Speeds and Feeds

Gordon Moore is a man of extraordinary significance in the semiconductor industry. He co-founded Intel, identified the trend now known as Moore's Law, and has made innumerable personal contributions to this field.

When Moore came up on stage for an interview here at IDF, he received a standing ovation. This was a 10th anniversary appearance; Moore keynoted the very first IDF in 1997.

He was interviewed by… Read more

I'm in a press briefing here at IDF covering Intel's 45nm and 32nm manufacturing processes.

Intel's tick-tock product schedule keeps moving along. The latest tick is Penryn; next year comes the tock of Nehalem. Both these chips are from Intel's 45nm process.

Stressing its environmental awareness, Intel stresses that these 45nm chips are… Read more

10:03 AM: That's it for the morning keynote. I'll be back later during the day with additional posts from other IDF sessions. (This post was delayed-- the WiFi did go away after all, just as the keynote was ending.)

10:01 AM: Otellini's last topic is "extreme inclusion." Now that there are a billion Internet-connected PCs, Intel is looking at how to support the next billion, and then the billion after that. He highlights Intel's efforts with the Classmate PC, which is its alternative to the One Laptop per Child-- although he shows the OLPC notebook on a slide as well. He also points out that the rest of the industry is working in this area.

09:57 AM: Otellini brings up Andrew Fanara, a manager of the Environmental Protection Agency's Energy Star team, to discuss the recent… Read more

"Power to the people" was a popular rallying cry among anti-establishment activists in the 1960s.

"Power from the people" appears to be the latter-day equivalent.

The theory behind the slogan is that humans move around a lot, and the only result of all this motion is that the humans end up in a different place.

According to some, this isn't good enough.

The MIT News reports that two MIT graduate students in architecture have proposed to extract energy from the motion of humans through… Read more

When I posted my review of Belkin's TuneTalk Stereo, a representative of APC commented on the story to suggest that I might want to use APC's Mobile Power Pack to extend the iPod's battery life when recording.

I started to reply to describe the gizmo I designed to power my iPod from a spare PowerBook battery-- a little clip that connects the battery terminals to an iPod dock cable. This is what I used to use to power up my old 4th-generation iPod while recording long conference sessions with the Belkin Voice Recorder for iPod.

But even as I was typing, I realized… Read more

I'd like to provide some additional information provided by Belkin as a followup to my review of the TuneTalk Stereo earlier in the week.

Belkin public relations coordinator Jacqueline Romulo wrote to me after the review appeared to confirm that the TuneTalk Stereo is not currently compatible with the iPod classic, and said it was listed as compatible on the Belkin Web site by mistake. (Indeed, it's no longer listed on Belkin's page for the iPod classic.)

In a subsequent e-mail, Romulo provided this… Read more

After my July 26 post about the inexpensive Linux-based PC called Zonbu, I was contacted by a public-relations agent working for the company.

He put me in touch with Zonbu CEO Gregoire Gentil, and I met with Gentil on August 22, prompting another blog post on the topic of flash drives.

Last week, I received the loaner system Gentil promised me, and I've been using it since. (It's small enough to be shipped in a standard U.S. Priority Mail box.)

On Wednesday, I read an article by Walt Mossberg of The Wall Street Journal. The piece's title conveys the subject as well as Mossberg's… Read more

Earlier this week, Advanced Micro Devices finally introduced the first true quad-core microprocessor in the PC market, code-named "Barcelona" and launched as part of AMD's Opteron line. David Kanter provided an excellent technical analysis of Barcelona on his Real World Technologies site.

Barcelona is not the absolutely fastest processor on the market. For single-core performance, both IBM and Intel offer faster chips. With multiple cores working, Intel and Sun can claim higher performance per socket--Intel because it can put two high-frequency dual-core chips in one socket, and Sun because it has an eight-core processor (the UltraSparc T2).

Although I'm sure AMD wishes it could claim those titles, there's another metric that matters even more to some customers. Barcelona delivers high… Read more

On Monday evening, I posted my first impressions of my new iPod classic 160GB. The first accessory I needed for my new iPod was a microphone so I can record conferences, meetings, and voice memos.

Right after receiving the iPod, I looked around online and found a comparative review of three iPod microphones by Mark Nelson on the O'Reilly Digital Media site. The review helped me settle on the Belkin TuneTalk Stereo for iPod.

I checked the Belkin Web site to make sure this model is compatible with the iPod classic. There's a page on the Belkin site just for that model, and the TuneTalk Stereo is on there--Belkin part number F8Z082-BLK.

I then went to the local Apple Store (at the Valley Fair Mall in Santa Clara, Calif.) since I remembered seeing this gizmo for sale there a couple of months ago. Sure enough, they were still there. In fact, there were two different… Read more