Underexposed

Correction 8 p.m. PT: I included the wrong duration for regular Ubuntu releases. It's 18 months.

Canonical plans to release Hardy Heron, its newest version of Ubuntu Linux on Thursday, and Chief Executive Mark Shuttleworth isn't being shy and retiring about it.

"This is our most significant release ever," he said in an interview.

Ordinarily I avoid publishing such marketing superlatives, but Shuttleworth is right. Hardy Heron, also called version 8.04 for its April 2008 launch date, is Canonical's proof-in-the-pudding moment that will show whether the company can grow beyond its subsidized roots into a self-sustaining business. Ubuntu has a strong following among Linux enthusiasts, but it's Red Hat and Novell that still dominate the commercial Linux market.

The reason so much weight rests on the skinny legs of Hardy Heron is because it's only the second Linux product from the company to come with long-term support. The first LTS version of Ubuntu, Dapper Drake, arrived when the company was still comparatively immature and unknown.

Long-term support means the company releases bug fixes, security patches, and other updates for five years on the server version and three years on the desktop version, time frames more palatable to businesses than the 18-month life spans of other Ubuntu versions.

On the server, the new version has support for KVM virtualization built in and comes in a stripped-down version called JEOS (Just Enough Operating System) for software "appliances" that run on KVM or VMware. The company has been working on better hardware support--though it no longer supports Sun Microsystems' Sparc processors, Shuttleworth said. Also included are better integration with Windows' Active Directory for corporate users and a certified, downloadable version of Java software.

On the desktop, Hardy Heron now can be installed directly into the Windows file system so people can try it without having to reformat their hard drives. The software also deals better with online music and photo sites such as Flickr, he added. However, because of an upgrade timing disconnect, fans of the KDE user interface software will have to make do with only 18-month support for the older KDE 3.5 or an unsupported developer version based on the new KDE 4.0.

Still not profitable
Shuttleworth, who funded Ubuntu with wealth from his sale of an earlier start-up to VeriSign, cares about business success, but he's also willing to continue spending to help Canonical grow into new areas--such as the mobile version that's beginning in earnest with Hardy Heron.

"Ubuntu will require continuing investment from me and from others. We are on a trajectory that will make the company sustainable," Shuttleworth said. But he wouldn't say when he envisions profitability: "I'd rather not be on the hook...I keep finding additional areas to invest in."

What's a surprise to Shuttleworth, though, is that the desktop Linux is financially more significant than the version for servers.

"The desktop contributes more to Canonical's bottom line than the server," he said. The server business is still Canonical's primary focus for support revenue. But the company has been getting paid for desktop and consumer-electronics work, he said.

"On the desktop, we see strong demand for custom engineering and assurance programs as people look to Canonical to indemnify them against potential copyright or patent issues," Shuttleworth said.

Canonical also works on unbranded Linux for consumer-electronics companies, though Shuttleworth expects they'll eventually opt for something like Ubuntu. "The hardware vendors are leaping at the ability to do their own operating system. I believe over time they'll tire of the costs and risks of doing that," he said.

Regarding engineering work, he added that Canonical has a tight partnership with Intel, an "extensive on-site engineering relationship where we integrate support for latest platforms."

I'm going to buy a new desktop computer to feed my digital photography appetites, and it's time to let the wisdom of the crowds steer me in the right direction.

There are innumerable options, but there's one particular choice I'm wrestling with: is my money better spent on a PC with a dual-core processor or a quad-core chip with a lower clock frequency?

For the benefit of anybody else in my situation, I thought I'd seek expert guidance from Adobe Systems, Microsoft, Advanced Micro Devices, and Intel and publish the results, but I got conflicting answers. So I'm hoping all you readers can be the tie-breaker on what my priority should be. Feel free to vote and to share any thoughts about that issue or other performance tradeoffs in the Talkback section below.

If I were swimming in money, I could have it both ways with a computer using an Intel Extreme processor, but that's not in the cards. If I were that flush, I'd rather sink the extra money into a lens with roughly five times the usable lifespan of a PC.

To put things in perspective, multicore chips have two more processing engines on each slice of silicon. That theoretically can permit more operations in a given amount of time, but it's more complicated in practice.

With four cores, processors are hotter and therefore have to be run at slower frequencies to keep from overheating. And perhaps biggest on the list, a lot of PC software simply hasn't solved the technical challenges of splitting a single job up into multiple independent threads.

The clock speed/multicore tradeoff is illustrated in prices from Intel's newly announced Penryn generation of Core 2 chips. The dual-core E8500 with 6MB of cache runs at 3.16GHz, and the quad-core Q9300 with 6MB of cache runs at 2.5GHz, and they both have the same price of $266. One thing they have in common is a reasonably fast 1333MHz front-side bus (the pathway between the processor and main memory), but on the quad-core model that bus serves four cores instead of just two.

