Mark Gilbert’s Blog

Well at this present point in time I would say that’s unlikely, but in the future, well who knows. Nvidia CEO Jen-Hsun Huang called Intel’s integrated graphics offerings “a joke”, which may be true from a certain perspective. From another angle though Intel have done a pretty good job so far of sewing up the laptop graphics market, only a few niche items really contain Nvidia or AMD chips, the integrated graphics on desktops shows a similar picture too. Surely however when it comes in discrete graphics cards and chips Nvidia is top dog? Well yes, currently, although that may soon change and I’ll tell you why, Intel’s Larrabee graphics chips.

Intel intend to take a new approach to graphics, with the Larrabee chips being based off the x86 instruction set like most CPUs rather than custom graphics oriented instruction sets like most current GPUs. Intel senior vice president Pat Gelsinger said at the Intel Developer Forum last week in Shanghai,

“First, graphics that we have all come to know and love today, I have news for you. It’s coming to an end. Our multi-decade old 3D graphics rendering architecture that’s based on a rasterization approach is no longer scalable and suitable for the demands of the future.”

Early schematics for the chips suggest they are have 16 cores capable of operating in excess of 2GHz, but the number of cores can easily scale up to the thousands. This high number of general purpose cores fites very nicely with Intel’s current Tera-Scale project. The vision of computing and architecture that Intel sees in the future seems to consist of a high number of general purpose cores, which can be used for different tasks and reallocated on demand. For example instead of having a dual core CPU and a dual core GPU, Intel envisage a quad core general purpose chip that performs the tasks of both. Not running a game? Then all four cores can be dedicated to general processing tasks. Doing a lot of 3D rendering? Well more cores can be dedicated to the graphics processing. Work from that basis and scale up, which Intel is already doing, as they have demonstrated a prototype 80 core chip that can perform 1 TeraFLOP, hence the name of the project, while still exhibiting a TDP of 62W. In comparison the first system to achieve 1 TeraFLOP was ASCI Red. It achieved this in 1996 and used nearly 10,000 Pentium Pro processors running at 200MHz and consumed 500kW of power plus an additional 500kW just to cool the room that housed the beast.

I think it is this that Nvidia are really worried about. Not that Intel will develop a better Discrete GPU than them, because that would take a lot of effort, but more that their role purely as a manufacturer of discrete GPUs will become more and more marginalised over time.

Huang was quoted as saying that

“if Intel manages increase graphics performance by ten times by 2010, that’s barely up to par with current Nvidia offerings”

Although with Nvidia spending $1 Billion on R&D and Intel spending $6 Billion on R&D, Intel may be able to do just that and more.

Personally I think the Intel approach will win out, multi-cored, multi-purpose chips seems like the way forward to me.

Cheers

The EU Competition Commission have conducted anti-trust raids against both Intel and large retailers in Germany and the UK. Intel’s Munich offices were raided on Tuesday and German retailer Media Markt-Saturn and UK retailers DSGi plc.

This comes not long before Intel has to answer to charges alleging that it abused its dominance of the market for processors. Jonathan Todd, a EU Commission lackey spokesman was quoted as saying,

“Commission officials carried out unannounced inspections at the premises of a manufacturer of central processing units and a number of personal computer retailers (believing they) may have violated EC Treaty rules on restrictive business practices and/or abuse of a dominant market position.”

The Commission has powers to fine companies up to 10 percent of their worldwide annual revenue if they are found to have committed competition abuses.

Cheers

Sadly as people may know I was a little slack on posting at times this year. I enjoyed writing my 2005 tech review, hopefully people enjoyed reading it, but when 2006 came round there was simply nothing posted. I didn’t write anything. In hindsight this was a mistake, so this year I have decided I will write a tech review, and so without any further ado, here is my 2007 tech review;

10. Windows Vista
Ooh controversial. Does Windows Vista deserve to be on here? Some will say yes, some will say no, but the fact that Microsoft managed to finally get such a large project out of the door is an achievement in itself. Although my most anticipated feature was sadly missing Vista is in most respects a step forward from Windows XP. Yes it runs slower, but then it has many more security features in place than XP. A lot of software is yet to support it, but from the bigger development houses you want to look at who’s to blame. The big boys with top MSDN accounts have had access to Vista builds for well over a year before launch and so have no excuse. While now most software is compatible only a small few developers are still whining on about their difficulties in getting their software to work.
Undoubtably Vista is the way forward, people like Dell may be offering XP as a BTO option but for how much longer? Microsoft can pull the plug on that whenever they want to, so as the saying goes, ‘Get with the program’

9. 21CN
BT’s 21CN simply stands for 21st Century Network, and that pretty well sums up what it is. With their grand plan, they are moving the UK’s old Public Switched Telephone Network based on a digital rework of old analogue technologies, over to a VoIP solution. 21CN will allow BT to completely revamp the services they offer both businesses and home users. Many larger businesses already use VoIP systems internally and the move to an IP based transit system instead of the traditional PSTN will make the whole implementation easier.
This whole project will cost BT £10 billion in capital expenditure over the next 5 years, but should set all of the UK up for faster broadband and pave the way for many more IP based services.

8. CentOS
Taking the RedHat source code, removing all the branding throw in a little love, recompile and distribute a free binary compatible RHEL clone. Sounds nice? Well it is, the CentOS guys have been doing this for quite some time now, but only recently receiving recognition for their efforts with some web hosts staring to offer CentOS on their dedicated servers as an option. I have played with CentOS and it’s a lovely distro, I have plans to use it on some servers sometime next year, and I chose it because I want RHE, but without paying for the branding and support contract.

