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While we're all familiar with the steady increase in the number of cores in mainstream PC and server processors, the corresponding progress in the embedded-processor market has been anything but steady.

With mainstream PC microprocessors standardizing on four-core designs such as Intel's Core i7 and leading-edge server chips ranging from 8 to 16 cores, single-core chips are no longer competitive. For embedded systems, however, one core may still be the right answer; if more are needed, the choices range up into the hundreds.

The Tilera Tile-Gx100 combines 100 independent 64-bit integer processor cores and cryptographic accelerators with memory, network, and PCI Express interfaces.

(Credit: Tilera Corporation)

The latest announcement in the many-core embedded processor market is Tilera's Tile-Gx family, which combines 16 to 100 64-bit integer processor cores with cryptographic accelerators and off-chip interfaces for memory, networking, and PCI Express. I met with Tilera before last week's announcement to discuss the technical and business issues related to the Tile-Gx.

The technical details
San Jose, Calif.-based Tilera is eager to set itself apart from the many other chip companies competing in its target markets. Unlike most embedded processors with high core counts, for example, Tilera's design allows its cores to operate truly independently, even to the extent of running different operating systems if needed. More commonly, groups of tiles will be combined to run a single task that is part of a larger workload. In this way, one chip can operate like a cluster of multiprocessor systems.

Between this distinction and the fact that cores in the Tile-Gx family are a full 64 bits wide, Tilera claims the Tile-Gx100 is the "world's first 100-core processor." I think that's just a little too broad a claim, personally, since companies such as Clearspeed and Xelerated have previously made similar claims for their chips. Even more significantly, the Tile-Gx100 doesn't exist yet. It won't be a real product until early 2011, according to Tilera's current schedule.

Tile-Gx processors aren't something most CNET readers will ever knowingly use, though these chips will likely, eventually, help carry traffic over the public Internet and through larger corporate networks. But they do provide an excellent example of the issues facing PC processor vendors as core counts continue to grow.

Consider the Tile-Gx100 block diagram shown above. It's easy to imagine that this chip can get a lot of work done. Every core can run up to three instructions per cycle at up to 1.5GHz. It has dedicated hardware accelerators for cryptography and network packet processing. The network interfaces can implement up to eight 10Gb Ethernet ports. The chip also has four DDR3 memory interfaces; to reduce DRAM accesses, every core has 320KB of local cache memory. (The total amount of cache memory in the Tile-Gx100, about 32MB, matches that of IBM's Power7 processor, which has only eight cores.)

The need for balance
It's not so easy to keep all these resources busy, however. The more complicated a chip gets, generally speaking, the more difficult it becomes to make full use of its resources. This is what we often call the balance between hardware and software.

Tilera will offer four products in the Tile-Gx family with 16, 36, 64, and 100 cores and corresponding differences in memory and networking support. This range of products helps meet the needs of different applications, but each product still needs a particular balance of application requirements for maximum efficiency.

So here lies Tilera's great challenge--finding software applications that need a large amount of CPU performance and that also:

1. Are highly parallel, so they can keep many cores busy.
2. Don't need much (if any) floating-point math, since the Tile-Gx doesn't do that.
3. Can benefit from cryptographic acceleration.
4. Consume large amounts of network bandwidth.

Tilera wants customers to think of its chips as "general-purpose" processors, but as this list shows, they're better for some purposes than for others. As PC processors reach higher core counts and integrate more functionality, they too will become more sensitive to application requirements. Integration eventually reaches a point where additional complexity adds no practical value. And the closer PC processor vendors approach that limit, the more difficult it will become to sell their latest, greatest, most complicated chips.

Network processing is the most natural fit for Tilera's capabilities, particularly high-level services like virus scanning as I discussed in September (see "Insatiable demand for mobile data challenges industry"). Internet service providers rarely provide such services for PC users, since PCs can do their own scanning--but mobile phones and other Internet appliances often can't, so these services are seeing increasing demand.

The networking market, unfortunately, is not large enough to support a company like Tilera. Although there is a lot of networking equipment sold each year, each company in the business has its own ideas about how this processing should be done. A single chip design could never capture the majority of this potential demand.