To set the stage, here are the computing bottlenecks that I notice most dragging down digital photography work I do with Adobe Photoshop and Lightroom: rendering and editing raw photos; converting raw photos to DNG; applying sharpening and noise-reduction filters; metadata-based searches through my 11,000-image catalog; and stitching photos into panoramas.

I recognize there are other price/performance tradeoffs, too--for example more memory or a faster hard drive for better performance when the computer does have to use the drive. But those are relatively easy to change and upgrade later.

A quad-core example of Intel's latest "Penryn" generation of processors.

(Credit: Intel)

Expert opinions
When I asked various companies what they advised, answers differed. Let's compare and contrast:

• Intel spokesman Nick Knupffer: "For digital photography, you are going to be using packages such as Adobe Photoshop that relish the extra threads that a quad-core processor brings to the table. Memory speed or bandwidth is not as crucial."

• AMD spokesman Brett Jacobs: "Given the excellent value of our quad-core Phenom and the improved performance you will see from four cores vs. two using multithreaded applications, the quad-core will offer more bang for the buck compared to a higher-clocked dual-core."

• Tim Grey, author and digital photography technology evangelist at Microsoft's Rich Media Group: "Higher processor clock and front-side bus speed on a dual-core system provides better performance than quad-core. When you consider the premium you pay for quad-core it makes the most sense to invest in the top-of-the-line dual-core. You get better performance at a lower cost."

• Adobe, paraphrased: It depends.

OK, that doesn't do justice to Adobe, which supplied fairly more nuanced information. Some Photoshop tasks can deal well with multicore processors, but others are starved for data from main memory.

"Bandwidth is a big deal," said Adobe's Kevin Connor, who manages professional digital imaging products including Lightroom, Photoshop, and the Digital Negative (DNG) format. According to one illuminating Adobe blog posting, one common Photoshop task that relies heavily on memory bandwidth is the seemingly simple Gaussian blur filter, and one common chore that can't be parallelized is the healing brush.

Things are somewhat different with Lightroom. One of its biggest chores is "de-mosaicking," which converts the "Bayer" checkerboard pattern of red, green, and blue data from a camera's image sensor into an image with red, green, and blue data for each pixel. That process can take advantage of as many as eight cores--the number available in high-end machines such as Apple's Mac Pro or those built on Intel's "Skulltrail" platform, said Tom Hogarty, Lightroom's product manager. DNG conversion, too, can use eight cores, he said.

Another advantage for Lightroom is that it can perform some tasks in the background, a natural fit for multicore. (Thank heavens: With my 3-year-old PC, I often queue up a few batches of Lightroom operations and come back later when they're done.)

Benchmark time
But wait! Let's look at some benchmarks. There are some handy ones here on CNET's review of Apple's iMac. The CNET Photoshop benchmark is a reasonable reflection of my digital photography work, but compare the scores of an iMac with a dual-core iMac with 2.8GHz Intel processors to a Mac Pro with two dual-core Intel 2.66GHz processors (a version tested before the quad-core models were out).

Apple comes out on top on Photoshop tests, but there's not much of an advantage to four cores.

(Credit: CNET Networks)

Mac Pro's time to complete the test: 120 seconds. iMac, just a smidgen slower at 125 seconds. The big question here is to what extent the raw-image processing in Photoshop correlates with my own raw-image processing done in Lightroom. Even if Lightroom is much better with multicore, the Photoshop tests aren't a great advertisement for paying for four cores.

When I asked CNET computer guru Rich Brown for his advice, he steered me toward the iMac, in part because Photoshop scores higher on Mac OS X than on Windows. (A Velocity Micro system with a 3GHz dual-core Intel processor had a significantly lower score of 157 seconds, for example, and a Hewlett-Packard system with a 2.4GHz Intel quad-core processor was even worse at 178 seconds.)

Although I'm not opposed to switching from my current Windows setup to Mac OS X, I don't think it's likely. For one thing, I'd have to repurchase some software. More significantly, Apple's lineup doesn't match my needs: the Mac Pro is too expensive, the Mac Mini is too anemic, and I dislike the iMac's lack of expandability, 4GB memory limit, and built-in monitor.

Another non-issue is picking the best laptop. Sure, all the cool kids are forsaking their immovable behemoths for svelte machines, but I already have a reasonable laptop when I need mobility, and for my home machine I want the better price-performance ratio and need the expandability.

Benchmarks notwithstanding, I'm leaning toward quad-core right now. First of all, there's the Lightroom abilities. Second, with the newer generation of processors from both Intel and Advanced Micro Devices, there's less of a premium for quad-core. Last, I'm hoping my machine will last into the era when desktop software catches up with multicore processors.

So that's my opinion. What's yours?

Update: I added a bit more detail, news of the CFO switcheroo, and a self-congratulatory but illuminating quotation from Intel's CEO.

Intel on Tuesday stomped all over estimates of its quarterly financial performance--not only Wall Street's but its own.

Three months ago, the Santa Clara, Calif.-based chipmaker in September predicted revenue of $9 billion to $9.6 billion for the third quarter of 2007. Then, in September, it raised it to a range of $9.4 billion to $9.8 billion.

