As it continues to work on a turnaround, Dell on Monday announced that it has named a former General Electric executive to serve as its new chief financial officer.
Brian Gladden, who had nearly 20 years of finance and management experience at GE, will join the computer maker Tuesday as a senior vice president, assuming the role of chief financial officer on June 13. Gladden is coming from Sabic Innovative Plastics, a GE Plastics spin-off where he has been serving as chief executive. Sabic is a unit of Saudi Basic Industries.
Prior to joining Sabic, Gladden held such posts as CFO of both GE Plastics and GE Medical Systems Healthcare IT.
"We look forward to welcoming Brian as an operationally focused CFO whose skills in running multibillion-dollar enterprises, and substantial experience with an industry leader, make him an ideal fit for the global economies in which we operate," Michael Dell, chief executive of Dell, said in a statement.
Gladden is replacing Donald Carty,
Carty, who will remain a Dell director, took over the CFO position in January 2007, as the computer maker tried to address a Securities and Exchange Commission investigation into its accounting practices.
Carty, who was on Dell's board at the time of his CFO appointment, had been serving on the board's audit committee, which initiated its own investigation into the company's
"Don has played a key role in re-establishing transparency and integrity in our financial practices, and we are extremely grateful to have had his leadership," Michael Dell, chief executive, said in a statement.
AMD-ATI and Nvidia are preparing for the next graphics chip showdown. And there is already a good deal of information (and rumor) on the two chips due in June.
The names of the two upcoming product families have been widely reported: The ATI line is branded as the Radeon HD 4800, while the Nvidia is dubbed the GeForce GTX 200.
Advanced Micro Devices is expected to launch the HD 4850 (price estimates of graphics boards range between $189 and $219) and then follow with the 4870 (estimates range between $199 and $279). In the fourth quarter, AMD plans to add the dual-chip ATI Radeon 4870 X2.
Nvidia will respond with the high-end GeForce GTX 200 family. Initial products will be the GeForce GTX 260 and GTX 280.
VR-Zone has already gotten its hands on some preliminary performance numbers for the HD 4850 and 4870. German-language site Hardware-Infos has posted a table with specifications of the HD 4850 and 4870.
Tech site tg daily said "that card vendors will start printing their boxes next week, which means that the specifications are final at this time."
Less seems to be known about the Nvidia GTX 260 and 280, though a Turkish site is claiming to have all the specifications.
The first dual G4 PowerPC systems from Apple were all heat sinks and fans. In this tradition, a rarefied Intel Skulltrail-based powerhouse from Thirdwave uses two top-line quad-core QX9775 processors and a bevy of Nvidia GPUs--and plenty of fans.
The real estate in Thirdwave's $12,000 Skulltrail system is taken up mostly by fans and power supplies
(Credit: Thirdwave Corp.)The system (photo) in fact looks more like a stand-alone power supply box than a computer. Of course heat dissipation is paramount in enthusiast screamers.
The original Apple dual G4 systems (circa 2001) were a testimony to heat dissipation--and Rube Goldberg. So much heat that the system could quite literally raise the temperature in a small room. (Note: I can testify to this.) And so many fans--as many as nine in the original dual G4 system but less in later G5 versions--that Apple had to quickly release a system redesign to reduce noise (and heat) levels.
Intel's Skulltrail technology is much more advanced of course but fans still occupy a large chunk of real estate.
Skulltrail is a very high-end enthusiast platform based on Intel's 5400 "Seaburg" workstation chipset. The design distinguishes itself with dual CPU sockets that power eight processing cores (two QX9775 chips). Skulltrail also supports the Scalable Link Interface (SLI). The system can be maxed out with two dual-GPU graphics cards from Nvidia (such as the GeForce 9800 GX2) or up to four AMD graphics cards using ATI CrossFireX technology.
System pricing is stratospheric. The "Prime Galleria XS" system from Japan-based Thirdwave is listed at $12,740. The Intel QX9775 processor alone costs $1,499, more than most PCs. And the system uses two of these overclocked to 3.6GHz.
Other specifications: Two Nvidia GeForce 9800 GX2 boards, each housing two graphics processing units (GPUs). Thirdwave lists two Scalable Link Interface (SLI) boards plus one more 9800 GX2.
The system also offers an unusual storage option: one 64GB solid state drive.
About a decade ago, wireless heart monitors hooked to patients at Baylor University Medical Center in Dallas went on the fritz, causing much scrambling among the building's engineering team.
