intel on SWiK

[from martti] Intel cuts electric cords with wireless power system

Sat, 30 Aug 2008 01:58:44 -0700

Intel acquires embedded Linux specialists - News - heise open source UK

Sat, 30 Aug 2008 00:55:34 -0700

Nice article from Heise online - they obviously liked Matthew's Millenium Falcon line :-)

Intel acquires Linux mobile developers for Atom - ZDNet.co.uk

Sat, 30 Aug 2008 00:55:34 -0700

Another nice article this time from ZDNet, and another use of the Millenium Falcon quote :-)

VisionMobile :: blog :: Intel buying OpenedHand: Yet another platform? Or the rise of a credible mobile alternative?

Sat, 30 Aug 2008 00:55:33 -0700

Quite in depth article from Visionmobile - but wtf, glib is ugly and compiz is nice? Anyway apart from that nit a nice article

Intel acquires Linux developer Openedhand

Fri, 29 Aug 2008 03:55:39 -0700

Nice little article about the acqusition

Intel acquires Linux distro developer | tuxmachines.org

Thu, 28 Aug 2008 18:04:43 -0700

another simple report

rEFIt - An EFI Boot Menu and Toolkit

Tue, 19 Aug 2008 20:05:35 -0700

INTEL D945GCLF inkl. Intel Atom 230 (1.6GHz) | Intel 945GC - Bustakt 800MHz - DDR2-SDRAM 667Mhz (PC2-5300) - 5.1 Audio - VGA - 2x SATA - LAN - Sockel 479 - PCI Preise und Daten im Preisvergleich

Fri, 15 Aug 2008 16:05:01 -0700

Intel’s Remote Wake Gives PCs a Super Poke

Thu, 14 Aug 2008 09:06:58 -0700

It isn’t quite earth-shattering, but Intel is introducing a technology that could make computers more useful. The company has developed ways to power up PCs remotely, allowing people to, say, retrieve files, according to the Wall Street Journal. Intel calls this Remote Wake, and it will work on forthcoming desktops with a new chipset that will have the new software embedded in the memory. Apparently, this will be much easier to use than the current options.

Intel is working with Jajah, CyberLink, Orb Networks and Pando Networks. Because of Remote Wake, a PC will also be able to make and receive calls over the JAJAH network and wake up from sleep mode to receive a call. This is improvement over the current scenario, where you can’t quite use your PC as your phone, because when it’s in sleep mode, you miss the calls. Pando’s service could deliver video at a dedicated time to a PC after waking it up remotely, an option that could make Pando quite viable as a desktop-oriented content delivery network.

If you are an expert on remote access and have some opinions about Remote Wake, please share your opinions with us.

PodcastDirectory | Episode: Intel's Online Thinking Tools Podcast

Thu, 14 Aug 2008 07:05:53 -0700

How Many Ports Does a Set-Top Box Need?

Wed, 13 Aug 2008 12:06:21 -0700

Following a petition filed with the Federal Communications Commission by Intel and Verizon requesting that Ethernet ports be required on the backs of set-top boxes, the National Cable and Telecommunications Association have come out in favor of an open standard such as Ethernet (or even better, the tru2way standard developed by the cable companies) but against any sort of federal mandates. The trade group filed an ex parte filing with the FCC last night in which it argued that industry groups could work together to figure out how to deliver digital content without any pesky government interference.

The effort to put Ethernet ports on cable boxes would be a boon to carriers delivering content via their own IP networks and to companies such as Intel that are trying to get Wi-Fi as the home networking standard of choice. Anyone inclined to point out that they can already connect their set-top box to devices via Firewire, HDMI, optical ports and coax, and hence to ask why Ethernet is necessary, may not realize the stakes at play when it comes to controlling digital content in the home.

Most vendors, be they carriers, networking gear makers or computer manufactures, view the set-top box as the key to digital content for consumers as ports will dictate how easy it is for consumers to plug their boxes into a variety of networks without adaptors. So as the computer industry and the telecommunications companies get deeper into the digital TV and home networking market, we’ll wait to see if the FCC decides to make Ethernet ports mandatory. Even if they do, a showdown between those in favor of Ethernet and those on the side of cable’s tru2way standard is likely to ensure as each industry seeks to control the home network.

image courtesy of Chris Albrecht

Can Nvidia Play with the Big Boys?

