Here is my collection of trends and predictions for year 2014:
It seems that PC market is not recovering in 2014. IDC is forecasting that the technology channel will buy in around 34 million fewer PCs this year than last. It seem that things aren’t going to improve any time soon (down, down, down until 2017?). There will be no let-up on any front, with desktops and portables predicted to decline in both the mature and emerging markets. Perhaps the chief concern for future PC demand is a lack of reasons to replace an older system: PC usage has not moved significantly beyond consumption and productivity tasks to differentiate PCs from other devices. As a result, PC lifespan continue to increase. Death of the Desktop article says that sadly for the traditional desktop, this is only a matter of time before its purpose expires and that it would be inevitable it will happen within this decade. (I expect that it will not completely disappear).
When the PC business is slowly decreasing, smartphone and table business will increase quickly. Some time in the next six months, the number of smartphones on earth will pass the number of PCs. This shouldn’t really surprise anyone: the mobile business is much bigger than the computer industry. There are now perhaps 3.5-4 billion mobile phones, replaced every two years, versus 1.7-1.8 billion PCs replaced every 5 years. Smartphones broke down that wall between those industries few years ago – suddenly tech companies could sell to an industry with $1.2 trillion annual revenue. Now you can sell more phones in a quarter than the PC industry sells in a year.
After some years we will end up with somewhere over 3bn smartphones in use on earth, almost double the number of PCs. There are perhaps 900m consumer PCs on earth, and maybe 800m corporate PCs. The consumer PCs are mostly shared and the corporate PCs locked down, and neither are really mobile. Those 3 billion smartphones will all be personal, and all mobile. Mobile browsing is set to overtake traditional desktop browsing in 2015. The smartphone revolution is changing how consumers use the Internet. This will influence web design.
The only PC sector that seems to have some growth is server side. Microservers & Cloud Computing to Drive Server Growth article says that increased demand for cloud computing and high-density microserver systems has brought the server market back from a state of decline. We’re seeing fairly significant change in the server market. According to the 2014 IC Market Drivers report, server unit shipment growth will increase in the next several years, thanks to purchases of new, cheaper microservers. The total server IC market is projected to rise by 3% in 2014 to $14.4 billion: multicore MPU segment for microservers and NAND flash memories for solid state drives are expected to see better numbers.
Spinning rust and tape are DEAD. The future’s flash, cache and cloud article tells that the flash is the tier for primary data; the stuff christened tier 0. Data that needs to be written out to a slower response store goes across a local network link to a cloud storage gateway and that holds the tier 1 nearline data in its cache. Never mind software-defined HYPE, 2014 will be the year of storage FRANKENPLIANCES article tells that more hype around Software-Defined-Everything will keep the marketeers and the marchitecture specialists well employed for the next twelve months but don’t expect anything radical. The only innovation is going to be around pricing and consumption models as vendors try to maintain margins. FCoE will continue to be a side-show and FC, like tape, will soldier on happily. NAS will continue to eat away at the block storage market and perhaps 2014 will be the year that object storage finally takes off.
IT managers are increasingly replacing servers with SaaS article says that cloud providers take on a bigger share of the servers as overall market starts declining. An in-house system is no longer the default for many companies. IT managers want to cut the number of servers they manage, or at least slow the growth, and they may be succeeding. IDC expects that anywhere from 25% to 30% of all the servers shipped next year will be delivered to cloud services providers. In three years, 2017, nearly 45% of all the servers leaving manufacturers will be bought by cloud providers. The shift will slow the purchase of server sales to enterprise IT. Big cloud providers are more and more using their own designs instead of servers from big manufacturers. Data center consolidations are eliminating servers as well. For sure, IT managers are going to be managing physical servers for years to come. But, the number will be declining.
I hope that the IT business will start to grow this year as predicted. Information technology spends to increase next financial year according to N Chandrasekaran, chief executive and managing director of Tata Consultancy Services (TCS), India’s largest information technology (IT) services company. IDC predicts that IT consumption will increase next year to 5 per cent worldwide to $ 2.14 trillion. It is expected that the biggest opportunity will lie in the digital space: social, mobility, cloud and analytics. The gradual recovery of the economy in Europe will restore faith in business. Companies are re-imaging their business, keeping in mind changing digital trends.
The death of Windows XP will be on the new many times on the spring. There will be companies try to cash in with death of Windows XP: Microsoft’s plan for Windows XP support to end next spring, has received IT services providers as well as competitors to invest in their own services marketing. HP is peddling their customers Connected Backup 8.8 service to prevent data loss during migration. VMware is selling cloud desktop service. Google is wooing users to switch to ChromeOS system by making Chrome’s user interface familiar to wider audiences. The most effective way XP exploiting is the European defense giant EADS subsidiary of Arkoon, which promises support for XP users who do not want to or can not upgrade their systems.
There will be talk on what will be coming from Microsoft next year. Microsoft is reportedly planning to launch a series of updates in 2015 that could see major revisions for the Windows, Xbox, and Windows RT platforms. Microsoft’s wave of spring 2015 updates to its various Windows-based platforms has a codename: Threshold. If all goes according to early plans, Threshold will include updates to all three OS platforms (Xbox One, Windows and Windows Phone).
Amateur programmers are becoming increasingly more prevalent in the IT landscape. A new IDC study has found that of the 18.5 million software developers in the world, about 7.5 million (roughly 40 percent) are “hobbyist developers,” which is what IDC calls people who write code even though it is not their primary occupation. The boom in hobbyist programmers should cheer computer literacy advocates.IDC estimates there are almost 29 million ICT-skilled workers in the world as we enter 2014, including 11 million professional developers.
The Challenge of Cross-language Interoperability will be more and more talked. Interfacing between languages will be increasingly important. You can no longer expect a nontrivial application to be written in a single language. With software becoming ever more complex and hardware less homogeneous, the likelihood of a single language being the correct tool for an entire program is lower than ever. The trend toward increased complexity in software shows no sign of abating, and modern hardware creates new challenges. Now, mobile phones are starting to appear with eight cores with the same ISA (instruction set architecture) but different speeds, some other streaming processors optimized for different workloads (DSPs, GPUs), and other specialized cores.
Just another new USB connector type will be pushed to market. Lightning strikes USB bosses: Next-gen ‘type C’ jacks will be reversible article tells that USB is to get a new, smaller connector that, like Apple’s proprietary Lightning jack, will be reversible. Designed to support both USB 3.1 and USB 2.0, the new connector, dubbed “Type C”, will be the same size as an existing micro USB 2.0 plug.
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Tomi Engdahl says:
What’s that you say? HP’s going to do WHAT to 3PAR StoreServs?
