As has been widely reported (for example, by EDN Magazine and both Brooke Crothers and Dan Ackerman here at CNET), Intel has delayed the first customer shipments (FCS) of its "Montevina" chipsets, part of the new Centrino 2 platform.
The delays are pretty short, however... a matter of just a few weeks.
Intel attributes the delays to two independent problems: one with FCC certification of the 802.11n WiFi feature in the chips (just "paperwork," Intel says), and one with the integrated graphics engines in some models.
Intel's probably right about the WiFi certification problem. I've been through the FCC certification process (for electromagnetic interference (EMI), at least); there sure is a lot of paperwork involved.
For the graphics problem, I see a couple of possible explanations.
Intel could have discovered a design flaw in the first production units severe enough to prevent them from being shipped, which would have caused a substantial delay while a new run of production units was completed. (See my earlier blog post, "Design flaws, defects, and faults", for an explanation of how design flaws are related to product defects and faults.) This delay would have been largely hidden by the usual rounds of testing, but perhaps it just used up a little more time than the slack that was available in the schedule.
Or perhaps there was a design or manufacturing flaw that didn't require trashing the first production run, but which did require some additional testing and qualification to reject specific problematic parts. This could be caused by slower or hotter operation than expected, for example. Such a problem would cause a shorter delay-- just the extra testing time. A statement from Intel in the Crothers post referring to "re-screening" suggests this is the situation here, although potentially that statement could also describe testing a second production run to ensure the problem has been solved.
I find it interesting that this problem is related to Intel's new graphics engine, which is certainly the most important element of the new chipset. Intel's previous integrated graphics products have been criticized for not really being up to the challenges of running Windows Vista, including by Microsoft itself, but due to pressure from Intel, Microsoft certified these chips as "Vista Capable." That's technically true-- I've used integrated-graphics platforms under Vista myself-- but the resulting shortfalls in performance and features probably discouraged many new Vista users.
Graphics engines are very complicated, and getting more complicated every year. Intel started out well enough in the graphics business when it worked with Real3D (now defunct) to develop the Intel740, a discrete graphics chip, but 18 months later it found itself already 18 months behind ATI and NVIDIA, and fell back to selling only integrated-graphics chipsets, where the graphics component is worth only a few dollars in incremental revenue.
Intel plans to get back into the market for discrete graphics chips in 2009 or (more likely) 2010 with "Larrabee", a multi-core CPU in which some cores are optimized for graphics processing. I think Larrabee will turn out to be a technical disaster, but Intel has leveraged its market domination to turn previous technical disasters into financial windfalls. Think of the Pentium 4's "Hyper-Pipelined" design, for example, which was too hot and too inefficient, ultimately forcing Intel to bring its predecessor, the P6 design, back from the grave several years later. Intel's current graphics engines, however, are barely worth selling today, and they won't be worth reviving after Larrabee has run its course.
CNET News.com's Declan McCullagh blogged Thursday on "Ten things that finally killed Net neutrality."
Most of his reasons related to a lack of political support from both Republican and Democratic politicians and bureaucrats. But those all sound like temporary delays to me.
I'm pretty sure Net neutrality will pop back up again because there's an inherent conflict between the business interests of network operators and the desires of ... Read more
Yes, I'm still at Hot Chips. This post covers a special presentation by Reed Hundt of Frontline Wireless, who is a former chairman of the FCC. (Michael Kanellos has also blogged about this speech, here.) Previous Hot Chips installments include the AMD keynote, wireless networking, technology and software, process technology, multicore designs, IBM's Power 6 efforts, Vernor Vinge's keynote address and Nvidia. Other CNET coverage may be found here. Comments are welcome!
Reed Hundt is best known as a former chairman of the FCC (Federal Communications Commission), where his role in enacting the Telecommunications Act of 1996 generated considerable controversy.
He opened his talk by regaling us with ... Read more
Yesterday, the FCC voted to apply new "Open Platform" rules to a chunk of the radio spectrum in the 700 MHz band, which is being vacated by UHF TV stations. CNET published a good summary of the situation here.
The chunk in question is just 22 MHz wide. Although the details of how this spectrum will be used are up to the winner of the eventual FCC auction, here are a couple of points of comparison. (These numbers could be off; I don't have all the technical details of the new band plan, just the summary from the FCC website here.)
A powerful one-way broadcasting system, like that used for HDTV, could send perhaps 100 megabits per second to any number of people in a metropolitan area-- but everyone in the area would get the same bits.
A cellphone system, on the other hand, with the need to distinguish among many users and support smaller antennae, might deliver 30 megabits/s of aggregate bandwidth within a single cell (split half and half between upload and download bandwidth)-- but a metropolitan area could support many cells.
In short, how the system will be used determines how it will be configured.
The essence of the Open Platform plan is that this spectrum will go to licensees who "will be required to provide a platform that is more open to devices and applications. This would allow consumers to use the handset of their choice and download and use the applications of their choice in this spectrum block, subject to certain reasonable network management conditions that allow the licensee to protect the network from harm."
That's a pretty reasonable summary, but I haven't seen the details.
I'd like to see something like a commercial version of the amateur-radio market. I'm a ham myself (73 de KE6SFO), and I like the way that market works. Anyone can make a ham radio, and as long as it meets FCC standards, it's legal to use it on the air. In fact, an amateur radio operator can build a radio from scratch.
A digital radio for this Open Platform spectrum would be a lot more complicated, but well within the capabilities of many small businesses-- not to mention non-commercial organizations. There are already open-source cellphone development efforts, such as OpenMoko and TuxPhone, though the latter project seems to have gone inactive. Because these projects are aimed at cellphone networks that are very tightly controlled by a few big companies, they may never achieve wide use.
But on this new 700 MHz spectrum, such projects could flourish, and that could only be good for everyone.
There will be more valuable spectrum opening up as TV broadcasting settles into the digital age; I hope more of it will be placed under similar Open Platform rules so we can have several different kinds of networks. It could be a great opportunity for innovation.
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