Wed, 13 Aug 2008 08:05:55 -0700

Despite reporting a second-quarter loss last night, due in part to costs associated with the faulty packaging on some of its chips placed in thousands of laptops, Nvidia still has a plan for semiconductor domination through the GPU. But if it wants to execute, it needs to accept the realities that come with stepping into a competitive market. The earnings call shows Nvidia still has a lot to learn.

In yesterday evening’s call, CEO Jen-Hsun Huang admitted to a $196 million charge because of problems with its GPUs in some laptops. He also talked about some pricing mishaps that occurred as AMD pushed out a highly competitive product with a lower price. Nvidia is learning, but there are two bright spots in the call, related to its Tegra chipset for mobile Internet devices and smartphones and bringing high-level parallel processing to the consumer.

Huang said Tegra wouldn’t be shipping in products until next year (something he told us earlier this year in an interview), but growth from CUDA on laptops and desktops should have an impact over the second half of this year (which will be the second half of fiscal 2009 for the firm). CUDA is a programming tool that allows software coded in C languages to run on the multiple cores in a GPU. It helped the company make inroads in the scientific computing community, and thanks to software from startups such as Elemental Technologies, the goal is to bring that level of parallel processing to consumers.

“We can’t just keep selling chips that make graphics run faster and cheaper. I mean, that’s all very nice and it’s all good but we need to advance the visual computing field in some remarkable and important way, and parallel computing is one of the most important investments that we are making,” Huang said on the call.

Such a shift, if well executed, will bring a level of power to computers that has been reserved for research institutions and mainframes. The next laptop you purchase could very well be able to analyze real-time trading data and spit out investment decisions. The key will be building software that’s designed to take advantage of it.

image courtesy of Nvidia

faddat.blogspot.com/2006/12/linux-and-intel-open-source-g965-gma.html

Mon, 11 Aug 2008 03:05:53 -0700

Why Microsoft and Intel tried to kill the XO $100 laptop - Times Online

Sun, 10 Aug 2008 21:08:45 -0700

So the big boys stamped on the fingers of the XO. Intel called it a gadget and then made their own cheap laptop, the Classmate, which they sold aggressively against the XO. Microsoft's Gates said, "Jeez, get a decent computer..." and then went around...

DOSBox, a x86 emulator with DOS

Fri, 08 Aug 2008 09:09:07 -0700

DOSBox is an Intel x86 PC emulator, complete with sound, graphics, mouse, joystick, modem, etc. for modern PCs and OSes. Any DOS application should run in it, but the emphasis has been on getting games to run smoothly.

Intel’s Larrabee Aims to Take on Nvidia and AMD

Mon, 04 Aug 2008 11:12:39 -0700

Last week, Intel offered up a sneak peak of its Larrabee graphics processor, due out in 2009 or 2010 and guaranteed to raise the competitive pressure on graphics chip makers Nvidia and AMD. Unlike its existing integrated graphics chips, Larrabee will be a standalone processor, but don’t expect that it will be a success.

As computing has required faster chips, Intel and other chip makers have added more cores, a tactic that GPU makers have used for years in order to increase parallel processing. GPUs from Nvidia contain as many as 240 cores while those from AMD, which that company acquired when it purchased ATI Technologies in 2006, have hundreds. So they’re faster.

But they’re also harder to program, something Nvidia is trying to solve with more flexible chips and a new programming tool called CUDA. But most enterprise and consumer software runs on x86 chips and needs adaptations to take advantage of GPUs. Intel’s Larrabee chip has multiple cores, but is not a GPU. Intel claims this offers people the performance gains and ability to render graphics much like a GPU does, but that Larrabee’s x86 architecture allows for easier programming.

It’s nearly impossible to judge a chip until you’ve seen it in action and tracked whether OEMs want to put it in their devices, but my bet is that Intel won’t be able to compromise with a many-cored CPU and believe it will beat a GPU at its own game. Nvidia and AMD are hoping as much, especially Nvidia, which has the dominant GPU market share — right behind Intel’s integrated chips — and wages an almost constant battle again Intel’s PR on this front. As Nvidia’s small but fierce marketing team faces off against Intel’s Goliath, grab some popcorn, because it’ll be a graphics showdown worth watching.

Intel Friends Facebook to Make x86 Chips Sexy

Thu, 31 Jul 2008 15:11:53 -0700

I have to hand it to Intel. The company that brought us the brilliant marketing of Intel Inside (remember the stuffed guy in a bunny suit?) says Facebook has chosen its Xeon chips to power the social network. But because Intel is aware that server chips are commodities, the chip maker is also working directly with Facebook, tweaking settings to really make those dual- and quad-core chips roar in the hopes that they will continue to power the servers running Web 2.0 sites and compute clouds.

