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

HP is poised to buy BT’s data centres off them in a deal reportedly worth £1.5 Billion. This deal would see BT offload it’ 40 data centres to HP according to the Sunday Times. BT would still have access to the centres under a 10 year deal which would also see BT’s management of HP’s voice and data networks extend worldwide.

The companies already have an outsourcing deal worth $1.5 Billion that was forged in 2004, including worker swaps. Now the ties between the two companies are getting tighter this will bring increased speculation of a merger of the pair. Obviously both companies are playing down this prospect the Sunday Times reports.

BT were unable to comment on the possible tie-up, but HP have said

If there are developments relating to the alliance between British Telecom and HP we will inform you through our usual channels.

Both companies will announce their latest financial results this Thursday, with BT’s announcement being the last for departing CEO Ben Verwaayen. Obvious benefits of an announcement being made now is that Verwaayen could leave the companies shareholders with a large pile of cash, courtesy of HP while making BT’s new developed services division more robust and profitable while HP on the other hand would be able to tout the massive deal to their shareholders.

As said previously both companies are playing the rumour down, but then they would, wouldn’t they?

Cheers

Well, that time of year came round where I have to decide on what new phone to get. Not being the sort of person to rush into a technology purchase uninformed I spend a lot of time debating and comparing all the options before finally making a decision. Seriously I will most likely give less thought to my child’s name than phones and other such tech things. I finally decided on the Nokia N95 and toddled off to the T-Mobile shop to get it. Except since I’m on a discount contract through my old job I cant have the N95, so on a whim I decided the N73 would probably suffice too, and went for that, horray hours of work down the drain.

As it turns out however things are not all bad. The N73 is actually a pretty good phone, it’s a smart phone, which is lovely, but not a big silly “look at me with my smart phone and touch screen, I have to use a stylus to control it but that doesn’t matter because it makes me look like an important cock”, but a subtle “yeah, I’ve got a smart phone, what of it?”

It’s a standard Symbian S60v3 affair, which fairly well apes the usual mobile phone interface. In most respects on initial glances it looks like my old Nokia 6280. However when you dive into the phone itself it becomes apparent that this is not normal phone. From the inclusion of PDF readers and office document viewers, to a flash viewer for the web it’s clear that this phone can do a lot more than just calls and texts. The real power comes from being able to install other applications on it though. For example, for some strange reason Nokia left out an auto keylock funciton. No worries, someone has coded one for you. Want Google Maps? Just install the application from Google’s website and you then have a local Google map client which can use your mobile masts to triangulate your location on the map. Throw in with that things like the Opera browser, and even Doom, not some cut down version of Doom either, a Symbian 60 application running the original Doom wad files. Throw into the mix a native Gmail client, an internet radio client produced by nokia and you have a very nice starting point for a great phone.

The camera is nice and take a good photo, with the usual amount of shutter lag, but that is only in the order of what I’m used to from previous phones. the flash is bright and the zoom good, combine that with the Carl Zeiss optics and it’s a very good handy snapper. Of course it will never have the clarity of my Canon Ixus 50 but it’s very good for when I’m caught short without a camera.

Now the negatives, it does go through battery fairly fast, it needs charging about every 48 hours. I have heard people say that smart phones have been prone to crash, well mine has not crashed once, so I’m happy on that front. Some people have commented that smart phones are slow and clunky, well I will admit it is a little slower than some other phones I’ve used, but not by much. Besides, if you want a phone that never crashes and is lightening fast get a Nokia 1200, bloody luddites, I’m sticking with my N73.

Cheers

As we all know, Blu-Ray has fairly well won the HD DVD wars. It was included in the PS3 console which massivly increased it’s user base. I think it would be interesting to see figures breaking down Blu_ray player sales into PS3 sales and standalone player sales. This would give a clearer insight into how much of a part the PS3 has played in this battle.

The other question that goes round my head is this, “would the outcome of this battle been different if Microsoft had included HD-DVD players in the Xbox 360?” Perhaps not the basic versions, but the Elite versions only. I feel this should have happened and it may have been an oversight on Microsoft’s part not to. I understand the logic behind not oncluding HD-DVD drives in the 360, MS did not want to be seen as having a dead weight round it’ neck if HD-DVD lost, but that may have become a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Cheers

Reuters is reporting that Toshiba is giving up on the HD-DVD format and admitting defeat to Blu-Ray. Toshiba’s share price rose 5% on the enws with investors happy that Toshiba have decided to cut it’s losses after a last ditch price cut was unable to prevent Wal-Mart putting all it’s eggs in the Blu-Ray basket.