No denial from IT goliath, maybe the rumours are true?
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2014/05/30/hp_and_deduplicating_3par/
Rumours circulating today suggest HP is going to add full data deduplication to its StoreServ (3PAR) storage arrays.
Deduplication identifies and removes duplicated blocks to prevent space being taken up by repetitive content. With a flash array, this also helps to reduce the amount of data written to the silicon which prolongs its working life.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Vinod Khosla: Doctors can’t beat big data, machines
http://www.sfchronicle.com/business/article/Vinod-Khosla-Doctors-can-t-beat-big-data-5501778.php
Never one to back away from controversy, venture capitalist Vinod Khosla said Friday the best way to improve health care is to get rid of most doctors.
Human judgment simply cannot compete against machine-learning systems that derive predictions from millions of data points, Khosla told an audience at the third and final day of Stanford University School of Medicine’s Big Data in Biomedicine Conference.
“Biological research will be important, but it feels like data science will do more for medicine than all the biological sciences combined,” he said. “I may be wrong on the specifics, but I think I will be directionally right.”
Tomi Engdahl says:
Single-Board Supercomputing Comes Home
Home-brew supercomputers
http://www.eetimes.com/document.asp?doc_id=1322539&
Supercomputers have been a symbol of achievement for corporations, government entities, and academic institutions for decades. They have been used for everything from predicting market trends to cracking codes. Over time, these power-hungry machines have grown in scope, featuring thousands of CPUs and workstation GPUs to crunch massive amounts of data. They require massive amounts of electricity and cooling to keep them going.
Unfortunately for us, these machines are so excessively big and costly that they remain fodder for science fiction — and forget running one out of your home.
However, since the SBC (single-board computer) boon of late, people see the possibility of building a pretty powerful supercomputer that won’t break the bank.
$192 Nvidia’s Jetson TK1 Development Board
Nvidia’s Jetson TK1 Development Board is an attractive option for home-based supercomputing.
Nvidia’s recently released Jetson TK1 Development Board, which features the company’s long-awaited Tegra K1 SoC. The board is actually a complete computer all on its own
To put that into perspective, the SoC is packed with a mind-blowing 192 cores. It was shown running the GPU demanding Unreal Engine 4 at CES back in January.
Out of the box, the board comes preloaded with Linux for Tegra, OpenGL 4.4, CUDA, and the VisionWorks tool kit for those who want to use the board for developing applications and devices.
Joshua Kiepert’s Raspberry Pi-based desktop supercomputer
The Pi has also been used to build relatively cheap and powerful supercomputers, such as Joshua Kiepert’s “Beowulf cluster research project.” A Beowulf cluster is a group of identical computers that are strung together or run parallel with each other in order to tackle complex problems
With the board costing a mere $45 (model B with an 8GB SD card), the grand total for his supercomputer was only $1,440
Tomi Engdahl says:
HP (Re-)Announces a 14″ Android Laptop
http://mobile.slashdot.org/story/14/06/01/1828228/hp-re-announces-a-14-android-laptop
The SlateBook 14 will run Android, rather than Windows (or ChromeOS, for that matter), which helps keep it relatively cheap, at $400. According to the article, Android is “a lot cheaper for HP to implement in a laptop; ChromeOS, in contrast, comes with more stringent system requirements that would cost HP a bit more.”
Tomi Engdahl says:
Windows 365: Not coming to a PC near you
http://www.zdnet.com/windows-365-not-coming-to-a-pc-near-you-7000029937/
Summary: Is Microsoft planning to turn Windows into a subscription service akin to Office 365? Some leakers say yes. My sources say no. Here’s why.
Tomi Engdahl says:
No spinning rust here: Supermicro’s cold data fridge is FROZEN
We do mean ‘no spinning’ literally with this one
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2014/06/02/supermicro_spins_down_for_cold_storage/
Fancy storing data until hell freezes over? Server house Supermicro has a cold storage product aimed at data that must be kept, can’t be thrown away but is accessed only rarely: its SuperStorage Server with spun-down disks.
According to Supermicro, the product “minimizes power consumption and reduces cooling requirements by spinning down or powering off idle drives and managing data streams via Supermicro’s compact, low-power Intel Atom C2750-based serverboard for cold storage.”
Tomi Engdahl says:
CDOT relatively crap for flash, hyperscalers crap for constant storage
NetApp CTO lays it on the line
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2014/04/08/cdot_relatively_bad_for_flash_hyperscalers_bad_for_constant_storage/
Chief NetApp techie Jay Kidd had some strong words for the flash and cloud crowd at a Wells Fargo event for investors.
Kidd thought that cloud storage economics didn’t stack up for mainstream enterprises except for transient workloads like test and development. He said recent price cuts by Google and Amazon “didn’t really change the dynamic at all”. Google and Amazon cost 2.5 cents/GB for archive class (S3) storage. Over three years that equated to 80 to 90 cents/GB: “You can buy and manage enterprise-class storage for well less than 90 cents/GB” for this use case.
Cloud block storage like EBS is around 10 cents/GB, which equates to $4/GB over three to three-and-a-half years: “You can certainly buy enterprise storage for well less than $4/GB.”
His view is that Amazon and Google – the hyperscalers – storage clouds are a good fit for transient and spiky requirements but not for constant or slowly growing storage needs. He said: “Amazon and Google reduce the cost of failure. They significantly increase the cost of success.”
The discussion then moved on to flash, which Kidd says is a nascent market (meaning NetApp isn’t behind, I think). The main customer moves here are a transfer if latency-sensitive database apps, typically loaded up on a Symmetric-type large array, to all-flash arrays (AFAs) for faster speed.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Microsoft’s NEW OS now runs on HALF of ALL desktop PCs
Gotcha! It’s the five-year-old Windows 7, not touchy 8.1
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2014/06/02/microsoft_windows_7_half_way_milestone/
One of Microsoft’s newest operating systems now runs on half of desktops – but it’s not the one Redmond might have wished.
Windows 7 accounted for 50.06 per cent of operating system market share in May according to Netmarketshare’s running monthly tally.
Windows 8.1 claimed 6.35 per cent of desktops
The number of desktops running Windows XP in May fell by 1.02 percentage points from the month before, landing at 25.27 per cent.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Samsung, with this new 3D NAND SSD, you’re really spoiling us … or perhaps a rival?
Did Sammy just poop a party before it even began?
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2014/06/02/samsungs_sort_of_3d_ssd_news/
We’re making it, but we’re not going to tell you much about it. That’s more or less what Samsung has to say about its second-generation 3D V-NAND and the flash drives the tech is going into.
As the name suggests, 3D V-NAND is made up of layers of flash cells stacked one on the other to increase storage capacity without increasing the silicon footprint.