Further, the larger equipment vendors often have policies in place against relying too heavily on individual suppliers, especially small start-ups. They will commonly design different products using different chip-level technology so that the failure of a single supplier--or the purchase of a supplier by a competing equipment vendor--will have only a limited effect on their bottom line.

New business opportunities
Tilera is working to develop new markets for its current TilePro and future Tile-Gx parts. The most significant of these new markets is cloud computing, which may favor solutions like Tilera's that offer higher performance per watt.

That's the metric Tilera touts most heavily for the Tile-Gx, promising 10 times the performance per watt of Intel's Westmere-EP, a six-core 32nm processor that Intel will begin shipping in 2010, which is aimed at high-efficiency servers. (Incidentally, I commend Tilera for making this comparison; Westmere-EP is exactly what they'll be competing against. Too often, chip companies will try to make themselves look better by comparing next year's products with last year's competition.)

Although 10x is a critical multiplier in this business (see my post "The factor factor"), such an advantage doesn't necessarily guarantee success. Tilera has done everything it can to minimize the difficulties associated with software development by adopting industry-standard development tools such as GCC and Eclipse, but its Tile chips still can't run Windows and it just can't match the developer relationships that companies like Advanced Micro Devices and Intel have established.

Fortunately, Tilera is small and relatively efficient for a chip company. Last month, Tilera announced that Quanta Computer invested $10 million in the company based on Quanta's interest in cloud computing. Tilera said it has enough funding to reach cash-flow breakeven in 2011, assuming the Tile-Gx reaches market and achieves the kind of success Tilera predicts.

I remain skeptical, but hopeful. I think there's no question that in the long run, there will be plenty of demand for complex, many-core processors like Tilera's. But will Tilera still be around by that time? And in the long run, once this demand develops, larger companies such as Intel will have their own offerings.

Can Tilera carve out a market niche that it can defend against such strong competition? I just don't know, but I'm always glad to see people trying new ideas.

The Hot Chips conference in Palo Alto, Calif this week is focusing on high-end chips for servers and scientific computers, with IBM's upcoming Power7 as a standout.

On Tuesday, IBM will give a presentation on its next-generation server chip, the Power7. IBM documentation describes the chip as having up to eight cores. A dual-chip module holds two processors for a total of 16 cores, according to IBM.

Each core has a rated performance of 32 gigaflops, providing 256 gigaflops per processor--one of the fastest chips to date based on this scientific-centric performance benchmark.

Power7 will be used in the National Center for Supercomputing Applications "Blue Waters" supercomputer, the first system of its kind to sustain one petaflop performance on a range of science and engineering applications, according to the NCSA. A petaflop is one quadrillion floating point operations per second.

Power7 "will be the first of a powerful new system design from IBM. The design includes extensive research and development in new chip technology, interconnect technology, operating systems, compiler, and programming environments," according to the NCSA.

Other chips to be described at the conference include the Sparc64 VIIIfx: Fujitsu's new 8-core processor for Peta scale computing. Sun will discuss its "next-generation multi-threaded processor Rainbow Falls" and AMD will spell out its Magny Cours processor, 12-core chip.

Intel will present a paper on its upcoming Nehalem server processor.

Intel will also discuss Moorestown, an upcoming version of the Atom processor targeted at mobile Internet devices and smartphones. Intel will also give a presentation entitled "Understanding the Intel Next Generation Microarchitectures (Nehalem and Westmere) transitioning into the Mainstream."

Adobe Systems, taking the same course with its forthcoming Creative Suite applications, will offer the next Mac OS X version of Photoshop Lightroom only on Intel-based machines.

Apple has chosen to discontinue support for Macs using PowerPC processors beginning with its next operating system, version 10.6 aka Snow Leopard, which is due to arrive in coming weeks. Adobe said last week that its next Creative Suite will follow suit. The CS family includes programs such as Photoshop, Illustrator, Premiere, DreamWeaver, and Flash Professional.

Lightroom, which is for editing and cataloging photos, isn't part of the suite, but it's headed the same route.

