go through without the need to bother any judges. This would seem to indicate that the deal is a bit shady in the first place, despite AT&T’s claims to the contrary.

But what kind of compromise would AT&T need to make to get this merger deal through? We know that T-Mobile does not care one way or the other. In fact they have a rather healthy failed merger clause that gives them a nice chunk of money in the event it is blocked. So the internet and the press begin to speculate and analyst put in their two cents. Right now there are rumors that AT&T will agree to sell off 25% of T-Mobile to its competitors. It will also probably agree to maintain the pricing and plan structure that T-Mobile has (for a predetermined period of time). These all sound good on the surface, but they hardly address the core argument in the suit. You see the DOJ put it very bluntly; if AT&T and T-Mobile merge it will reduce the competitive market by 25% and put the GSM Market firmly in AT&T’s hands.

This is something that is absolutely not in the interest of consumers, but then again most business dealings are not. AT&T is in a rough position, with the loss of the iPhone to Verizon and the possibility that Sprint will get the iPhone5 later this year AT&T no longer has a truly big seller and the fact that they banked on the iPhone instead of working on 4G put them behind their competitors. Now they have to act or they will fall even farther behind. Instead of investing in rebuilding their aging network they want to buy up one that is working towards modernization and pickup quite a few customers in the mix.

For now it is all in the hands of the Federal Regulators and perhaps even judges as this merger moves towards its fate; whatever that is

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Friday, 02 September 2011 19:45

Did Apple Investigators Pose as Police?

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73A man in Bernal Heights might have had his home searched by Apple Employees who were masquerading as police. According to SFWeekly Sergio Calderón is the person whose home was searched. Calderón’s story, if true, is extremely concerning and raises questions about what Apple will do to get its way.

Calderón says that in July six people (four men and two women) wearing badges showed up at his door saying they were from the San Francisco Police Department. The “Police” claimed they had traced the phone to Calderón’s home via GPS and also asked him if he had been to Cava 22 (the site where the phone was believed to have been lost).

Apparently the “police” also threatened to call INS on Calderón’s family (even though Calderón is an American Citizen and his visiting family members are all here legally). One of the investigators even offered a $300 reward for the return of the phone (which Calderón says he knows nothing about). The thing that makes things even more odd about this story is that one of the “police” who called himself Tony gave Calderón a plain card with a phone number on it. Calderón gave this number to SFWeekly who called it and found that it was a phone number to Apple. This number was answered by a man named Anthony Colon who is currently employed by Apple and a Senior Investigator.

As the plot thickens the SFPD first said they had no knowledge of any search at that location, but now are saying they did assist Apple in searching a house in July.

SFWeekly has more information including the linked-in and facebook pages for “Tony”. This one will be interesting to follow up on, if Apple really did misrepresent themselves it is very concerning as it shows they are willing to stop at nothing to get what they want (regardless of what laws they break). Plus when you add this to the falsified evidence Apple presented in the EU we have to wonder about how concerned they are with the consumer…

Source SFWeekly

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Thursday, 01 September 2011 20:54

DOJ files Anti-Trust suit over AT&T TMobile merger

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ATTAlthough the news of this broke a couple of days ago we thought we would wait and take a deeper look at what the recent DOJ (Department of Justice) Anti-Trust suit means to the AT&T/T-Mobile merger. First and foremost the DOJ does not have the authority to prevent business mergers nor does the Federal Trade Commission. These two governmental bodies can enforce certain laws if someone files a complaint, but they cannot take direct action in most cases.

However, when the companies merging are very large (like AT&T) or there is direct evidence that the merger will harm consumers or the market, then they can step in and file an Anti-Trust lawsuit to force the companies in question to change things. This is what has happened with the AT&T/T-Mobile merger.
The DOJ looked at the claims that AT&T has made and found that some of them just did not make any sense.

AT&T is claiming that the only way they can improve their network is by acquiring T-Mobile. The biggest problem with that is once they do they will have cornered the market on GSM Cellular service in the US. This is something that is certainly not good for consumers (although AT&T claims it is). It is also important to note that AT&T and T-Mobile compete in over 90 out of 100 markets making the deal a big relief for AT&T as far as competition goes.

The sad part is that even though there is a law suit filed it does not mean the deal is dead. AT&T now has the chance to reorganize the deal and present it to Federal Regulators or they can go to court and prove to a judge that the deal really is in the best interest of the consumer. Considering the level of understanding that many of our higher judicial officials have on what is good for the consumer this could be an easy win for AT&T.  We will keep you up to date on this as we find out more.

Read the full suit here

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Thursday, 01 September 2011 19:05

Starz Stops Negotiations with Netflix

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NertflixIn what has to be rather big blow to Netflix Starz has ceased contract negotiations with Netflix. This means that once the contract expires in February 2012 there will be no more Starz movies streaming on Netflix. Although this is certainly not a death toll for Netflix it is not good at all. Starz has rights to both Disney and Sony content which makes their contribution somewhat large to the Netflix catalog.

As you can imagine the issue is the amount of money that is changing hands over the deal. Although the exact amount is not known to anyone other than Starz and Netflix there are some estimates that put the amount at around $300 Million to renew for the next four years.  This is an amount that Netflix just cannot afford to pay.
As we mentioned above this does not mean the death of Netflix, it only means that they will have to come to some sort of compromise. As both Netflix and Starz need each other we are sure this will happen but the exact details of this (or any) compromise is guess work. We would suspect a reduced number in return for more restrictive content rules. This would be similar to when Starz pull their Sony content because Netflix had reached the total number of views for those titles.

The Netflix of next year might not be the same as what we were seeing even last month. If the content dries up they will not be able to justify the price increases and they will lose customers. Conversely if they pay the higher amount to keep the content and raise their prices more they will lose customers that do not want to pay that high of a price for a streaming service. To put it bluntly Netflix is between a rock and a hard place…

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Wednesday, 31 August 2011 22:33

Does anyone really know what AMD is doing next?

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230HP-Bulldozer-MD23There is a ton of contradictory information on the net today about just exactly what AMD and Globalfoundries are going to do with the next process. As we already know AMD’s next gen CPU Bulldozer will be a 32nm 8-core monster that has the potential to turn things around for AMD (at least on paper) that is if they can correct some of the past issues with memory performance.  What happens from there we are not so certain about, nor is anyone else for that matter. This is despite the fact that multiple journalists ended up at a press event hosted by Globalfoundries.

So far the rumors run something like this; AMD and Globalfoundries are moving away from SOI (Silicon on Insulator). SOI has been the basis for AMD CPUs for some time and to see them move away from this is a little shocking. Oh, wait; that rumor was contradicted by Globalfoundries who now say they will be sticking with SOI moving forward. Next we hear that AMD won’t move to the next node (28nm) until 2013. This is actually somewhat believable as AMD tends to try and get the most money out of any process move. After all they have been on 45nm for a number of years! To think they won’t move to the next process node until 2013 is not unreasonable (although I really think 22nm is much more likely).

To add to this are the usual suspects commenting back and forth about what they think of each article or the writer in general. It makes trying to find out real information a tad tedious.  To be honest about the only thing we know for certain is that AMD will launch Bulldozer sometime between the middle of September and the end of the Year. It will have 8 physical cores (in four CPU clusters) improved core to core communication and a few other tricks up its sleeve. We do not know much about the memory controller, but it appears from looking at the design to be a slightly modified revision of the one in the Phenom II. If this is the case and the optimizations are not spot on we could see this hinder what is certainly a bold CPU design from AMD. I guess we will all find out what is going on around the middle of September. We hope to be on the very short list of sites to review this new CPU for you, but again time will tell on that.

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