The South Koreans are remaining tight lipped about the cell geometry and whether it’s MLC or SLC flash.
“The new 3D V-NAND-based SSDs have approximately twice the endurance for writing data and consume 20 per cent less power, compared to planar (2D) MLC NAND-based drives.”
Tomi Engdahl says:
Will IBM System x sink without trace before Lenovo can grab the helm?
Server market doom plunge slows, but Big Blue’s doesn’t
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2014/05/29/ibm_servers_sales_decline/
It’s squeaky bottom time for Lenovo execs waiting to get their hands on IBM’s System X division, as Big Blue’s sales train continues to head south, making sporadic station stops at Double Digit Declines-ville and Commodity Central.
Overall market trends are playing more to the strengths of the stack ‘em high brigade: global x86 revenues were up 4.9 per cent to $8.9bn as unit sales lifted 2.5 per cent to 2.1million servers, IDC data showed.
“Demand for IBM’s x86-based Systems x servers and System z mainframes declined sharply,” said IDC.
Chinese server wannabe Lenovo is paying $2.3bn to take System x off IBM’s hands, and though the acquisition is still in the lap of the US regulators, the more time passes the more the business seems to slip.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Do NOT adjust your set, viewers: UK server sales are GROWING
Big iron drags sector into the black, x86 helps out too
http://www.channelregister.co.uk/2014/06/02/uk_servers_q1_2014/
There was some welcome respite for hard pressed server box pedlars during Q1 as private and public sector organisations queued up to spend again, bringing to a close several quarters of declining market revenues.
“The market is relatively healthy,”
“It is clear the market economics are improving but it is not clear what the impact of virtualisation and cloud will be, we are evaluating that,”
Tomi Engdahl says:
Google uses disruptive ‘poem’ tech to announce new Chromebook availability
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2014/06/02/google_uses_disruptive_poem_tech_to_announce_new_chromebook_availability/
Google has announced that Chromebooks will soon be available to buy in nine more countries.
Google launched the Chromebooks in 2011. Sales haven’t been huge – 45,000 were sold in Western Europe in the first quarter of 2014, but the company has high hopes the devices could do well in emerging markets.
Tomi Engdahl says:
What’s New And Different About Apple’s New Swift Programming Language?
http://www.fastcolabs.com/3031400/whats-new-and-different-about-apples-new-swift-programming-language
We tore apart Apple’s 850-page iBook on its new, simpler programming language, to find out why Apple would introduce a new language–despite all the headaches it will cause.
Tomi Engdahl says:
The 9 Best Languages For Crunching Data
http://www.fastcolabs.com/3030716/the-9-best-languages-for-crunching-data
Here’s a roadmap to the latest and greatest tools in data science, and when you should use them.
R
It would be downright negligent to start this list with any language other than R. It has been kicking around since 1997 as a free alternative to pricey statistical software, such as Matlab or SAS.
R’s greatest asset is the vibrant ecosystem has developed around it
Python
If R is a neurotic, loveable geek, Python is its easygoing, flexible cousin. Python is rapidly gaining mainstream appeal as a hybrid of R’s fast, sophisticated data mining capability, and a more practical language to build products.
Julia
The vast majority of data science today is conducted through R, Python, Java, MatLab, and SAS. But there’s still gaps to be filled, and Julia is one newcomer to watch.
Java
Java, and Java-based frameworks, are found deep in the skeletons of the biggest Silicon Valley tech companies. “If you look inside Twitter, Linkedin, or Facebook, you will find that Java is the foundational language for all of their data engineering infrastructures,” says Driscoll.
Hadoop and Hive
Hadoop has exploded as the go-to Java-based framework for batch processing.
Hive, a query-based framework that runs on top
Scala
Scala is another Java-based language
Kafka and Storm
What about when you need rapid, real-time analytics? Kafka is your friend.
Kafka, which was born inside of Linkedin, is an ultra-fast query messaging system. The downside to Kafka? It’s too fast
Storm is another framework written in Scala, and it’s gaining enormous traction for stream processing in Silicon Valley. It was acquired into Twitter
Honorable mentions:
MatLab
Octave
GO
Tomi Engdahl says:
What’s Apple Really Up To? Keeping You in Apple World.
http://recode.net/2014/06/02/whats-apple-really-up-to-keeping-you-in-apple-world/
The biggest new features were about making iPhones, iPads and Macs work seamlessly together, so that people on Planet Apple have no reason to leave, and those toting other brands might be tempted to fully join the Apple tribe.
In one important case, Apple is looping in Windows users. The company is finally adding a face to its iCloud service with something called iCloud Drive, which allows you to store files in and retrieve them from the cloud. It’s like Dropbox, or Microsoft’s OneDrive, or Google Drive. But, while it works on Windows — a platform Apple fears less and less as it becomes a mobile-first company — it doesn’t work on Android, which is now Apple’s most dangerous competitor.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Samsung, Chipzilla in 4K monitor price cut pact
Tooling around to drop costs to $US399 so a whole family can fondle one slab
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2014/06/03/intel_and_samsung_in_4k_monitor_price_cut_pact/
Intel and Samsung have created a “collaboration” to help the latter company slice the price of 4K monitors.
In a pre-Computex briefing call Lisa Graff, Chipzilla’s PC Client Group veep and general manager of the Desktop Client Platforms Group opined that PC buyers are aware of 4K but that monitor costs are so high they’re scaring punters away.
That’s no good for Intel: punters won’t buy a new PC packing this year’s 4K-capable Core CPUs and graphics if 4K monitors are so expensive they make a new purchase too pricey.
But why Samsung came to Intel’s party isn’t clear especially as it won’t be the only beneficiary: the Korean company’s monitor-making division supplies displays to plenty of other companies.
Graff said cheaper 4K monitors will mean users whose phones start to include 4K cameras will consider new PCs to display their newly-captured images can be seen in all their glory.
Tomi Engdahl says:
The report reveals: IT lags five months after the business requirements
According to a recent survey, nearly two-thirds ( 65 percent ) of IT decision-makers in Europe , the Middle East and Africa, feels that the business wishes it takes up to five months for the information management will be able to implement them.
The study commissioned by virtualization and cloud infrastructure, VMware supplier . It is carried out by research company Vanson Bourne .
Business and IT, the mismatches have important consequences for the organization ‘s performance , competitiveness and growth potential . IT decision-makers , the gap reduces the likelihood of innovation ( 39 per cent of respondents), reduces employee productivity (36 percent) and result in the loss of customers to competitors agile (33 per cent).
VMware CTO Joe Baguley , almost a half -year delay in the business , however , and it ‘s supplies is enormous . According to him, it is constantly balancing between of existing systems to maximize the value and the introduction of new technologies.