The culprit, as it turned out, was interference from a nearby broadcast television station, which was testing its digital signal on the same channel where some of the medical devices operated, as detailed in the journal Biomedical Instrumentation & Technology a few years ago. The Federal Communications Commission ultimately cordoned off spectrum just for that purpose, although migrating there was largely voluntary.
Now, hospital administrators and medical device manufacturers fear similar problems could happen again if federal regulators don't place limits on requests by Google, Microsoft, and other high-tech companies to free up spectrum "white spaces" between television channels.
Those companies and consumer advocacy groups have been agitating in recent years for unlicensed use of those unused pockets because their signals can propagate long distances and penetrate walls, making them uniquely disposed to gigabits-per-second mobile broadband service--"Wi-Fi on steroids" or "Wi-Fi 2.0," as Google telecommunications counsel Rick Whitt has taken to calling it.
The medical community, however, wants to ensure those plans don't imperil the safety of its patients.
"If a new white space application that's operating thousands of times more powerfully came online, either in the hospital or outside the hospital, it could very well directly interfere with the telemetry system and prevent patient monitoring," Tim Kottak, engineering general manager for GE Healthcare's systems and wireless division, said in a telephone interview with CNET News.com this week. "The whole system could be taken out, just like what happened at Baylor."
Since the late 1980s, medical telemetry devices, as they're known, have been used in virtually every hospital throughout the United States to keep tabs on patients' vital signs, such as their heart rate and blood oxygen levels, Kottak said.
A patient wears GE Healthcare's Apex Pro, a wireless medical telemetry device. Telemetry devices continuously measure a variety of vital signs and transmit data to a central location.
(Credit: GE Health Care)It works like this: The patient wears a small transmitter that's connected to a wireless network within the hospital, which consists of an antenna system and receivers. Through that system, doctors and nurses can generally check on the patient from anywhere in the hospital, without needing to be bedside, and the patient is meanwhile free to walk around to visit labs, get X-rays, and work on recovery without being tethered to equipment.
Unlike the National Association of Broadcasters, which has been the loudest opponent of the high-tech industry's white spaces plans, the medical industry isn't asking for a ban on all unlicensed TV white spaces uses by portable mobile devices. (General Electric, of course, also owns NBC Universal, a major broadcasting entity, but Kottak said his division isn't speaking for NBC in this matter.)
Rather, GE and others are seeking a compromise of sorts, in which certain channels would be off-limits, and device operators would be required to alert hospitals and other medical centers before deploying them nearby.
After the Baylor incident, FCC decided to set aside channel 37 of the broadcast TV band as a protected area for exclusive use by medical telemetry devices. But the FCC also allowed hospitals to continue operating existing devices on other TV white spaces, with the understanding that they would move be best served by moving to channel 37 eventually. It's operators of those older systems, which can cost millions of dollars to upgrade, that could face the rudest awakening if new gadgets come online without their knowledge, the medical industry says.
GE, for its part, would like to see the FCC continue to block off not only channel 37 but also adjacent channels 36 and 38, in an effort to create a greater buffer for its devices. It also wants the FCC to require new white spaces users to refrain from releasing new devices that use another popular location for medical telemetry devices--channels 33 to 35--for one year after any rules are developed so that hospitals have ample time to leave that spectrum. In addition, it's asking for the FCC to limit the power output of the new devices to reduce interference potential.
The American Society for Healthcare Engineering, a division of the American Hospital Association, has also weighed in, asking the Federal Communications Commission to require that anyone operating devices in the unused TV channels notify hospitals, nursing homes and other health facilities within range of the signals beforehand.
"With adequate advance notice, health care facilities operating these legacy systems can take steps either to identify the source of any interference and address it or to replace equipment that can no longer serve its intended purpose with newer, protected (channel 37) installations," Dale Woodin, deputy executive director of the American Society for Healthcare Engineering, wrote in a filing with the FCC.
Their recommendations may not be far off from reality. Google, for its part, has already embraced at least some of those suggestions, proposing in a recent filing with the FCC that unlicensed white spaces be prohibited from operating in a "safe harbor" between channels 36 and 38, specifically citing concerns over medical telemetry devices.
Brian Peters, a spokesman for the Wireless Innovation Alliance, which is pushing for the unlicensed white-space use, said discussions with GE are "ongoing" and voiced confidence that they can reach an agreeable solution that allows for unlicensed use of mobile broadband devices. The Wireless Innovation Alliance's members include companies like Google, Microsoft, Dell and HP, and consumer advocacy groups like Public Knowledge, U.S. Public Interest Research Group, and Free Press.