7. Ubuntu
In 2007 Ubuntu really has gone from strength to strength and marked itself out as the Linux distro of choice for the desktop. Built in WPA detection, native NTFS read and write support, and includes Compiz and Beryl for all of you whole like your eye candy. I have used Ubuntu and it is incredibly easy to get to grips with.
As a brand Ubuntu has almost become synonymous with desktop Linux and the fact that they will send you discs to pass onto your mates isn’t half bad either. With Dell now giving its customers the option to have Ubuntu preinstalled on some of their systems I see only bigger and better things for Ubuntu in 2008.

6. Intel Quad Core
2007 was the year that Intel’s ‘Core’ chips finally completely destroyed the competition. AMD released the rather pathetic Barcelona to try to gain some point back but was met with underwhelming reviews. Having used a Core 2 Duo for the last year on my iMac I can say with certainty that Intel have the formula for success at hand, so slapping two Core 2 Duo cores together must be a step in the right direction. The thermal envelopes for the Quad core parts is generally lower than the old P4 chips, as show here and here.
With AMD’s Phenom nowhere to be seen and Intel’s quad core parts batttering Barcelona on both price and performance fronts, coupled with Intel’s soon to be seen 45nm processes, the future looks bright, and very small.

5. Asus Eee PC
An ultra-portable PC for £215? Madness you say? Not so, the Asus Eee PC tips the scales at only 928g and runs a custom Linux distro. It ships with Firefox and OpenOffice and is a great machine if, like the majority of the world seems to, all you want is a machine to do a few letters on and surf the net. It comes complete with a webcam built in, 802.11g as standard, so really what more do you want? For probably most of my uses of a computer that would be fine, since I seem to spend most of my time either surfing the net or working on documents, it only lacks in the ability to do the other part of my time, gaming and video encoding. Otherwise, it’s a great machine that deserves some great kudos.

4. Windows Home Server
Windows home server seems like one of those technologies that should be a given for Microsoft to produce. A simple yet powerful server product that can run on hardware that is well below the bar as far as current PC performance goes.
Based in Windows Server 2003, WHS makes it very simple to share and control media on both the server and the computers connected to it, as well as monitoring the health of both the network and the connected clients. Storage worries are taken care of by WHS, all RAID configs are handled easily as well as backup of the clients to the server. Microsoft really are spot on the money here, and with vendors like HP taking up the baton and running with WHS, MS are onto a winner here.

3. Google Apps
The buzz goes that Google Apps are MS Office killers. Well I actually agree with the buzz, Google’s Apps are fantastic pieces of work. Google provide most of the functionality that’s found within the Office suite from Microsoft, with Gmail, Google Talk, Google Calendar, Google Docs, Page Creator and Start Page all being included for the rather cheap price of nothing. Gmail, we all know and love, Google talk is based on the jabber IM protocol, Calendar does exactly what it says on the tin, Docs mimics the basic functionality of MS Word, Excel and Powerpoint, page creator is a basic GUI web page editor and start page offers a customisable home page.
All this seems a little much for a free package, but then so did Gmail when it was launched, offering 1Gb of storage while other languished around 10Mb. With Google Apps the whole set is portable, any net connected computer can be used to access the same documents, contacts and events as you would on your office or home PC. Simply put, why spend £250 on MS Office when you can have Google Apps for free and take them with you wherever you go?

2. Apple
Apple, consistently developing new products that seem to attract consumers like moths to a flame. That could be there company mantra, the iPhone has had a phenomenal launch worldwide and seen a large uptake, even though it is locked to one network in each region. 30,000 units sold in 5 days since the French launch, 500,000 unit expected to be sold in Europe by the end of the year, and Millions sold in the US, no one could say the iPhone’s sales have been lackluster. Apple also expect to sell 10 million worldwide next year but some analysts put the figure higher.
Leopard has taken off this year too, with a hell of a lot of people, myself included, queuing up outside and Apple store to buy Leopard. Apple claim 2 million copies sold in 2 days at launch, stick that in your pipe and smoke it Vista. It’s especially good going when you consider Apple estimates that there are only 21 million machines worldwide capable of running Leopard.
On top of all that though the new iPod range is stunning as usual and the new iMacs leave little to be desired, Apple made the right choice with Intel and its a decision which is playing off in spades now.

1. Nintendo Wii
Nintendo really had to steal the show here. At the end of last year they managed to create a product which by all accounts has largely outsold all the competition in such a short space of time as to be staggering. VG Chartz really show the big picture as to how well Nintendo are stomping the competition in terms of sales.
The Wii is something everyone wants to play on, when friends come over we all go on the Wii, no matter how old they are or how young. The selection of games still sadly tends to favour mini-games at the moment but things like Zelda and Mario Galaxy are starting to buck that trend. There are a lot of good things to come for the Wii, a lot of large publishers were caught off guard by just how popular the Wii was going to be and as a result they have been behind in development, but now they’re starting to catch up.
Nintendo has brought gaming to the masses with the Wii and do it all at the right price too, and so for that they take the top place in this review.

I hope you all enjoy reading this piece, please comment as you please on it, I always welcome the discussion.

Cheers

Intel are apparently readying a dual-core Celeron part for release in the first quarter of next year. The E1200 dual-core processor running at 1.60GHz with an 800MHz FSB and come with a small 512Kb of L2 cache. This part will be supplemented further down the line with more chips in the same range.They will likely sell for between £20 and £40 and will add to Intel’s current offerings for low cost desktop systems. These new chips will not mean the end of days for Pentium chips, as they will still serve the top end low cost desktops.If I can get any confirmation on this I most certainly will.

Cheers