"The next full version update of Lightroom will not run on PowerPC-based Mac computers," Lightroom product manager Tom Hogarty said in a blog post last week. "Lightroom 2 updates will continue to support PowerPC."

Meanwhile, Photoshop Principal Product Manager John Nack, while fond of PowerPC, took a pragmatic tone on his blog: "By the time the next version of the (Creative) Suite ships, the very youngest PPC-based Macs will be roughly four years old. They're still great systems, but if you haven't upgraded your workstation in four years, you're probably not in a rush to upgrade your software, either."

MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif.--Much more than most companies, Intel's success depends on the technology that will arrive in its field years hence. As a result, the company has more than 1,000 researchers beavering away to gauge and develop that technology.

And the company wants everyone to know it.

Intel CTO Justin Rattner

(Credit: Stephen Shankland/CNET)

At its Intel Research Day at the Computer History Museum here Thursday, the company touted a wide range of projects that extend beyond the company's core business of making computer processors. On display were projects to improve the WiMax regional wireless network technology, improve mobile devices' processing power while reducing their energy consumption, refine software to make larger-scale data storage faster, and transmit electrical power wirelessly within a modestly size room.

Intel also gave the work a higher-profile name Thursday, with Chief Technology Officer announcing that the Corporate Technology Group now is called Intel Labs. The group's role is to evaluate not just what works, but to find out what doesn't before Intel invests a lot of money in that area, Rattner said.

Power-efficient Atom systems
Intel rules the roost for PC processors, but it's an also-ran when it comes to cell phones and other mobile devices, in part because its x86 processors consume more power than rivals, including those of the ARM lineage. Intel's Atom chips are the company's current attempt to crack the market, and the next-generation "Moorestown" processor boasts lower energy consumption requirements.

"I've been doing this about 15 years now. We've had advancements, but never the magic doubling of battery life," said Paul Diefenbaugh, principal engineer

At the research day, Intel showed off technology that lets a Moorestown system use less power by using a more aggressive version of existing power-saving idea, sending a computer into somnolent states as deeply and frequently as possible. "We realized the problem was really about the platform," Diefenbaugh said, because saving small amounts of power in the processor was futile when something like a USB controller chip was consuming more power and keeping the system from entering a low-power idle mode.

Intel researcher Paul Diefenbaugh

(Credit: Stephen Shankland/CNET)

Platform-level engineering is easier with Moorestown, which combines many computer system elements onto a single processor, integrating graphics, a memory controller, and more in a technology generally called system-on-a-chip. That means it's relatively easy for one part of a chip to signal when it's idle and doesn't need power and when it's about to get busy and need more power, Diefenbaugh said.

Intel showed a running Moorestown system that cut power consumption by 50 percent to 90 percent compared with the current "Menlow" model by using research versions of this power-saving technology. Rattner said that production versions would see power savings of "up to" a factor of 50 with Moorestown compared to Menlow.

Silicon Photonics
Although Intel showed a wide range of technologies, some are closer to the company's core business than others. Rattner and Mike Mayberry, vice president of Intel's technology and manufacturing group, described one: silicon photonics, in which light rather than electricity transmits data from one chip to another.

Today photons carry data across long distances with fiber optics, but Intel is among those who believe it will eventually travel directly from one chip to another, with transceivers built into the silicon chips to send and receive light pulses.

"We're hard at work to demonstrate a complete silicon photonics transceiver this year," Rattner said. "We won't tell you exactly our bandwidth goals, but they're very impressive."

In the nearer term, light will be used to transmit data among servers in a data center and then within a computer chassis, Mayberry said, but photonics embedded completely in silicon should arrive afterward. "We're talking about potentially the middle of the next decade," Mayberry said.

Mayberry also said Intel is working on bringing new technology for creating silicon chip circuit patterns from research to manufacturing stage. That next technology uses extreme ultraviolet light, which has a shorter wavelength and therefore can be used to help etch smaller features to help keep up with Moore's Law predictions for ever-more processing electronics in a given amount of chip area.

And Intel wants a place in next-generation memory technology, too. On the agenda today are "floating body" cells, phase-change memory, and seek-and-scan probes, each of which hold promise but have drawbacks, he said.

