Speeds and Feeds

It's been an interesting several days since I posted "Is Clear a present danger for football fans?" and "Is Clear worth anything at all?" last week.

After that second post, Steven Brill, CEO of Verified Identity Pass, Inc. (VIP runs the Clear Registered Traveler program) contacted me to dispute my conclusions. Brill was very generous with his time in helping me to understand what Clear does and is trying to do.

That was nothing unusual; I often get followup calls from the companies behind products and services I mention here.

The Clear card

(Credit: Verified Identity Pass)

But shortly after the first post, I got a call from Ellen Howe in the public-affairs office of the Transportation Security Administration. Apparently, government bureaucracies can be even more responsive than private companies. (I also know a smart, effective manager in the Corporate Communications division of the Department of Homeland Security, TSA's parent agency. Assuming this isn't purely a coincidence, I hope the rest of the Federal government follows DHS's lead in hiring good people for these important positions.)

Howe was correcting a factual error in my first post, but as I explained in the second entry, correcting the error only strengthened my original argument, which Howe agreed with.

Having discussed the issue at great length with the two involved organizations, I feel I'm in a better position to explain the problems I see with the Clear program. To me, there are two essential assumptions behind Brill's vision for Clear: ... Read more

Finally, I can call myself an inventor.

I've been inventing things for almost 20 years now, but Montalvo Systems was the first company I worked for that took intellectual property seriously. (That was no coincidence; it was also the first company I worked for where I helped develop the intellectual-property strategy.)

During my years at Montalvo, I came up with quite a few ideas and participated in brainstorming sessions that yielded more ideas. Most of these sessions were limited to Montalvo's own people, but there was one person I brought in to help us as a consultant--Don Alpert, who was the principal architect of Intel's Pentium processor and, possibly less significantly, a member of the editorial board at Microprocessor Report.

Working with three of us from Montalvo--myself and chief architects Greg Favor and Peter Song--Don took the lead in preparing a set of related patent applications describing a new way to design microprocessors.

The first patent from this set was ... Read more

Dean Takahashi sent me an e-mail pointing to a piece he wrote on VentureBeat describing statements Wednesday by Intel's Chief Technical Officer Justin Rattner targeted at NVIDIA. CNET's own Brooke Crothers covered the same story and provides additional background here.

Intel Chief Technology Officer Justin R. Rattner

(Credit: Intel)

The technology at issue relates to 3D graphics for PCs. All current PC graphics chips use what's called polygon-order rendering. All of the polygons that make up the objects to be displayed are processed one at a time. The graphics chip figures out where each polygon should appear on the screen and how much of it will be visible or obstructed by other polygons.

Ray tracing achieves similar results by working through each pixel on the screen, firing off a "ray" (like a backward ray of light) that bounces off the polygons until it reaches a light source in the scene. Ray tracing produces natural lighting effects but takes a lot more work.

(That's the short version, anyway. For more details, you could dig up a copy of my 1997 book Beyond Conventional 3D. Alas, the book is long since out of print.)

Ray tracing is easily implemented in software on a general-purpose CPU, and indeed, most of the computer graphics you see in movies and TV commercials are generated this way, using rooms full of PCs or blade-server systems.

Naturally, Intel loves ray tracing, and there are people at Intel working to ... Read more

I have to hand it to fellow analyst Rob Enderle. Way back in August of 2005, he called the high-def format war in a piece titled "Blu-ray Wins or Nothing Does."

Logo of the Blu-ray Disc Association, winner of the high-def disc format war

(Credit: The Blu-ray Disc Association)

Then again, he also said in that article that "the more likely outcome is that the market will bypass both products and move to something else," so perhaps he wasn't perfectly prescient.

And come to think of it, a year later (in December 2006) he changed his mind entirely in columns titled "Optical HD Battle May Be Over: HD DVD Wins," "HD DVD Wins," and "Sony Kills Blu-ray."

And in August and even November of 2007, Enderle still believed HD DVD would win.

Well, if Rob Enderle couldn't predict the result, who could? Even just before the Consumer Electronics Show this year, when Warner Bros. Entertainment announced it would stop supporting HD DVD and join the Blu-ray camp, I was still hedging my bets: "Blu-ray wins, HD DVD loses. Probably.")

But when Wal-Mart--the Brünnhilde of modern retailing--took the stage last week to throw its weight behind Blu-ray, everyone knew it was over. And this week, Toshiba--leader of the DVD Forum, which developed HD DVD--officially conceded defeat. The company aims to end production on HD DVD hardware for home theaters as well as PCs by the end of March.

So we can all relax. Right?