A Toshiba source who asked not to be named said

We have entered the final stage of planning to make our exit from the next generation DVD business,

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

Two updates in the film arena today. First off Apple have announced that starting today if you’re Living in America (boo) you can now rent full films. Every major studio going ha signed with Apple, including Touchstone, Miramax, MGM, Lionsgate, Newline, Fox, Warner Brothers, Disney, Paramount, Universal, and Sony.

30 days after a DVD is released it will appear in the iTunes store and will cost $3.99 for new films and $2.99 for archive titles.
Current HD releases will start at $4.99 with archive titles at £3.99.
All types of title will stream over the net so you can start watching straight away, and UK support will be coming later this year.

To go with all this Apple have also announced an update for AppleTV, this will bring HD support and full Dolby 5.1 surround, along with the ability to buy films directly from the AppleTV interface without a computer required.
The update will be released in a few weeks and will add the support to all existing AppleTV units.

Cheers

The next big announcement at Macworld 2008 is the new Time Capsule. In basic terms it is an Airport Base Station with what Apple refer to as a server grade hard drive inside to do Time Machine backups. It comes in two different capacities, 500Gb and 1Tb obviously you want the 1Tb version, Time Machine backups can be quite large.

This is something that users had been crying out for since Time Machine was introduced in OS X Leopard, however support for backing up to Airport connected drives was apparently removed, and now we know why.

Cheers

Well once again Macworld here and brought with it a whole host of new goodies.

First off the Macbook Air. Essentially a thinner version of the existing Macbook, but ohmygodhaveyouseenit? It is simply stunning. The features are as follows;

• 13.3″ widescreen backlit LED display
• Backlit keyboard with ambient light sensor
• 80Gb HDD as standard, upgradable to a 64Gb solid state drive
• 2Gb RAM
• 1.6 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo as standard with the 1.8 GHz upgrade option
• 802.11n
• 5 Hours of battery life

Things to note are no optical drive comes with the machine, but then at just 0.76″ at it’s thickest down to 0.13″ at the thinest it’s sort of expected, and when you realise it weighs just 1.36KGs it really is a very good prospect.

Cheers

Chinese PC manufacturer Lenova has decided to dump the IBM brand name and logo two years ahead of schedule. It’s been three years since Lenovo bought Big Blue’s PC division and they have used the IBM name on their Think range of products. However Lenovo sales rose 20% to $4.4 billion in the third quarter of 2007 when compared to last year and profits surged 178% to $105 million.

Lenovo boss, William Amelio suggests this is a sign of the progress the company has made in the PC market.

Personally I like Lenovo products, they’re well built with some really fantastic features such as the Think Vantage range of technologies and services.

Cheers

Hard drive manufacturer Seagate have offered customer who bought their drives in the last 6 years a cash refund or free backup software. This comes in light of a lawsuit which they have settled in relation to hard drives coming with 7% less capacity then promised. Seagate use a decimal definition of a gigbyte, where 1GB equals 1 billion bytes, however computer operating systems instead report hard drive capacity using a binary definition of GB, where 1GB equals 1, 073, 741, 824 bytes. This was found by the court to be misleading and so Seagate have been ordered to pay back 5% of the total cost of the drive to consumers.This applies to anyone who bought a drive between March 22nd 2001 and September 26th 2007, although those who bought drives between January 1st 2006 and September 26th 2007 will only get free backup and recovery software instead of the money. To qualify the drive must have been bought in the U.S. and not be a drive bundled with other hardware or devices. You will need proof of purchase to fill in the online claims form and a seperate form must be filled for each drive you wish to claim for.This comes to you from Computer World.Cheers

Zen Internet, my ISP of choice BTW, has revealed a possible fault with the Texas Instruments AR7 chip. This chips is used by many router brands, with some estimates putting it’s usage at around 33% of all routers worldwide including Linksys and Netgear.

Zen have advised their customers not to buy routers containing this chip as unstable connections have been seen. In cases when BT have been called out to test lines, they use a Speedtouch based device, which has no problems and therefore BT determine that the line is ok. This leave the customer with the call out bill of £169 and still with no resolution on the problem.

“We’re not saying there’s definitely a problem [with the AR7 itself], but it does seem to be a common factor.”

That was the official line from Zen, and they went on to add that the problem seems to occur on lines with varying Signal-to-Noise Ratios. Varying SNR levels can be caused by electrical interference, or old wires as a result of our aged telephone infrastructure.

Infineon who recently acquired Texas Instruments DSL manufacturing business insist the chip is fine and that they are aware of no problems with this particular chip.