Faster storage
Intel manufactures and promotes solid-state disks (SSDs), which replace spinning platters of conventional hard drives with packages of unmoving, fast-responding flash memory. The biggest hurdle with SSDs today is their higher cost.

Intel manufacturing vice president Mike Mayberry

(Credit: Stephen Shankland/CNET)

Intel is working on benefiting more from SSDs without going whole hog, though. The company's approach goes beyond the idea of using an SSD as a high-speed cache for a storage system that relies more on conventional hard drives.

Instead, Intel has created a variation of the ext3 file system Linux uses to store data. The Intel version checks the hard drive command requests and prioritizes the ones it judges to be high-priority data so the single SSD in a 12-drive storage system handles that data, said Matthew Eszenyi, a technology strategist.

Adding the SSD cache doubles the overall system speed, he said, and using the prioritized data system doubles it again, Eszenyi said.

Wireless power transmission
Electric toothbrushes and other devices can be charged without wired connections, but Intel has been working on technology that works over much longer distances. At the research event, the company showed off a new variation of the idea that transmits power through the air to run a speaker without any other power source.

Two flat copper coils are used in the technology, each tuned to resonate at a particular frequency. That means when electromagnetic energy is released from one, the other picks it up in much the same way an opera singer can shatter a wine glass by singing at just the right pitch, said researcher Emily Cooper.

Ultimately, Intel sees the idea as useful for delivering power to a laptop computer inside a room, but it could be used over shorter ranges, too--for example to replace the fallible wires that connect laptop screens through a hinge, Cooper said.

The wireless transmission shows efficiency of 90 percent at distances of up to a meter, she said, and Intel has shown it powering a 60-watt light bulb, too.

Multicore data dealings
Intel's tera-scale processing project--which Rattner said is expanding by a factor of 1,000 to become the exa-scale project--is designed to tackle the challenges of serious multicore processing. Today's chips typically have eight or fewer processing engines called cores, and communications among them are relatively straightforward along a bus--a linear data pathway that links the cores together.

Wireless power transmission researcher Emily Cooper

(Credit: Stephen Shankland/CNET)

But with more cores, things get more complicated. Aniruddha Vaidya showed a mesh of 36 cores--a 6-by-6 grid made of programmable chips rather than an actual single slice of silicon as eventually will be the case.

The cores on the periphery can connect to resources such as memory or graphics, but the cores in the interior connect only to other cores. To transfer data, each core must often transmit data from one to another in multiple hops.

In the 36-core mesh, data takes an average of 4 hops to get where it needs to go, Vaidya said.

Part of the reason for the research is to develop necessary higher-level features. The mesh can be partitioned into multiple independent patches to support virtualization or security needs, he said, and the data-routing technology can adjust when individual nodes fail.

Boosting WiMax capacity
Intel has long touted WiMax technology for bathing an area in broadband wireless, though it's had less success fostering adoption. Intel showed two WiMax technologies at the event.

First was a method squeezing 40 percent more capacity out of a WiMax networking station when handling voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) calls. The system groups calls with similar characteristics so call-control data can be shared across each group rather than sent individually, said Vijay Kesavan.

Second was a peer-to-peer networking idea that ends up giving each device on a wireless network more network capacity. The technique helps smooth out areas with weak wireless network coverage and could let a person use a WiMax-enabled PC shoulder the battery burden instead of a nearby WiMax-enabled phone, said Intel researcher Ozgur Oyman, but it doesn't work as well when many of the devices on the network are moving instead of stationary.

An Advanced Micro Devices executive claims that Intel and Apple cut a deal in 2005 that made Intel an exclusive supplier of processors to Apple, preventing AMD from gaining Apple business.

No AMD CPUs are currently used in Apple computers.

(Credit: Apple)

The claim, made in a phone interview with Tom McCoy, AMD's senior vice president of legal affairs, earlier this week, holds that Intel has had a longstanding deal to be Apple's sole supplier of microprocessors. To date, Apple has not used an AMD central processing unit (CPU) in any of its products. Currently, only Intel CPUs populate Apple's laptop, desktop, and server lineups.