Despite this announcement and this week’s partnership to create a cloud testbed with HP and Yahoo, Intel must be sweating. The premise of the rise in cloud computing is that hardware will no longer matter to most people. Even during interviews with representatives from Yahoo, HP and Intel to talk about the test bed, Prabhakar Raghavan, head of Yahoo Research, explained that the clouds were more than “just the nuts and bolts of hardware,” a point Intel’s Andrew Chen was quick to downplay.

So Intel needs to make sure IT buyers know and love its chips. Architectures that are not x86, such as Sun’s SPARC or IBM’s Cell, made up 46 percent of the server market in the first quarter of the year, according to data from IDC — and those specialty chips’ share of the server market is rising. To be sure, servers using x86 chips from Intel or AMD accounted for $7 billion worth of sales in the first quarter of the year, but growth is slowing, partly due to success with virtualization. So look for similar high-profile announcements from Intel touting not just the chips, but the company’s ability to make those chips work even better.

Google Eyeing a VC Arm?

Thu, 31 Jul 2008 08:12:22 -0700

According to the Wall Street Journal, Google may be trying to build out a corporate venture capital arm similar to other strategic venture groups at companies ranging from Intel to Motorola. The Journal reports that Google SVP David Drummond will be in charge, and that the search giant has hired 33-year-old former entrepreneur and investor William Maris to help.

Since Google already invests in plenty of companies, from Current Communications to 23&Me, the genetic information company run by Sergey Brin’s wife, I don’t think this news it terribly new or exciting. It also has a program in place for clean and renewable investments as part of its philanthropic arm. And so far, its track record as an investor has been unproven or weak given issues faced by portfolio companies. Current faces lackluster BPL use, Meraki is trying to stay relevant and electric vehicles are still far out there.

When a company sets up a venture arm it needs to decide if the investments it makes are part of a money-making effort similar to the way Intel now invests its capital, or to push product lines or ideas. Google already invests in companies to further its technology goals, so it may be looking for a strategic arm to create financial returns.

The downside of setting up a formal investment arm is that investing in startups is a long-term effort and many public companies are driven by short-term results. In tough times, it can be hard to write down the value in the portfolio, as Dell and Boeing discovered after the crash. They have both discontinued their strategic investment groups.

Update: To create a successful strategic investment group a company really needs to focus, something Google has not historically done well. If the goal is to complement and push Google’s technology efforts, the comapny needs to figure out what those efforts should be, and ferret out the best startups in that sector. If the fund is motivated by returns, then Google will need to temper its desire to only get involved with the best, the brightest and the hottest items right now (You know like accepting a $17,000 a year daycare instead of $30,000), because valuations on those deals can be sky high. I’m not terribly optimistic that Google has the discipline to handle strategic investing, or even if it really should.

photo of David Drummond courtesy of Google

Compiz Fusion in openSUSE 11.0

Wed, 30 Jul 2008 13:14:40 -0700

Compiz is a compositing window manager that uses 3D graphics acceleration via OpenGL. It provides various new graphical effects and features on any desktop environment, including Gnome and KDE....

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Welcome to the PS3 Data Center

Tue, 29 Jul 2008 16:04:10 -0700

Computerworld has done a nice job of encapsulating a corporate IT trend we’ve been writing about for the last couple of months with our focus on accelerator chips — among them graphics processors from Nvidia or AMD and Cell (which was designed originally for the PlayStation 3) from IBM — moving into the enterprise. To sum it up, the x86 processor, the workhorse of corporate computing, can do a lot, but accelerators such as Cell or GPUs can do some things better and faster, such as Monte Carlo simulations on Wall Street or video encoding and decoding.

That’s leading some IT managers to look into hybrid machines like the newly launched Roadrunner supercomputer, which uses AMD’s x86 chips and Cell. Hybrid machines won’t take over the data center, but plenty of firms that build high-performance computing systems for enterprises are eying the trend with interest.