According to him, the solution is to increase investment in information management, which could affect the business and reduces delays.
A number of companies are familiar with it , the pressure on the supply of a challenge. Every other IT decision-makers (55 per cent ) feel that the smaller competitors can implement modern IT to more quickly and therefore react more quickly to market changes. As a result, 73 percent of these respondents were from smaller companies either worried or felt threatened by them.
VMware , the responses show that organizations need the right people in the right places to ensure that it supports the organization’s performance , competitiveness and growth potential of growth.
Source: http://www.tietoviikko.fi/kaikki_uutiset/selvitys+paljastaa+tietohallinto+laahaa+viisi+kuukautta+liiketoiminnan+vaatimusten+perassa/a991378
Tomi Engdahl says:
Find a partner? Nah, these students ALL play with same tools in giant CLUSTER-SHUCK
Asia Student Supercomputer Challenge configs laid out
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2014/06/03/chinese_racks_revealed/
So even though all the teams are using equipment from a single vendor, there’s still quite a disparity when you look at the configurations.
The bulk of the teams sported configurations of eight, nine, or 10 nodes, and most of those pimped out their clusters with NVIDIA GPUs for that extra number-crunching boost.
Tomi Engdahl says:
DevOps is actually a thing – and people are willing to pay for it
But you’ve got to untangle deployment wizards from the duct-tape cats
http://www.channelregister.co.uk/2014/06/03/michael_cote_dev_ops/
Is DevOps actually a thing, or just the latest funny way to case a word? At least there are vowels in it. We finally know the proper casing, but is it actually something normals are doing?
DevOps started as a rallying cry around doing something with the combination of agile software development, lean manufacturing theory, and using new automation technologies like Puppet and Chef on top of cloud platforms.
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The goal was to get “10+ releases a day”.
The idea of releasing code to production more frequently is certainly appealing, and who wouldn’t want to do that in the age of constantly updating mobile apps?
48 per cent of study participants deployed software at least monthly, with 22 per cent deploying weekly, and eight per cent deploying daily. With near half operating on a tight 30 day cycle
Why bother with this hassle, we asked? Mostly because of business demands
“Tools are not the issue, meet my hammer. I call it ‘culture.’” They go on and on about culture, and process.
Spinning the vision dial way up, in the ideal DevOps toolchain it feels like you’d see at least two things.
First, consistent use of modern model-driven automation tools like Puppet, Chef, Ansible, and Salt throughout development, QA, and production to model, deploy, and manage the application. You do this to reduce the amount of changes and manual work needed between each stage
Second on the vision-questing, you’d expect DevOps teams to be using some sort of continuous integration tool, a Jenkins-type system, if not Jenkins itself.
That 28 per cent of respondents who aren’t doing any sort of CI is the most shocking. Surely things would improve for that lot with a bit of CI.
As in software development, the good news is that people are willing to pay for these tools.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Google launches 64-bit version of Chrome, starting with Dev and Canary channels for Windows 7 and Windows 8
http://thenextweb.com/google/2014/06/03/google-launches-64-bit-version-chrome-starting-dev-canary-channels-windows-7-windows-8/
Google today announced the debut of a 64-bit version of Chrome for Windows, starting with the introduction of 64-bit Dev and Canary channels for Windows 7 and Windows 8 users. You can download both now from their respective pages: Dev and Canary.
It’s worth noting that in both cases the 64-bit version is offered by default if you are running a 64-bit flavor of Windows, though the 32-bit version is still available. This would suggest Google eventually plans to serve up the 64-bit version of Chrome as the default version for 64-bit Windows users.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Intel Bets On Surface Pro 3-Like “2-In-1″ Devices
http://techcrunch.com/2014/06/02/intel-bets-on-surface-pro-3-like-2-in-1-devices/
Today at the Computex event in Taiwan, Intel unveiled a reference design ’2-in-1′ device, raising the profile of tablet-hybrids. The chip maker, increasingly betting on mobile in the face of a immiserated personal computer market, wants to grow its market share in the tablet industry.
The idea of a ’2-in-1′ — hereafter called 2-1 — is simple: Have a tablet that locks into a keyboard natively, allowing for both touch-first, and keyboard-first experiences. Microsoft has been a long promoter of the concept, sinking billions of dollars into its Surface project.
Intel, a company that is presumably loath to watch the PC market decline, is making a bet that it can advance its tablet efforts and juice PC sales at the same time.
Intel of course won’t be making the device itself. OEM partners will build devices that conform to its general specifications. According to a note from Intel, devices “based on” the reference design will be announced over the next few months.
Think of the 2-1 reference design as something akin to a generational evolution of the Ultrabook, Intel’s alternative to the popular MacBook Air. The new reference design will face the same challenges as Microsoft’s Surface effort: Can the inherent design tradeoffs that come with a detachable keyboard be overcome by the benefits such an arrangement can bring?
Tomi Engdahl says:
Some Thoughts on Apple’s Metal API
by Ryan Smith on June 3, 2014 10:30 AM EST
http://www.anandtech.com/show/8116/some-thoughts-on-apples-metal-api
Metal is Apple’s forthcoming low-overhead/low-level graphics and compute API for iOS. Metal is primarily geared towards gaming on iOS, and is intended to offer better graphics performance than the existing OpenGL ES API by curtailing driver overhead and giving developers more direct control over the GPU.
Metal is the latest in a wave of low-level graphics APIs to be introduced over the last year in the GPU space, joining the ranks of AMD’s Mantle and Microsoft’s DirectX 12.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Touch-first Microsoft Office for Android to beat Windows 8 version to market
http://www.zdnet.com/touch-first-microsoft-office-for-android-to-beat-windows-8-version-to-market-7000030162/
Summary: In another example of Microsoft’s mobile-first strategy, the company is expected to make the Android version of its core touch-first Office apps available months ahead of the Windows 8 variant.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Linux Mint 17 ‘Qiana’ Released
http://linux.slashdot.org/story/14/06/04/0031230/linux-mint-17-qiana-released
“Linux Mint 17 ‘Qiana’, a long term support edition of Linux Mint, has been released. Mint 17 is available in both MATE and Cinnamon editions. Mint 17 is derived from Ubuntu 14.04 (Trusty Tahr) and will receive security updates until April, 2019.”
Tomi Engdahl says:
Apple’s Safari browser wins mobile, tablet porn-watching crowns
But Chrome takes first place in desktop porn browsing according to a Pornhub study.
http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2014/06/apples-safari-browser-wins-mobile-tablet-porn-watching-crowns/
In its study (yes, posted on Pornhub), the pornography outlet said that more than 38 percent of mobile Web surfers employed Safari with second place going to mobile Android browser (accounting for nearly 30 percent).