This assertion by AMD comes in the wake of the EU decision last week to fine Intel $1.45 billion for violating antitrust legislation. Last week's EU decision centered on whether Intel used illegal tactics to deny processor business to AMD at PC makers.

McCoy said that a deal was struck when Apple moved from the PowerPC (IBM-Motorola) chip architecture to the x86 (Intel-AMD) architecture. The transition was announced by Steve Jobs at the Worldwide Developers Conference in 2005.

"They made a deal when they were porting over from PowerPC to x86 as to how much Intel was willing to pay for that port. My guess is that Intel asked for and won exclusivity in return for the help that they gave Apple to port," McCoy said.

McCoy continued: "That deal will not be exclusive forever and when that exclusivity is over, I'm sure they (Apple) will choose on the merits. We'll have a chance to compete for Apple's business when Apple is ready," he said. Intel denies this allegation.

Though McCoy did not make any direct charge of illegal activity regarding such a deal, the assertion is not that far removed from charges made in the July 2005 AMD complaint against Intel. AMD, in that filing, cited Dell, among other examples of exclusive Intel deals with PC makers. "In its history, Dell has not purchased a single AMD x86 microprocessor despite acknowledging Intel shortcomings and customer clamor for AMD solutions, principally in the server sector...Dell has been and remains Intel-exclusive. According to industry reports, Intel has bought Dell's exclusivity with outright payments and favorable discriminatory pricing and service." (Note: Dell, in 2005, offered no AMD-based products, though it does today.)

Whether the deal is exclusive doesn't in itself constitute a legal argument, according to Joshua D. Wright of the George Mason University School of Law, who has written about the EU decision in a blog, "Truth on the Market." "Under Section 2 of the Sherman Act, a plaintiff must show that the exclusive dealing arrangement harmed competition in the form of higher prices, lower output, or reduced innovation," Wright said, responding to an e-mail query.

In the wake of reported merger talks with IBM, Sun Microsystems executive vice president John Fowler talked about Big Blue as a rival.

Sun Microsystems executive vice president John Fowler

(Credit: Sun Microsystems)

Fowler, in a phone interview Friday, discussed IBM as a competitor in the server computer market and the competitive differences between Intel and Advanced Micro Devices.

"IBM is obviously a classic competition space where we bring to bear all of our technology innovation," Fowler said. "In this particular case, how we've incorporated and done networking technology, how we've incorporated and done flash (memory). The fact that we have an open operating system that runs across our RISC platforms and our x86 platforms and that we have an open storage offering on the 7000," he said.

Fowler continued, "Those are all great discussions to go have with IBM customers. Those are all things that IBM just doesn't have and represent a significant amount of value."

In a question about comparing IBM--which also offers a RISC architecture server platform (PowerPC) as well Intel and AMD--to other competitors like Hewlett-Packard and Dell, Fowler said: "They (IBM) are more similar (to Sun) than the others and interested in more of the same things."

And how does Sun compete with larger rivals? "We have for decades now innovated in a marketplace where companies like HP and IBM have been consistently bigger than us. What we do is incorporate new technologies or invent new technologies more quickly," he said.

Fowler also spoke of some of the differences between Sun offerings on AMD and Intel platforms. He began by saying that a recent Intel Nehalem server chip announcement covers only two-socket (a socket accommodates one processor) servers and that Intel's product is an "entry level" product. "It's a solid product but it really applies to the volume entry-level systems in the world today," he said.

Fowler continued: "Obviously, AMD and (Sun) SPARC cover a much broader range of application scale. In AMD's case, extending up to eight-socket servers and in SPARC's case up to 64-socket servers," he said.

Recent events have raised the question of whether the United States is prepared to defend its electricity grid.

Spies from other countries have been detected hacking into the United States' electricity grid, leaving traces of their activity and raising concerns over the security of the U.S. energy infrastructure to cyberattacks. The spies apparently sought ways to navigate and control the power grid as well as the water and sewage infrastructure, according to a published report. It's part of a rising number of intrusions, the article said, quoting former and current national security officials.