The Computerworld article quotes Dan Olds, an analyst at Gabriel Consulting Group, as saying that 40 percent of Fortune 1,000 companies will be using hybrid computers within five years. One challenge will be getting enterprise software ported onto the different chip architecture through efforts like Nvidia’s CUDA or IBM’s software development kits for Cell, but there are plenty of companies working on that problem.

photos courtesy of IBM

Cloud Computing Test Bed: Live Notes From The Conference Call

Tue, 29 Jul 2008 09:05:16 -0700

Hewlett Packard, Intel and Yahoo announced the Cloud Computing Test Bed this morning. Executives from the three companies are holding a 9 am PST conference call to discuss the new venture. Participating are Prith Banerjee, Senior Vice President, Research, HP and Director, HP Labs; Prabhakar Raghavan, Head of Yahoo! Research; and Andrew Chien, Vice President, Corporate Technology Group, Intel and Director, Intel Research.

The product is a distributed computing platform for third party research and application building. My live call notes are below.

Notes, in chronological order:

…waiting for call to begin

Prith Banerjee from HP began the call and introduced Andrew Chien and Prabhakar Raghavan. Summarizing the key news: HP, Intel and Yahoo are partnering with governments and academic institutions to create an open source cloud computing test bed with six distributed centers. Global, distributed, Internet scale platform. The main goal is to remove financial and logistical barriers for people to develop cloud computing application. Partners include the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT) in Germany.

HP believes we are entering an era of “everything as a service.” Businesses and users will use the services, which will anticipate your needs based on location, etc. This shift towards everything as a service will require a new approach. HP will conduct research in two areas: intelligent infrastructure and cloud services. They say they’ll experiment with radically new data center structures.

Andrew Chien from Intel: cloud computing is a big challenge. important technology issues around hardware stack to drive performance, energy usage, etc. This isn’t a “test tube” study, it’s a large scale distributed global platform. “Intel has a long history of open collaboration” he says.

Prabhakar Raghavan from Yahoo: Says Yahoo is pleased to be a cofounder of the project. Want to take Internet research “to the next level.” Says the next generation of the web demands collaborative research. Discussing M45 data center they launched with Carnegie Mellon and other projects where they experimented with cloud computing. Says this announcement is in the spirit of the earlier partnerships. Building and contributing to an “intellectual commons.”

Questions:

- how are each company contributing?

Each company is providing people and resources, and each is creating one of the six test beds. Research can be conducted across the stack. Yahoo has contributed open source software, from the OS to Hadoop. Chien reiterates support for open source software. Says some of the pieces of the data centers are up and running now.

- Size of investment by each company?

not disclosing financial terms. each facility will have 1,000- 4,000 processor cores.

- web needs a new architecture…please expand?

They want people to take the cloud for granted, so people can create applications at any scale.

- have they measured how much collective computing power? Why not part of IBM/Google research announced last year?

we’re complimentary to IBM/Google, and also different. they are going to allow people to run low levels of customized software. IBM/Google is focused on application level right now. In terms of scale, they say not to focus on total computational capability, but to focus on scalability.

- idea of timeline? what will finished products look like?

some of this is underway and being used. M45 datacenter has been in operation since 2007, this takes it to a broader level. they are looking to see publication of research by all parties, contribution to an intellectual commons.

- have they received government R&D funds?

says they are partnering with the national science foundation and various academic organization, never really answered the question.

- can others join this group? IP ownership?

Chien says they are taking a leadership step. open to more people contributing. On IP ownership, they are making clear statements about what is open source, commitment to openness.

Note: I was not allowed to ask a question for some reason. Things I would have asked:

1. How do third parties open their own facilities/data centers? What if Stanford wants to open a facility?

2. Pricing: How will resources be allocated to people building on the platform?

3. Where to people go for information on APIs and other tools needed to access the platform?

4. Yahoo kept referring to M45 as a version of this already deployed. Is that their contribution or are they building out a new facility.

Overall this is super squishy, and appears to be more of a hype release than anything. More details are needed. A lot more.

Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.

HP, Yahoo, Intel Launch Cloud Computing Test Bed

Tue, 29 Jul 2008 09:05:17 -0700

The mystery announcement we mentioned yesterday was just released - Yahoo, Hewlett Packard and Intel are jointly announcing a new cloud computing research initiative called the Cloud Computing Test Bed. Users will be able to build and launch new applications on the platform.

It’s being described as “a globally distributed, Internet-scale testing environment designed to encourage research on the software, data center management and hardware issues associated with cloud computing at a larger scale than ever before.” Other partners include the Infocomm Development Authority of Singapore (IDA) (which is distinct from the MDA, I believe, which is unfortunate), the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT) in Germany:

The test bed will initially consist of six “centers of excellence” at IDA facilities, the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, the Steinbuch Centre for Computing of the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, HP Labs, Intel Research and Yahoo!. Each location will host a cloud computing infrastructure, largely based on HP hardware and Intel processors, and will have 1,000 to 4,000 processor cores capable of supporting the data-intensive research associated with cloud computing. The test bed locations are expected to be fully operational and made accessible to researchers worldwide through a selection process later this year.