However, a whopping 73 percent used Apple’s browser on tablets, the study said.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Please be seated at your FOUR-LEGGED PC
Is it a desk? Or a PC case? Fiddle with the innards to find out
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2014/06/04/please_be_seated_at_your_fourlegged_pc/
The show floor at Computex bears a zillion gadgets all trying to catch your eye, but one that really stands out by offering a new way to sit down is the computer case/desk from Taiwan’s Lian Li.
The desk itself is unremarkable: it has four legs and a glass top.
The desk’s drawer is where things get interesting, because it offers all the mounts you’d expect to find in a PC case, such as eight disk drive slots, space for motherboards and USB slots. Pulling the drawer in and out is possible while the PC is running.
Lian Li says the idea for the case/desk comes from the fact that some PC tinkerers want super-easy access to their machines.
Tomi Engdahl says:
‘Fan docks’ are about to become a thing
Typoslabs need to cool down to speed up
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2014/06/04/fan_docks_are_about_to_become_a_thing/
Yesterday at Computex, Intel announced the new Core M, a new CPU architecture based on a Broadwellian 14nm process, and said it is destined to appear in premium tablets and two-in-one typoslabs.
Today, Chipzilla revealed a little more about the new product by showing off a reference design for a Core-M-equipped typoslab called Llama Mountain. The device was a typical, if very thin, typoslab inasmuch as the keyboard and display come apart.
But Intel also showed off a fan-equipped dock into which it settled the reference machine’s screen. Blowing cool air over the tablet lowered its temperature sufficiently that it was possible to crank up the clock speed of its CPU.
Tomi Engdahl says:
IBM, HP, others admit products laced with NORK GOLD
That high-pitched screaming your fan makes? It’s not the fan.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2014/06/03/hp_ibm_north_korea_gold/
IBM, HP, Seagate, and other companies have admitted that some of their products include gold from North Korea.
The companies disclosed in recent financial filings – first spotted by Foreign Policy – that some of their suppliers sourced gold from the “Central Bank of the DPR of Korea”, according to filings with the US Securities and Exchange Commission.
The companies made these filings in response to a new reporting rule aimed at uncovering the links between stuff mined in troubled Central Africa and products sold or manufactured by US-listed companies.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Pixar To Give Away 3D RenderMan Software
http://entertainment.slashdot.org/story/14/06/03/1917235/pixar-to-give-away-3d-renderman-software
‘The 3D rendering software behind films such as Toy Story, Monsters Inc and Harry Potter is to be given away free for non-commercial use.”
Pixar to give away ‘Toy Story’ 3D RenderMan software
http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-27677712
The 3D rendering software behind films such as Toy Story, Monsters Inc and Harry Potter is to be given away free for non-commercial use.
RenderMan, which is developed by Pixar, has faced increased competition from rival animation rendering programmes such as VRay and Arnold.
Although Pixar, which is owned by Disney, produces its own films, it licenses RenderMan to rival studios.
The company has also cut the price of its software for commercial use.
In a statement, the firm said it would release a free version of RenderMan “without any functional limitations, watermarking, or time restrictions”.
“Non-commercial RenderMan will be freely available for students, institutions, researchers, developers, and for personal use,” it added.
The new version of RenderMan was unveiled in London, which has become a global hub for the visual effects (VFX) industry.
Press Releases: Pixar Animation Studios Announces Monumental Innovations In Film Rendering
http://renderman.pixar.com/view/DP25846
Advanced Global Illumination, New Pricing, Free Non-Commercial Use
Effective immediately, Pixar is also announcing that the price of the current version of RenderMan is $495 per license for commercial use, with customized peak render packages offering built-in “burst render” capability.
free non-commercial licenses of RenderMan will be made available without any functional limitations, watermarking, or time restrictions.
The new RenderMan is being released in the timeframe of SIGGRAPH 2014 and will be compatible with the following 64-bit operating systems, Mac OS 10.8 and 10.7, Windows 8, 7, and Vista, and Linux.
Tomi Engdahl says:
US tech worker groups boycott IBM, Infosys, Manpower
Advocacy groups say the companies should look first for U.S. tech workers for U.S. IT jobs
http://www.itworld.com/software/421378/us-tech-worker-groups-boycott-ibm-infosys-manpower
Tomi Engdahl says:
Apple says many users “bought an Android phone by mistake”
http://www.neowin.net/news/apple-says-many-users-bought-an-android-phone-by-mistake
Apple CEO Tim Cook spent a moment during his keynote at the company’s Worldwide Developer Conference today comparing user adoption of OS X Mavericks with that of Windows 8, mocking Microsoft’s OS for only managing to convince 14% of the total Windows user base to the 8.x versions.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Apple has sold 800m iOS devices, including 500m iPhones
http://www.neowin.net/news/apple-has-sold-800m-ios-devices-including-500m-iphones
It’s no secret that Apple’s phones and tablets sell in enormous numbers (although its iPad sales did actually go down last quarter). But unlike Microsoft, which keeps sales figures of its own Surface tablets to itself, Apple has no qualms about sharing details of its sales performance.
At its Worldwide Developer Conference (WWDC) today, Apple revealed that it has sold over 800 million iOS devices so far – an increase of 100 million since September 2013. A staggering half a billion of those sales were iPhones – a remarkable figure by any reasonable measure.
Tomi Engdahl says:
AMD Launches Mobile Kaveri APUs
by Jarred Walton on June 4, 2014 12:01 AM EST
http://www.anandtech.com/show/8119/amd-launches-mobile-kaveri-apus
A couple weeks back, AMD flew us out to San Francisco for a briefing on their upcoming Mobile Kaveri APUs. Along with the briefing, we were given some time to run benchmarks on a prototype Kaveri laptop, though I’ll note up front that the laptop isn’t intended for retail and is merely a demonstration of performance potential. A funny thing happened about a week after the briefing, which some of you likely saw: AMD’s web team accidentally posted all of the specs for the upcoming mobile Kaveri APUs ahead of schedule (for about half a day). We removed our coverage of the Mobile Kaveri APUs when AMD corrected the error, but we might as well jump right into things with the overview of the new mobile APUs.
Kaveri is AMD’s latest generation high-performance APU, and appeared first released on the desktop back in January of this year. We were a bit surprised – perhaps even perplexed – about the desktop first launch, considering AMD’s “we’re not going after the highest performance CPU market” stance.