"We are also fully confident that the FCC engineers can write the rules necessary to prevent interference to medical devices," Peters said in an e-mail interview. "The FCC is the expert agency, and they've been managing medical device spectrum issues for years."
Even if the medical devices industry reaches an agreement with the high-tech companies, however, the broader white spaces debate is likely to continue. The National Association of Broadcasters hasn't budged from its position that allowing unlicensed devices on TV bands is "a guaranteed recipe for producing interference and should not be allowed under any circumstances." It also claims more than 70 members of Congress share its concerns, although that opposition is far from universal.
The FCC is currently retesting early-stage equipment designed to "sniff" for broadcast signals to ensure new devices don't operate there and cause interference. But it's not expected to issue any rules for the white spaces for another several months. Even then, the spectrum won't be available for use until at least February 2009, when over-the-air broadcasters are required to vacate that band as part of the congressionally mandated shift to all-digital television.
We already know that Nvidia doesn't think highly of Intel's graphics technology. But is it really that bad, or is it good enough for most PC users?
Let's focus on the graphics technology that Intel has been supplying in volume to notebook PC makers over the last year or so. Namely, the Graphics Media Accelerator (GMA) X3100, which is integrated into the GM965 chipset. Like many graphics platforms (Nvidia and ATI not excluded) it has a checkered past: late drivers (very late in some cases), broken DirectX promises, and erratic performance.
That said, tens of millions of people blithely use computers with Intel X3100 integrated graphics. And there's no great hue and cry for better graphics (gamers excluded).
That doesn't mean Intel's graphics technology is great. It simply means that "free" (as Nvidia CEO Jen-Hsun Huang put it) Intel integrated graphics is used without objection by lots of people. "Corporate is 60 percent of (graphics chip) unit volume. So, 60 percent of the market falls into the 'don't care' category," said Dean McCarron, founder and principal of Mercury Research.
Where Intel gets into trouble is its claims about game performance. Here's what Intel says on a Web page entitled Intel Graphics: Making the Most of Your Visual Experience. "With the dramatic improvements in Intel Graphics and Intel processors, it's no longer necessary for most users to buy expensive add-on graphics cards."
Intel integrated graphics capabilities
(Credit: Intel)Complete Intel chart here (PDF).
Though the cost-saving claims are accurate for low-end games, the overall gaming claims can be problematic for analysts. (Note IGP is Integrated Graphics Processor.) "If you want to do anything that has good to great video quality associated with it...you won't be very happy with an IGP," said Jon Peddie of Jon Peddie Research.
"You can find examples of (video and game) applications that will run just fine with an IGP, but that's like saying I can drive my Pinto over the mountains and cross-country just as well as you can in your fancy Lexus. True--but which experience would you prefer?"
Intel has compiled a list of popular games that are playable on the Mobile Intel GM965 Express chipset family which uses X3100 graphics silicon.
McCarron says that part of Intel's performance problem is tied to a transistor budget dilemma. Only a limited number of chipset transistors can be allocated for graphics. "They do what they can in hardware within their transistor budget and what won't fit in, they do in software (on the CPU)," he said.
Upcoming X4500 graphics that will be part of the mobile Centrino 2 "Cantiga" chipset will be an improvement in areas such as Direct-X and Shader Model technology (typically used for scene lighting) but still pale next to the standalone "discrete" graphics offered by Nvidia and AMD-ATI. "The (X4500) will be a credible DX-10 device. Yes, they're doubling performance but you'll find that integrated graphics is still 5X to 10X behind the discrete stuff," McCarron said.
Which brings us back to the original point. Yes, Intel graphics is not good enough for about 30 percent of the market (McCarron). And that's a very significant number of people--around 100 million users (Peddie). But that leaves hundreds of millions of users for whom Intel graphics is good enough. Or at least they're not complaining.
Intel spokesman Dan Snyder said recently (in an e-mail response to a query) that good graphics needs a fast CPU too. He cited artificial intelligence, physics, video encoding, and 3D rendering--all consume significant CPU cycles. "We feel that the CPU is absolutely vital and you need a fast CPU AND a fast GPU for the best experience." (Original caps included.)
(For a full review of Intel GMA X3100 graphics see this write-up from NotebookReview.)
