The acronym UMPC is anything but a household word--and equally obscure, at least to the masses of computer buyers, are the handheld gadgets that the term describes, despite the best efforts of heavyweights like Microsoft and Samsung.
UMPCs, or "ultramobile personal computers," debuted around this time last year, as Microsoft's Origami software effort unfolded into yet another form factor for computing tech that fits in a pocket, more or less. Samsung's Q1 device made the biggest splash, and then quickly sunk out of sight until version two, the Windows Vista-based Q1 Ultra, appeared at last month's CeBit show.
Now comes word that this week's Intel Developer Forum in Beijing will show what the world's leading chipmaker can do with this mini mobile PC design. ZDNet Australia, a cousin of News.com, is providing details on Intel's so-called Mobile Internet Device, based on its McCaslin platform. A host of blogs also are in the game, offering pictures along with specs--and speculation about what success might await the design. Apparently some of the early word on the Intel device came from some Powerpoint slides that slipped onto the Internet.
Much of the blog chatter has centered on Intel's use of the Linux operating system. Some also noted similarities to the design of Nokia's N800 Internet tablet.
Blog community response:
"Big news on the UMPC front this morning folks. Looks like Intel is shedding the Origami gorilla (read: Microsoft) as they prep a Linux-based platform to compete with Vista and XP-based UMPCs."
--Engadget
--Provoking Thoughts on Business, Technology, & Life
"The 'Mobile Internet Device', or MID, looks to be positioned underneath the existing UMPC platform currently being pushed by Microsoft. Chief difference - and of vast interest to the community of tinkerers out there - is its open-source, Linux-based OS; it actually sounds a lot like Nokia's N800 Internet Tablet, which similarly runs a modified version of Linux."
--Slashgear
"With its Mobile Internet Device Intel is trying to improve all of the things that annoy us in current UMPCs: battery life, price, performance and usability. If they go anything near what we've seen last days surely they have a winning concept."
--GadgetRoad
LAS VEGAS--As expected, Intel announced three new quad-core processors at the Consumer Electronics Show here on Monday. And a new desktop model lowers the entry price a notch for the technology.
The 2.66GHz Core 2 Extreme QX6700 introduced in November costs $999 in quantities of 1,000, but the new 2.4GHz Intel Core 2 Quad processor Q6600 is $851. The products, which spread computational chores across two dual-core chips in a single processor package, still cost more than respectable PCs.
Intel also announced two low-end Xeon chips for single-processor servers. The X3220 at 2.4GHz costs $851 in quantities of 1,000, and the X3210 costs $690 in quantities of 1,000. Servers generally juggle multiple independent tasks at the same time, a workload that's more amenable to the multicore processor technology than that of most PCs.
Intel has eliminated most of its Intel Developer Forum processor conferences in 2007 to cut costs.
In 2006, Intel held 14 IDF shows around the globe--though some were minor events rather than full-blown multi-day affairs. In 2007, there will be just three IDF conferences, spokesman David Dickstein said: in Beijing from April 17-18, in San Francisco from September 18-20, and in Taipei from October 15-16.
"By reducing the number of shows, it saves money and strengthens the resources for the shows we are holding," Dickstein said.
Just a few days after one Adobe Photoshop co-architect rained on the 64-bit chip parade, another is trying to rein in expectations for another hardware advance: dual-core processors.
Photoshop co-architect Russell Williams cautioned that multicore processors don't necessarily speed up operations. Recapitulating Adobe's gripe about 64-bit chips, Williams said that memory access performance is a limiting factor that multicore designs don't fix.
"If your system is bandwidth-limited and the operation you want to do involves moving a big chunk of data from here to there while doing a limited number of arithmetic operations on it, adding cores cannot speed it up no matter how clever the software is," Williams said on the blog of John Nack, Adobe's senior Photoshop manager.
"To take good advantage of 8- or 16-core machines, we'll need machines whose bandwidth increases with the number of cores, and we'll need problems that depend on doing relatively large amounts of computation for each byte fetched from main memory."
Intel systems "don't necessarily" add memory bandwidth as they add more cores, and although AMD systems do add memory bandwidth with new processors, it can be difficult ensuring that the right data is stored in the memory next to the right processor, he said.
Multicore chips can help in several circumstances, he said. In editing video, for example, separate frames can be processed on separate cores. And some Photoshop tasks can use Adobe's technology for parallel computation that divvies up tasks across multiple cores.
But many tasks just don't benefit. Arranging text layouts on a page can't be divided into parallel tasks, and Photoshop's healing brush, in which the computer finds mathematical solutions to partial differential equations, also doesn't, he said.
Adobe's software is used by countless professionals for editing images, video and illustrations, and presumably the company has clever programmers and high-end coding tools to optimize its products for the latest high-end hardware. But if Adobe is running into the limits of multicore chips for desktop machines, it doesn't bode well for the average programmer.
SAN FRANCISCO--Intel's Xeon 5300 "Clovertown" processor consumes 80 watts or, with a higher-end "performance-optimized" version, 120 watts. But early in 2007, the company will release a 50-watt Clovertown, said Tom Kilroy, co-general manager of Intel's Digital Enterprise Group, at an Intel software event here Tuesday.
It's not yet clear at what clock speed the processor will run, but it's expected to be less than 2GHz. Processors running at lower frequencies consume less electrical power and throw off less waste heat, both a major concern for computer customers.
The Xeon 5300 processors combine two Xeon 5100 "Woodcrest" chips into a single package. Intel began selling them Tuesday.