The test bed will leverage Yahoo!’s technical leadership in open source projects by running Apache Hadoop — an open source, distributed computing project of the Apache Software Foundation — and other open source, distributed computing software such as Pig, the parallel programming language developed by Yahoo! Research.

“The HP, Intel and Yahoo! Cloud Computing Test Bed furthers our commitment to the global, collaborative research community that is advancing the new sciences of the Internet,” said Prabhakar Raghavan, head of Yahoo! Research. “With this test bed, not only can researchers test applications at Internet scale, they will also have access to the underlying computing systems to advance understanding of how systems software and hardware function in a cloud environment.”

Researchers at HP Labs, the central research arm of HP, will use the test bed to conduct advanced research in the areas of intelligent infrastructure and dynamic cloud services. HP Labs recently sharpened its focus to help HP and its customers capitalize on the industry’s shift toward cloud computing, a driving force behind HP’s vision of Everything as a Service. With Everything as a Service, devices and services will interact seamlessly through the cloud, and businesses and individuals will use services that anticipate their needs based on location, preferences, calendar and communities.

More on Yahoo, HP and Intel’s websites. This gets Yahoo in the game that Microsoft, Amazon and Google have been playing for some time.

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What Are HP, Intel, and Yahoo Announcing Tomorrow?

Mon, 28 Jul 2008 17:59:40 -0700

We just got word that HP, Intel, and Yahoo will be announcing a joint research initiative tomorrow morning. We don’t have any details at the moment, but we’re guessing it will probably have to do with large-scale processing. Leave your own speculation in the comments - the first person with the right guess will get a TechCrunch T-shirt.

Employees from HP, Intel and Yahoo are not eligible to participate.

Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.

Will My Computer Run Hyper-V? Detecting Intel VT and AMD-V

Sat, 26 Jul 2008 01:00:08 -0700

Very handy utilities

Extending Xen* with Intel® Virtualization Technology

Fri, 25 Jul 2008 07:01:16 -0700

Open Source Game Development

Fri, 25 Jul 2008 06:50:12 -0700

Intel Is Branching Out With Embedded SoCs

Thu, 24 Jul 2008 16:53:28 -0700

Intel, the world’s largest chip maker, is spreading its R&D efforts far outside of its server and PC kingdom. The company has just launched a new line of products that will combine four processors onto a single chip, reducing both power consumption and the footprint required by the chips.

Intel rightly points out that in a connected world, devices ranging from ATM machines to mobile phones need more speed (but lower power) to offer next-generation use cases for businesses and consumers (you know, things like your refrigerator texting you when you’re out of milk.) So it’s gearing up for this revolution with a line of system-on-a-chip devices, later versions of which will be based on the Atom processor, which was built for networks and mobile Internet devices. One of these SoCs, code-named Linmore, should be available for mobile phones in late 2009 or 2010.

Intel CEO Paul Otellini told us that Atom would be in mobile phones and in embedded devices, which is smart in case the netbook market doesn’t pan out. But will the embedded market embrace Intel? Will the mobile phone market embrace Intel? Most sources in the industry doubt this will happen given Intel’s behavior as the primary provider of chips in the x86 market.

However, the Intel effort does bring software issues to the fore. One of the reasons Intel argues that its SoCs are better is because developers can use a common operating system that will stretch across multiple platforms, something that’s already proving important in creating a user experience that consumers can embrace. That common software platform is why Nokia bought TrollTech, which means Intel might be able to use the common platform edge to push out other embedded chip guys.

Intel Switches From Ubuntu To Fedora For Mobile Linux

Thu, 24 Jul 2008 13:44:58 -0700

An anonymous reader writes "According to a report on heise, Intel is switching from using Ubuntu to the Fedora Project for the second version of the Intel supported Mobile & Internet Linux Project Moblin, citing a desire to use RPM package management." So far, of the various subnotebooks I've been glancing at over shoulders at OSCON, though, most of the ones with an easily identified operating system seem to be running Ubuntu.

PC World - Business Center: Intel Releases Moblin Into the Wild

Thu, 24 Jul 2008 12:53:53 -0700

Face detection with PHP - xarg open source

Thu, 24 Jul 2008 12:44:58 -0700