The launch has been scheduled for H1 2014 for some time now, and with AMD able to offer significant GPU performance with their APUs coupled with the space benefits of an integrated GPU versus a discrete GPU, it should be an easy sell. Mobile of course is not without its challenges. Power use is paramount
Tomi Engdahl says:
AMD tops processor evolution with new mobile Kaveri chippery
‘Big A’ architecture change occurs ‘once every 15, 20 years,’ says AMD CTO
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2014/06/04/amd_releases_new_kaveri_mobile_apus/
AMD has unveiled the mobile version of its “Kaveri” desktop processor, topping off its series of processors in which CPUs and GPUs not only reside on the same die, but also work together in shared-memory harmony – or heterogeneity, to be more precise.
“This a culmination of five years of work to build out this APU roadmap,”
the concept of the APU, or accelerated processing unit, what AMD calls its CPU/GPU/whatever mashup, was first introduced at an AMD financial analysts’ event in 2006, first demoed at Computex in June 2010, and first shipped in November of that year in the 18-watt Zacate and 9-watt Ontario parts.
AMD has also been working on the CPU/GPU shared-memory heterogeneous system architecture (HSA) for some time, as well, tossing an OpenCL net over their CPUs and GPUs as early as 2009, and talking heterogeneity up big at their 2011 Fusion Summit. AMD was also one of the founding members of the HSA Foundation in June 2012, along with ARM, Imagination, MediaTek, and TI.
“CPU and GPU cores are now sort of equal citizens in terms of their ability to do compute work,” Lensing explained at the briefing, “so we’ll combine them together into a very simple concept that we’ll call ‘compute cores’.”
But CPUs and GPUs aren’t, of course, equal – CPUs excel in linear processing and GPUs show their muscle when handling highly parallel tasks.
What allows Kaveri’s compute cores to play well together are one lower-case and upper-case acronym, hUMA (heterogeneous Uniform Memory Access), and one lower-case and upper-case initialism, hQ (heterogeneous Queing).
These two chunks o’ tech exist to enable CPUs and GPUs to work together more efficiently.
So exactly what cores are in the mobile Kaveri?
With the mobile Kaveri’s release, Macri, Keller, and their 500 compatriots have evolved the CPU cores to raise IPC as much as 20 per cent over its predecessors, “Trinity” and “Richland”, with an average IPC boost of around 10 per cent. Accomplishing this, of course, involved a boatload of tweaks.
Kaveri’s GPU cores are based on AMD’s GCN architecture, first unveiled in July 2011 and now extending throughout the full range of AMD’s offerings. “Now every product in the AMD portfolio,”
Macri said that the mobile Kaveri’s designers allocated nearly half of its entire 245mm2, 2.41 billion–transistor, 28nm die to graphics and other accelerators – the other 53 per cent are filled by CPU cores, caches, I/O, power management, and other housekeeping stuff that chipsters often call the “uncore”
Kaveri’s GPU is essentially a version of AMD’s “Hawaii” GCN cores
The are eight graphics compute units in the top-of-the-line Kaveri part, each with 512 IEEE 2008–compliant floating point–capable shaders, as well as a flat address space
Lansing was quoting performance of the top-of-the-line FX-7500 – which tops out at 818 GFLOPS – but AMD announced nine members of the mobile Kaveri family on Wednesday, three in a standard voltage group with a 35-watt TDP, three in an “ultra-low voltage” group at 19 watts, and a third group of three in a business-focused Pro series – more on that series in a moment.
Lansing also rolled out slides that compared a few of these new parts with allegedly comparable Intel offerings: an AMD FX-7500 with four CPU and six GPU cores versus an Intel “Haswell” Core i7-4500U, an AMD A10-7300 with four CPU and six GPU cores versus a Haswell Core i5-4200U; and an AMD A8-7100 with four CPU and four GPU cores versus a Haswell Core i3-4010U. Each of the Intel parts had two compute cores running a total of four threads, along with Intel HD Graphics 4400.
Lansing’s competitive analysis was based three performance benchmarks: PCMark measuring system performance, 3DMark measuring graphics, and Basemark CL measuring compute.
Speaking of the 4K video–resolution capabilities of the new mobile Kaveri, Macri noted that although 4K is all well and good, there’s very little 4K content available at present. “The best way to experience 4K today,” he said, “is to take 1080p content and upscale it. Well, if you upscale it, you better have some great post-processing. Otherwise you’re going to end up with a pretty ugly image on your beautiful monitor.”
The new Kaveri mobile APUs also include three accelerators – coprocessors – that aid in media processing; one exists to enable AMD’s TrueAudio technology.
The new Kaveri mobile APUs also have a video coding engine (VCE) and a unified video decoder (UVD). The biggest change in the VCE from Kaveri’s predecessors Trinity and Richland, Macri said, is the addition of the YUV444 color encoding, which he said “allows you to create perfect text.”
This is important because of the emerging 60GHz WiGig tech from Wilocity and others, which enables wireless docking to displays.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Calxeda co-founder unleashs 48-core ARM SoC
We’ll get you this time, Intel, says Cavium
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2014/06/04/cavium_sets_sights_on_intel_with_48core_soc/
ARM vendor Cavium has revealed 48-core silicon it reckons will pitch it into high-end data centre and server apps.
just about anything an enterprise user could want will run on 64-bit ARM hardware. With cloud providers, and those who aspire to operate at cloud scale, open to the idea of cheaper-to-acquire-and-operate alternative to Intel’s high-end chippery, now is a better time to swoop.
And swoop they have: the Thunder X SoC is a 28 nm device with up to 48 custom 64 bit ARMv8 cores at 2.5 GHz, running the whole show at between 20 and 95 W.
ThunderX isn’t yet in fab – it’ll be sampling in Q4 2014 – which means Cavium is light on performance specs, but it says its SoCs should compete with, or beat, the power dissipation of Intel-based systems.
So far Cavium has said there will be five variants of the ThunderX range: the ThunderX_CP for content serving applications; the ThunderX_ST for Hadoop and other storage workloads; the Thunder_SC for Web front-end, security and cloud workloads; and the Thunder_NT for embedded applications and NFV workloads.
For low-end applications there’s the ThunderX CN87xx 8-16 core range
The devices support a variety of Linux distros, with KVM and Xen virtualisation support, Java and GCC development support.
“Innovation sells,”
Tomi Engdahl says:
Dell’s New Hybrid Laptops Will Offer Ubuntu Preinstalled
http://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/2014/06/dell-announce-new-laptops-optional-ubuntu
Dell is to offer Ubuntu on its latest batch of ’2-in-1′ Inspiron laptops, marking the first time the OS has been sold on a mainstream hybrid device.