Well, for a while, sure. But remember, DVD and Blu-ray were separated by only five or six years, so presumably we're due for yet another format three or four years from now. And a new format means the potential for a new format war.

The basic parameters are easy to predict. As I described last August in "After HD, what's next?" the heir apparent to HDTV is what's called "4K"-- that is, a display resolution with about 4,096 horizontal pixels and 2,160 scan lines. Sony already makes projectors that support this resolution. Red Digital Cinema makes 4K cameras. Director Peter Jackson has made a short film in 4K, and the "Final Cut" of Blade Runner was remastered in 4K.

So 4K is coming, and it isn't far away.

But why should there be a format war?

Well, there's always a format war. There was even a DVD format war, although we're all fortunate that it was resolved well before discs or players hit the market.

Sony will want to lead the transition to 4K, but the DVD Forum will still be around in five years. That's a recipe for a format war right there.

Will it happen? I sure hope not. Our best hope for a lasting peace is that Sony, Toshiba, and the rest of the DVD Forum members settle their differences and start working on the next generation immediately. If you have any influence within these companies, now's the time to start cooperating on technology development. The future won't wait.

You've probably seen or heard of the industrial robots that build cars, and the various humanoid robots like Honda's Asimo. Most of these are made in Japan. But let's face it, there's only so much these can do. An industrial robot is bolted down, and only knows one or two simple tasks. Asimo is small and weak, and famously collapsed once while trying to climb stairs.

Monty, a wheeled robot from Anybots.

(Credit: Anybots, Inc.)

As we know from sci-fi movies, real robots are the size of a man and can do things--dangerous things. Real robots are suitable for building robot armies. For that, we have to look to America. Companies in the United States have given us vacuum-cleaner robots, bomb-disposal robots and even robot military aircraft. Where better to look for humanoid killer robots?

And I found some on Wednesday night at the headquarters of Anybots, a six-year-old angel-funded Silicon Valley start-up company of just four employees.

Of course, Anybots doesn't talk about robot armies. Its robots can't kill anyone, not even by falling on them--they're not heavy enough for that. In fact, the company's favorite publicity photo shows one of its robots loading a dishwasher. But I can tell they're really thinking about robot armies. I've seen this before...in bad sci-fi movies, anyway, but now I think someone's trying it in real life.

The mad scientists of Anybots, I believe, are just lulling us into a false sense of complacency with these pleasant domestic demonstrations.

We learned on Wednesday that Anybots is planning to make its fortune from these peaceful applications. In fact, the Anybots employees we met seemed to be good people, sincerely devoted to this idea that robots can free mankind of dishwasher-loading and similar drudgery. If any of them was an evil genius, he (or she) escaped my detection. Well, maybe I'm just paranoid. As you may have heard, that's a useful survival trait here in Silicon Valley...

Anybots was hosting a special monthly meeting of the Homebrew Robotics Club, which I've mentioned here previously. We got a presentation by Anybots founder and CEO Trevor Blackwell, who summarized the company's vision quite efficiently: "Make robots that do what people can do."

Initially, Anybots is developing teleoperated robots--that is, robots operated by a person some distance away. Autonomous robots, which operate independently, are further in the future. The major challenges of humanoid robot design are the same for both cases: balancing, moving, recognizing objects, aiming rifles and conquering the world. (That's just me talking; Blackwell said nothing about military combat. Clever man.)

We also got to see a couple of Anybots' robots. Monty is the one pictured here and on the main page of the Anybots Web site. It has a two-wheeled balancing base; the balancing function is autonomous, so the operator doesn't have to worry about it. Unlike Honda's squat Asimo, Monty is 5'7" tall, so it has the height and reach of a (small) man. On the other hand, Asimo is self-powered, whereas Monty must be connected to an external source of compressed air and electrical power.

According to Blackwell, Monty can basically go anywhere a wheelchair can go. It's powered by a combination of electric and pneumatic actuators, which has proven to be a challenging design decision. As Blackwell said, few other companies use pneumatics for robots, and Anybots is learning why...

The other robot is Dexter, which is a few inches taller and walks on its own two legs; it's also permanently tethered to its air and power supplies. It even wears human shoes, and walks using an algorithm that models the way humans walk. (However, the poor thing has no arms, and when we saw him, he didn't even have his head on!) Dexter is still learning to walk, but Anybots expects it will eventually be able to run, cross rough terrain, and generally transport itself anywhere a human could go.

Anybots is a sponsor of the RoboDevelopment Conference and Exposition, coming to the San Jose McEnery Convention Center October 25-26, so you can go there to learn more about Anybots' work and other robot-related technology.