Even the mightiest graphics boards bow to Crysis. And Nvidia's newest dual-graphics board is no exception.
First some background. Crysis is a science fiction computer game developed by Germany-based Crytek and published by Electronic Arts. "Crysis is visually stunning, packed with intelligent, thrilling gameplay, and easily one of the greatest shooters ever made," according to GameSpot (which is owned by CNET Networks). For hardware reviewers, it's the ultimate gaming test of a graphics card.
Nvidia's GeForce 9800 GX2 contains two graphics chips.
(Credit: CNET)Though so far the reviews of Nvidia's GeForce 9800 GX2 are positive ("The GeForce 9800 GX2 is an absolute powerhouse, the fastest graphics card you can buy today"--The Tech Report), it stalled when faced with the gaming equivalent of Everest's north face, running Crysis at its highest settings.
"The 9800GX2 is no magic bullet for Crysis," said Rich Brown, a senior editor at CNET Reviews, responding to questions. The GeForce 9800GX2 "was still unable to achieve 60 frames per second, which is generally considered the goal for acceptably smooth gameplay in first person shooters." he said.
CNET Asus EN9800GX2 review here.
Another review discussed similar issues when antialiasing (a technique for smoothing the jagged edges of curved objects) was turned on. "When antialiasing is activated and the card should be showing all it has to offer, its performance drops to the same level as the other cards," according to Tom's Hardware.
Optimally tweaked drivers are another hurdle in getting games to run well on the latest and greatest hardware. Particularly in the case of multi-GPU configurations using Scalable Link Interface (SLI). Nevertheless, Crysis has yet to meet its match at the highest settings using mass-market graphics cards.
Upcoming four-way configurations using SLI may be up to the challenge. We'll see.
Replica of the Difference Engine, the original mechanical computer, designed in the 19th century by Englishman Charles Babbage.
(Credit: Science Museum/Science & Society Picture Library)DARPA-funded researchers are racing to develop an energy-efficient, heat-resistant mechanical nanocomputer that could be used in everything from cars and toys to dishwashers and machine guns.
Mechanical computers depend on millions of microscopic moving parts instead of solid-state transistors and other components to push the electrons to perform calculations. Gates, pillars, levers, and pistons create the binary switches, which compute the ones and zeroes that drive modern computers, explains the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering of the University of Wisconsin at Madison.
Because they are more rugged and can perform at much higher temperatures than conventional silicon chips, scientists say, nanomechanical chips will have a wide range of uses in "extreme environments such as space, car engines, battlefields, and children's toys." Another benefit: they require less power to operate, meaning they don't need the energy-sucking cooling systems required by conventional computers. (One estimate is that somewhere between 15 and 20 percent of the total energy used in the United States goes to operate and cool computers.)
"Mechanical switches offer some unique advantages over solid-state electronic switches like transistors," Kanakasabapathi Subramanian, a researcher with GE Global Research in Niskayuna, N.Y., said in a recent interview with Computerworld. "One is the ability to minimize the heat that's generated within the system. Because you have a physical air gap, you minimize leakage currents that give you heat. When the switch is off, it's really off."
Although DARPA-funded companies and universities are demonstrating that mechanical nanodevices are able to operate in spaces as small as those occupied by silicon circuits, there are no guarantees of any market for them yet.
"We can compete with simple microcontrollers costing less than $1, the kind used in a dishwasher or, for DARPA's purposes, counting the bullets in your machine gun," Robert Blick, the professor who is leading the university's team told Computerworld.
Wasting no time, Blick and his colleagues are trying to make nanomechanical memory to pair with the new computers. Now there's a niche market--a mechanical memory. Sooner or later we'll all need one of those.
It's certainly not a bad thing that the new $349 (give or take, but more likely give) Nvidia Geforce 8800 GTS delivers comparable performance to last year's $500-plus GeForce 8800 GTX. The question is, would you be able to pick it out off the shelf? To do so you'd have to sift through the older (and slower) 640MB and 320MB GeForce 8800 GTS cards, as well as the 512MB and 256MB (introduced today) versions of the GeForce 8800 GT. Then, of course, there's the various overclocked SKUs from ASUS, EVGA, XFX, and Nvidia's other board partners. And that's just the Nvidia side of the aisle. We haven't even mentioned ATI's newer cards yet.