Although Dell offers the devices with Windows 8.1 by default customers can opt to replace it with Ubuntu 14.04 LTS Desktop. Dell say the Ubuntu option will be available to select worldwide from September.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Netflix ditches Silverlight for HTML5 on Macs too: Available today in Safari on OS X Yosemite beta
http://thenextweb.com/insider/2014/06/03/netflix-ditches-silverlight-html5-macs-available-today-safari-os-x-yosemite-beta/
Netflix says it has been “working closely” with Apple to implement its Premium Video Extensions in Safari. These extensions allow playback of video directly in the browser without plugins such as Silverlight or Flash, but still keep publishers happy that their content won’t be ripped off.
The extensions are made up of three components, all of which Apple has included:
The Media Source Extensions (MSE), using the “highly optimized video pipeline” on OS X. Since Media Foundation supports hardware acceleration using the GPU, Netflix can achieve “buttery smooth” 1080p video playback with minimal CPU
The Encrypted Media Extensions (EME) provides the content protection needed for media services like Netflix.
The Web Cryptography API (WebCrypto), which allows Netflix to encrypt and decrypt communication between its JavaScript application and its servers.
Netflix says it is looking forward “to a time when these APIs are available on all browsers” so that it can ditch plugins once and for all.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Intel aims to eliminate all PC cables in 2016
http://www.cnet.com/news/intel-aims-to-eliminate-all-pc-cables-in-2016/
Goodbye rat’s nest! Intel says wireless power, docking and connectivity will form the basis of its post-Broadwell “Skylake” reference designs.
TAIPEI, Taiwan — Intel’s post-Broadwell next-generation platform — codenamed Skylake — will lead to Intel reference designs that eliminate all cables from the PC, the chipmaker announced Wednesday.
On stage at the Computex show here, Intel’s Kirk Skaugen, senior vice president and general manager of the PC Client Group, demonstrated wireless display, docking and charging features that will close the loop on the final few mandatory cables in the typical PC environment.
The high-speed WiGig standard will be used as the short range “docking” technology, instantly creating a connection to a screen and peripherals when a device is moved within range and then swapping back out to standalone usage by just picking up and walking away. WiGig delivers speeds of up to 7Gbps.
For power, Skaugen demonstrated Rezence, the magnetic resonance charging technology, promoted by the Alliance 4 Wireless Power (A4WP), that Intel is aligned with.
Skaugen demonstrated a table that charged a laptop, phone, headset and tablet all at once.
With Skylake expected second half of 2015 it’s likely devices based on Intel’s reference designs would start to hit the market in 2016.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Microsoft: Software update unlocks more GPU bandwidth on Xbox One
Devs can now access 10 percent GPU slice previously reserved for Kinect, system functions
http://arstechnica.com/gaming/2014/06/microsoft-software-update-unlocks-more-gpu-bandwidth-on-xbox-one/
Tomi Engdahl says:
Digesting WWDC: cloudy
http://ben-evans.com/benedictevans/2014/6/4/digesting-wwdc-cloudy
First, Apple is continuing the steady process of removing restrictions on what developers can do – but doing so in a very specific way. Almost all of these restrictions are necessarily trade-offs – on a smartphone more flexibility is ipso facto less security and less battery life.
The second theme, and a very interesting one, is cloud, the big Apple weakness. The whole of WWDC is full of cloud. A very large proportion of the new user-facing features touch the cloud in some way, as a conduit or as storage. And the ones that don’t use what you might call the personal cloud – the Bluetooth LE/Wifi mesh around you (such as HealthKit or HomeKit). So edit a photo and the edits are on all your devices, run out of room and your photos stay on the cloud but all but the previews are cleared off your phone, tap a phone number on a web page on your Mac and your phone dials it. But none of this says ‘CLOUD™’ and none of it is done in a web browser. Web browsers are for web pages, not for apps. Hence one could suggest that Apple loves the cloud, just not the web (or, not URLs).
This is obviously a contest with Google, which has pretty much the opposite approach. For Google, devices are dumb glass and the intelligence is in the cloud, but for Apple the cloud is just dumb storage and the device is the place for intelligence.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Apple: We’ll tailor Swift to be a fast new programming language
Kiss goodbye to five years of Objective-C
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2014/06/02/apple_aims_to_speed_up_secure_coding_with_swift_programming_language/
Apple stunned the audience at its Worldwide Developers Conference in San Francisco on Monday with a tool few expected: a new programming language for iOS and OS X software called Swift.
There already is a programming language called Swift that was developed by the University of Chicago and Argonne National Laboratory for use in parallel computing applications. This isn’t that.
What it is, is an entirely new syntax that – in the words of Apple senior VP Craig Federighi, who unveiled it during the Monday morning WWDC keynote – aims to be “Objective-C without the baggage of C.”
Like scripting languages but unlike C, Swift lets you get straight to the point. The single line println(“Hello, world”) is a complete program in Swift.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Australia to build 35,000-core supercomputer on Xeon-E5-2600 v3
Cray-CHING! Pawsey Centre’s Magnus will top a petaflop using Chipzilla’s next beasts
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2014/05/11/pawsey_centre_reveals_plan_for_35000core_supercomputer/
Australia’s Pawsey Supercomputing Centre has revealed basic information about an upgrade to its ‘Magnus’ supercomputer.
The upgrade will see Magnus transmogrify into a Cray XC30 supercomputer with over 35,000 cores. Intel’s future Intel Xeon processor E5-2600 v3 will be pressed into service to give Magnus its upgrade and take it past the petaflop barrier.
That new Intel CPU is due to be announced by the end of Q2, 2014, and to have clock speeds 100MHz to 200MHz faster than current generation Xeons.
“is expected to be the most powerful supercomputer in the southern hemisphere.”
Tomi Engdahl says:
LIVE TODAY: Simplifying IT with cloud apps
Breaking the customisation habit
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2014/06/05/simplifying_it_with_cloud_apps/
Why? Because as well as the obvious benefits of cloud, these apps allow you to concentrate customisation where it has a benefit. They mean you can ban “bespoke” apps and plug into a common architecture to take advantage of economies of scale, but customise based on policy and workflow to increase efficiency.
Tomi Engdahl says:
ASUS shows off a 14-inch USB touchscreen monitor
http://www.engadget.com/2014/06/03/asus-14-inch-usb-touchscreen/
ASUS is demoing quite a few alleged “world firsts” at its Computex booth. In addition to a 32-inch curved LED monitor, there’s a 14-inch USB touch monitor on hand here in Taipei. We’re used to seeing USB monitors here — ASUS had one at this same venue last year, actually — but the addition of touch is definitely the standout feature this time around.