Kudos to Zen for reporting this potential problem, and for those who are concerned there is a list of routers which contain the chip at Wikipedia

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

Sandisk have announced 64Gb flash based drives in both 2.5″ and 1.8″ flavours. The drives are not in production yet and wont be until the end of the year, and as usual Sandisk gave no indication of price. Needless to say they will be pricey, but the cost will fall over time, just like magnetic media.Whether they offer any real performance gains over standard hard drives remains to be seen, but as they only consume 0.5W and 1.0W for the 1.8″ and 2.5″ drive respectively, compared to 1.9W for a standard hard drive, notebook users should see some increase in battery life.I would like one of these in my laptop, just for the nerd points.Cheers

Rumour has it that the end could be nigh for Apple’s diminutive headless machine. The rumour mill is churning thick and fast on the back of an Apple Insider article slating the Mini for becoming only a memory very soon.

I have owned two Mac Minis in my time and both were very good, it was the original G4 Mini which brought me over from Windows. I simply bought one as an experiment to see what they were like, and I’ve never looked back since.

Cheers

Currently it would appear that the 8-core Mac Pro is only available in the US since I could find no reference to it on the Apple UK site. Still the machine is an absolute monster. Boasting two quad core Intel Clovertown chips it really is a monster of a workstation.

to quote Apple, “Consider the bar officially raised”

Cheers

The title makes Google sound like an eccentric evil genius from a cartoon, harnessing the power of the sun itself to enslave mankind. Alas, nothing quite as dramatic, they have installed a large number of solar panels though, 9,212 to be exact, covering the entire roof of the Googleplex and then some. They produce a total of 1.6MW at peak output which is enough to cover 30% of Google’s peak power demand.

In order to install more panels they even covered parking areas to both cool cars and to generate yet more power. Google’s Anthony Ravitz explained that in 7.5 years they will have earned their investment back and after that will have inexpensive power for years to come.

This is a perfect example of corporate and environmental concerns acting as one. Google did mention that this was coming on their blog back in October 2006. Ars has the full story today though.

Cheers

I must admit that I have been slack recently with regards to writing for my blog. I am the first to admit this, and so I decided to have a flick trhough my RSS feeds and clear the backlog of unread items. Slightly over 1000 for those who are interested was the number I read through.

Anyway, the point is I saw two reviews of valve amps for iPods. One over at Ars and the other on Reg Hardware. The Reg one is for the Fatman iTube 182, which I was well aware of and have lusted after for quite some time, for reasons which should be apparent when you look at the picture below.

Just imagine the conversation;

“Darling can we have some music on?”
“Yes of course dear, wait on a while and I’ll just get the valves warmed up.”

Fantastic.

The second was an amp I hadn’t heard of, the Roth Audio MC4 Music Cocoon. It looks fantastic, and comes with a fantastic price, $769. This, however simply falls into insignificance when compared to some of Fatman’s other iPod amps. For example the Fatman iTube 402, coming in at a princely £1399.

These amps really do look extraordinary and I would love one, but I can’t justify spending that much money on an amp. However, my birthday is coming up, anonymous gifts are always welcome.

Cheers

Rumours are going around that Dell, the maker of dull black boxes could soon buy Acer, another maker of dull black boxes. This comes from the Wall Street’s Sanford Bernstein analyst Toni Sacconaghi and puts the price at about $4bn. This would give Dell access to Acer’s alrge indirect sales channels, while continuing to use their direct dealings to further increase market share.

This doesn’t seem too far fetched as rumours go, Dell’s sales did slow for 2005 and 2006 and so this could be the answer to their problems, although it does kind of go against their mantra of direct is best.

Cheers

I have no idea how this slipped under my radar, maybe I was sat with ym eyes closed and my fingers in my ears. Anyway, courtesy of The Register comes the news that some TomTom Go 910 units shipped with trojan horse viruses on their hard drives. TomTom put out a statement regarding the issue to the tune of

Isolated number of TomTom GO 910’s may be infected with a virus
A small, isolated number of TomTom GO 910’s, produced in one week in the last quarter of 2006, may be infected with a virus. The virus is qualified as low risk and does not affect the navigation performance of the TomTom GO 910 in any way.

The virus can be removed safely with virus scanning software, also free ware like, Trend Micro’s “Housecall” or Kaspersky.
Appropriate actions have been taken to make sure this is prevented from happening again in the future.

Well well well. It would appear that shipping viruses on devices isn’t solely the domain of Apple

Oh well, I’m pleased I use a Mac for my TomTom and iPod related activities.

Cheers