The real number: $10.1 billion, a 15 percent increase from the year-earlier quarter. And net income of $1.9 billion, or 31 cents per share, a 43 percent annual increase. Revenue exceeded Thomson First Call analysts' average expectation of $9.6 billion by nearly a half billion dollars, while net income was a penny more than the 30 cents per share expected.

Wall Street analysts will get to spend some more quality time with their spreadsheets soon. For the last quarter of 2007, they have been expecting revenue of $10.4 billion, but Intel set its guidance to between $10.5 billion and $11.1 billion.

Intel ascribed the results to strong sales of its processors--the most it ever sold in a quarter, though average prices remained flat. Also contributing were strong sales of chipsets, which support the central processors, and of flash memory. With costs of the transition to 45-nanometer manufacturing process dropping, gross margin--a measurement of how much revenue turns into profit--increased from 46.9 percent in the second quarter to 52.4 percent in the third.

Chief Executive Paul Otellini tooted his horn and indicated that he expects to do more tooting next quarter.

"A combination of great products, strong and growing worldwide demand, and operational efficiency from our ongoing restructuring efforts led to record third-quarter revenue and a 64 percent year-over-year gain in operating income," Otellini said in a statement. "We see each of these elements continuing to improve into the fourth quarter. We are very pleased with the results and optimistic about our business."

Intel stock rose $1.17, or 4.6 percent, to $26.65 in after-hours trading.

In the third quarter, Intel sold 2 million quad-core processors. Rival Advanced Micro Devices has just launched its first quad-core chip, code-named Barcelona, and doesn't expect significant revenue until the fourth quarter. That's a sharp reversal from two years ago, when AMD was riding high after stealing market share from Intel.

Also Tuesday, Intel promoted Stacy Smith to chief financial officer, replacing Andy Bryant, who held the job since 1994. Smith, who was assistant CFO, still will report to Bryant, though, whose new title is chief administrative officer.

Otellini indicated that the move was relatively routine. "These moves are part of our long-term succession planning," Otellini said on a conference call with analysts.

Intel plans to launch an effort called LessWatts.org on Thursday, a combination of open-source software and helpful hints to reduce power consumption of Linux servers, PCs and gadgets.

LessWatts, to be detailed during a Intel Developer Forum speech by Renee James, vice president and general manager of Intel's Software and Solutions Group, is geared toward technically sophisticated folks from programmers to system administrators. It gathers together a number of Intel projects, such as the PowerTop utility for finding which software is pestering the processor and preventing it from dozing in low-power states.

Taking Intel's advice and fixes can trim about 10 watts of power consumption off a modern dual-processor server, said Dirk Hohndel, chief technologist of Intel open-source technology center. That's not a gargantuan amount--until you consider that if done correctly it's free power savings, that each watt of server energy saved cuts another 1.3 watts from air conditioning (according to Intel figures), and of course that 10 watts per server is a lot when multiplied by the thousands of servers that populate larger data centers.

Announcements of open-source contributions often carry an altruistic flavor, but don't believe for a minute that Intel is acting out of the goodness of its own heart. It would dearly love to make its server technology customers happier, and lower power consumption can help bring the chipmaker's vision of mobile Internet devices to fruition by extending battery life.

On a current laptop, running Fedora 7 from Red Hat uses about 21 watts. "If you apply six little changes we propose, that same laptop takes 15.5 watts," Hohndel said. "You have just added a more than an hour to your battery run time."

Intel is cooperating with various programmers and Linux sellers, so it's likely that some of its suggestions will be incorporated into standard software.

Pardon me while I nerd out here a bit, because I find this stuff intriguing. Here are some of the particulars of the work that Hohndel detailed:

• "Race-to-idle" changes to the Linux scheduler, a component of the kernel that decides what the computer is concentrating on at any given moment. Processors actually consume less power if working in bursts of business followed by cooler, idler moments than if working at a constant pace, and scheduler changes can encourage this hurry-up-and-wait philosophy.

• Compressed data in graphics-processor communications. The memory interface consumes power when transferring data from memory to the graphics chip, but it takes less if that data is compressed, and graphics chips have built-in abilities to decode that data. It takes power to decode--perhaps thousandths of a watt--but a half a watt can be saved in memory interface, Hohndel said.

• Changes to higher-level software. One example: Linux has software to mix sounds such as system beeps and music useful on desktop machines, but that software often is installed on servers with basic sound chips that typically aren't used. And the sound mixer checks 50 times each second to see if somebody has fiddled with the volume control, prodding the processor into activity each time.

• Dialing down network transfer rates. Dropping down from 1-gigabit-per-second Ethernet to a tenth that speed can save about 2 watts. "If you know when your link is needed and when it's idle, you can save power," Hohndel said.

• The tickless Linux kernel This approach essentially trims out the processor busywork of checking for things to do regularly, instead letting it drift off into low-power states and then wake up when there's work to be done.