It might be a good idea to go check out the show just so you can figure out which side you want to be on in the inevitable war between man and robot...

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

This is the fifth in a series of posts from the Hot Chips conference at Stanford. The previous installments looked at multicore designs, IBM's Power 6 efforts, Vernor Vinge's keynote address, and Nvidia. Other CNET coverage may be found here. This is sort of an experiment for me; I usually prefer to have time to review my work before I publish it. If you see anything wrong, please leave a comment!

I'm back for one last session today, a panel discussion on the topic of "What's Next Beyond CMOS?" The question refers to the common processes for making complementary metal-oxide semiconductors.

The panel includes many leading experts in the ... Read more

This is the fourth in a series of posts from the Hot Chips conference at Stanford. The previous installments looked at IBM's Power 6 efforts, Vernor Vinge's keynote address, and Nvidia. Other CNET coverage may be found here. This is sort of an experiment for me; I usually prefer to have time to review my work before I publish it. If you see anything wrong, please leave a comment!

The first talk in session 3 is from Advanced Micro Devices, describing the ATI Radeon HD 2900. (I checked, and AMD does still use the ATI brand name for some of its products; this is one of them.)

This is another chip I described briefly in one of my Siggraph 2007 pieces (here). The 2900 has 320 cores (which AMD calls "stream ... Read more

A big fuel cell from UTC Power was in the news here in Silicon Valley this week when Fujitsu installed it as a backup power source for its local campus. CNET's Michael Kanellos wrote a good story about the event here, and took pictures ("Photos: Fujitsu unveils king-size fuel cell").

Although the fuel cell itself runs on hydrogen, there's no convenient source of pure hydrogen in Silicon Valley, so UTC Power also provided a steam methane reformer that yields hydrogen from natural gas.

One place where pure hydrogen is readily available is NASA's Cape Canaveral facility, and BMW recently completed an eight-week test of its Hydrogen 7 prototype vehicle there. (See the Edmunds review of the car, and a story of the test, with a great photo of the car posed in front of the Endeavour before the recent launch.)

BMW has now handed the keys to one of these cars to actor Will Ferrell (BMW press release), though I suspect BMW will learn less from Ferrell than it did from the NASA testers.

Interestingly, however, the Hydrogen 7 is not a fuel cell car, in spite of stories like this one. BMW just uses its big 6-liter V12 engine with minor modifications allowing it to run on hydrogen as well as gasoline. This is may be the most practical way to run a car on hydrogen, but it's not the wave of the future.

Ford has made a true fuel-cell car, the Fusion 999, and it's considerably faster than the Hydrogen 7. In fact, Ford's unique vehicle, derived from its production Fusion sedan, recently set a speed record for fuel-cell vehicles, reaching 207.297 mph on the Bonneville salt flats. This isn't a car you'll be seeing on the road anytime soon; it has a 770-horsepower electric motor and several huge pressure tanks, it weighs 6,700 pounds, and its range is only just good enough for the high-speed runs on the salt. Richard S. Chang blogged about the event for The New York Times and there's also an interesting video on the Popular Mechanics site.

Ford worked with Ohio State University on the Fusion 999 and on OSU's scratch-built Buckeye Bullet 2, a fuel-cell streamliner that may be able to exceed 350 mph. There's a blog for that project, and it's fascinating reading if you like cars and high technology.

But when can we regular folks have fuel cells of our own? Other than expensive and clumsy solutions like the Trulite and Medis products I blogged about last month (somewhat disparagingly), it won't be soon.

EE Times recently reported that Toshiba, for example, expects it will take several years to bring practical fuel cells to market. "Practical," in this case, means fuel cells based on DMFC (direct methanol fuel cell) technology, which can be powered by inexpensive methanol (also known as wood alcohol).

Samsung has demonstrated a version of its Q35 ultraportable notebook running on a DMFC power supply, achieving 240 hours of operation over the course of a month, but don't get too excited-- the supply is fairly bulky (see some photos and a video on AVING.net) and I'm not entirely convinced that the full month's worth of fuel is stored internally.

It's no coincidence that Samsung chose the Q35 for the demonstration; even the best DMFC fuel cells have much lower power density (watts of output power per cubic inch) than lithium batteries, so they'll have to be very large to support high-performance notebooks.

I'm sure DMFC technology will reach the consumer market soon enough, and then we'll see how it compares with batteries. I suspect lithium batteries will remain the most popular solution for laptops, and I'm sure handheld electronics will stick with batteries unless there's some breakthrough in fuel cells. But it'll be good to have another choice in portable power supplies.