There have long been concerns over securing the power grid and other infrastructure. Those security issues are mounting as utilities use more Internet-based communications and software to control the grid through smart-grid technology. A report by security firm IOActive last month warned that people with $500 worth of equipment and the right training could manipulate smart meters with embedded communications in people's homes to potentially disrupt operation of the grid.

More than a decade after initial reports said critical infrastructure in the U.S. is vulnerable to cyberattack, the situation has only worsened as utilities move their control systems closer to the Internet and install smart-grid technology, according to security experts.

For many utility workers, it's easier to log onto the Internet from home when they get called at night. But if those home computers are infected with spyware they can be used by attackers to get into the control systems, which are supposed to be separated from the Internet.

But there are other problems that are more deeply embedded in the day-to-day operations of utility business. Network control software that utilities buy from outside vendors often includes the ability to run Web servers and enable remote access and wireless access. Then there are configuration problems, such as routers and other systems with no passwords or default passwords,

Another infrastructure vulnerability materialized this week in the Silicon Valley, where vandals were blamed for a massive phone and Internet outage. Police confirmed the phone and Internet outage that left thousands of customers in the San Jose, Calif., area without phone or broadband Internet service was caused by vandals who had cut AT&T fiber-optic cables. A cable in San Carlos, Calif., owned by Sprint Nextel was also cut about two hours later.

A representative said a utility hole cover had been lifted, and the fiber underground had been cut. She confirmed that the Sprint fiber that was cut also appeared to be the work of vandals.

Return of the worm?
The Conficker worm that has infected millions of Windows-based computers will likely be used to send spam and steal data much like one of the nastiest botnets on the Internet does, researchers said after finding links between Conficker and Waledac family of malware that includes the Storm botnet.

A week after failing to do anything but snore, the much-hyped Conficker worm was roused from its slumber, with infected computers transmitting updates via peer-to-peer and dropping a mystery payload onto PCs. Researchers suspect that the payload program may be a keystroke logger, a spam generator, or both.

Conficker now also tries to connect to MySpace, MSN.com, eBay, CNN.com, and AOL as a way to test that the computer has Internet connectivity, deletes all traces of itself in the host machine, and is set to shut down some functionality on May 3. In addition, Conficker reaches out to a domain that is known to be infected by Waledac and downloads an encrypted file.

One expert theorized that Eastern Europeans are behind Waledac. He suspects they created the Storm botnet to try different payloads and business models and that Waledac resulted from that. Ferguson speculates that they may be putting their lessons learned from earlier efforts into practice with Conficker.

The worm spreads via a hole in Windows that Microsoft patched in October, as well as through removable storage devices and network shares with weak passwords. The worm disables security software and blocks access to security Web sites.

To check if your computer is infected you can use this Conficker Eye Chart or this site at the University of Bonn. There is also a Conficker removal guide at CNET's Download.com.

Meanwhile, the cost of security is mounting for the Pentagon, which spent more than $100 million in the past six months to clean up from Internet attacks and network issues.

The Defense Department was forced to take up to 1,500 computers offline last year because of a cyberattack, and it banned the use of external removable storage devices because of their ability to spread viruses. The news comes amid internal government squabbles over which department would be best to manage the nation's cybersecurity programs and in the middle of a cybersecurity review ordered by President Obama.

Battling piracy
In a surprise development, the French parliament voted down Internet piracy legislation that had largely been expected to pass. Because the bill was expected to pass, few members of parliament were present for the final vote.

The "Creation and Internet" bill, which had won the preliminary approval of the parliament last week, would compel Internet service providers to take graduated actions against customers accused of illegally downloading copyrighted material. After warning a customer against such actions for a third time, an ISP could suspend the person's Internet access for up to a year.

Meanwhile, the copyright infringers responsible for leaking an incomplete version of the unreleased movie "X-Men Origins: Wolverine" will likely face harsh penalties thanks to strict U.S. intellectual property laws, but copyright enforcement is still woefully inadequate abroad, representatives of the entertainment industry told members of Congress.

One week after the 20th Century Fox film was found on the Internet, the House of Representatives Committee on Foreign Affairs held a hearing in Los Angeles to listen to industry representatives about addressing piracy. Committee Chair Howard Berman (D-Calif.) said he plans to introduce legislation shortly to bring more attention to intellectual property rights abroad.