Despite its history of no-holds-barred marketing, Intel has become more candid about the difficulties the company has had with its Itanium processor, which was hobbled by delays, poor initial performance and software incompatibility with the company's mainstream x86 chips such as Xeon. Now Pat Gelsinger, the company's former chief technology officer and now head of its digital enterprise group, engaged in a little wishful thinking about what might have been in the company's approach to the high-end server market.
"If we could unwind the clock, I would have just built a RAS version of Xeon to attack the market," Gelsinger said in an IInformationWeek interview. RAS means reliability, availability and servicability, and refers to features that let chips and servers nip errors in the bud.
Gelsinger also said in the interview that Intel is working on making Itanium a productive member of the company's overall business. "We're working pretty hard to get it to a profitable product," he said.
SAN JOSE, Calif.--If there was any doubt that a chip's clock frequency is no longer the preeminent measure of the chip's worth, a senior Intel chip designer put the idea to rest Tuesday.
"We're not focused on gigahertz at all," Dileep Bandarkar, architect at large in Intel's Digital Enterprise Group, said in a speech at the Fall Processor Forum here. Performance matters, but only within the context of power consumption, and clock speed is just one way of boosting performance for the company's server chip lines, Xeon and Itanium, he said.
"It's about delivered performance. Frequency doesn't really matter," Bandarkar said. "With Itanium, frequency has not been a major thing. We've focused on performance on server benchmarks--TPC-C, TPC-H, SAP. We never had that same megahertz mania on the Itanium line. Now, even on the Xeon line, megahertz is just one of the ways of doing more performance. If I can get the same performance on flat megahertz or even down, that's OK."
That's position contrasted sharply with IBM's. Brad McCredie, chief architect of IBM's Power6 processor, had to restrain himself from boasting that the new server chip is performing at the high end of the company's promised 4GHz to 5GHz range.
"We're coming in above target, and we'll be delivering some very nice frequencies next year," McCredie said.
Intel has been publicly stepping away from clock frequency since 2004, but the internal discussion has been going on longer than that.
"I gave a talk 10 years ago at Gartner that frequency doesn't matter," Bandarkar said, then quipped, "Nobody in Intel management saw it so they didn't fire me at the time."
Nvidia stock perked up Wednesday on rumors Intel might buy the graphics chip maker to counter rival Advanced Micro Devices' acquisition of ATI Technologies, but Merrill Lynch analyst Joe Osha doubts the idea.
"We think it's wrong to assume that Nvidia must be a potential target for Intel just because AMD is buying ATI Technologies. What AMD wanted out of its deal was a workable platform strategy. Intel has that already," Osha said in a report published Thursday.
Indeed, Intel already has a strong business selling chipsets, the chips that support central processors, that have built-in graphics. However, Intel's integrated graphics aren't up to the demands of top-end graphics tasks such as computer-aided design or video games.
Osha also thinks Intel and Nvidia are poorly aligned when it comes to manufacturing. "Intel's whole manufacturing process is tuned to very high volume and relatively slow product cycles, whereas GPU (graphics processor unit) product cycles are usually quicker," Osha said.
Another factor is Microsoft's Windows Vista operating system, which taxes graphics cards and is likely to spur sales of add-in graphics cards, he said, giving Nvidia a boost and encouraging managers and shareholders to keep the company independent.
SAN FRANCISCO--Intel's "Bensley" platform--a chipset and other technology used to build dual-processor servers--will last longer than the chipmaker originally disclosed.
Bensley arrived with two dual-core Xeon processors almost at the same time: the older-generation "Dempsey" and the higher-performance, more power-efficient "Woodcrest." Later this year, it will be upgraded with the quad-core "Clovertown," which is due to arrive in November.
But Kirk Skaugen, general manager of Intel's Server Platforms Group, said Wednesday at the Intel Developer Forum here that Bensley will house Clovertown's successors, too. Clovertown is built with a manufacturing process that can make circuitry features as small as 65 nanometers. But in 2007, Intel will begin moving to a 45-nanometer process, and both dual-core and quad-core processors will fit into Bensley, he said.
That means Bensley will live on through 2009, Skaugen said.
The 45-nanometer quad-core chip is called Harpertown, said Pat Gelsinger, general manger of Intel's Digital Enterprise Group. "When you put Harpertown into a Bensley, that's a great platform," Gelsinger told News.com.
Dell has ordered between 1 million and 1.2 million desktop computers with Advanced Micro Devices processors and about 800,000 notebooks, Bank of America financial analyst Sumit Dhanda said in a report Thursday.
The new machines are likely to arrive late in the third quarter or early in the fourth, Dhanda said, citing sources in the manufacturing supply chain in Taiwan. That would mean Dell is awarding AMD 15 percent to 16 percent of its desktop business and 18 percent to 19 percent of its notebook business, he said.
Dell currently has announced plans only for a four-processor server using AMD's Opteron processor, but sources told CNET News.com that the computer maker is expected to announce a broader AMD partnership Thursday that includes more mainstream dual-processor servers as well as desktop and mobile computers.
Dhanda raised his estimates for AMD's financial performance because of the deal. His price target for AMD went from $19 to $23 per share, while his expectation for fourth-quarter revenue rose from $1.38 billion to $1.51 billion.
However, Dhanda believes AMD's profit margins are under pressure because of higher expenses, changes from the plan to acquire graphics chipmaker ATI Technologies, and Intel's new competitiveness.