For anyone looking to get some work done, the ability to navigate an external display with 10 fingers is definitely appealing.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Facebook, are you listening? Fusion-io chucks 6.4TB ‘Atomic’ flash kit at world
Flash goes nuclear, sort of
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2014/06/05/fusionios_atomic_explosion/
PCIe-card flasher Fusion-io has a new piece of ioMemory hardware and is calling it the Atomic Series.
PX600 for the fastest speed,
1TB, 1.3TB, 2.6TB and 5.2TB capacities
2.7GB/sec and up to 2.2GB/sec read/write bandwidth
to 330,000/375,000 random read/write IOPS (4Kk)
92µ/15µ read/write latency
12, 16, 32 and 64 PB written endurance for 1TB, 1.3TB, 2.6TB and 5.2TB models
Standard height, half-length card
The hardware uses a PCIe 2.0 x8 interface and has self-healing features.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Why the New Obamacare Website Is Going to Work This Time
http://www.wired.com/2014/06/healthcare-gov-revamp/
The drama of the HealthCare.gov Ad Hoc team is now a modern tech fable: a small cadre of young geeks from Silicon Valley and President Obama’s election campaign parachute into the federal bureaucracy to rescue the site and help exceed the goal of 8 million insured households nationwide.
Members of the Ad Hoc team were already looking ahead to the next version, recruiting a second wave of programmers drawn from startups as well as larger companies like Google.
Officials at Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services outlined the key pieces for WIRED:
Application 2.0: This is the new front end for the application, including a component that determines an applicant’s eligibility for a plan. Though the underlying logic is the same as the recent one developed by the Ad Hoc team and used by more than 5.45 million people in the first go-round, the 2.0 team aims to create a simpler, more efficient user interface
Plan Compare 2.0: Browsing and selecting plans was difficult on the original site. Way too often, it would crash, losing all applicant information and forcing the user to repeat the process.
Scalable Login System: This will be another built-from-scratch system handling identity management and account creation. It replaces the flaky login system that drove the first rescue team crazy and chased away countless potential applicants.
“They knew this platform needed some architectural changes and the idea was that we would work on the next generation,” Liaw says. “We know how to deploy consumer applications that scale. We use the Silicon Valley playbook utilizing open source and off-the-shelf –technologies. This is something that we’re good at—we’ve done it over and over.”
Tomi Engdahl says:
Google’s secretive 3D-mapping project now has a tablet: here it is
http://www.engadget.com/2014/06/05/project-tango-tablet/
Comprehending the world around us is something we humans take for granted, but it’s not so easy for our technology. Sure, autonomous robots and military-grade research labs have hardware that can approximate the same visual acuity of human eyes, but Google’s Advanced Technologies and Projects (ATAP) division started Project Tango to bring that sort of tech to the masses. Its mission is to make mobile devices capable of using depth sensors and high-spec cameras to craft three-dimensional maps more cheaply and easily than other current efforts. ATAP announced its first piece of hardware in February, a prototype smartphone equipped with Kinect-like 3D sensors and other components, but the team is now expanding the project to a new form factor: a seven-inch tablet that’s packed with a lot more power.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Intel, Taiwan Target Tablets
Broadwell Core M debuts at Computex
http://www.eetimes.com/document.asp?doc_id=1322625&
Intel’s President Renée James gave a keynote address at Computex that highlighted Intel’s close and historic ties to the Taiwanese PC business and how the company is leveraging those connections to gain a bigger slice of the tablet market. Intel continues to stress its process technology and used this event to announce the mobile processor based on the 14 nm Broadwell chip — the Intel Core M processor.
While no technical details were given for the part, James also demonstrated the part in an Intel reference design for a “two-in-one” hybrid notebook/tablet. The design is only 7.2 mm (0.28 inches) thick and only weighs 670 gm (1.5 lbs) with the keyboard detached. It achieves the thin design by going fanless.
The so-called Llama Mountain platform uses a 12.5 inch QHD (2,560 x 1,440 pixel) display from Sharp. Asus will ship a version of the reference design as the Transformer T300 Chi. Eliminating the fan saves space above the processor, but can only be achieved by keeping active power below just a few watts.
This is a major milestone for Intel’s Core family and does overlap with the low-power Atom-based BayTrail processors, which can also be used in fanless designs. But the Atom chips lack the single-thread performance of Intel’s Core processors and do not have the same graphics performance. No date was given to production shipments.
The company’s 14 nm products are scheduled to ship later this year, and James says Intel can “see clear to 10 nm.”
Still, the rest of the mobile processor industry is doing quite nicely with 28 nm.
Tomi Engdahl says:
FIGHT! Intel disputes ARM’s claims of Android superiority
Chipzilla rep: ‘Someone’s gotta be the truth squad around here’
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2014/06/05/intel_disputes_arms_claims_of_android_superiority/
Last month, The Reg published test results performed by ARM that the UK chip designers said show that mobile processors based on its technology have significant advantages over Intel’s chips when running Android apps. Intel would beg to differ.
“Someone’s gotta be the truth squad around here, right?” Intel corporate communications manager Bill Calder told The Reg.
Specifically, ARM senior technical marketing engineer Rod Watt had said at his company’s 2014 Tech Day in Austin, Texas, that if apps haven’t been recompiled to run natively on Intel-based Android devices and therefore have to be converted at runtime from native ARM code into native Intel x86 code using “binary translation” (aka “bridge technology”), the conversion caused “a huge impact to the user and to the performance of the system.”
What’s more, Watt said that in July 2013, 6 per cent of those apps simply didn’t work at all on x86-based Android devices, and that by January 2014, that number had risen to 9 per cent.
Watt added that binary translation exacted a heavy penalty on Android systems
“We don’t think that ARM’s presentation is a reflection of [Intel Architecture (IA)] device compatibility and performance – an accurate reflection,” Lavery politely countered.
Lavery agreed with ARM’s Watt that a “large percentage” of apps in Google Play only have an ARM-native version. “This is true,” he said, “but almost all these apps run with good user experiences on Intel devices.”
Lavery also took issue with ARM’s claims that binary translation has a heavy impact upon energy consumption. “We actually think that – not think that, but know that – the effect of the bridge technology on battery life is negligible,” he said.
As Calder put it, ARM was right about binary translation requiring more power – but not much. “We agree – but guess what? It’s like less than four minutes out of 10 hours.”
Although there are still a goodly number of apps in Google Play that have yet to be ported into x86-native versions, Intel’s goal is to get that number up to 80 per cent – although neither Calder nor Lavery could provide a timeline for that effort.
Tomi Engdahl says:
The Strippers, Unicorn Computers and Martian Watches of Computex
Taiwan’s tech tat bazaar viewed through the lens of ten prominent products
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2014/06/06/the_strippers_unicorn_computers_and_martian_watches_of_computex/