Piracy cost the film industry $6.1 billion in 2005, according to the Motion Picture Association of America, while copyright infringement overall resulted in $18.3 billion in trade losses in 2007, according to the International Intellectual Property Alliance. Copyright infringement also costs the U.S. 750,000 jobs per year, according to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce.

It specifically cost one entertainment columnist his job. Roger Friedman, who worked 10 years for FoxNews.com, a division of News Corp., posted a short review of the forthcoming "X-Men Origins: Wolverine" and he soon found himself out of work.

Friedman wrote in his Fox 411 column last week that downloading the unreleased superhero movie from the Internet was "so much easier than going out in the rain."

News Corp., saying that the review promoted piracy, initially said that Friedman's employment had been terminated but issued a revised statement saying it was a mutual decision.

Also of note
Sun Microsystems rejected IBM's formal buyout offer, calling the bid insufficient and putting future deal talks at risk...General Motors and Segway are working on a two-wheel concept vehicle called Project PUMA (Personal Urban Mobility and Accessibility) and designed to ease congestion and pollution problems in cities...Groups advocating for the blind and reading disabled held a protest at the Manhattan offices of the Authors Guild, which has been very vocal in opposing text-to-speech technology in the Kindle e-reader.

National Semiconductor on Thursday announced that it has delved deeper into its energy efficiency efforts with the acquisition of Act Solar.

National Semi, which expanded into the solar business last year, plans to use the privately held company's technology for monitoring solar arrays with its SolarMagic product line.

Under the deal, whose financial terms were not disclosed, Act Solar's business for monitoring technology, which is designed to improve the efficiency of solar panels by balancing, or recirculating energy, will be folded into National Semi's SolarMagic business.

Power efficiency is an issue with electronic devices, given that it effects the life of powering a device and the amount of heat a device can generate. And the output of solar panels can be affected by shade, debris, different panel styles, and aging panels.

"Now with Act Solar, we can further improve the performance and efficiency of solar systems, at the same time providing monitoring capabilities not available before," said Mike Polacek, senior vice president of National's Key Market Segments. "This will make solar installations more efficient and ultimately reduce the cost of solar energy for everyone."

Updated at 3:45 p.m. PST with correction of Motorola, IBM executives' names.

Even the biggest chip companies churn out their share of flops. But the hype that surrounds these chips is more fascinating than the failures.

It's been almost a year since I posted A brief history of chip hype--and flops (part 1). Consider this Part 2.

Itanium
First, I have to revisit Intel's Itanium. Simply because it's still around and still missing production target dates.

Intel's Itanium has been relegated to obscurity if not practical oblivion

(Credit: Intel)

The hype: "This design philosophy will one day replace RISC and CISC. It is a gateway into the 64-bit future." This copy was, at one time, posted on Hewlett-Packard's Web site. And analysts were drinking the Kool-Aid too. "I expect Itanium to replace Xeon, but not until 2003," one analyst said back in 2001. (Xeon is Intel's successful, lucrative line of server processors that doesn't include Itanium.)

The reality: Yes, Itanium is still warm, still breathing in the rarefied very-high-end server market--where it does have a limited role. But its architecture will never live in a desktop or laptop or even 99 percent of the servers as once thought. And it certainly hasn't remade the computer industry. And it is still chronically late. This time it's Tukwila that's tardy. The quad-core version of Itanium is late because Intel had to make "some engineering enhancements to the Tukwila platform," according to an Intel statement earlier this month. I can only guess that one day Intel will finally let this failed research project go cold and die quietly.

PowerPC
IBM's original PowerPC platform never lived up to the hype. Even when Motorola and IBM processors populated Apple computers.

The hype: "The PowerPC G5 changes all the rules. This 64-bit race car is the heart of our new Power Mac G5, now the world's fastest desktop computer," said Apple CEO Steve Jobs back in 2003. Jobs, a master of hype (also referred to as a Svengali-like reality-distortion field), continued with this precious quote. "IBM offers the most advanced processor design...and this is just the beginning of a long and productive relationship." (Emphasis added.)