Nvidia's new 512MB GeForce 8800 GTS
(Credit: Nvidia)We'll point you to Anandtech and PC Perspective for the blow-by-blow performance charts. The gist is that the 512MB GeForce 8800 GTS is faster than both the older 8800 GTS cards and competitive with the 8800 GTX due to a new chip design (code-named G92) that uses a 65 nanometer manufacturing process. The result is increased power efficiency compared with the older chips' 90 nano and 80 nano processes, and higher core and memory clock speeds.
We're less sure about the price-performance of the 256MB 8800 GT. If you can find it for its suggested $199 price tag, it seems like a good buy. And while it seems to be faster than the $179 256MB ATI Radeon HD 3850, it doesn't outpace the $249 512MB Radeon HD 3870. With 512MB quickly becoming the recommended amount of video RAM for respectable 3D gaming, you're better off spending more for the faster ATI card. But then when you consider the 512MB GeForce 8800 GT card is between $275 and $300 (when it's actually in stock), you start to see just how much ATI and Nvidia are thin-slicing the hyper-competitive graphics card market to the point of consumer confusion.
NISKAYUNA, New York--General Electric will spend $1 billion in research and development this year on clean energy technologies, part of its Ecomagination environmental initiative.
The industrial giant announced the investment on Tuesday at its Global Research center here, where it also said that it will put $6.8 million of that into plug-in hybrid vehicles as part of a U.S. Department of Energy project.
The company hosted a day-long presentation at its labs to showcase technology developments in solar electricity, plug-in hybrid components, water desalination, high-efficiency lighting and home energy dashboards, and materials for wind turbines and aviation.
GE will invest about $1.1 billion of research this year, and it is on track of meeting its internal goal of spending $1.5 billion yearly by 2010 on cleaner technologies, said Lorraine Bolsinger, GE's vice president of Ecomagination.
Lorraine Bolsinger, vice president of GE's Ecomagination initiative, presenting at its upstate New York labs.
(Credit: Martin LaMonica/CNET Networks)"While I'm delighted to hear about all the venture capitalists and entrepreneurs (in clean tech), we have our own clean tech fund going on right here," Bolsinger said.
Started two years ago, Ecomagination is a companywide initiative to create cleaner energy and water-related products and services. GE CEO Jeffrey Immelt tapped Bolsinger to lead the program which also covers the corporation's efforts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.
It has become a high-profile campaign within the company. Publicly, Ecomagination has garnered the bulk of the company's advertising and marketing dollars.
Financially, Ecomagination is yielding results, Bolsinger said during a presentation. She said that the company's revenue from Ecomagination products is growing at 12 percent a year, faster than the company's overall revenue growth rate of 8 percent. The company is on target to make $20 billion a year by 2010.
"It is starting to get talked about in the (financial) analyst community, and I think it's because they see the 12 percent annual growth rates," Bolsinger said.
GE's industrial divisions manufacture a wide range of energy products, from nuclear power plants to solar electricity and engines for airplanes and trains. GE has a process to certify that Ecomagination products and services are more energy efficient and perform better, Bolsinger said.
She said that energy efficiency in its products, like GE's hybrid locomotive train engine, makes them more cost-effective.
It is likely that regulations will be put in place in the United States and other regions to limit greenhouse gas emissions, which will make the financial decision to purchase cleaner technology products easier, she added.
"We like to think about (carbon emissions reductions) as risk abatement as well as cost reduction," Bolsinger said. "We are in carbon management...Every one of our businesses are impacted to some extent."
Editor's note: Later this week, CNET News.com will be running a photo gallery of some of the energy and water technologies GE is working on at its Niskayuna lab as well as a transcript of an interview with Lorraine Bolsinger about its Ecomagination program.
Welcome back to the ongoing Speeds and Feeds coverage of Hot Chips 19 at Stanford. They give us comfy chairs and free Wi-Fi, so blogging about it is the least I can do. By the way, Dean Takahashi of the San Jose Mercury News is also blogging from Hot Chips, so you can get another perspective on the event here.
Session 2 is the first of two sessions of "Multi-Core and Parallelism" presentations. This one happens to be all about Nvidia. Session 3, up next, will include presentations about AMD's ATI Radeon HD 2900, Intel's 80-core "Tera-Scale" processor, the TRIPS project at the University of Texas at Austin, and the Tile Processor from Tilera.
The first presentation in this session, "The Nvidia GeForce 8800 GPU," is an overview of that chip. As I mentioned in my Siggraph coverage, the 8800 includes 128 ... Read more