The reality: Apple dumped IBM, Motorola, and the PowerPC in 2005 and it was revealed later that the Mac operating system had been leading "a secret double life" for about five years. But the PowerPC platform had really failed long before 2005. Look no further than these comments from an IBM marketing manager in this 1997 Electronic News article: "Many business school case histories will be written about this failure," Jesse Parker, marketing manager at IBM Micro, said at that time. "No one of the three companies involved in PowerPC executed on their plans. IBM didn't. Motorola didn't. And Apple didn't," he said.

The original PowerPC project was conceived by John Sculley, president and CEO of Apple, and Jack Kuehler, vice chairman of IBM. Phil Hester, an IBM manager at the time, and David Mothersole, a Motorola executive, where also instrumental in starting the project, known initially as "Somerset." But as the PowerPC came to market, Mr. Sculley was pushed out of Apple (and) Mr. Kuehler retired. Their replacements did not have the same enthusiasm for the PowerPC alliance, dooming the project.

In short, the PowerPC failed to challenge Intel in the PC market in a big way. (Though it has been reincarnated as IBM's Cell processor that powers Sony's PlayStation and the architecture still powers IBM servers.)

And I have my own vignette to relate that illustrates one reason why Apple eventually dropped the PowerPC. When Apple first began to crow about the dual-processor Power Mac (circa 2003), a neighbor of mine at the time bought into the hype and purchased an Apple Power Mac tower with two IBM G4 processors (this preceded the dual-processor G5 tower that followed soon after). This thing was a furnace. It quite literally raised the temperature in the room it was in, had about five fans too many, and was deafening, to boot. That was the first time I fully understood the magnitude of Apple's fabrications about IBM's "superior" PowerPC designs. (IBM's less-than-impressive--at that time--chip manufacturing process that was used for PowerPC processors also contributed to the problem.)

AMD Puma
Lastly, turning to Advanced Micro Devices, I'll try to look beyond the botched Barcelona launch in September of 2007 (as I've already covered this in Part 1) and focus instead on AMD's mobile "Puma" platform. Though I can't leave Barcelona entirely out of the discussion because there are some disturbing parallels. (Note: AMD's upcoming Yukon and Congo platforms offer some hope for mobile redemption.)

The hype: Like Barcelona, AMD had too much to say about Puma too long before it was real. AMD started pumping Puma back in April 2007 when the company did one of its many (infamous) soft launches (a PR strategy that it has thankfully ditched). This prompted some editorializing from me as well as other publications. "It is questionable whether...Puma will meet the hype AMD is currently trying to generate though these early announcements," according to a rare editorial from DigiTimes in 2007.

Things got even more dicey at the financial analyst day in December 2007 when AMD said Puma would be delayed until the second quarter of 2008.

It's not so much that Puma (aka Turion X2 Ultra coupled with ATI graphics) is a failure of epic proportions like Itanium, it's that the CPU component (separate from the ATI GPU component) fell so far short of the long, ballyhooed build-up it got.

And it is beaten consistently by Intel in the mobile marketplace. Here's an October 2008 CNET review of laptops with AMD's Turion X2 Ultra. "Turning to AMD's 2.0GHz Turion X2 Dual-Core RM-70 CPU might be an option if you're looking to keep costs down and have only basic computing needs," the review said. "The Acer Aspire 5735-4624 costs only $499 and uses a 2.0GHz Intel Pentium Dual Core T3200; it completed our multitasking benchmark test in one-third the time the HP G60 did. The HP G60 wasn't the last-place performer in our mainstream midprice holiday retail laptop roundup. That dubious distinction goes to the Toshiba Satellite L355D-S7825, also an AMD-powered system."

And there are more unfavorable comparisons. This review at Hexus.net of a Toshiba Satellite 300D with AMD Turion X2 Ultra ZM-80 said the Turion X2 Ultra CPU was "found wanting when compared to Centrino 2." The one bright spot was the ATI Mobility Radeon HD 3650 graphics card--but this speaks more about solid ATI technology than AMD's shaky Turion processor.